“Fly down to the set,” he said. I could tell he was talking on a cell phone.

The connection was breaking up. Before it cut off I heard him say, “We can talk between takes.”

“Talk between takes?”

I met Trevor Massely before he was a star. On that day two years ago we Sat around the kitchen table at his parents’ farm eating freshly baked bread and sip­ping hot apple cider. This time I was head­ing down to Hollywood, California, far from the sound of neighing horses and lla­mas to interview Trevor as he filmed his first movie.

Los Angeles with all its glamour and bustle greeted me with a humid hug as I stepped off the plane. A small man wear­ing a black suite and an oily mustache stood at the gate holding a sign with “Harris” scrawled across it.

“I’m Josh Harris,” I told him.

“There’s a limo waiting for you, sir,” he said with a quick bow.

“A limo? My, my you’ve come a long way, Mr. Massely,” I thought to myself.

As we pulled out of LAX into rush-hour traffic, I settled back into the plush leather of the limousine and wondered how it all happened. Flow did a conserva­tive home schooler wind up in Hollywood?

The “Massely Phenomenon,” as peo­ple in the industry refer to it, exploded three months after I first interviewed Trevor. First, New Attitude’s article made him an instant celebrity among home schoolers. At home-school conventions he spoke to packed auditoriums. Practical Horneschooling Magazine named him “Homeschooler of the Decade.” Home-school moms with signs reading “I Will Pay You to Marry My Daughter” staked out his hotel rooms and mobbed his tour bus.

The rest of the country found out about Trevor via Jay Leno. The producers of the “Tonight Show” thought an inter­view with a Christian home schooler who didn’t date would be good for a few laughs. The last laugh was on them.

Trevor Massely was introduced to America, and the country went nuts. “Trevor Mania” swept from Boston to San Diego. His book “The Only Courtship Formula” topped the New York Times Best-Seller list. Bookstores couldn’t keep it stocked. Trevor made the cover of People, Rolling Stone and US. The “home-school look” dominated fashion runways in Paris and New York. Suddenly home schooling and courtship were the pop-culture craze—a surging, mounting wave of consumer madness. And riding it all like a California surfer was Trevor Massely. He was everywhere. On the TV he was pitching Nike’s “HomeschoolAir” shoes. In magazines his smiling face pro­moted milk. The caption under the picture of Trevor, upper lip covered with a milk mustache read: “It’s not easy being a per­fect home schooler. That’s why I drink milk.” For an undisclosed amount (some estimate over $40 million), Trevor signed a seven-year endorsement deal with A Beka to only use their textbooks and cur­riculum.

I shook my head as I reflected on it. Trevor was indeed larger than life—The Beatles, Michael Jordan and Bill Bennett all rolled into one. And now he was going to be a movie star. My thoughts were interrupted as the limo pulled into the movie studio parking lot.

After giving my name and showing my I.D. to three secretaries, I found my way to the back lot. A large gentlemen stopped me as I was about to step onto the set. “Excuse me, this area is restrict­ed,” he said gruffly. “Gary, he’s with me,” a voice called out. It was Trevor. Shooing away the two women doing his makeup, he jumped off of his chair and ran over. “So glad you’re here! Come sit down.”

He asked me about the flight, my family and New Attitude’s last issue. He was the same. I was pleasantly surprised to find that in the midst of the lights and cameras, in spite of the success, Trevor was still the same old likable, friendly, per­fect home schooler.

“Fame hasn’t affected who I am,” he said. “Sure, my lifestyle is a little different but I’m still me.” Trevor views his books, commercials, records (his rap album “Homeboy For Life” went gold in two weeks), and now movie as merely vehicles for the message.

In the movie he’s shooting, “The Courtship of Trevor Massely,” he plays himself. “It’s actually more like a docu­mentary,” he explained. “We’re filming my courtship as it happens.”

Trevor got the idea of capturing a real-life courtship from reading a few of the now popular “courtship story” books. “I thought to myself, ‘These books are great, but it’s not as real as if you could watch it happening in living color.”

Filming an unfolding courtship isn’t the easiest thing to do. “Shooting the footage of me talking to her parents and meeting with her dad was easy,” he explains. “But the conversations between Jessica and myself are difficult. It’s tough having a camera in your face, fifteen light­ing technicians hovering around and a director shouting orders as you try to pro­pose to a girl. And then if you don’t get it right, you have to do it again!” Trevor sighed. “What keeps me going is knowing how many people will be helped. We’ve always needed a step-by-step, live-action courtship movie. People can watch how I courted Jessica on their VCR, stop the video in the appropriate place, duplicate what we did and then start it up again when they’re ready to move on.”

A fair-skinned girl with long blonde hair pulled back in a pony tail walked up as we were talking. Trevor beamed as he introduced her. “This is my fiancée Jessica,” he said proudly.

“I’m not your fiancée yet,” she gently reminded him. “We haven’t finished film­ing the proposal scene.”

“Oh, that’s right,” Trevor laughed.

“So what’s the rating for this movie,” I asked the two love-birds, “G?”

“No,” Trevor said, “they had to come up with a new rating for this film. It’s so clean it’s a Triple G rating.”

“And I assume the only kiss comes on the wedding day?”

“Kiss on the wedding day?” Jessica said with a shocked look of indignation. “How licentious! Trevor and I are saving our first kiss for our 25th anniversary, aren’t we dear?”

Trevor smiled weakly. It looked as though Mr. Massely had met his match.