From: Jasper
Date: 16 Apr 2000
Time: 12:31:41
Remote Name: dyn1-tnt6-172.detroit.mi.ameritech.net
Kari,
I have to tell you that I thought the original D.O.A. was great. I thought the '88 remake stunk. But that's the one where the Bundy killer got his ideas (you'll see) and there are elements of D.O.A. ('88) as well a Moonlighting that seep into Murder 101.
You did get one thing wrong about Murder 101. The killer killed only three people--the wife of the doctor he frames for murder, one of Prof. Charlie Lattimore's students and the student's lover--the head of the English department played by MARK Taylor. Mark Taylor's character is also dating the professor's wife. She, too, is a college professor. Her name is LAURA. She has filed for divorce.
In D.O.A. '88 the professor's name is Dex. Like Chalie, he is a successful writer. The killer kills a student of Dex named Nick. He then kills the professor's wife and frames Dex for her murder. She was seeking a divorce from Dex and having an affair with Nick. Nick was in his early 20s (Ron Goldman was 25). Dex's wife was in her mid 30s (Nicole was 35). In the 1949 and the 1988 version of D.O.A. the hero is murdered with a slow-acting poison. In Murder 101 poison is one of the props that Prof. Charlie Lattimore pulls out of a bag to show his class what kinds of weapons might be used in a murder mystery.
You see how all of these things run together. Even if you didn't see the '88 version of D.O.A. the trailers that were run on television pretty much told the story of a dead student, the professor looking for the man who murdered him (the professor, not the student) and a student (Meg Ryan) who gets dragged along.
You'd be amazed at the information you pick up in trailer.
For example, I'd never seen Robert Altman's The Player ('92) until Jennifer Jason Leigh's birthday (Feb 5) led me there from Single White Female. I took notes for the book. Then, when I was following blood links (brothers and sister, parents and children acting in movies related to the evidence Fuhrman was associated with in the Bundy case) I saw a trailer of The Player on a video tape of a Michael Madsen movie. The scenes from the trailer were almost identical to my notes. Yes, I could have written the high points strictly from my appreciation of what was important in the movie as it related to Mark Fuhrman, Laura Hart McKinney and the Bundy murders. But how likely is it that NONE of what I must have seen in the trailers back in '91 and '92 ended up in the part of my brain labeled "The Player"?
I'm saying that every one of us is subject to the same association traps just because of the way the human brain is wired for perception and recall. We never see everything that's in front of us as a whole--only in related pieces that we store in different parts of our brain. When we remember something, were are actually calling on zillions of bits of information residing in a zillion different places to assemble in one place through a network of permanent and temporary associations. Errors in memory are bound to creep in from time to time. But these "errors" in memory are also exercises in imagination. That's why memory and imagination are so easily confused. The difference between them can be so subtle that without more information to distinguish them there is no way we can tell them apart on our own. --Jasper