by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
A Man Called God is a remarkable movie that has its roots in the
1970’s in the careers of two men: Blaxploitation actor Christopher St. John and his son Kristoff. Christopher’s best-known credit is probably as the leader of the “Lummumbas,” the Black
nationalist group who work with Black detective John Shaft (Richard Roundtree)
to rescue the kidnapped daughter of a Black businessman in the original 1971 Shaft. He was married to a white actress and had a son,
Kristoff; then they broke up and he married another white actress, Maria, and
the couple raised Kristoff. In 1972 Christopher St. John wrote, produced,
directed and starred in Top of the Heap, about a Black police officer who harbored a Walter Mitty-esque dream
to be the first African-American to become an astronaut and visit the moon — A
Man Called God contains a film clip from
this which suggests it might be a movie worth seeing — only he got a reputation
in Hollywood as a troublemaker and got blacklisted (at least that’s what his
son says in the narration to A Man Called God; the usual legend is that the formal blacklist was
over by 1972 but it’s entirely possible that the underground blacklists, the
subtle don’t-hire lists that had circulated in Hollywood for decades, did in
the elder St. John’s career). At loose ends, Christopher and Maria St. John
drifted into an involvement with Eastern religion and eventually became
devotees of a guru named Sathya Sai Baba.
For anyone whose mental image of an
Indian guru is an old guy with long hair and an unkempt beard — the appearance
of Paramhansa Yogananda, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Meher Baba and Bhagwan
Shree Rajneesh — the first sight of Sai Baba in this movie is going to be
startling: he was baby-faced, clean-shaven and, quite frankly, looked more African
than Indian: he had a broad nose and his hair was in a tall “natural.” He
always dressed in an orange robe — at least during his public appearances — and
he taught what a writer for Creem
magazine, covering the movement of Guru Maharaj Ji (the teenage guru who
briefly emerged in the early 1970’s being promoted by his mother, who later
fired him and replaced him with his elder brother; the reason a rock magazine
like Creem was interested in him
was that part of his entourage
was a promising young rock musician named Freddie Mercury, who later became the
lead singer and one of the two principal songwriters for Queen), called “the
usual Hindu-based snake oil.” Actually, though its roots were clearly in
Hinduism (which is, after all, the oldest of the world’s religions with a
current mass following), Sai Baba claimed to be synthesizing all the world’s
major religions in his teachings. He also — and this is where the title of the
movie comes from — literally
claimed to be God on Earth and to have (presumably in a previous incarnation)
fathered Jesus Christ. Christopher and Maria St. John got so involved in Sai
Baba’s organization that they ended up living in his main ashram in Puttaparthi, India — the tiny village where Sai
Baba had been born and which turned into a major religious center as his
movement grew. Because he had moviemaking experience, Christopher St. John was
hired by Sai Baba to make a documentary film that would hopefully recruit more
people to the movement. He brought filmmaking equipment and shot many of the
activities around the compound until he was abruptly ordered to leave — A
Man Called God starts out with his being
thrown out of the ashram, hints
at dark secrets the St. Johns had found out about the guru that made him want
to get rid of them, and the rest of the film describes the story of their
relationship with the movement.
The bulk of the film consists of the footage
Christopher St. John shot during his months at the ashram, which came to an abrupt end right after Sai Baba’s
elaborate 55th birthday celebration in November 1980; when Sai Baba
threw him out he demanded that St. John leave all his film behind, but in a
daring escape his son (who co-wrote the script with Marc Clebanoff and delivers
the narration in first-person) compared to the film Midnight Express, the elder St. John got the film out of India with
him and resettled in Hollywood — where the footage sat for over two decades
until his son finally hit on the idea of making a movie out of it and telling
his own tale of his life in the ashram and how and why it ended. Kristoff St. John and Marc Clebanoff (who’s
credited on the postcard announcing the film merely as co-editor but clearly
had a key role in writing the script and working out the film’s overall
structure) build a quite good suspense story out of the experience and his
dad’s old footage (it’s because virtually everything we see was shot by
Christopher St. John that he is officially credited as director, even though
the film’s IMDb.com page lists Kristoff as the director). At first they show
the positive aspects of Sai Baba’s movement, including the enormous amount of
money they put into hospital construction and social improvements around India
in general and Puttaparthi in particular — for once, you think, one of these gurus
actually shows a sign of giving a damn about the grinding poverty afflicting
much of the human race and especially much of his home country — and it’s only
later that Kristoff and Clebanoff start dropping hints of the darker side of
the story. Kristoff, who in the old footage is shown wearing Indian shirts and
a “natural” of his own that makes him look more like Sai Baba’s son than
Christopher St. John’s, recalls how dazzled he was by Sai Baba’s purported
power to materialize objects, including rings, medallions and sacred vibhuti ash, out of thin air. As a boy in Sai Baba’s ashram, Kristoff was jazzed when Sai Baba gave him a silver
medallion he had supposedly created out of thin air; only years later, after
his and his family’s disillusionment, did Kristoff realize that this was a
simple sleight-of-hand trick that any stage magician could do (which reminded
me of Harry Houdini’s famous campaign against phony spiritualists, and in
particular the $10,000 reward he offered to any spiritualist or medium who
could do something Houdini could not duplicate himself with his skills as a
stage magician — needless to say, nobody ever collected).Things got worse as
hundreds of thousands of people, mostly from India but also from all over the
world, thronged the ashram for
the three weeks of celebration before Sai Baba’s birthday in 1980 — and
Christopher St. John, with his film credits as both actor and director, was
ordered to direct a play about Jesus Christ (Sai Baba’s son, remember? At least
to the true believers!).
Though Kristoff recalls that there were certain parts
of the ashram he and his crew
were not allowed to film, they did
get to record one of the rehearsals for this play — the scene in which Jesus is
throwing the moneylenders out of the Temple (you remember) — which looks as
wretched as you’d expect given that he was working with a nonprofessional cast
and an awfully stiff script (the film hints, though it doesn’t come right out
and say, that Sai Baba wrote it himself). Around this time [spoiler
alert!] someone else, a pre-pubescent boy,
came to Kristoff with a story that Sai Baba had lured him into his private room
and, under the guise of doing a “purification” ritual called “genital oiling,”
jacked him off and forced him to suck the guru’s cock. Kristoff believed it
instantly because Sai Baba had similarly molested him, and after it was over had sworn him to secrecy and
told him never to tell anyone, even his parents. As narrated on screen, the
molestations didn’t sound all that different from the sorts of things Roman
Catholic priests had been doing during all those long years that even the
priests who weren’t molesting
kids were covering for those who did, but there’s a difference between a
pedophile who’s part of a hierarchy that’s supposed to be supervising him and making sure these things
don’t happen (or are dealt with properly, quickly and definitively when they
do) and a pedophile who’s also the unchallenged head of a religious movement
with millions of followers worldwide who literally think he’s God. Indeed, A Man Called God opens with a montage of similarly destructive cult leaders, including Jim
Jones, Marshall Applewhite of Heaven’s Gate, and Bhagwan — as well as some like
David Koresh whose transgressions against his followers included sexual exploitation.
(Kristoff missed one particularly intriguing parallel: Joseph Smith, Jr., the
founder of the Mormon Church, who when he wanted a younger, hotter wife than
the one he’d married legally simply declared that it was the new doctrine of
his church that men not only could but should marry more than one wife.) More recently there’s
been the Vanity Fair exposé of
Bikram Chaudhury, founder of the Bikram school of yoga, who didn’t go after
kids but did lure 20-something
women to his movement with promises of training them to be yoga teachers and
then, at least according to the Vanity Fair article, got them alone and out-and-out raped them.
Though Sai Baba died in 2011 (Kristoff, leading a Q&A after the screening,
was asked if he and his dad deliberately waited until the guru died before
starting the film about him, but he said they had already got it underway while
Sai Baba was still alive, albeit in ill health and clearly on his way out), his
pedophile exploits did get
exposed during his lifetime in TV documentaries produced by the public
broadcasting company of Denmark in 2002 and the BBC in 2004. The BBC film, The
Secret Swami, claimed that there were
hundreds of boys who had been victimized by Sai Baba, but that they and their
parents wouldn’t complain to the law because so many of the most powerful
people in India were members of Sai Baba’s faith. Kristoff and Clebanoff
include clips from The Secret Swami
in A Man Called God, including a
chilling interview the BBC did with one of Sai Baba’s most powerful non-Indian
devotees, Isaac Tigrett, founder and owner of the Hard Rock Café and House of
Blues chains. (Ironically, Kristoff was staying at a Hard Rock Inn during his
trip to San Diego to show his movie.) Tigrett is shown being asked if his
attitude towards Sai Baba would change if it was established that the guru was
a pedophile who was regularly molesting pre-pubescent boys — and Tigrett
replied that it wouldn’t make a difference because Sai Baba had done so much
good in the world that compared to that, even if he had molested kids, it wouldn’t matter to him. A
Man Called God had a definite streak of
homophobia in that it suggested that Sai Baba had relationships with adult men
as well, and Kristoff’s writing seemed to reflect a view that this was part of
the same moral evil that caused the guru to molest him and other boys at the
Puttaparthi ashram — he doesn’t
come right out and say that Sai Baba was a bad man because he was Gay, but the
hint was there and it was strong enough to annoy me. In the where-are-they-now
epilogue, Kristoff tells the story of Satyajit Sailan, who after Sai Baba’s
death filed a lawsuit challenging the claims of Baba’s relatives on his $9
billion estate and saying that the guru had meant it to be left in trust and
administered by Sailan, whom Kristoff claims was not only Baba’s aide but also
his boyfriend.
Though I could have wished for a bit more material in A
Man Called God about what attracted people
in general and the St. Johns in particular to Baba’s cult (to me that’s the most
interesting aspect of cult stories: why do people get involved in these things
in the first place; and once they’re involved, how do they rationalize staying
in even as they learn some of the cult’s darker secrets?), the film as it
stands is a chilling tale which alleges that Sai Baba’s crimes didn’t stop at
raping boys; he also had his security people (some of whom are shown in the
film in rather grainy still photos — and they look as fearsome and intimidating
as you’d expect) simply murder people who were in his way, confident that his
connections with some of the most powerful people in India would ensure that
these crimes would never even be investigated, much less prosecuted. There’s
also a sense of tragedy in that Maria St. John was so convinced that Sai Baba
was a righteous man and a legitimate spiritual leader that she not only refused
to believe her stepson’s tale that the guru had molested him (would she have
been more likely to believe him if he’d been her flesh-and-blood son instead of
her stepson, I wondered), and when her husband and stepson were thrown out she
refused to leave, camping out on the outside of the ashram, pleading for an audience with Baba and leaving only
when those hefty, intimidating security guards told her to get out or they’d do
her bodily harm. Like most cult stories, A Man Called God is another illustration of how power corrupts and
absolute power corrupts absolutely; once you’re surrounded by people who literally believe you’re a prophet, or a god, or some other
sort of “special” person (the entourages of celebrities, especially notoriously
reclusive ones like Michael Jackson, are not that different from the literal
cult shown in this film), and who have essentially granted you the power of
life and death over them, they will do just about anything to stay in your good graces — and you’d have to be
an extraordinarily humble and saintly human being not to take advantage of that for some sinister purpose
or another: financial, ideological (there’s a sequence in the Baba camp that
was strikingly like the scenes of the tents in Nuremberg where people were
staying for the Nazi rally in Triumph of the Will, and later Kristoff and Clebanoff use a clip from Triumph of Hitler being driven in triumph, in the literal
sense with which the Romans used the word, through the city’s streets) or
sexual.
