TV

‘Bonnie & Clyde’ shoot ‘em up in new miniseries

They killed 13 people, stole 100 cars and robbed dozens of banks, mom-and-pop stores and gas stations. For their efforts they became media darlings in the bleak landscape of Depression-era America. Their exploits were broadcast in the newsreels shown in movie theaters before the main attraction. They themselves leaked photos of their exploits to newspapers, to shape their own Robin Hood-esque narrative of crime, romance and illicit sex. And boy, did it work. By the time Bonnie and Clyde were shot to smithereens on a country road in Bienville Parish, Louisiana, in 1934, they were folk heroes. Forty-thousand people came to view the body of Clyde Barrow as it lay in state; 50,000 came to pay their respects to his lover and moll, Bonnie Parker.

Bonnie & Clyde, now: Emile Hirsch and Holliday GraingerJoseph Viles

There has never been another couple like them and their story has given rise to three movies, the most famous of which is Arthur Penn’s 1967 revolutionary, romanticized account starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway. Nearly 50 years later, a miniseries will tell their story again, with the same painstaking, fatalistic detail that made “Hatfield & McCoys” a blockbuster for History during the summer of 2012. Starring film actor Emile Hirsch and Holliday Grainger (“The Borgias”), the crime drama is receiving an unprecedented showcase — a simulcast Dec. 8 and 9 on three cable networks, A&E, History and Lifetime. The director (Bruce Beresford) and writers (John Rice and Joe Batteer) depict a dreamer (Bonnie) and a loser (Clyde) driven to violence by the times they lived in, the “dirty thirties” when Americans were having their homes foreclosed by the banks.

“There were a lot of people with anti-establishment feeling at the time,” says Rice. “With the Depression closing in, the common guy had nothing. When someone goes out there and takes the money from their homes, you go get him. There was hero worship. We get to find out what was behind these people.”

“The real Clyde was my height, five-feet-seven,” says Emile Hirsch. “Everything I read about him said he was a very serious dude, kind of an uptight control freak. Clyde wanted to be like John Dillinger. To call the shots. He wanted to make a name for himself. He had a huge, huge ego. He and Bonnie, they both wanted to be famous.”

In the miniseries, Bonnie is a dreamer who sends her eight-by-ten headshots off to Hollywood studios, looking for a way out of small-town life in the South, and sings a honky-tonk song at her father’s funeral. When she takes up with Clyde, having been dumped by her first husband, she’s the one who goads him to develop his talent for crime.

Bonnie & Clyde, then: The real outlawsAP

“Bonnie had always thought of herself as someone very special,” Rice says. “She wrote poems. She sent her headshots to Hollywood. She could never get anything in the local paper. In the movietones, Pretty Boy Floyd and others were getting as much attention as movie stars and once they started getting headlines, Bonnie certainly knew how to run with it.”

And so did Hollywood, when they got their hands on the project. In the film, Bonnie and Clyde are as glamorous as Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty were in 1967, but the miniseries downplays that aspect with some realistic detail, including actual black-and-white footage of the bullet-ridden automobile their dead bodies were found in. Clyde, who already had a record before he paired with Bonnie, “paid another inmate to chop off two of his toes to get his release from prison,” says Bateer. Near the end of their criminal career, Bonnie was in a car accident that left her badly burned.

“Bonnie got addicted to painkillers after she was burned up in that crash,” says Rice. “Eventually, Clyde weaned her off them.”

Another important difference had to do with Clyde’s sexuality. When he was in prison, he was molested by a fellow inmate. In the film version, Clyde is also portrayed as impotent.

“The filmmakers completely made that up, I didn’t read anything about that,” says Hirsch. “He was raped in jail for a year. Clyde murdered that guy. That’s what really made him hardened.”

The 1967 film, which grossed $70 million at the box office, is a hard act to follow, but Hirsch and the filmmakers believe enough time has passed for a new audience to discover a new Bonnie and Clyde.

“This is not a romantic comedy starring Bonnie and Clyde,” says Hirsch. “They are dark characters. It is a gnarly version of events.”

“We don’t want to have the same kind of bouncy thing of the ’67 film,” says Rice.”I’ve got some kids that are late teens, early twenties. They don’t know much about Bonnie and Clyde. It’s been a while since it’s been done like this.”