Marc Smerling
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“An Opportunity to Look at How True-Crime Storytelling Can Affect Reality”: Marc Smerling on Reinvestigating Errol Morris’s Reinvestigation in A Wilderness of Error
Marc Smerling’s true crime docuseries for FX, A Wilderness of Error, debuting September 25, is a deep-dive reinvestigation of the case of convicted murderer Jeffrey MacDonald, who has spent the past nearly four decades serving time for the 1970 killing of his wife and two young daughters – a gruesome triple homicide that the onetime Army surgeon and Green Beret blamed (and still blames) on Manson Family copycats. The five-part series is based on Errol Morris’s non-fiction book A Wilderness of Error: The Trials of Jeffrey MacDonald, a deep-dive reinvestigation of the case – specifically the case laid out by […]
by Lauren Wissot on Sep 24, 2020 -
Episodic and In Your Ears
While the migration of independent filmmakers to the small screen is a much remarked about phenomenon, another entertainment platform, one growing even faster than television, is opening its loving arms to independent directors, screenwriters and producers. Podcasting, for its first decade or so, has consisted primarily of interview shows, like Marc Maron’s WTF, and the occasional fresh approach to journalism, like Serial. But now it’s moving more and more into the fiction world and creating alluring creative opportunities for independent storytellers. Founded in 2014, Gimlet Media has been making a name for itself producing shows like StartUp (about starting a […]
by Peter Rinaldi on Jan 18, 2017
