Editor’s Note: John Marks is the showrunner of “Giuliani: What Happened To America’s Mayor?” A former 60 Minutes producer and US News & World Report correspondent, Marks has worked most recently as a staff showrunner and director at Left/Right, a New York based production house, for a variety of cable and streaming networks. The views expressed in this commentary are his. Read more opinion on CNN. Watch “Giuliani: What Happened to America’s Mayor?” on CNN Sunday at 9 and 10 PM ET/PT.
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My father, a lawyer, once told me he hated movies about the law. With one exception, they were always false in one way or another. Yet the exception spoke to him profoundly, to his years as a defense attorney in the civil courts of Texas. That was 1982’s “The Verdict,” starring Paul Newman, directed by Sidney Lumet with a screenplay by the playwright David Mamet. Newman plays an alcoholic ambulance chaser named Frank Galvin, who finds himself suddenly giving a damn about justice in the midst of a case that should have been open and shut.
“The Verdict” is a movie about redemption. Newman’s closing argument is a confession about his own loss of faith in the law. Framed in a wide shot that shows the lawyer, the jury, the judge, the grain of the wood of the court itself, the symbolism of American justice becomes visible.
That image came back to me so many times over the last year and a half as I worked on a CNN documentary series about another lawyer – former US Attorney, former New York Mayor and former counsel to President Donald Trump, Rudolph Giuliani. I thought about Giuliani, and then I thought of this scene and what it meant to my father.
We tend to think of Giuliani in his capacity as mayor, as indicated in the subtitle of the series, “What Happened To America’s Mayor?” – but for most of his life in government and in private practice, the mayor was a lawyer, at one time, by all accounts, a great one. He started there, and it seems likely he will end there. At this time, his law license has been suspended in New York and Washington DC.
Read through this lens, can the story of Giuliani be seen as the tale of a lawyer who lost faith with the law, like the character in “The Verdict,” but without the Hollywood ending? When we ask what…
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