Chris Porco (AP)
VERDICT: Matt Barr (above,left) plays killer Chris Porco (inset) in a Lifetime movie that Porco asked a judge to stop before Saturday’s airdate. (AP)
Chris Porco, now serving 46 years to life in an upstate prison for the murder of his father and attempted murder of his mother, has shut down a Lifetime movie about him — three days before it was set to air.
The movie, called “Romeo Killer: The Chris Porco Story,” starred Eric McCormack from “Will & Grace” and was scheduled for Saturday night.
A State Supreme Court judge in Warren County, just north of Albany, yesterday granted Porco’s jailhouse motion and issued a temporary restraining order barring the women’s network from airing the movie.
In court papers he wrote from his jail cell in Dannemora prison without a lawyer, Porco argued that Lifetime couldn’t make a movie about his controversial case without his permission.
Porco, now 29, was convicted in 2006 of attacking his parents with an axe while they slept. He killed his father, but his mother — badly disfigured — survived.
The case got national attention when his mother retracted her story and refused to testify against her son at his trial.
In the movie, Porco is portrayed as a spoiled playboy wannabe who forged his parents’ signatures to get bank loans to support himself.
A dogged cop, played by McCormack, gathers enough evidence to get a conviction even though the doting mother testified the attacker wasn’t her son.
Lifetime filed an immediate appeal in hopes of getting the restraining order lifted by Saturday.
New York State law prohibits portraying people in a “fictionalized” fashion for “purposes of trade.”
In his ruling, Judge Robert J. Muller said Lifetime “appears to concede that the movie is fictionalized” and ordered the network to cancel the movie and send Porco a copy of the script.
For its part, Lifetime argues that because it wrote the movie from court transcripts and interviews with friends and family, “the essential elements of the story are accurate and true.”
Details of Porco’s story had already been on “48 Hours” and TruTV’s “Forensic Files,” it told the judge.
Lifetime says in court papers that it spent $2 million making the movie and another $1 million promoting it.