Fox’s ‘Menendez Murders’ a Real Trial

Television: The network’s rushed production of the brothers’ gritty story airing tonight plays like a rerun of dull newscast sound bites.

Television’s first movie about the Menendez murders arrives tonight, and as you’d expect, it’s not pretty.

How despicable. How coldhearted. How calculating. How cynical. How savage and unfeeling. How utterly without conscience. How remorseless. How greedy. There’s obviously nothing they wouldn’t do for money.

But enough about Fox and the producers.

Picture it: The clock was ticking like a time bomb. Like a frantic traveler chaotically tossing some clothes into a suitcase before racing off to catch the red-eye, the Fox team approved a script and hurried into production, completed shooting in 20 days and somehow clamped it all together--even while the case remained in progress--in time to nose out CBS at the tape.

Only slightly less mad-dash tainted than Fox’s version, a two-part account of the Menendez case is indeed on the CBS schedule for late May, a gory slaughter for sweeps that itself will precede the expected retrial of Lyle and Erik Menendez by perhaps a year.

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When it comes to Menendez quickies, though, Fox is class valedictorian. The PR buzz is that everyone involved with tonight’s “Honor Thy Father and Mother: The True Story of the Menendez Murders” did a remarkable job considering the time constraints they worked under. Which is like claiming a collapsed overpass was well constructed given the short time it took to erect it.

Most striking about “Honor Thy Father and Mother” are its bad hair days, from the bald Lyle getting his expensive rug torn off by his angry mother to the halo of yellow friz surrounding the head of Erik’s attorney, Leslie Abramson (Susan Blakely).

Yet if there is any hidden nitty-gritty regarding the shotgunning of Jose and Kitty Menendez in their Beverly Hills mansion by their sons, you won’t learn it from Michael J. Murray’s teleplay for “Honor Thy Father and Mother,” which is based on the book “Blood Brothers” by John Johnson, a Times reporter, and Ronald L. Soble, a former Times reporter, neither of whom covered the trial for this newspaper. Nor is anything disclosed about the lives of the rich and dysfunctional that hasn’t already been banner-headlined across the public record.

It seems like only yesterday that the first trial of the Menendez brothers ended with separate juries being unable to reach verdicts. That’s because, figuratively, it was only yesterday, with the deadlocked juries getting sent home in January following relentless media coverage of the case. No wonder, then, that this dull movie seems so pointless, so premature, a scribbled-out first draft of a first draft of unfinished history that at times plays like a rerun of unrevealing newscast sound bites.

The movie opens ominously at night with a gunshot behind closed doors followed by Lyle (Billy Warlock) and Erik (David Beron) bursting from the family house and speeding away in a car. Then--after the famed 911 call in which Lyle and Erik feign shock and hysterical grief over their parents’ deaths and the brothers’ subsequent indulgent splurges on Rolexes, a Porsche and other expensive trinkets--the story plods slowly in reverse through a labyrinth of flashbacks.

Most of them are triggered by the testimony of witnesses during truncated courtroom sequences in which director Paul Schneider is at his least effective, from over-deployment of meaningful glances to a reliance on cliched murmurs from spectators for embellishment.

“Honor Thy Father and Mother” earns no murmurs. Every major character emerges as a roughed-up, fright-wigged caricature. Nor does it help that the smallish Warlock makes an odd-appearing Lyle, looking Michael J. Fox-sized beside the head-taller Beron’s Erik, whereas the real Menendez brothers appear to be about the same height.

The brothers’ attorneys failed recently to persuade a judge that Fox should be barred from airing “Honor Thy Father and Mother” tonight. The attorneys had argued that showing the movie would preclude seating impartial jurors for the retrial.

One thing that this self-annointed “true story” can’t be accused of, though, is consistently taking sides. Just as there are sections of the movie that contradict the brothers’ courtroom testimony by depicting them as money-driven bloodless assassins, there are also scenes portraying Jose (James Farentino) as the ruthless despot and sexual abuser that Lyle and Erik claim he was, and Kitty (Jill Clayburgh) as a hazed-over boozer who was indifferent to the alleged plight of her sons. Those scenes support some of the brothers’ testimony, possibly including even their claims to have slain their wealthy parents out of fear for their own lives, not out of greed or hatred. However, there is nothing in the movie to support Erik’s testimony that a big family row immediately preceded the shootings.

Not that one should expect much beyond hit-and-miss history from “Honor Thy Father” or any other instant docudrama. As a definitive record of a sensational crime case, it’s raw and incomplete. As entertainment, it’s nothing to flip your wig over.

* “Honor Thy Father and Mother: The True Story of the Menendez Murders” airs tonight at 8 on Fox (Channels 11 and 6).