Crazy for God (33 page)

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.”

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 sheet 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:

T
o 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: