Manson Family’s dark legacy, 50 years later
Three new movies tap into Americans’ fascination with a macabre moment in time in Hollywood.
Grisly tale still has a hold on pop culture.
Fifty years after the Manson Family killed actress Sharon Tate and shook Hollywood to its core, Charles Manson still holds sway over pop culture.
A trio of new films tap into the grisly anniversary of the Tate-LaBianca murders masterminded by Manson in August 1969, the latest in a lengthy list to reference the cult leader. He has been a central figure of books, podcasts, movies and TV, including 1976 TV biopic “Helter Skelter,” 1960s-set show “Aquarius” and episodes of “American Horror Story” and “South Park.”
A number of high-profile serial killers, especially from the ’70s and ’80s, still are “celebrated” in entertainment and documentaries, says James Alan Fox, criminology professor at Northeastern University and co-author of “Extreme Killing: Understanding Serial and Mass Murder.”
Still, Ted Bundy, played by Zac Efron in Netflix’s new “Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile,” and Andrew Cunanan, Darren Criss’ killer from “The Assassination of Gianni Versace: An American Crime Story,” can’t compete with Manson.
“The fascination continues,” Fox says. “There are lots of different ways in which that crime really was the crime of the century, not O.J. Simpson.”
Three very different cinematic projects this year take Manson out of the spotlight to focus on the social politics of his followers amid a tumultuous period in American history and Hollywood.
Directed by Mary Harron (“American Psycho”), the drama “Charlie Says” (in select cities Friday, including New York and Los Angeles, and on digital HD platforms May 17) is set in 1972 and centers on a grad student (Merritt Wever) who helps three of Manson’s imprisoned female followers (Hannah Murray, Sosie Bacon and Marianne Rendon) come to emotional grips with their roles in the murders, with flashbacks to their lives with Manson (Matt Smith).
The horror film “The Haunting of Sharon Tate” (streaming now on digital platforms) stars Hilary Duff as the onthe-rise
actress who has visions of herself and four others being killed, but the film also is a fantasy, introducing twists to the story of that fateful night.
And director Quentin Tarantino’s highly anticipated “Once Upon aTime in Hollywood” (out July 26) features Tate (Margot Robbie), Manson (Damon Herriman) and his family (including Dakota Fanning, Lena Dunham and Margaret Qualley) as supporting players in the tale of fictional fading TV star Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his stunt double Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt).
It’s a personal film for Tarantino, who was a 6-year-old Angeleno in 1969. “In many ways, this movie was as much of a memory piece for me as ‘Roma’ was for (Alfonso) Cuaron,” Tarantino says. “Once Upon a Time” at its core is a film that explores the social levels of a changing Hollywood, “while Charlie and his ‘family’ exist on the periphery.”
The Manson murders are an inside Hollywood tale but one noteworthy in letting “evil” loose on an unsuspecting movie industry, says “Haunting” director Daniel Farrands. “Hollywood was on red alert, and a lot of very famous people thought they, too, would be targeted (as) this wave of paranoid and fear swept through Los Angeles.”
Hollywood historian Karina Longworth
devoted an entire season of her podcast “You Must Remember This” to Manson. “I was interested in the idea that there is a single degree of separation between Doris Day and Charles Manson,” says Longworth, author of “Seduction: Sex, Lies, and Stardom in Howard Hughes’s Hollywood.”
The details of murders and “the claptrap of the family” don’t interest her as much as “the fact that he was a bumbling con man who ended up in the right place at the right time to become permanently infamous.”
Fox figures part of media’s continued fascination with Manson (who died in California State Prison in 2017 at age 83) was Tate, a celebrity victim who was 81⁄2 months pregnant. But what also has long intrigued true-crime fans is the nature of the Manson Family. “They weren’t hardened criminals,” Fox says. “They were ordinary kids – middleclass, valedictorians, librarians, you name it – who were mesmerized.”
With “Charlie Says,” Harron wanted to show what happened when the girls who still lived in Manson’s “fantasy world” recognized the reality of their violent actions.
“They didn’t even want to remember what they’d done those nights. And once they do, that’s opening the door to their real punishment,” Harron says.
Manson was bewitching, and that cult of personality extended beyond the family. During his trial, “young people were protesting that Charles Manson was wonderful, a great person, and the evil government is wrong,” Fox says.
“Charlie Says” shows that “extremely charismatic” side, but Smith’s Manson also is a bullying control freak and wannabe rock star who had his “ambition and delusions of grandeur” buoyed through his friendship with Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson, Harron says.
“He thought he was going to be bigger than The Beatles,” she says. “If only he got a record contract, life might have been better for everybody.”
Still, should we be obsessing about Manson and these horrible circumstances decades after the fact? “Why are we still obsessed with Jack the Ripper?” Farrands counters. “When things (reach) that level of unthinkable, they become almost legend.”
Longworth says that to give Manson “the aura of a fascinating madman” misses the point.
“He was able to prey on young women because they had become disenfranchised from their lives, and he was able to wedge his way into the entertainment industry because that industry had lost touch with the youth movement and was desperate for guidance,” she says. “That desperation clouded everyone’s ability to see that Manson was a snakeoil salesman. To call him anything else is to glamorize him.”