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Dr. Death has arrived!
"You Don't Know Jack" premieres on HBO April 24th!
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| See HBO's Official "Jack" Page! |
Director Barry Levinson took "Door No. 2" for his retelling of Dr. Kevorkian's campaign for euthanasia and doctor-assisted suicide called 'You Don't Know Jack,' which premiered last Saturday on HBO. And when Emmy rears its massive
head scanning the crowd for suitable nominations for the best actor in a mini-series, you can bet it will point its bony,
golden finger Al Pacino's way.
"To be honest with you, I didn't know Jack," Levinson admitted
on a select conference call last week. "I only knew Jack from sound bites on television. That was really the extent of it
and I thought I kind of knew him in a way until I read the screenplay and I went, 'Oh, wait a minute. This is far more
interesting than what I had been aware of in the past.'"
"You Don't Know Jack" is certainly about getting to know the facts about Kevorkian's life -- the
court cases, the jail time, the 130-plus assisted suicides -- but thanks to the work by Al Pacino in the lead role, it's also
a character study of a man.
"You see the good and the bad, but you can see the shades within
the character of how he may react to his sister, and how in a sense he can become you know somewhat almost obnoxious at times,
where he doesn't necessarily listen as well as he should," Levinson explained.
Pacino crafted his version of Kevorkian without ever meeting
the real man in person, though Levinson met with Kevorkian and made sure to steer as many small behavioral details as he could
into Adam Mazer's script.
Given the potentially controversial subject matter, what does
Pacino hope viewers take from the film?
“It sounds funny, given the subject matter,” he says, “but
I want people to enjoy it. The fact that you don’t know Jack is what you go into the picture with. Hopefully, when you
leave, you still don’t know him well, but you know him better.”
"He's a very, very gentle soul," John Goodman says of Kevorkian, "and very,
very bright. I never met Kevorkian. I guess I was with the next best thing."
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