Fracture

Daniel Pyne pitched this to Castle Rock early in 1999 as a cat and mouse game between a man who thinks he committed the perfect crime and a prosecutor out of his depth, and meant to direct it. New Line took it over years later, Gregory Hoblit got the chair, Pyne wrote with Glenn Gers. The confession arrives at once: Crawford tells the police himself that he shot his wife, then signs away his right to counsel, so the question is never who did it but whether the prosecution can produce the gun. How the ending gets round the acquittal is legally contested; an acquittal normally bars further prosecution outright. Crawford’s house is a real glass and steel residence in Encino, built in 2001. Hoblit puts it at roughly 80 percent glass, so you see from one end straight through to the other, exactly right for a crime that is visible and unprovable. The marble machines are not invented dressing: they follow designs by Dutch kinetic artist Mark Bischof, who says he only advised and took no part in the Hollywood copies. A good fit if you accept seeing the crime first and spending the rest on where the gun is. Not for viewers who resent the time given to the prosecutor’s move into private practice.