On July 1, 1981, William Deverell, Ronald Launius, Joy Miller, and Barbara Richardson were brutally slaughtered at 8763 Wonderland Avenue in the Hollywood Hills, not far from the LA residence of then-governor Jerry Brown. The noir film Wonderland, directed by James Cox, presents alternative but jumbled explanations for the unsolved crime, focusing on the key roles of porn star John Holmes (played by Val Kilmer), nightclub owner Eddy "The Arab" Nash (played by Ed Bagosian), and his bodyguard Greg DeWitt Diles (played by Faizon Love) as possible suspects. Holmes, who was acquitted for the crime in 1982, fled to Florida with his teenage girlfriend Dawn Schiller (played by Kate Bosworth), and died of AIDS in 1988, having appeared with his 13.5 inches in some one thousand films; according to a film title, he had sex with thousands of women, but the movie depicts him as a confused porn star has-been who is more addicted to cocaine than to sex. Diles and Nash were arrested by LAPD in 1986 but acquitted. However, Nash was indicted by a Federal grand jury in 2000 for racketeering, conspiracy to commit murder, intimidating a witness, and bribing a juror in the 1986 case; he pled guilty to lesser charges, served less than two years in prison, and is now on parole in the LA area. Wonderland portrays Holmes, the four who are murdered, and many other party guests at the Wonderland house as drug addicts who on June 29 are hard up for drugs; with information from Holmes that a door to Nash's nearby Doña Lola residence will be open, the latter house is raided for drugs and money, so one inference is that Nash arranged the killings in retaliation, and Holmes feared that he would himself be murdered if he did not assist in both crimes. Wonderland tries to humanize Holmes and his love relationship with Dawn, but the only decent characters in the film are LAPD detectives Sam Nico (played by Ted Levine) and Louis Cruz (played by Franky G.). In their interviews of mixed-up witnesses, drug addict David Lind (played by Dylan McDermott) tries to pin the crime on Holmes, who in turn presents another fabricated account of events. MH
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