Joseph McBride

IF YOU DON'T WANT KNOW THE ENDING OF "ONCE UPON A TIME . . . IN HOLLYWOOD," SKIP THIS, but the film is out there in public, and I don't believe in companies coercing the media into not reporting on films: A friend of mine who saw the Tarantino movie at Cannes filled me in (without attribution) on what happens in the last part. (The plot synopsis on Wikipedia is wrong about the ending, BTW.) In the actual film, Tex Watson and the Manson girls drive to the Tate house to do their killings. But they are confronted by the somewhat inebriated Rick (Leonardo DiCaprio) for idling in front of his nearby house in their noisy old car. So the revved-up intruders turn on Rick by invading his home instead. One of the girls inexplicably drives away in the meantime. Cliff (Brad Pitt) is at Rick's (Rick is a struggling TV actor, and Cliff is his pal and stunt double), and when Tex Watson bursts in with his gun, saying, "I'm the devil and I'm here to do the devil's work," Cliff scoffs at him and has his pit bull attack Tex with the expected results, including gnawing at his balls. Cliff meanwhile bloodily pummels Patricia Krenwinkel and Susan Atkins. Krenwinkel appears fatally wounded. Atkins desperately winds up in Rick's swimming pool brandishing Tex's gun and screaming maniacally. Rick brawls with her and then burns her to death with a flame-thrower he handily keeps in his garage. In the process Cliff gets a non-fatal wound from a knife in the hip. The police come upon the bloody scene. Cliff, still cool despite it all, is hauled off to a hospital. Eventually Jay Sebring wanders over from the Tate house to find out what happened. Rick says some crazy hippies tried to deliver some bad xxxx [s-word censored here] but had some bad xxxx [s-word censored here] happen to them. Sharon Tate, speaking from her house on the intercom, is reassured that Rick is all right and asks him to come sip some wine with her and Jay and Abigail Folger and Wojciech Frykowski. Rick's fading career seems to be getting a career boost from his new exploits and connections, and we get the sense he might go on to become a star as Burt Reynolds did when he raised himself out of routine TV Westerns (Reynolds was supposed to play George Spahn in this Tarantino movie before he died and was replaced by Bruce Dern). I have no idea how all this wish-fulfillment historical revisionism will play out when we see the movie, which apparently has a post-modern ironic tone throughout. Of course, the ending is reminiscent of the fantasy of the Allied hit squad killing Hitler in INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS, which seemed glib and irresponsible to me, and the gang of Allied avengers, including Jews, acting like fascists throughout the film was an uncomfortable irony, to say the least. Our fantasies tell us a lot about our collective yearnings and atavistic desires for brutal revenge. But I always reserve judgment until I see a film, so I await ONCE UPON A TIME . . . IN HOLLYWOOD with interest. Tarantino's films, even when they are wrongheaded, are compellingly made (he's a terrific dialogue writer, among other things) and sometimes genuinely gripping. But his flirtations with actual history are problematic. This report from Cannes proves that there is a trope out there in three new movies for the 50th anniversary of trying to rewrite the story of the Tate/LaBianca murders to make them seem less troubling to our contemporary consciousness. Having seen the other two recently released movies (the very uneven CHARLIE SAYS and the abominable THE HAUNTING OF SHARON TATE), I don't think that is a good trend, because we're in a time of even deeper than usual denial of history in this land Gore Vidal liked to call "The United States of Amnesia."

David, I didn't write what you apparently quote me as saying above, so there must be some confusion. Of course I have read the brilliant Mae Brussell analysis, which makes more sense to me than the phony official story or other theories. There is still much we don't know about the case and the role of Tex Watson in it. I look forward to Tom O'Neil's book. By the way, CHARLIE SAYS can be watched via streaming on Amazon Prime, although it just opened briefly in theaters.

Thanks for your good work and John's, Hargrove. About Mentzel, all I know is what I wrote in INTO THE NIGHTMARE and my followup article on Jim DiEugenio's website. There's also a photo of Mentzel standing as an honor guard in front of Tippit's casket.

CHARLIE SAYS is not negigible, but something of a misguided mess with some good acting here and there and some feeling for the pervastive insanity of the period and some sense of trying to understand the psychology of the girls. It unfortunately doesn't succeed in doing that very well due to uneven casting, a lack of focus in the screenplay, and an overreliance on conventional perspectives. But next to THE HAUNTING OF SHARON TATE, CHARLIE SAYS seems like a work of Carl Theodor Dreyer. Now let's see what Tarantino makes of it.

No, I haven't read that. I will. Atkins always struck me as the most evil of the girls. I also just watched another new movie on the subject, THE HAUNTING OF SHARON TATE, an absolutely dreadful piece of exploitation trash. Imagine the worst possible kind of movie on the subject, and this is it, abominably written and acted and with the Tate murders turned into a gorefest for people who get off on blood and mayhem. The movie's stupid gimmick is that Tate has premonitions of the slaughter for about a year, which amps up the constantly hokey "eerie" nature of every shot in this slackly directed film but actually deprives the movie of genuine dramatic shock. The murders are shown in detail twice, once as they sort of happened (though the directing is incoherent), and then at the end as a fantasy of Tate and her friends fighting back and killing the intruders. So this is the way Manson/Tate movies are going this year of the 50th anniversary -- fantasy "happy endings." I wonder if the people who made these two low-budgeters got wind of what Tarantino might do (did he?) and decided to preempt him. In any case, it's a sad trend that exemplifies what T. S. Eliot wrote: "Humankind cannot bear very much reality."

I have no idea what you are talking about, sorry.

I never could reach him.

As I write in INTO THE NIGHTMARE, "Although I could not reach the generally close-mouthed Murray Jackson (who died in 2012) for an interview, I did manage to talk with his mother, Lura Fern Jackson, who volunteered a surprising fact. She said that on November 22, her son was on only his fourth day on duty as a police dispatcher (Mary Ferrell had earlier told the HSCA that Jackson was in his second day in that position). Was Jackson, a former partner of Tippit, put into the critical role as dispatcher, wittingly or not, as part of a plot to manipulate an unsuspecting Tippit, who might trust Jackson more readily than he would another dispatcher? Or was Tippit himself more witting and more consciously part of a conspiracy than the Warren Commission would have us believe? . . ."

CHARLIE SAYS, a new film on the Manson case that isn't getting much attention, blames the murders almost entirely on Manson's anger at Terry Melcher for not letting him record an album. This is absurdly reductive and is contradicted in the film itself by Manson learning before the murders that Melcher no longer lives at the house, which he visits to find Sharon Tate there with Jay Sebring (Manson actually did visit the house and had a brief interaction with Tate). That film has some virtues (mostly involving what Orson Welles told me interested him about the case, "how this man got control of the minds of all those girls") but mostly hews to the simplistic Vincent Bugliosi theory of the case (which is thoroughly demolished by Jim DiEugenio in PARKLAND/and the revised version, THE JFK ASSASSINATION). The role of Tex Watson in the murders is portrayed incoherently in CHARLIE SAYS; he disappears for long stretches, comes back for no apparent reason, and becomes seemingly the most savage of the gang, with the girls' savagery somewhat minimized. Susan Atkins was arguably the most psychotic and savage of the girls, and the least repentant (unlike Krenwinkel and Van Houten), but Atkins is only vaguely portrayed, and the film seems to buy her specious claim to have found Jesus afterward (as Watson also claimed, though the film doesn't show that). Mae Brussell thought Watson was the prime actor in the murders and Manson the patsy to discredit the antiwar movement and the hippie movement (http://www.maebrussell.com/.... Of course, Watson's Army Intelligence connections are not mentioned in CHARLIE SAYS. There was more than meets the eye in this story. . . . Since Quentin Tarantino -- taking a page from the Harvey Weinstein CRYING GAME playbook -- has managed to intimidate the press into basically not reviewing the last 34 minutes of his film ONCE UPON A TIME . . . IN HOLLYWOOD in which the plot strands come together, I don't know if Sharon Tate lives or dies in that film, but some reports from Cannes seem to suggest that he contrives a fantasy happy ending for her to make the audience feel good. I can report that CHARLIE SAYS does something like that with its tragic primary character, Leslie Van Houten. Sharon doesn't live, but Van Houten earlier is given a chance to escape the Spahn Ranch in a key scene but chooses not to leave and then somewhat without motivation volunteers to go along and help slaughter the LaBiancas. But at the end of the film, writer Guinevere Turner and director Mary Harron tack on a fantasy ending in which the scene is replayed, and Van Houten chooses to leave Charlie and not participate. This reminds me of William Dean Howells's observation to Edith Wharton, "What the American public always wants is a tragedy with a happy ending."

Evan, many directors create myths around themselves. DeMille was a reactionary who was a leader in blacklisting and even had a private intelligence service on others in the industry. So I don't think much of him as a human being, or as a director for that matter, although he did some striking work in the silent period, such as THE CHEAT.

I now have a website collecting information, reviews, interviews, photos, documents, etc., for my new book, FRANKLY: UNMASKING FRANK CAPRA: franklycapra.com.

Even Bernstein & Woodward put a footnote into ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN that they wondered if the Wallace shooting was not the ultimate dirty trick by the Nixon administration.

I mentioned all I learned about the shooting incident. I hope you and others can dig up more.

During my 1988 Bush research I was told about a possible assassination attempt against Poppy Bush shortly after the inauguration in January 1981. He was leaving a home in Georgetown (said to be a woman's home) when there was gunfire on the street -- so the story went. It was unknown whether he walked into some kind of random street shooting or if it was targeted at him. All I could find out about it was (1) the Washington Post mentioned it a couple of months later carefully buried in a feature on unconfirmed "rumors"; and (2) Kitty Kelley mentioned the incident in one of her books as the subject of merriment among Reagan officials who learned about it at a restaurant that night. Perhaps this event had something to do with the power struggle within the new Reagan administration between Reagan and Bush, which I learned was resolved after the attempted assassination of Reagan by Reagan ceding much of his executive power secretly to Bush. The Bush family connections with the assassination attempt against Reagan are well-known, if still somewhat mysterious; even Newsweek referred to them the week after the shooting of the president in a sidebar on oddities surrounding the event. These were some of the many loose ends I uncovered in my research during the 1988 presidential campaign. Many things I was told about Bush and the Bush Crime Family were verified later by me or others, but some things I was told I could not document sufficiently.

The 11/22/63 Belmont memo Doug Horne wrote about, and I wrote about in INTO THE NIGHTMARE, is a "smoking gun" document that disproves the Warren Report, since that bullet "lodged behind the President'e ear" was never entered into evidence. It is the shot that struck Kennedy in the right temple from the front and blew the brains out the back of his head. Various witnesses (including William Newman, Emmett J. Hudson, George Hickey, Sam Kinney, and Bobby W. Hargis) reported seeing Kennedy being struck in the right side of his head. Hurchel Jacks corroborated this after seeing Kennedy lying in the limousine, and Assistant White House Press Secretary Malcolm Kilduff pointed to that area in his filmed press conference. I found this memo in 1985 and wrote an article about it then but couldn't get it published at the time. The memo also helps prove David Lifton's body alteration theory, but he missed it in his research for BEST EVIDENCE.

Hinckley did not shoot Reagan. The shot that hit Reagan was fired from above. It was on a downward trajectory and hit the side of the car, flattened itself, and richocheted into his left underarm, lodging in his chest. Hinckley was firing diversionary shots, like Sirhan. I remember finding it odd that the government never issued a report on the shooting. Some details did not emerge until months later, in a book on James Brady. Judy Woodruff, then a network radio reporter, was among those at the scene of the gunfire who said a shot came from above, but in her autobiography she changed her story to fit the official story, which is why she gets the big bucks today. As Vonnegut used to put it, "So it goes." In an official White House color photograph taken during the shooting (which is available online), you can see a man in the balcony at top right with his arm protruding in what looks like a firing position.

Penn Jones once told me to get into the manhole to check out the theory. I took a photo from that angle. It was theoretically possible, but the window of opportunity was so short and uncertain it seemed unlikely. The storm drain at the end of the picket fence where it adjoins the railroad overcrossing, on the other hand, looked like a much easier and more certain shooting location for a trained sniper.

Another key Curry quote is from November 23, 1963, his response on live TV to a question about the lack of clear fingerprints on the rifle. He said, "I don't know whether it would be enough to convict him or not. If we can put his prints on the rifle, that would certainly connect him with the rifle." The FBI evidently put his prints on the rifle the next day, after his death, in the Miller Funeral Home in Fort Worth.

https://midnightwriternews.com/mwn-episode-117-joseph-mcbride-on-unmasking-frank-capra-and-unearthing-george-bush/ Here is a new podcast S. T. Patrick did with me for The Midnight Writer News Show on how I unmasked Frank Capra . . . and Poppy Bush.

Thanks, Jeff, glad you like it. David did a great job. I appreciate your comments too on my work on John Ford. It was great working with you on two videos in Len Osanic's 50 REASONS . . . FOR 50 YEARS series, the ones on the Tippit murder and on "Political Truth: The Media and the Assassination." You did superb editing and videography, and I appreciated your deep knowledge of the field.

One of the critics I most admire, David Walsh of the World Socialist Web Site, did massive preparation for his thoughtful and gratifying April 24 review of my 2018 book HOW DID LUBITSCH DO IT? and his accompanying interview with me about that book and my new book, FRANKLY: UNMASKING FRANK CAPRA. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/04/24/lubi-a24.html https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/04/24/inte-a24.html

The 1946 Orwell essay "Politics and the English Language" is essential reading to understand today's world, as is NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR. http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit/

Thanks, Rob. Yes, we need to take back that term "fake news." As Orwell helped teach us, political language can be perilous. It was Poppy Bush who popularized the term "political correctness" -- he used it as his broad-bush slur on liberals, and then liberals unthinkingly took it up as their credo, and it spiraled out of control into what can at its worst be a narrow-minded and often puritanical censoriousness. We all know how the CIA spread the term "conspiracy theory" as a slur, and how eagerly the media took that up. This has caused endless problems, including the recent obsession over Trump and his cronies engaging in "collusion" -- forgetting or not knowing that collusion is not a crime, what people should have been focused instead on is criminal conspiracy. Collusion can be offensive and damaging to the body politic and a cause for impeachment and other political decisions. But the MSM and many people are terrified of the word "conspiracy," so they fixated on collusion rather than conspiracy, and even when Mueller clarified the difference in his report, it caused consternation among some people who still don't understand what the laws are or how we should deal with evidence of political conspiracy and obstruction of justice.

Thanks for your kind words, Robert. I also like that Gary Wills book on John Wayne. I did an enjoyable and informative radio interview today with Doug Holm and Matthew Clark of KBOO-FM (Portand, Oregon), dealing with my new book, FRANKLY: UNMASKING FRANK CAPRA, on my legal and other problems getting my 1992 Frank Capra biography, FRANK CAPRA: THE CATASTROPHE OF SUCCESS, published. We also discuss how I dealt with the enigmatic personality of John Ford in two books, a critical study (written with Michael Wilmington) and a biography. My part of this show begins 45 minutes from the end and concludes seven minutes before the end. https://www.kboo.fm/media/71697-interview-film-historian-joseph-mcbride-frank-capra?fbclid=IwAR39Ea0RfEwUxQU8GOovo9w5CevEPYajtpZROHSfHkz7B0pYcJwwjJJpOxw

I once met a woman in DC who was working in the Democratic National Committee headquarters the Watergate at the time of the burglaries. I asked her why she thought they really happened. She looked alarmed and was struck speechless. I wonder if she knew about the call-girl ring.