Lights, Camera, Gospel!

"The building of Chartres was an amazing story of envisioning that phenomenal cathedral, and then getting it all to happen against the odds. There have been a number of projects like that, especially with much more primitive building skills than we have today," says Harold Stassen, professor of Christian ethics at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena. "[For a Christian] a big part of life is to be a participant in something really great that God is doing."

Over the course of several months, more than 100 people audition for a part in Gravity, many after seeing an ad that WYSIWYG posted on Craigslist declaring that the company was casting thousands of actors for a Christian epic, work for which they would not be paid. The week before Christmas, 150 people return for what the company insists are "callbacks," but really appear to be an attempt to test out some of Gravity's more ambitious scenes for the camera.

Some 30-odd women, dressed in brown ponchos sewn by Sandy Gazowsky, stand on Voice of Pentecost's stage, in front of where the movie screen used to be, waving palm fronds around a blond actress cradling a plastic baby doll. One of the women paints a portrait of the newborn on a pad of paper set up on an easel. This scene, I'm told, is supposed to be a royal birth and will ultimately have 70 people in it. A camera on a big crane moves slowly below the stage, with Gazowsky standing beside it, watching intently. Meanwhile, the scene unfolds a few feet away on a little monitor.

In the theater's foyer, a group of guys rehearse a giant brawl that's been choreographed by Sunny Gazowsky. Two young men thrust a long wooden pole at an imaginary door, and their crouching opponents repulse them by toppling over a plastic garbage can. A man in back pretends to spray the garbage-can warriors with arrows from his toy crossbow. Off to his right, two twentysomething males engage in hand-to-hand combat with a fake wooden ax.

The actors wear earnest expressions of concentration, and a few are breathing hard from exertion. They've been at WYSIWYG for more than five hours already.

They came from all over the Bay Area; a few even flew in from out of state. Rudy DelGado, an aspiring actor and Christian from Arizona, heard about the production from a casting agent and jumped at the chance for big-screen exposure. One of the WYSIWYG staffers is letting him stay at her house while he's in town. "They seem to be a wonderful group of people," he says.

Thrown into the mostly suburban-looking mix of actors are several hipsters. One of the men holding the wooden pole in the fight scene, for instance, is a tall indie rocker, blond with long sideburns. Another guy has crazy, curly long hair and is wearing a funky patchwork leather jacket.

I assume these guys saw WYSIWYG's ad and came for ironic reasons. I'm wrong. They and a few other non-Christians were recruited by one of WYSIWYG's volunteer staffers, a former Dickens Faire producer who (à la Madonna) goes by a single name, Daktarri. A mysterious, ponytailed fellow who told me on one of the first days I met him that he "commutes from Maui," Daktarri wears sunglasses even when indoors and dresses entirely in black. He used to be "involved in the occult" before becoming a Pentecostal Christian and attends church at VOP in part because it is "nonjudgmental." He has availed upon various "freaks" he knows from Burning Man and the Renaissance and Dickens fairs to audition for Gravity.

One of them is the blond singer/songwriter, Eenor (also a one-name guy), formerly of Les Claypool's band, Fearless Flying Frog Brigade. His stunning, redheaded, longtime girlfriend and he decided to audition with their young daughter to fulfill the little girl's fantasies of being in a movie.

"These seem like very unorthodox callbacks," says Eenor. "My partner has done these before and said that they don't usually keep you for more than a few hours."

The leather-jacket guy is Dave D'Ambra, frontman for the San Francisco band Funky Beulah.

"Daktarri told me to come on down and audition and 'wear the craziest clothes you own!'" says D'Ambra. "'Just be the biggest freak you can be!' And I was like, 'GREAT! Be more freaky? Sure!'" He donned pants he'd made out of some old curtains for the initial auditions, and even though the WYSIWYG people seemed taken aback, they also, says D'Ambra, "seemed to appreciate it." He's not a Christian, but the fact that WYSIWYG is doesn't bother him. "I take it with a grain of salt," he says. "They're friendly, cool folks."

Though it's not required, others who've gotten involved have been saved.