Quentin Tarantino’s last movie, 2015’s Hateful Eight, was basically an Agatha Christie mystery set in the 1870s with more blood-vomiting. Now, it looks like the director is interested in tackling something set in the more recent past: According to Hollywood Reporter, his new movie will likely focus on the 1969 Manson murders.
Tarantino is reportedly finishing up a script for the still-untitled project, which will probably go into production next summer. He has already reached out to Jennifer Lawrence and former Inglourious Basterds star Brad Pitt about roles, sources told the Reporter.
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The Los Angeles murders of actress Sharon Tate, her house guests, and the LaBianca family were orchestrated by Charles Manson in an attempt to incite a race war he called “Helter Skelter” after the Beatles song he believed foretold it. The brutal slayings by Manson’s teenage hippie followers put a cap on the already-faltering love generation and helped usher in the paranoiac hangover that was the early 70s in California.
The story is basically tailor-made for Tarantino, as if in some mind-bending time travel scenario it was he who sent coded messages to Manson hidden inside the White Album all along. The killers are all a bunch of waifish young women, their hideout is a dilapidated Western movie set called Spahn Ranch, and Tarantino can score all the bloody scenes with incongruous pop tunes if Sony or whoever owns the Beatles catalog this week gives him the OK.
The only way the thing could go even more Tarantino is if he decides to go all Basterds with it and shoot a revisionist history third act where Manson actually incites Helter Skelter and the whole world erupts in an apocalyptic race war.
An insider told the Reporter that Lawrence was not planning to play Tate, so Tarantino is probably eyeing her for Patty Krenwinkel or something. There’s no word on who Brad Pitt will end up playing, but he’ll have to go all Legends of the Fall again if he winds up as Manson.
If this movie comes to fruition, it will be Tarantino’s ninth film overall, leaving him with one left to make before he can retire.
