It’s a true story that, nearly 30 years later, is still stranger than fiction. In March 1997, members of the Heaven’s Gate cult visited a Carlsbad, California, restaurant for their last supper—identical orders of iced tea, salad, turkey pot pie, and cheesecake. Days later, everyone sitting around the table would be found dead in a home in nearby Rancho Santa Fe, a secluded, wealthy part of San Diego otherwise known for decorative citrus orchards, horse stables, and its elite country club. What remains the largest mass suicide in the US left 39 people dead. Later that year, it was parodied by Will Ferrell on Saturday Night Live and referenced by Jodie Foster in the sci-fi film Contact. Now the story of the cult is fictionalized in The Leader, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival on Friday, June 5.
Tim Blake Nelson and Vera Farmiga play founders Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles, respectively; Applewhite, a Texas music teacher, met Nettles in the early 1970s at a psychiatric institution where she worked as a nurse. They first went by the names Bo and Peep, then rebranded to using Do (pronounced “doe”) and Ti—names inspired in part by Nettles’s love for The Sound of Music.
Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie NettlesBettmann/Getty Images
The platonic pair began telling people they were extraterrestrial beings sent to Earth to guide humanity to the next level of existence. In September 1975, Applewhite visited a small town in Oregon to lecture its residents about how and why UFOs were visiting Earth. According to The New York Times, the cult leader was able to convince 20 of the roughly 150 people in attendance at the talk to take action and join Heaven’s Gate. (Nothing suggests the name is connected to Michael Cimino’s notorious 1980 box office flop of the same name.)
Dozens who believed the couple abandoned their lives, dropped out of polite society, and joined the cult. “A score of persons…have disappeared,” Walter Cronkite said on the October 8, 1975, episode of CBS Evening News. “It’s a mystery whether they’ve been taken on a so-called trip to eternity—or simply been taken.”
After stints in various states including New Mexico and Colorado, the group eventually settled in California. According to The Washington Post, Applewhite, the son of a Presbyterian minister, had been fired as a music professor at the University of St. Thomas in 1970 after administrators learned he was in a relationship with a male student. He and Nettles didn’t preach free love, instead advocating for total sexual abstinence among their followers, two of whom are played by Simon Rex and Jim Parsons. Seemingly to help stave off temptation, a half dozen of the 18 male cult members who died had been surgically castrated, according to The New York Times, including Applewhite.
