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Interesting that I grabbed the movies section of the AJC last night while I waited for dinner and read reviews of these two films that I would very much like to see. The problem of course is that they are both playing at a single theater each in Atlanta which means I'll probably see them whenever they make it to TV. But I digress:
Sobering new film revisits Jonestown
Son, members recall good times before fatal end
By JOHN BLAKE
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 11/30/2006
Jim Jones Jr. knows how history remembers his father.
The demented preacher behind the dark glasses. The man who fed his followers cyanide-laced Kool-Aid. The man who left dead men, women and children clinging to one another on a jungle floor in Guyana.
But he doesn't restrict his memories of the Rev. Jim Jones or the Peoples Temple to Guyana on Nov. 18, 1978.
He talks about a father who adopted him at birth when no one wanted him because he was black. A man who wanted to build a racial utopia. A church where he helped make pancakes for the poor at 5 a.m.
"Man, I'm proud of my name — I'm not hiding from anybody," Jones Jr. says in an interview. He appears in "Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple," a mesmerizing documentary that opens Friday at the Plaza Theatre in Atlanta.
"I ain't Rosa Parks, but I'm Jim Jones Jr.," he says. "I grew up in a rainbow family with the idea that you can change the world."
How did the Peoples Temple go from feeding pancakes to the poor to feeding cyanide to their children? That's a question examined by film director Stanley Nelson. He and two former Peoples Temple members recently discussed Jonestown myths.
Today Jonestown has become a macabre punch line in popular culture; people joke about gullible followers who "drink the Kool-Aid."
But survivors say the senior Jones didn't start off as a demented leader and his followers weren't religious zombies.
Jones Jr. was 18 years old and living in Guyana when his father orchestrated the murder-suicide of 909 Peoples Temple members. He says Jonestown was a tragedy. He's still angry at his father. But he, too, says the full story needs to be told.
"Do I think Jim Jones had a master plan to take everyone down to Jonestown and murder them?" he asks. "No."
His father created something that was initially wonderful, he says. The Peoples Temple established programs to get people off drugs, to build senior citizens homes and to help the mentally ill. It won humanitarian awards. It was courted by politicians.
"Nobody joins something they think is going to hurt them," says Deborah Layton, a former Peoples Temple member, at the beginning of the documentary.
Nelson didn't open his film with the familiar images of the bodies sprawled in Jonestown. He opened instead with rapturous images of what these people were doing only 24 hours earlier: laughing with one another, dancing together, holding their children tenderly in their laps.
"In some ways, they were looking for what we're all looking for: community and fellowship," Nelson says.
Jones gave that to his followers. He moved his church to San Francisco in 1974 and quickly became a Bay-area fixture. He was a white minister who preached like a black Baptist. He was civil rights activist who also claimed to heal people. Whites and blacks, doctors and lawyers, street hustlers and Vietnam vets all became friends in his church.
"I represent ... total equality, a society where people own all things in common, there's no rich nor poor, no racists." Jones declares in one sermon.
Tim Carter, who fled the Jonestown compound after his first wife and infant son were forced to take cyanide, says he still doesn't know how Jones transformed.
"I have no answers about Jim Jones," he says. "Nobody can tell me who he is. The man who existed in Jonestown was a shell of the human being I met in the Bay Area. Nobody would have followed a man like that."
Nelson says that Jones adopted whatever persona he needed to draw different groups.
"Jim Jones was really good at being so many different things to so many different people," Nelson says.
Strange — and benevolent
But Jones' pathological nature eventually surfaced. Obsessed by religion, Jones grew up in a small Indiana town, the son of an alcoholic father. A childhood friend says in the film that Jones killed a cat with a knife as a boy then conducted its eulogy.
Jones' sickness eventually infiltrated his church.
He urged members to sell their homes and give their paychecks to his church. He deprived members of sleep. He had sex with men and women in the church. He conducted mass suicide drills to test loyalty.
Carter says it was hard to pull away because the change was gradual. Strange took place right alongside good. He compared it with the proverbial frog in a pot that stays even at the boiling point, because it's there from the start, exposed to incremental increases.
"As the water started boiling, we were so acclimated, we didn't jump out." Carter says.
Jones Jr. says his father kept his good and dark sides compartmentalized, but "on Nov. 18th, those lines intersected."
Carter says he still remembers the last day. He overheard Jones coolly ask someone if Kool-Aid would mask the cyanide. He remembers armed men suddenly surrounding Peoples Temple members. Jones had just called a mass meeting after some members had gunned down Congressman Leo Ryan, who was visiting Jonestown after hearing complaints.
"I'm a Vietnam vet," Carter says. "I was in combat mode. Every fiber of my being said this guy is going to murder everybody, but another side said this doesn't make sense. It still doesn't make sense."
What happened afterward didn't make sense to many survivors.
Some are angry that the event was described as a mass suicide. They say many of the people who died at Jonestown were forced to take poison. They call it murder.
Carter says Jonestown's victims have been reduced to "wackos." No U.S. cemetery would accept Jonestown bodies for four months after their deaths because they feared their burials would attract cults, he says.
"We couldn't even find a place to bury our children," Carter says.
Jones Jr. says he went by James Jones for 10 years after Jonestown. He didn't want anyone to know who is father was. But his perspective has changed. He now calls himself by his more well-known name.
Today he is a salesman in Pacifica, Calif. He has a wife and three sons. Active in his local Catholic parish, he doesn't sound haunted or bitter during telephone conversations from his home. He sounds happy to be alive.
Those who didn't survive Jonestown still baffle outsiders. But a letter left by one of them asked future generations to not judge them too harshly.
"The story of this movement must be studied over and over," the unknown person wrote. "We did not want this ending. We wanted to live, to shine, to bring light to a world that is dying for a little bit of love."
_________________
"To keep you is no benefit. To destroy you is no loss."
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