Popular Netflix series 'Wild Wild Country' happened by accident
The directors behind the popular Netflix documentary Wild Wild Country revealed the accidental origins of the series, which follows an Indian religious leader, Rajneesh, and his followers descending on a small town in Oregon.
Maclain and Chapman Way revealed on Megyn Kelly Today that they were making a film, “The Battered Bastards of Baseball,” about their actor grandfather Bing Russell’s sports team and stumbled across the story.
Maclain Way told Megyn Kelly, “It was an incredible story. We did a documentary on a baseball team called the Portland Mavericks in 2014, and we had this licensed footage from this film repository in Portland, Oregon, called the Oregon Historical Society. And one day I was talking to an archivist there, and he said, “I have 525 raw U-matic tapes on the most bizarre story that ever happened in Oregon.”
However, that didn’t initially persuade the pair to pursue the story. The archivist told the filmmakers about the wild story, which involves bussing in thousands of homeless people, one of the largest poisoning cases in U.S. history, and attempted murder plots.
Way added, “We were almost doubting him at first because it seemed like it was a story we would’ve known about growing up or at least have heard about. … When we started getting the footage back, just visually as documentary filmmakers, we knew we could tell the story.”
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