Sheela Take a Bow: Wild Wild Country on Netflix

"I'm the only one in the family who doesn't have any Nike stock," he said.

Bowerman says about $1,000 in Nike stock he bought shortly after the company went public in 1980 grew to $25,000 at a time when he needed the money to build his house on his land next to the John Day River.

"If I had not built the house it would have been worth a million or two," he said of the stock.

He says his father left equal amounts of Nike stock to the Oregon Community Foundation in the name of him and his two brothers, Jay and Tom. The three brothers, Bowerman said, consult with the Community Foundation about where their share of money should be donated each year. He said his father also left stock to him. But those shares – valued at nearly $500,000 – went to his second wife in the divorce settlement.

yeah okay but come on, that is a very different background/set of connections than the short-order cook at the shuttered diner.

i just didn't have a strong sense of the economy/lifestyle of the town before rajneesh - we got a vague and cliched cultural snapshot of simple small-town folk but how many of those interviewed lived in the town? worked there? what kinds of jobs? there was a suggestion that there were a lot of retirees just chilling out but then it's also clearly a dying small town that people were moving away from even before a cult (we're told - i believe only by sheela or niren - that a lot of the houses they bought had been sitting on the market for a while, but like everything else this is not contextualized or cross-examined). and some of the people in the file footage were way younger than retirement age. was there some middling local economic base that was slipping? a small tool and die shop that employed ten people but then closed? did they all commute out to the hills to work as ranch hands for the people later interviewed in the doc...? how many people were really left at the end, if so many moved away?

clearly on some level i would just have been better off with a book than with a documentary series, but i do think this one exposes some pitfalls of the "just put them on camera and let all sides tell their version of the truth" format. six hours later, i'm not sure i actually understand anything that happened, nor do i have the tools to sift through and weigh the competing claims in a way i'd trust.

I agree with all the points you made; I kept losing threads and feeling vaguely annoyed that lots of things were getting 'lost' but there was too much 'look at THIS' to remember what was being pushed aside.

I think they tried too much or couldn't resist some of the interview subjects they had. Like for example, if they didn't have Niren and the FBI/US attorney guys, they could get away with "but all along the government had been building a case and then it came down like a hammer." But with so much lawyering sprinkled in, we have the bits and pieces of a procedural, without the... procedure.

This was interesting.

The thing that struck me was the obvious hokiness and cultural crassness of the cult: things like calling the cafe 'Zorba the Buddha', having parts of the commune with ostentatious names like 'Jesus Grove', 'Lao Tzu Annexe' etc. Sheela and Osho's ridiculous presentational style, reaching for gravitas and failing. The fact that he's called Osho because of course he's also a Zen master as well as a Hindu sage; the fact that he's clearly loaded and the 'Bringing spirituality and materialism together' line as a weak cover for that.

The brief flash of the Christian abstinence camp that took over the site was grim also, also crass and hoky, and there again they're advertising their abstinence camp using clips of sexy girls in bikinis diving into swimming pools.

I now think if I was going to start a cult a winning strategy would be to bombard potential recruits with SEX but also SPIRITUALITY and kind of create a cognitive dissonance, I suppose it fries people's brains.

Holy Hell is another very good cult doc, covering a smaller group with more from the escapees.

Back to the whole Jesus plus Zen plus Hinduism plus plus throw it all in 'aesthetic' the Rajneesh lot had going on, I find that really interesting in that they're basically claiming Baghwan has read and digested all these complex, varied and contradictory traditions so you don't have to, now just follow Baghwan's orders and run around with no clothes on.

i could only watch a few episodes of this. just despised the smarmy, oblivious cult fucks too damn much. any people who can come into conflict with PNW conservative hicks and make the latter seem like the good guys are beyond caring about. wish someone would've poisoned them

wish someone would've poisoned them

because turnabout is fair play?

Something about rural Oregon attracts morons.

Late in his career, Les Zaitz, the Oregonian reporter interviewed in the series, did much of the reporting on the occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, so, yeah.

Almost none of the occupiers at Malhuer were from Oregon. They may have been attracted, but they came from Nevada, Arizona, Montana, Idaho and similar places.