The Thin Blue Line (documentary)
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| The Thin Blue Line | |
|---|---|
| Directed by | Errol Morris |
| Produced by | Mark Lipson |
| Written by | Errol Morris |
| Starring | Randall Adams David Harris |
| Release date(s) | August 25, 1988 |
| Running time | 103 min |
| Language | English |
| IMDb profile | |
The Thin Blue Line is a 1988 documentary film concerning the November 28, 1976 murder of Dallas police officer, Robert W. Wood, during a traffic stop. The Dallas Police Department was unable to make an arrest until they learned of information given by a 16-year-old resident of Vidor, Texas who had told friends that he was responsible for the crime. The juvenile, David Ray Harris, led police to the car driven from the scene of the crime, led them to recover a .22 caliber revolver he identified as the murder weapon and subsequently identified a 28-year-old Ohio resident, Randall Dale Adams, who was living in a motel in Dallas with his brother, as the murderer. The film presents a series of interviews about the investigation and reenactments of the shooting, based on the testimony and recollections of Adams, Harris and various witnesses and detectives. Two attorneys who represented Adams at the trial where he was convicted of capital murder also appear: they suggest that Adams was charged with the crime despite the better evidence against Harris because, as Harris was a juvenile, only Adams could be sentenced to death under Texas law.
The film was directed by Errol Morris and scored by Philip Glass. The film was marketed as "nonfiction" rather than as a documentary which disqualified it from being considered in that category for an Academy Award. However, as a result of publicity around the film, Adams (whose death sentence had been overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1980 and commuted to life in prison) had his conviction overturned by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals and the case returned to Dallas County for a retrial. The district attorney's office declined to prosecute the case again and Adams was subsequently ordered released as a result of a habeas corpus hearing in 1989.
Harris had testified in the original trial that he was the passenger in the stolen car that he allowed Adams to drive and that Adams committed the murder. He recanted this testimony at Adams' habeas corpus hearing. However, he never admitted guilt in a judicial setting and was never charged in the case. Harris was executed in 2004 for an unrelated murder in Beaumont, Texas which occurred during an attempted abduction in 1985.
The film's title comes from the prosecutor's comment during his closing argument, paraphrasing Rudyard Kipling's Tommy, that the police are the "thin blue line" separating society from anarchy.
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[edit] Awards
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 and an Edgar Award. In 2001, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
[edit] Lawsuit
Shortly after his release, Adams sued Morris. In an interview with Danny Yeager published in The Touchstone the summer of 2000, Adams said "Mr. Morris felt he had the exclusive rights to my life story...Therefore, it became necessary to file an injunction to sort out any legal questions on the issue. The matter was resolved before having to go before a judge. Mr. Morris reluctantly conceded that I had the sole rights to my own life. I did not sue Errol Morris for any money or any percentages of The Thin Blue Line, though the media portrayed it that way." [1]
Morris, for his part, remembers: "When he got out, he became very angry at the fact that he had signed a release giving me rights to his life story. And he felt as though I had stolen something from him. Maybe I had, maybe I just don't understand what it's like to be in prison for that long, for a crime you hadn't committed. In a certain sense, the whole crazy deal with the release was fueled by my relationship with his attorney. And it's a long, complicated story, but I guess when people are involved, there's always a mess somewhere." [1]
[edit] References
[edit] External links
- David Harris Offender Information
- Interview with Errol Morris
- The Thin Blue Line at the Internet Movie Database
- The Thin Blue Line at Rotten Tomatoes
- Officer Robert W. Wood at The Officer Down Memorial Page, Inc
- Discussion of the documentary aspects at the New York Times
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