So says Videomatica in their latest update. This film was directed by Sam Green, who went on to co-direct the VERY interesting documentary The Weather Underground. Here's my review, from the August 1998 issue of BC Christian News:
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FIVE YEARS ago, Steve Taylor scored a modest hit with 'Bannerman', a tune about the guy who showed up at sports events wearing T-shirts emblazoned with John 3:16 and other Bible verses. Taylor's song turned the man behind the media stunt -- now emulated at sports events around North America by a raft of banner carriers -- into a sort of hero.
But in The Rainbow Man / John 3:16, documentarian Sam Green takes a closer look at the original bannerman, Rollen Stewart, and paints a portrait that is as disturbing as it is sympathetic.
Stewart was not the polite, slightly ironic figure in Taylor's song who knew how to wink at his detractors. Instead, he was an overly earnest man, desperate for attention, who smoked too much pot, watched too much TV and, when things didn't go his way, turned violent.
Relying on interviews and excerpts from his diary, Green traces Stewart's life from his unhappy childhood in Spokane to the shock he felt when his first wife left him in the mid-1970s. Lonely and depressed, Stewart donned a rainbow-coloured Afro wig and began to appear at sporting events around the country, dancing and playing with his super-long moustache for the TV cameras. His burst of fame earned him a spot in a Budweiser TV commercial, but after a few years of non-stop partying, he felt burned out.
As always, he turned to TV. And there he saw Charles Taylor on Today in Bible Prophecy. Thus, in 1980, Stewart became a Christian and, convinced that the world was about to end, he added T-shirts and banners with Bible verses to his repertoire.
When that gimmick ran its course some years later, Stewart created a third persona for himself: the 'backslidden Christian,' whereby he set off stink bombs near televangelists' offices in the hope that reporters would show up and, while covering the story, give the preachers a chance to warn the world of its impending doom.
When that plan backfired -- the police fingered Stewart immediately -- he took a hotel maid hostage and demanded a three hour press conference. The police burst in on him while he was smoking a joint to relieve his tension. In 1993, a judge sentenced Stewart to three life sentences.
Green is remarkably non-judgmental, and he allows Stewart to speak for himself, for the most part. Whenever he does use footage from TV shows like Hard Copy and The Price Is Right, the hosts invariably come across as smug and condescending; Stewart, at least, has an apparently deep and sincere sense of his own calling.
Unfortunately, Stewart also suffers from a martyr complex fed by a shallow, self-serving theology, as well as a weakness for methods that proved to be counter-productive, if not dangerous. As Steve Taylor himself might put it, the end don't justify the means anytime.
The Rainbow Man / John 3:16 will be preceded by Andre the Giant Has a Posse, Helen Stickler's short film about a more mainstream form of culture-jamming (if that isn't an oxymoron).