by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I wanted to watch the
Lifetime “world premiere” movie Manson’s Lost Girls, thinking it would be good clean sleazy fun even
though I can’t stand the continued depiction of Charles Manson in books (I
recently read a new biography that was one of the last things I ordered from
the Quality Paperback Book Club before it merged into the Literary Guild, which
is still sending me e-mails and which I have no intention of joining), films,
TV shows (he was a major character in the short-lived TV-series Aquarius, a police procedural set in the 1960’s, and indeed
that show featured the police as being far more interested in Manson, and far
more aware of his activities, than they really were — if they had been he
probably wouldn’t have been able to commit the Tate and LaBianca mass murders
on which his reputation as a super-criminal and cult leader rest) and other
media (the 20-something woman who married him is running a Web site selling
Manson memorabilia, including autographs — though, as with the Hollywood stars
of the 1930’s, Manson has a whole staff, in his case fellow prisoners at
Corcoran, signing “autographs” for him). There’s a cottage industry surrounding
Manson largely because the radical Right is fond of using him as a whipping boy
against the 1960’s counterculture and “values” in particular — “You see! You
see what comes of saying you believe in peace and love? You start killing people!” — and also because Manson seems so
unprepossessing as a cult leader, let alone one who could brainwash depressingly
ordinary young women to commit particularly brutal murders for him. He was only
5’ 2” tall (though as with most dramatizations Manson’s Lost Girls cast an actor considerably taller and at least
somewhat better-looking than the real one; Steve Railsback, who played him in
the original Helter Skelter, is the only actor who’s played Manson who’s as small and dorky-looking
as the original) and ugly, and however he attracted and kept his followers,
physical appeal wasn’t it. Manson’s Lost Girls takes the story from the point of view of Linda
Kasabian (Mackenzie Mausy), who hadn’t been part of “The Family” for very long
when she was tabbed by Manson to drive the car containing his long-term
brainwashed killers to the Tate and LaBianca murder sites (both locations
Manson was thoroughly familiar with, by the way — he’d been at the Tate house
many times to visit its previous occupant, record producer Terry Melcher, who
Manson believed was going to sign him to Columbia Records; and he’d been at the
LaBianca house because for a while some of the “Family” lived next door and the
LaBiancas had frequently filed complaints against them to the police) because
she was the only cult member who had a valid driver’s license (aside from Mary
Brunner, who was already in custody on other charges).
Kasabian eventually
became the star witness against Manson and his killer “Family,” receiving
immunity from first-degree murder charges for her testimony, and an end-of-film
credit says she’s now living in Oregon under a different name. She was on the
stand for 19 days (that’s what happens when you testify in a trial in which
there are five different defendants, each with their own lawyer who has a right
to cross you) and didn’t waver. We hear the story through her eyes and Manson
(Jeff Ward) becomes, if not a peripheral figure, certainly an odd one: the
framing of the story makes clear his total dominance over “The Family” but for
the most part he’s off to the side and it’s the girls — Susan Atkins (Eden
Brolin, Josh Brolin’s daughter and James Brolin’s granddaughter), Patricia
Krenwinkel (Isabel Shill) and Leslie Van Houten (Greer Grammer, Kelsey
Grammer’s daughter) — who take center stage as Manson’s enforcers, along with
Charles “Tex” Watson (Christian Madsen, son of Michael Madsen and nephew of
Virginia Madsen), who as in real life is the hottest stud in Manson’s entourage
and was sometimes his designated seducer: Watson would get a woman Manson was
interested in recruiting to have sex with him, and once they started an affair she’d
be hooked and would be willing to move in with Manson and follow the cult’s
rule (never spelled out specifically in the movie) that any woman in the cult was expected at any time to have
sex with any man Manson told them to. It’s how he kept bending people to his
will — by having a lot of hot, nubile young things around for horny straight
celebrities like Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys (Stephen Sullivan, who looked
like he would have fit right into the Brian Wilson biopic Love and Mercy) whom he wanted to manipulate. (Manson actually
got one of his songs on a Beach Boys album — his title for it was “Cease to
Exist” but it was released as “Never Learn Not to Love” and Dennis Wilson got
the songwriter credit; Manson was less pissed about that than that Dennis
changed the line “Cease to exist” to “Cease to resist” — he’d given Dennis
permission to tweak the melody but had insisted there be no changes in the
lyric — but aside from that and a couple of professionally recorded demo
sessions, he never fulfilled his ambition of making it as a professional
musician and becoming a rock star.) Manson also assigned his girls to give
regular blow jobs to octagenarian George Spahn, at whose Movie Ranch in
Chatsworth (built in the 1920’s as an all-purpose Western town for moviemakers
to rent as a shooting location) the “Family” hid out after Dennis Wilson
finally threw them out of his Pacific Palisades mansion. (One aspect of the
story that isn’t mentioned here is that because they were ordered to have sex
with any man Manson wanted them to,
his “girls” regularly got sexually transmitted infections; Dennis Wilson paid
their treatment bills at V.D. clinics and later, when Manson offered his girls
to a motorcycle gang leader he was trying to ingratiate himself with, the motorcycle
guy said, “Next time I want a case of the clap that takes a year to go away,
I’ll let you know”).
Manson’s Lost Girls follows the basic outline of the real case — though in one particular
it deviates from the known facts: in this telling of the story (written by
Stephen Kronish and Matthew Tabak and directed by a woman, Leslie Libman, who
was shown during an interstital segment explaining how she directed the actors
in the dance-orgy scene that immediately precedes the Tate murders), after
Manson freaks out when one of his male “Family” members has been arrested for
the murder of Gary Hinman (Christopher Redman), it’s one of the girls who hits
on the idea of committing other murders with the same modus operandi and getting the police to blame them on the Black
Panthers so Hinman’s killer, Bobby Beausoleil (Garrett Coffey) — the only
member of the Manson entourage who had the talent for a potentially major musical career (after he was
convicted Kenneth Anger hired Beausoleil to score one of his films despite the
difficulties of working with a composer who was behind bars) — would be
released. I was wondering how they would depict the actual murders, and
director Libman and her writers neither took the shadowy Val Lewton-style
approach I was hoping for nor went all out for gore. Instead they tried to do
an in-between depiction, showing enough of the killings to give the modern-day
audience the blood ’n’ gore it wants while not showing enough to make it clear
just what was going on. (I mentioned Val Lewton and it was only after the movie
and its accompanying Beyond the Headlines documentary were over that I realized Lewton was just one degree of
separation from the Manson case: his protégé, Mark Robson, directed Sharon Tate
in Valley of the Dolls.) Manson’s
Lost Girls was well acted (especially
by Brolin and Shill, who duplicated their real-life prototypes’ utter lack of a
moral sense and sheer joy in killing) and decently done overall — though,
probably due to copyright and licensing issues, no songs by the Beatles were
heard in the film and the only two recognizable songs from the 1960’s that were included were the Turtles’ “Happy Together” and
Donovan’s “Hurdy Gurdy Man” (and the songs supposedly being composed and played
by Manson were actually written by one Jamie Floyd) — but the Manson killings
are already a tale that’s been told way too often and I quite frankly wouldn’t mind having a respite from it
for a while!
