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In a corner room, on the thirty-fourth floor of the Millennium Hotel, United Nations Plaza, I look for a place to sit. There isn't one. Every surface is covered with cameras, laptops, cords, drives, surge protectors, recharging batteries, and, occasionally, other people. I end up on a windowsill, cold glass against my back, traffic far, far below me.
One floor down, my father, Douglas Wilson, is asleep. A few blocks away, I assume, Christopher Hitchens is as well. It's late enough to be early—even in New York—but this room bustles on.
Two cameramen are dumping their hard-drives and backing everything up. Two producers are talking. The director, cross-legged on the floor between a bed and my windowsill, is reviewing footage from the night. He can't help himself. He must edit. He must make something. And he must do it now.
"Check this," he says. "Gangster. Your dad's a gangster."
The room quiets, and the two producers join me, huddling over the director's head. In a small window on his laptop screen, we watch traffic freeze and surge in fast motion. The sun sets on NYC. Old-school rap begins to throb from the small speakers.
And there they are, my father's cowboy boots, moving down the sidewalk in slow motion. And there he is, turning, realizing a camera is following him, grinning in his beard, laughing as he enters the hotel. Cut.
Nothing has happened yet. The cameras have captured only New York establishment footage, and one scene of a pastor from rural Idaho arriving at his hotel.
In May of 2007, Christopher Hitchens published God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Christopher's polemic naturally drew some attention. It was designed to inflame, and it did, while settling in for a long run on the bestseller list. His taunts and insults were delivered in polished and often amusing prose and reiterated verbally in television appearance after television appearance, all as droll and limp-faced as they were acidic.
And then the debates began. Hitchens wanted all comers.
Aaron Rench, a literary agent (he happens to represent Christopher Hitchens' Anglican brother, Peter), watched the skirmishes, and he wasn't impressed. He wanted something different, and it wasn't long until he was presenting Christopher Hitchens and Douglas Wilson with a proposal from Christianity Today—an epistolary debate, giving both men room to throw literary elbows and revel a bit in their prose. Because of the success of that debate, the correspondence was collected into a small book with introductions from both authors, Is Christianity Good for the World?, released in September of 2008. And that's when all this started.
Darren Doane. That's the name of this man sitting on a hotel room floor, pursing his lips and bobbing his head while he cuts footage. When he's done shooting this documentary, he and his crew will be off to California to work on a project with Van Morrison. But for now, it's all about atheism and Christianity. It's all Hitchens vs. Wilson.
Darren has done a lot of music video work. He loves it. He loves seaming narrative to song or song to narrative. He says he doesn't read much, but he lies. He's full of tidbits from obscure commentaries on the book of Revelation. He once mixed a heavy hip-hop background behind an audio version of the Bible (so he could more easily jog to it). Filming an artist backstage after a show, he was asked to provide the assembled band and roadies with the word of the day. His word: epistemology.
When Darren was contacted by a producer about the possibility of working on a documentary on the new wave of militant atheism, he was interested. When they began searching for content, they found one interaction far more interesting than most. The project morphed, and Christopher Hitchens and Douglas Wilson ended up in three cities over the course of three crazy days. Early morning discussions over coffee, a town-hall forum, stories told in limousines, a formal debate at a seminary, an informal debate squeezed into a pub booth with seminarians, late night admissions and confidences, a two-hour, unmoderated finale in a Georgetown tavern, mockery, rebuke, instruction, jokes, laughter, sharp dispute and warm affection.
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