E! Acts Out a Way to Cover Simpson

Move over, “Murder One” and “Law & Order.” There’s another courtroom drama coming to television.

E! Entertainment Television today will start featuring reenactments from the O.J. Simpson civil trial, with actors portraying Simpson, his friend Al “A.C.” Cowlings and other figures in the murder case.

E!, the entertainment-oriented cable network that provided gavel-to-gavel coverage of Simpson’s criminal trial, decided to do the reenactments in response to the banning of television cameras from the courtroom by Superior Court Judge Hiroshi Fujisaki.

“Our audience showed during the criminal trial that they were very interested in what was going on in the courtroom,” John Rieber, vice president of programming for E!, said Wednesday. “This is the best way to take viewers inside the courtroom, because that is where they want to be.”

The reenactments will be performed by a group of 25 actors who will work from trial transcripts, and will be acted out at the E! studios on a set that approximates the look of the Santa Monica courtroom where the trial is taking place.

Re-creations of that day’s testimony will be taped for airing the following day during “The O.J. Civil Trial,” a one-hour recap that will also feature analysis of the proceedings by legal experts and interviews with guest experts and trial watchers. The show will air Monday through Friday at 5 p.m. and will repeat the following day at 1 p.m.

Rieber said the production team will receive transcripts at the end of each court day and determine which testimony accurately reflects the tone of the proceedings. About 30 to 40 minutes of each day’s show will be devoted to the reenactments.

E! reporters covering the trial will assist the actors in capturing the nuances and phrasing of the witnesses and attorneys, Rieber said.

“That is an understandable concern,” he said. “Our highest priority is to give a fair and accurate depiction of what happened in the courtroom. We will have TelePrompTers to make sure there is no ad-libbing. It will be absolutely verbatim without any editorializing.”

E! hired casting agents to help find actors. “There were two criteria--one, that they approximate the look of the witnesses, and two, that they could do this accurately with a short turnaround time,” Rieber said. “These are not celebrity look-alikes. These are trained professionals that can reenact honestly.”

Unknowns will portray the trial principals. Simpson will be portrayed by Stephen Wayne Eskridge, a film and stage actor who has had several small roles in movies and television. Mason Dragotto will portray Faye Resnick, the friend of Simpson’s ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, who was killed outside her condo on June 12, 1994, along with her friend Ronald Lyle Goldman.

At least one local TV station, KCBS-TV Channel 2, considered doing daily reenactments of the trial. But executives ultimately decided against it.

“It’s a real prickly issue,” said KCBS news director Larry Perret. “You have to make sure it is not taken the wrong way, and we’re not sure how we could have made it work properly. There would have to be a neutral third party doing this, like a law school and professors. It’s really hard to capture what happens in court; you have to listen to the testimony, then capture the nuances.

“We just thought it would be hard to do without hurting our overall image, and we didn’t want to do that.”