(People's Temple, part 3--check out at the church service at 3:00 as Jones refuses the camera crew access , and his subsequent comments about the media)

This 22 minute documentary shot in 1973, provides in hindsight  many clues that things weren't quite right with Jim Jones' Peoples Temple. Jones' megalomania leaks out, as does the somewhat obsessive "love" his followers feel for him. Yet there is also a sense of Utopian hope, a desire for a colorblind world of self sufficiency.

Director David Gottlieb filmed Jones and his followers on their property in Redwood City and at their church in Los Angeles where Jones' crazy comes out in full force. Just before filming began, a negative article about Jones ran in the San Francisco Examiner,  and the documentarians were denied permission to film faith healings and other controversial  aspects of the church.

Hoping to stave off further media criticism, Jones gave out grants to 12 newspapers and bussed his followers to demonstrate in support of Fresno Bee reporters who had been jailed for refusing to reveal confidential sources.

In retrospect you have to ask, how did Jones gain political and social influence, and how did he go from being appointed to the San Francisco Housing  Authority to ordering the deaths of hundreds of his followers in Guyana?

Jones was an ordained minister in the Disciples of God, and at his peak  his followers numbered over 8,000. He began his San Francisco power brokering by raising funds for the families of slain police officers. As his church grew, it offered jobs and social programs as well as religious services. Jones could bus bodies to political events and he was seen as a force in progressive circles. The People's Temple donated to the NAACP, the Ecumenical Peace Institute and other groups. He was toasted at testimonial dinner by Assemblyman Willie Brown, San Francisco Mayor Moscone, Angela Davis, lawyer Vincent Hallinan, Lieutenant Governor Mervyn Dymally and publisher Carlton Goodlett; he met with Roslyn Carter and Walter Mondale.

But by 1976, as Jones grew more powerful, the press stepped in and began more and ever deeper investigations, discovering faked faith healings along with attempts to raise the dead and what cult expert Rick Ross calls

extremely coercive fund raising that pushed members to liquidate their assets and hand over the money to the church. 

Jones and his followers fled to his compound in Guyana in August of 1977 on the heels of a New Times magazine article exposing the fraud and financial shenanigans. In the summer of 1978, a Jonestown defector, Deborah Layton, gave lengthy interviews to the San Francisco Chronicle about abusive conditions in Jonestown and Jones' out of control behavior. On November 18, Rep. Leo Ryan, Deborah Layton, and members of the media investigating the compound were murdered, followed by the mass murder/suicide of Jones and his followers.

Willie Brown said in the aftermath:

If we knew then he was mad, clearly we wouldn't have appeared with him. But it's not fair to say what you would have done if you knew the kind of madness that would take place years later.

And Mayor Moscone, who along with Harvey Milk would be assassinated nine days later, responded to Jonestown saying:

It's clear that if there was a sinister plan, then we were taken in. But I'm not taking any responsibility. It's not mine to shoulder.

The clues were there--you can see them, though perhaps with the hindsight that is 20/20-- in Gottlieb's documentary and surely the press coverage of Jones in 1972 and 73 might have been enough to give politicians pause--especially that "raising the dead" stuff, yikes! But politicians seemed to weigh to cost-benefit of having a cult providing them with voters and opportunities for free publicity, erring on the side of  "Well they do so much good for the community--let's just ignore the negative reports..."

Michael Thomas' article in the San Francisco Chronicle, twenty years after Jonestown quotes Jones' lawyer Tim Stoen:

There wasn't anything magical about Jim's power. It was raw politics. He was able to deliver what politicians want, which is power. And how do you get power? By votes. And how do you get votes? With people. Jim Jones could produce 3,000 people at a political event.

In the same article, Agar Jaicks, Chairman of the county Democratic Central Committee seemed to agree with Stoen's assessment saying:

What you had here was a ready-made volunteer workforce and he was very strong and here was a guy who could provide workers for causes.

Gottlieb was there, he spent time with Jones and People's Temple members, and his insight into the early days of this coercive and dangerous group--and how religion forces itself into political power as we move into a new administration will certainly make for lively discussion.