That's certainly true with his latest film, The Central Park Five, which tells of the violent assault and rape of a female jogger in 1989. The place was New York City — and because of citywide racial tensions at the time, the story was seized upon by New York tabloids and national TV newscasts alike.
The victim was white — and the five teenagers accused of brutalizing her were black and Latino. It made for frenzied, heated news coverage — and, as the late Ed Koch, former mayor of New York, explains in the film, both race and place were key factors in the attention this case received.
