Director Billie Mintz came into his newest documentary project, Making Manson, with a colossal task ahead of him: finding a new way to frame the story of infamous American cult leader Charles Manson.
Since the media frenzy that followed the Tate-LaBianca murders in the late 1960s and early 70s, Hollywood creatives have periodically revisited the crime, often with diminishing results. Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood stands out as a rarity within this strange subgenre; often, audiences are subjected to the crime’s retelling in the form of low-budget B-horror films, such as The Haunting of Sharon Tate.
The question “What else is there left to say about this guy?” loomed over the docuseries and weighed on Mintz’s mind. He found his answer in over 100 hours of recorded conversations that Manson had with prison pen pal John Michael Jones during the last two decades of his life, prior to his passing in 2017. Over the course of …