The 1991 murder trial of Pamela Smart, part of the birth of reality television as we know it, was the first trial to be broadcast in its entirety and make celebrities of those involved. Smart, director of a high school media lab in a small New Hampshire town, came home one day to find her house ransacked and her husband murdered. The murderers turned out to be her fifteen-year-old lover and his friends, and Smart was convicted as the mastermind behind the plan. The scandalous student-teacher relationship, along with Smart’s seeming cold-hearted indifference to the killing, ignited a media frenzy. At the center of the hype was a grossly caricatured woman who faced a modern-day Salem witch trial. This film presents a sophisticated dissection of our media culture, which all too easily transforms our myth-making impulses into a self-fueled, ratings-driven juggernaut that crushes the lives of real people and conceals the nuances of truth.  MM