West Hills, a San Fernando Valley suburb of Los Angeles, has many reasons to be proud of its junior baseball league. There are the facilities, which are so luxurious the Los Angeles Times has referred to them as 'Mini Dodger Stadium'. There are its distinguished alumnae, many of whom have gone on to play professionally. And then there's the little league's role in keeping the community together - no small advantage if you happen to be raising young boys in a sprawling, inharmonious city whose annual murder rate is twice that of New York. Not every West Hills parent carries these statistics at the front of his or her mind, of course, but compared with some of the things adolescents could be doing, baseball is a welcome hobby.
In 1992, the West Hills Baseball Yearbook flaunted the smiling faces of several close friends: Ryan Hoyt, Jesse Rugge, William Skidmore and Jesse James Hollywood, all of them 12 years old. Jack Hollywood, Jesse's father, was their coach. Though some of these boys would later move away from West Hills, the ties between them would never be broken. 'They were great kids from nice families,' Jack Hollywood remembers now. 'You didn't see any signs that anything like this would come up. I think it was just a spur of the moment thing where it spiralled out of control.'
On 12 August 2000 at approximately 1pm, three hikers in the Los Padres National Forest near Santa Barbara stopped in their tracks. There was a terrible smell coming from somewhere off the path. They veered in that direction and as the smell became stronger they found, under a manzanita bush and next to a large boulder, a body-length stretch of recently turned earth. They called the police.
Susan Markowitz had gone upstairs on the morning of 7 August to tell her 15-year-old son Nick that his breakfast was ready. As soon as she opened the door to his bedroom, she saw that he was missing. She and her husband Jeffrey spent days crippled by anxiety, and when the police arrived at their door on 12 August, they bore the news the Markowitzes hoped not to hear. Nick's body had been found in a shallow grave: bound, gagged and shot nine times with a 9mm semi-automatic pistol.
The following Wednesday at 4.30pm, a SWAT team surrounded the Cowboy Street home of William Skidmore. As the cars lined up outside, a crisis negotiator spoke to him by phone and convinced him to surrender. Skidmore was one of four people arrested that day and taken to the Santa Barbara County Jail. Graham Pressley, the youngest of them at 17, was a family friend of Jesse Rugge's; the others - Rugge and Hoyt - were Skidmore's old baseball buddies. All except Hoyt had criminal records.
In statements, signed confessions and, eventually, trial testimony, it emerged that this group had kidnapped Nick Markowitz because his half-brother Ben owed Jesse James Hollywood money. Ben, who was a year older than the other West Hills boys, later testified that he sold 2lb of marijuana for Hollywood each week. By the time Nick was picked up by the group, Ben Markowitz was involved in a feud with Hollywood, which involved Markowitz allegedly vandalising Hollywood's home and owing him a drug debt that was variously reported as $1,200 and $36,000.
Rugge, Hollywood and Skidmore were en route to retaliation when they happened to see Nick Markowitz in the street. On the spur of the moment, they bundled him into the rented van they were driving and took him to Rugge's father's house in Santa Barbara. There, he was plied with drugs and alcohol and invited to join in a 48-hour party the purpose of which was far from clear. Many people present saw Nick there and either did not know he was being held captive or didn't see any reason to report it. Nick wasn't locked up or restrained in any way, and according to later eyewitness accounts appeared to be enjoying himself. Barron Rugge, Jesse's father, met Nick and presumed he was simply a guest, and invited him to stay over.
Back in West Hills, Ben Markowitz was apparently unaware that his brother was a hostage. The group moved from Rugge's house to the Lemon Tree Inn in Santa Barbara where, they said later, they thought they were waiting for instructions to send Nick home.
Early on the morning of 9 August, Jesse Rugge and Graham Pressley were drinking Jack Daniel's and smoking dope - Nick Markowitz had passed out on a bed - when Ryan Hoyt arrived with a duffel bag that made, as Rugge remembered, a metallic noise when placed on the ground. Hoyt took Pressley to the hiking trail and forced him to dig a grave. They then picked up Rugge and Markowitz at the hotel, and returned to the site. While Pressley stayed in the car about a third of a mile down the hill, Hoyt ordered Rugge to bind Markowitz with duct tape. Hoyt then hit him on the head with a shovel and fired at him until the gun jammed. Rugge threw up. Hoyt laughed.
At their individual trials, all four men said they acted out of fear of Jesse James Hollywood, and that the abduction and the murder were conducted on his orders. Jesse Rugge was acquitted on murder charges but convicted of aggravated kidnapping - he received a sentence of seven years to life, with the possibility of parole. William Skidmore received nine years for his part in the original kidnapping, and is eligible for parole next year. Graham Pressley, who was tried as an adult but sentenced as a juvenile, is also due out next year - he will be released from a juvenile detention centre on his 25th birthday. Ryan Hoyt was found guilty of murder in the first degree and sentenced to death.
Jesse Hollywood was nowhere to be found. He would remain a fugitive for five years, and was indicted in absentia, under the heading People vs Hollywood. And that, curiously enough, was where Hollywood - the movies, not the man - came in.
Nick Cassavetes, 47, who is still best known as the son of the celestial screen couple John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands, had directed two films of his own when the Jesse Hollywood story caught his eye. Cassavetes's daughter Gina went to the same high school as most of the boys involved, and as he came into contact with the real families and real defendants, the director was surprised to find in their situation something of a personal fable.
'I expected to find a bunch of spoiled, disaffected rich kids raised by parents with a great sense of ennui, and that's not what I found at all,' Cassavetes later said. 'What I ended up finding, which frankly I'm guilty of in my own life, was that it's a complicated world now where both parents have jobs and get caught up in their own lives. The by-product of that is you find yourself "checking in" with your children to find out where they are going to be and if they need any money, instead of putting in the time with them.' Most of the parents he encountered, Cassavetes reflected, 'were people I wouldn't find great fault with'.
Over the next few years, Cassavetes put together Alpha Dog, a film so minutely researched that, although all names have been changed, it is, in his own estimate, 95 per cent accurate. Told in a gritty yet elegant documentary style which owes much to the work of his late father, Alpha Dog stars Bruce Willis, Harry Dean Stanton, Justin Timberlake and a phenomenal Sharon Stone as Susan Markowitz, the victim's mother.
According to local police, the West Hills area is actively under threat from the Canoga Park Alabama gang, who operate about two miles away and are known to deal drugs, rob and murder. Yet none of these kids was part of that scene. As a Los Angeles Times editorial put it just after Markowitz's murder, bad kids can come from good neighbourhoods, too. Even if much of their behaviour was play-acting, they had real drugs and real guns to play with. 'Our young look up to and try to emulate criminal culture,' Cassavetes said. 'The kids take on all the affectations of being those types of people, even though they're not, and what can happen is one day they have to back it up and prove it to themselves.'
In time, Cassavetes developed a close personal relationship with Jack Hollywood, the ex-convict father of the defendant on the run. In the hope Hollywood could lend his production some veracity, Cassavetes offered to hire him as a consultant on Alpha Dog. In the hope of influencing the film and correcting his son's much-tarnished image, Hollywood agreed.
'I signed a contract saying I wouldn't sue them for whatever they said about me,' Jack Hollywood says now. 'They'd already said so much rotten stuff about me in all the papers that I just said: "How much worse can it get?"'
But despite the fact that Jack Hollywood spent a good deal of time on set, talking to Cassavetes and guiding Emile Hirsch, the actor who plays his son, things didn't turn out as he hoped. He now feels the film is 'pretty fictitious', and in many ways prejudicial to his son's legal case. 'I thought they made it look like he was Manson-esque,' he argues, 'You know: he wasn't really there, but all these people were just doing it because he told them to, much like the Manson situation. And I don't think that was the case at all.'
If Cassavetes identified with the parents, Michael Mehas, who gathered evidence on which the screenplay was based, identified with the kids. Mehas is a criminal defence lawyer as well as a part-time writer; he grew up down the street from Nick Cassavetes and was an associate producer on the film.
'To tell you the truth, I spent a lot of time in Nick's house when we were growing up,' Mehas says now. He remembers walking into the house at the age of 14 and stumbling over some huge electrical cables: Peter Falk and Gena Rowlands were rehearsing A Woman Under the Influence in the living room - a film for which both Rowlands and Cassavetes were nominated at that year's Academy Awards. 'As my relationship with Nick prospered, John became my mentor,' Mehas says. 'I worked for him, I realised this was the world I wanted to be in.' In a way, Mehas hopes his work on Alpha Dog will finally be his springboard into that world.
In researching the facts of the Hollywood case, both for Cassavetes's screenplay and for a forthcoming book of his own, Mehas tried to put himself in the boys' shoes. 'I had to understand, if they were looking up to Jesse Hollywood, what it was that Hollywood's charisma and his money could offer them that they didn't normally have in their lives.' (At Ryan Hoyt's trial, one witness described Hoyt's 'indentured servitude' to Hollywood - something that comes across plainly in the film.) 'And there's a funny parallel,' Mehas continues, 'I look at myself growing up, at my parents who aren't famous, and I look at Nick Cassavetes and John Cassavetes and their making a movie in the house, and there's something there that's very attractive to me.' As kids, Cassavetes and Mehas 'played sports together, we partied hard, we rode that edge - just like these guys did. The identification was incredible.'
While Cassavetes was developing a relationship with Jack Hollywood, Mehas became very friendly with Ron Zonen, the Santa Barbara County deputy district attorney, who had prosecuted all four of the defendants, and who was then, in 2005, receiving a good deal of publicity for prosecuting Michael Jackson. At the time, Jesse Hollywood was still at large and Zonen, hoping to influence the film - much as Hollywood's father did, only in reverse - also became an (unpaid) consultant on the film. Considering that the movie itself might lead to Jesse Hollywood's capture, Zonen handed over to Mehas confidential material relating to the case - his trial notebooks, police reports, autopsy photos, interrogation tapes.
And at that point, Michael Mehas was plunged right into the middle of the criminal proceedings.
Originally, Cassavetes had intended to end his film with suspension points: Jesse Hollywood - or as Alpha Dog calls him, Johnny Truelove - had simply disappeared into the ether. Cassavetes had finished shooting and was well into post-production when, in the spring of 2005, he turned on the news and was suddenly devastated. The ending would have to be changed.
On 8 March 2005, a young man claiming to be a Spanish schoolteacher was having lunch with his pregnant girlfriend in an outdoor cafe in a surfing spot near Rio de Janeiro. He was briefly questioned by strangers who seemed to think he was someone else. He denied the identification but did not resist arrest, and in the event the matter of extradition was irrelevant, since Jesse James Hollywood was found to be travelling on a false passport and immediately deported.
In his absence - or rather, by the very fact of his absence - Jesse Hollywood had become one of the youngest people on the FBI's 'Most Wanted' list. He appeared on the popular TV show America's Most Wanted, and the Santa Barbara County sheriff's department led a well-publicised search for him that took them from California to Colorado, then back to West Hills, up to Canada and, finally, via Interpol and the Brazilian federal authorities, to Saquarema, Brazil. There was news of a gun being found in a town where he had friends, of clothes left behind in hotel rooms, of cops being thrown off the scent by the discovery of a car thought to be his. By the time he was escorted back to a jail cell in Santa Barbara five, years after Nick Markowitz's murder, Jesse Hollywood was famous - and the whole city wanted him dead.
Jack Hollywood was suspected both of supplying his son with drugs as a matter of routine, and subsequently of funding his son's flight from the law. Hollywood denied the former accusation under oath, and not enough proof was found of the latter to charge him. Still, he was behind bars when the police escorted his son to Santa Barbara on 10 March 2005. He served 18 months in prison after being found attempting to buy marijuana and in possession of the recipe and ingredients to make the date-rape drug GHB, and was released last September.
Mehas and Cassavetes attended the police press conference in Santa Barbara. Afterwards, Mehas visited the elder Hollywood in jail. He said he wanted to meet his attorney; he said he wanted more information. Mehas and Jesse Hollywood's lawyer James Blatt met at Jerry's Famous Deli in Encino, California. Mehas was hoping to get more information for his book, but Blatt had a different agenda. He knew about Mehas's relationship with Ron Zonen; he knew Mehas had access to all the prosecution's files. 'So now all of a sudden he puts it to me,' Mehas recalls, 'that I may have information that could help save his client's life.'
Blatt asked Mehas to submit an affidavit to the court saying exactly what Zonen had given him. Mehas's head was spinning: on the one hand here was his friend, the prosecutor, who had graciously given him everything he'd asked for; on the other, there was a kid who might face the death penalty because Mehas refused to share information he had.
'So I call Ron Zonen,' Mehas recalls. 'I say, "Ron, this is what's going on, man." He yelled at me a little bit, he started cross-examining me on the phone ... I just got cross-examined by Jim Blatt that morning, and here I've got Ron Zonen working my ass over, on my relationship with Cassavetes, on my relationship with Jack Hollywood, on Hollywood's relationship with Cassavetes ... I said: "Ron! Enough!" When he calmed down he said: "Michael, I'm facing potential criminal prosecution for illegal misconduct on the information I gave you."'
Eventually, Ron Zonen was removed from the case, although he has since had this removal suspended. Mehas wouldn't, ultimately, face prosecution, but when he was called to the witness stand the judge ordered him to hand over all of his notes to the court.
James Blatt's aim to get a fair trial for Jesse Hollywood had two prongs: to get Zonen kicked off, which he succeeded in doing, and to block the release of Alpha Dog, which he ultimately failed to do, though the release was delayed an entire year as a result of the legal situation.
Blatt believes that local anti-Jesse Hollywood sentiment is now so blatant that he has asked that the entire Santa Barbara district attorney's office - not just Ron Zonen - be removed from the case. (The attorney general's office would then take over.) He is awaiting the California Supreme Court's ruling, and until then no trial date can be set. Beyond that, Blatt envisages possibly having to argue that the venue for the trial should be changed, on the grounds that the jury pool in Santa Barbara couldn't possibly be objective. Ask Blatt about Alpha Dog and he'll tell you there is only one place where it did undeniably good business: Santa Barbara. The DVD is due out on 1 May in the US, and this, he says, is of considerable concern.
Asked whether the film should be judged on its own merit or as part of the Jesse Hollywood case, Blatt replies with measured ferocity: 'There is no question that it relates specifically to the Jesse James Hollywood case. The district attorney's office helped to develop the screenplay. This has never been done by a prosecuting agency or a private attorney in the history of the United States.'
So far, the film has affected the case, the case has affected the film ... Is it possible, I wonder, that the film itself will be part of Jesse Hollywood's eventual trial?
'Well, I think the movie will become part of the trial,' Blatt suggests, 'because what happened in this matter was that the actors, screenwriters and director interviewed some of the witnesses. So if those witnesses are called to the stand and they gave a different statement to the actors, we have a right to call Justin Timberlake and Bruce Willis and Sharon Stone to the stand. Now, this is not what a criminal trial should be about. Interjecting a motion picture into the fabric of the case? That's totally unnecessary and detrimental to both sides.'
Nick Cassavetes, for his part, doesn't believe his film is prejudicial to Jesse Hollywood's case. How could it be, he has asked rhetorically, when each side thinks it benefits the other? Yet for Blatt it appears to be a matter of principle.
'The motion picture industry can be very seductive to an individual,' Blatt explains, 'Individuals who may not ever talk to the press will talk to someone when they find out they're going to be in a movie. That jeopardises the integrity of the criminal justice system.' Blatt pauses for the briefest of moments, then adds: 'It's difficult enough, many times, to determine the truth.'
The US premiere of Alpha Dog in January was attended by, among others, Susan and Jeffrey Markowitz. Though Jeff Markowitz later said he was frustrated by the changed names (he wanted to shout out Nick's name all the way through), Susan Markowitz was reportedly very moved by Anton Yelchin's sensitive portrayal of her only son. After the screening, she embraced Sharon Stone, who had played her as suffering from almost shockingly raw wounds.
Susan Markowitz has attended every trial relating to her son's death, missing just a single day to appear at what would have been his high school graduation. There, she handed out key chains inscribed with the words 'In Memory of Nick'. She has brought Nick's black leather jacket with her to court, and she has taken the stand in an effort to convince the jury to deliver the maximum penalty for those responsible. Yet, as Ryan Hoyt was sentenced to death, she pictured her baby in his nursery all those years ago, and wept. 'This is not a sweet victory,' she said. 'This is a loss all the way around.'
After Nick's death, his mother made their home a shrine to him (they have since moved away). She put poster-sized photographs of him on the walls, displayed his baby things on bookshelves, and thought she saw his ghost everywhere. She wrote poems addressed to him and posted them on the internet, superimposed over a faint image of his boyish face. She did not want Nick's half-brother at the funeral. 'Nick died for Ben,' she later said. 'He did nothing to escape, because he felt his brother would come and save him. In my opinion, Ben has done nothing in memory of that.' A couple of years after the murder, Susan Markowitz signed up for a creative writing course at UCLA. Her first assignment was to write her own obituary - ironic, perhaps, given that she has attempted suicide more than a dozen times since the summer Nick died. She wrote:
'Susan A Markowitz died of a broken heart on 15 August 2000.'
Jack Hollywood now sees his son once a week. Jesse has been in solitary confinement in Santa Barbara County Jail for the past two years, while he awaits his trial date, and they speak with glass between them. 'The problem I had,' says Jack, 'is that they were just putting in the paper from the beginning, before I even knew where my son was, that they were gonna go for the death penalty - that he was the mastermind. I mean, mastermind? This was probably the stupidest thing that ever happened - there was no masterminding going on.'
Jesse is, however, his father reports, 'holding up pretty well. He's exercising, he's reading, he's trying to keep a positive attitude.' In contrast to his outlaw-fated father, Jesse James Hollywood's son (who lives in Brazil and will turn two this year) is named John Paul - after the late Pope.
Despite being in the crossfire between the film and the crime, Michael Mehas still feels strongly about sparing every possible life. 'I'm anti-death penalty,' he explains. 'I believe that if we lose one of us we're all sinking as a race. Ryan Hoyt is on death row - he'd never been arrested in his life; the death penalty was not made for Ryan Hoyts. When the facts ultimately come out, I believe people will understand that the death penalty was not made for Jesse James Hollywood either. I'm not speaking one single word towards innocence or guilt,' he says. 'I'm talking about death.'
· Alpha Dog is released on 20 April