June 17th, 1994

Pros: Extensive amount of clips, great use of Talking Heads song, favorite episode of 30 for 30, different perspectives Cons: Two words-OJ

I was born in 1987, so although the OJ Simpson trial was the biggest news scandal growing up, the start of it was a bit before my time. I started watching this by accident and couldn't not turn away from the TV. It basically chronicles the sports world on June 17th 1984, just showing sports clips. There is no independent narrator or direction given, just the news coverage from the day. It is so haunting, how many huge events were going on at the same time. Showing the start of the day, where the New York Rangers are having their celebratory parade and everyone is so happy, and then as the day goes on the mood changes to the NBA finals game being interrupted to show the car chase! The announcers at the NBA game were so flustered. Like Bob Costas, he is still an announcer today and he looked so confused. The addition of stuff from OJ's past also adds to the mysteriousness of the program, watching how he used to be perceived before the murders and afterwards is so insane. I think for most of us it is impossible to think of OJ without thinking of the murders and this show reminds us of how loved he was. I have never seen anything like it, it was magical. Watch it if you can.

This is full of unexpected depth. It's about that day in June of 1994 when OJ Simpson fled in a Bronco with a dozen helicopters filming from above, expecting drama. That same day the US World Cup was opening. The Rangers were celebrating their first Stanley Cup in decades. Close by, the Knicks were playing game 5 of the finals in Madison Square Garden.

So we flit between all these events, from one coast to the other. We flit from festive crowds at the Rangers parade in New York, to crowds of reporters gathered outside the LA courthouse waiting for Simpson to give himself up. It's comprised entirely of TV footage from that day, no narration other than from TV. There's palpable excitement in the air, a sense of event.

Nevermind that it's financed by ESPN, this is eyeopening work. Simple if you peruse as just a documentary. But if you peruse it as a wandering montage, all about entirely visual flows churned out by life and picked up by the eye to splice together a larger world?

See, crowds gather up in bridges where OJ's car is going to pass by, followed by a dozen police cars. What do they see in those few fleeting seconds? A car has just come and gone, zipped by before you know. Others are waiting for hours outside his house in the hundreds, again seeing nothing much, maybe a house a few hundred feet that way.

More than just about obsession with spectacle, the same hysteric culture that would soon be gobbling up reality TV, I see this as about people coming together to be part of something larger that rends the air with anticipation. People want to partake. How descriptive then, transcendent almost, to see TV footage of Simpson's aerial chase bleeding on-air from one channel to the other, the airwaves blurring and coalescing, because there were so many cameras transmitting close by?

And all this as memory that hovers over these events from the distance of time. I was at a beach-house on the other side of the world with my grandfather that day watching the World Cup, my first ever. None of the other things reached us. I'm sure people watching at home would be doing so with some of the same anxiously fascinated sense as people below. Looking back now? Fondness at recalling, probably. Life has that completely marvelous quality, it unravels, then works itself out.

So when it all aligns, it lights up this world which would never take the shape it does without people clamoring to watch. Watch this as if it was a Soviet 'city symphony' from the silent era.

I don't know if Brett Morgen's made-for-TV (would it be any other way?) documentary on June 17th, 1994, is subtle, but how could it be? It's was a Big, BIG day, for sports and for sport figures who become murder suspects. It was a day when the Rangers, having one the Stanley Cup for the first time since 1940, had their parade in NYC; Arnold Palmer, one of the most respected figures in golf history, had his final day as a regular-pro-tournament golfer (albeit not a great day of golf); the Knicks, following close on the heels of the Rangers, were playing at the Garden for Game 5, a deciding game, for the Championship; the World Cup had just started that very day; Ken Griffey Jr matched up to Babe Ruth for a Homerun record. Big news, big emotions, big everything, with commentators like Keith Olbermann(!) and Bob Costas and Marv Albert giving a point-by-point scoop.

And then came O.J., with his arrest warrant and his Bronco being driven by Al Cowling, and assisting whether he knew it or not in the birth of a kind of perverse media-obsessed culture that watches Court TV, Reality TV, whatever-TV that has celebrities in bad (bleep). What I took away from it, from Morgen and his masterful editor, is that the sports figures throughout this day are deified by the media, and indeed at one time O.J. made commercials with Arnold Palmer. They're just people, but they become more in the public consciousness, brought to you by TV. If Marshall MacLughan were alive Morgen's work would be the kind to make him weep in between being thought provoked.

It's a tale of media and sports, and of a kind of circus that overtook the media in-between changing channels (which, cleverly, is used at one point as an editing trick based upon certain news stations in LA getting cross-interference from all of the helicopters in pursuit). For those who were alive then and remember the day (I was a youth but knew very well about the Rangers win and was reminded that guy in the Naked Gun movies wasn't all he seemed), it's a shot from the past, like the best Youtube video you've never seen, without a talking head from today but feeling present as ever. And for those seeing this blast from the immediate past for the first time, I imagine it would be sobering: not only have we not changed much, we've probably gotten more obsessed with Celebrity culture over actual achievements in Sports.

To this day, there are few documentaries that stack up to June 17, 1994. It brought a unique perspective to a day that is remembered for a singular event, bringing a bit of gravitas to what led up to that fateful chase on that lonely LA highway. We all remember the crowds, the insane fanatics clogging the streets with little to no idea what they were actually entrenching themselves with. There is a reason why the OJ Simpson trial is still being talked about to this day.

What made it so engrossing was the intensity of the real time reactions. The addition of OJ talking to the psychologist gave us an insight to what was happening in the troubled mind of a man we all loved. The film picked the right kind of music, ramped up and slowed down the pace when needed, and even gave moments of clarity over the absurdity over the situation. You would never realize how incredible that day truly was until you watched this film.