TV

Filmmaker revisits OJ trial, 20 years after Bronco chase

It’s been nearly 20 years since that “Where were you?” moment when TV viewers were glued to their seats watching LA police chase OJ Simpson and Al Cowlings in the now-infamous white Ford Bronco.

Filmmaker Nicole Rittenmeyer, executive producer of the new Investigation Discovery documentary “OJ: Trial of the Century” (Thursday at 9 p.m.), remembers watching the chase as an undergraduate film school student. And, she says, she’d been wanting to revisit the chase, Simpson’s subsequent trial and the “not guilty” verdict that rocked America.

“The going understanding at that time was [that] a high-paid defense team picked an uneducated, race- and income-specific jury pool and that’s how we ended up with [the verdict] we ended up with. It just seemed a little too pat,” Rittenmeyer tells The Post.

“I always thought it would be a really cool thing to relive that and play it out and delve as deep as you can in two hours into the real nuances and context.”

Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron GoldmanAP

Unlike traditional documentaries, “Trial of the Century” includes no voiceover narration or present-day interviews. Instead, Rittenmeyer and her team spent about nine months poring over 2,000 to 3,000 hours of footage and cutting it into the two-hour film.

All of the footage is from 1994 and 1995 (it includes both news reports and raw tape B-roll/outtakes that never made it to air) and goes from the night Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman were murdered on June 12, 1994, to the Ford Bronco chase (June 17) and the jury issuing its “not guilty” verdict on Oct. 3, 1995. “The one thing the world doesn’t need, I don’t think, is another OJ program that pores over all that stuff, where people are telling you what their positions are or what they think and it’s all kind of filtered for you,” Rittenmeyer says.

“It seems to me the thing we could do that … would be totally fresh and totally different would be to almost provide a re-experience — a total immersion.”

The limitations of the archival format means that some telling off-camera details learned in research — including the fact that one black male juror gave a Black Power salute after the verdict — don’t make it into the film.

Instead, “Trial of the Century” acts as a time capsule, a history lesson for viewers too young to remember a time when Simpson’s lawyer and friend, Robert Kardashian (Kim’s father, who’s now deceased), was the most famous Kardashian — and as a chance for others to revisit the case.

“If you really want to know what OJ is and what that meant and why that’s in our cultural ether as Americans, [this] will take two hours of your life,” says Rittenmeyer. “And it will give you a primer about what it was like at the time.”