Truth and Consequences – The Drift

The filmmakers had turned over the raw production audio, and the full transcript revealed that the smoking-gun quote did not really exist. The filmmakers had re-ordered his words and removed other sentences in between, splicing together what had potentially been two disparate thoughts. Amid twenty rambling sentences on a hot mic, Durst may have made some kind of confession, but it was certainly not nearly as clear as the show had made it seem. Critics viewed this as a grave transgression, and journalists saw an engineered quote meant to gin up drama and deceive viewers. (The New York Times headline read, “As Durst Murder Case Goes Forward, HBO’s Film Will Also Be on Trial.”) For filmmakers, radical audio edits like this one are routine, even though the ramifications for their subjects tend to be less severe. It was a clear breach of journalistic ethics, but none of the men behind the film were journalists. The two camps were not really speaking the same language.