Binion movie paints sympathetic portrait of Sandy Murphy

If there's one thing wrong with TV -- other than the fact that there's still not a Tina Fey Channel -- it's this: My attention span has been obliterated. Seriously, sometimes I'll just trail off in the middle of a ...

I can't follow a story for more than a day or two unless it features Jack Bauer or a smoke monster, so I'm not familiar enough with the case to argue the facts in "Sex & Lies in Sin City: The Ted Binion Scandal" (9 p.m. Saturday, Lifetime).

Besides, whether she's guilty, innocent or somewhere in between, I know enough to say I'd rather spend eternity trapped between Sherri Shepherd and Elisabeth Hasselbeck on "The View" than get on Sandy Murphy's bad side.

So I'll just stick with the movie itself, which seems to be a step above the usual Lifetime fare. Oscar-winner Marcia Gay Harden portrays Becky Binion Behnen, a role that casual Lifetime viewers might assume was Valerie Bertinelli's birthright. And instead of Tori Spelling, producers called on Mena Suvari to play Murphy.

"The story appealed to me, I think, just because it's so twisted and interesting," Suvari says. "I've always been really fascinated by human psychology, what makes people do the things that they do."

"Sex & Lies" wastes no time in getting to the action. In the opening two minutes, Murphy drives into Las Vegas -- albeit past Mandalay Bay, which wouldn't exist until after Binion's death -- loses all her money playing blackjack and starts stripping in a Dallas Cowboys Cheerleader outfit. By the seven-minute mark, Binion (Matthew Modine) is splayed out on his living room floor, dead in his tighty-whities.

The rest of the movie, which relies heavily on flashbacks, mostly makes Murphy out to be a victim. Behnen is introduced while referring to Murphy as "that gold-diggin', booty-shakin' whore." And when Binion isn't twitching, stumbling and waving a gun around, he's calling Murphy a bitch, a slut and a whore, hitting her and threatening to send her back to Cheetah's where he found her. "If people knew what it was like living with Ted," Murphy tells Rick Tabish (Johnathon Schaech), "they'd congratulate me for staying faithful as long as I did."

That likely wasn't always the case.

"There were a lot of changes that we had to make, even like halfway through filming, because there were these pending lawsuits from Sandy," Suvari says. "So we had to kind of restructure these characters. ... I felt like we kind of had to cater to so many different people, we couldn't exactly make it the story we wanted."

The actress, who admits Murphy was more of a two-dimensional character in the original script, says scenes were changed at the last minute, and one of her favorites -- Murphy's threatening one of her lawyers at the end by saying he should watch his back -- was cut altogether. "That's always rough," she says, "because you start to think, like, 'What did I really sign on to do?' "

Another change is the vague "Sex & Lies" title. The movie was based on the book "Murder in Sin City" by the Las Vegas Sun's Jeff German, but since Murphy and Tabish were acquitted in the retrial, there was no longer a murder.

But a more noticeable compromise was the decision to film in New Mexico, which offers better financial incentives than Nevada. "I know that it was frustrating for a lot of people," Suvari says. "It would have been really wonderful if we could have shot there."

The problem is, you can find a passable stand-in for the outlying areas of Las Vegas -- to the untrained eye, scrub brush is scrub brush -- but you can't fake the Strip. An early scene set inside Caesars Palace might as well have been filmed in somebody's rec room. And the second half of the movie takes place in a courtroom that looks like it was borrowed from "Matlock." Or "Inherit the Wind."

But despite the compromises and lawsuits, Suvari -- who studied courtroom footage of Murphy and read several books on the case in addition to books about criminal psychology -- doesn't shy away from her opinion of what really happened to Binion.

"I feel like they (Murphy and Tabish) were involved, but I don't know to what extent," she says. "I don't think that she murdered him, but I think it might have been one of those things where they didn't really call for help right away."

Christopher Lawrence's Life on the Couch column appears on Sundays. E-mail him at clawrence@reviewjournal.com.