Maybe you haven’t heard about the Jonestown Massacre, but now that the brain behind Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul is tackling the topic, you soon will. Vince Gilligan will be adapting the book Raven: the Untold Story of Jim Jones and his People for an HBO miniseries.
The book was written by journalist Tim Reiterman, talked about how the pastor Jim Jones convinced 918 people, including 909 Americans and many children, to take their own lives in a self-created village in the middle of the Guyana jungle back in 1978. The story focuses on the warped mind of Jones and how he built the movement which lead to the massacre. Courtesy the Hollywood Reporter on the book,
“Raven tells the definitive history of Peoples Temple, from its idealistic beginnings to its terrible end in Jonestown. The adaptation will focus on Jim Jones, but also on his followers, who, by and large, were ordinary people of good will. It tells the mysterious story of how so many of them came to give up their lives for this man.”
Hopefully HBO picks this miniseries up, not just because it’s Vince Gilligan, but because the story of Jim Jones is one of the most fascinating, eerie and terrifying about cults, religion, and the willingness to follow one man who claims to have all the answers around.
[Uproxx; Hollywood Reporter; Photo Credit: Grantland]
