Jodi Arias Lifetime Movie Shoots While Courtroom Drama Heats Up From Bomb Threats and Delays

The verdict may be in, but the drama is still unfolding in the Jodi Arias trial. Laquint H. Cherry, an 18-year-old Phoenix man was arrested on suspicion of tweeting a bomb threat, the aggravation phase of the trial that supposed begin yesterday was postponed until May 15 and the convicted slayer was put on suicide watch. It’s enough for a Lifetime movie. One that will air in June. The movie is tentatively titled “The Jodi Arias Story” and stars “Lost” actress Tania Raymonde. Lifetime promises that it will have sex, drama and a troubled relationship.

While the young killer who has kept the nation hypnotized for the last four months sits in a jailhouse psych ward on suicide watch, Raymonde dyed her hair blonde. The actress to bring out the “sweet and likeable things” that drew Travis Alexander to the woman who stabbed him 29 times, shot him once and slit his throat on June 4, 2008.

Arturo Interian, vice president of original movies for Lifetime Networks and A&E networks, said “Tania has somehow tapped into the sweet and likable things that drew Travis to Jodi, into Jodi’s weird eccentricities that are hard to explain, and into the demons that drove this young woman to do such a terrible, extreme thing. Tania has immersed herself in this role and I’ve seen her go from sexy to downright scary in the same scene.”

Lifetime promises that the biopic will be steamy. Interian said, “There was certainly more to the Jodi-Travis relationship than just sex but given the dirty phone calls, the naked pictures, the sexts between them, certainly the media has focused in on their sex lives,” Interian said. “They were a young couple and they had kinky sex. I think our director, Jace Alexander, is up to the challenge. It’s basic cable so we don’t have to be quite so chaste as folks think. So, yes, there will be sex.”

Lifetime began developing the “Jodi Arias Story” last March and focused on the now relationship and the doomed couple’s now-famous sex life. The movie opens with Arias posing for pictures nude on a bed in pigtails. Interian said that the script is being revised now that Arias has been convicted. It will include some of the more heated trial moments, especially the heated exchanges between Arias and prosecutor Juan Martinez. Tony Plana will play Martinez. Travis Alexander will be played by Jesse Lee Soffer of “The Mob Doctor.” Interian says the actor “will bring home the fact that a young man died needlessly here.”

By Tony Sokol