It's been a long time coming but it appears Anthony DiMaria's project has found a studio to distribute his film. Many people have been looking forward to something on film about Jay and his life. And it's something we will get to see later this year!
'Jay Sebring....Cutting to the Truth' chronicles the 1960s rise of the celebrity Hollywood hairstylist before he became one of the Charles Manson cult's grisly murder victims.
Shout! Studios has nabbed the North American rights to Jay Sebring....Cutting to the Truth — a documentary feature from director Anthony DiMaria, 1010 Films and Halation — about the 1960s Hollywood trendsetter Jay Sebring.
Sebring is mostly remembered as a faceless victim of the grisly Charles Manson cult murders of Roman Polanski's pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, and three others at the director's Benedict Canyon residence in August 1969. But the film by DiMaria, Sebring's nephew, chronicles the late haircutter's rise as a Hollywood celebrity who styled the hair of Frank Sinatra, Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, Marlon Brando, The Rat Pack and Elvis Presley, among other stars.
Jay Sebring....Cutting to the Truth, co-produced by Noor Ahmed, DiMaria and Johnny Bishop and executive produced by Chad Layne and Voss Boreta, will screen at film festivals this spring before a commercial release on streaming, digital and other major platforms later in 2020.
"This is an intimate, fascinating portrait of a man whose legacy is so much more than how he died. It’s how he lived that is the main subject here, and his profound contribution to an entire industry, as well as to the style of the 1960s, is expertly — and finally — celebrated,” Jordan Fields, vp acquisitions at Shout! Studios said in a statement.
Sebring was played by Emile Hirsch in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. DiMaria's documentary has interviews collected over 12 years with Dennis Hopper, Nancy Sinatra, Tarantino, Quincy Jones, Debra Tate, Manson prosecutor Stephen Kay and Vic Damone.
The distribution deal was unveiled by Shout! Factory’s founders and CEOs, Bob Emmer and Garson Foos, DiMaria and Fields, who negotiated the pact with Ahmed on behalf of the filmmakers.
Did you know that there was a lawsuit filed by Shorty's first wife, Phyllis Shea, on behalf of herself and daughter Karen?
The lawsuit called for a $1.5 M payoff.
There was a small article published in various California newspapers in March of 1971 before the trial charging Manson, Davis and Grogan with Shorty's murder had been scheduled. As it was explained to me by David, our resident attorney, a wrongful death suit needs to be filed within one year of the death. In this case Shorty was considered missing until a grand jury in December 1970 issued an indictment against Manson, Davis and Grogan for the murder of Shorty. So, the clock starts at the indictment.
Also, included were Steve Grogan's parents, named as John Doe Grogan and Mary Doe Grogan in the lawsuit, because Steve was a minor at the time of Shorty's disappearance/death. Steve turned 18 years old on July 13th 1969 and was considered a minor at that time because he was under the age of 21. Many articles about the Manson Family say that Leslie Van Houten was the youngest member of the Family to have been convicted of murder but actually Steve was the youngest.
Phyllis Shea's lawsuit claimed that Shorty had been the sole support for her and their daughter. In fact, Phyllis and Shorty separated five months after their marriage May 15, 1959. Their daughter was born November 10, 1959, a month after the separation. There is no record of a divorce for Phyllis and Shorty. There is also no evidence that Shorty ever paid Phyllis any alimony or child support although Shorty may have given Phyllis money from time to time but considering Shorty's record of earning and borrowing money even that is doubtful.
Phyllis did hook-up with a man not long after she and Shorty split up and had four children with that man before Shorty was killed. I think it's safe to say that Phyllis did not depend on Shorty for an income. But, no one can fault her for trying to get a little something for the daughter she had with Shorty.
The lawsuit went on for years but eventually petered out due to unknown reasons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbionese_Liberation_Army The United Federated Forces of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) was an American left-wing terrorist organization active between 1973 and 1975 that considered itself a vanguard army. The group committed bank robberies, two murders, and other acts of violence.
The SLA became internationally notorious for the kidnapping of heiress Patricia Hearst, abducting the 19-year-old from Berkeley, California. Interest increased when Hearst, in audiotaped messages delivered to (and broadcast by) regional news media, announced that she had joined the SLA. Hearst later said that members of the terrorist group threatened to kill her, held her in close confinement, and sexually assaulted and brainwashed her.
Similarities with the Manson Family:
--Both groups were led by charismatic ex-cons.
For the SLA it was Donald DeFreeze (aka General Field Marshall Cinque DeFreeze):
From the book Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror, and Deliverance in the City of Love, by David Talbot c. 2012 pg174
The SLA leader mesmerized his followers with his revolutionary gibberish ....
https://escholarship.org/content/qt8tw2935x/qt8tw2935x.pdf
Hearst... stated that whenever Cinque had a point of view, “no one doubted anything he said.”
General Field Marshall Cinque* DeFreeze
*(pronounced 'sin-Q')
--Both Charlie and Cinque had delusions of divinity:
https://escholarship.org/content/qt8tw2935x/qt8tw2935x.pdf
... Cinque gathered his small army together for what he considered a major announcement. While drinking his ever present plum wine, he told his troops that he had just discovered that “I am really a prophet. I am here on earth to lead the people.”
--Their philosophies were similar:
The Voices of Guns by Vin McClelland and Paul Avery pg19
This was to be a black revolution, a neo-Maoist Helter Skelter, the triumph of the nonwhite overthe bourgeois white capitalists.
Season of the Witch by David Talbot pg174
..."the revolutionary vanguard" believed that it was its duty to set an example and inspire the people to rise up*. A thick air of doom and drama hung over the youth... 'As the SLA assassins ran for their getaway car, she was heard giggling. When Steiner asked Nancy how she felt about killing a person, she said, "He's not a person, he's a pig." '
*just like Charlie would have to show the blacks how to do it.
--Manson had his well-known 'get out of jail free' card. And so did DeFreeze:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbionese_Liberation_Army
DeFreeze escaped from Soledad State Prison on March 5, 1973, by walking away while on work duty in a boiler room located outside the perimeter fence.
Soledad
Season of the Witch by David Talbot pg174
As Cinque roamed around the Bay Area, prison authorities seemed surprisingly lax about tracking him down. ...
pg193
Lake Headley, a Los Angeles private investigator hired ... to dig into Cinque's shadowy past,.. ran down Cinque's long rap sheet and the special treatment he had received from police and the courts as a multiple offender. Headley, whom Manson prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi once hailed as "the best private investigator on earth" .... came the closest to understanding Cinque. He was a "monster," Headley said, created in the dark criminal netherworld where police and government agencies manufacture their agents of chaos. And when their Frankenstein went rogue and began imagining that he truly was a revolutionary hero, he had to be put down.
--Both led a small group of disaffected, fanatical followers, mostly female:
Season of the Witch, by David Talbot pg174
...Cinque's consciousness-raising class became the seedbed for the Symbionese Liberation Army, an "army" ... made up of earnest, middle-class firebrands suffering from deep self-loathing...
https://escholarship.org/content/qt8tw2935x/qt8tw2935x.pdf
...the SLA demonstrated a knack for developing alternate identities.. They kept isolated from their past lives...
https://escholarship.org/content/qt8tw2935x/qt8tw2935x.pdf
When Patricia began opening up to Angela Atwood and Willie Wolfe regarding her personal and family life, she found the love and acceptance that she had not found at home with her family. ....
The Voices of Guns, by Vin McClelland and Paul Avery pg36
In two months of isolated captivity a conventionally liberal teenage girl had been completely transformed, brought to the point where she was apparently willing to kill and smirk.
Patty, .... and 'Tania'
--Both groups had celebrity victims. Both had victims who were the heiresses of wealthy old-line blue-blood California families from the Bay Area.
(Talking of Abigail Folger and Patricia Heast.)
--Both had group sex practices.
Season of the Witch by David Talbot pg174
He strutted around the SLA's various safe houses buck naked and fully erect, quickly establishing sexual dominion over the women in his flock... Cinque and his women formed the power nucleus within the group. None of the men ever challenged him; his... prison credentials gave him supreme status.
--Both groups were steeped in talk about death and destruction:
https://escholarship.org/content/qt8tw2935x/qt8tw2935x.pdf
“Death stalked the foul air in that safe house,” wrote Patricia, “More than ever before, all of them talked of death. Hardly a day or night went by but that someone mentioned death and others quickly took up the subject.”
--Both had people linked to their groups that tried to whack the President.
In Manson's case it was of course Squeaky Fromme, who pulled a .45 on the President during an appearance in Sacramento on September 5, 1975.
In DeFreeze's case, it was Sarah Jane Moore, who sent a .45 round whizzing past President Ford's head in San Francisco just 17 days later, on Sept 22, 1975. She was not a follower, but rather a volunteer in the organization set up by Patricia Hearst's father to comply with the kidnapper's demands to deliver free food to the poor before they would release his daughter. But even before that, she was an informant for the FBI.
[She was also a visitor at the radical Wellspring Commune's Northern California retreat. Also at this camp at the time was one-time Family member Larry Bailey.]
Soliah: The SaraJane Olson Story, by Sharon Darby Hendry, pg114
She(Moore) knew people who knew its members and would admit later on, "I had a catalog--I was one of the few people around who had a copy of every one of the SLA tapes, every one its communiques."
--Both the Mansons and the SLA were media darlings, with the Media giving them all the publicity they ever wanted to spread their goals:
--Both had probable government informants planted within their ranks.
Though significantly, it appears DeFreeze was an informant himself:
Vegas PI Lake Headley pg128
During the early fall of 1968, the LAPD detective and his agents, including DeFreeze, became part of a new subversive super secret unit--the Criminal Conspiracy Section (CCS). DeFreeze's job involved moving guns and grenades to be used against the Black Panther Party.
--Both committed terrible crimes to kick start the revolution, but that just ended up advancing the agenda of The Man.
https://escholarship.org/content/qt8tw2935x/qt8tw2935x.pdf
...what
resulted from this unique opportunity to take a deeper look into the
issues and concerns of the New Left led not to the embrace of these
ideas by the middle class, but their almost total alienation from the
SLA and its goals. ... Within progressive circles, discussions concerning Cinque as an agent provocateur ensued because the actions of the SLA led directly to police actions against those involved in progressive causes.
http://disinfo.com/2013/01/the-parts-left-out-of-the-patty-hearst-trial-part-2/
The family of slain SLA member Willie Wolfe hired Lake Headley–an ex-police intelligence officer who was chief investigator at Wounded Knee–to find out what had really happened. What he discovered, with fellow researchers Donald Freed and Rusty Rhodes, was that the SLA was part of the CIA’s CHAOS program.
-- https://escholarship.org/content/qt8tw2935x/qt8tw2935x.pdf
After taking the photograph, in a manner similar to that of the American military, the members of the cell proceeded to “unceremoniously cut off” Patricia/Tania’s hair leaving “no more than a half-inch growth” around her head.
Links:
Incredibly, DeFreeze may actually have known Charlie.
Season of the Witch by David Talbot pg176
"I crave the power Charles Manson had," declared Cinque, who claimed thathe had met the fellow ex-con in Los Angeles."
aadl.org/node/200649
Who Ran The SLA? by Dick Russell
Ann Arbor Sun, January 22, 1976
(Donald) DeFreeze, as an informer for a special Public Disorder Intelligence Unit(of the LAPD), did not want for "useful" tasks. During the fall of 1969, police sources recall DeFreeze informing on the Charles Manson family concerning a planned arms burglary. He next surfaces in Cleveland on October 11...
More evidence that Charlie knew Cinque is this insert from the 'Lie' Album of Manson tunes, which was signed by fellow inmates at the Los Angeles County Jail, probably in the spring of 1970 when Charlie was there awaiting trial, and shortly after the album was released.
(contributed by DebS)
Highlighted in yellow you can clearly read "Donald DeFreeze." It's entirely possible that were even friendly during that time period.
