“With Great Power, Comes Great Responsibility”: A Perspective on <em>Wild Wild Country</em> and Television News Footage Citation in the Epic Documentary

Abstract

"With Great Power, Comes Great Responsibility"A Perspective on Wild Wild Country and Television News Footage Citation in the Epic Documentary Bill Goetz (bio) In addition to daily print, radio, and online journalism, television news captures its own first rough-draft version of history 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Often, the broadcast photographer's ability and intuition to be in the right place at the right time produce the kind of reportage that can be quite visceral, revealing the depth and complexity of human nature. Documentaries that focus on the people and events of the last seventy years—a period broadly covered by local, network, and cable television news—are regularly shown on cable networks and public television and streamed via platforms such as Netflix. Their stories, which vary widely in subject matter, are often told through excerpts from originally broadcast TV news reports and sometimes from rare caches of unedited 16mm news film and news tape footage. One of the most extensive uses of local television news footage can be seen in the recent Emmy Award–winning Netflix docuseries Wild Wild Country (2018), directed and produced by brothers Chapman and Maclain Way. Wild Wild Country is an epic documentary project in terms of both the story it tells and the time needed to watch all six episodes (6 hours 43 minutes). What cannot be seen is any citation for the many TV news organizations that originally filmed the people and events essential to production of the docuseries. Fair use may somehow permit the lack of complete attribution, but the sheer volume and the unique qualities of the footage cannot help but prompt fair questions: who was responsible for the original news reports, and where did they come from? To understand why the missing citations appear so conspicuous requires a familiarity with the story Wild Wild Country tells, an explanation of how effectively and broadly TV news clips are used, and how the news material came to be filmed and preserved. But, once elucidated, additional questions come up regarding the filmmakers' responsible and extensive use of TV news materials in a project of such enormous length and depth. Wild Wild Country is the story of Indian mystic Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and the efforts of his disciples to transform a desolate and rugged sixty-three-thousand-acre ranch in Central Oregon into Rajneeshpuram, a town with its own housing, shopping mall, airport, restaurants, police force, sustainable farm, and huge meditation hall that could accommodate thousands. This enormous enterprise was a massive story during its time (1981–86) with intensive television coverage by reporters and photographers from the Pacific Northwest, as well as from American and foreign network TV correspondents. The Way brothers' retelling of the saga of the Bhagwan and the Rajneeshees includes not just the transformation of the Big Muddy Ranch into an innovative religious experiment and self-sustaining "utopian" community but [End Page 50] also its impact on the neighboring small town of Antelope (population forty) and its mostly retired citizens. This truth-is-stranger-than-fiction saga eventually involved conflicts with state and federal authorities, arson, assassination attempts, immigration fraud, wiretapping, and the food poisoning of 751 people in the city of The Dalles, Oregon, through the deliberate contamination of salad bars at local restaurants with salmonella. It is an epic story in its telling of land use battles, colliding cultures, spiraling mistrust, paranoia, and hostility, and of how the Rajneeshee vision of a utopia in Oregon eventually falls apart. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Wild Wild County publicity illustration. Netflix. As a Eugene, Oregon, television news [End Page 51] photographer who occasionally filmed events in Rajneeshpuram and Antelope, Oregon, between 1984 and 1986, I did experience that peculiar feeling expressed by singer-songwriter Stephen Stills: there was something happening there, and what it was was not exactly clear. To their credit, Maclain and Chapman Way have examined many facets of the Rajneeshee story and conducted revealing interviews with Antelope residents, state and federal officials, and key followers of the Bhagwan. As I watched, I found myself once again feeling as confused as I was while covering the story decades ago...