Limited Hangout

Thoughts on the new Errol Morris documentary.

I didn’t expect to be writing a follow-up to my last letter, about the journalist Tom O’Neill’s mind-bending book, “Chaos: Charles Manson, the C.I.A., and the Secret History of the Sixties,” and the many ways it discredits Vincent Bugliosi’s 1974 bestseller about the Manson murders, “Helter Skelter.” But I’ve since watched Errol Morris’s film adaptation of “Chaos,” released by Netflix this month.

You can read my full response to the documentary in a review published today over at the Los Angeles Review of Books. In short, I found the film to be an unsatisfying departure from the book. Viewers who haven’t read “Chaos” may find the film interesting enough; the archival footage is sadly gripping. But the power of O’Neill’s book lies in its slow, meticulous amassing of evidence, and in the film, much of this reporting is diminished or left out entirely.

In the weeks since I filed the review, I haven’t been able to stop ruminating. I keep thinking of more ways that “Chaos” the film fails to convey the scope of “Chaos” the book. One distortion-by-omission has started to seem important. In the documentary, there’s little indication of just how many leads O’Neill followed over the twenty years he spent reporting the book. Viewers who watch the film without reading the book could easily come away with the impression that government involvement is the only theory O’Neill ever seriously considered. This matters, I think, for reasons I’ll get to later.

From the beginning of the book to the end, O’Neill leaves no stone unturned. In the earliest months of his research, back in 1999, he looked into three seedy drug dealers who were regulars at the Cielo Drive house in the summer of 1969, and who reportedly had all been romantically involved with Cass Elliot of the Mamas and the Papas. Interviews with friends of Sharon Tate, the actress who was killed at her home in Benedict Canyon, also had him harboring suspicions about Tate’s husband, the director Roman Polanski, for a time. In pursuit of another lead, O’Neill got haircuts from a barber who’d been Jay Sebring’s protégé, and who’d traveled with Sebring, the Hollywood hair stylist killed alongside Tate, every few weeks to Las Vegas, where Sebring’s clients included Frank Sinatra and a few casino owners. This barber told O’Neill that Sebring had vague ties to organized crime in Vegas and Chicago. Because of a menacing phone call he received from a notorious mob guy after Sebring was murdered, the barber believed Sebring was targeted.

Before O’Neill had even blown his first Premiere magazine deadline, the characters swirling around his Manson reporting included mobsters, ex-military figures and intelligence agents. (“Chaos” doubles as a fascinating portrait of Hollywood and Los Angeles at a tumultuous boiling point in American culture.) By the end of the first year, O’Neill had interviewed more than 500 people.

Tom O’Neill at his home office in Venice Beach in 2014.

Listen to any long podcast interview with O’Neill and you’ll hear him describe months and years spent reporting angles that never even ended up in the book. I heard a few new ones in a three-hour conversation O’Neill had with Rick Rubin last year. Two hours in, Rubin asks O’Neill if he thinks there might have been an occult element to the murders. We learn that O’Neill looked into the fact that Tate had been studying witchcraft, that he examined Polanski’s film “Rosemary’s Baby” through the lens of the Manson murders, and that he spent months researching a rumor that Manson was influenced by the Process Church of the Final Judgment, a religious group founded in London by two former Scientologists that reportedly had a presence in the Haight in 1967. Ten minutes later, O’Neill mentions he also spent months looking into Manson’s relationship with Frank Retz, a World War II German Army captain who lived next to Spahn Ranch, and into whether Rocketdyne, the rocket engine manufacturer with a longtime laboratory in the hills near Spahn Ranch, hired German scientists as part of Operation Paperclip.

“Can you think of an example of a lead that you got that you followed for a long period of time but it took you nowhere?” Rubin asks. “So, so many,” O’Neill responds. “Here’s the thing. I did it for twenty years. I would say, you know, generously, half of those twenty years were spent on dead ends.”

When O’Neill is speaking in the documentary, it’s almost always about the possible involvement of Mk-Ultra, the C.I.A.’s notorious research program on mind control, or two other covert federal programs active at the time: Operation Chaos, the C.I.A.’s domestic spying effort; and Cointelpro, the F.B.I.’s counterintelligence campaign. He seems to exist in the film for this reason alone—to float the theory that Manson was an informant. This is what O’Neill ended up believing in the end. (He takes pains in the book to acknowledge that he can’t prove it and doesn’t know exactly what form such an arrangement might have taken.) But as a representation of the path he took to report the book—the path that led him to suspect government involvement—Morris’s portrayal is reductive in the extreme.

I understand why Morris doesn’t retrace O’Neill’s steps, of course. But he could have spent a little time conveying how many other theories O’Neill exhausted along the way. Instead, O’Neill’s decades of footwork are reduced to a sound bite. “I interviewed just about everybody,” we hear him say at one point.

This kind of thing happens a lot in the film. One of O’Neill’s most baffling findings is a pattern of leniency toward Manson by law enforcement during the two and a half years leading up to the murders and his final arrest. In the book, this pattern unfolds as a WTF after WTF after WTF for pages upon pages. In the film, it becomes a brief sound bite or two.

At one point I distilled the sequence into a timeline, included below, and filled in some blanks with details obtained from O’Neill. (Most of the additional information comes from a timeline shared with O’Neill by Deputy Sheriff William C. Gleason, the sergeant who organized his department’s raid on Spahn Ranch and wrote the corresponding search warrant.) Read it with the knowledge that, during this entire stretch of time, Manson never had his parole revoked.

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March 21, 1967—Manson is released from Terminal Island, the federal prison in San Pedro, after serving seven and a half years for forging a government check. As a condition of his parole, he is required to stay in L.A. He travels to the Bay Area the day he is released.

July 28, 1967—Manson is arrested in Ukiah for contributing to the delinquency of a minor and interfering with a police officer in the line of duty, both felonies, after trying to prevent the arrest of one of his followers, Ruth Ann Moorehouse. In what is probably the result of a plea deal, Manson pleads guilty to one charge of resisting arrest, a misdemeanor. Instead of returning to prison, he is released and sentenced to three years probation, which is never enforced.

August 27, 1967—Manson receives a citation from the L.A. sheriff's department for unknown reasons.

September 25, 1967—Manson is issued a traffic warrant by the L.A. sheriff’s department for unknown reasons.

October 14, 1967—Manson is cited in Sacramento.

November 11, 1967—Manson is cited in Salinas.

February 19, 1968—Manson is arrested in L.A. for “failure to appear” on the traffic warrant issued in L.A. in September 1967.

February 26, 1968—Manson is “convicted” for the citation he received in L.A. in August 1967.

April 18, 1968—Manson is “convicted” for the citation he received in Sacramento in October 1967.

April 21, 1968—Manson is arrested on suspicion of grand theft auto, along with thirteen of his followers, when they are found sleeping in a ditch beside Pacific Coast Highway. The L.A. Times reports on this group arrest in an article dated April 23, with the headline: “Wayward Bus Stuck in Ditch: Deputy Finds Nude Hippies Asleep in Weeds.” Manson turns out to be the legal owner of the bus, but the media coverage alerts the San Francisco probation office to the fact that he has been traveling back and forth to L.A. for months. This angers the head of the San Francisco probation office and the head of the L.A. probation office. Manson’s parole is not revoked.

May 2, 1968—Manson is arrested in Topanga Canyon for pot possession, along with six of his female followers. He is held in jail for four days, then released.

March 29, 1969—Manson is arrested by the L.A. sheriff’s department for rape and assault with a deadly weapon.

June 3, 1969—Manson is arrested for public drunkenness or being high in Canoga Park.

June 4, 1969—Manson is arrested in the San Fernando Valley for driving under the influence, being on drugs and operating a vehicle without a license. He is released within twenty-four hours.

July 7, 1969—Manson is stopped and taken into custody on suspicion of grand theft auto.

August 16, 1969—Manson is arrested in a massive raid at Spahn Ranch, along with some two dozen adults and seven juveniles. Thirty-five squad cars, numerous ATVs and more than 100 officers descend, armed with handguns, rifles and tear gas, led by an elite SWAT team. Manson and his followers are arrested for operating an auto-theft ring, not for the Tate-LaBianca murders earlier in the month. Officers find stolen cars, narcotics, underage girls and an arsenal of weapons, including a submachine gun. When he is arrested, Manson, who is identified as a federal parolee in the search warrant, has four stolen credit cards in his pocket. He and the rest of the group are released three days later.

August 24, 1969—Manson is arrested for felony pot possession and contributing to the delinquency of a minor when he is found in an abandoned cabin near Spahn Ranch with several joints and a 17-year-old girl, Stephanie Schram. Manson is released two days later with no charges. Schram is charged with felony possession, even though she is a minor with no criminal record.

August 27, 1969—A judge signs another warrant for Manson, on the strength of his having been found with drugs and a juvenile. Manson is not arrested. He stays at Spahn Ranch until he and the family move to Death Valley around September 10.

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It doesn’t make any sense. Even Bugliosi, the lead prosecutor in the Manson trial and the author of “Helter Skelter,” acknowledged that the charges Manson racked up in the months leading up to the murders should have been enough to send him back to prison. “During the first six months of 1969 alone, he had been charged, among other things, with grand theft auto, narcotics possession, rape, contributing to the delinquency of a minor,” Bugliosi wrote in his book. “There was more than ample reason for parole revocation.”

I have no need to believe that Manson was an informant. If there are other possible explanations for this confounding series of charges and releases with zero parole violations, I’m all ears. By the end of the film, it very much seems Morris does not believe Manson was an informant. Great! How does Morris make sense of Manson’s apparent immunity from parole revocation, then? We don’t know because Morris never tells us.

If, as it seems, Morris is not inclined to think Manson was an informant, he could have steered his film in any number of other directions. For instance, he could have attempted to ask law-enforcement agencies about O’Neill’s findings and the many other unanswered questions hanging over the Manson cases.

He could have asked the Los Angeles district attorney’s office to review its handling of the Tate-LaBianca trial. O’Neill found extensive evidence that Bugliosi’s office planted a former prosecutor on the defense team. He also found evidence indicating that a key witness for the prosecution, Terry Melcher, a producer for the Beach Boys and the son of Doris Day, committed perjury, suborned by Bugliosi. These ethical violations could have been grounds for a mistrial. Does the D.A.’s office have anything to say about this?

He also could have asked the D.A.’s office why it has fought the release of a key piece of evidence—some twenty hours of audio recordings of Charles “Tex” Watson, one of Manson’s most ardent followers, describing the killings to his attorney in Texas in November 1969. There is reason to believe these tapes may contain the most complete account of the Manson family’s crimes. They were made before Watson was charged, before Manson or any of his other followers were revealed as suspects, and, most importantly, without Bugliosi’s involvement. (It was O’Neill who first learned of the existence of the tapes, by the way, after tracking down Watson’s former attorney in Texas in 2008. That lawyer, Bill Boyd, told O’Neill that Watson described “other” murders in the recordings—murders that had never been discovered or connected to the Manson family by law enforcement. Long story short, court battles ensued.)

He could have asked the Los Angeles Police Department about the dozen or so unsolved homicide cases potentially linked to the Manson family. The last time the Los Angeles Times reported on these cases, in 2019, they were still technically under active investigation—in and of itself an indication that there may be more to the story.

He could have tried to ask the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department about its raid on Spahn Ranch. To ascertain why—given the amount of surveillance the department conducted beforehand, the preponderance of evidence found in the raid, and the fact that Manson was known to be a parolee—Manson was released three days later. Morris also could have asked the department why exactly it took law enforcement months to connect the family to the murders, and the murders to one another, when, according to O’Neill’s reporting, the lead investigators assigned to the first case linked the three murder scenes right away.

He could have pressed the U.S. Parole Commission to release Manson’s complete parole file, which for reasons that remain unclear was not permitted into evidence in court. (At the trial, Manson’s parole file was described as “four inches thick.”) After a series of Freedom of Information Act requests that stretched on for years, O’Neill was able to obtain only sixty-nine of 138 pages, many of which were redacted. There is no good reason why the parole records of America’s favorite bogeyman need to be secret for more than fifty years.

In other words, Morris could have tried to advance the story in a material way. Instead, as I say in my review of the film, he skates around on top of O’Neill’s reporting without grappling with the substance of it.

This might not seem quite so compromising if not for the way Morris leaves things at the end. He effectively gives Bobby Beausoleil, a onetime Manson follower convicted of murder, the last word. “The problem with this story in particular is that people are very fond of their fantasy,” Beausoleil says. “They don’t want to hear how mundane the story actually is.” Morris responds that people love conspiracies. “Yeah, they do,” Beausoleil says. “They want it to be more complicated than it is. And it’s so hard to disabuse people of those fantasies.” It’s only by glossing over so much of what’s in the book that Morris can pass this off as a satisfying conclusion.

O’Neill spent twenty years following enough paper trails to fill 400 binders, demolishing the credibility of the best-selling true-crime book of all time and unearthing significant scoops along the way. He did this at the constant risk of going broke. (He drove an Uber at one point to keep the lights on.) He did it at the constant risk of lawsuits. And he did it mostly as a freelancer, without the steady support of a media institution or its legal team. His reporting deserved a much fuller airing than Morris gave it.

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