LOS ANGELES, Jan. 28 — Police doubt that the slaying of producer Laurence Merrick, who made a documentary about Charles Manson’s followers, was the work of the murderous “family.”

“The feeling is they had nothing to do with it,” Hollywood division homicide detective Paul Osten said Thursday.

Osten noted that witnesses said the killer, a heavy-set man in his 20s, had been hanging around Merrick’s acting school for two days before the shooting and had to ask after Merrick, apparently because he could not recognize Merrick on sight.

Manson’s followers knew Merrick from his work with them on the 1972 movie “Manson.”

The young gunman shot Merrick in the back in the school parking lot Wednesday and fled.

Merrick, 50, became interested in the Manson family because actress Sharon Tate, one of the family’s victims, had been a student at his school. His documentary, which included interviews with rifle-carrying Manson girls, was nominated for an Academy Award.

He was not connected with another movie, “Helter Skelter,” a dramatization for television.

Manson and three of his female followers were convicted of the seven Tate-LaBianca murders and Manson and male followers were also convicted of two earlier killings.

Manson and the women were sentenced to death, commuted to life imprisonment when the death penalty was abolished.

One of the women, Leslie Van Houten, is currently awaiting a retrial, ordered because her first defense attorney disappeared midway in the original trial, and was later found dead in a remote mountain area.

Virtually all of the “family” members are in prison for murder or other serious crimes, including Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, one of the “stars” of Merrick’s movie, sentenced for attempting to assassinate President Ford in Sacramento.