All posts tagged: drag race

The Cocreators of RuPaul’s Drag Race Bring a Shocking Killing to HBO

The Cocreators of RuPaul’s Drag Race Bring a Shocking Killing to HBO

When it debuted in the fall of 2011, Ryan Murphy’s American Horror Story blurred the line between fiction and reality with its allusions to real-life cases such as mass nurse murderer Richard Speck, the Black Dahlia case, and the slayings at Amityville manor. But just a year before the series dropped, there was a different high-profile homicide less than two hours from Murphy’s hometown of Indianapolis involving a huge brick mansion and an ominous rubber suit—eerie similarities to the first season of the FX series. Now that case is the subject of a new HBO docuseries helmed by two other iconic filmmakers: Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, the directors/producers behind RuPaul’s Drag Race, Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures, and Party Monster, 2003’s dramatic adaptation of the Michael Alig manslaughter case. The crime at the heart of Murder in Glitterball City, which premieres on February 19, shares some themes with Party Monster; both involve drugs, gay men, and homicide. And with both projects, Barbato tells Vanity Fair, their goal as filmmakers wasn’t to further sensationalize an …