Joe Berlinger is an Oscar-nominated filmmaker who in recent years has focused on true-crime documentaries that have a strong social justice component to then. Recent productions for include Conversations With A Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes. Crime Scene: The Vanishing At The Cecil Hotel (both for Netflix), Confronting A Serial Killer (done for Starz) and Murder Among The Mormons.
In all of those productions, he has expanded the vision of what a true-crime documentary should be. In Crime Scene: The Vanishing At The Cecil Hotel, he told the story of the hotel's crime-ridden past, but also used those stories to illustrate the dangers of trying to solve crimes from the safety of your living room. Confronting A Serial Killer told the horrific story of serial killer Sam Little, but it also told the story of Jillian Lauren, a true-crime author who found herself drowning emotionally as she became Little's outlet for his stories of murder.
In the same way, Crime Scene: The Times Square Killer tells the story of Richard Cottingham, a nearly forgotten serial killer nicknamed "The Torso Killer" by the press. But the episodes also tell the story of Times Square in the 1970s: a sexually-charged neighborhood filled with everything from hundreds of sex workers to live shows featuring couple having sex in front onstage.
I recently spoke with Berlinger about the show and why he felt it was so important to tell the story of Richard Cottingham. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
It was really interesting to me how you framed the arc of the episodes this season. You spent a lot of time building out this look at New York City and specifically Times Square in the 1970s. And it felt like this was a crime that really reflected the specific moment when it took place.
The whole idea of the series is to not just look at a specific crime - because I and others have been doing that for a long time - but to tweak the true crime genre a bit. To pull back a little and look at the social forces that have aided and abetted crime. What are the factors involved besides just the criminal deciding to act? And so, Times Square in the 70s was a particular time and place that I think created this monster called Richard Cottingham.
The sexual liberation of the 60s led to people pursuing their darkest, deepest fantasies in the 1970s with impunity with New York's Times Square as an example. There was an economic crisis in New York, so there weren't as many police. 5,000 police officers were let go in 1975. So, New York, in the 70s, in the middle of Manhattan, a lot of people don't remember what it was like. Today we look at Times Square, and it's the corporate theme park that it's become. But in the 70s, you took your life into your hands by going into Times Square. And it was also this sexual playground where everything seemed available to you. So if you had dark intent, or were a predator, then it was a place to go to pursue that interest as well.
I was not as familiar with this this story as I was with the one involving The Cecil Hotel, in part because as a college student back in the 70s, I stayed at The Cecil for a couple of months.
(laughing) What was that like?
As an pretty innocent teenager from the Midwest, let's just say it was quite the adventure. But watching this season of the series, I learned a lot about not just the Times Square murders, but how crime prevention and just policing in general have changed so much. It's easy to forget how rudimentary it was back then.
I think a lot of people don't know this story, and it's one of the reasons I thought this would make a great season of Crime Scene. If you say to anybody, "Hey, who are the top American serial killers?," of course, you're gonna hear Gacy, Dahmer. Bundy. But nobody really says Cottingham and it's because Cottingham preyed upon sex workers. And that is kind of the social force or social justice component of the show. Sex workers, particularly in that era, were criminalized, which makes it hard for them to come forward. Rape laws were such that, you had to provide a witness to your rape allegations, to even bring a charge of rape. And so, as you can imagine, most rape happens behind closed doors, and there is no witnesses to the to the rape. So sex workers were treated terribly back then. And even to this day, there is a stigma against sex workers where the police just don't take these crimes as seriously.
The fact is that in the 80s in LA in particular, there was this phenomenon, where these these cases were coded as "no human involved." Police would roll up on a body that was in the dumpster and if they believed it was a sex worker they would classify it as "no human involved." Which meant they weren't going to investigate this. I've been an advocate of victims through my work for decades and this is all deeply problematic. All victims of crime - no matter what you do for a living - need to be treated equally. That's just a fundamental aspect of our justice system, And the 1970s was just the epitome of that phenomenon.
Do you have a sense that has changed at all? Because just from someone who sees stories go by it, it feels like still to this day, if you're going to go out and kill people, killing sex workers is the way to do it. Because there's still just not much attention paid to them by police.
I wish I could say things have changed a lot. I don't think police departments are using the phrase "no human involved" anymore. On the other hand, last year I did a show about Sam Little, who wasn't apprehended until very recently. God forbid, you're not just a sex worker, but a sex worker is a person of color, because then you are truly marginalized in our criminal justice system. And Sam Little was able to kill again and again because he targeted primarily sex workers of color.
Police just don't pay attention to those kinds of cases. Sadly, it's a stigmatization against sex work. And the stigmatization, pursuing justice on the behalf of the sex worker of victims, was for me on of the reasons why focusing on Time Square in the 70s was important. That time and place is long ago. But the stigmatization of sex workers and the tendency of police to ignore crimes against them lives on today.
One of the ironies of his story is that for all the time and effort the city of New York put into trying to clean up Times Square, it really didn't change substantially until AIDS come along. That was really the thing that changed Times Square
Exactly. That made it impossible for that Times Square to continue as it was.
And it seems like a lot of the police attention at the time was focused on the wrong people.
As one of the experts in our series says, it was a lot easier to hassle and arrest the sex worker than to track down a serial killer. There was a lot of pressure to crack down on crime. So you saw a lot of visible busts of prostitutes and johns, as opposed to a real police effort to find who the killers were.
I'm curious about how a documentary series like this is put together. Obviously, you have access to a lot of archival footage. And you do a number of contemporary interviews. But you also need to put together some recreations and I'm wondering how you decide what you need and how everything fits together. Are you working from a script or just cutting it all together as you go?
We don't script things. We do an outline of what we think we want to cover. And we book our subjects, do the interviews, and that informs us where to go next. Sometimes you discover things you weren't expecting in an interview, that's always the best thing. And then we edit together the interviews and the archival footage and decide which elements of the story are best served by doing a recreation. It's kind of an evolving process and by the rough cut stage of the edit, we know what recreations we need to shoot.
Sometimes there's an editorial hole you need to fill because you don't have an archival shot, but I usually try and stay away from that reason. It's often because there is some thematic element that I want to bring forward.
What was important to me in this season was trying to evoke and recreate the look and the feel of that era because I remember that place.
This whole thing started because we took my daughter to "Hamilton" in December 2019. Little did we know what was coming with COVID and all that. I hadn't actually been to the theater in New York in Times Square - Broadway - at the holiday time since I can't remember when. We had such a great time watching "Hamilton," we're walking down the street and it's lights and Broadway and Disney. And I said to my daughter, who was 20 at the time, I said, "you know, when I was 14, 15, I used to come into the city. And you would take your life into your hands.
Before movies, my first love was magic. And there was this famous magic store in Times Square - Lou Tannen's Magic Shop. Looking back, I can't believe my parents let me do it. Not out of neglect, it was just a different era. But when I was 13, 14 years old, I would take the train to Grand Central from Westchester. I would walk from Grand Central right to Times Square to the magic shop. And I just remember it was a mix of fear and teen titillation. I was looking in the window at things I shouldn't have been looking at.
So from a production standpoint, I really wanted to bring that era to light. So for instance, I went out with a real Super 8 camera to shoot some scenes. There's a certain color palette with that footage and I even treated some of the archival to give it that feel. There are some montages that are very collage-like to illustrate how Cottingham was overwhelmed with the sensory overload in Times Square. Which encouraged him to break taboo after taboo. I wanted to give the production a vibe that evoked and brought that era to life.
Rather than asking you what you're working on next, I'm curious about your dream project. Is there a story or a person that would like to do a fil about, but haven't been able to get it into production yet? Either because you can't get access to the materials you need or just haven't figured out quite how to do it yet?
There's a guy named Eddie Bunker who wrote his autobiography, "Eddie Bunker: The Education Of A Criminal." He started off as the youngest ward of the state because his parents abandoned him. He was an inmate at San Quintin. And somehow he met this incredible woman who was a former movie star and gave him positive reinforcement. And even though he was in prison for years, he emerged as this incredible prison writer. He wrote books like "Animal Factory," which Steve Buscemi turned into a movie. And "No Beast, So Fierce," which became the Dustin Hoffman movie "Straight Time." I've been wanting to tell his life story, but when I pitch this to people, I won't say they glaze over, but I've had trouble pushing that boulder up the hill. But it's an amazing story and I hope I can tell it one day.
Crime Scene: The Times Square Killer premieres Wednesday, December 29th, 2021 on Netflix.
