Hollywood Pitches Suicide Cult as ‘Flavor of the Day’

One version features the reptilians and the orbs duking it out for control of Pluto. Another has a lucky few humans morphing into bald, dome-headed aliens as they drift off into cosmic bliss.

Then there’s the psychological drama approach: A youngish set designer, a film biz type, responds to an ad in the L.A. Weekly and joins a cult, following its rituals and adopting its values until suddenly he decides to cut out on his own--just a few weeks before all 39 of his buddies pull out purple shrouds and commit mass suicide.

As inevitable as the crowds at “Star Wars,” as predictable as Hale-Bopp’s orbit, proposals for movies, documentaries and television series inspired by the strange saga of the Heaven’s Gate cult are popping up everywhere.

To be sure, most of the projects have little chance of making it to the screen. It has become rather voguish in Hollywood to sneer at ripped-from-the-headlines productions. And the suicides seem to lack dramatic punch (not to mention lust, gore and suspense).

Still, several producers are having a go at it. They’re betting on an unusual pitch: They can literally tell the Heaven’s Gate story in the disciples’ own words.

Years before they swallowed sedatives and tugged plastic bags over their heads in Rancho Santa Fe, members of the cult were etching a remarkable record of their lives on paper, video and computer disk. They completed one full-length screenplay and sketched an outline for another movie. They also granted on-camera interviews that one producer hopes to turn into a documentary--a sort of Q & A on Luciferians, mother stars and castration.

Their aggressive publicity efforts spun such intrigue, in fact, that producer Alan Landsburg whipped up a television movie about them back in the late 1970s. He based his story on news accounts of the charismatic duo Bo and Peep, who founded the cult that became known as Heaven’s Gate.

The movie, “Mysterious Two,” starring John Forsyth, languished for years before airing on NBC in 1982. It painted the cult’s leaders as “possibly aliens, possibly charlatans,” writer and director Gary Sherman said.

Although they did not help with Sherman’s script (they had gone underground and he couldn’t track them down), the Heaven’s Gate members clearly saw their story as a momentous one. “The Mother of Holy Wars,” they called it in one Internet communique.

Alex Papas, head of the aptly named Way Out Pictures, chooses slightly less apocalyptic terms. But he’s still hot on the idea. “Are you kidding?” he asked. “It’s the flavor of the day.”

Papas’ prize is the fat, meandering screenplay that several Heaven’s Gate members wrote while they were renting his house on Mummy Mountain, in the upscale Phoenix suburb of Paradise Valley. When the cult members learned he was a producer, they turned the script over to him along with their monthly $3,400 in rent.

“It’s a very Shakespearean type of story,” Papas said. “Good versus evil, a big battle.” Without giving away the ending, he promised that the script would be perfect for Hollywood. “Good,” he said, “wins out in the end.”

Full Screenplay and an Outline

Titled “Beyond Human: Return of the Next Level,” the screenplay came in a bit wordy, what with all the talk of aliens tromping around Earth trying to find humans suitable to zap up to the Orion nebula. It was also crowded with characters; the original draft featured more than 100 speaking parts. But the authors were willing to modify their script, and Papas said he helped them cull it down to a more manageable scope.

“Put in the hands of professional rewriters,” he said, “this could be something very, very valid.”

The allure, of course, is that while most viewers would regard the film as snazzy science fiction, the authors swore it was the straight-up truth. They died believing they were the chosen few hitching that spaceship ride to the “next level” of evolution.

They even included sketches to make sure set designers would get the details right, Papas said. They drew their transport as a “Star Trek”-inspired saucer with lots of portals and high-tech monitors. The higher-level aliens they envisioned as leading them to astral glory were the same ones that beckon from their Web site: androgynous creatures with big bald heads and smiling faces.

While the Heaven’s Gate members apparently poured most of their creative energy into the screenplay they gave Papas, they also drafted the outline for another movie--this one a sweeping history of Earth’s encounters with alien beings, as observed by wise and mysterious orbs.

“It’s very bizarre,” said publicist Danielle Forlano, who has read the eight-page treatment. “They’ll talk about the reptilians, the grays and the orbs all arguing about ownership rights to Pluto. It’s very Trekkie.”

It’s also very far out. And some Earth-bound entrepreneurs are betting that human viewers will prefer a more accessible story on Heaven’s Gate.

Beverly Hills businessman Nick Matzorkis, for one, sees great potential in a documentary (or movie of the week, he hastily amends) about the lone surviving member of Heaven’s Gate, former set designer Richard Ford, who was known in the cult as Rio D’Angelo.

Matzorkis, who employs Ford as a computer programmer, envisions the docudrama as a sort of psychological thriller, a look at how one man found the cult so persuasive that he cut off ties with his family, shut off his sexuality and tried to rid himself of all the “human aspects of his life.” The story would climax, of course, with Ford’s decision to leave the group a few weeks before the suicide--and his shattering discovery of the 39 decomposing bodies in the Rancho Santa Fe mansion.

“You know Hollywood--they keep saying, ‘Where’s the conflict?’ ” Matzorkis complained. “But I see this as the ultimate conflict, of deciding between humanness and non-humanness.”

‘A Twist of Outer Space’

For all his insistence on the story’s inherent integrity (he quotes Martin Luther King Jr. to back him up), Matzorkis is willing to pander a bit to Hollywood sensibilities, if pandering is what it takes to get his project underway. He promises that any documentary would include “a twist of outer space and the spaceship things that are getting everyone’s attention.”

Matzorkis--a fast-talking entrepreneur who runs a missing person search firm, a record label, a long-distance telephone company and a talent agency out of his InterAct Entertainment Group--is betting he has the inside track on this documentary because he learned a lot about Heaven’s Gate through talking with Ford and other cult members he hired to design Web sites.

Plus, he can boast some personal involvement in the story: He was the one who drove Ford to Rancho Santa Fe after Ford received a video suggesting that his friends had committed suicide.

But Matzorkis does have competition in the documentary market.

In fact, the first Heaven’s Gate spinoff to hit the market will probably be a half-serious, half-snide documentary based on video footage of Heaven’s Gate members discussing their philosophy at Boise State University in Idaho. Santa Monica freelance producer Sergio Myers, who calls his company Rising Sun, plans to market the 90-minute tape to video distributors starting this week.

A student of UFOs who founded a group called Believers of the Unknown, Myers said the video is eerily persuasive.

He does poke fun at the group; the segment on their suicide, for example, is set to “Happy Trails.” And he tries to point out inconsistencies--like how they’re drinking Coke as they talk about the need to abstain from Earthly temptations.

Yet the Heaven’s Gate members talk so logically and earnestly about their religion that Myers predicted they will win converts even now through his video.

Asked if he worried about recruiting people to a group that led its members to mass suicide, Myers responded: “I do, I do. But it’s business.”

Times staff writer Brian Lowry contributed to this story. Simon reported from Los Angeles and Sahagun from Paradise Valley, Ariz.