Helter Skelter: An American Myth director Lesley Chilcott: “Charles Manson was not a master criminal”

Just over 50 years ago, on January 25, 1971, Charles Manson and three of his followers were convicted for the horrific murders of nine people in California, including actress Sharon Tate, hairdresser to the stars Jay Sebring, and Abigail Folger, heir to the Folgers coffee empire. The seemingly random killings terrified residents of Los Angeles, and the eventual unearthing of the charismatic and unhinged Charles Manson and his young and predominately female “Family” members as the culprits inspired a rabid media and cultural frenzy, giving birth to the true-crime entertainment industry as we know it today.

Despite dying in prison in 2017, the fascination with Manson as a “svengali” with mind control-like powers over his obedient followers has never abated over the decades. There are countless books and films about Manson and “The Family,” from Manson prosecutor and Los Angeles County Deputy District Attorney Vincent Bugliosi’s 1974 bestselling book Helter Skelter to Quentin Tarantino’s recent Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood film, which showcases an idealized alternate take of the history of Sharon Tate and “The Family.”

Due in part to Bugliosi’s case against Manson as a mastermind who influenced his followers to kill in order to kick-start “Helter Skelter,” a purported race war apparently inspired by Manson’s fascination with The Beatles song of the same name, Manson’s legacy has grown to outsize proportions over the years – he’s come to be seen as an insane boogeyman who had a well-thought-out plan to inspire a bloody revolution.

Helter Skelter: An American Myth, a new six-part series directed by Lesley Chilcott (Watson, Codegirl), bursts that bubble, showing Manson as an incompetent criminal stumbling from one bad decision to the next. Featuring revealing new interviews with Family members including Dianne Lake and extensive interviews with Manson biographer Jeff Guinn, Chilcott examines how the charismatic Manson was able to build a following with traditional cult leader techniques, and how a series of rash decisions and violent responses to petty grievances created the Manson myth that still persists to this day.

We spoke with Lesley Chilcott about why members of the Family agreed to speak out now, whether the “Helter Skelter” theory holds any water, the insidious ways Manson was able to lure his young followers, and the lessons we can learn from the case and its continuing ramifications.

Helter Skelter: An American Myth is airing now via Hollywood Suite (Canada) and EPIX (United States).

Bad Feeling Magazine: You captured really open and frank interviews with some of the Family members; was it something about the way that you approached them with the project that allowed them to really open up and get back into their mindset from the 60s?

Lesley Chilcott: I think part of it is a lot of time has passed. And part of it is that people wanted to clear up some misconceptions. With Bobby Beausoleil, we did a series of 30 calls from prison and I flew up there, I talked to him and I said, “Listen, you did something horrible, you murdered Gary Hindman, but help us understand why, because there was nothing about your history that suggested you would do something like this.” And there’s been nothing since then. You know, he has a very clean prison record, at least for the last couple of decades. I said, “Look, I’m doing six hours. I’m doing this dig. So if you want us to get it right, then tell us what happened.” And I think after a series of saying things like that, for a few months, I think that was effective, and made people feel a little safer in sharing their story. It’s a really complicated story, there are two dozen Family members, more after the murders. And I think that it’s been made very tabloid-esque. And I said, “Look, I want to get to the moral seriousness underneath this spectacle. You know, let’s talk about what happened and why you did what you did.”

Watching the whole series, I’m not sure if it’s even more frightening to think that all of this maybe just spun out of a few petty grievances, or whether you believe in the whole Helter Skelter plot, because that just seems so outlandish. What do you think of the prosecution’s Helter Skelter theory? Do you think it holds water?

Well, it’s interesting, because that’s why we added  “An American Myth.” I mean, Helter Skelter, the book is an incredibly well-written book by Vincent Bugliosi, I think he did a great job as a prosecutor, he didn’t have the burden of proving motives, but the girls and Charlie were behaving so strangely in court, and the crimes were so strange that he felt he needed to come up with this theory. And Charlie would talk to each Family member in isolation, and certain people would know certain things about going to the desert, or stealing car parts, or where to get food from, and everybody was siloed. So no one had the complete picture of what was going on.

And you combine that with dumpster diving for food and doing incredible amounts of LSD, and people were pretty out of it. And it all started out so nice. The commune in the valley, and free food and free love, and it would just get a little darker each time. So when Dianne Lake tells us how Charlie raped her, she couldn’t believe it when it was happening, because Charlie’s hadn’t been like that a few months before. When it starts to go bad, you’re like, “Oh, he didn’t mean that. She didn’t mean this, whatever.” And it took the family members a long time to sort of realize that.

Now, to some people, Charlie was saying, “Hey, there’s going to be a race war.” But he wasn’t saying to very many people, we’re going to start the race war, we’re going to create Helter Skelter, and we’re going to rule the world.” You know, a lot of people I talked to thought that was just campfire stories. And other people really believed it. You can go online and listen to Leslie Van Houten’s police interview after she was first arrested, and she’s completely in the cold and totally under the influence and was saying crazy things, which, once she got away from him, you know, she realized, and doesn’t believe those things now, and has been an exemplary prisoner, and all of those things, which is a totally different topic. But, in my opinion, Charles Manson was not a master criminal. And he was not going about starting a race war in a systematic way. And he’s given credit for something that he doesn’t deserve. He performed a series of desperate acts, and went from like, one paranoid blunder after another. He was a small-time con artist who happened to have a lot of influence over these Family members. And then once he had the influence, he didn’t know what to do with it. So he kept doing crazier and crazier things. And obviously, he had a screw loose.

One thing the series really illustrates is how, right to the very end, just how incompetent Manson was, in terms of everything from burglary to his dealings with people. It helps deflate the myth of him as this mastermind, which is important if you consider the case spawned the public’s fascination with true-crime.

Yeah, and also, Charlie was the first kind of celebrity true-crime villain. And people watched the news every day, like an ongoing thriller, and that was new, even though the cameras weren’t around in the courthouse, that hadn’t happened before. Now, I don’t think it would have happened at all if the murders hadn’t been famous people and icons in Hollywood and, you know, people that were well known, not just Sharon Tate, but Jay Sebring. But then there were the murders beforehand and Gary Hinman and then “Shorty” Shae was killed. Gary Hinman isn’t talked about all that much, and that’s why we made a big deal out of that story because Bobby [Beausoleil] wasn’t an official family member, but he was an associate. And you know, these people weren’t criminals before Charlie, that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t have made other bad decisions. But, you know, if, Bobby had meant to do that, then why do you take the guy whose car you killed, and then drive away and leave the murder weapon in the car. It’s obvious something else was going on there. And I’m not defending any of them. But it is clear that they were all under the outside influence of one person. And that was Charlie and they should all pay for those crimes, and I believe they have.

Can you talk about the decision process behind including the crime scene photos? They’re shocking but important to see. Was it a tough decision to include them?

We were trying to find the most minimalist way we could explain the murders without letting the murderers off the hook. So, you know, we didn’t do slow-motion recreations of murder weapons or knives, or all of those things like you might see in a feature film, or some of the more tabloid-esque coverage. Or do re-creations for that part of it. But we do have the audio recordings from both the prosecutorial side and then some of the older tape recordings that were made back from the initial police interviews. And so the idea was to only show one photo per victim. And that’s it. And keep it minimal. But if you don’t show the photos — because initially, I didn’t want to — then you kind of let the killers off the hook for how brutal the crime was. And so, that didn’t seem right, either. So one photo in silence felt the most respectful way we could do it without letting anyone off the hook.

That sort of ties into including Manson’s music as well — the music sort of plays on two fronts — some of it is not very good and you can say he had no talent, but then every now and then, there’s a song that makes you think that maybe he could have had a career. What were your thoughts on including his music?

So that’s the debate, right? Like, I felt we needed to play some stuff that was good, like, “Look at Your Game Girl” seemed to seduce all of the women. And it’s a decent song. You know, he’s quite a good lyricist. And it’s the 60s, to be able to say, “I see what you’re doing, are you under your parents’ influence?” I think it was important to show that some of the girls just fell for him because they thought he was going to be a rock star, it’s that simple. But then he has these other songs where Charlie couldn’t even play to time. Now, was it because he couldn’t play to time? Or was it what Bobby Beausoleil said, you know, which was much more interesting, is that because he had been confined and regimented and imprisoned his whole life, he was never going to play to time because he was doing it his way. Which was it? I don’t know. So let’s have the viewers listen and hear, but we were very careful to never use it as score. It was always to show this happened because of this song, or this person fell for him and a lot of family members were musicians, and playing music out in the desert was a big attraction at first, and I think it was important to share that.

Going through this whole process, was there anything that really jumped out to you about his influence on the Family or about his personal life that you hadn’t considered before?

Yeah, there are a couple of things. One, I didn’t know that he genuinely had a horrific childhood. And you want to wonder, you know, Charlie’s technically a spree killer, as opposed to a serial killer or mass murder, and you want to know, well, was he born, or was he made, right? And you go back, and he had a horrible childhood. But there’s a lot of people with horrible childhoods that turned out differently. So, I think it’s very clear that it was a combination, you know, he may have had certain instincts if he’d been in a completely different environment, which may have never happened, if he had had a recording career, maybe this would have never happened because he would have gone in another direction.

I think that his horrible childhood was a genuine surprise to me. When you think about a cult leader, it feels like there’s some very direct recruitment techniques that are employed. And I did think there was much more natural planning, you know, he’s referred to as The Bearded Svengali, you know, by Sadie [Family member Susan Atkins]. And people gave him so much credit. And it was a surprise to me to know that there absolutely was no master plan. He was going from one horrible blunder to the next, you know, he wasn’t even a good criminal, when he was trying to be he would do stupid things. And so the fact that we’re still talking about this guy, when there was so little planning there, you know, that was a real surprise.

And I kind of wanted to attempt to take him off of that pedestal. You know, he’s been infinitely fascinating to talk to for people over the years. I didn’t talk to him, obviously, he died in 2017. But when you ask him a question, he won’t answer you, but tell you something else, he’ll answer with a different question. And there are so many people that feel like they got to know the real Charlie, and I don’t think anybody did. When you look at the classic techniques, you know, he kept repeating the same phrases, he isolated his Family, he used sex both for pleasure, but also for coercion. He alternated fear with love. And all these Family members were trying to get back to like, the good times when it was fun, you know, he treated life as a game they would role-play. And he changed all their names. I didn’t realize how classic cult it actually was.

What do you hope viewers take away from this? It’s a six-hour film or a series or however you want to label it, it’s a lot to take in.

A couple of things. I think that these small-time con artists can be very dangerous. I think when people repeat things that aren’t necessarily true over and over again, it’s quite dangerous, and people try and control you with an ideology. And, by the way, you know, “Come out and live in the desert, play music together, and we’ll get our free food out of trash,” I mean, there’s nothing’s wrong with that in and of itself. He’s like, “Oh, you don’t need all those material things. We’re too materialistic, you know, we shouldn’t be sending our youth off to war, your parents don’t understand you. They just want you to work and sell widgets.” And, you know, we can identify with all of that. And it makes you wonder if Charlie had had better education and skills, you know, what could be different for that. So, the similarities between what was going on in the late 60s, and what’s going on now in society, you know, with an unpopular foreign war with unpopular politics, there’s a lot of similarities between then and now. And do I think Charlie could have done his thing now? No, but you have Keith Raniere and the Nxivm cult, and he got all of these people to do crazy things like brand themselves. You do have examples of modern-day cults.

So I think it’s important to look at that. But I actually think it’s important that this guy was small-time, you know, we don’t need to keep talking about him over and over again. We’re doing a deeper dive so you can learn the story behind the story so to speak. But there are other things we can talk about and if you’re fascinated with them then great, but at least knock him off of this “mastermind with a master plan” pedestal because he was not that guy.

Helter Skelter: An American Myth is airing now via Hollywood Suite (Canada) and EPIX (United States).