The making of Jesus

Christian Century, June 6, 2001 by John Dart

OKLAHOMA-RAISED Bill Bright came to Los Angeles in 1944 and started a business selling candies, fruits and jams. He was drawn to the large First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood and there came under the considerable influence of Christian educator Henrietta Mears. Her circle of friends included the men who founded Fuller Seminary in 1947 and a youthful Billy Graham, who shot to national fame during his eight-week L.A. tent crusade in 1949. Bright would start on his own path toward evangelistic prominence in a more modest way in 1951 when he began Campus Crusade for Christ on the UCLA campus.

Five years earlier, however, Bright was uncertain about his business, his career, his faith commitment and the alluring power of Hollywood. He went east in 1946 to study at Princeton Seminary, and an enamored starlet tagged along. With his thin mustache and dark hair, the young William R. Bright strikingly resembled Clark Gable, at least in his photos. Yet needing to tend his candy business in L.A., he returned a year later to enroll in the first class of Fuller seminarians in Pasadena. He also kept in touch with Vonette Zachary, the young Oklahoma woman who reminded him of actress Diana Lynn. Joining him in Hollywood, Zachary married Bright at the end of 1948, several months after Mears guided her to faith in Jesus.

A number of actors, song writers and film professionals attended First Presbyterian of Hollywood or were part of the Hollywood Christian Group meeting at Mears's Beverly Hills home. In his autobiography, Just As I Am, Graham recalls speaking in 1949 to Mears's group, which attracted the likes of Connie Haines and Jane Russell. "I was inspired especially by the testimony of actress Colleen Townsend, who had a contract with Twentieth Century-Fox and whose picture had just been on the cover of Life magazine," Graham wrote. Townsend later married Louis Evans Jr., son of Hollywood Presbyterian's senior pastor.

Heeding the Mears directive to think big, both Bright and Graham dreamed in the late 1940s of using motion pictures to spread the gospel. Bright even approached several producers (including Cecil B. De Mille, who had directed the silent King of Kings in 1927), but without success. Graham had better luck. His quick rise to celebrity enabled him to launch World Wide Pictures in 1952, which eventually had some success with movies such as The Restless One, The Hiding Place and Joni.

Bright was also seized with the idea of evangelizing on college campuses. Graham and others advised him to go ahead, so Bright quit Fuller Seminary and abandoned his goal of becoming an ordained minister. He started well by targeting a popular UCLA sorority, but his ministry was close to collapsing after he and his wife lost their rented place near campus. Mears came to the rescue, according to longtime Hollywood Presbyterian member Anna Kerr. Mears's sister had recently died, and Mears needed companions to live with. She bought a mansion on Sunset Boulevard near UCLA for herself and Bill and Vonette Bright.

Soon the campus ministry blossomed. Campus Crusade spread to dozens of other U.S. campuses. By 1968 it had workers in 32 countries. About 80,000 people attended its Explo `72 gathering in Dallas, and more than 300,000 attended Explo `74 in South Korea.

Campus Crusade was in the middle of a national media campaign in 1976, promoting the slogan "I Found It!" on billboards, bumper stickers and lapel buttons, when an unexpected opportunity arose to realize Bright's longtime goal of making an evangelistic movie. Knocking on Bright's door at Campus Crusade headquarters in Arrowhead Springs, California, was producer John Heyman.

Heyman headed a London-based artists agency which represented Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton and Michael Caine, among other film stars. Heyman also had begun to co-finance major movies such as Chinatown, The Odessa File, The Rocky Horror Show and Marathon Man. His World Productions films won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival in 1971 and 1972.

Heyman, whose Jewish family left Germany for England before Adolf Hitler took power, had a grandiose plan of his own: to put all the Hebrew and Christian scriptures on film. His Genesis Project had already filmed verse-by-verse 22 chapters of Genesis and the first two chapters of the Gospel of Luke for what he called the New Media Bible. The series of 15-minute films, in which the actors' words in Hebrew and Aramaic are muted under a voiceover narration in English, were designed for educational purposes. "People tend to know what their preacher says the Bible says, or what Billy Graham says the Bible says," Heyman said in later years, "but few have ever read it sufficiently to know what it really says."

But the New York-based Genesis Project, founded in 1974, was a costly one. It was unlikely to make a profit or even survive unless church folks began to see the value of a cinematic version of the Bible.

Heyman and Bright decided to seek backing for a feature film on Jesus that would be suitable for showing in theaters. Heyman hoped that the revenue would offset his investment and help publicize the Genesis Project. Bright saw an opportunity to make a pioneering evangelistic tool.