For those of you who want more information on the tragic true story behind the movie Alpha Dog!

To add to the previous post...

Hey guys, I had no idea that Alpha Dog was based on a true story, so I decided to find some more information on it. Here are all of the websites I looked at, if you are also interested. I highly recommend #2 and #4, if you don't wanna read everything. Since this contains a lot of spoilers (or rather, the entire plot of the film), I suggest that people in Wednesday's class don't read this until after.

1.) All of these wikipedia pages give more information about the real life murder of Nick Markowitz (AKA: Zack in the movie):

-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_Dog (Has a chart where it shows the movie character name, actor, and then real life name and outcome- this is the same link that the previous post contained)
-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Markowitz
-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_James_Hollywood (Johnny Truelove in the movie)
-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Rugge (Frankie in the movie)
-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryan_Hoyt (Elvis in the movie)

And as you'll see on these pages Professor Baird remembered correctly- most of the gang members were 20 or 21.

2.) This article gives some more info on the real crime and the people involved. Seriously, there is so much information and it offers a lot of insight into the individuals, so I suggest you read this first:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16636250/ns/dateline_nbc/

3.) This is the website that Nick's mom Susan made. It includes info about what happened and the outcomes of the offenders (with Susan's comments here and there), as well as pictures of Nick and poems Susan wrote (as you can see there are quite a few of them- they were probably therapeutic for her):
http://nicholasmarkowitz.com/

It's really tragic because she now defines herself through her son. She's no longer Susan Markowitz, but "Nick's Mom Susan"- she refers to herself as this on both her facebook and myspace pages.

4.) Here's an article Susan wrote in 2010 about what she had to go through:
http://www.independent.com/news/2010/feb/06/letter-susan-markowitz/

One memorable quote from this article that echos back to what Professor Baird told us to think about in class is, "Jesse James Hollywood should have been charged with two murders— mine as well as my son's."

5.) Annnnd here's the book Susan wrote:
http://www.amazon.com/My-Stolen-Son-Markowitz-Berkley/dp/042523634X


Finally, I'll end this with a fun fact from IMDB concerning the film Alpha Dog:
"The word "fuck" and its derivatives is said 367 times."
I wonder who bothered to count?


-Christy