Charlie Manson Gave Quentin Tarantino Some LSD... and it was a Bad Trip...

The Cannes Film Fest gave the 56 year-old film maker a standing ovation for his recent creation, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood. They would. After all, it’s Tinsel Town enablers, enabling. I’m not sure that’s the barometer one should use to assess this celluloid trip.

Quentin was six and I was five when the Tate-La Bianca murders went down. I doubt either one of us on August 9, 1969 were smoking LSD laced cigs in between playing with Barbies and G. I. Joes, but sober and young, we were obviously both affected.

Although light-years higher and farther in artistic success than little old me, Quentin and I have used the same delivery in our works — wrapping a fictional tale around a factual event. For both of us, it’s a way to go down Memory Lane and get revenge or sneak in the last word or just plain have a few chuckles at inside jokes only those present could appreciate. I get that, I do, but here’s the rub… and I will explain via paraphrased dialogue from Robert Redford’s 1976 movie, All the Presidents Men, regarding publishing an article which said President Nixon’s Chief of Staff was the 5th person to divvy out CREEP — Committee for the Re-Election of the President — funds to pay off the Plumbers;

You hit too high, and miss

You make people feel sorry for them [the bad guys]

You can’t do worse than doing that.

What you do is you go from the outer ring

And slowly work in

You hit too high and miss

And it’s over

In other words, Quentin went too far off the rails as per this momentous historical timeline for it to be of any lasting value. He hit high and missed our hearts and minds. The New Yorker magazine summed up its take in one word: inert — of having no effect.

Now, don’t get me wrong.

I love Quentin’s movies.

He has a delivery all his own, and over the decades, has given a much needed boost to Hollywood when its creativity had so plummeted, but in terms of working with an iconic historical event and warping the astronomical shit out of it, Tarantino has cheapened his brand and sullied an already stained time that put all of North America in a hippie panicked tail-spin, and most certainly cheapened the victim’s deaths as a bonus. I highly doubt Sharon Tate’s middle sister, Debra, and Jay Sebring’s nephew, Anthony DiMaria, got much of a Buntline revolver bang out of this demented tale.

Yes. I get it. You go to a Q.T. film knowing you’re entering a frigged-up world.

Yes. I get it. Don’t expect reason or rational anything. Hell, don’t even look for completed plot lines or relevant characters.

Look to laugh and squirm and head-bob to the music.

That doesn’t mean Tarantino’s result is an artistic Tour de Force, peeps.

It may be a Ninja blender’s worth of inedible mush that leaves you sullied and embarrassed and feeling an apology is needed to history on behalf of this hyper producer/director.

Beyond Quentin’s obvious hallucinogenic take, Tarantino got quite a bit wrong even when he chose to dip his toes into a Tate pool of bobbing “facts” (and in no particular order);

· Sharon did not own/drive a black Porsche Spyder. That was Jay Sebring’s car, and Jay did not live at Cielo Drive that his car would have been easily available to Sharon. Sharon’s car was a red Ferrari that was in a repair garage the week of the murders. If Sharon had driven any car down to Hollywood, she would have borrowed Abigail Folger’s yellow Camaro.

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· Two of Sharon’s girlfriends lunched with Sharon at Cielo on August 8th, not a single woman with a baby. It was Joanna Pettet and Barbara Lewis. The fact that Quentin inserted a baby into this scene I’m sure he thought was a “cool” symbolic harbinger of the slaughter to come. The real effect just brought out disgust in me.

· Susan, “Sadie” Atkins and Patricia “Katie” Krenwinkel did not have fixed long blade buck knives at Cielo. They had the folding switch blade models. Charles “Tex” Watson had the only fixed blade and it was a bayonet.

· In 1969, Cielo Drive was not a private, gated drive. It was a public thru-way. There was no right hand side retaining wall. It was merely open ground. There was no large parking spots along Cielo for the other homes (seen right) and all were basically without yards or pools and sat on stilts (pink dot denotes Tate house).

· Sharon did star in The Wrecking Crew with Dean Martin; however, there is no publicly known evidence that she went and watched the film by herself in Hollywood.

· Tate, Sebring, Folger and Frykowski arrived back at Cielo from the el Coyote before 10pm as Abigail “Gibby” received a phone call from her mother at 10pm, telephone records later showed.

· There were no eye witnesses to Tex and the Girls approaching the Tate residence.

· Manson did visit 10050 Cielo Drive prior to the murders, looking for music producer/Doris Day’s son, Terry Melcher, but it was Sharon’s photographer, Shahrokh Hatami (left), not Jay Sebring (middle), who answered the door, and in broken English ordered Manson to “go the back way” that Charlie may have taken as a slight; i.e. the servant’s entrance, when in fact all Hatami meant was to take the back path to the Guest House and inquire there.

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· There was no Manson Family girl nicknamed “Pussycat.”

· The girl who had sores on the bottom of her feet was Susan “Sadie” Atkins, a symptom from most likely contracting gonorrhea.

· The Tate pool was at the end of the house, not in front.

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· Abigail Folger and Voytek Frykowski did not do marijuana the night of the murders. Their post mortem toxicology screens showed MDA.

· Steve McQueen was close friends with Jay Sebring. There’s no evidence to suggest that McQueen desired a romantic relationship with Sharon.

To desire to create/re-create history is an appealing prospect to artists, but to take an horrific time and the brutal loss of real lives and force it and them into a pop-culture zeitgeist blender is going beyond the pale. The outcome, if it had been good art… maybe. But Once Upon a Time wasn’t even good art. The characters were caricatures. The acting was flat considering the talent Quentin had swimming around the place. I actually feel sorry that Al Pacino and Bruce Dern got roped into this fantasy fest.

If only Quentin had taken a more sober approach infused with a life lesson he’s known to elucidate so well in his films. It’s not that he lacks for skill. But Hollywood Shock & Awe always supersedes Truth even when the plain truth is psychedelic enough.

Once Upon a Time will leave the theatres this “Summer of ’19” easily forgotten.

The audience will be left feeling empty and embarrassed and maybe even hurt.

And that manufactured standing ovation at Cannes… well, who remembers what happens on those sunshine filled shores once the waves crash in.

I’m not saying don’t go see it.

I’m saying viewer beware.

If you, as I, well remember living through those heady days, your heart won’t be uplifted with Quentin’s tale. And after you finish laughing at the ending, and you will, you may feel like you need a mental shower and an email of apology sent to the victim’s family members, and maybe even one to yourself.

My take: thank God Vincent Bugliosi wasn’t alive to go to the theatre.