Charles Manson, the cult leader who sent the young men and
women out on horrifying kill-missions in Hollywood over the
summer of 1969. “The first true-crime serial killer I heard about
on the news was actually not Manson, but a guy in Los Angeles
that was killing people with a hammer,” remembers Tarantino.
“That just seemed horrible and grabbed my imagination. And
the next thing that popped up was Manson. Everybody was
talking about him, but for a six-year-old it wasn’t clear what had
happened. I asked my stepfather, ‘Who’s this Manson guy?’ ‘Oh,
Quentin, you don’t want to hear about it.’ He didn’t tell me.”
That’s hardly surprising; even for a youngster with a strong
stomach (tiny Quentin watched the blood-soaked MAS*H
five times in 1970), it would have surely induced nightmares.
What had happened was a horrific home invasion on the affluent
Cielo Drive: four disciples of Manson entered a house seemingly
at random, then brutally murdered pregnant actress Sharon
Tate, celebrity hairdresser Jay Sebring and three others. Director
Roman Polanski, Tate’s husband, only survived because he was
in Europe at the time prepping a movie. The next night, the
Manson Family struck again, stabbing to death a married
couple, the LaBiancas, in Los Feliz.
The awfulness of the crimes sent shockwaves through
Hollywood — parties were cancelled, Frank Sinatra was
reported to have gone into hiding and Steve McQueen started
keeping a weapon under the front seat of his sports car. And
while the perpetrators were caught, 50 years on the murders are
still pored over in pop culture. This year alone, there is a Hilary
Duff film called The Haunting Of Sharon Tate, another called
Charlie Says in which Matt Smith plays Manson, and yet
another, Tate, starring Kate Bosworth. But it’s Once Upon A
Time In... Hollywood — which sees Rick Dalton also living on
Cielo Drive, just one door over from Tate — that has drawn the
most flak, particularly over the fact its original release date was
the anniversary of the LaBianca murders.
Tarantino brushes off the controversy briskly. “Columbia
doesn’t know when the fucking murders happened!” he says.
“They thought it was a good time on the schedule and were
like, ‘Oh, it’s his ninth movie... August 9... That should be great.’
They literally didn’t know.” Early in production he met with Debra
Tate, Sharon’s younger sister, who had voiced dismay about the
project, to show her the script and talk her through his treatment
of the events. “She liked the script — she saw where I was coming
from,” he says. “She pointed out a few inaccuracies that I had.
A couple of them were just what’s always been reported.
Sometimes I liked what I had better, so I just left it. But no, once
she saw where we were coming from, she was down with it.”
The Manson Family are in the film, portrayed by the likes
of Lena Dunham, Dakota Fanning and Austin Butler. So is
Manson himself, embodied by Damon Herriman, who is also
playing the buck-clad maniac in this year’s instalment of David
Fincher’s Mindhunter. But for now the filmmakers are keeping
schtum on how exactly they fit into Tarantino’s tale. Will he
recreate the tragic real-life events, or futz with history as he did
with the Hitler-killing climax of Inglourious Basterds? One clue
may be that the intertitle at the start of the film reads February
1969, not August, when the killings occurred.
“I’m telling you with my eyes,” protests Margot Robbie,
the actor playing Sharon Tate in the move, when the subject
is gingerly broached. “It’s hard to talk about!” She read the
top-secret screenplay in Tarantino’s kitchen, as the director
watched Dexter in the other room. “He gave me a VB beer,
which is a very Australian beer that I’ve never seen outside of
Australia in my life,” she laughs. “People credit him often for his
film knowedge. They’re totally failing to recognise his amazing
beer knowledge also.” And as she sipped her brew, flipping the
pages of ‘MAGNUM OPUS’, she realised the significance of
Above: Rick guest-stars in an episode of (real) TV series The F.B.I.
Below: Cliff investigates strange goings-on at the Spahn Movie Ranch.