Retelling the Tragic Story of ‘Selena’

On March 31, 1995, the day tejano singing star Selena Quintanilla Perez was gunned down by her fan club manager at a motel in Corpus Christi, Texas, a young Guatemalan woman named Lizzett Padilla was cautioned not to go out of her house in Los Angeles.

The bubbly, dimpled aspiring actress resembled Selena so closely that family members feared she would be taken for the murdered singer’s ghost.

Now Padilla is playing Selena in E! Entertainment’s two-hour re-creation of the crime, “The Selena Murder Trial,” airing today.

“When I was studying modeling,” Padilla recalls, “the other girls kept calling me Selena and I said, ‘Hey! I have my own name, you know.’ But it’s true--I have Selena’s likeness and her personality. We’re both Aries, too. We were born a year and a week apart.”

Aside from the look-alike casting, E!’s docudrama seeks to go against the grain of TV docudramas by sticking to the transcript of the trial, rather than imagining scenes that might or might not have happened.

“Accuracy is what sets us apart, our use of verbatim transcripts,” says Fran Shea, E!’s senior vice president of programming.

Shea says that E!’s work on its Selena film last summer inspired the network to embark on its current daily re-creations of events in the O.J. Simpson civil trial. After previously making docudramas about the late actress Rebecca Schaeffer and comedian Sam Kinison, the network now plans monthly two-hour documentary treatments of “True Hollywood Stories” in 1997. Margaux Hemingway is the next subject on its list of recently departed stars.

“The Selena Murder Trial” presents varying recollections of events “in a ‘Rashomon’ style,” Shea says. “We avoid slanting by presenting different points of view,” based on more than 2,500 pages of transcripts.

Selena, 23 when she died, was on the brink of crossing over from her Tex-Mex roots into the mainstream. She was in the middle of recording her first English-language album when Yolanda Saldivar, a woman she thought of as a close friend, shot her. Saldivar was convicted of the murder and sentenced last year to life in prison.

The E! reenactment begins with three minutes of Selena performing “to set the story up for viewers and remind them of why it’s so interesting,” says E!’s Shea.

The concert footage also makes it unnecessary for Padilla herself to sing. Although she made a video of herself lip-syncing to Selena tunes in her quest for the part in the feature film, she is no singer.

“I never won the singing contests at school,” Padilla says. “I used to sing at home and my mother would yell, ‘You shut up or I’ll shut you up!’ So naturally I sang to annoy her. Perhaps it’s a good thing I am not singing on television.”

* “The Selena Murder Trial” airs at 4 p.m. today on E! Entertainment Television.

* Selena Quintanilla is also the subject of a feature film that will be released in May. See Sunday Calendar for a look at the making of the movie.