::North Carolina's son, America's 'pastor in chief'
How do you prepare to step into the shoes of America's preacher on the big screen?
"I was on YouTube watching every sermon I could get my hands on," said Armie Hammer, the actor who plays Billy Graham in "Billy: The Early Years," a film on its way to theaters across the country Friday.
The film, which premiered in churches, starts with a 17-year-old Graham contemplating his future on a North Carolina dairy farm in the 1930s.
It is after an "unforgettable experience" at a tent revival that Graham pursues the call to evangelism, which eventually takes him all over the world. With extraordinary charisma, he would embrace a preaching style that never detoured from the single theme that mankind is sinful but through Jesus those sins are forgiven.
"He literally scared the 'hell' out of people,' " Hammer said about Graham's sermons during a telephone interview to promote the movie.
The crusades - old-fashioned tent revivals that later morphed into coliseum-seating events - brought together ecumenical choirs and beloved musicians and focused on personal salvation and conversion.
"There was an electricity to them that could captivate an audience," said Bill Leonard, dean of the divinity school at Wake Forest University.
Sam Zealy Jr. once told me that he stood alongside his dad at the 1958 Charlotte crusade, which the elder Zealy helped organize. He was 10.
"After Dr. Graham's message, he made his invitation to come down front, saying: 'As the choir sings "Just As I Am," we will wait. ... You may be seated in the upper level and far away from this stage, but just come. We'll wait,' " Zealy recalled in an interview after the opening of the Billy Graham Library in June 2007. "I can remember today, after almost 50 years, that I stood up and felt that my feet were glued to the floor."
"I don't think I even looked at my father but struggled, slowly at first," Zealy, who died in an accident last fall, said of walking to the altar. "With tears in my eyes and standing amidst a throng of tall people, I looked up. Dr. Graham looked down upon us and said, 'A team member will give you some material and make sure that you are rejoined with your family ... and know that Jesus loves you.'"
Told in flashbacks, the movie includes the courtship of Graham's future wife, Ruth Bell, as part of a journey that resulted in Graham's place in history as a national icon.
Graham has been called "America's pastor in chief" in deference to his relationship with every president back to Harry Truman.
"His strength of character played a major part in his long-term influence - and his hesitancy to become too involved in major theological controversies that rocked Protestantism in the last half century," Leonard said.
Lois Lee, whose dad was a Baptist minister and of the same generation as Graham, attended a crusade in Michigan as a girl.
"He was such a compelling speaker. People came from miles around to hear him in person," Lee told me last year. "His message never, ever wavered. He was faithful to God's word. He was clear in the invitation he extended to accept Christ."
Lee has read an early biography of Graham and said today's televangelists could learn a lot from revisiting the path he took - one on display during the movie.
"I was impressed with how the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association was formed - how his close friends and advisers were careful to be sure all financial donations were aboveboard," Lee said. "He determined that his salary should be no more than a minister of an average church - that benchmark might have changed by now - with the point being that he never lived lavishly, nor did he spend the organization's money on himself."
