Chapman Way and Maclain Way were finishing work on "The Battered Bastards of Baseball," their 2014 documentary about the Portland Mavericks baseball team, when an archivist at the Oregon Historical Society asked what they were doing next.

The two weren't sure. As grandsons of Bing Russell, actor-turned-owner of the Portland Mavericks, it wasn't a stretch that the brothers would make a documentary about the colorful team, which entertained baseball fans from 1973 through 1977.

Then, Chapman recalls, archivist Matthew Cowan started talking about the hundreds of hours of footage the historical society had, about "the craziest story in the history of the state of Oregon."

The more Cowan told them about the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and his followers in rural Oregon, the weirder it all seemed, Chapman says.

"To be honest, Mac and I were thinking, 'we don't think he has this story correct,'" says Chapman, 31.

A guru from India, followers who built a city, assassination attempts on Oregon officials, busing in homeless people to vote, poisoning residents of The Dalles? It sounded bizarre, Maclain, 27, says.

But then the brothers, who live in Los Angeles, started digitizing the footage from the historical society. They were struck by the visuals, and the story that emerged, and they decided telling this tale would be their next project, which turned into the six-part Netflix docuseries, "Wild Wild Country."

"We found it so visually interesting, all these people in red going to the Oregon desert to build a city," Maclain says. "It was so complicated and in-depth, we wanted to do it in long-form," rather than try to cram everything into a feature-length running time.

For new interviews, the brothers decided right away that they wanted to speak to Ma Anand Sheela, as she was known when she was the Bhagwan's chief aide and spokesperson.

"She's just an incredible character," says Chapman. "So outspoken and fierce and bold."

The brothers went to Switzerland to interview Sheela, who's now known as Sheela Birnstiel, and operates two homes for the aged and mentally disabled.

"She's very successful," says Chapman. "Which doesn't surprise me."

The brothers spent five days in Switzerland, hearing Sheela give her version of how she came to be a follower of the Bhagwan and how the group traveled from India to Oregon, to create their supposedly ideal community of Rajneeshpuram, on property outside of Antelope.

Getting veterans of both sides of the Rajneeshpuram/Oregon conflict to revisit those contentious days wasn't easy. Both "feel like they've been burned, time and time again," Chapman says, "because the story is so easily sensationalized."

The brothers found a characteristic shared by veterans of the Portland Mavericks and sannyasins, as the Bhagwan's followers were known.

"Like the Mavericks, the sannyasins say this was the most important thing that had happened to them in their lives," Chapman says. "Even though it ended in a failure of epic proportions."

It was almost as difficult to get rural Oregonians to "participate and trust us," says Maclain. "It was an incredibly traumatic experience in their lives, and they didn't want to relive it."

It was tricky, Maclain says, delving into a subject "where both sides are willing to call the other side 'pure evil.'"

Making "Wild Wild Country" a six-part docuseries was essential, Maclain says, "because we needed that bigger canvas. We wanted to give every perspective full weight."

It was also important to the brothers to tell this story to viewers who might have no knowledge of it. Though the events happened in 1981 through 1985, the conflicts touch on contemporary concerns, including separation of church and state, freedom of religion and the temptation, as Maclain says, to "demonize the other side."

"Wild Wild Country" streams on Netflix beginning March 16.

-- Kristi Turnquist

kturnquist@oregonian.com

503-221-8227

@Kristiturnquist