One of my guilty-pleasure filmmakers is the British director Nick Broomfield, who, in the prime of his career making documentaries around lurid tabloid material, including two about the Aileen Wuornos case (Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer and Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer), another about Heidi Fleiss (Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madam), and two more, back to back, about violent pop-culture tragedies, Kurt & Courtney and Biggie & Tupac. All of these cases had been thoroughly picked over in mainstream media, so Broomfield’s approach, particularly in Kurt & Courtney and Biggie & Tupac, was to poke around at the fringes and find compelling weirdos with minor connections to the major players. His schtick was to put himself in front of the camera and act like he fell off a turnip truck, and it worked like a charm every time.
Now that The Jinx has gotten past its first season, where it played a role in successfully nabbing a murderer, and past the first episode of this season, where it took a victory lap for successfully nabbing a murderer, the show seems to be settling into a Broomfield doc — wholly unnecessary, wildly entertaining. The path from Robert Durst’s apprehension to his conviction is not all crucial for a six-part documentary to follow, which has given The Jinx Part Two the quality of the longest DVD supplement of all time. But Andrew Jarecki and company are obviously interested in seeing this project all the way through, and the case has immediately started to drum up some incredible misfits on the edges. Bob Durst was not an ordinary guy, so it makes sense that his confidants are not ordinary people. Someone normal, like his first wife Kathie, never really fit in his sphere.
Though it introduces some other fun characters — I look forward to more from Michael and David Belcher, the apple-cheeked law clerks known as “the Wonder Twins” — “Friendships Die Hard” focuses intently on three friends who Durst worked hard to keep loyal in the lead-up to his trial in Los Angeles. With the trial on the horizon, Durst has been anxious about using his prison calls to secure their protection and sending his lawyers if that doesn’t work. Meanwhile, our cold case specialist, John Lewin, peppers them with phone calls in an effort to pry them away. Jarecki’s access to all of these calls and prison videos gives us some insight into how the case against Durst was built, but mainly it works as a window into the type of morally feeble misfits whose loyalty could be bought through a checkbook. A question like, “What do you do when your best friend kills your other best friend?” would be easy for 99.9 percent of humanity to answer. Jarecki introduces us to the other .1 percent.
First up is Doug Oliver, a real estate developer who seems awful even by the low standards of real estate developers. Charles Bagli of the New York Times describes Oliver as a would-be playboy in the ‘80s who convinced Durst to buy out a tenement building to rehabilitate the property and got 50 percent of the profits in return. When Lewin calls him about speaking to the prosecutors about Durst, Oliver brusquely declines, then wonders if he’ll have to pay for his flight to Los Angeles if Lewin subpoenas him. That leads to Oliver snootily negotiating for the state to pay for a private plane, knowing full well that Lewin can only offer a coach, and then telling him, “You guys are not going to get me on the commercial flight.” He would rather go to jail in New York than fly commercial. (Honestly, the quality of commercial flights makes that a less ridiculous statement than it should be.)
With Oliver looking like a firm “no,” Lewin turns to the most absurd figure of the three: Nick “Chinga” Chavin, an advertising executive who earned millions when the Durst Organization became his only client. Chavin feels especially grateful to Durst because he wasn’t likely to make his fortune as the frontman of Chinga Chavin, a “country porn” band that made its theoretical bones on country-western numbers with names like “Cum Stains on My Pillow (Where Your Sweet Head Used to Be).” Chavin met Durst through Susan Berman, who’d reviewed his band positively and become friends promoting his career. The two men were “naughty boys” having fun in New York, and Chavin describes them as sharing “a contempt for the law and for society and for the rules.”
It’s blazingly apparent that Chavin would have kept dodging any involvement in the case at all if not for his wife Terry, whose distaste for Durst and Debrah Lee Charatan, Durst’s second wife and co-conspirator, is rivaled only by her hatred of Chavin’s music. It turns out that Terry, at a low moment in her life, took a job working for Charatan at a real estate firm that sought a niche in the male-dominated field by hiring all women as employees. Yet in Terry’s account, this was not a great step forward for womankind: In maybe the craziest story in an episode full of them, Terry recalls Charatan being so concerned about how the women in the office smelled that she’d line her workers up in her office, have them lift their arms, and sniff their pits for inspection. If they didn’t smell up to standard, they’d have to go home for a shower.
As Terry’s cajoling makes the reluctant Nick more persuadable, Lewin moves on to Susie Giordano, Durst’s assistant and possible girlfriend, who worked with Chavin at his firm. Giordano’s status as a penpal and future love-nest inhabitant makes her a tough get for the prosecution, though the nature of her relationship with Durst naturally puts her at odds with Charaton, who doesn’t want to hear about the $150,000 he transferred to her. Of particular interest to Lewin is a package that Giordano shipped to Durst in New Orleans while he was plotting his getaway. The box was stuffed with clothing and other items that Giordano claimed to have jammed in there over the three minutes she was in his darkened apartment. There was also some cash that she estimated at $1,000 and that the authorities discovered was $114,000 higher than that estimate.
The sad truth of “Friendships Die Hard” is that loyalty can be purchased at various price points that a man like Robert Durst can easily afford. For Susie Giordano, the price was at least six figures. For Chris Lovell, the bald juror from Galveston, the mere promise of money seemed to have been enough.
• Funny callback from the Wonder Twins to Limp Bizkit frontman Fred Durst, who had to clarify in a 2015 Instagram post that he did not, in fact, “Kill ‘em all.” The only thing that Durst killed was rock and roll.
• Digging deeper into the Chinga Chavin phenomenon, the album Country Porn sold over 100,000 copies via mail order through Penthouse magazine and included a song called “Asshole from El Paso,” a parody of Merle Haggard’s notorious “Okie From Muskogee,” that Chavin co-wrote with Kinky Friedman.
• Did Durst dismembering Morris Black bother Chavin? “It just didn’t have any impact on me. I don’t have that same moral hatred of murder and murderers.”
• It may be far down the list of Jarecki and company’s motives for revisiting the Durst case for another season, but staging a reenactment of women lifting their arms in Debrah Lee Charatan’s office is real cinema.