The Murder of Mary Phagan, a 1988 two-part American TV
miniseries written by
Larry McMurtry, produced by
George Stevens, Jr., directed by
William "Billy" Hale, starring
Jack Lemmon and
Kevin Spacey, made by
Orion Pictures Corporation, and distributed by
National Broadcasting Company (NBC), is a dramatization of the story of
Leo Frank, a factory manager charged with and convicted of murdering a 13-year-old girl, a factory worker named
Mary Phagan, in
Atlanta, Georgia in 1913. The trial was sensational and controversial. After Frank's legal appeals had failed, the governor of Georgia in 1915 commuted his death sentence to life imprisonment, destroying his own career in the process. In 1915 Frank was kidnapped from prison and
lynched by a small group of prominent men of
Marietta, Georgia. In addition to Lemmon and Spacey, the
film features
Rebecca Miller,
Peter Gallagher,
Charles Dutton,
Richard Jordan,
Cynthia Nixon,
Dylan Baker and
William H. Macy. Lemmon noted during a publicity appearance on
The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson shortly before the miniseries was broadcast that the cast was the best with which he had ever worked.