The Makers Of "The Jinx" Are Being Taken To Court For Editing Robert Durst's Final Scene To Make It Look Like A Confession
NYT — Then, the episode ended with Mr. Durst muttering to himself, perhaps confessing, as he marched off to the bathroom, still wearing his microphone from the interview.
“What the hell did I do?”
“Killed them all, of course.”
Viewers were left stunned. The documentary went on to win huge ratings, a Peabody and two Emmys.
But it turns out Mr. Durst’s remarks were significantly edited; rather than being consecutive, the two sentences had been plucked from among the 20 in his rambling remarks, and presented out of order.
Mr. Durst’s lawyers are now preparing to cite those edits — they’ll call them manipulations — in an effort to cripple his prosecution as they get ready for a trial set to begin in a few months in California. They are planning to call the documentary filmmakers as witnesses and to suggest that they cooperated so closely with the police that they became, in effect, “agents for law enforcement.”
This is why I fuckin hate documentaries! Everyone who watches a documentary comes to you the next day and can’t stop talking about the subject, as if everyone is just in a mood to discuss the conditions for Orcas at Sea World or why climbing a mountain without ropes is hard. They think they’re geniuses who have opened their mind to some new and unique topic that will wow the world. Shut up! You’re just regurgitating exactly what some producer wants you to say. You watched a fictional show with heavily edited facts and now think you’re a genius. Guess what? You’re actually a gullible fool.
Don’t get me wrong, “The Jinx” is one of the few documentaries I’ve watched and I love it. I gasped when the big reveal was Robert Durst confessing to the murders while a stream of piss left his shriveled old penis. But it was all a lie. The filmmakers edited the hell out of it in order to trick us all. They cut his words and folded them up into a nice little package so we could all pretend we were detectives who’d been part of cracking the case.
This is what happens with every documentary ever. We all become captivated by it, we raise hell for a little bit, then when the dust settles and we get a little distance from the camaraderie of watching the show together we look at it through a different lens we realize, “Oh wait, I was stupid.” It happened with Serial (Adnan did it), it happened with “Making a Murderer” (Steven Avery fuckin’ definitely did it), and now it’s happening with “The Jinx.” I mean Robert Durst still killed those people, but your smoking gun was movie magic.
And you know what the worst part is? They didn’t even have to edit it! Here’s the real transcript:
That still makes him look like a lunatic. I have no idea what is going on there but it’s clearly the ranting and raving of a madman, except not a madman blatantly admitting to murder. The show could have ended with that and we all still would’ve thought he’s a psycho who very-likely did it, but the filmmakers wanted their big moment so they lied to the viewers and pretended he outright confessed. Fuck documentary makers and watchers, you’re all a bunch of shitheads.