August 11, 2022

Helter Skelter · I Just Killed My Dad

the true crime that's worth your time

The crime
The August 1969 murders of Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, Wojciech Frykowski, and Steven Parent; and Leno and Rosemary LaBianca…for starters.

Also this correspondent is guilty of misdemeanor nana for still having a Netflix DVD account, but it’s the only way I could write up…

The story
…the original scripted Helter Skelter, the 1976 miniseries that closely follows prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi and his co-author Curt Gentry’s legendary account of the so-called “Manson murders,” from investigation to trial. While you can find snippets of it on YouTube and it’s no doubt torrentable, Helter Skelter isn’t currently available to stream. Should it be?

Well, my initial response is to note that, every 10-15 minutes during my viewing of it, I would stop to self-Google and make sure I hadn’t already written it up before. It hardly seems possible that I’ve never reviewed it, or even seen it from beginning to end, prior to now…but it seems very possible that I’ve confronted, digested, and/or osmosed enough other Manson content over the years — including documentaries and series that used clips of this Helter Skelter to illustrate various points — that it just felt like I already knew the material. Sure, I may have run a review on the old blog years ago and just not turned it up on search, but it’s just as likely that listening to You Must Remember This’s Manson season, watching that Epix docuseries, reading the actual book on the plane back in the day, Aquarius, Chaos, Once Upon A Time…In Hollywood, etc. and so on gave me the sense that the property is a stone I’d already touched.

My point is that much of HS 76 has entered the collective cultural consciousness, and irrespective of how that happened, it’s probably true for you, and it’s probably not a great use of your true-crime time to investigate the lesser-known bits — particularly if you’ve read the book, to which the miniseries hews very closely. I do recommend a quick tour through the mini’s “Trivia” page on IMDb, which contains dubious but still entertaining gems like the offering of the Manson role to Martin Scorsese, and the ouster of Bugliosi from the set for micromanaging George DiCenzo’s performance in the V. Bugs role. Also: Steve Railsback, who did play Manson, also played Ed Gein? I feel like that BET-CRP would end up in some advanced-calc realm I’m not qualified for.

But if you’ve never read the book; you have access to the DVDs and the ability to play them at 1.25x speed; and you think twentieth-century primetime genre miniseries have something to teach us about how true crime is told and sold now, versus then? HS 76 doesn’t have nothing to offer. The acting in the early going is difficult to take seriously; I understand that the idea is to communicate the horror of the scene without recreating the actual gore, but somewhere, Theda Bara is sipping absinthe and grumbling at Dorothy Meyer, who plays the housekeeper, to bring it down a notch. And the pacing in the first half hour, and for most of the trial, is very stately and punctilious. Here again, I understand what’s intended, the desire to convey just how very disruptive and annoying Manson and his co-defendants made themselves, but I’m not sure the form should follow the function quite so closely.

But a couple of performances stand out. Railsback is the Manson against whom all others will forever be measured, and he’s successfully threading a very tiny needle in creating a believable version of a guy who was, in word and deed, kind of unbelievable. Like, the actor quite literally has to do Manson lamps, and every time I was about to take an “easy, tiger” note, I remembered: this is really how Manson acted. These histrionics really occurred. (You also have to respect that Railsback had to know this role would follow him forever if he did it “right,” and he did it right.) Nancy Wolfe as Susan/Sadie chooses the perfect delivery, that sing-song estrangement from empathy.

And before HS 76 starts to get dragged down by the weight of recusals, countermotions, and performatively outré bailiff-taunting in the last third, there’s a scene in which Bugliosi is debriefing Paul Watkins (Jason Ronard, who didn’t do much besides HS but is flawless here). A foundational problem with any Manson “text” has always been that the consumer knows the outcome, and that the journey is therefore frequently more frustrating than enlightening — unless you’re there for evidence of law-enforcement ineptitude/linkage blindness, and who feels like they have to go looking for that at this point, right? But that interview scene has a verité feel, with the ringing phone and the “we each have our jobs to do” unvarnished performances by DiCenzo and Ronard, and it comes the closest of any case materials I know of to making sense of Manson’s Beatles/White Album/race-war “teachings” — of translating them for civilians.

It’s not so much making it so that we can understand them per se; it’s hacky stoner-racist1 claptrap, manufactured correlation. It’s making it so that we can understand why Manson’s loyal Family responded to it. The unspoken parallel in the scene — Bugliosi’s search for a motive he can package for a jury, running alongside troubled kids’ search for an organizing principle in their lives — is surprisingly non-judgmental towards the believers, as is the miniseries overall, possibly because the murders weren’t even a decade in the past as of airtime, and compassion for clearly lunatic curdled-hippie belief systems may have been easier to access.

As I got to the last act of HS 76, I found myself thinking, as I occasionally do in the context of watching a received-wisdom “classic,” of seeing Citizen Kane for the first time and having to be reminded of the reason so many of its narrative devices felt ho-hum — that I’d seen them all before because of Citizen Kane, that it invented them. I wouldn’t put Helter Skelter at that level, and I don’t think it’s a must-watch — but it does do some things well, a few of them very well, and it does mostly hold up. — SDB

It’s hard to believe a satirical property hasn’t already come down the pike with this title, but Based on a True Story is headed to Peacock — and has cast Kaley Cuoco as its lead. No premiere date yet, and Cuoco is filming something else at the moment, but here’s more from Syfy’s Josh Weiss:

Details on the dark comedic thriller series are being kept tightly under wraps, though it is confirmed that Cuoco will assume the role of "a married woman named Ava Bartlett," per the release. The project — which hails from executive producer Jason Bateman (Ozark) and writer/showrunner Craig Rosenberg (The Boys) — is purportedly based on a gonzo true crime story involving a plumber, a former tennis star, America's fanatical appetite for tales of the macabre, and the slow-close toilet seat. Again, we're not joking.

I tried various search strings to try to figure out which “gonzo” tale BoaTS is based on; the only thing that came up, weirdly, was the post-cancellation realty dealings of one Justin Gimelstob, a former tennis big shot from North Jersey. I didn’t know him or his embattled brother Josh personally back in the day, but he was known to my family and they were…not fans, so it’s mildly amusing that, of all the stories in the world this could be, the only one that comes up on search is one where I know the names of the players (as it were).

I wouldn’t not watch a The House of Gimelstob limited series, but this is almost certainly not that. If you think you know which story this actually is, let’s hear it! — SDB

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NYMag’s Court Appearances newsletter is back — with the “legal hysterics” (Choire Sicha’s phrase, not mine) surrounding the Elon Musk/Twitter kerfuffle. Finance correspondent Kevin T. Dugan has already dropped a couple of issues on the matter, even though the court proceeding proper doesn’t start until October.

Whatever CA covers, I’ve found they do it thoughtfully and from innovative angles, and although I’m as disappointed as they seem to be that they won’t have the opportunity to write up a Jen Shah trial, subscribers will get a lot out of Musk v. Bird App coverage too. — SDB

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The crime
Per Decider’s review,

In June of 2019, Anthony Templet called the police and said, “I just killed my dad. I shot him three times.” What started as a murder case uncovered a history of kidnapping and abuse in this rare true crime story where justice was served.

The story
Folks, I just don’t know how much else there is for me to say about Skye Borgman content, and I Just Killed My Dad is very typical of that content: SEO-friendly title; abduction so flagrant as to seem like a fairy tale as the central story; top-notch access and professional construction; and the occasional bracing moment that seems, correctly or not, to make any cynicism in said construction tenable.

Anthony Templet’s story, and his family’s story, all of it, is wretched and symbolic and worth hearing testimony on — his birth mother, Teresa, leaving notes everywhere (even in the oven!) saying, “If I die, Burt did it”; his grandma looking at family photos around her house while musing sadly on the cycle of violence — but in the context of Borgman’s c.v., and coming so soon after Girl in the Picture and its handful of parallels to the Templet case, I don’t know if I recommend this one either.

Is that because my notes on IJKMD mirror a large a chunk of my review of GitP? Because here’s what I said, in part, about Borgman’s previous series:

It’s not essential; it’s well built, it avoids judging its witnesses for the things they didn’t think — or were too afraid — to report decades ago, and it doesn’t use too many visual genre clichés (re-enactments and drone shots are minimal and sparing), but at the same time, Borgman has staked out a territory of sorts with outré files like Girl’s, and appears content not to push the boundaries of narrative much past, you know, a 48 HRS but with swears in it. “Tonya”’s story/fate is horrifying, but that powerful engine is, for lack of a better term, in the same old chassis as a Dateline or a sweeps SVU. That car will drive fine and get you where you need to go (unlike this metaphor, I’m afraid, but let’s just soldier on), but it’s also missing the opportunity to push harder on ideas[.]

Alas, the visual genre clichés in IJKMD fly thick and fast early on (this is just a Netflix “feature” I shouldn’t put down to creators)…but it doesn’t push any harder on the ideas it raises. I’ve said many times that I don’t need a doc to hold my hand on the capital-I Issues, and would prefer that they didn’t, everything else being equal, but…Borgman kind of does do that by using format tropes, and then at the same time doesn’t necessarily take us anywhere else. It’s interested, but not invested, and that creates the same response in me. Given the luridity of the circumstances, I don’t know if that’s enough.

As I’ve also said before, there’s nothing per se wrong with a by-numbers recounting of a dark story. Sometimes that’s the best way to do it, to let a familiar framework underline just what strange territory we’ve wandered into. But Borgman has certain topical preoccupations she seems unwilling to meet unaided, and certain human subjects she recognizes as apt storytellers but can’t quite bring herself to put forward as faces of the capital-I Issues I mentioned. Which is fair, and that’s not what every TH interviewee signs up for nor what every genre documentarian is required to try, but the holy-shit factor of a story isn’t always enough, by itself. How is the material supposed to change us, or the world it laments, if it never changes?

I Just Killed My Dad is fine — see my comments above; you won’t despise the experience of watching it — but its director is in a unique position to make her material personal, in the best and most universal ways, and of late, she’s not doing that. She doesn’t have to on my account, but there’s a missed opportunity there that feels like a shame. — SDB

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