Heaven's Gate

The L.A. Times has a series of video clips of Marshall Applegate in honor of the recent anniversary of the Heaven's Gate suicides.

In my search for full versions of the HG tapes, I found a trailer for a documentary called "Heaven's Gate Cult Speaks: Mass Suicide." It looks more even-handed than expected, but (unfortunately) Sergio Myers, the documentary maker, own all the rights to hours and hours of pre-suicide film—the most valuable records of all.

One of the ex-members interviewed for the film said something to the effect of, "I wish people would focus on the 20+ years before the suicides." If you want to understand something like Heaven's Gate or People's Temple, you need to know what happened before the event that seems to defy understanding. It's too bad that Myers won't release the tapes to the public so that others can try to understand what happened.

The Weekly also has a decent story about HG, and you can always examine the HG website itself which is still in the condition it was in immediately after the suicides.