Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple Page #2

Synopsis: Featuring never-before-seen footage, this documentary delivers a startling new look at the Peoples Temple, headed by preacher Jim Jones who, in 1978, led more than 900 members to Guyana, where he orchestrated a mass suicide via tainted punch.
Director(s): Stanley Nelson
Production: 7th art
  1 win & 4 nominations.
 
IMDB:
7.9
Metacritic:
79
Rotten Tomatoes:
94%
Year:
2006
86 min
Website
386 Views


A friend of mine told me that

he saw Jimmy kill a cat with a knife.

Well having a funeral for it

was a little strange,

killing the animal was very strange.

Jimmys father did not work,

did not have a job, and was a drunk.

Jims mother had to work

in order to support the family.

And he was kind of

left to his own devices.

Kind of the kid who ran wild

in the street, you know what I mean?

Listen, he was in a

dysfunctional family.

We got a nice name for it now.

But when you live

in a dysfunctional family,

you think its normal.

Feeling as an outcast,

Id early developed a sensitivity

for the problems of blacks.

I brought the only black

young man in the town home

and my dad said that

he could not come in

and I said, Then I shant,

and I did not see my dad for many years.

In Lynn, Jim Jones looked for community

and couldnt find community,

in Lynn as a town... which had a

population of what, a thousand people?

But he did find community

in the Pentecostal Church.

He saw that they were

a surrogate home.

He saw that the preachers were like

father figures to their congregations.

And that role represented power

over the lives of your congregation.

Jim Jones started out

on the revival preaching circuit,

learning the ropes of

being a preacher.

And once he started doing that,

it became clear that

he could get a following.

The first time I met Jim Jones

was Easter 1953.

My mother-in-law, Edith Cordell,

had a monkey and it hung itself

and she wanted to

replace the monkey.

So she looked in theIndianapolis Star,

and in thatIndianapolis Star

was Jim Joness ad

that he had some monkeys to sell.

So it was through that

that she met Jim Jones,

and came back saying that

he had invited her to church

this next Sunday.

It didnt make no difference

what color you were.

It was everybody welcome there

in that church

and he made it very plain

from the platform.

We had some people

that disagreed with Jimmy.

They got up in the audience

and they said they disagreed with him.

They did not like this

integration part of the services.

We did ask people to leave the church

one night because of that.

I was the first Negro child

adopted by a Caucasian family

in the state of Indiana.

Jim and Marceline actually

went to adopt a Caucasian child.

The story goes that

I was crying real loud

and it drew attention

for Marceline to come over,

and once she picked me up,

I stopped crying.

My family was a template

of a rainbow family.

We had an African American,

we had two American Asian

and we had his

natural son, homemade.

Jim was breaking new ground

in race relations

at a time when the ground was

still pretty hard against that.

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Marcia Smith

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Submitted on August 05, 2018

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