Ezra Edelman isn't sure he'd make ESPN's O.J.: Made in America today

Indiewire

Edelman won an Oscar and and an Emmy for his 2016 five-part documentary examination of O.J. Simpson, the Los Angeles Riots and race in America that was made for ESPN's "30 for 30." But with Donald Trump now president and Simpson out of prison, Edelman says he isn't sure how he'd approach the film from a 2019 perspective. "The idea of Trump being in the White House would likely make me more compelled to want to take this on, because in some ways, it’s the logical extension of a lot of the things we discussed in the film," he tells Indiewire. "I don’t know how to answer the part about O.J. being out of prison because I think, from the beginning, there was the idea of a coda to a story in which he ended up in prison as a sort of, however you want to term it, judicial or karmic retribution. When I looked at the whole story, it felt like a proper ending, this idea of a last chapter after the climax of a story which people had focused on, which was him being acquitted of murder in 1995. That there was a last chapter that involved him being convicted of armed robbery 13 years later, that was fundamental to me in the initial architecture of the story I was exploring. With him now out of prison, I think it’s a different story in some ways and a different commentary: 'Yes, he went to jail, but now he’s out and again living his life' versus 'He went to jail and he’ll be there for the rest of his life, which is where many people thought he should have ended up a decade earlier.' While I always thought the story was going to have another chapter, I also think I would be slightly less engaged by the idea."