Ratings Gambit

By Frank Rich

GUYANA TRAGEDY: THE STORY OF JIM JONES April 15 and 16, CBS, 9 p.m. E.S.T.

It is hardball time in network land. For the first time in four seasons, CBS has a real chance at regaining the ratings championship it lost to ABC in early 1976. Since the two networks are now in a dead heat, they are unleashing an arsenal of stunts before the season officially ends April 20. ABC has moved up the annual Academy Award telecast (April 14) to an earlier starting hour, 9 p.m. E.S.T., so that more of that perennial ratings juggernaut will play during prime time. ABC will also rerun the hit movie The Sting on April 20, ahead of schedule. Not to be ambushed, CBS has slipped in Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones, a two-part TV movie, just before the closing of the ratings season. Should this show prove a smash one-two punch, CBS may once more be known as "the Tiffany of the networks."

Guyana Tragedy, which has been adapted by Ernest Tidyman from the Washington Post's quickie book on the Jonestown massacre, is as refined as it can be under the circumstances. There are some name actors (Ned Beatty, Colleen Dewhurst, LeVar Burton, James Earl Jones, Veronica Cartwright) in the cast, though several only have walk-on roles. The re-creations of the story's pivotal events are skillful enough to jog one's memories of the infamous TV news footage. Yet CBS may have erred on the side of caution. The movie's lengthy, dutiful depictions of Jones' early yearsas a child in Indiana, as a civil libertarian preacher in Indianapolis and the San Francisco areaprovide too many unassimilated facts and details. There really is no point in recounting the minutiae of a madman's life if, after four hours, it is still impossible to understand how Jones became a sex-and-drug-crazed megalomaniac or why his misfit followers so easily accepted his larcenous and sadistic behavior.

Most of the action in Guyana occurs in the final half-hour of each installment. In Part 1, there is a climax that makes Dallas look like Washington Square: having already had an affair with a married female follower (Diana Scarwid), Jones starts to make love to the woman's husband (Brad Dourif) as she looks on. One's mind reels merely in contemplation of the efforts it no doubt took to get the scene past the network's censors. In Part 2, things get going when Congressman Leo Ryan (Beatty) arrives to investigate the Peoples Temple. The airstrip murders and subsequent mass suicides are as graphic as one can stomach.

The eerieness of the final slaughter is heightened not only by its verisimilitude, but by the movie's one extraordinary performance. A young actor named Powers Boothe captures all the paranoia, sexual magnetism, hysteria, rage and even intelligence of "Dad" Jim Jones. His final incantations to the dyingdelivered in a feverish but strangely disembodied voicecreate a more deathly mood than all the corpses piling up onscreen. If Writer Tidyman had only matched Boothe's talent with a complexly written role, Guyana Tragedy would be as notable as drama as it is as ratings gambit.

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