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May 2003
In this interview Edgar nominee D. W. Buffa discusses his new Hollywood legal thriller, STAR WITNESS, in great detail. (Please note that Buffa's reply to the sixth question contains a plot spoiler. If you have not read the book, you may want to skip this one.)
Q: You worked for ten years as a defense attorney. Clearly that adds to your ability to bring a dose of reality to your descriptions of what goes on inside a courtroom. In what other ways did that experience impact you as a writer?
D. W. Buffa: As a defense attorney doing trial work, all you think about is the trial you're currently involved in. Then the verdict comes in --- guilty or not guilty --- and it's over. You might have certain emotions about it one way or the other but the next day you're on to the next case. It's the same for judges and prosecutors. Everybody moves on to the next case, the next case, the next case. What we rarely do is stop and think about the people whom the old case was about and what will happen to them. In THE DEFENSE Antonelli defends a man accused of raping his 12-year-old stepdaughter. At one point in the trial, the judge says to him, "I've watched you work and you're probably going to win, but what will happen to that little girl?"
As a practicing trial attorney always moving on to the next case you sometimes forget that there are serious consequences to what you do; that other people will have to live with those consequences the rest of their lives. You can keep moving through the system and do the best you can in each trial, but you've left behind either some witness you've savaged on cross examination, a defendant who maybe didn't get the result they should have, a victim who may not have gotten the justice they deserved. There's a moral tension between what the law does and the effect it has on individuals. I try to bring that same tension to my writing.
Q: Why did you leave the law?
D. W. Buffa: The other side of being a defense lawyer is that it gets very depressing after a while. Over time there is a certain sameness to it because the system is basically broken and in need of major repair. The average defendant --- the guy you're seeing on a daily basis --- is in his early 20's with barely a tenth grade education. What happens in the tenth grade? The answer is school starts to get tough and that's when they start dropping out. And so of course they have no job skills. Eventually they get in a little trouble with alcohol or some form of narcotic and before they know it they're in the system. The first time around they typically plead guilty. They're put on probation. And although they can't afford a lawyer they're hit with fines and costs. Almost inevitably they violate the terms of probation. And then they're back doing jail time. Of course they still have the alcohol and drug problem because there's really not much of any kind of alcohol or drug treatment program in our jails. And then they're back out. In ten years of practicing law virtually all of the burglary cases I was involved in had some connection to drugs. And none of them involved planning of any kind. These kids were simply driving down the street and needed a hit. And of course they got caught because they're not really that smart. Now they're going to prison. And the cycle just goes on and on. It got very depressing and that's why I left.
Q: How do you fix a system that broken?
D. W. Buffa: The first thing that should be done is to set up alcohol and drug treatment programs in every county jail. Think about it. You've got a guy who you've just arrested for something related to drugs and alcohol. He's going to be in jail for at least thirty days (which is the average time of most residential care alcohol and drug treatment programs). He's literally a captive audience. It's the perfect opportunity to break the cycle and get to the problem that more often than not got him in trouble to begin with. And I'm not talking about setting up some kind of fancy program, I'm simply talking about bringing in counselors --- which means people who themselves are recovering addicts or alcoholics --- to work with these young offenders. In a lot of cases providing this kind of treatment will get them clean and sober.
The next thing that needs to be done is to provide some kind of decent job training. It's not enough to require inmates to get their G.E.D., you've got to give them some kind of marketable job skills. I met a fellow here in California who had a really wonderful idea. He got companies who were updating their computer systems to donate their old computers to his non-profit organization. These would then be brought to state prisons where he had set up a program that trained inmates to become computer technicians. As part of their training the inmates refurbished the old computers, which were then donated to various schools. The program was so wildly successful that California Governor Pete Wilson mentioned it in his state-of-the-state address and introduced the man who created it. I met him once when we were both on a panel. I asked him about the recidivism rate among the people his program had trained. He said, "We don't have one. No one we've ever trained has gone back to prison once they've gotten out."
And finally, judges need to be given more discretion in terms of sentencing. This business about mandatory minimum twenty-five or thirty year sentences for possession of drugs is insane. Clearly there are dangerous people who need to be kept locked up but there are plenty of others who, with the right kind of training and treatment, could turn their lives around and become valuable members of society. The problem is politicians like to talk about how tough they are on crime. What they don't talk about is the huge price we're paying for these sentencing policies. And it's only going to get worse as the economy continues to decline and states continue to look for ways to cut costs. We've all seen stories about states cutting loose x numbers of prisoners because they can't afford to keep them anymore in already overcrowded facilities. These inmates are now coming out at a time of spiraling unemployment. They have virtually no chance of finding jobs and there are no work programs for them to get into. What are they going to do? They're going to return to the things they know: get back on drugs and alcohol and commit crimes.
Q: Where did the idea for this story originate?
D. W. Buffa: I had been intrigued by a number of famous murder cases --- most recently the O.J. Simpson case --- where you have a crime involving a celebrity (either as the victim or as the accused) and everybody is utterly convinced, even before the trial gets underway, that the defendant is guilty. I wondered what would happen if, regardless of the outcome of the trial, it was subsequently discovered they weren't guilty at all.
What I tried to do in STAR WITNESS was set it up so basically you had celebrities on all sides. The victim is movie star Mary Margaret Flanders; the accused is her husband Stanley Roth. Everyone thinks Roth is guilty. All the evidence points towards him --- it's almost an open and shut case. Antonelli is having a hell of a time figuring how to save him. But unlike most people, Roth, as a celebrated director and studio head, has the ability to shape public opinion. He makes a movie about the murder that changes the public's perception of what happened. In a way this novel is an attempt to deal with the tensions that exist between a fictionalized account of reality and reality itself.
Q: You've written that in Joseph Antonelli, you wanted to create a character that was intelligent, and deeply aware of the moral dilemmas, not just of the law, but also of life. Why?
D. W. Buffa: Perhaps one of the reasons is my half-Sicilian background. There are a great many Italian-Americans who feel, as Gay Talese put it, that "Italian-Americans are the only people you're allowed to make fun of." Or to portray as genetically predisposed to criminality. In movies like The Godfather, Casino, Goodfellas, Donnie Brasco and The Untouchables, to name just a few, as well as programs like The Sopranos, Italians, and especially Sicilians, are often painted as obscenity-spewing crooks. I'm not offended by it but I also don't find it particularly funny. Instead I find it very interesting. In Antonelli I wanted to have a lawyer who comes from a Sicilian background and who gives thought to the moral issues and dilemmas he faces every day both in and out of the courtroom. I wanted to have a Sicilian who people would think was interesting and worth knowing.
Q: What sort of moral dilemmas are you talking about when it comes to the law?
D. W. Buffa: There's a certain moral tension in almost every kind of legal action. The law, in defining conduct, distinguishes between that which is permissible and that which is not. It operates by using categories and setting up certain standards. The problem is that every situation is in some sense unique. You can have two people who commit exactly the same crime and one is more culpable than the other. Perhaps one guy did it with deliberate intent and the other because they were driven to it, or under someone else's influence. But the law often doesn't recognize those differences. And because it is something of a cumbersome instrument, the law can often have the effect of working an injustice. Antonelli is acutely aware of this. THE DEFENSE featured two trials. In the first Antonelli used the law to win an acquittal for somebody he knew was guilty of a really terrible crime. In the second he basically got somebody to lie on the stand to insure the acquittal of someone he was absolutely sure was innocent. The dilemma I was trying to raise was this: Is it better to use the law to achieve an unjust result or to break the law to achieve a just result. It was an exploration of the tension between what the law requires and what the just result should be.
In STAR WITNESS I've gone a little farther. At the beginning of Roth's trial Antonelli thinks something weird is going on when the judge delivers a ruling on bail that makes no sense. That becomes an example of the power of the movie industry. And it is the desire of people to be a part of the industry that works its influence on what goes on in the courtroom. Eventually the trial ends in a hung jury. It soon becomes public knowledge there was one holdout; one person who refused to go along with a guilty verdict. When Antonelli sees the movie that Roth makes about the crime and the trial, he realizes the woman playing the clerk is the holdout juror. The influence was very indirect. Nobody bribed her. But she was an actress, just starting out in her career, who didn't have much work. There was a conversation that took place between Roth, his partner, and the woman's agent. If Roth could make another movie they might have a part in it for her. She holds out because the possibility of a future career was more important to her than what was going on in the courtroom.
Q: How much of you is in Joseph Antonelli and how closely do his experiences match your own as a defense attorney?
D. W. Buffa: I am Joseph Antonelli but Joseph Antonelli isn't me. A lot of the courtroom stuff he does is routine. It's the stuff I did as a defense attorney; the stuff all defense attorneys do. Then there's the extraordinary stuff he pulls off that I would like to have done but never did. For example, there's a scene in THE JUDGMENT, the third Antonelli novel, in which he confronts a tyrannical judge in open court. He says, "Your honor, in your presence I feel like the Buddhist in front of his idol. I know you are ugly but I know you are great." Antonelli has a certain flamboyance that I never had. And I love his "the-hell-with-what-happens-I'll-say-what-I-want" attitude. Another big difference between him and me is that he's become rich, successful and one of the most famous lawyers in America. I mainly did indigent defense (probably because ninety-five percent of the criminal cases in this country involve people who can't afford a lawyer). What we do have completely in common is a love of being in a courtroom, of being in a trial. There's a certain vanity to being in front of judge and jury that we both share.
Q: There is a lot of good contemporary courtroom fiction out there and certainly lots of mystery stories set in Los Angeles and/or Hollywood. What makes this book different? What sets it apart?
D. W. Buffa: I think what sets it apart is Stanley Roth, one of the story's main characters. Roth is the most powerful man in Hollywood. He's someone who has been enormously successful but is completely dissatisfied with what he's done and wants to do something great. He wants to make the greatest picture ever made-a picture as good as, or better than, Citizen Kane. He wants to be as good as, or better than, Orson Welles. And he's willing to risk everything, including even the chance that he might be convicted of murder, to accomplish his goal.
Q: You've said each of your novels is an attempt to deal with a separate question or issue. What's the issue you're trying to deal with in STAR WITNESS?
D. W. Buffa: STAR WITNESS is a novel about the power of fame and celebrity, the power of the public opinion on which celebrity depends, and the power of movies and entertainment to shape that public opinion. There are all sorts of people out there right now whose understanding of what happened to JFK or Malcolm X is based entirely on what they saw in the movies. I wanted to explore the power that films and visual images have to construct the reality we end up believing in.
Q: Who served as the model for Roth?
D. W. Buffa: I started thinking about writing a book about Hollywood after rereading F. Scott Fitzgerald's THE LAST TYCOON, a novel whose central character is based on Irving Thalberg, the legendary director who was considered the boy genius of Hollywood's golden era. What's fascinating about Thalberg, or at least the depiction of him in the novel, is that he was not just the most influential person in Hollywood but someone who was considered the best at what they do. Yet despite all the acclaim, the money, the fame and power, Thalberg didn't think like that. Instead he was acutely aware of what he hadn't done; what he hadn't accomplished. There was this element of dissatisfaction to his life, and a drive to do something that would justify, in his own mind, his very existence. Stanley Roth suffers the same problem. He's someone who's made his name and fortune turning out the kinds of movies everyone wants to go see. The problem is his movies don't have much meaning --- and he knows it. So he ends up disparaging his own success and finds himself driven to create the kind of movie he originally got into the business to make: a great American classic, something greater than Citizen Kane. All through the book, everything about him, including his own murder trial and maybe even the murder itself, is subsidiary and becomes almost a means to achieving that one ambition.
Q: What about Roth's wife Mary Margaret Flanders. Who served as the inspiration for that character?
D. W. Buffa: At the height of the Hollywood studio "star system" people often went to see a movie just because a particular star was in that movie. Grace Kelly was that kind of star. When you saw her on the screen you couldn't forget her. Not only couldn't you forget her, there was also a sense that you sort of knew her better than people you actually knew in real life. The effect Mary Margaret has on the screen was derived to some extent from the effect Grace Kelly had. If you saw her on the screen, even standing off to the side while someone else was talking, she's the one you'd look at.
The same sort of phenomenon was very much in evidence when Princess Diana died. Tens of thousands of people lined up at British Consulates all over the world to lay down flowers and pay their respects. They didn't know her personally but they all identified with her in some way. We tend to associate and identify with people we don't know. And when we do we convince ourselves we really do know them. That's exactly what I think goes on in movie theaters.
Q: What do you want readers to get out of this novel?
D. W. Buffa: When they're done I want readers to put this book down and be troubled by what they've read. I want it to have an unsettling affect. Of course I want my readers to be entertained but I also want them to take it seriously. I want them to think about the extent to which our thoughts, our beliefs and our reality are based on what we see on the screen. And I want them to wonder about who really committed the crime in this story. As they read it I hope they change their mind three times as to who did it and why.
© Copyright 2003, Penguin Putnam. All rights reserved.
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