Speaker 1: You're listening to. Later with Moe Kelly on Demand from
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Speaker 2: Forty Nature Kelly Mark talks about pontificates about pop culture,
Speaker 2: Ron and Report with Mark Ronner.
Speaker 3: KFI AM six fortyears later with mo Kelly. Let's get
Speaker 3: to Mark Ronner and the Runner Report.
Speaker 4: All right. I was reading the book about the Manson
Speaker 4: killings called Chaos by Tom O'Neill, and he was on
Speaker 4: my shirt list of people to invite as a guest
Speaker 4: whenever I filled in again as host, if that ever
Speaker 4: happens again. I'd always been interested in that stuff. And
Speaker 4: before I moved to La I was visiting and a
Speaker 4: friend drove me to where the house on Clo was
Speaker 4: where Sharon Tate and the others were murdered, just because
Speaker 4: he knew I'd like that. I wasn't finished with the
Speaker 4: Chaos book. The library yanked it from me on my
Speaker 4: iPad because it was do we're living in the future,
Speaker 4: then I see Chaos. The Manson Murders is a documentary
Speaker 4: on Netflix and directed by Errol Morris. No Less, no
Speaker 4: Brainer front of the line. Here is the trailer.
Speaker 5: It's one of the scariest true stories out there. Eight
Speaker 5: and a half month pregnant, beautiful woman getting stabbed to death.
Speaker 5: Manson was able to gain control of his followers, but
Speaker 5: he could get them to go out and kill on
Speaker 5: command without remorse. How did he learn how to brainwash
Speaker 5: those kids and turn them into monsters?
Speaker 1: These people were on LSD.
Speaker 5: Manson was preaching all the time Race wars.
Speaker 4: The murder was okay.
Speaker 1: When a story did start.
Speaker 4: To emerge, it was managed very carefully.
Speaker 5: To manage and manipulate it. I know that what we
Speaker 5: were told isn't what happened. Were these research sciences You
Speaker 5: were working secretly for the government.
Speaker 2: One of the most bi itself in CIA history.
Speaker 5: Plant of false memories and people without their awareness.
Speaker 4: My was.
Speaker 2: Manson was really into mind control and I'm underessting what
Speaker 2: I was doing. You just mentally difference.
Speaker 5: Manson became exactly what the CIA was trying to create.
Speaker 4: Well, you're suggesting your Manson was a puppet. Now, Morris
Speaker 4: won an oscar for the Fog of War back in
Speaker 4: two thousand and four, and if you haven't seen that,
Speaker 4: you're in for a treat. He's also done the Thin
Speaker 4: Blue Line. And none of this is dull homework stuff.
Speaker 4: It's totally absorbing. Morris is seventy seven now, and not
Speaker 4: only has he not lost a step, but Chaos is
Speaker 4: such an immersive documentary that it really added layers to
Speaker 4: my understanding of this Manson case. And I wish it
Speaker 4: had been twice as long. It's just ninety six minutes.
Speaker 4: You could fit like two and a half of them
Speaker 4: into one brutalist. If you're like me, you've gone to
Speaker 4: sleep plenty of time with true crime documentaries on TV
Speaker 4: because they're soothing, and the guys with the deep voices
Speaker 4: are also very soothing to listen to while they're talking
Speaker 4: about horrific stuff. But you're not dozen off during this
Speaker 4: documentary with the graphics and the editing. This like documentary
Speaker 4: adderall we know. The Tate LaBianca killings back in nineteen
Speaker 4: sixty nine were so horrifying that they more or less
Speaker 4: ended the Swinging sixties, and they had an effect similar
Speaker 4: to what I understand about the Charles Starkweather killing spree
Speaker 4: a decade before that. People were freaked out and scared.
Speaker 4: Maybe you loved Quentin Tarantinos once upon a time in
Speaker 4: Hollywood like I did, for giving us the fantasy ending
Speaker 4: we wished for a lot like the one in Inglorious Bastards.
Speaker 4: Here's a spoiler, they smoke Hitler. Chaos does a thorough
Speaker 4: and like I indicated, a hyperactive job of explaining who
Speaker 4: everyone was, where they were, how they were related to
Speaker 4: each other. The thing just barely stopped short of showing
Speaker 4: charts with red strings showing who gave each other chlamydia.
Speaker 4: It's extremely thorough. If you've read Helter Skelter, the Chaos
Speaker 4: book and documentary are a whole different ballgame in that
Speaker 4: it sort of craps all over Helter Skelter and Vincent Boliosi,
Speaker 4: the Manson prosecutor who wrote it or co wrote it
Speaker 4: or had a ghost written that was the all time
Speaker 4: best selling true crime book. I wouldn't say I knew
Speaker 4: or was friends with Buliosi, but I interviewed him around
Speaker 4: two thousand and eight for his book called The Prosecution
Speaker 4: of George W. Bush for Murder. Whatever you want to
Speaker 4: say about the guy, he had balls roughly the size
Speaker 4: of the Goodyear Blimp. In twenty twenty five, not a
Speaker 4: lot of people are going to argue that our invasion
Speaker 4: of Iraq was righteous or had anything to do with
Speaker 4: the nine to eleven attack. It's an objective, non partisan
Speaker 4: fact at this point, and if you got a problem
Speaker 4: with it, go pick an argument with a historian. Not me,
Speaker 4: but back in two thousand and eight putting out a
Speaker 4: book about prosecuting a president for lying US into a
Speaker 4: war and the American soldiers who died from that, let's
Speaker 4: just say that it took some nerve. In fact, it
Speaker 4: got him blackballed from national media. If you look at
Speaker 4: the reception section for the book on Wikipedia, that's blank.
Speaker 4: The guy who wrote the all time best selling true
Speaker 4: crime book gets shut out of national media. And I
Speaker 4: was the only person in major media at the time,
Speaker 4: at the Seattle Times, in fact, to give him some ink.
Speaker 4: And it involves sticking my own neck out a little bit.
Speaker 4: I found boog Leosi to be sharp and impressive, not
Speaker 4: just in the interview, but throughout the process that goes
Speaker 4: with that stuff, the follow ups, the fact checks. It's
Speaker 4: not like just sitting down for a tight five with
Speaker 4: Jimmy Kimmel. It's an exhaustive quality control process, and you
Speaker 4: don't really get it with a blog these days. After
Speaker 4: the interview, finally Ran Bugliosi came to the old Seattle
Speaker 4: Times Building to thank me and shake my hand in person,
Speaker 4: which was one of those solid old school marks of class.
Speaker 4: I really liked him. Now, to be clear, this isn't
Speaker 4: some rambling bragathon about somebody famous I had a connection with.
Speaker 4: I'm admitting to you how naive I was, and how
Speaker 4: this new documentary and book have caused me to rethink
Speaker 4: that whole scenario. Try to imagine how gobsmacked I was
Speaker 4: reading Tom O'Neil's Chaos and watching the Morris Dots documentary
Speaker 4: to be told that Bugliosi may have fudged some stuff
Speaker 4: to shape the Manson story how he wanted it, and
Speaker 4: the real story was likely different and larger. And what
Speaker 4: that book goes into that the documentary doesn't is Bugliosi's
Speaker 4: back and forth with O'Neil, which gets a little nuts
Speaker 4: as O'Neil comes back to him with information that doesn't
Speaker 4: add up about the Manson case and Bugliosi gets increasingly
Speaker 4: bent out of shape. Now he's not around to defend himself.
Speaker 4: He's gone, so I guess O'Neil gets the last word.
Speaker 4: But O'Neil makes a compelling case at the very least
Speaker 4: that Bugliosi was mainly interested in making himself a star
Speaker 4: and then protecting his legacy. There's lots more in the
Speaker 4: documentary that I'll point out but not completely spoil. One
Speaker 4: thing is how close Manson was to break an into
Speaker 4: the music industry and maybe becoming a star. You heard
Speaker 4: a snippet of his singing in the trailer. One of
Speaker 4: the Beach Boys was very involved with the Manson family,
Speaker 4: Dennis Wilson. He died in nineteen eighty three, so I
Speaker 4: guess O'Neil gets the last word on him too. But
Speaker 4: some of Manson's music is played in the documentary, and
Speaker 4: it almost pains me to say this. It ain't terrible,
Speaker 4: It's of its time, and this drives home the concept
Speaker 4: that things could have easily gone the other way for
Speaker 4: him and lots of others around him. Something else O'Neil
Speaker 4: gets into, which a surviving prosecutor disagrees with, is a
Speaker 4: possible connection with Manson an MK Ultra, which was essentially
Speaker 4: a CIA mind control program. How did Charlie go from
Speaker 4: being a somewhat charismatic X con loser who nobody really
Speaker 4: took seriously back in the hate Ashbury district to a
Speaker 4: cult leader who could make women and men do anything
Speaker 4: for him, including killing. Maybe it wasn't just the riz.
Speaker 4: How did Manson get so many breaks from the cops
Speaker 4: when he was on parole when they should have violated
Speaker 4: his ass several times over. I don't know how much
Speaker 4: I buy into the mk ultra angle, or even how
Speaker 4: much Morris does as a filmmaker. He strikes some new
Speaker 4: ground out himself and talks to people. It's not just
Speaker 4: the straight adaptation of the book, but this is all
Speaker 4: laid out plausibly, and I didn't feel like I was
Speaker 4: listening to the babblings of some crank telling me that say,
Speaker 4: breast milk is better than vaccines and science. This stuff
Speaker 4: has lots of resonance in the present day, not specifically Mchaeltra,
Speaker 4: but the way certain people can get their followers to
Speaker 4: become radicalized and do what you and I might consider
Speaker 4: to be the unthinkable. Based on my observation, people don't
Speaker 4: need to be coerced. Now. There's plenty of footage of
Speaker 4: Manson's family members then and later in their lives, and
Speaker 4: that stuff is chilling to me. True believers who don't
Speaker 4: blink when they talk to you when they speak, it's
Speaker 4: in this patient, serene, even condescending voice while they're saying
Speaker 4: things that are utterly deranged more than a half century ago,
Speaker 4: but relevant now. Even if you don't have cable TV.
Speaker 4: I am not a conspiracy whack job, and you don't
Speaker 4: need to one hundred percent buy into everything you watch.
Speaker 4: But this chaos documentary on Netflix is even more worth
Speaker 4: your time than a trip to buy a horse paste
Speaker 4: for your COVID MO. So it was compelling. It makes
Speaker 4: a compelling argument. Is that fair to say? Very absorbing?
Speaker 4: And O'Neil himself admitst some things where he doesn't have
Speaker 4: conclusive evidence. I think the thing raises more questions than
Speaker 4: it answers. But it's interesting stuff and it's not just
Speaker 4: it's not like that UFO show with the guy with
Speaker 4: the wild hair. What is that Ancient Aliens? Yes, ancient
Speaker 4: alien I mean some of that stuff can be fun,
Speaker 4: but I think this is serious and it's extraordinarily well crafted,
Speaker 4: well put together.
Speaker 3: In fact, I'm going to take you up on that,
Speaker 3: and I'm going to watch it this weekend on a
Speaker 3: strength of your review and recommendation.
Speaker 4: You got to tell me what you think of it.
Speaker 4: I'm really curious to see people's reactions. It doesn't have raves.
Speaker 4: The last time I looked on Rotten Tomatoes, it was
Speaker 4: somewhere down around to sixty five, and I just don't
Speaker 4: understand that.
Speaker 3: Possibly because you and I are old enough to kind
Speaker 3: of remember the evolution of the whole Manson saga. Even
Speaker 3: though it happened right around when we were born, Manson
Speaker 3: was still a resonant figure in popular culture for a
Speaker 3: long time after that.
Speaker 4: It was a major pop culture touch stone, and so
Speaker 4: was Helter Skelter Yes, and the Beatles album that Manson
Speaker 4: got that from. He was a huge Beatles fan. The
Speaker 4: whole thing is really interesting, and one of the people was,
Speaker 4: I believe Doris Day's sun interesting rabbit hole to go down.
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