The Jodi Arias trial may not reach a conclusion until early in 2014 but that doesn't mean that all of the people who were entranced by the sordid trial have to wait until then to see the movie version of Arias' story. Lifetime will be premiering "Jodi Arias: Dirty Little Secret" on Saturday and the people behind it have shared their experiences with the Arizona Republic.
"Jodi Arias: Dirty Little Secret" wasn't thrown together in a couple of weeks to capitalize on the popularity of the trial as many suspected. According to the screenwriters of the film it's been in production for over a year, reports the Arizona Republic.
"This project was in the works over a year ago," Richard Blaney, who co-wrote the script along with Gregory Small, said. "This thing didn't move as fast as everything thinks. We completed the script in December."
"Once the trial kicked in to gear, we didn't anticipate it was going to grab the nation as much as it did," Small said. "That's when the heat first got turned up a bit."
The movie isn't about the trial that ended with Jodi Arias being found guilty of first-degree murder, instead it is about the killing of Travis Alexander and what led up to that point, according to the Arizona Republic.
Since the film didn't need to wait for the outcome of the trial shooting took place as it was going on, which proved to be a bit of a challenge to the actors.
"The fact that the trial was ongoing was a huge challenge," Tania Raymonde, who plays Jodi Arias in the film, told the Arizona Republic. "I made a conscious effort not to expose myself too much, but her trial was unfolding on every single one of our shoot days: new evidence, new testimony. And every time something happened in court that made me feel one way or the other, she would say something the next day that just tugged at my heart."
After seeing the outcome of the trial and spending so much time portraying the convicted killer Raymonde still isn't sure what to make of Jodi Arias.
"Jodi's an enigma to me," Raymonde said. "Truthfully, I feel like I know less about her now after all this research and time spent thinking about her than I did before the shoot. To me, Jodi is a lot of things: She's ambitious and driven and had a tragic desire to please."
The writers of the film made sure to explain that the film is not a 100 percent factual telling of the events that occurred, according to the Arizona Republic.
"We never set out to write a biographical account," Small said. "We wrote an account based on a true story. We're drama writers. We took liberties."
In a review of the movie set to premier on June 22 Variety has called it "unabashed exploitation." Variety says that the film, much like the nation's attention in the trial, is completely fueled by the salacious details of the relationship between Arias and Alexander. The movie portrays Arias as the obvious villain and aggressor while Alexander is the tragic victim, eliminating the ambiguity that was introduced into the actual case by Arias' claims of abuse.
The following passage from the Variety review is pretty good summation of what to expect from the film.
"Outside of one relatively witty moment when Arias announces she's decided to convert to Mormonism and then goes down on Alexander in a hot tub before reemerging in a baptismal pool, the film finds no spark in its clumsy mix of religion, sex and death. Any guilty-pleasure potential is spoiled by the unsettling aftertaste of a real person losing his life to make the movie possible."
"Jodi Arias: Dirty Little Secret" premiers Saturday June 22 at 8:00 p.m. EST on Lifetime.
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