Darrow, Flaws and All : A PBS Biography Focuses on the Man Behind the Lawyer

Orson Welles and Spencer Tracy played him on the big screen. Paul Muni, Melvyn Douglas and Henry Fonda played him on stage.

They’re tough actors to follow, but now Kevin Spacey has taken his best shot at portraying the complex character of Clarence Darrow, America’s first superstar defense lawyer and a turn-of-the-century prototype of the modern American political liberal.

Spacey, who earned good reviews as televangelist Jim Bakker in NBC’s “Fall From Grace,” appears in nearly every scene of “Darrow,” a two-hour PBS “American Playhouse” production that recently ended a month of shooting here.

This rendition is not merely another repeat of the standard pop-culture Darrow, co-producer Stephen Stept insisted during the final day of shooting.

This is not Darrow the defender of evolution and the mocker of religious fundamentalism, as presented by Tracy in “Inherit the Wind,” Hollywood’s version of the Scopes Monkey Trial. Nor is it Darrow the impassioned foe of capital punishment, as played by Welles in “Compulsion,” the dramatization of the Leopold-Loeb murder trial.

“Darrow’s never been done, as far as we’re concerned,” said Stept, a transplanted-to-L.A. Pittsburgh native who spent seven years raising funds and otherwise mothering his courtroom-heavy drama down the poky PBS assembly line. “What has been done are some of his more famous cases. But he’s never been done, and that’s where we’re different. This is a biographical movie. The focus will be on the man.”

“Darrow,” a $2.5-million co-production of KCET and producers Stept and Richard Heus, will probably air in June. It was written by William Schmidt and directed by John Coles.

Pittsburgh has become an increasingly popular movie location, for photogenic reasons and because of low production costs and a growing community of seasoned technical workers. But Stept said that the main reason “Darrow” was shot here was to take advantage of the city’s well-preserved, turn-of-the-century neighborhoods and mansions and, particularly, the availability of its finely restored old courtrooms.

Darrow the real folk hero had several careers, few details of which Hollywood has seen fit to immortalize.

He was a successful country lawyer in Ohio before moving to bustling Chicago in 1887 at age 30. A lover of ideas, a persuasive speaker and debater, a member of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, he believed devoutly in nonviolence.

He was interested in socialism and evolution and fought hard for better treatment for society’s less fortunate. He despised capital punishment, calling it “murder by the state,” and he was deeply skeptical of religion. He could not, said historian Charles A. Beard, “endure the conventional lies of civilization.”

Darrow dabbled in local Chicago politics before becoming a well-paid railroad company lawyer. But at 37, he walked away from his secure railroad job and became a labor lawyer, defending striking unions and their leaders. He started with the Pullman Strike and Eugene V. Debs in 1894, which is about where Stept and Heus pick up Darrow’s story.

The film ends with Darrow at age 67, successfully fighting to save the murderers Leopold and Loeb from hanging in 1924. In between, however, is what constitutes the centerpiece of “Darrow’s” drama--Darrow’s nightmare in Los Angeles, where his career as a nationally famous labor attorney came to a sudden and notorious end.

In 1911, he came to Los Angeles to defend the McNamara brothers, two union leaders accused of dynamiting the Los Angeles Times Building and killing 20 employees. Not long after he began preparing his defense of the McNamaras, the brothers shocked Darrow and all of uniondom by suddenly switching their pleas to guilty.

Darrow, who more than anything hated capital punishment, managed to save his clients’ necks. But he subsequently was charged with trying to bribe prospective jurors. Quickly dumped by the labor movement, Darrow had to spend more than two years in Los Angeles defending himself, which he did successfully, but at great personal cost.

“It destroyed him economically and emotionally and it destroyed his reputation,” Stept said. “It’s out of those ashes that you have your Leopold-Loeb cases, your Scopes trial. That’s what’s fascinating about him. He’s a man who brought himself back.”

Darrow is amazingly relevant today. Many of the issues he dealt with are still kicking--from the fight over teaching creationism in the schools to capital punishment. But it is not Darrow’s heroic virtues or his modern liberal political values that made Stept want to make “Darrow,” Stept said. It was his faults.

“If he was just a hero, a knight in shining armor, it’d be really boring,” Stept whispered during a scene in which Darrow, a railroad lawyer in a fancy pin-striped suit, is confronted by a bedraggled striking railroad worker in an 1894 shanty town created in an industrial area near the Monongahela River.

“But the fact is, he’s a beautifully flawed character. He’s a man with great passion, a profound sense of justice. He was also a man who was, in his own right, kind of cynical and, as we portray him, somewhat vain.”

“Darrow” had a mandate from the National Endowment for the Arts, one of its funding sources, to be as accurate as possible. But it is not a docudrama, Stept said.

He and Schmidt relied heavily on Darrow’s long and persuasive courtroom summations and other historical research. Dramatic license was taken, Stept said, but they strove “to be accurate to the spirit of the man and the spirit of the times.”

“One reason we made this movie is that we share his values. But I felt there’s a personal heroism, in terms of perseverance, of believing in yourself and pulling yourself up and moving on and doing even greater work. That’s as great a lesson as the political lesson. That’s what makes him a hero to us--to me anyway.”