Here’s one real-life tragedy that did not need to be "ripped from the headlines." The story of slain actress Adrienne Shelly – an independent film star who once appeared as a guest star on an episode of "Law & Order" in 2000 – will be fictionalized in an upcoming, sources said yesterday. Shelly was beaten to death and hanged from a shower rod in her Greenwich Village apartment last Nov. 1, allegedly by an illegal-immigrant construction worker with whom she had argued. Now the NBC drama has put out a casting announcement seeking a Hispanic man to play a murderer who kills a woman after a dispute. The casting notice calls for a male Hispanic between the ages of 19 to 24 to play an illegal immigrant named José Contreras who argues with a Manhattan woman named Erin Garrett. She falls, hits her head and is knocked unconscious. Thinking he may have killed her, Contreras tries to cover up the incident by making it look like the woman hanged herself – and actually murders her in the process. Given the drama’s rapid-fire production schedule, the episode, called "The Melting Pot," could hit the air as early as next month. The actor would play a character modeled after Diego Pillco, an Ecuadorean national who had been doing work inside an apartment below Shelly’s at 15 Abingdon Square. In real life, Pillco is accused of having killed Shelly, 40, moments after a heated argument over noise and after she had called him a "son of a bitch." Police said he confessed to killing Shelly and making it appear as if she had hanged herself in her bathroom. NBC officials defended the show as fiction, and declined to offer more details. Shelly’s last film, "Waitress," is scheduled to premiere at the Sundance Film Festival this month.
NY Post
I wonder when SVU is going to do the episode about the singer who gets photographed without underwear and they are called in to investigate her rape.
