Every time I see a TV movie or miniseries from the late '70s to early '90s, I am always impressed with the sheer production value and ambition of TV movies from that era. Beginning roughly with 1975's Kansas City Massacre and ending around 1988 with The Bourne Identity, and including such titles as Shogun (1980), The Day After (1983) and Noble House (1988), this era was a golden age of TV movies/miniseries.
The Guyana Tragedy was shown over two nights in 1980 on CBS. This was an effective format to tell a nonlinear story beginning right before the mass suicide/massacre in Jonestown, Guyana, with flashbacks covering Jim Jones's life, beside a concurrent storyline about a congressman traveling to Jonestown to investigate the situation for himself.
The movie depicts Jones's upbringing by an abusive Klansman father, the sort of thing that can literally warp one's amygdala, which regulates one's fight-or-flight response and diminishes one's ability to weigh risk vs. reward, which explains how Jones ultimately behaved when his social experiment came crashing down around him in his failed utopia in Guyana. We see how Jones started out with good intentions, and we even root for him for awhile as he stands up to institutional racism. We see him gradually become corrupted, as he engages in ethically questionable practices for the good of his community, then later for his own benefit, how once a line had been crossed, he was able to rationalize going further. He worked hard for the good of his flock, and he had to keep pushing himself to do more, which drove him to amphetamines. We understand how he did the wrong thing for the right reasons before doing the wrong things for the wrong reasons. Once he began using hard drugs, his underlying mental disorders came to the surface, and he began down a self-destructive path that unfortunately took nearly a thousand people down with him.
Guyana Tragedy is a well-made and truly disturbing film. It might also be the only movie about Jim Jones that actually features an actor named Jim Jones (James Earl Jones). I highly recommend tracking down a copy of this film.
The Guyana Tragedy was shown over two nights in 1980 on CBS. This was an effective format to tell a nonlinear story beginning right before the mass suicide/massacre in Jonestown, Guyana, with flashbacks covering Jim Jones's life, beside a concurrent storyline about a congressman traveling to Jonestown to investigate the situation for himself.
The movie depicts Jones's upbringing by an abusive Klansman father, the sort of thing that can literally warp one's amygdala, which regulates one's fight-or-flight response and diminishes one's ability to weigh risk vs. reward, which explains how Jones ultimately behaved when his social experiment came crashing down around him in his failed utopia in Guyana. We see how Jones started out with good intentions, and we even root for him for awhile as he stands up to institutional racism. We see him gradually become corrupted, as he engages in ethically questionable practices for the good of his community, then later for his own benefit, how once a line had been crossed, he was able to rationalize going further. He worked hard for the good of his flock, and he had to keep pushing himself to do more, which drove him to amphetamines. We understand how he did the wrong thing for the right reasons before doing the wrong things for the wrong reasons. Once he began using hard drugs, his underlying mental disorders came to the surface, and he began down a self-destructive path that unfortunately took nearly a thousand people down with him.
Guyana Tragedy is a well-made and truly disturbing film. It might also be the only movie about Jim Jones that actually features an actor named Jim Jones (James Earl Jones). I highly recommend tracking down a copy of this film.