His new movie, the midcentury lesbian romance Carol, just debuted at Cannes, but Todd Haynes is already planning his next foray into sumptuously photographed dissatisfied women. According to IndieWire, the director is planning a TV limited series based on The Source Family, the real-life hippie cult profiled in the 2013 documentary of the same name.
The Source Family began as a meditation group that met in the back of a popular health-food restaurant in L.A. before its leader, an ex-petty thief named Jim Baker, established a commune, changed his name first to Father Yod, then to Ya Ho Wa, and took multiple members of the Family as his wives, as cult leaders tend to do. Yod/Ya Ho Wa died in a hang-gliding accident in Hawaii in 1975, and the Family dissipated shortly thereafter; today, its greatest legacy is the musical output of the Family’s in-house rock band, YaHoWa 13, beloved amongst record nerds for its fractured, unstructured approach to psychedelic music.
No date or network has been set for Haynes’ Source Family series. But it will probably have to wait until after his Peggy Lee biopic, set to star Reese Witherspoon as a different sort of glassy-eyed blonde.