Director John Harkema was fascinated by the story of murderous Manson groupie Leslie van Houten.
"The king of shock and outrage is shocked and outraged by my film," says Reginald Harkema with a grin.
Apparently his new film Leslie, My Name Is Evil - a courtroom satire about the infamous Manson family trial - has drawn the ire of cult director John Waters. True, Harkema's heard this third- or maybe fourth-hand, through a friend of a friend of a friend. But inspiring (rumoured) indignation from a filmmaker whose body of work might be described as an encyclopedia of aesthetic transgression is no small feat.
See, the Leslie in Harkema's new film is Leslie Van Houten, the all-American girl turned killer. Claiming that she was brainwashed by Manson's apocalyptic prophesy, the now-60-year-old has been repeatedly denied parole despite her reputation as a model prisoner. And it's a case that Waters has taken a public interest in, even penning a lengthy piece for The Huffington Post. "I am guilty, too," Waters writes. "Guilty of using the Manson murders in a jokey, smart-ass way in my earlier films without the slightest feeling for the victims' families or the lives of the brainwashed Manson killer kids who were also victims in this sad and terrible case."
Of course, in the 40 years since Charles Manson and his gaggle of mostly female disciples were tried for a series of grizzly, drug-fuelled murders in the Los Angeles area, there have been countless films and books about them. Most famous are Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry's 1974 true-crime bestseller Helter Skelter and Jim Van Bebber's 2003 cult film The Manson Family.
That a Canadian filmmaker should take up the task may seem odd, however, given that we've never romanced the sixties-era counterculture or serial killer mythology with the same zeal as our neighbours to the south. But Harkema says his film was a long time in the making. "I grew up in a Christian household with a cop father," he says. "He had two crime books around: Helter Skelter and The Family, an Ed Sanders book with a green Manson head on the cover."
Decades later, Harkema found a dog-eared copy of Helter Skelter while rummaging through books at a secondhand store, and his interest in the Manson trial - and especially the character of Van Houten - was immediately piqued. "I remember flipping through it and thinking, 'Wow, this Leslie Van Houten is hot,'" he says with a laugh. "And she's a Dutch Christian girl, basically the same age as my mom. So it became this idea of how does my mom become a hippie death-cult murderess?"
It's the focus on Van Houten (played by Kristen Hager) and a baby-faced male juror named Perry (Gregory Smith), who had a crush on her during the trial, that distinguishes Harkema's approach to the case. And Perry's fascination with Leslie seems to implicitly critique the kind of "jokey, smart-ass" flippancy of Waters' Manson imagery, adding a degree of seriousness to the otherwise playful proceedings.
Still, Leslie, My Name Is Evil is an ironic take on radical politics that might remind some viewers of Harkema's last feature. That was 2006's Monkey Warfare, a film about aging lefty hipsters scrounging for eBay-worthy knickknacks at yard sales, shot in Toronto's Parkdale neighbourhood.
Harkema trained with the kings of hip (some might say "smart-ass") Canadian film: He cut his teeth as an editor on Bruce McDonald's breakout 1996 rockumentary Hard Core Logo and Don McKellar's 1998 doomsday drama Last Night. He's also worked with Winnipeg filmmaker Guy Maddin - who Harkema says is "the only certifiable genius I've ever met in filmmaking" - on 1997's Twilight of the Ice Nymphs.
Those experiences inspired Harkema to make his first feature, 1999's A Girl Is A Girl. "I figured if these guys can do it, then I can do it," says Harkema, whose interest in film montage experiments weren't being satisfied cutting together other directors' footage. A Girl Is A Girl "kind of got lost in that black hole between VHS and DVD," Harkema says, but since then he's earned the respect of both critics and cinephiles ( Monkey Warfare won Toronto International Film Festival's Special Jury prize in 2006).
With Leslie, My Name Is Evil, Harkema has made a modern update (to a fuzzy soundtrack by Vancouver psych-rockers Pink Mountaintops) of the Manson myth, and the volatile Vietnam-era climate that nurtured it. Shocking? Outrageous? You decide. Special to The Globe and Mail