Making "MarriageTrial.com"

John Ainsworth, who with John Ireland is producing a YouTube recreation of the Perry vs. Schwarzenegger Prop 8 trial, expects to complete shooting in the next day or so, with the rest posted on their site in the next couple of weeks.

The latest piece of casting: Morgan Fairchild, who will play M.V. Lee Badgett, professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts and an expert witness on the 6th day of the case.

Ainsworth, an actor, says a highlight has been the recreation of the testimony of William Tam, the same-sex marriage foe who had expressed fears that televising the trial would subject him to harassment, who is played by Gedde Watanabe. But he's also mindful that such witnesses are the dramatic moments in hundreds of pages of legal detail, making for long days of production followed by up to 11 hours of editing.

"We have to show all of it," Ainsworth says of what he calls the "mind boggling"  task of getting the complete record, some 3,000 pages of transcripts, on video. "We decided we can't include some portions and not others, or they will claim bias based on that." (One of the bigger expenses has been making copies of the script).

He and Ireland, a filmmaker, came up with the idea on Jan. 13, the day that the Supreme Court issued its ruling blocking the showing of the trial on YouTube.

Essentially, what they have done is create a set up that mirrors Judge Vaughn Walker's plans for a split screen at the trial, with a mock courtoom at USC's law school standing in for the federal courtroom in San Francisco. Having planned to stream the real thing, YouTube and its engineers were ready to handle this project, and provided consultation.

"We were just filling in where [the actual trial] would have been," he said.

The actors --- who also include Tess Harper, Arye Gross and Adrienne Barbeau --- have little time to prepare, not to mention memorize all of their lines. But because this project is sticking strictly to the transcript, and "we don't want them to be adding too much in character."

"It's almost an exercise in cold reading," Ainsworth says.

Instead, the subtleties will come through in other ways. The crescendo of the trial was undoubtedly David Boies' (Jack Laufer) contentious cross examination of defense witness David Blankenhorn, the president of the Institute for American Values, who is being played by Gregory Itzin. Journalists who were in the courtroom have been consulting, Ainsworth notes, and they've learned that Blankenhorn's baritone voice started going into a falsetto as he sparred with Boies and the afternoon dragged on.