Heaven’s Gate Videotape Surfaces, Goes Hollywood

For sale: The exclusive ramblings of Bo and Peep. Coming soon, maybe, to a video store near you.

Filmed in 1976 when he still had a full head of hair and she was very much alive, the tape that the leaders of the Heaven’s Gate cult called their “last statement” surfaced recently in an Oklahoma video vault.

It is believed to be the only authorized video featuring Peep--she was the real leader of the messianic cult before she died in the mid-1980s--and it’s all there, the genesis of the philosophy that ultimately led to mass suicide: Sex is bad. Dogs are unworthy of “the literal heavens.” UFOs are the way to ascend to the “next kingdom.”

So who will bid what?

It was, of course, altogether predictable that the bizarre Heaven’s Gate saga would spawn every kind of proposal for movies, documentaries and television series. Many were breathlessly announced soon after the bodies of Marshall Herff Applewhite and 38 disciples were discovered two months ago in a Rancho Santa Fe mansion and, for the most part, remain “in development.”

The twist is the discovery of the tape and the revelation that Applewhite and Bonnie Lu Nettles Trousdale, who had consistently urged their followers to renounce all things material, had themselves opted years ago to go Hollywood.

Per the contract they drew up in Oklahoma, the two-hour video was kept under wraps for 21 years, under seal until 30 days after “departure,” when the producer who had quietly kept it all that time notified his Beverly Hills lawyer of the potential blockbuster.

Now the attorney and the William Morris Agency have big plans for the video. They see it as a network TV special. Then--what else?--they hope to sell it to every household in the world with a VCR.

Cashing in on death?

“We look at it as business,” said the attorney, Jerry Weinstein, whose firm, Weinstein and Hart, has long specialized in representing the estates of dead celebrities, among them Fred Astaire, Bruce Lee, and Bud Abbott and Lou Costello.

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It is his legal duty under the contract, Weinstein said, to make as much money as possible for Applewhite’s and Trousdale’s heirs, whoever and wherever they may be.

Under the deal, the heirs get 40 cents on the dollar. “Wait until they hear about this,” Weinstein said.

The rest goes to the Oklahoma-based producer and distributor, a longtime client of Weinstein, and to the lawyer and the Morris agency.

Though its market appeal is untested, those in the know believe it will be a hit. “It is to my knowledge the only extant video of the two of them,” said Dick Joslyn, 48, who was with the cult for some 15 years and became Applewhite’s close aide before leaving in 1990. He is now making plans from his Tampa, Fla., home for a nationwide speaking tour about his experiences.

The video was made during a period when Applewhite and Trousdale believed they could be killed any moment and later resurrected as a “demonstration” of the truth of their message, according to Robert Balch, a University of Montana sociologist who infiltrated the cult for a few months in 1975 and has since written articles about it.

“In those days they thought they were going to be assassinated,” Balch said.

To that end, as Applewhite says in the opening minutes of the tape, members wanted to “leave record” for “those people who care to know what we were about.”

Before they ever sat down in a television studio, however, Applewhite and Trousdale went to extraordinary lengths to commit to writing the terms and conditions of the deal--particularly for two people who preached that “the truth” meant discarding the vestiges of human activity.

In Tulsa, Okla., amid their wanderings, they signed a typed two-page contract on April 7, 1976. It called for them to produce a video titled “An Informal Session with Bo and Peep” and details the 60/40 split of any money received. He signed it as “Bo,” she as “Peep.”

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Two weeks later, on April 21, they signed a two-page addendum that made clear the video was to be kept in storage until 30 days after “departure.” The addendum also required that Applewhite and Trousdale receive an annual financial statement from the distributor.

On May 3, in a letter apparently written by the local attorney who put the deal together, Applewhite and Trousdale announced that the name of the video was to be changed. The new title: “The Last Statement of Bo and Peep (The Two) Before Their Departure From Earth.”

“The new title will have greater impact and be more effective from an advertising and news media standpoint,” the letter said.

The tape itself was made the day the contract was signed, on April 7. Applewhite says so, at the top of the show.

In the tape, Applewhite and Trousdale are seated at a white round table, facing an audience made up of other cult members, according to Joslyn, who said he was there. Applewhite does virtually all the talking, first delivering a half-hour lecture, then responding to questions.

Trousdale, who has a round face and bobbed hair, speaks only at the end. Talking in a soft twang reflecting her Texas roots, she reads a four-page summary that blasts the apostle Paul for distorting the teachings of Jesus.

Applewhite only vaguely resembles the balding, big-eared, wide-eyed man captured in the farewell videotape the Heaven’s Gate members made just a few weeks ago. He has a full head of brown hair, just turning gray, that sweeps over his forehead.

Throwing adoring glances at Trousdale, Applewhite refers to her as “my father,” saying she is “higher-ranking in the next level.”

Occasionally Applewhite wipes sweat off his upper lip with a tissue. But at all times he seems calm, measured, almost mesmerizing. He has an answer for every question, no matter how bizarre.

For instance, about halfway through the tape, a woman asks from the audience: “Why hasn’t the chief of chiefs destroyed Lucifer?”

“Germination requires both poles,” meaning good and evil, Applewhite explains, adding that it is a “gift” to have the influence of the devil on earth, as a test of faith.

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Though most media accounts in the wake of the mass suicides--even those that followed last week’s suicide of another cult member--touched on the more unusual elements of the group’s philosophy, Applewhite and Trousdale stress in the video that they carry “the identical truth that Jesus brought to human beings 2000 years ago.”

That truth, according to Applewhite, is that only humans, not dogs--which are lower life forms, he points out--can ascend to heaven, a literal, physical space where one inhabits one’s familiar body and “goodness” prevails.

And that getting there means riding “spacecrafts or flying saucers or whatever appropriate label you think they might have.”

And, most important, to be ready for the ride, one must “trade all desires that you had at the human level for one single desire, becoming a member of the next level.”

Obstacles must be overcome, he says, offering these tips: Stop having sex, which wastes energy. And avoid “sorcery,” the “technique of abuse of the mind” practiced by an “army of discarnates.”

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Seek instead, he says, to connect with a member of the next level for guidance. Applewhite adds, in a comment that reflects the influence of the TV show “Laugh In” and ‘70s popular culture and foreshadows the group’s later embrace of “Star Trek” and other TV shows: “You’re saying to the minds of the next level, ‘Sock it to me!’ ”

Near the end of the video, Applewhite says that there is a common sense way to make sure he and Trousdale are the real deal: There’s two of them.

“If there was only one, you would know we were so insane that we should quickly be locked up,” Applewhite says. “But for two to be so totally insane and in the same direction is a very rare thing.”