Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones (1980)

The life of cult leader Jim Jones, founder of the Peoples Temple and orchestrater of the Jonestown mass murder-suicide, is expertly portrayed here by Powers Boothe. Jones somehow started off as a champion of civil rights, pushing for integration in his Indianapolis church and housing equality in San Francisco, only to lead those same people he championed to their certain deaths in Guyana. The miniseries is pretty comprehensive in its view, even including actual dialogue from the Jamestown death tape. There are great performances throughout the cast from a James Earl Jones cameo to Brad Dourif as a drug addict turned follower, but it’s really the charisma of Boothe portraying Jones’s downward spiral toward megalomania and paranoia that stands out.