True Unsolved Mysteries

King of crime re-enactments

For the past 19 years, Greg Klein, the creative producer of " America's Most Wanted ," has produced roughly 500 true-crime re-enactments for the trailblazing Fox series.

These little movies, featuring actors -- including a pre-" Sopranos " Edie Falco -- have helped nab more than 1,100 criminals profiled on "AMW."

They also spawned a veritable cottage industry of true-crime re-enactments on shows like " Rescue 911 ," " Unsolved Mysteries ," " The First 48 ," " 48 Hours Mystery " and almost everything on cable's ID network.

Klein will be producing fewer re-enactments now that Fox has canceled "AMW" as a regular series (it's slated to return as a series of specials), but says the genre is alive and well.

"I think our storytelling is unique on our show because we're not hampered by any sort of formula that we have to adhere to," he says.

"When you produce [primetime dramas] like ' Law & Order ' or ' CSI ' or ' Without a Trace ,' you're bound by convention of what the audience will accept.

"We're not bound by that," he says. "We have creative freedom to tell stories in the way we want to tell them. We've had a fake documentary crew interviewing our crew, and we've told stories in flashback and flash-forward.

"I compare our re-enactments to a collection of great short stories," he says. "They're shorter in length than novels, and we have six to 16 minutes to hit all the beats we want -- and to get the audience emotionally involved, so they care."

The genre itself has evolved over the past 19 years, Klein says.

"When I came here in the beginning, we shot a lot of our stuff on video, which gave it that tabloidy look that a lot of other shows started duplicating," he says. "Video tends to make everything more melodramatic.

"But we now do the majority of our pieces on film, which makes people feel like they're watching a movie. About five years ago, we began using a process . . . where we shoot on tape or a disc but it looks like film . . . which saves a little bit of money and time."

While a high-end re-enactment can cost "AMW" upwards of $100,000, Klein says re-enactments are handled case by case.

"It depends on the elements we have at our disposal," he says.

"We may have nothing, not even video surveillance, and no news footage . . . and, in a case like that, it really lends itself to a re-enactment.

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"From the files of the untold, comes a series that brings to light the evil that lurks among us. Dramatizations of true, unsolved (at the date of broadcast) crimes... some grisly, some frightening, some supernatural. Unsolved Mysteries provides the facts, details, and clues that let you, the listener. solve each case. This series, broadcast in 1936, features such famous crimes as 'The Houdini Escape' and Jack the Ripper'.

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