The Rise of the Religious Right in America
PRODUCER DAVID VAN TAYLOR
"PARTITIONED HIS BRAIN"
WHILE WORKING SIMULTANEOUSLY ON TWO MAJOR FILMS
WITH GOD ON OUR SIDE: The Rise of the Religious Right in America
and the Critically Acclaimed A Perfect Candidate
Kept Him in High Gear
It has been a wild three years for David Van Taylor. The 33-year-old filmmaker was three months into an 11-month editing process on A Perfect Candidate -- a theatrical documentary filmed behind the scenes of Oliver North's Senate campaign, which The Washington Post recently called "one of a small handful of essential films about politics in this country" -- when he began "serious production" on WITH GOD ON OUR SIDE: The Rise of the Religious Right in America. The six-part, in-depth, non-ideological look at the controversial movement will be presented on PBS stations by South Carolina Educational Television, in association with the Independent Television Service, beginning Friday, Sept. 27, 1996. [Check schedule page for local station broadcast information ].
"Both films were floating around in my head at the same time," he says. "There was a lot of overlap in theme and subject. I feel I've spent the last three years living among conservative Evangelical Christians."
WITH GOD ON OUR SIDE was conceived in April 1993. Van Taylor and Cal Skaggs, the series' executive producer, had known each other for a long time. Van Taylor had started in film as an apprentice editor for Skaggs eight years earlier, not long after graduating from Harvard with a B.A. in Sociology and Afro-American Studies. In the interim, he had produced and directed an Emmy-nominated documentary film called Dream Deceivers: The Story Behind James Vance vs. Judas Priest, in which a primary character was a born-again Charismatic Christian. The character and her beliefs introduced him to a world he hadn't known before.
"In April '93, David dropped by my office," recalls Skaggs. "We were having
a casual conversation about films that should be made. We talked about the arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, Robert Mapplethorpe, and how vehement the Religious Right's attack was. We talked about abortion, about gay rights, about how quickly things have changed in society, and how the forces were massing to provoke change or to prevent change."
"David said, 'What all these things have in common is the Religious Right.' And then he suggested an historical exploration in the vein of [the acclaimed PBS Civil Rights history series] EYES ON THE PRIZE. We didn't know how far back it stretched or where it went, but we sat and talked about it for hours. That's how the project started."
For Van Taylor, who served as series producer, the subject was fascinating, and the working arrangement a good fit.
"This is essentially my third film," he says. "I had never done a series before; never worked with a staff bigger than four people; never raised over a million dollars. Cal has done all those things and more. At the same time, our skills are very complementary in many ways. I have a strong background in documentary, Cal's is in drama. Cal was raised Southern Baptist, I'm Jewish. Sometimes that allowed me to look at this culture with a fresh eye, without the preconceptions that Cal brought."
The producers launched their project, travelling to 19 states, most of which were not in the South. "We talked to people from every walk of life -- preachers, school teachers, nurses, professors, an EST trainer, television producers," says Van Taylor. "You can't pigeonhole, and the stereotypes are not true."
The team acquired footage from "all kinds of obscure places," and received mounds of scrap books with thousands of newspaper clippings, photographs, fliers and brochures from people being interviewed. Some of their subjects -- including Pat Robertson -- made their own audio or videotapes of the interviews, recalls Skaggs, "to guard against our taking their words out of context and saying something totally different."
"The challenge," notes Van Taylor, "was to try to be as thorough as possible while at the same time telling this history through stories that people could be engaged in, stories about human emotions and human drama. I think we've touched on all the important movements and difficult questions."
As with A Perfect Candidate and Dream Deceivers, both of which were lauded for their balance and compassion, Van Taylor is particularly proud of building a bridge across ideological divides.
"I think the greatest accomplishment of this series," he says, "is that the usual PBS audience will understand this movement and the people in it in a way they never have before, precisely because we did suspend our judgments long enough to gain insight into what makes people tick, rather than go in with an alarm to sound or an ax to grind."
