Anatomy of a Hate Crime

Production

Immediately after the broadcast, MTV News presented a special on hate crimes, and the network then displayed a continuous on-screen scroll listing the names of hundreds of United States hate crime victims. The scroll ran without commercials for seventeen and a half hours, marking the first time in its twenty-year history that the network went dark. The lost advertising revenue was estimated at about $2 million. Writer Max Ember stated that the script was not really about Matthew Shepard but about the murder of Matthew Shepard.

He believed that telling the story from the perspective of the two murderers, Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, could produce something unique. Ember said that Aaron and Russell had no great political agenda or belief system, and that they did not hate gay people more than anyone else they knew; they did not wake up intending to kill a gay man, yet that is what happened, and he considered it worth exploring why. Cy Carter recalled that the project was secretive when he first auditioned; the script used different names, and only at the second audition was he told it was a Matthew Shepard story.

Carter said recreating the beating and murder scene was difficult, leaving the cast and crew in tears. He noted that Brendan Fletcher and Ian Somerhalder were both crying because they had to access frightening places inside themselves to summon that kind of hatred, and seeing even a fraction of what Shepard experienced made them realize the film's importance. The Matthew Shepard Foundation issued a statement regarding the film.

Critical reception

The Washington Post review stated that the best parts of the film are the performances of Cy Carter as Shepard and Brendan Fletcher as one of his killers, Aaron McKinney, but that the worst part is writer Max Ember's inability to settle on a timeline, causing the narrative to jump around distractingly. The Baltimore Sun called it not only a good movie but one with potential to do good, praising Ian Somerhalder's performance as outstanding and noting that the character of Russell Henderson is made comprehensible by a smart script.