{"id":25993,"date":"2025-03-06T18:30:00","date_gmt":"2025-03-07T02:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/?p=25993"},"modified":"2025-03-07T17:38:43","modified_gmt":"2025-03-08T01:38:43","slug":"were-taking-errol-morris-for-granted","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/were-taking-errol-morris-for-granted\/","title":{"rendered":"We’re Taking Errol Morris For Granted"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A couple of weeks back, Slate<\/em> culture writer Sam Adams posted this conundrum on Blusky<\/a>: <\/p>\n\n\n\n

an Oscar-winning filmmaker, a living master of the medium, has a new movie on Netflix in 15 days. There\u2019s nothing on their press site, and I haven\u2019t received a single email. I would wager few people know it even exists. Meanwhile, I have screeners for TV shows that drop in late April. Explain.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Oscar-winning filmmaker he was referencing is the documentary innovator Errol Morris, who won his Oscar for the probing policy examination The Fog of War<\/em><\/a>, made Roger Ebert\u2019s all-time ten best list<\/a> with Gates of Heaven<\/em>, and basically invented the modern true-crime documentary <\/em>(and got an innocent man off Death Row) with The Thin Blue Line<\/em>. His new movie on Netflix is CHAOS: The Manson Murders<\/em><\/strong><\/a>, an adaptation\/expansion\/meditation on Tom O\u2019Neill\u2019s riveting and baffling 2019 book CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The day after Adams\u2019s post, Netflix finally put something up on their website<\/a> about the movie, and released a brief but tantalizing trailer<\/a>. And a great deal of what\u2019s happening here is an ongoing concern for those of us paid to pay attention to Netflix \u2014 the feeling that they spend vast amounts of money to produce or acquire work by important filmmakers, only to bury them with a minimal amount of publicity and an outsized amount of trust in their algorithm. And on top of that, it\u2019s a Netflix true crime documentary, and on top of that, <\/em>it\u2019s a Netflix true crime documentary about a serial killer. They don\u2019t really have to go looking for an audience, or advertise that one of them happens to have a classy pedigree (just ask Joe Berlinger, the acclaimed co-director of Brother\u2019s Keeper<\/em> and Paradise Lost<\/em> who has, per his IMDb bio<\/a>, \u201c16 Netflix productions under his belt\u201d).  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the bare-minimum release of CHAOS<\/em> also speaks to something depressing in the current climate of non-fiction cinema. Once upon a time, and not that long ago, a new Errol Morris movie was an event<\/em>. A Brief History of Time, Fast Cheap & Out of Control, Mr. Death, Standard Operating Procedure, The Unknown Known<\/em>; these movies were big deals, released by major distributors like Sony Pictures Classics, Lionsgate, and The Weinstein Company. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And then, about a decade ago, something subtly shifted. In 2017, he made Wormwood<\/em>, which he deemed an \u201ceverything bagel\u201d movie<\/a> (it mixed all forms and techniques of his filmmaking, from traditional documentary to scripted narrative), for Netflix, where it made no more of a splash than most of their \u201ccontent.\u201d His 2018 feature American Dharma<\/em>, an extended conversation with (a sly subversion of) Steve Bannon, had difficulty finding distribution, and was shrugged off by critics for lacking the piercing payoffs of The Fog of War<\/em>. (This was not Morris\u2019s fault; Fog<\/em> subject Robert S. McNamara was capable of some degree of self-reflection and self-criticism, and Bannon simply is not.)\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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His 2020 film My Psychedelic Love Story <\/em>and its 2023 follow-up The Pigeon Tunnel<\/em> were made for Showtime and Apple TV+, respectively, and they basically disappeared there; last year\u2019s Separated, <\/em>an urgent and prescient warning of the barbaric immigration policies possible under a second Trump administration, was buried by MSNBC<\/a> until after the election, when it aired to little fanfare. (There is also last year\u2019s Tune Out the Noise<\/em>, which I have not seen, and which appears to be essentially a 90-minute commercial financed by its subject, the investment firm Dimensional Fund Advisors.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An argument can be made that the reason these films have not penetrated even arthouse cinema circles is that they\u2019re not as good as his earlier work. That take is not altogether without merit \u2014 I certainly wouldn\u2019t claim any of the late Morris output rivals Thin Blue Line<\/em> or Gates of Heaven<\/em> in terms of first-watch high quality. But there are things worth seeing in all of them: continuations of career-long thematic preoccupations, bursts of unexpected humor (often in Morris\u2019s off-camera reactions to his subjects\u2019 wilder statements), and of course, a peerless sense of style, using his distinctive visual sensibility, cockeyed archival footage choices, and hypnotic sound design to draw the viewer into even the most mundane of events.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

American Dharma <\/em>becomes, in some ways, a film about itself, in which we sense Morris\u2019s frustration to find some semblance of reflection or even humanity within Bannon\u2019s hollow crust of a human being. My Psychedelic Love Story<\/em> is a fine entry in the third, less-discussed corridor of Morris\u2019s filmography; like Tabloid<\/em> and Vernon, Florida<\/em>, it\u2019s a portrait of weirdos, of the strange company we sometimes find ourselves in during our journey through humanity, and how we react to them. The Pigeon Tunnel<\/em> is something like an extended episode of his marvelous docu-series First Person<\/em>, and as with that show, is at its best when it departs from the standard biopic beats and ponders the essential question of inscrutability. And Wormwood<\/em> is a low-key crowning achievement, both for its combination of styles and subtle shift in focus, from a true crime investigation to a portrait of decades-long obsession.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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That is, in some ways, also the ultimate subject of his new film CHAOS: The Manson Murders<\/em>. The ostensible subject is Charles Manson: when and how he committed his crimes, and the lingering questions that surround the official narrative of both his motive and means. Rehashing the details of one of the most well-documented crimes of the 20th century seems, at first blush, beneath a filmmaker like Errol Morris, but that\u2019s not what he\u2019s doing (or not all\u00a0 <\/em>that he\u2019s doing). He seems more interested in Tom O\u2019Neill, who started investigating the Manson murders for a 1999 thirtieth-anniversary magazine piece and went into a rabbit hole for thirty more years<\/em>. He blew his deadline, the publication itself went belly-up, he ran out of money, but he just kept digging, because there were all of these things in the story we were told \u2014 in prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi\u2019s bestseller Helter Skelter<\/em>, in the TV movie adaptation of that book, and in countless true crime books and documentaries much like this one \u2014 that simply did not add up<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhat does it all mean?\u201d O\u2019Neill says. \u201cI\u2019m very honest about not knowing.\u201d And so, in that way, CHAOS<\/em> becomes something like a documentary counterpart to David Fincher\u2019s Zodiac<\/em>, an exploration of obsession and enigmas and conspiracies. Morris spends a fair amount of the running time on the particulars of the murders \u2014 perhaps too much, and there\u2019s a question of necessity there (how much of this is familiar to freaks like me, and how much does the casual Netflix viewer need to be read in on). The film doesn\u2019t really come alive until Morris goes into the rabbit hole with O\u2019Neill, digging into the American intelligence apparatus\u2019s experiments with mind control and memory replacement, drawing sensible comparisons to the FBI\u2019s COINTELPRO and the CIA\u2019s CHAOS programs, and asking reasonable questions about how this dangerous man was allowed to walk free and orchestrate his crimes, even while ostensibly under the watchful eye of Californai\u2019s parole system. \u201cI would never go that far to say that it was orchestrated,\u201d O\u2019Neill insists. He simply doesn\u2019t understand how \u201cManson had leeway to do whatever he wanted for two years,\u201d and he\u2019s not the only one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Morris uses the snazzy inventory of his well-stocked toolbox to tell the story briskly: archival footage, crime scene photos (with the bodies whited-out, an especially creepy touch retained from the Helter Skelter<\/em> book), maps, graphics, newspaper clippings and documents, audio of O\u2019Neill\u2019s interviews and Morris\u2019s own, and, of course, some dramatizations. He has quite a history with dramatizations; when he used them for the first time, in The Thin Blue Line<\/em>, documentary purists were up in arms, insisting that such flourishes were antithetical to the \u201ctruth\u201d of non-fiction cinema. His use of them in that film, and of an original score by Philip Glass (another no-no at the time) were the late-20th century equivalent of Dylan going electric, and the presence of both in The Thin Blue Line<\/em> was the most common explanation for its otherwise inexplicable omission from that year\u2019s nominees for Best Documentary Film at the Oscars.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course, those touches have become cornerstones of contemporary documentary filmmaking in general, and true crime documentary in particular<\/em>. (Such conventions are pointedly pinpointed and skewered in the Sundance documentary Zodiac Killer Project<\/em>, and one of that film\u2019s unstated but undeniable conclusions is how much Morris has influenced an entire subgenre.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I asked him about making another film\/series in the Wormwood<\/em> style back in 2017, he confessed<\/a>, \u201cThe only problem is that they\u2019re very costly\u2026 I do wanna do it again. I just need to find those companies willing to pay for it. I\u2019ve developed an expensive hobby! But I kind of love doing it.\u201d And so, Errol Morris making a barely-promoted Netflix true crime documentary is not a reflection on the quality of his current work; it\u2019s a reflection on the bleak landscape of non-fiction cinema in 2025, the tattered remnants of a burst bubble in which this is the only kind of movie that even a savvy, commercially-oriented filmmaker like Morris can get paid to make. It would, indeed, be easy to relegate him to has-been status, just another cog in the Netflix true-crime doc machine. And that would be a real shame for an artist of his considerable stature and influence.

\u201cCHAOS: The Manson Murders\u201d is <\/em>streaming on Netflix<\/em><\/a> tomorrow. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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