Audience of One
In 1994, at age 40, Pentecostal Pastor Richard Gazowsky saw his first movie.
Later that year he had a vision from God who, Gazowsky says, told him to start a
film company.
And so begins the tale of Richard Gazowsky, his film company and his attempt to turn the story of Joseph and the coat of many colors into a $50 million "epic" set in the future, sci-fi style. Something Gazowsky himself has called "Star Wars meets the Ten Commandments."
Gazowsky's story is documented by a film maker, who followed him for several years, to make Audience of One:
It’s a story of one man’s delusions of grandeur and his ability to manipulate hundreds of other people into joining him on his crazy odyssey. Disaster is written all over the project from the start: the oddball costumes created for the film, the clunky sets built in the parking lot of Gazowsky’s San Francisco church, the street people he signs on as actors, the ill-conceived and drastically unprepared five-day trip to an Italian village to shoot scenes for the movie where timing is everything and nothing goes right.
Gazowsky is a former UPCI minister who pastors a church in San Francisco. His attempt to make a movie, without any experience and based on the funds raised from his church has garnered quite a bit of attention, clearly not all of it positive. Unfortunately, in the documentary Gazowsky comes off as a bit of a fanatic and perhaps a charlatan. Even his own mother refers to him as "sweet, gentle and naive."
While there is something to be said for media coverage of Pentecostal personalities, it is unfortunate when that coverage portrays people of like faith as disillusioned con men or when those people feed the world's negative opinion of the rest of us.
Despite the negative feedback on his project, and the widespread criticism Gazowsky is undeterred. At the end of Audience of One, "Gazowsky stands in front of his flock promising better days ahead: a slate of 47 films a year, a Christian theme park, ownership of eight television networks, construction of 27 resort cities around the world, even the colonization of a distant planet."
Listen to NPR's interview with Gazowsky and decide for yourself if he is simply a misunderstood dreamer or if he has in fact lost touch with reality.
