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In the fall of 1967 a restless, really smart Grand Rapids boy was working hard on getting kicked out of Calvin College, doing everything he could, in fact, to make that happen so he might fulfill his image of himself as hip firebrand out to vandalize the cultural guts and soul of the old tradition.
Paul Schrader had gone to Calvin as a matter of course; it was the college for brainy "covenant children" of the staunchly creedal, ardently cerebral Christian Reformed Church, a school at once rigorous and safe, adept at molding mind and spirit to fit the purposes of "kingdom work" and the CRC. Schrader entered Calvin pre-sem, but he fast grew discontent and rebellious, getting himself kicked out, says he, for vandalism and general trouble-making (the college has no record of the expulsion, but Schrader says that his father bought his way back in with a big donation).
In any case, by his senior year at Calvin, young Schrader had imbibed ample quantities of ideas, literature, movies, and booze, the last a first installment of long-term addiction problems. After the "expulsion," older brother Leonard introduced him to the intellectualist malcontents of the newspaper crowd. It was this arena that gave Schrader his last chance for Calvin to boot him permanently when, in a fuss over inviting black activist Dick Gregory to campus, Chimes published the private phone numbers and addresses of college board members.
By this time, too, Schrader had already become a huge pain for his lead role in finagling film into the college's life (the CRC condemned film until 1966, when Synod belatedly sanctified it as art). With this as a backdrop, Schrader hoped the newspaper ploy would finally bring his coup de grace. By this time, though, the college was on to Schrader's stratagem, and so it only slapped the wrist of the enfant terrible. In the spring of 1968 Schrader graduated, a simmering mix of idealism, bravado, protest, zeal, and the troubled hell-bent rowdyism that passed for virtue in the sixties.
To learn film criticism, Schrader went off to UCLA film school, and the rest is, well, history. His rise was indeed meteoric, although not as spectacular as the ascent of film school pals Coppola, Lucas, and Spielberg. Together they composed the heart of a "brat pack" that would revolutionize American filmmaking.
Schrader's progress in filmdom was brilliant but erratic, seemingly haphazard, indirect. From fledging critic he moved to really hot screenwriter and then to director to arrive now in mid career within a small high rank of distinguished writers and directors. The screenplays alone have made Schrader legend—Taxi Driver (1976), Raging Bull (1980), and The Last Temptation of Christ (1988)—as have the many films he has both written and directed—Mishima (1985), American Gigolo (1980), Light Sleeper (1991), and the just released Affliction (1998), a "quietly stunning" adaptation of a Russell Banks novel that has won rave reviews and acting awards (James Coburn) and nominations (Nick Nolte). While many of Schrader's contemporaries have greater fame, none has forged so singular, incisive, and ultimately wrenching a body of work. The American film community has belatedly re cognized his achievement with retrospectives aplenty, and in March he received the Writers Guild of America's prestigious Laurel Award.
And all the while, Schrader's natural constituency has either ignored or derided his work. Many church people, it's reasonable to assume, have never seen even a single one of his films, even though his insistent preoccupation is with how we understand personal evil and the possibility and shape of grace. Schrader's relentless pursuit of these themes does not make for a pretty trip, for the routes to both perdition and redemption are not the stuff of goo or slogan. Then again, truth hurts, and well it should in a place where people maim and suffer in body and soul.
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