The Holy Scripts

The scheme is bold, perhaps foolhardy. Film the entire Bible. The movies would run for 100 hours, take 33 years to make and cost at least $256 million. However grandiose a notion, that is exactly what the entrepreneurs of the Genesis Project have set out to do. Judging from the quality of the first ten segments now being previewed by pastors and educators from coast to coast, the Genesis people are off to a good start.

The project is being funded without a sou from a synagogue or a church. A straight commercial venture, it is backed by 18 wealthy businessmen, most of them British and American, who have already anted up $5 million. The startup money came from John Heyman, 43, a self-described "inactive Jew," who has produced more than 40 feature films, including The Go-Between and The Hireling. Now he works full time as chief executive of the Genesis Project: "It was a unique opportunity to share my ability as a film maker as opposed to putting on another piece of slurp."

No Navels. The first installment of the New Media Bible, as it is called, consists of ten 20-minute segments covering Genesis 1-22 (from the Creation to Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac) and Luke 1-2 (the Annunciation, the Nativity and Jesus' youth). They were filmed in the sere landscape of the Holy Land and neighboring areas, using largely unknown actors. One exception: Topol, the Israeli star of Hollywood's Fiddler on the Roof, who portrays Abraham.

But how to film the story of Noah? Heyman opted for a sketchy style of animation, with surrealistic clouds and waves, and cartoon rabbits and lions clambering aboard the ark. The budget did not permit construction of the ark nor the assembling of all God's creatures. For the Creation story, Heyman wove together spectacular color footage of the sun and stars, flowing lava, beasts on the Kenya highlands and fish and flora along an ocean floor. In Eden, Adam and Eve are discreetly nude, and without navels. Heyman insists that he will film every jot and tittle of the Law of Moses, but his project will be well into the 1990s before he faces the challenge of dramatizing the doctrinal letters of the Apostle Paul.

"We attempt to be as literally accurate as we can possibly be," says Heyman. "We don't make up any dialogue." The actors speak their lines verbatim from the Bible, using the languages their characters would have used, though the producers have taken some liberties. Adam and Eve mouth words silently; Abraham speaks Hebrew; Luke, Greek. The voice-over is a word-for-word reading of the Bible in English by such narrators as Alexander Scourby and Orson Welles. The sound track is available in three versions: King James, Revised Standard and New American.

Each film comes with two filmstrips keyed to records or cassette recordings, and a magazine called Bible Times. To develop these teaching materials, the Genesis Project has assembled 120 Bible scholars and historians at various seminars. Thus viewers will see Abraham on his way from Ur to the Promised Land, then watch a filmstrip as scholars explain that Ur was probably the earliest civilization and the place where writing was invented.

The major strategic problem with the teaching aids was how to handle competing interpretations of the Bible. The solution: though purchasers get identical films, the explanatory materials are offered in two editions, prepared by different sets of scholars. One version is aimed at those buyers who accept the Bible as reliable history, the other at those who accept more mythic interpretations of some biblical events. A colloquy in the liberal edition of Bible Times, for example, suggests Mesopotamian influences on the Creation story, while a discussion in the conservative edition upholds unique inspiration by the Holy Spirit.

The New Media Bible costs $2,000 for the ten segments to be released this year ($2,500 after Nov. 1). The producers are encouraged that in just a few months of preliminary marketing, 426 churches, hospitals, libraries and other institutions have signed up. If the project survives, it could turn around the sagging enrollments suffered over the last decade by many of the nation's Sunday schools and synagogue classes. Because of TV, observes Virginia Saari, the director of education for the First United Methodist Church in Lakeland, Fla., "children are visually minded now. We have to appeal to them through their eyes if we want them to get the Bible."

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