By Randi Altman

Most people know the story of Charles Manson, his loyal followers and the gruesome Tate-LaBianca murders they committed on his behalf. There have been countless news pieces, books and movies featuring the story of this oddly charismatic psychopath, including last year’s Quentin Tarantino film, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, which alluded to Manson but gave audiences a much happier ending than what really happened.

Lesley Chilcott

Lesley Chilcott was determined to offer a different perspective in Helter Skelter: An American Myth. When asked how she made the six-part Epix docuseries different from what’s been tackled in the past, the showrunner/executive producer/director explained she was surprised there had never been a deep dive that told the full story of the Manson family saga.

“A lot of the footage that people have seen over the years was shot after the murders, with the family members that had not been arrested, so while it gave some context, it was very incomplete,” she explains. “My thinking was we could do an anthropological dig into the era. I wanted to help explain the unexplainable. I also wanted to peel away the lore. Manson is given way too much credit as a captivating criminal mastermind who had a big plan, and that couldn’t be further from the truth.”

The series, the brainchild of EP Eli Frankel and his business partner Elizabeth Davies, is captivating, disturbing and addicting. It features news clips, stills (including of Manson as a child) as well as some original photography-type re-enactments. Additional EPs include Greg Berlanti, Sarah Schechter and Erika Kennair.

We reached out to Chilcott — whose credits include An Inconvenient Truth (climate change), Waiting for Superman (education disparities) and It Might Get Loud (rock guitar legends) — to find out more about her process and the series’ production and post, some of which took place during the COVID shutdown.

Photo by Everett/Shutterstock

Why was it important for you to direct and produce these, and can you talk about your process?
I think with any limited series, there are huge benefits to having the EP/showrunner and director be the same person, in terms of keeping the vision consistent. This can be especially true in the documentary form because there is no script. Additionally, when I came onto the project, we had 10 months until delivery of the first episode, which is absolutely nuts for six hours of content. There was really was no time for me to divide the whole thing out and assign other directors to specific episodes. We had to look at it like one long story, shooting and editing as we went along.

I created the look and tone of all the original photography with the talented and versatile main cinematographer, Eduardo Fierro, SVC, SDC. And I worked closely with supervising editor Steve Prestemon, whose editorial skills are seen in the first episode.

My process was to do an intensive story immersion, and we brought Steve on to start editing with archival material before I had begun shooting. Then we did a block of 15 interviews in a week of filming with DP Logan Schneider. This was so I could gather as much story from a lot of different people who were actually there at the time, either with the family or in court. This way I knew what visuals I needed to plan for around their stories.

The first interviews were all greenscreen, so we could do them in one location and maximize our shoot days. I also asked everyone I interviewed to bring personal photos and artifacts from the period so we could shoot those in-camera with a rehoused vintage Schneider 100mm macro lens on the ARRI Alexa, so it feels different from a swing and tilt applied in post.

We did it right there on set, so most people took their personal newspapers and photos and records home with them the same day. For example, juror Bill McBride had saved his original hand-written notebooks from the trial in 1970, so we filmed many of his notebook pages in-camera. Months later we repeated this process with more artifacts we had collected. In addition, we used a P+S SkaterScope, with an ARRI/Zeiss 100mm macro lens to shoot the vintage teletype machine we rented. I wanted to have a lot of things in-camera so the series would feel more handcrafted and not slick. After all, it’s a very dark story.

In the first couple of episodes, you touch on both pollution in LA and music — two things close to your heart and that you’ve made films about.
Ha, that’s true. The aim here was to put people in the visual landscape of the times: Smog was extraordinarily bad in Los Angeles at that time and left a brown haze over everything. It created these oddly beautiful red and orange sunsets, but most of the time, it was rather awful. It’s also ironic in that we’re still talking about this today. Fifty-one years later we might be a little better, but we have not gotten our act together, which is incredible to me, yet true.

Charlie’s music was a big draw for people at that time, so while we were careful never to use his music as score, we did use pieces of different songs to show specifically how some of the girls, especially the early “family” members, fell for him. He was an interesting lyricist and a so-so guitar player with a decent voice. The lyrics made him into an abstract, acid rap poet of sorts, so when you hear his out-of-meter style and his songs, it helps you to understand why some young people might fall for his story.

The outtakes from the various times Manson went into the recording studio provided us with instances of him talking casually. It was very curious to hear a side of him when he was nervous or awkward, as opposed to the interviews he gave over the years when he was always provocative.

Did you use only stock footage on establishing shots, like LA, or did you use newer footage that was made to look old, or a combination?
A combination. Our archive team found some incredible film footage of LA streets, clubs, beaches and, of course, all the news footage surrounding the case. However, we did a helicopter day in LA to get very specific areas … aerials of where Spahn Ranch used to be, long-lens shots of the family bus driving along, shots of Benedict Canyon, the courthouse downtown and more.

We used an old-school legacy camera, the Sony HDR-1500, with a beautiful Fujinon 42×13.5 lens. Our long-lens shots were about the equivalent of an 800mm. The rig is a Cineflex V14 that Group 3 Aviation has. (Interesting note: It’s the same camera that was used for Monday Night Football pre-4K.) This choice was partly budget-motivated and partly because the video grain that comes with an older HD camera like this was useful.

We had the opposite approach as you normally would: Aim for the smoggiest day possible rather than the clearest. In post we added grain and aged some of the shots to better intercut with period stock footage. With other scenes we were taking a look back at the past through someone’s memories, so it made more sense to leave that footage modern-day. It was all built with OFX tools in Blackmagic Resolve, and we used CineGrain for the grain.

In West Virginia, where Manson grew up, we shot a lot of drone footage so you could have an understanding of just how small the towns were and how the area is bifurcated by the huge Ohio River.

How difficult was it to find some of these stock shots, especially from Manson’s youth? Can you name some stock houses you worked with?
Lauren Grzybowski and Jeremiah Alverio had extremely difficult tasks, as there was so much archive to track down and get permissions for. And some of the footage and stills from the ‘60s didn’t have clear paper trails.

Jeremy discovered that NBC had several boxes of film from the Tate-LaBianca trial that had never been transferred. They were still transferring some of that film for us when the pandemic hit and things shut down. It was beautifully preserved, and we were able to use a good bit of it in Episodes 5 and 6.

We also used a lot of foreign sources of footage (such as France’s Ina Mediapro) that had stuff that had not been widely seen or not seen at all. A lot of our important period local news footage came from the UCLA Film & Television Archive, but we literally have hundreds of sources. AP, Kino, Huntley, Getty, ITV, Veritone, Pathe, CieloDrive.com and the list goes on and on.

We licensed from films of the period as well many stills and artifacts from private collections. Reporter Sandi Gibbons has saved all of her teletypes from the reporting on the trial. Wendy Horowitz from the Los Angeles Public Library, who manages the old Herald-Examiner photo collection, found contact sheets that had not been uploaded online, so were able to use several of those photos as well.

You also used stills (like the Spahn Ranch), not just moving imagery. Any challenges there?
The Spahn Ranch burned down during the Manson trial, so our production team found a ranch that looked similar, and our art department brought in and made key pieces of set dressing and props that were exactly like what we found in historical still photos.

Some of the folks I interviewed, like courtroom sketch artist Bill Robles, had actually been out to Spahn during the trial and shot some Polaroids that I had never seen.

Another example is David Dalton — a photographer/reporter for Rolling Stone who, along with David Felton, wrote the first in-depth piece on Manson and the family in 1970. He had a trove of photos he had taken when he stayed at the ranch after the murders. He also had a great cache of photos he had shot of the Beach Boys. So we mixed these in with the more iconic shots of Spahn and the family that we’ve seen throughout the years. At least once in each episode, we use a historical still and match-cut it to the same place as it is today. It’s a really nice device to allow us to travel back and forth in time.

Charles Manson at Dennis Wilson’s house

Was cleaning up some of the older audio a challenge for your audio post team?
Indeed it was! There was a lot of cleanup. We did a lot of layering of voices in parts — some of it was outtakes from when Manson recorded his music, and others were news clips with loud ambience — so that all had to be cleaned up. There is a wonderful writer named Steve Oney who did an oral history of the Manson story, and he had saved his mini-cassette tapes from those interviews. They were recorded at different speeds and didn’t age well, so they needed a lot of help from Wild Woods Picture and Sound.

We also had static-filled radio reports and old public domain police recordings that all needed work. Our re-recording mixer, David Ball, addressed all our technical issues and SFX needs. He used Avid Pro Tools for the mix and primarily iZotope software for the cleanup. He used Dialogue Isolate as a starting point to remove ambient noise and then fine-tuned from there with quite a few different tools. EQ Match was great to help get two mismatched sources of the same person to sound like the same source. De-clip, De-crackle, and De-click helped remove any distortion and mic noise throughout. Spectral Repair was great for removing hits and unwanted background noises, like chair movement. De-reverb was a huge help to tone down a couple of the interviews that sounded a little too roomy.

What did you shoot the new interviews on? Same camera as the re-enactments?
We shot the interviews on ARRI’s Amira and Alexa Mini, and we used both cameras for what I call original photography, since they were not typical re-enactments. Most of the Steadicam work was done with the Mini and shot by William Walsh.

Eduardo Fierro did the vast majority of shooting. He was often shooting handheld while Walsh was shooting Steadicam, and we had a sunset timelapse happening simultaneously. We used a variety of lenses — the K35 zoom for the interviews and Zeiss Super Speeds for the rest. As I mentioned above, Logan Schneider did the early interviews and excellent macro photography work. We also rented all our cameras from Logan’s camera house, 20/20 Camera.

Drone shots were via Trevor Bryson at Glide Aerials. He shot LA, Independence and Death Valley. We also did drone work in West Virginia with Angelo Re. I favor the DJI Inspire 2 for this kind of work.

How involved do you get in the post, and how long was the post process?
Post is where great documentaries are created. I had four incredible editors: Steve Prestemon, Francy Kachler, Dan Swietlik and Banner Gwin. Everyone ends up working on bits of other editors’ episodes, and sometimes a sequence one editor would do would get “stolen” for another episode, and everyone had a great attitude about it.

I’ve worked with both Steve and Dan many times, so I really wanted them on my team, and I knew I needed their talents if this project was to be completed in the crazy timeframe we had, which before COVID was six episodes from start to finish in 10 months.

Dan explores ideas and direction thoroughly before sharing, and when you see it, you are wowed. It’s storytelling at its best, with all the nuance and details in there. And Steve is able to hold two different ideas in his head and then weave them together in the way that tells the story the most truthfully while allowing the layers to unfold. His inner sense of pacing is first-rate.

Francy cut the darkest episode, Episode 4, and brilliantly pivoted from the best of the ‘60s to the worst — from ideal days at Spahn Ranch to some of the most horrific murders ever. We both wanted to show how awful the murders were while doing it as respectfully as possible. Francy cut this scene over and over again — which wasn’t easy, as it’s very dark material — before we settled on what was our very first idea … doing it in a way that is minimal and sensitive without lessening how brutal the murders were.

Banner had a huge challenge with the episode about Manson’s past before starting “the family.” Manson’s childhood had not been previously well-documented, so Banner was editing while I was still shooting and learning new information every day. He is great at seamlessly switching from light to dark and brings an incredible sense of style to everything he does. He spearheaded the last episode, which ends with the trial verdict. He had to wrap up everything we’d been talking about for over five hours. This episode easily could have been two.

Lesley Chilcott and Trevor Bryson looking at drone footage.

Some of the richest creative times on this series were when we would get together and the editors would watch each other’s episodes. We could never figure out properly how four editors could do six episodes in the 10 months allotted on a calendar, so we just gave up and went for it with a partial plan, and fortunately it all worked out. Ultimately the schedule was extended two months due to COVID-19, but then that also really slowed things down for us.

What did they edit on? All that different footage from different sources must have been interesting to work with?
Avid Media Composer and graphics in Adobe After Effects. Our biggest challenge was figuring out at what point in the pipeline we converted our material, both what we shot and the tremendous amount of archive spread over six hours. And you take a risk editing with low-res archive material and hoping it comes in higher quality when you order the masters.

Some of the court film footage was beautiful in the end, but other clips hadn’t been well-preserved or were low-quality to begin with. This was one of the reasons I chose to have stylistic consistencies in each episode, so you wouldn’t be distracted from the story by the changing archival.

Helter Skelter Episode 106

We spent a lot of time checking to make sure the archive was cut in the right temporal order. AP Crystal Thompson was relentless with fact checking, and story producers Phil Laaveg and Colin Devenish were always on this, as were the editors. This was especially complicated during the Tate-LaBianca trial, with all the changing looks and hair styles, X’s carved into foreheads.

What about the color grading? What kind of look/feel were you looking for? 
We did four to five days of color per episode, first in person, then remote due to COVID, then in person again. We did some early tests and developed three looks, which each stood for different types of footage that colorist Leandro Marini and I labeled historical dream, modern anamorphic and Ektachrome blue. I wanted a richness to the footage so you would feel immersed in the story visually as well as sonically and lock into that time period, right down to the smog that was so prevalent in LA in 1969. So all the color choices were story-based and thematic.

The Manson story, while fascinating, has spun a lot of myths, so I colored some of the footage we shot on the Amira to match archival, so you don’t always know what is newly created and actual archive.

As for challenges, the wildly different quality of archival footage — some that you could see had been transferred several times — was complicated, and Leandro and his team at Imperial Creative tried many different methods on each individual piece of archive to achieve the best results.

What about the show’s graphics?
Bigstar did the main titles, graphics/animation and designed the backgrounds for the interviews that were shot greenscreen. Assistant editor Travis Smith-Evans handled a number of graphics in house as well.

Was some of the post being done during the shutdown?
We had only delivered one episode, so five of six episodes were still being worked on when we shut down. At first, we all looked at it as a special challenge that might be oddly fun … although our assistant editors certainly did not enjoy making multiple 28TB copies of the show.

It got complicated really fast, especially when trying to get master material from stock houses that were officially closed or open with reduced hours. Leandro is a technical genius. He quickly converted the Sprinter van he uses on set for color to a remote workstation, and we did about half of the color remotely using Sohonet’s ClearView. Color grading was done in Blackmagic Resolve.

In the beginning the van was in my driveway, but then Leandro got it working remotely, and we were at our respective homes. I had the same large Sony monitor at my house with the same settings as he had, and while it’s slower to work this way remotely, it worked for a while. It was a lifeline that ultimately allowed us to stay to our revised schedule and deliver.

Eventually there began to be issues with uploading and downloading and tracking changes, especially with needing to overcut stock footage every time it arrived, always in bits and bobs. Ultimately you can’t sign off on something remotely, and we ended up back at Imperial, wearing masks and sitting more than 8 feet apart in the theater and being very careful. This added two months to the schedule, but fortunately our air dates had also been pushed. Epix and Warner Horizon were amazing during the process.

Finally, can you talk about the score?
Composer Christophe Beck did the dark and quirky title theme and the first episode, so he set the tone for the whole series. It was important to me to capture these two worlds of the late ‘60s while using minimal instrumentation so we weren’t leading the audience.

Composer Leo Birenberg did Episode 2 through Episode 6, taking this wonderful dark/light balance and running with it. We have so many characters throughout the series, and having several themes repeat in various iterations helps to orient you. I have to admit that one of my favorite parts of this process during lockdown was doing virtual scoring sessions through Slack or Zoom, where we could each mute the other and watch a few minutes at a time and then come back and collaborate on what was needed for that scene. I thought it would hinder us creatively or make it a more intellectual approach rather than emotional, but it was quite freeing.

Randi Altman is the founder and editor-in-chief of postPerspective. She has been covering production and post production for more than 20 years.