FORT COLLINS, Colo. -- They were three old high school buddies, aspiring filmmakers with a willing investor and a goal of making a compelling movie.
Their documentary, they decided, would challenge the conspiracy theories surrounding the government's 1993 standoff with the Branch Davidian sect near Waco. It would capitalize on the exposure and insight of an Academy Award-nominated researcher who had done a film on the siege and was considered by some to be an expert on the subject.It would be a quick job: four months, tops. And maybe the filmmakers would dig up some new facts along the way.
"One of my goals was, how much merit was there to this argument?" said Jason Van Vleet, 28.That's how Van Vleet, technical director Aric Johnson and composer Dan Hoeye -- most of the staff at the tiny, independent MGA Entertainment -- approached a new movie with Fort Collins researcher Mike McNulty. McNulty's 1997 documentary, "Waco: The Rules of Engagement," earned an Emmy recently for investigative journalism and an Academy Award nomination for best documentary.
As they researched their soon-to-be released documentary, "Waco: A New Revelation," they became lightning rods for public uproar over the government's handling of the siege, which ended April 19, 1993, with a fire that consumed the sect's compound. The bodies of sect leader David Koresh and at least 80 of his followers, including several children, were found in the charred ruins.
The film builds on assertions in the first documentary and responds to critics of the theory that the government misled the public in its characterization of the events.
Their findings, based partly on the Texas Department of Public Safety's stores of physical evidence from the case, have stirred up a maelstrom on Capitol Hill and prompted pledges by Congress to investigate the matter. McNulty's previous film earned him notoriety in Washington.
"We've got a film that's going to answer questions that you don't even know you should be asking," said Van Vleet's father, Rick Van Vleet, who owns the production company with his son.
None of them is formally schooled in investigation. Neither are they former federal agents or conspiracy theorists with an agenda, they say.
McNulty and Jason Van Vleet, who is directing, producing and helping research the film, were the first private citizens to gain access to tons of evidence collected by the DPS and federal investigators at the scene of the tragedy.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Johnston pushed to give them access to the lockers after months of public-information requests by McNulty and Van Vleet. Johnston has recused himself from any part in further investigations.
The filmmakers have stacks of photographs, diagrams and documents and more than 400 hours of videotape -- crime scene footage from federal investigators, personal interviews and surveillance video. They read thousands of pages of testimony and reviewed 51 days of tapes that recorded negotiations between the Davidians and federal agents.
They interviewed theologians, explosives and infrared experts, witnesses, survivors, former federal employees, attorneys representing the Branch Davidians, and investigators from federal, state and local agencies.
McNulty and Van Vleet say have sent their findings to people in Washington and requested interviews but were declined. The government is defending itself in a wrongful death suit brought by the Branch Davidians.
Their findings, some of which they have turned over to lawmakers pushing for a more thorough examination of the government's role in the siege, include the first public hints that Delta Force, an elite anti-terrorist military unit, may have done more than observe and advise in the operation.
A recent Texas Rangers review of the evidence mentions McNulty's allegations -- which include at least six pyrotechnic "flash-bang" devices mislabeled as silencers and gun parts -- and states that those items will be kept separate for further review when all the evidence is cataloged and shipped to a U.S. district court in Waco.
These devices are in addition to two that the ATF acknowledged in congressional hearings that they used during the initial raid Feb. 28, 1993. Rangers have declined to confirm the presence of those devices. The Van Vleets allowed a reporter to view film footage on the condition that only approved outtakes could be publicized.
The movie asserts that:
Delta Force members fired on the Davidians during the blaze from concealed positions behind armored vehicles, out of sight of the media. Infrared film from a surveillance aircraft shows figures on the ground behind the Bradley fighting vehicles and quick, bright flashes that an analyst characterizes as gunfire.Analyzing that infrared tape is Edward Allard, a former intelligence scientist who has worked with forward-looking infrared film, also known as FLIR, for 20 years. The same footage was shown to members of Congress during hearings in 1995, and was supplied to the Davidians' defense attorneys during 1994 criminal trials.
It was also featured in McNulty's first film. Van Vleet's follow-up documentary takes a closer look at the footage and presents arguments rebutting the FBI's response to it.
The FBI may have engaged in gunfights and used at least six Defense Technologies flash-bang devices -- which spew flames, smoke and heat -- inside the compound in the seconds before the fire broke out. According to evidence that Van Vleet and McNulty found in the Rangers' evidence locker, three of those devices were found at or near the same places that officials said the fires started.
McNulty has made the allegations in interviews, but the Rangers have not offered official comments. But much of what the filmmakers found didn't make the final cut because "we didn't put anything in the movie that we couldn't confirm two, three, four times," Jason Van Vleet said.
Other footage, such as shots of all six flash-bang devices that were found, were left out for esthetic reasons, McNulty said.
"If we put every little thing in the movie, it'll be 12 hours long," he said. "People would fall asleep." Their work has captured the attention of the national news media. Interview requests have flooded their offices for weeks.
But the filmmakers are withholding some details until they stage a premiere, which they hope will be in Washington. They plan to invite Attorney General Janet Reno and John Danforth, a former Republican senator from Missouri whom Reno named as an independent investigator.
The reason?
"We don't want to give any of them a chance to form their public positions before everyone sees it at the same time," said Johnson, 30, who is also sound designer for the film.
McNulty and company already have taken barbs, and Reno publicly denounced their conclusions shortly before appointing Danforth Sept. 9.
Van Fleet had never seen McNulty's documentary when he approached him about the film and was unfamiliar with the details of the Branch Davidian siege.
A week later, he watched the movie and walked away a skeptic with an idea -- answer the unanswered, debunk the implausible, and get to the bottom of what happened at Waco.
"We're not just here to make money," Rick Van Vleet said. "We do have bills to pay, but we realized we could actually do this and do it right. Justice doesn't have to be overburdened if society can figure out how to be fair. That's what we're about."
But the Van Vleets' enthusiasm for the film project was not echoed throughout the studio. Johnson was angry about it. When he was 8, the blockbuster George Lucas film "Star Wars" reinforced his dream of becoming a filmmaker. His father, however, was a federal employee, and Johnson had grown up believing fully in the integrity of the federal government. So he resisted.
"I wasn't prepared to accept anything he had to say," the pony-tailed Johnson said of McNulty. "I was against MGA doing the movie."
But he worked on it because he was a professional, having studied filmmaking at Brigham Young University and completed a stint as art director for the Sundance Film Institute near Park City, Utah.
And then he had an epiphany.
"All along I continued to fight it -- until I saw the actual evidence, the footage, the testimony," Johnson said. "I was forced to admit that there was something very, very dark, very unjust, about the whole engine. Now I'm fully passionate about this project. Personally, I've yet to fully come to terms with it."
The reawakening of public opinion and interest in the issues surrounding Waco has the crew a bit overwhelmed.
They aren't rabble-rousers, they say; they're just normal guys.
"We started out as moviemakers, and in the end, that's all we are; we wanted to make a good movie," said Hoeye, 30, the father of two, who composed original music for the film. "We found a sense of patriotism, and the desire to make a difference."
Johnson, Hoeye and Jason Van Vleet went to high school together in Fort Collins. Hoeye received his music education and composition degree from Colorado State University in Fort Collins. He toured with an a cappella singing group and then resettled in his hometown. Jason Van Vleet is married and has two children. Johnson spent a few years doing social work in North Carolina.
Even McNulty, who has, for the last five years, been needling the federal government over the issue, disavows any extremist philosophies. Rick Van Vleet declines to affiliate himself with a political party and says he has never voted in a primary for that reason.
None of the filmmakers claims to sympathize with Koresh's religious beliefs or practices, or even the way he and the others handled the siege.
"We aren't anti-government," McNulty said. "We believe these agencies need to be here, and they need to be clean and honest, and for one reason: They represent us."
They simply are, they say, moviemakers who started out with an intriguing idea and found a deeper purpose.
McNulty is a firearms and munitions expert who has given expert testimony in California trials and did three tours of duty as a Navy combat photographer in Vietnam. He also spent 11 years in public relations and working on the campaigns of four California Democrats, most notably former Gov. Jerry Brown, in the 1970s.
In their efforts to find answers to questions about the standoff that trouble many Americans, the filmmakers went to firsthand sources for information.
"It had to be an independent, outside investigation," Johnson said. "That was the only way the truth would come out. Part of our story is that we aren't anybody in particular. That's why we found the experts, the people that we found, to tell it for us."
For example, in analyzing the forward-looking infrared film they went to Allard and Maurice Cox, a retired intelligence analyst who worked on military satellite operations. Their assertions have been rebutted by other analysts who have said that the flashes, which Allard says are at a speed of 600 per minute, could be Davidans' bullets ricocheting off the Bradley fighting vehicles.
The FBI has said the flashes are light reflections -- an assertion that Allard and Cox contradict in their film.
Cox employs geometry in the film to demonstrate their rebuttal: That the FLIR plane would have had to circle the compound at a speed of Mach 1.8 to capture reflections in the manner in which the flashes appear on the tape.
The crew has mixed feelings about how the information has played out in the news media, and they anticipate more controversy when the film is released.
They toyed with the idea of dropping the project several times because of its difficulty and sensitivity. But they couldn't force themselves to abandon it, Rick Van Vleet said.
There were too many questions left unanswered by other documentaries, books, trials, hearings and extremist viewpoints, he said.
"We wanted as many questions answered as possible," Rick Van Vleet said. "We kept digging, and digging, and digging, and when we got into the evidence locker, that was it ... I couldn't live with myself if I had walked away from this."