In the Nebraska State Penitentiary, John Lotter sits in a death row cell. Tom Nissen wonders if he will spend the rest of his life in prison. The woman they murdered, Teena Brandon, had fooled them and many others. As Brandon Teena, she lived as a man even having girlfriends who didn't know or chose to ignore the truth. Angered by the deceit, Lotter and Nissen raped Teena on Christmas eve. After she went to the county sheriff, the two men went to the farmhouse where Teena was staying and murdered her along with two others.
[Excerpt from the Montel Williams Show, Carrie:] "Everybody was fooled. She walked like a guy. I mean she has a lower voice than I do."
It was a story that attracted national attention, both the serious and the tawdry.
[Question from the audience:] "I want to know does she accept your daughter as a male? Did you treat her as though she was female or accept her as male?"
[Tammy, Teena's sister:] "We always accepted her. She was going through a phase in her life which I think most people go through of, you know, who she was, who she really was."
Also appearing on "Montel" that day, an author who specializes in true crime pot boilers, Aphrodite Jones, a woman who claims she had a personal obligation to tell the story.
[Aphrodite Jones, Author, All She Wanted] "The essence and the main part of this book has to do with the love story between this male figure and all these young women that this male figure woos. What's behind that psychological and emotionally."
Jones told Statewide she doesn't view Teena Brandon as an innocent victim of an unprovoked act of violence. In fact, she claims neither of the convicted murderers is the central villain in the book.
[Jones:] Actually if there's anybody who is a villain in the book, it's Teena Brandon."
[Q:] In what sense?
[Jones:] "She was not only a deceiver in the sense of her sexuality, why did this person need to steal in order to romance these girls? Why did this person-- why was this person such an obsessive compulsive liar? What about this person fed into this crime itself? If this person had not been so pathological in her lying, his lying, would this triple homicide never have occurred? Probably wouldn't have."

[Greta Olafsdottir, Filmmaker:] "All they keep talking about there is this girl who keeps passing as a guy. And for us that's--"
[Susan Muska, Filmmaker:] "Almost blaming it on that person."
[Greta:] "Yeah, almost blaming that person. For us that's nothing new. We see women dressing as guys all the time."
[Susan:] "You don't have to kill them."
Susan Muska and Greta Olafsdottir produced a documentary about the case with a much more sympathetic take.
[Greta:] "All this focus on Brandon dressing like a guy and how everybody is upset about that. And we were like, 'So?' "
[Susan:] "It's a triple murder story and this is --"
[Greta:] "It's like almost in the background and for us that was really disturbing."
"The Brandon Teena Story" made the rounds last year earning praise from critics and awards at film festivals despite its rough, low-budget style. With a series of remarkably candid interviews with the Nebraskans drawn together by the case, two filmmakers take viewers on a very unflattering tour of Falls City, Nebraska while revealing why so many people, Brandon's girlfriends especially, so willingly accepted his hazy identity.
[Daphne:] "He would have women after him all the time. I mean he knew how to please you. He knew how to do everything right."
[Susan:] "People see what they want to see and need to see. To these girls, Brandon was the ideal man, even after they knew that Brandon was, underneath the clothing, female. Brandon was a better boyfriend than the men they had been with. He was kinder, gentler, smaller, which we perceive as non-threatening. He listened to them. You know, it was a fantasy kind of a person."
The tape of a sheriff's interrogation of Brandon after the rape by Lotter and Nissen gives the film a disturbing emotional climax.
[Sheriff Laux:] "The one, the girls that don't know about you, thinks you are a guy ... do you kiss them?"
[Brandon:] "What does this have to do with what happened last night?"
[Sheriff Laux:] "Because I'm trying to get some answers, so I know exactly what's going on. Now, do you want to answer that question for me, or not?"
[Brandon:] "I don't see why I have to."
[Sheriff:] "The only thing is, if it goes to Court, that answer, that question is going to come up in Court. And I'm going to want an answer for it before it goes to Court. See what I'm saying?"
[Greta:] "I think kind of hardest things was the stupidity of it when it came to his part. You know, we just couldn't believe it that the sheriff of this town, this is how he would ask a rape victim questions."
[Susan:] "To have people in authority in this town ... you have a sheriff who is a bigot, and he doesn't hide his feelings about this person. You know, he is homophobic. I don't know if he was racist or not, but he certainly is not a good role model at all. Then you have people in the position of Nissen and Lotter who think, 'Oh, maybe he's not going to do anything. You know, maybe it's okay to pick on this person.' "
That harsh reality shapes the film's theme about the intolerance and the root of hate crimes.
[Greta:] "It's five lives that have been ruined and then all the family members of those people are to a certain extent, too, victims. So there is no hero to this film."
[Muska:] "The film ends with like complete and utter devastation. I don't think there's really any seed for hope."

Another filmmaker, Kimberly Pierce, found a much more hopeful story out of the Brandon Teena tragedy.
[Kimberly Pierce, Director of "Boys Don't Cry":] "It was April of 1994 that I opened up the Village Voice article, and I read about Teena Brandon. I was completely overwhelmed with the fact that here was a girl from a trailer park who didn't have much money, didn't have any role models, and she completely transformed herself into her fantasy of a guy. Not only does she transform herself into a guy, she went out and made the dream come true."
The result was "Boys Don't Cry."The movie showed up in theaters in major cities last Fall.
Fox Searchlight pictures presents...a true story of hope..."Make sure you get out" ...Fear..."Are you or are you not?"...And the courage it takes to be yourself..."Nothing can go wrong if we're together. That dream I had running away together. We can still do it."
[Kimberly:] "The great thing was it reminded me of some of my favorite fairy tales -- "Pinocchio" or "Cinderella" or "The Wizard of Oz." Basically you've got the character in their room dreaming of something better."
[Dialog from the Film:] "Brandon, honey, where did you say your folks are from?"
[Hilary Swank as Brandon:] "I'm from Lincoln, but my dad is out in Memphis right now."
If the movie succeeds in making Teena Brandon a sympathetic character, the credit likely goes to actress Hilary Swank.
[Hilary Swank:] "I would have to say the actual process of the transformation was not one where I just woke up and was like, Boom! I was a boy."
She had to become Brandon Teena.
[Swank:] "It was something that took weeks of getting it all together. And it just finally melted together and came a lot easier -- to the point where I felt I lost all my femininity and lost all sense of Hilary. It took a couple of weeks to get that back."
['Lana' from the movie:] "Someone walked me home last night. I think it was you."
The film leaves no doubt Brandon is a deceiver, but Pierce believes it was a deception for a higher purpose of Brandon's life.
[Kimberly Pierce:] "You begin with a story of transformation of a girl into a boy, but then you ask why she does that. She does it one, because it's her identity; but two, because she wants to fall in love. And she feels that's the only way she can fall in love. So the most universal thing of all is, it's a tragic love story. I mean not unlike "Romeo and Juliet." And that's something everybody can identify with."
['Lana' from the movie:] "I have a thing for cows."
['Brandon' from the movie:] "I know a song about cows. My dad taught it to me."
[Kimberly:] "What's so great about this love story is it really rises and falls on the same premises as any love story. If there's lies and betrayal within a love affair, eventually the truth is going to come out, the lies are going to fall away. The two people are going to have to face one another as who they actually are. It's in the search of that truth between two people that ultimately you find out how deep the love was."
Chloe Sevigny plays Lana, the woman courted and deceived by Brandon.
[Chloe Sevigny:] "She saw Brandon, and Brandon was this incredible boy who is not like anybody else she had ever met. She sort of saw him as her escape, and all his ideas and how much enthusiasm you have for life. She had never had that before. He sort of opened her up in that way."
[Hilary:] "One of the greatest things about Brandon was, this person loved being Brandon. I think that he shared that with everybody he met. He was kind of a daredevil. He was kind of a bad boy. He really pulled in wonderful iconography of the American guy. You know, good guy, bad guy."
After interviewing the same people and reviewing the same facts, another woman reached an entirely different conclusion about Teena Brandon.
[Aphrodite Jones] "Rather than divulge to these people that-- girls that she was dating -- rather than divulge what her sexuality really was at the moment and be honest and square about that, she chose as a he not to do that with a number of these girls. So that's really unfair to young women who do not identify as lesbians and now find themselves being identified as lesbians."
Aphrodite Jones thought her book would be snapped up for a movie deal. It didn't happen. "The Brandon Teena Story" was a hit on the film festival circuit and got very good reviews and it was featured on HBO.
[Scene from Boys Don't Cry:] "There's this one thing you got to remember, little man, is this is my house."
"Boys Don't Cry" won over most of the major film critics and now the Academy Award gone to Hilary Swank ... the woman who portrayed the woman portraying a man. For Statewide, I'm Bill Kelly.

Captioning by Nebraska Captioning Center, Lincoln, Nebraska .