Zeroville

On the same August day in 1969 that a crazed hippie "e;family"e;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-"e;the two most beautiful people in the history ofthe movies"e;-tattooed on his head. At once childlike and violent, Vikar is not acineaste but "e;cineautistic,"e; 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.