The dozens of students who didn’t make it into a popular class on Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis are in luck—they can catch the results on national television in fall 2004.

With the help of its professor, Armand M. Nicholi II, the subject of the popular house seminar Leverett 74, “The Worldviews of Sigmund Freud and C. S. Lewis,” has been made into a PBS documentary, scheduled to air in September.

Every year between 50 and 100 students apply for the 20 spots in Nicholi’s course, which addresses the question of the existence of God, juxtaposing Sigmund Freud’s materialist worldview with C. S. Lewis’ spiritual worldview.

Now, however, those who don’t make it into the course can wait to watch “The Question of God: Sigmund Freud and C. S. Lewis,” which reconstructs the life experiences of Freud and Lewis and interviews prominent professionals in various fields on their own worldviews.

The four-hour series, which cost $3 million, is “a very elaborate television version of what the students at Harvard go through in their seminar,” says Michael Sullivan ’68, an executive producer of the documentary.

According to Sullivan, the documentary’s dramatic reconstructions of chapters of Freud’s and Lewis’ biographies are taken from course readings, and the discussions with adults parallel the student discussions.

The series dramatizes, through actors and reconstructed sets in foreign countries, the parts of Freud’s and Lewis’ lives that influenced their philosophical beliefs, and illustrates how those beliefs affected the ways they viewed love, death, pain, suffering and friendship, according to Catherine A. Tatge, co-executive producer with Sullivan and Doug Holliday.

Nicholi says he had not thought of making a film based on the subject of his course, which he has taught for about 35 years, until a former student of the course made the suggestion around eight years ago.

“I never go to movies and I don’t particularly like television,” Nicholi says.

But with encouragement from the student, who had started his own production company, Nicholi eventually contacted Tatge, who has a production company in New York City.

“It’s pretty unusual to find philosophy on television,” Sullivan says, “[But] it’s a lot more fun to watch the television show than to do the reading.”

Tatge also says that this project was novel in the way it was conceived.

“I’ve never taken an academic class and translated it into a film,” says Tatge, who produced and directed the ten-hour Bill Moyers series, “Genesis: A Living Conversation,” and the 1988 PBS series, with Bill Moyers, “Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth,” for which she won an Emmy Award. “It was possibly the most difficult project I’ve ever had to do.”

MAKING THE MOVIE

After six weeks of filming and three and a half years of production, the documentary is now in the post-production process—the final stages of editing.