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The production of How Should We Then Live? was intense. Over the two years it took to make, the crew paid for my inexperience, not least because I hired a middle-aged Swiss-American former L’Abri student to direct the series. (He had once been a commercial director in New York.) It was a decision we all soon bitterly regretted.
I should have been fired for hiring him. I did so because I was insecure and wanted “my” director to be someone I could control. And of course, being an overconfident smartass, I also thought I knew it all, and that this man was a “real artist,” unlike “some American evangelical that Billy Zeoli might foist on us,” as I told Dad.
The only thing our director was really good at was stroking my young ego. Ironically, when at last he was fired by Billy Zeoli, for not shooting the script on time and on budget—the episodes wouldn’t cut, there were huge gaps, and he was refusing to show us his dailies, so no one knew how much of a mess we were in—I took over as director! It was a very undeserved promotion, no doubt all the more galling to our crew of professionals because of the naked nepotism involved.
When How Should We Then Live? was complete, we launched it with a massive and well-promoted seminar tour sponsored by Gospel Films. We projected our movies from a giant arc projector that we trucked all over America. My parents and I flew from city to city on the private plane Billy Zeoli hired. The events were mainly held in civic arenas.
We were in fifteen cities, including a gig in Madison Square Garden. We talked to a total of over forty thousand people. They would show up for a whole day and watch each half-hour episode in order, and we had discussions led by my father and, later in the tour, sometimes by me.
Our seminars were unique. Crowds of this size would have been nothing unusual for evangelistic crusades or Pentecostal “charismatic” shindigs. But evangelicals were coming to us to watch movies about art history and to hear Dad talk about philosophy! Each event got bigger as the word of mouth spread. By the end of the tour, Dad was one of the most sought-after and best-known evangelical leaders in the United States.
There were memorable moments during the production and the seminars: Dad standing on a scaffolding, next to the shoulder of Michelangelo’s David while dusting the statue’s head for the close-up . . . Dad and me alone in the Sistine Chapel at night, waiting for the crew . . . eating a tray of delicious lasagna at midnight in the Uffizi, with the run of the whole place . . . realizing that the lights were too close to Van Eyck’s Marriage Supper of the Lamb in St. Bavo’s Cathedral in Ghent, Belgium, and that we were about to strip the paint . . . wondering again and again how so much art in Italy, Belgium, and other European countries had survived for so long, given the complete indifference of so many museum guards and curators, who literally turned over some of the world’s greatest treasures to my crew, then disappeared for a coffee . . . stepping out alone on the platform at our Dallas seminar to launch How Should We Then Live? and looking at a crowd of six thousand, and realizing that we were on the road to a monster success, then being introduced to Roger Staubach (the Dallas Cowboys’ quarterback), who showed up with half his team—and not knowing who he was, being that I was some Swiss, movie, art nerd. . . .
One event stands out as foreshadowing one of the many reasons I would later flee the evangelical world: The best material we shot for How Should We Then Live?—genuinely historic and unique footage—was filmed in the Accademia that houses Michelangelo’s David. Dad was on a scaffolding that we built right up next to the statue, so people would get the sense of scale. (That was when I handed him a featherduster to clean off David’s head! We noticed it was dusty!)
We filmed a magnificent dolly shot past Michelangelo’s Captives (or “unfinished works”) that line the hall up to the David. Then the shot continued all the way around David and ended on Dad.
Gospel Films insisted that I cut the scene and replace the shot with stock footage bought from an old NBC show because our shots revealed—oh, horror!—David’s genitals. The old NBC footage conveniently blacked them out.
“We can’t have this for a Christian audience,” said Billy Zeoli. “Churches won’t rent it.”
“But we have other nudes and you never said anything. What about Mary’s breast in that Virgin and Child?”
“That’s bad enough! One holy tit is okay, as long as you don’t leave it on screen too long. But churches don’t do cock!” said Billy with an uproarious laugh.
I fought and lost. When I told Dad, he muttered, “We’re working with fools.”
44
I may have lost the cock argument over David, but, unde terred—and thoroughly bitten by the movie bug, not to mention the ambition bug—I went right on to make our second series for the evangelical market. At the same time, I was already starting to plan my long-term exit strategy from the evangelical subculture. I figured I could kill two birds with one stone: make another series on a subject I believed in, and also create more footage for my show reel, so I could get a “real job” making movies.
Whatever Happened to the Human Race? was the brainchild of Dr. C. Everett Koop and myself. He had seen our first series and wanted to team up to expand on the last episodes of How Should We Then Live? where Dad had denounced the “imperial court” for stripping the unborn of their right to life.
Dr. Koop was an old family friend. He was also a leading pediatric surgeon and surgeon-in-chief of the Philadelphia Children’s Hospital. He was an ardent pro-lifer and Calvinist evangelical. His pro-life passion was based on having spent a lifetime saving the lives of babies that were sometimes the same age as those killed in late-term abortions.
Koop was delighted with the abortion episode of How Should We Then Live? In the mid-1970s he traveled to Switzerland to talk to Dad and me about it. Dad had known Koop for years, but I first met him at our Philadelphia seminar. We had talked and discovered we shared deep antiabortion convictions.
After having dinner with my parents, Koop came down to the apartment where Genie and I lived. We talked for three or four hours and mapped out the idea for a new series and book.
Koop’s parting shot was: “This needs to be done! You’re the one who really understands this issue. It’s up to you! Talk your father into it!”
When I asked Dad to collaborate with Dr. Koop, he went along. There was no more talk about avoiding becoming too political. Through the How Should We Then Live? film series, book, and seminars, my father had been able to reach more people (directly and through the general “buzz”) in a few months than in his whole previous lifetime. And Dad had enjoyed the attention.
I wrote the screenplay and directed Whatever Happened to the Human Race? Jim Buchfuehrer produced it. The series dealt with the issues of abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia. Jim and I raised all the money and Gospel Films merely signed on as the distributor. Jim and I formed a new 501(c)(3) (not for profit company) to make the movies: Schaeffer V Productions.
We didn’t use dead-fetus pictures but stuck to allegory and visual metaphors to make our points. I illustrated Koop’s and Dad’s arguments with actors playing caged slaves, elderly people disappearing into a whiteout, thousands of plastic dolls on the salt flats of the Dead Sea, as well as a lot of footage (and interviews) shot in the Philadelphia Children’s Hospital. The musical soundtrack was recorded by the London Symphony Orchestra. The budget was again one and a half million dollars. And those dollars were well-spent and were, as they say, “on the screen.”
The impact of our two film series, as well as their companion books, was to give the evangelical community a frame of reference through which to understand the secularization of American culture, and to point to the “human life issue” as the watershed between a “Christian society” and a utilitarian relativistic “post-Christian” future stripped of compassion and beauty.
The title sequence of Whatever Happened to the Human Race? involved Genie, my seven-year-old daughter Jessica, and my four-year-old son Francis, painting the main title on a huge she
et of glass that was then shattered. My wife and kids popped up all through my documentaries. (I had also included them in the sections I directed for the first series after we fired the director.)
I asked my daughter Jessica what she remembers:Where other directors left noisy young children behind, Dad brought us along. We knew why; his parents had often left him, and he wasn’t going to do the same to us. Anyway, he said, we humanized the set. During How Should We Then Live? my brother Francis and I not only visited Roman ruins we climbed them. We would clamber up and scamper off along the crumbling walls.
I remember my first little movie part when I was about three or four. My job was to be a Roman Christian child running away from a guard. I remember the night air coming through my thin white nightgown and the prickly grass under my feet. I was to run toward a distant light. The “Roman Guard,” a sweet gentle L’Abri student, would run out and catch me, then push me down. (Mom also had a white nightgown, they caught her first.)
For Whatever Happened to the Human Race? we traveled to Israel. On the salt shores of the Dead Sea, I fell and scraped my elbow so later I had to float like a little buoy with my arm stuck up above my head so it wouldn’t sting in the concentrated salt water.
I remember looking down from the helicopter as we flew over the desert to film Av on Mount Sinai. (“Av” was what all the Schaeffer grandchildren called our grandfather.) They shot a pull-back from that mountain: Av is standing on the top, the wind from the helicopter blowing his hair in every direction, as he squints up looking at the copter flying away from him. He is on a large rock alone in the desert but he is talking and talking, telling everyone the things they should know. I miss him. My brother Francis and I were in a scene filmed in Mom and Dad’s bedroom where we played dress-up and then had to sit very still for the closeup. Dad told us not to move but to look straight ahead. Francis’s nose itched and a tear of frustration came down his cheek right when the voice-over was talking about the killing of the unborn. Dad was nice to Francis but he was also pleased. The tears fit perfectly.
Av was quite grim during these shoots. He would pace back and forth learning pages of narration. I wonder how he did it. Eventually Dad started to cut away so that Av didn’t have to know everything at once but could say less at a time.
Dad reveled in the love and war of getting the films “in the can”; capturing light and shadow and space, the immense struggle against time, exhaustion, and human error. He also believed in what he was doing.
45
To try to get a bit of perspective on the “Schaeffer jugger naut,” I asked two old friends, Jim Buchfuehrer and Ray Cioni, to write a short summary of events related to the film series’ making and the rise of the “Schaeffer phenomenon.” Jim was my best friend, more like a brother. (He still is, though we rarely see each other these days.) Jim’s story represents the many hundreds of people who were inexorably drawn into the Schaeffer firmament and who offered their services. Jim was also typical of many other evangelicals, because his encounter with my father’s ideas changed his life.
Jim wrote:February 9, 2007
After going to college and getting married I worked for an evangelical organization for 10 years. I became cynical about the Christian [evangelical] world until I came across the writings of Dr. Francis Schaeffer. . . . I wanted to go deeper into his thinking, so I went to L’Abri for 3 months of study.
It was there that I met Frank Schaeffer, then known as “Franky.” The first time I met him he was standing on the road through Huémoz where a bike race was coming through town. He seemed friendly enough, although I had heard a number of negative things about him. He was known in some circles as the “Little Shit from Switzerland.”
My next encounter with him was a dinner discussion, which took place at the various Chalets at L’Abri, where he argued and tried to dominate the discussion. He could not quite accomplish the domination part. His sister Debby, whose place we were having dinner at, held her own with Frank. Later he would tell me that his sister was the only one that he could not “out-argue.”
Dr. Schaeffer said I should see Frank’s paintings and I did go down to his apartment and meet his wife Genie, who was terrific and a real beauty. Frank told me he was selling his paintings. I didn’t buy one.
I left L’Abri with a rather negative view of Frank, although I really liked the rest of his family including Frank’s young wife who was nothing like him. We all wondered why in the world she would marry a guy like him.
I came back to the evangelical organization that I had worked with leading a staff of about 35, and started to teach things and concepts that Dr. Schaeffer had taught me and this led me to resign my position, since I could longer justify the philosophy of that organization based on the new insights I’d gotten from Dr. Schaeffer.
I resigned not knowing what I was going to do.
I got a call from my mentor and brother-in-law, Wendell Collins, who was vice president of Gospel Films. He knew I was unemployed and that maybe I would like to work on this new project they were producing, How Should We Then Live? with Dr. Schaeffer.
He thought I would be a good fit since I knew Schaeffer’s material well. The President of Gospel Films was a man named Billy Zeoli. I knew all about “Z” and had met him from time to time, and did not like this guy. If you saw the Godfather films, he was the Godfather. (I later learned to like Z and found him to be one of the most trustworthy men I ever worked with. If Z gave you his word you did not need it in writing.)
The bad part of the job is that Franky was “producer.” This guy was a 19-year-old kid who hung out in his basement painting and knew nothing about organization, working with people and his film experience totaled doing a few 8-mm movies, running around the mountains of Switzerland like a crazy person, and he was made producer!
Z must have given Frank the job to get the deal done with Dr. Schaeffer. I figured that Dr. S would have done anything to get the Little Shit out of his ass.
The Swiss-American director who Frank insisted on hiring was a madman. He was the worst person that any of us ever had the “pleasure” of working with. I had a run-in with this director in a hotel lobby. He was making some outrageous demands and I came up to him and got in his face. The demands went away, and I think that from that point on Frank and I did a little better together. Not friends, or anything, but better.
When the state-side shooting was done, Gospel Films planned a 3-month seminar tour with the 5-part film series and Dr. Schaeffer in person. GF (Gospel Films) hired me to work with Wendell (“Wendy”) Collins to set these up all over the country.
We were still in production on the series. And this crazy Swiss-American director was finally fired, before the project was over. . . .
Then Z did something that I thought was even crazier than making Frank producer, he gave him a budget and said you finish this thing, you direct the remaining scenes.
Short story: Frank pulled it all together and put together a superb final product. I thought, maybe he has more talent than I’d credited him with. But I still didn’t like him.
The seminars were a great success. Two things happened that changed my relationship with Frank.
First, Frank, who may have been 21 years old by then, and with no college, was going to fill in for Dr. Schaeffer one evening in Oakland, Calif. What a disappointment since Dr. Schaeffer was a master at question-and-answer sessions! But he had lost his voice after the flu. “Frank, you’ve got to do this,” said Z. “We have three thousand people waiting to see your dad.”
I was really blown away by how well Frank took over for his father and in some ways was even better. Afterward I paid him a compliment. He said, “I sat at my father’s feet and listened all those years.”
Second, Frank said, “let’s go to lunch,” and over a sandwich he said, “I know you think I’m a prick” (or something like that), “and I know that I got the producer’s job because of my father, and if I was producer I would be able to talk my dad into making thi
s series. I’m a terrible producer, and I don’t want to produce. I want to direct and write. You are a producer and I want us to be partners.”
I was blown away, again. Here was a young kid with not much life experience outside this film series, who knew who he was, and wasn’t afraid to tell you the good and the bad.
With the huge success of this project Frank was in a position to do whatever he wanted to do. Z tried to hire him and give him a budget to do what he wanted to do. Frank had other ideas.
We formed a nonprofit 501(c)(3) and raised $20,000 to start. We called it “Schaeffer V Productions.”
Frank was in Switzerland when a old friend of the family stopped by, Dr. C. Everett Koop, surgeon-in-chief of Philadelphia Children’s Hospital. Frank called me and we discussed a new project, which would team Dr. S. and Dr. Koop. It sounded good to me and we were off and running. Another film series and a second seminar tour.
The problem was the budget, 1 million or more for the film and another million for the tour. So Frank and Koop started working on the script for the first 3 hours of the series, and Frank and his dad worked on the last 2 hours. I started to figure out how we were going to get the money and organize this whole thing.
Ray Cioni had the best animation studio in Chicago (until computers swept away the old cel-painting, art-based business, and Ray’s studio with it). Ray is still an evangelical and looks back with fondness at that period of our lives.
After not seeing Ray for more than twenty years, I met him in Chicago in February 2007, at the opening of a play at the Chicago Cultural Center produced by the Griffin Theatre—Letters Home—based on several of my books, principally Voices from the Front—Letters Home from America’s Military Family and Faith of Our Sons—A Father’s Wartime Diary. I asked Ray to try to remember what we were up to thirty years ago:February 8, 2007
Crazy for God Page 23