The movie is credited as an adaptation of Tom O’Neill’s book Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties, a sprawling, occasionally off-the-rails investigation that eventually ties Manson to the U.

Tom O'Neill was commissioned by Hollywood-centric film magazine Premiere to investigate exactly what had - by then - happened a mere 30 years earlier, when a small-time criminal, Charles Manson, was unveiled as the mastermind behind one of the most brutal and defining crimes of the 20th century.