How the 2017 March in Charlottesville Inspired Me to Write ‘The Order’

In 2018, I went to Oklahoma City to visit the memorial for the victims killed in the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. There, in 1995, a 26-year-old Gulf War veteran lit a fuse inside a rented truck packed with 5,000 pounds of explosives, killing 168 people, including 19 children at the second-floor daycare.

I was 15 when Timothy McVeigh committed what remains the deadliest act of domestic terrorism in American history, but I had only recently become interested in how he and other white men in America were radicalized against the federal government and drawn to private militias with violent racist ideologies.

It may be hard to remember now, but seven years ago it was still surprising to see white supremacists marching publicly in the streets of Charlottesville, Va., shouting “Jews will not replace us.” And it was during that naïve period of shock that producer Bryan Haas and I began researching the American militia movement. We were looking for a story to explain how we got here, and we found a crazy one at that museum in Oklahoma City.

One of the first exhibits you see when you enter the bomb memorial is a book called “The Turner Diaries.” It is the fictional account of a group of white supremacists called the Order who are waging a race war against the US government. They counterfeit money, rob banks and armored cars, assassinate prominent black and Jewish Americans, and incite an armed revolution that goes all the way to the Capitol. They also blow up a federal building using a rented truck packed with explosives.

It is in this book that McVeigh found his plan, but it landed on his radar because a decade before him, another young man had also tried to make the fictional book a reality. His name was Bob Mathews. I didn’t know his story at all, but it turned out to be the exact, horrible starting point we were looking for.

“The Order,” the script I ended up writing, which was directed by the incredibly talented Justin Kurzel, tells the story of Mathews, a 25-year-old, charismatic ideologue who in the early 1980s leads a group of white supremacists. in the Pacific Northwest on the same race war. Inspired by the doctrine of “The Turner Diaries,” Mathews’ group, which he also called the Order, carried out the largest armored car heist in American history and used cash from a series of robberies to fund domestic terrorist attacks and assassinations. Its most infamous crime was the 1984 murder of Alan Berg, an outspoken, liberal, Jewish radio host in Denver. Mathews and his men followed Berg home from his radio station one night and shot him 12 times with a MAC-10. (Marc Maron plays Berg in the film.)

I knew little about Alan Berg’s murder, mostly that it had inspired Eric Bogosian’s great play “Talk Radio.” But I didn’t know until I started this project how closely it was connected to my own life. My wife grew up in Denver and it turns out her family knew Alan Berg well. My father in law bought his car in the 70’s and his sister had dinner with Alan and his ex wife the night Alan was killed. Mathews and the hitmen were parked in a car across the street from the restaurant and watched them eat the MAC-10 in their laps.

Jude Law, left, Jurnee Smollett and Tye Sheridan in ‘The Order’.

(Michelle Faye/Vertical)

Berg’s murder investigation began in Denver and became one of the largest manhunts in FBI history. The agents who tirelessly investigated Mathews’ crimes make up the other half of the film.

With the classic structure, Justin, Bryan, star Jude Law, all the filmmakers and I were striving to make an old-school crime thriller in the vein of “The French Connection” or “Prince of the City,” full of car chases and knock-offs. heists and shoot-outs that would hopefully be as viscerally entertaining as they were terribly relevant.

Bryan chose a very good book called “The Silent Brotherhood” written by two Denver Post reporters who chronicled the order, and I used that as the basis for my research. (In another instance, one of the authors sat on the Denver City Council with my mother-in-law.)

Unfortunately, most of what is in the film, especially the crimes and the insidious ideology Mathews advocated, is factual. Not the most fun things to research or write, but in trying to understand how we got here, it felt important to be precise about where we’ve been.

All told, I worked on the script for over five years, and after we found funding, I spent many more months working with Justin to shave what had at one point been a 150+ page script, that spanned a dozen states and hundreds of locations and characters down to 100 pages. It was a difficult film to get financed.

During those years, I thought back a lot to that trip to Oklahoma City and the naivety and anxiety that started this project. I remember how urgent I thought it was at the time to get this film made. It was almost seven years ago. Unfortunately, I worry that it is even more relevant now.