Zeroville

On the same August day in 1969 that a crazed hippie “family”led by Charles Manson commits five savage murders in the canyons above LosAngeles, a young ex-communicated seminarian arrives with images of ElizabethTaylor and Montgomery Clift—“the two most beautiful people in the history ofthe movies”—tattooed on his head. At once childlike and violent, Vikar is not acineaste but “cineautistic,” sleeping at night in the Roosevelt Hotelwhere he’s haunted by the ghost of D. W. Griffith. Vikar has stepped into thevortex of a culture in upheaval: strange drugs that frighten him, a strangesexuality that consumes him, a strange music he doesn’t understand. Over thecourse of the seventies and into the eighties, he pursues his obsession withfilm from one screening to the next and through a series of cinema-besottedconversations and encounters with starlets, burglars, guerrillas, escorts,teenage punks, and veteran film editors, only to discover a secret whose clueslie in every film ever made.