I DVR’d the show that Sundance was running this week.
As an aside question; how well was Jones known to the general public before Jonestown?
The whole sad affair happened before my time, but reading about it, it seems like he was known and respected enough in liberal circles in San Francisco to the extent that people like Feinstein and Mondale and Jerry Brown and George Moscone and Rosalynn Carter associated with him. Would someone outside San Francisco have known his name if they saw it in the paper, or would he have been little more than an Alex Jones type?
He also became addicted to drugs, mostly amphetamines, and his sexual preferences seemed to switch over time from women to men. Some people have wondered if his paranoia and other behavioral changes towards the end of his life may have been due to AIDS, which hadn’t been identified yet but do remember that he was engaging in promiscuous sex with other men in the San Francisco area. (I vaguely recall starting a thread about this a while back.) Of course, there’s no way to know that now.
This very interesting book goes into considerable detail about Jones’ life, from start to finish.
I was in 10th grade when it happened, and it didn’t make as big an impression on me as it might have if it had when I was a few years older.
Found that thread.
https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=827079
IIRC, that book told stories about people who did leave the cult before they went to Guyana, or even when they were still in Indiana. It wasn’t as hard to leave as, say Scientology, but when you’re living in an isolated group facility with no money or transportation, where and how do you start over?
Powers Boothe in the made for TV movie Guayna Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones is positively frightening , and deservedly won an Emmy.
And let’s not forget the innocent victims, Leo Ryan who died, and the others who were shot. That is the real tragedy.
Can’t have a scary-monsters-out-to-get-you movie without Veronica Cartwright!
I can only speak for myself, and I was only a college student on the other side of the country from CA…but I’d never heard of him.
Sheesh, I remember it. Senior in high school in northern California. A Congressman got killed in the whole shebang. The People’s Temple was a venue for hardcore punk concerts in the very early 1980’s (IIRC it was near Japan town, and near the Filmore West (aka the Elite Club) in the old Filmore District of San Francisco
Yeah, it was big news where I grew up, too. We used to get about 5 channels on TV. One of them was KTVU (Oakland, I think).
My mom was a big fan of that channel back then.
The Sundance Channel recently had a documentary (it could have been old, I’m not sure) but Jim Jones looked like the typical kooky preacher from across town that “regular” people would not want to belong to his church but those “religious fanatics” did.
At some point, and I couldn’t tell when, he became absolutely insane.
What got me is that at Jonestown, Leo Ryan could have been his saving grace. They had nearly a thousand people and the ability to only properly feed near five hundred. This got the populace upset and starting to (very silently) grumble, which caused Jones to impose harsher labor and punishments to quell the uprising.
Ryan gave him the perfect out. Allow everyone who wanted to leave, just go ahead and leave, then have more food and be less brutal; all the while talking smack on those who left and continuing to be worshiped as a god.
some people still say between him and manson they killed off a lot of the positives of the 60s………
Manson yes, but I don’t associate Jonestown with anything having to do with the 60s. 
I see his/her point. Jim Jones’ putting into practice interracial cooperation, starting just as the sixties were ending, and eventually founding a rural utopian community…Heck, the pre-tragedy Jonestown photos look like Sly and the Family Stone album covers.
I was a teenager at the time. I remember the headlines, but never really paid that much attention to it. Now that I’m seeing clips and stories from back then, I realize that I really didn’t know anything about it other than the whole kool-aid thing. I need to learn more about it.
Where did Jones get all the poison? Having enough cyanide on hand to kill all 900+ on the spur of the moment seems unlikely. So he must have planned for such a situation at least early enough to acquire sufficient quantities of cyanide.
Soon after the Jonestown “pioneers” started to build the vlllage, someone acquired a license to purchase cyanide, supposedly to purify mined gold. They then purchased a little at a time over a couple of years.
That does make me wonder how long he may have had the mass suicide option in his mind.
It was probably something he wanted to have in his back pocket just in case. What an evil man.