"I love movies (although I'm sorry to admit I've never seen The Exorcist) and reading about how they're made. Friedkin made two or three (or four?) great movies, a few good ones, and at least a few clinkers (at least if you believe the critics, and sometimes he does).

My only real critiques are a) I would like to have heard a bit more about his personal struggles outside of filmmaking, and b) while he goes into huge detail about not only the hits, but also about some of his smaller (budget- and box-office-wise) movies, he literally doesn't mention two pretty big projects from the eighties, DEAL OF THE CENTURY and the oddly wrought THE GUARDIAN. Literally not a single word about either. Not saying they needed their own chapters, but at least a couple of lines acknowledging their existence, however fraught.

Minor quibbles. And I recommend the audio version, as Friedkin's a fine narrator of his own story. "

"Holy crap, where do I start with this? First off, I’ll say that Tom O’Neill’s 2019 book “CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties� is so fascinating of a read that there were times that I was tempted to call off work just to finish it. I didn’t, of course, because I’ve used up all my sick time already, and I actually like my job.

There is literally too much to unpack about this book, so I won’t do it, mainly for my mental health. I could gush for pages and pages about this, which is basically what O’Neill does, for 436 pages. Just read what he wrote.

This book is basically what happens when an intelligent journalist falls into a rabbit hole of investigative journalism about the Manson murders and uncovers 30-year-old conspiracy theories that flip on its head nearly everything we think we know about the Manson murders. Through hundreds of interviews and countless uncovered documents, O’Neill has pieced together a 5000-piece jigsaw puzzle that’s unfortunately missing a couple thousand pieces, but it still shows us a pretty clear picture.

Consider this a companion piece to Vincent Bugliosi’s 1974 “Helter Skelter�, which is still considered the definitive account of the Manson murders. O’Neill’s book is, however, more than just a companion piece. He literally excoriates and destroys Bugliosi’s account by more than implying that Bugliosi (prosecuting attorney for the Manson trial) suppressed vital information, lied under oath, and created a completely horse-shit motive for the murders. That, and he was an allegedly pretty horrible human being, and O’Neill has police reports to prove it.

That’s not even close to the tip of the batshit crazy iceberg, though, as O’Neill somehow (plausibly) connects the Beach Boys; J.Edgar Hoover’s illegal COINTELPRO (counter intelligence program) of the late �60s; the CIA’s campaign to discredit and dismantle the anti-war movement via an operation called CHAOS; and rogue free-clinic doctors conducting LSD experiments on unwitting patients, especially a certain group of hippies living out in the desert led by a charismatic ex-con who may or may not have been an LA county sheriff’s or federal informant.

This book is wild. I’d almost write this book off as nutso conspiracy theory nonsense, except I’ve just lived through the past 10 years in which some asshole New York real estate douchebag who once did a cameo in “Home Alone� actually became president and contributed to the untimely death of millions of Americans because he thought injecting bleach into the bloodstream was a good idea and then fomented a violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol because of a bullshit lie that the 2020 elections were stolen and that a couple million Americans still think this idiot should run in 2024. So, yeah, the idea that Charles Manson may have been a federal informant and/or a pawn in some illegal CIA experiment trying to make hippies into violent psychopathic killing machines using LSD and methamphetamines honestly isn’t that hard to believe."