August 15th to 18th, 1969.  These are of course the dates of the famous music festival known as “Woodstock”.  Billed as “an Aquarian exposition”, the music festival was held on a 600 acre farm run by Max Yasgur.  It has since been considered one of the defining counter-culture events of the 1960s, a seminal moment which distinctly stated the values of the peace and love generation – the flower children, hippies and dropouts who had protested American authority during the Vietnam War and had followed to the letter acid guru Timothy Leary’s credo “turn on, tune in and drop out”.  The musical celebration was felt by all and sundry to be an almost magical expression of the revolutionary ideology that had swept the 1960s and made it the most radical decade in C20th American history.

The Woodstock event was filmed, from multiple cameras and multiple angles, the resultant hours of footage being meticulously assembled and edited into one of the finest concert movies ever released, and one of the first films to utilize the emerging technology known as split-screen: splitting the screen into multiple images so as to convey an abundance of visual information within a given frame.  Densely packed with commentary and music, the film of Woodstock subsequently played throughout the country, referred to and quoted in the film The Omega Man where Charlton Heston (playing the last survivor of an apocalyptic plague – a role that Will Smith would remake in I am Legend) alone in a deserted city seeks refuge at a theatre playing Woodstock, a film he has seen so often that he remembers all the dialogue.  But: he sits alone in the cinema, the film of relevance only to him.

In 1973’s The Omega Man there is a note of despair in the Woodstock reference.  Heston as the last man on Earth has seen humanity destroyed.  Lost in his own messianic narcissism he watches Woodstock to remember an idealism that he knows proved short-lived: The Omega Man posited that America in the 1970s was moving so far away from the peace and love ideal of the Woodstock culture as to make that work seem dated nostalgia.  There was a note of truth to this – America in the 1970s saw the flower children replaced by the political disenchantment of the Nixon era, such scandals as Watergate and the beginning of the legitimization of hardcore pornography with the release of such as Deep Throat (which in terms of cost to profit ratio is today the most successful film ever made).

Over the years, Woodstock has come to symbolize everything good about the so-called “sexual revolution” – a Baby Boomer movie pilgrimage and a must-own counter culture DVD right up there with Easy Rider.  Yet, this crowning achievement of American counter-culture was already too late to save the flower power movement from obliteration by the forces of history and American law and order.  For, despite the positivism associated with the flower power generation as symbolized by Woodstock, just five days earlier, on August 10th on the US West Coast of California, an event not likely to be commemorated but of perhaps (sadly) equal significance to Woodstock took place.  Herein, the flower power generation effectively wrote their own epitaph and, Woodstock the next week notwithstanding, sounded the death knell for the sexual revolution. 

On August 10th, 1969 Lino LaBianca and his wife Rosemary were brutally murdered by hippie members of Charles Manson’s “family” – a disparate group of youths (mostly women) who gathered around the charismatic cult leader Manson and followed him out to California’s Death Valley where – in accordance with his drug inspired vision of an impending race war between blacks and whites – family members went on a murder spree, first murdering the LaBiancas before the next night moving onto another residence – that of pregnant actress Sharon Tate – and murdering the inhabitants.  The unrivalled butchery of these murders and the counter-culture madness surrounding Manson’s “family” would by the time the culprits were convicted some two years later effectively bring the free love era of the 1960s to an end: the flower children were not Woodstock’s peace and love optimists but Manson’s demented “garbage people”.

The gulf between the idealism of Woodstock and the savage madness of the Manson Family was too much for popular culture to reconcile.  Subsequent films that reflected on the sexual revolution – Getting Straight, Fritz the Cat – were chaotic and tumultuous movies, swept up by counter-culture ideology but tending towards sociological perspective: indeed, the movie of Woodstock would be the last to unquestioningly document the peace movement as a positive social catalyst and the sexual revolution was reconsidered a period of social upheaval which a decade later would be buried in a resurgent wave of conservatism and its associated focus on material success and traditional moral values over ideological freedom.  By the 1990s Oliver Stone was recreating the 1960s in a series of political dramas centered on the Vietnam War, rock band The Doors and the JFK assassination while director Ang Lee essayed the consequences of the sexual revolution on individual adult behavior in The Ice Storm.

Even counter-culture film history changed after the Manson murders.  Victim Sharon Tate was at the time married to director Roman Polanski who was absent the night of the murders, though his friend was there.  The effect on Polanski was devastating and his subsequent film, a version of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, was considered one of the bloodiest of films ever made, the brutality interpreted as Polanski’s reaction to the murder of his pregnant lover.  But Polanski had a weakness for young girls and would soon flee the USA for Paris to avoid prosecution on charges of statutory rape.  Meanwhile, countless exploitation directors seized on the idea of murderous flower-children and a number of Manson-inspired cult-killer movies proliferated, amongst them a movie made in South America called Slaughter, which would soon galvanize the burgeoning feminist movement.

Slaughter was made cheaply by husband and wife duo Michael and Roberta Findlay and delivered to distributor Alan Shackleton who considered it so inept as to be un-releasable.  Ever the entrepreneur, and moved by the levels of butchery in the epidemic of crime soaring through America since the Manson Family murders, Shackleton commissioned a tacked-on ending to be filmed in which a girl is eviscerated in front of the camera.  Cheap, tawdry and inept (the eviscerated girl can be seen laughing) it was re-titled Snuff and released in New York.  The film’s sense of a sex murder filmed for pleasure outraged feminists who soon picketed Snuff, considering it the epitome of all that was wrong with American morality and dismissing it as “pornography”, the objectifying debasement of women.

Ironically, Snuff would have far more of an influence than Woodstock.  While the boomers clung to their idealized image of themselves, the flower children as represented by Manson and his Family of killers soon came to dominate the public perception of radical counter-culture ideology.  The anti-authoritarian streak of defiance that led to student riots in protest of the Vietnam War was replaced by a palpable desire for increased law and order as the 1970s erupted into an unprecedented wave of urban violence – assassins (from Sirhan Sirhan to Mark David Chapman, murderers of Robert Kennedy and John Lennon respectively), sidewalk snipers and serial killers whose victims numbered in the dozens proliferated in the years after Woodstock. 

And Hollywood took note: by 1971 there was a new hero, one who could keep the murderous hippies in line – crazed hippie Scorpio randomly killed strangers in defiance of authority, justice finally in the hands not of the flower children and their Woodstock-ian ideology but of a ruthless cop, Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry.  As Woodstock faded into nostalgia, Manson movies continued to be made: underground documentaries like Charles Manson Superstar sought to immortalize him as a cult hero while Manson Family Movies sought to explore the popular urban myth that Manson had made snuff films of his own using stolen film equipment, films he had buried somewhere in Death Valley.  The curious cult of celebrity in the USA ironically turned to Manson instead of Woodstock and despite occasions like the recent Woodstock anniversary, it is the socio-criminological consequences of the Manson Family Murders which arguably impacted more on American mores: except of course, in Baby Boomed ideology.    ###