I dont know if I can let that pass, fwiw, Nova. This case is what it is. No one railroaded MacDonald except for himself. At least imo. Because everyone wanted it not to be him. People loved him and respected him and were overwhelmed by everything about him.
But just about everyone reached the same conclusion after listening to his version of the truth and then to what the evidence showed.
Throw everything out but the blood typing and how Kristy was stabbed along her pulmonary vein. You would still get a conviction. JMVHO.
In any case, this guy was hired or invited to see if he could get MacDonald a new trial-win for MacDonald if it worked and win for Morris because he gets publicity either way.
His mistake was making it clear, again imo, that he isnt sure that MacDonald is innocent. The way he made that clear to me is by not dealing with all of the evidence.
(Emphasis added.) Not "everyone", but "almost everyone" most certainly including me. Haven't I made that clear?
But the question of Morris' motive came up. Here's an excerpt from Wiki about his first big success in 1988:
The Thin Blue Line won Best Documentary honors from the New York Film Critics Circle, the Kansas City Film Critics Circle, the National Board of Review, and the National Society of Film Critics. Morris himself won an International Documentary Association Award, an Edgar Award, and a MacArthur Fellowship Genius Grant (1989). The film was marketed as "nonfiction" rather than as a documentary which disqualified it from being considered in that category for an Academy Award....
Variety credits the film in a 2008 retrospective of documentaries as “the most political work of cinema in the last 20 years.”
The film in question proved the innocence of Texas death row inmate, Randall Adams, and won his acquittal several years before the Innocence Project was started. (In fact, I suspect the film helped to inspire the organization.)
In 2003, Morris won the Oscar for Best Documentary for
The Fog of War on Robert S. McNamera and the Viet Nam War. Morris is arguably the most successful documentary maker in the U.S. save for Michael Moore.
So he isn't some Johnny-come-lately that has to latch on to the McDonald case to get work. THAT was my point.
But he may indeed have a bias against LE of all stripes, considering both of his most famous documentaries are about government cover-ups that lasted decades. That TOO was my point.
Bottom line: even great artists can be dead-wrong. But that doesn't make them shysters. No, Morris probably wouldn't make an anti-McDonald film because that territory has been well covered by McGinnis. But neither do I believe Morris would make a pro-McDonald film just to make a buck. Documentaries don't usually pay that well.
