Zeroville

It is an August afternoon in 1969. A hippie "family" led by Charles Manson commits five savage murders in the canyons above L.S. The same day, a young, ex-communicated theology student walks Hollywood Boulevard, having just arrived in town with the images of Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift tattooed on his shaved head. At once childlike and violent, Vikar is not a cineaste but cineautistic, sleeping in the Roosevelt Hotel where he is haunted by the ghost of D.W. Griffith. He has stepped into the vortex of a culture in upheaval: drugs that frighten him, a sexuality that consumes him, a music he doesn't understand. He's come to Hollywood to pursue his obsession with film, only to find a Hollywood that's as indifferent to film as it is to Vikar.