The future. Do we plan for it? Do we “take no care for tomorrow, for it has enough trouble of it’s own?” Do we watch the news for clues of whether we are approaching the End Times? Are we close?
As one speaker I once heard put it, many Christians today say, “We’re gonna fly, they’re gonna fry, so let’s just watch the news and root for the Anti-Christ!”
As many of us know, End Times madness ends up being just that. For decades, Evangelicals have pronounced with glee that the End is almost here because Israel became a nation in 1948, and “this generation will not pass away until all these things take place.” Continue reading “Mother and Child”
Same-sex marriage. Abortion and infanticide by the millions. Brazen occult imagery at the Olympic ceremonies, the Grammy Awards, and the Oscars. Teaching sodomy to our five year olds in public schools. Allowing monuments to Satan in public places. The body politic seems to have gone insane.
When I was in Oxford, England, I had the privilege of interviewing Oxford Professor Timothy Ware (now Metropolitan Kallistos Ware of the Orthodox Church, at the time Bishop.) He is the author of The Orthodox Church and The Orthodox Way, two of the most popular books in the world on Orthodoxy.
Many of you likely cringe at including all those other words along with “conspiracy theorist.” And that’s exactly why Jay is, in my opinion, one of the pre-eminent thinkers of our day. We live in a very corrupt generation, and unless some people are willing to start dealing with facts in a rational manner and take the risk of a lost paycheck—or being called names—the rest of us will continue to live under a cloud of deception and manipulation.
Nonethless, however pervasive the evil around us, confessing the name of Jesus Christ and following the two great commandments will get you far down the road, even if you are only a simple thinker. Thankfully, Jay is a card-carrying Christian and currently identifies with the Orthodox Church. And, while some of his “conspiracy theories” might be jarring, he doesn’t move into the realm of aliens, reptilians, extraterrestrials, and other la la land material—unless, of course, he considers such activity demonic distractions.
Need some intellectual grounding in a world of chaos—from the perspective of Christian truth? Jay is your man.
On the interview itself: Jay answers the following questions, among others:
– the massive Hollywood film funding from defense and intelligence departments
– the “transhumanism” religion of the elites which Jay identifies ultimately as “Luciferianism”
– the concept of “predictive programming” in film and cartoons, the motives and purpose
Much of the discussion from the crowd focused on the last question, a large pill to swallow. I consider the audience to be some of the sharpest people (many high level filmmakers) in Chattanooga. This was not a one-sided classroom lecture.
He lightened up at the end with some quick impersonations of Nicholas Cage, Rand Paul, and Matthew McConaughey.
Franky Schaeffer is a difficult conundrum. I invited him to speak at Covenant College in the mid-80’s when I was a student and spent three days with him. He was very sharp, well read, not much of a sense of humor. Sensitive to what people thought (even though he loved to irritate them).
He gave an address that I will never forget that was very powerful: basically that the fall of the Soviet Union was the fruit of 500 years of the godless Renaissance finally failing for good. He had great moments.
I subscribed to his Christian Actviist publication as an avid pro-lifer, but a couple years in, men in long beards and black robes started appearing on the cover. What gives? Franky had become an Eastern Orthodox Christian. This was my first introduction to someone I knew becoming Orthodox, which I later became. I respected Franky’s intellect and background, so it certainly caught my attention.
But a few years into my Orthodoxy it became clear that other Evangelicals who had become Orthodox stopped mentioning or claiming Franky as a poster child. His attitude was hardly saintly, nor of the Orthodox way, and his trashing of his parents not very appreciated. Most of us from our Evangelical backgrounds appreciated the fact that we had found Christ in our traditions, believed godly people could be found there, and were not rebelling from them but rather looking for a firmer foundation for the true Faith we had been introduced to.
At the beginning of the video I posted here, Schaeffer identifies himself as “a survivor of polio and a fundamentalist, evangelical upbringing.” Hardly. As Franky got more shrill, other voices finally began to emerge. The best response I ever read (which I can never find online) was from his brother-in-law Os Guiness in Christianity Today. He provided a touching account of Franky and Francis’s relationship, but noted that the younger Schaeffer was hardly the victim of Fundamentalist abuse. Rather, Francis and Edith never disciplined the young boy, let him run wild at L’Abri, and he became quite spoiled. In Guiness’s words, Franky, rather than being a victim of fundamentalism, instead “was the poster child for Dr. Spock.”
I don’t really know for sure Franky’s financial situation, but his last couple decades of trashing his parents and Evangelicalism seems be a variant on the theme of shucking and jiving for reactions and cash, similar to what he admitted he did as an Evangelical speaker (15.00 mark). He accused others of the same, but he should speak for himself: I think James Dobson believes very much his message.
Franky doesn’t sell many books the past 15 years if his message is in line with Orthodox Christianity, emphasizing “Blessed are the poor in Spirit.” But he definitely needed to do something different than those movies, which were gosh awful terrible, so boring you didn’t want to watch more than 20 minutes.
And his representation of Orthodox Christianity is unfortunately incorrect. at the 21.00 mark of the video, he says Eastern “Apophatic” theology stresses “not knowing.” This is quite misleading and arguably the exact opposite. In fact, it was Western theology that had stressed the inability to truly know God himself, and therefore the best we could do is to know “about” God. Thus, the intellectualism and scholasticism of late Middle Ages and the Reformation emerged, which still affects us today with church leaders looking more like John Calvin than Francis of Assisi. The true virtue is apparently encyclopedic knowledge.
Eastern Christianity never believed that. The belief has always been that God himself is knowable: through prayer, ascetism, faith, the sacraments, charity, love, obedience, humility, etc. Knowing God, therefore, is more of a struggle, and it is more mystical than a rational certitude, which Franky hints at, but it is by all means true knowledge. This “apophatic” theology, while always emphasized in the historic church for 2000 years, was championed in the 14th Century by Saint Gregory Palamas of Thessalonika, whose cathedral and remains I had the privilege of visiting a couple of years ago. He taught that we cannot know God in his essence, since we are creatures, but we CAN know him in his energies. His whole point—the point of apophatic theology—is that we CAN know God.
Franky is really screwing up by misrepresenting the historic church.
He also said in this video that he doesn’t “pretend I have the Truth or something like that.” Well, now Franky is the hypocrite, because as an Eastern Orthodox he sings the following words at the end of every liturgy: “We have seen the True Light, We have received the Heavenly Spirit, We have found the True Faith, Worshipping the Undivided Trinity, who has saved us.”
It has been one month since the premiere at the IMAX Theater of Harriet’s Secret: A Progressive Marriage in the 1890s, the full feature documentary I have been working on for two years.
Having now taken a deep breath, I will devote a blog entry to discussing the most common questions and comments I heard that night after the show and the week following. For those who haven’t seen it yet, click here for the storyline.
1. It really wasn’t what I was expecting . . . but I liked it!
Apparently, a large portion of the audience was ready to chill out with some popcorn and enjoy an evening of light entertainment. I got the sense it was entertaining—it did keep everyone’s interest—but it was hardly light. The intense themes, tragic drama, and large amounts of information imparted to capture the social history of the era made for a night of intensity. It was more like the Deer Hunter, Sophie’s Choice, and Clockwork Orange and less like The Sound of Music.
People pay money to watch those intense movies made by Hollywood as well, so I think everyone was glad they came. It just took a few minutes to adjust.
2. That could be made into a narrative movie, not just a documentary. This often mentioned comment surprised me. But I guess all the stuff is there for a Hollywood version of my doc. I was flattered. There are two reasons why I didn’t make it that way. 1. I am naturally inclined toward documented history and hard journalism and 2. It would have been literally ten times more expensive. Maybe more.
3. I hate Percy. Why does Harriet act that way? Cecil confuses me. These are sample comments on various characters. They represent the sense that the movie really made people think, which was a definite goal of mine. People on both sides of the ideological aisle enjoyed the film, and it challenged them.
4. I liked the Andrew Carnegie/Theodore Woodruff subplot as much or more than the main story. I heard this quite a bit. The story of Percy and Harriet lasts about 55 minutes. The remaining 35 minutes provided me the opportunity to also tell the story of another ancestor of mine, Percy’s grandfather, who invented the Pullman sleeping car that revolutionized rail travel. Carnegie and Pullman stole the patent and left Woodruff penniless, but Carnegie decades later in his autobiography credited Woodruff with starting his fortune. This subplot is a fast paced story with adventure and intrigue and ends with Woodruff dying mysteriously. I used the subplot in part to lift the mood of the audience as the Percy and Harriet story, while also fascinating, is heavier and somewhat slower moving.
Subplots can perform various functions. One is to contrast with the main plot. Another is to confirm it or double down on the climax, which is what this one does. The movie ends with two strange and mysterious deaths.
5. The first half was slower than the second half. This was actually a backhanded compliment. In fact, the second half of the movie is so interesting and moves so quickly that even I have a hard time stopping it, and I’ve watched it dozens of times. But, yes, the first half is slow by comparison, but still keeps your attention. This is one of those tricky facets in the art of storytelling where you have to provide just enough intrigue while imparting the necessary background information to properly set up the rest of the movie. This story required quite a bit of information, so I counted the cost when writing the script. But I feel like it worked.
6. The quality was so professional, like what you would see out of Hollywood. Indeed. Much of the credit for that goes to cinematographer and co-producer Axel Arzola, who shot and edited the entire film. His standards are extremely high, and he’s just flat out talented. Our actors, untrained volunteers, also had an unusual amount of raw talent.
7. What are you working on now? I have been chewing and praying on this question for a while. I don’t have the answer yet. However, I have in fact started playing around with a romantic comedy and it’s starting to take some shape. (I guy who plans to become a monk falls in love with his buddy’s mail order bride.) We’ll see where that takes me.
8. Did you enjoy it? Yes. Very much. I was a good bit concerned about the medium of film as opposed to what I am used to—writing books. I wondered if the big but temporary splash of a movie would be less satisfying than the longterm feedback you get from a book. I guess it’s a bit too soon to fully compare and contrast the two, but I will say I did enjoy the high intensity of premiering a film. I didn’t say, “Well, that was anti-climactic. I won’t do that again.” I really enjoyed the experience, and if the right opportunities come together, will look to try and do something again.
9. What else is planned for Harriet’s Secret? It has been submitted to several film festivals (and we plan to submit to a few more). Hopefully, we will catch someone’s attention. We won’t know for several more months. Until then, we have to refrain from distributing via DVD, streaming, YouTube, etc. as festivals often require their festival to be the first public viewing of the film (our premiere was by private invitation only). If the movie gains traction at a film festival, perhaps a cable company will pick it up.
In order to enter all these festivals and tie up loose ends, we have a remaining need of $500. Click here if you have an interest in helping with that.
10. Any other interesting stories? Yes. A friend from high school and her husband traveled from Cape Canaveral, Florida, to attend the premiere. Really, Amy was more of an acquaintance back in the day, so her traveling all the way to Chattanooga was surprising, but certainly flattering. It was one of the little bonuses of the event for me.
Turns out, there’s more to the story. Amy’s husband Ed is an entrepreneur and investor. And one of his pastimes is Kickstarter. So one day he was surfing around the fundraising site and came across my film project. He thought it was really cool and showed it to Amy.
“I know that guy!” she said.
So they decided to make the nine hour trip. I got a chance to chat with them at the afterparty; they had dressed up to the nines, participating in all the fun of a premiere. That’s when I learned the story of how they came across Harriet’s Secret. They loved the film and want to help advance it’s promotion with a network of friends in the Los Angeles area.
Amy and Ed travelled from Cape Canaveral, Florida.
What a great night! The event Friday a week ago at the Chattanooga IMAX Theater can only be described as a success in every way.
Jacki Rexford (playing Harriet Thompson Gerson) on the red carpet.
We had a great crowd. Not every seat was taken but it was clearly full. The red carpet ceremony before the show, accompanied by period musicians, was a total hit (I wasn’t exactly sure how that would go). Afterwards, we had Q & A. The program said for ten minutes, but the several dozen people who stayed wanted to stay even longer. The rest of the night we had an afterparty next door where about 50 people showed up to discuss and process what they’d just seen.
On the big screen!
I plan to write a separate post about crowd reaction, questions, postives and criticisms about the show. Until then, just know that overall the premiere was a great evening, everything I had hoped for.
We have submitted the film to the following: Sundance Film Festival, San Francisco Film Festival, Portland Film Festival, Malibu Film Festival, Atlanta Film Festival, Hollywood Reel Independent Film Festival, and the Berlin Independent Film Festival. We should find out in two or three months if we get accepted to any of these events or a few others we plan to enter.
When a dog in Mexico ripped off the top lip of our leading lady a few months ago, it wasn’t pretty.
Jacki Arnold Rexford, my niece, plays the leading lady Harriet in our documentary film. I asked her on a whim to try dressing up and see if the camera work we would do around trains that day would also look realistic with a period actress. Jacki walked up while we were at the Railroad Museum that morning and took our breath away. She was perfect.
Not only that, she is incredibly photogenic and has great presence in front of the camera. She is one of those classic actor/actress types (I directed a bunch of them when I headed up the dramatic productions at Covenant College) who is quite low key in real life, but when given the opportunity comes alive in a performance. (Conversely, the happy chatty types are usually not good at acting.)
Jacki graduated from Cooper Union Art School in Manhattan and moved here with her husband Caleb who works with Fancy Rhino video company. She is a homemaker in their East Lake fixer upper and one of her current of a multitude of talents and activities is fermenting and pickling whatever she can get her hands on.
One of the shots of Jacki in the train car was so perfect, we used it for the key image and poster for the entire project. Her green eye matches the green background, and her prominent pouty lip adds intrigue to the title, “Harriet’s Secret.”
Oh, yeah, the lip. So my beautiful niece and her husband Caleb take a quick jaunt to see a friend in Mexico about a month after we finished shooting. As they are eating, his dog comes under the table towards Jacki, somehow gets riled up and leaps up at her and bites her twice in the face. It all happened in a split second. There was blood and an obvious need to head to the emergency room immediately.
Waiting to heal.
Caleb kept telling Jacki it was going to be fine. Meanwhile, Caleb’s friend was in the back seat holding the middle part of Jacki’s upper lip in a jar. He had found it on the ground right after the incident.
Thankfully, the plastic surgery industry in Mexico is pretty darn good. Apparently, a lot of Americans travel to Mexico for those operations. She spent a couple days in the hospital, the docs did their magic, and all I know to tell you is that today she looks exactly the same. She is as beautiful as she ever was. Thank God.
One of Caleb and Jacki’s many fun pics and poses.
You can see some of Jacki’s great acting in this trailer. I’m so glad to have her as part of the team and the cast.
P.S. 11 days to go. We had four new donors yesterday to reach $2,921. Help us reach $3,000 today! Give at the Kickstarter site here: http://kck.st/1jxKoL5
So how will you distribute your film? What’s the end game?
I get that question a lot. Sure, it can be a little unnerving when the bottom line answer is, “I’m not really sure.” But I have confidence good things will happen.
As an author, I have never had a “publisher” publish one of my books. I have hundreds of rejection letters to prove I gave it a serious college try. So, my books have been self published. A few have done little, and a couple of them have done really well. One of them, “Old Money New South” about Chattanooga history, was the best selling book of all books at the local Barnes and Noble for one month. It was the best selling book of the year for a local downtown bookseller.
So, by intuition and experience, I know you can do the “build it and they will come” thing for creative media projects. I gave up long ago waiting for some atheist magnate in New York to give me permission to write or film something.
But, to answer the initial question: we will have a cool premiere of the movie in Chattanooga. Details to be announced. We will enter the film into several film festivals. I am confident we will get selected somewhere, although it may not be Cannes or Sundance. (I will try, though!)
We will put it on NetFlix. There is a way to do that, although it’s difficult to find just surfing around. If the project continues gaining traction and is well-received, we will submit it to various cable channels and see if one of them is interested in picking it up. If the general market has an interest (see my previous blog Sex sells), when we can sell it on the DVD market or on demand. Eventually, it will be available for everyone on YouTube.
One thing we have going for us is that the film is good. Each day of editing, I get excited about how it is all coming together. So, while being connected and having super duper marketing strategies are all important, they pale in comparison to having a first rate product. So I’m hopeful. See you at the box office.
12 days to go for the Kickstarter campaign. Please spread the word! Thanks.
I’ve decided to start blogging again as I make this film.
The first topic to choose was a no-brainer. My documentary deals a good bit with the topic of sex, and sex sells. It even sells blog posts.
“My great grandparents advocated for communism and free sex in the 1910s and 20s.” That’s the soundbite I use to describe this major documentary I am creating. It always works. Sex sells.
Percy and Harriet espoused what they called “free love,” along with socialism and atheism, at the turn of the century, even though Harriet was a circumspect Christian from a strong religious family when she first met Percy on a train in 1893.
This was all way before the hippies’ sexual revolution of the 1960s. And the 60s wasn’t a gradual thing. The effort of the Progressives like my great grandparents died rather suddenly with the emergence of World War II. First, I’m guessing, because too much was at stake on a world level to be jacking around back home on moral issues. (Reminds me of the rugby team guys in South America whose plane crashed in the mountains for months. They said there were never any dirty jokes or swear words spoken—they needed God’s help too much.)
The second reason was the exposing of eugenics. Americans were dabbling in it, but the Nazis were deep into human breeding and gene selection, selecting males over females, lighter over darker, and all the things that come along with acting like God.
Margaret Sanger
The Progressives, like Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, the largest performer of abortions in the world (and a buddy of my great grandparents), were deep into eugenics. “More children for the fit, less for the unfit” was on the masthead of Sanger’s birth control newsletter. I’m guessing that this association with eugenics was part of the reason the sexual views of the Progressives were also left behind for a “Father Knows Best” era until the 60s came along.
It’s pretty clear my great grandfather was running around with lots of young girls. He was a gynecologist in Hollywood, an abortionist (possibly handy on a personal level), and lived next door to the “Denishawn Dancers,” a world class dance troupe. These girls hung out all day at the house (and at night, too, I imagine), and their daughter ends up writing a lot about it in her journal decades later. That’s how we know all about it.
Percy flirts with a Denishawn Dancer (film footage).
It’s pretty normal for a cad to run around with various women. But I regularly get asked, “Do you think your great grandmother was sleeping around?”
I have no way of knowing for sure, but I suspect she did not. Her quotes from the journal seem to espouse a kind of high minded “Free Love” that one should be open to for making the world more open. Did she experiment a little here and there? Don’t know. I would think probably a few times to fit in with her radical crowd. But her ultimate reaction to Percy’s philandering—extreme jealousy and depression—indicates to me that she never personally embraced the lifestyle.
Harriet watches from behind. (Film footage)
How it all pans out is the point of the documentary, so I will leave a little bit unsaid to keep you on your seat. But one of the points, I think, is a reminder that “there is nothing new under the sun.” Think you or your parents are sexual progressives? Ummm . . . someone’s already been there, done that. And it’s a lot more complicated than you think.
Monday this week I had the opportunity to interview Jay Dyer (
