Southeast Iowa Union offers audio versions of articles using Instaread. Some words may be mispronounced.

FAIRFIELD – The next chapter in the Fairfield History Series will premiere the weekend of June 20-22 at the Fairfield Arts & Convention Center.

Fair Field Production’s latest documentary is called “When Maharishi Came to Town,” and it’s about the arrival of Maharishi International University to Fairfield in 1974, setting up shop in the campus vacated by Parsons College the year before. The three showings at the arts center that weekend will all be free and open to the public, with the first two showings on Friday and Saturday starting at 7:30 p.m., and the Sunday matinee beginning at 3 p.m.

Producer and Director Dick DeAngelis said this film is not intended to be a history of MIU, but rather a snapshot focusing on the first few years of the college after its move from Santa Barbara, California to Southeast Iowa. DeAngelis interviewed both people affiliated with the university and native Fairfielders, who talk about their first impressions of their new neighbors.

The university’s first president, Dr. Robert Keith Wallace, is among those featured, as is another key player during this transitional phase, former bank president and chairman of Fairfield Chamber of Commerce Gordon Aistrope. Aistrope was among the first Fairfield residents who learned Transcendental Meditation, and DeAngelis noted that about 200 Fairfield residents learned TM in the year after MIU arrived.

Nathan Dilley is interviewed about his father, Rev. Dilley of the Presbyterian Church who learns to meditate and attempts to persuade his congregation that TM is not a religion and not an attack on Christianity, at a time when pastors at eight local churches declared that TM was “witchcraft.”

DeAngelis also talks to Fairfield natives Ron Hunerdosse, Ralph Messerli, and Martha Rasmussen, wife of then Fairfield Mayor Bob Rasmussen. He interviews people who were involved in moving MIU to Iowa but who haven’t been involved in the movement for 50 years.

This film promises to educate everyone who views it, “even people who have been around TM a long time,” DeAngelis said, like those who came to Fairfield for the Taste of Utopia conference in 1983.

“This is before the domes,” DeAngelis said about the time period covered in the film. “This is about those first people and why they came here. What was it like? How did the town react? I don’t want to tell the whole 50-year story. I just want to tell how it started, because that’s historically relevant, and it will be historically relevant 20 years from now.”

“When Maharishi Came to Town” is the sixth film in the Fairfield History Series, which began in 2017 with the film “Life Before Fairfield.” DeAngelis said he had originally planned to make eight films in the series, though today he’s leaning toward stopping after seven.

DeAngelis is responsible for creating the film’s storyline, planning the interviews, and writing and voicing the narrations that can be heard. His production team includes Jason Strong as director of photography, Amine Kouider as editor, Tim Britton as sound director, and Ariel Sewall as assistant to the director. He also received a pleasant surprise from fellow documentarian and photographer Paul Saltzman, who followed the Beatles on their retreat with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in Rishikesh, India. DeAngelis said the rights to Saltzman’s photos of the Beatles in India normally cost $1,000 per image, but Saltzman agreed to let DeAngelis include them in his film for free.

Production of the film hit a bump in the road when, after receiving nearly $30,000 in a Humanities Project Impact Grant, the newly formed federal Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) canceled the grant on April 2. DeAngelis was later told he might see some of that money, but so far it hasn’t come. In the meantime, he’s got bills to pay, and a movie to finish.

“I’ve even taken some of my own money to cover bills to make this happen,” DeAngelis said. “I got to the point where I had nowhere else to go, and I came to our donors and said, ‘Help!’ And just as this community always does, it has come through.”

DeAngelis said in late May that he needed a bare minimum of $10,000 to finish the film, and he had received close to $7,000. He said he doesn’t want to focus on the politics of DOGE nor does he want to divide people. Instead, he hopes this episode will show the generosity of the film’s supporters.

“The Fairfield History Series is about bringing people together through knowledge and art,” he said.