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Stanley Nelson is executive producer of Firelight Media, a non-profit production company he founded with partner and writer Marcia Smith, and a director of documentaries on subjects ranging from America's first woman millionaire, Madame C.J. Walker, to early black-owned-and-operated newspapers. His projects for PBS include Marcus Garvey: Look for Me in the Whirlwind and The Murder of Emmett Till.

Earlier this year, he simultaneously premiered his latest documentary, Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple (2006), at the San Francisco International Film Festival and the Tribeca Film Festival. I caught the film here in San Francisco and recently had the opportunity to talk with him about the film.

Courtesy of the California Historical Society

Stanley, I saw Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple at the San Francisco International Film Festival when it screened at Berkeley's Pacific Film Archives with various Peoples Temple members in attendance. I wanted to follow-up on that exciting event. What's happened with the film since then?

That was kind of a whirlwind because we were at the Tribeca and San Francisco International Film Festivals at the exact same time. Since then we've been at Silver Docs, the AFI Film Festival in D.C., and a film festival in North Carolina. So we've done a number of festivals and we're now just starting to do the international festivals. The film's going to be in a festival at the Canary Islands - which unfortunately I can't go to - so we're sending the editor because that's the day I think it opens in New York, so I can't go. We've been in Australia, New Zealand...

So it's fully launched now.

Yeah, yeah. We're doing a ton of festivals.

The PFA screening was one of the first screenings, was it not? Even some of the people who had worked on the film hadn't seen it projected yet.

That was our first week of screenings, so we premiered at the San Francisco film festival and the Tribeca film festival simultaneously. That was maybe the third screening we had.

What I'm trying to get at is: clearly here in the Bay Area, you had an audience who was receptive and, in our own way, healing ourselves through the film. How has it been received in the rest of the country?

The reception's been incredible. At the Tribeca Film Festival in New York, we started out with five screenings. Every screening was sold out. They added a sixth screening, we sold that out. Every single screening we've had has been sold out. I just screened it in the first annual Martha's Vineyard Film Festival in Cape Cod and that was sold out. The screenings have all been amazing. I think part of it, hopefully, is the film, but I think a large part of it is the story. People are intrigued by Jim Jones, Peoples Temple and Jonestown.

Jonestown is powerful. It struck me as a healing document; difficult to watch because of the heartfelt testimonials you captured. Where did you get most of the footage of the actual Jonestown and the Tarmac episode; where did all that come from?

The footage came from a lot of places but there were three main areas. There was one set of footage that came from Peoples Temple members who had footage in their closets and attics that had never been seen before. So there's footage of them cutting through the jungle with machetes to build Jonestown. There's the stuff where they interview each other and themselves about how much they loved Jonestown, about how wonderful it is. There's a shot from a plane of them flying over Jonestown and you hear Jim Jones's voice in the background describing what he's going to build; all that actually came from Peoples Temple members and none of that footage had been seen before.

Then there was a guy who went into Peoples Temple in the mid-70s and shot over a few days. He actually lit the church and shot with three cameras. He did close-ups, cutaways, long shots and medium shots and he shot in 16mm, and he lit the whole church and it's just beautiful. That's where you see Jim Jones preaching and you really hear his message, and there's an incredible scene where Jim Jones does a healing ceremony and he makes a woman see and he heals a woman's hand and then he makes a woman walk and she actually starts running up and down the aisles. That came from this gentleman.

The stuff that happened the last two days in Jonestown came from the film crew that went in there with Congressman Ryan. That was an NBC film crew and they started filming before the plane even took off so you actually see them walking across the runway to get on to the plane down there. They shot on the plane; you see them on the plane. They shot the plane landing. They just shot for the next two days and that's just incredible footage because they were shooting up until an hour or two before the suicides started.

And it's real. If I remember correctly, you had mentioned at the PFA screening that you had considered maybe doing re-creations, but actually you didn't have to. You had this original material and nothing could speak better than the original material.

Yeah, that was our first thought. Our first outline script was that we were going to go down and shoot some stuff down there - bullet holes going into the plane, some palm trees waving airily in the breeze and stuff - but once we collected the footage, we realized we didn't have to. The footage is just incredible. Besides that, there's thousands of stills that Peoples Temple members took.

[Greg Robinson], the camera man who went there with Congressman Ryan, was killed. He was actually filming his own death. You see the guys come out of the truck and shoot him and his camera goes blank. The still camera man who was taking still pictures of all this, he gets shot and killed. Then a reporter grabs his camera and starts shooting it and you see the dead bodies on the Tarmac that were shot with [Robinson's] camera. So there's just incredible documentation of what happened all the way up until the last minutes where there's this audiotape of Jim Jones saying, "Okay, it's time to drink the poison, to take the Kool-aid." You hear an argument with Jim Jones from one of the Peoples Temple members, a woman who stands up and says, "I don't think we should do this. I don't think we should commit suicide." There's an argument back and forth with her and Jim Jones, and then you actually hear her shouted down and then you hear the suicide murders start: women, men and kids screaming and dying while Jim Jones is saying, "C'mon, it's time, we've got to go, hurry, hurry, hurry, drink drink," all those things. It's an incredibly harrowing and moving audio clip.

Horrific and painfully harrowing. Backtracking just a bit, Marcia Smith is the writer?

She's my wife, too.

Oh, she's your wife? I didn't realize that. If I remember correctly, she said that she heard a radio broadcast of Peoples Temple members reminiscing at the 25th anniversary and that's what got her juices flowing about wanting to do this documentary. Did she bring it to you? Did you both hear it at the same time? What got you going on it?

To be honest, I've always told this story in the simple way, which is like I heard this thing; but, no, what really happened was my wife heard it. She heard them on the radio. We work together and she said these people are incredible, you should hear it. I think it was on an NPR show. So we got the tape and then I listened to it. It was just amazing. We heard Peoples Temple members describing their own experiences and their experience was so different from the experience I had heard of Peoples Temple. They talked about how wonderful their experience with these people was, with the people who were part of the Peoples Temple. How they were part of something bigger than themselves. Part of a truly integrated church. They still spoke of Peoples Temple with a great degree of fondness.

As one of the greatest times of their lives...?

As one of the greatest times of their lives. They hated Jim Jones, but they loved Peoples Temple. They loved their experience of Peoples Temple. Clearly, they said there had never been anything in their lives that compared to their time in Peoples Temple. At that point, both of our juices were flowing and we said, "What was going on there?" We knew there was more to the story than we knew and that's when we started looking for the story and investigating it.

One of the things that chilled me watching your documentary was recalling how I came to San Francisco in the mid-70s. I was a hippie boy. I remember being down on Market Street and, at that time, people from the church would approach people like me on the street and invite us to the church. I remember being invited to the Peoples Temple but I was shy and had a lot of trouble with group things, so I declined. But I often think about that because, I think for myself, it would have also been an experience I would have loved. With racial equality, gender parity, age wasn't a problem, it had all groupings of people together, so it was a truly utopic vision in action.

That was something that was really important to us in making the film: to show in the beginning what it was like and why it was attractive to people. So that you understood that these people weren't crazy. I'm glad I wasn't around in those days. I'm glad I didn't visit it. Because if I had visited it, I might have stayed, I might have joined. It was really important for us to show that aspect of Peoples Temple.

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