The Manson Family, As Told by Women
‘Charlie Says,’ a new film from ‘American Psycho’ team Mary Harron and Guinevere Turner, revisits the 1969 murders with a focus on Charles Manson’s female followers. It’s both an affecting film and a reflection of a long-term creative partnership.The Manson Family, As Told by Women
‘Charlie Says,’ a new film from ‘American Psycho’ team Mary Harron and Guinevere Turner, revisits the 1969 murders with a focus on Charles Manson’s female followers. It’s both an affecting film and a reflection of a long-term creative partnership.
“We wanted to believe that something big was going to happen,” Leslie “Lulu” Van Houten, serving life in prison at California Institution for Women, says to her visitor Karlene Faith. “I mean, do you remember in 1969? It really felt like there was going to be a huge cosmic shift and things were never going to be the same.”
“It felt that way to most people I know, but it didn’t make them kill strangers,” Faith retorts.
This exchange occurs near the end of IFC Films’ Charlie Says, based on Faith’s nonfiction book The Long Prison Journey of Leslie Van Houten. The film follows three Manson family women—Van Houten (Hannah Murray), Patricia Krenwinkel (Sosie Bacon, daughter of Kevin and Kyra Sedgwick), and Susan Atkins (Marianne Rendón)—from their arrival at the infamous Spahn Ranch to their subsequent imprisonment for assisting the murders of Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, Wojciech Frykowski, Steven Parent, and Leno and Rosemary LaBianca. Most of the film is told from Van Houten’s point of view, who denounces her biological family to live on the ranch, where a growing number of young women live their lives by the maxim “Charlie says.” Alternating between the women’s lives with Manson and their later time in prison, where they were regularly visited by teacher and counselor Faith, Charlie Says explores the nature of choice and consequence as it applies to Van Houten. “I want to remind them who they were before they met Charles Manson,” Faith, played by Emmy-winner Merritt Wever, says in the film. “I just want to give them back themselves.”
Charlie Says is the third collaboration between director Mary Harron and screenwriter Guinevere Turner, best known for their work on the 2000 film American Psycho, which the two co-adapted from Bret Easton Ellis’s 1991 novel, and Harron directed. At the time, the film caused the ire of feminists, and critics condemned it for its violence and misogyny; it has since become a cult classic. Harron, a former journalist, and Turner, a member and advocate of the queer community, went on to co-write and co-produce 2006’s The Notorious Bettie Page, directed by Harron and based on the 1950s pinup model. Their partnership has become something of an anomaly in Hollywood, where prominent creative partnerships more frequently involve two men.
Like many films and books before it, Charlie Says opens with a famous Joan Didion quote, in this case one from her 1979 essay collection The White Album: “Many people I know in Los Angeles believe the sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969.” The line refers to the murders that captured the nation and struck fear in Hollywood, then and now. “This mystical flirtation with the idea of sin—this sense that it was possible to go too far, and that many people were doing it—was very much with us in Los Angeles in 1968 and 1969,” Didion wrote. The 50-year anniversary of the murders looms, and those two nights of nonsensical chaos have inspired another wave of cultural reexamination: This spring, Hilary Duff played Sharon Tate in the critically panned The Haunting of Sharon Tate; in July, Quentin Tarantino will share his version with Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. And in August, the second season of Netflix’s Mindhunter will supposedly feature Manson.
Charlie Says, which opens in limited release on May 10, focuses on the Manson family women instead of Manson himself. It is a fitting chapter in Harron and Turner’s partnership, and a reminder that the most honest films about women often involve filmmakers and collaborators who listen to one another. Still, like American Psycho before it, Charlie Says doesn’t offer any easy conclusions. Both Harron and Turner are committed to representation, rather than absolution. Or as Harron puts it, “I’m not here to make an ultimate judgment on them.”
For more than 20 years, Harron and Turner have carved out projects exploring complex women, both real-life and fictional ones. Charlie Says is Harron’s first feature film since 2011’s young-adult vampire flick The Moth Diaries, but she’s worked steadily in television, including a TV movie about Anna Nicole Smith and the acclaimed 2017 Canadian miniseries Alias Grace, about a 19th-century woman who may or may not have committed murder. Turner, meanwhile, has directed a few short films, cowrote the Jamie Babbit–directed film Breaking the Girls, and acted in web series like “Crazy Bitches” and “Different for Girls.”
A few years ago, the producers of Charlie Says approached Turner about writing a Manson girls movie. The producers had no idea Turner was born into a cult, which she recently wrote about for The New Yorker, and lived in it until she was 11 years old. “The producers wanted to meet with me because they’re fans of American Psycho, and I’m like, hold up—that’s the least of the reasons I should write this,” Turner tells me over the phone. “I thought that this was a perfect outlet to talk about my own experience and infuse some real at-the-core knowledge on how families like this work. I’m the only person in the world who should be writing this movie.”
Turner’s New Yorker essay focuses on “the banality of daily life” in her cult, which is telegraphed in Charlie Says. The family occasionally engages in orgies, drugs, and domestic violence, but there are also more mundane aspects of life on the ranch: The women do chores and visit a local dumpster to steal food. After Tex Watson (Chace Crawford) and the women murder the LaBiancas, he and Patricia raid the bloody “Healter Skelter”–marked fridge and drink milk and eat watermelon liked nothing happened.
Besides using the script as a somewhat personal means to explore her feelings, Turner used Charlie Says to discuss forgotten women: Van Houten, Atkins, Krenwinkel, Squeaky Fromme (Kayli Carter), Mary Brunner (Suki Waterhouse), and Linda Kasabian (India Ennenga). “I was fascinated by the fact that no one talked about these women after they were sentenced,” Turner says. “Why did people lose interest in who they were and where they were? People were still interviewing Manson in prison and nobody talked about them.” It took several years, but Krenwinkel renounced Manson as a sort of savior in the late ’70s, as eventually did Atkins. Atkins died of brain cancer in 2009, and Van Houten and Krenwinkel are still serving life sentences.
Even though they hadn’t produced a film together since Bettie Page, Harron and Turner frequently showed one another what they were working on, including Turner’s Charlie Says script. “Mary said, ‘This thing is the best thing you’ve ever written. I wish I could direct this,’” Turner recalls. “I said, ‘I think people will be into you directing something I wrote.’”
Harron, who as a young journalist once attempted to interview Manson herself, was drawn to the script’s original approach and the way the women appeared after their arrests. “I’m of a generation that was affected by Manson members and the images of the women, these kind of bizarre images of the women at the trial where they’re smiling and laughing,” Harron says. “I realize now it was what Charlie told them to do.” A similar energy finds its way into Charlie Says; when Faith meets the girls for the first time, they still have crazed smiles plastered on their faces. “Those images are so strange and so contradictory and contrasting with the horror of the crimes. It stays with you,” says Harron.
Matt Smith plays Manson, ultimately a supporting character of Charlie Says, as a manipulator rather than an incarnation of pure evil. “One thing I did decide is I know he made a lot of stuff up as he went along, and then the more people who followed him and listened to him, the more he starts to believe his own hype,” admits Turner. “I think that’s the truth, but I don’t really know.”
The film culminates in the two nights of murders, which occurred on August 9 and August 10, 1969. Instead of taking a gory, ultra-violent route for the murder sequences, Harron chooses a more restrained approach. Van Houten, screaming, stabs Rosemary LaBianca at least 14 times, which Harron shoots as a close-up on Van Houten’s increasingly blood-splattered face, an image reminiscent of Christian Bale’s Patrick Bateman running down a hallway with a chainsaw. “I’m not that influenced by violence,” Harron says. “I’m interested in the effects of violence. ... I was amazed when people talked about American Psycho as being this very violent movie, and there’s actually very little violence in it. Yet people are disturbed by it because they think it’s very violent.”
Throughout her film career, Harron has explored the concept of female victimhood, portraying women as something beyond either good or bad. Her first feature, 1996’s I Shot Andy Warhol, tells the story of Valerie Solanas (Lili Taylor), who in 1968 tried to murder Warhol because she thought he stole her work. She shot him; he survived, and she ended up in prison and then a psychiatric hospital. The six-part miniseries Alias Grace, which can be streamed on Netflix, follows another real-life woman, Grace Marks (played by Sarah Gadon), an Irish housekeeper living in Canada who may or may not have assisted servant James McDermott in murdering their employer and his housekeeper/lover. “People who suffer, who are victimized—it doesn’t necessarily make them more innocent or better people. It can also make you more angry and violent,” says Harron. “Dramatically, I would always be more interested in something where there are big questions that I think are hard to resolve.”
To Harron, the Manson girls were concurrently victims and criminals. “How do you separate the two?” she says. “Obviously if they hadn’t been so dominated, I don’t think left to their own devices any of them would’ve committed murder or inflicted great violence on anyone. They got sucked in. But then you can’t remove the idea of choice, because not everyone who got sucked into the cult stayed.” In its final shot, Charlie Says takes a Sliding Doors methodology: In an imagined moment, Van Houten hops aboard a paramour’s motorcycle and leaves the cult, never participating in the murders. The scene suggests that Van Houten chose to stay there, and thus is accountable for what happened. “I’m not trying to condemn or advocate for them,” says Harron. “What we’re trying to do is really trying to understand how they got there.”
American Psycho, distributed by Lionsgate in 2000, was the last time Harron worked with a major studio. Since then, she’s chosen the indie film and TV route, which she prefers. “I can’t say anybody’s offered me a huge studio film that I would want to do,” Harron says. “I feel pretty comfortable in that phase. I have a lot of control.” She has occasionally directed one-off television episodes, though that offers less flexibility. “I had a lot of creative freedom on Alias Grace and I have a lot of creative freedom in the movies. Doing miniseries and these kinds of movies definitely suits me. But I wouldn’t say no if someone offered me a lot of money to do a film I liked.”
Harron suspects that it’s a bigger “if” for her than for some others. “Honestly the way it works, the more money that’s involved, the less of a shot women have. They have a better chance at low-budget films than they do on big-budget films. That’s the way it’s always worked. That may change, but so far that’s how it is.” Turner, who’s an accomplished screenwriter, actress, and director in her own right, has struggled within the studio system, too. “The fact of the matter is the studio system isn’t asking for me,” Turner says.
It is now 25 years since Turner’s seminal queer film Go Fish, which she starred in and co-wrote with director Rose Troche, and Turner feels at least that queer representation in cinema, and particularly in TV, has expanded by leaps and bounds. “Back when I was a young woman coming out, there was so little and it was so precious, and none of it was particularly amazing. It was all we had. That’s the whole reason we made Go Fish. I was like, ‘Can we have a movie that’s really for us, that’s about us in a regular kind of way?’ I feel now we can have LGBTQIA characters that are broad. We get to represent a wide array of people.”
Outside of the studio system, Harron and Turner have built their own collaborative relationship and are working together on a new screenplay about a group of homeless teens. “It doesn’t feel like a long time when we last worked together, because we’re always talking about work,” Turner says. “We try to work in the same room when we can, which is hard because she lives in New York and I live in L.A. We like to hash things out a lot, and then one of us will be like, ‘Let me write the scene,’ and the other one will be quiet. It’s a very equal relationship in the sense that when we’re writing together, it doesn’t feel like she’s the director and I’m only the writer. We have such similar sensibilities in that we hardly ever disagree on things.”
Charlie Says is the first project that Turner wrote on her own, though she says that Harron was still deeply involved in the process. “Mary was constantly asking me questions,” Turner says. “I did a whole rewrite after she came onboard, after she read everything I wrote. She brings her director vision to it, obviously.”
Almost 20 years later, their masterpiece American Psycho is funnier and more pathological than it was in 2000. In a recent interview with The Observer, though, Ellis said the book probably wouldn’t get published today. “I think it’s very true,” Harron agrees. “It’s not a celebration of open greed; it’s just as greedy a culture and just as materialistic a culture [now], but people cover their tracks better. Bateman would be paying more lip service with the political correctness, but he would still be the person he is, and he’d be even richer, for sure.” Turner, who played victim Elizabeth in the movie, recently viewed it again and found the Trump references were cringeworthy. “Now that toxic masculinity is a thing people say, it’s like Exhibit A. That’s what that is, and that’s also an aspect of Charlie Says.”
Though it grossed $34 million, American Psycho wasn’t considered a huge hit, and Turner felt disappointed by criticisms from feminists who hadn’t seen the film and from the critics who didn’t get it. She also wondered “if we made it too soon.” “It’s been amazingly gratifying that slowly over these two decades people have come to appreciate it and are still talking about it,” Turner says. “It feels like a new generation of people grew up and embraced it.”
A week before Charlie Says hits theaters, Turner says she feels excited about its release. But the experience of American Psycho—the bad reviews, how people didn’t comprehend it—“made me bulletproof,” she says. “If people don’t get Charlie Says, I don’t feel like it’s not because I didn’t do an amazing job. I don’t need people to like me. But I really hope people get Charlie Says when it comes out, not 20 years later.”
Garin Pirnia is a freelance arts and culture writer and author of the book Rebels and Underdogs: The Story of Ohio Rock and Roll.