Sequel to a Simpson Subplot

The way they talked about her, behind her back, on the air, in court, you’d have thought she was on trial.

Oh, an aspiring screenwriter, are you? From North Carolina? How much are you selling those tapes for? Were you and Det. Fuhrman good friends?

Of all the figures in the O.J. Simpson trial, whose principals learned how even ancillary fame can alter the stream bed of lives, Laura Hart McKinny is one of the most compelling.

Her reluctantly divulged tapes of Mark Fuhrman’s brutal braggadocio gave the defense what it needed--Fuhrman impeaching Fuhrman. The prosecution savaged her to salvage the former detective, who it had to concede, in the end, was “the worst the LAPD has to offer.”

The Simpson season is over, and McKinny, 44, is back to teaching screenwriting at the North Carolina School of the Arts.

To the bad, she has $50,000 in legal fees, a heap of nasty news clippings and a lot of hate mail that blames her for Simpson’s acquittal last fall in the slayings of his ex-wife and her friend.

To the good, there is the family she loves, work she enjoys, an unflagging mission to write “social action” films, and the hopes that those films will get made and that her novel about women cops will be published.

And she has a champion in Sam L. Grogg, the dean of the school, who produced “A Trip to Bountiful” and others, and co-produced “Kiss of the Spider Woman.”

Where even McKinny’s criticisms of Hollywood are gently voiced, Grogg is annoyed on her behalf. “Men Against Women,” McKinny’s screenplay that resulted from her interviews and research, was lambasted, even by some who hadn’t read it, which leads Grogg to caustically call it “the only screenplay ever reviewed before the movie was made.” Now McKinny may find herself “simply Xed,” forced to work under a pseudonym, blacklist-fashion, if she is to work in Hollywood at all--and why?

“It’s very much a club, and here’s someone being called a screenwriter--and who’s she?” says Grogg. “So Hollywood rises up in indignation and puts this black hand over the head of a person they don’t know. . . .

“That, to me, was as unjust as I think the results of the trial were.”

In an industry town where a prostitute can get commercials and talk show deals because she was arrested with actor Hugh Grant, it is McKinny, paradoxically, whose name is a “deal-killer,” says Grogg. Too many people think of her as the woman--the “would-be screenwriter” in one stinging entertainment-industry column--who lost the Simpson case. She took all manner of flak: for coming forward at all, and for not coming forward right away, for fighting to keep the tapes, and for not destroying the tapes.

How is it possible to calculate the hit-by-a-meteorite odds that the cop she met in a Westwood restaurant would, 10 years later, be the fulcrum in the murder trial heard round the world?

Having taped Fuhrman and other officers for one purpose--research for her screenplay--McKinny saw the tapes turned to another. It was not her storytelling ability that made defense attorneys F. Lee Bailey and Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. squeeze each other’s hands in excitement the first time the tape turned and Fuhrman’s words poured out.

The mantle of victimhood has been tried on for size by many figures in the Simpson case, not the least of them Simpson himself. Tender McKinny such sympathies and she will say: There are only two victims in this case, and I’m not one of them.

*

Late winter. Tight shot on a sign painted on a building in a Southern city that tobacco not only built but christened. The sign reads, “THANK YOU FOR SMOKING.”

Cut to tracking shot of a slim woman, in jeans and her husband’s old cut-down Armani jacket, driving an aged stick-shift Volvo over iced streets to the health food restaurant where the signs read, “Thank You for Not Smoking.”

McKinny likes this city, its fat-fest bakeries and the lady clerks at the gas station that gets held up so often they call it the Shotgun Chevron. She likes the spring, and the fledgling film school where she teaches.

In its first incarnation, the brick building was a diaper factory. Ava Gardner worked here once--a nice legend for a film school, and a legacy that suits a place in its own infancy, with big plans.

The McKinnys moved here from Santa Monica in 1993, after declaring bankruptcy over unpaid taxes and $80,000 in credit card debts. The teaching jobs here were the first steady paychecks of their married lives.

Since the Simpson Summer ended, McKinny has cooperated with the California attorney general’s investigation into whether to charge Fuhrman with perjury. She is fighting a subpoena to testify at Simpson’s civil trial.

She also has addressed members of the National Center for Women and Policing about her research into how sexism hobbles good policing. In February, McKinny spent eight hours with the Los Angeles Police Commission to detail what they didn’t hear in the trial, about sexual harassment, about life for women who wear LAPD blue.

You wouldn’t know it from the trial testimony, but that is what her work was about--sexism in policing. The screenplay hasn’t sold. The tapes aren’t for sale. But she still has that story to tell.

On this ice-bright day, her two sons clamber into the Volvo after school. There was a time last year when the elder boy, John, refused to go anywhere with her; all those people looking at his mom, whispering, made him self-conscious.

She was standing in the bathroom one morning last summer when John came to the door. “ ‘Mom, is there anything in these tapes that shows O.J. is guilty?’ No. That was the question he was interested in. If that had been the case, I’d have come forward.”

She believes now as she did then--and as the district attorney’s office has said--that the taped remarks of Fuhrman, however unpleasant or incendiary, have no bearing on the murder charges against Simpson. That, and the confidentiality she had pledged, are why she battled the subpoena that ultimately put her in Judge Lance Ito’s courtroom.

The defense hardly had to depend on McKinny to show Fuhrman to be a problem officer. There were LAPD files on that. And any number of people could--and did--attest to his using the “N-word.”

But she had the tapes.

Her husband, Daniel, who teaches directing and cinematography at the school, figures that “something like 50 people” in Hollywood and beyond knew about her project, had even seen the name Fuhrman, for he was the script’s technical consultant.

Fewer knew of the existence of the tapes, he says, and none had heard them. But someone tipped off the attorneys. “We don’t know who,” he says.

At first she was afraid the tapes would carry more weight with jurors than any other evidence, but now, she believes they were just another fragment in the mosaic. To the extent that they mattered, she thinks, the case was lost not because Laura Hart McKinny interviewed Mark Fuhrman on tape, but because Fuhrman lied in court.

Of Simpson himself, “I really don’t know whether he’s guilty or innocent,” she says. She is certain only that justice has not been done, because the killer of two people goes unpunished.

Being back here, where “North Carolina screenwriter” is not an oxymoron, has restored her aplomb. “I’ll be OK. I’ll write under a pseudonym if it comes to that. But it upsets me that people think I made a fortune on this.”

*

Cochran: What you do want to sell is your screenplay, ‘Men Against Women,’ isn’t that right?

McKinny: Yes, that would be lovely.

*

Selling is what Hollywood does--actors, ideas, words, images. Simpson has sold a book and a video. Cochran, prosecutors Marcia Clark and Christopher Darden have sold books. McKinny has not sold anything.

Two companies dropped “Men Against Women” because of the trial controversy, she says.

So she has retrenched. She has a “gentlemen’s agreement” with two women, Bonnie Forbes and Ginny Schreckinger, who produce TV movies. Their plans basically scuttle McKinny’s feature-film screenplay--”I know it won’t [go anywhere] and she knows it,” says Forbes. Instead, they want to use her wealth of material for a made-for-TV project, probably written by a team of network writers.

No money has changed hands--not for McKinny or for Fuhrman, who has a $10,000 stake as a consultant’s fee if “Men Against Women” gets made. Those six-figure numbers bruited about as the going price for the tapes were just so much air. Her attorney said he was “duty-bound” to assess their value, but his client says she never intended to sell them.

Forbes once asked her straight out: “ ‘Did you ever try to sell the tapes?’ She said it was her work she wanted to sell, not the raw material.”

If it had been Simpson on those tapes, McKinny would “be sitting pretty,” says Grogg acidly. And even the Fuhrman material--”if Joe Eszterhas or fill-in-the-blank had had those tapes, it’d be in production right now.”

Eszterhas is a successful screenwriter who chided McKinny last year, telling The Times of her “civic responsibility . . . to reveal what she had. . . . Our responsibility as human beings should outweigh our muses. It’s a moral crucible, and she flunked the test.”

Eszterhas’ scripts, which bring at least a million dollars each, include “Basic Instinct,” in which Sharon Stone gets steamy, and the NC-17-rated striptease drama “Showgirls.”

*

Darden: When Mark Fuhrman used these words in your presence, why didn’t you just tell him to stop?

McKinny: . . . I was in a journalistic mode. I was not judgmental. . . . I needed to know how he would speak.

*

There are two parts to the ethical debate about McKinny and her tapes.

This is a woman who tutored black athletes at UCLA. She brought the African makers of the film “Sankofa” to her film school and invited the neighborhood to see it. Why, then, did she sit for hours listening to Fuhrman, whose grievances about minorities were as numerous and as distasteful to her as his insults about women cops, liberals and the ACLU?

To write about real cops she needed to hear real cops, she says, even the unfiltered Fuhrman. Authenticity may mean “putting forth viewpoints I don’t necessarily agree with.” She slept in a box among San Francisco’s homeless in 1981 to write about them. So she would no more stop Fuhrman from speaking his truths his way than an attorney would halt a witness’ testimony he found important but personally offensive.

(The editor in chief of Variety, who declared in print after reading her script that her “principal talent lies not in writing but rather in getting into trouble,” advised her in the same piece “not to over-research a topic. If you submerge yourself in a subculture like the LAPD, you run the danger of surrendering your own sensibility to that of your new environment.”)

In the 13 hours of tapes made with Fuhrman and other officers over nine years, is it possible that Fuhrman aggrandized himself and his exploits to make a more salable story? “He could have exaggerated, he could have lied, but he made no indication that was his intent,” she says. More than anything, she recalls, he wanted his attitude toward women cops in particular to be vividly depicted.

And what about those tapes? Why didn’t she get rid of them?

Once their existence became widely known, she says her lawyers told her she could face a felony charge for destroying them.

Anyway, says Sam Grogg, it drives him nuts that anyone in his profession would say, “ ‘Why didn’t you burn the tapes?’ That’s what the bad guys do.”

*

Darden: Now, your relationship in 1985 with Mark Fuhrman--was it only professional?

McKinny: . . . It was a business relationship. He was the technical advisor for this screenplay.

*

When McKinny first appeared in a courtroom to fight the subpoena, there were knowing mutters in front of TV sets: Well, that explains that. Had to be something between those two.

Then Darden said something at a sidebar about “her love letters to Mark Fuhrman,” and in open court asked about their relationship. “I already answered that,” she says steadfastly to the same questions--no. No love. And no love letters.

The prosecution’s questioning troubled her: “I felt I got burned. “Burned” is probably not the best word for that. I was very sympathetic to the situation in which they were finding themselves. . . . The trial was going on too long and here this comes. I thought if I were in their shoes, I was the last person I’d want to see.”

*

Darden: Have you had any [work] made into a film?

McKinny: I have had short pieces filmed, yes.

Darden: OK, you had a short piece called “The Painter” . . . and this was what? A kind of soft porn kind of a . . .

*

“The Painter” is a woman’s switcheroo on the Pygmalion myth of a Greek sculptor who fell in love with the marble woman he carved, and brought her to life. A copy of Jean Leon Gerome’s painting of the classical tale hangs in Laura and Daniel McKinny’s bedroom.

When the couple set out to make the short film some years ago for a Playboy project, the budget couldn’t afford sculpture materials, so they instead made the artist a painter, a woman. The subject on the canvas is a knight who comes alive, makes love to the artist and returns to the easel.

Only in storytelling do models return to the canvas. For the Simpson cast, both starring and supporting, the genies uncorked in Judge Ito’s courtroom will never be stuffed back into the bottle.

That is certainly true of McKinney’s long-running project.

Daniel McKinny cites confidential cover letter assessments from industry people he cannot name. Beyond the “Pass--too nervous about media glare” comments are others, like “Great writing but it’s primarily a woman’s story.”

The careful praise that Forbes and Schreckinger have for “Men Against Women” dwells more on her research and integrity than on the writing itself.

With crossed fingers, the Forbes-Schreckinger-McKinny project is on. “Ginny and I are not about to turn the industry around,” says Forbes. “But we believe in Laura, period.

“If there’s a final ‘no,’ it’ll be a final ‘no,’ but it’ll be a noble ‘no.’ ”