Jonestown docu sheds light on "Life and Death" saga

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - The grisly end of Jim Jones' would-be utopia has held a morbid fascination since 1978: How did a decades-long, church-based experiment in communal living lead to the murder and "revolutionary suicide" of more than 900 people in a tiny South American country?

Most mainstream-media studies of the event get no further than the poisoned Kool-Aid. But in the extensively researched "Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple," director Stanley Nelson and writer Marcia Smith dig a good deal deeper into the workings of Peoples Temple and the paradox at its core -- the visionary quest for social justice and the extreme personality disorder that together drove Jones and held his followers in sway.

Through interviews with Jonestown survivors and rare footage of Jones himself, this sober documentary presents an unforgettable historical portrait. Nelson has dug up audio and video recordings of sermons as early as 1953, including a staged "healing," and previously unseen footage from the final days in Guyana. The DVD version, which will offer material that didn't make it into the 85-minute version that screened at the Los Angeles Film Festival, should have a long life.

A number of the survivors who spoke to Nelson still cherish the good times when, before devolving into the siege-mentality totalitarianism that was its undoing in San Francisco and Guyana, Peoples Temple realized an agrarian ideal in Northern California. The group began in the Midwest as a socialist slant on old-time religion. Preaching racial integration in the Klan stronghold of Indiana was a gutsy thing. The Peoples Temple was always in many ways a "black church," but empowerment gave way to mind games.

Nelson has collected striking testimony, from graphic sexual revelations about Jones to church members' memories of watching their children die. Perhaps most extraordinary is the interview with a childhood friend who recalls the 5-year-old's obsession with death. Conducting funerals for animals is no rarity among kids, but little Jim Jones killed a cat in order to preside over its final rites.

Reuters/Hollywood Reporter

• Email Story
• IM Story
• Discuss
• Printable View

RECOMMEND THIS STORY

Recommend It:

Not at All Somewhat Moderately Highly Very Highly

Average (Not Rated)

» Recommended Stories