Is Brown TV Movie Accurate? Most of It

“Bang, bang--right in the back of the head.”

I murmured the line a second ahead of the actor on the TV screen, amazed even as I mouthed the words at what a weird experience this was.

It was almost as if I was watching a rerun of a show I had seen countless times, but something was different: This time the characters had changed.

Alice in Wonderland meets murderous Orange County psychopath David Brown.

This was what it was like for me to watch “Love, Lies and Murder” last week on NBC, the story of Brown and his success in manipulating his teen-age daughter, Cinnamon, and his sister-in-law and lover, Patti Bailey, into killing his wife in their Garden Grove home.

I have covered the Brown case for more than two years. The story of his shocking arrest, after his daughter finally confessed to everything from her California Youth Authority cell, was only the second story I wrote in Orange County for The Times after I arrived here in 1988.

I listened with fascination to the case from the preliminary hearing through the trial and sentencing. I watched Bailey’s initial shock and then proud anger as I told her during a jailhouse interview that her husband had paid a hit man to kill her. And later, in the same jail, I listened to Brown blame everyone but himself.

And I could have sworn that--more so than any other case--I knew pretty much all there was to know about this one. That is, until I watched the NBC movie and, with my arrogance blindsided, remembered that there’s always another slant to every story.

In the days after the movie aired, people invariably asked me: How close is it to the truth?

I have few complaints here. Considering the medium and its reputation for embellishment, I thought the movie follows a fairly narrow and accurate path from the night of Linda Brown’s murder in 1985 through Brown’s sentencing to 27 years to life without parole.

Sure, there are inaccuracies.

Unlike what was shown in the movie, the characters depicting Orange County Deputy Dist. Atty. Jeoff Robinson and investigator Jay Newell (their names were changed) never directly confronted Brown to tell him that he had been snitched on and set up in connection with his jailhouse plot to kill them.

In reality, the Youth Authority conversations between Brown and his daughter, trying to get him to say something incriminating, were audiotaped, but never videotaped.

In the movie, the chronology of scenes from Brown’s preliminary hearing is condensed and mangled with his actual trial so as to make them at best confusing, at worst inaccurate. He is given one attorney throughout the proceedings, even though he actually had three. And the flashbacks from the movie’s trial scenes appear to have Cinnamon Brown and Bailey giving testimony about memories that they never talked about in open court.

There are more examples. But much of the dialogue, when possible, appears to have been taken nearly verbatim from the trial (for instance, Brown’s hired hit man telling him “Bang, bang, right in the back of the head,” after the paid murders were supposedly carried out).

And the errors that are in the film did not bother me all that much. After all, TV claims only that its movies are based on true stories.

More jarring, however, are some of the characterizations in the movie, which seem so one-sided as to taint the entire depiction of the case.

Examples are two lawyers: defense attorney Joel W. Baruch, who--despite a knock-down, drag-out bout with prosector Robinson in the preliminary hearing that left both sides reeling--is depicted as suave and always in total control; and Bailey’s attorney, Donald Glenn Rubright, painted as an almost-reverent white knight in saving his client.

Both attorneys maintained after the movie aired that they are pleasantly surprised, but a bit embarrassed as well, by the portrayals.

The Alice in Wonderland effect, watching the movie through a looking glass that seems to distort some of my dominant impressions of the case, grew magnified with the main characters.

Hollywood turns David Brown--in reality a man with a bloated and pockmarked face and a fondness for fruit pies--into a smooth, good-looking leading man. Who wouldn’t listen to him? This makes the Brown character’s query to Bailey about whether she wanted him to lose weight and get plastic surgery either laughable or just plain confusing.

Cinnamon Brown--her voice at her father’s trial so distinctive and memorable for its small, whimpering, childlike quality--takes on a defiant, bold tone in the movie. It belies her age and left me wondering whether I had watched the same witness.

As for Bailey--I should have been prepared when I saw NBC promotions laud her for the “incredible courage it takes to face something like this.” The movie portrays her as a victim--a “martyr,” as Robinson said--who was under the complete spell of Brown for more than six years, forcing her to murder and betrayal.

I too have some sympathy for Bailey as the sexual and psychological victim of a man such as Brown. But the movie’s producers seemed to forget that Bailey lived well off the rewards of her sister’s murder; that, as heard on recordings of her conversations with Brown and Cinnamon, she went to great lengths of imagination to maintain her facade of innocence, and that it was only after striking a deal with prosecutors to keep her out of jail for life that she agreed to help in righting the record.

Then again, if I had used Bailey as a crucial source of information for my work and had set up a substantial trust fund for her daughter--as did the movie makers--my memory might fall short too. As the saying goes, I guess that’s show business.