David vs. Goliath

The tempest had passed, but new storms were brewing: Two years after an embattled Jim Caviezel hauled the cross to Mel Gibson’s makeshift Calvary in the Biblical landmine The Passion of the Christ, movies with overt religious content were still waging an uphill battle. It was summer 2006 and a tame little football movie called Facing the Giants was branded with the mildly restrictive PG rating by the Motion Picture Association of America. The rating itself didn’t bother the filmmakers, but the motive was suspect. Directed by Georgia-based pastor Alex Kendrick, Facing the Giants features God-fearing characters whose newfound faith inspires them to become athletic champions. When the film’s distributors contacted the MPAA for an explanation of which “thematic elements” warranted the rating, they were told that its pro-Christian message had the potential to irk nonbelievers. “So it’s not football and it’s not infertility,” Kendrick remarked in an interview a few months later. “We mentioned Jesus Christ and they consider that proselytizing.”

Was the industry trying to protect viewers from religious pronouncements? The possibility stoked the ire of Christian activists around the country, inadvertently giving rise to grassroots marketing. Facing the Giants eventually made back its measly $10,000 budget—primarily made up of church donations—more than a thousand times over. “People felt that they had to rally to the film’s support,” says Christianity Today film critic Peter T. Chattaway. Ultimately, the conspiratorial accusations were quelled from the inside out. “It wasn’t [intended] to bash Christians or anyone else,” explains Dr. Ted Baehr, founder of the Christian values site Movieguide.org and Chairman of the Christian Film and Television Commission. “[The MPAA is] promoting the six major studios. This wasn’t a major studio movie, so they wanted to find a way for it to lose its credibility.”

The communal outcry defending Facing the Giants adhered to a familiar pattern. One of the first groups to voice concern was the American Family Association, a group that wrestled with Hollywood 18 years earlier, when Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ depicted Jesus in flagrante delicto. Outraged at ex-Catholic Scorsese’s subversive approach, AFA leader Reverend Donald Wildmon challenged MCA/Universal head Sidney Sheinberg to single out the Christian executives at his studio—implying, of course, the prevailing power of another faith, one long-rumored to control the movie business.

The nasty allegation made a comeback in late 2004, shortly after the release of The Passion of the Christ, when The Catholic League President Bill Donohue shrugged off Hollywood’s disdain for the film. “Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular,” he fumed to Scarborough Country guest host Pat Buchanan. “It’s not a secret, OK? And I’m not afraid to say it. That’s why they hate this movie. It’s about Jesus Christ and it’s about the truth.” After a loose complaint about free love in mainstream entertainment (including the dubious assertion that “Hollywood likes anal sex”), Donohue finished his point. “Mel Gibson represents the mainstream of America,” he said. “The culture war has been ongoing for a long time. Their side has lost.”

Four years on the Gregorian calendar later, Donohue has calmed down a bit. “I was expressing frustration over the pounding Catholics have taken from disproportionately Jewish studios,” he says over the phone from his New York City office. “We finally had a movie that we liked, and not only does nobody want to put it out, but we’re considered anti-Semitic because we like the movie.” If Donohue actually believed his 2004 contention, he hides it well. “Look, the problem is not Jews,” he says, widening his complaint to encompass a larger secular crowd. “But Hollywood definitely has more secular-minded Jews than Catholics or Muslims. If someone says Jews run Hollywood, how can you deny it?”

At least one Hollywood Jew left a positive impression on Donohue. He fondly remembers when DreamWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg invited him out west 10 years ago to work as a consultant on the studio division’s first release, The Prince of Egypt. “He said, ‘We’ve got this Jewish nonbeliever making a movie about the Bible. I’m a little concerned,”‘ Donohue recalls. “He definitely went about it in a professional way.” The movie grossed more than $200 million worldwide and won an Academy Award.

The success of a widely appealing Bible movie like Prince of Egypt suggests that you don’t necessarily need controversy to sell religious narratives to the masses—but it certainly helps. Donohue’s seething victory dance over the culture war may have been premature, because while Gibson’s Passion showed that a person with enough money could defy Hollywood through the magic of independent distribution, mass audiences haven’t given subsequent Biblical treatments the same warm welcome. 2006’s sole studio entry in the genre, The Nativity Story, flopped big time, earning hardly more than a fifth of its original budget. Considering the boom in publicity focused on the Christian marketplace in the wake of the Passion hailstorm, the landscape appears strangely barren.

Contemporary nondenominational films are often placed within ideological contexts in many religious communities, Christian or otherwise, but explicit Christian films remain few and far between, possibly because of America’s shifting political climate. The Passion arrived in the middle of a heated presidential election, during which the country’s red states defined the national zeitgeist. “There’s an unprecedented search for meaning in our country today, especially among young people,” says Larry Ross, whose publicity firm helped engineer the success of The Passion. “Whether it’s post-9/11 or because we’re going into a recession—people tend to be open to spiritual topics in times of tension or transition.”

But times are changing: A 2007 Gallup poll found that 82 percent of Americans identify as Christians, down from 86.5 percent in 2004. The annual number of churchgoers continues to decline, and audiences want Hollywood products to be sleek and non-dogmatic. For many Christians, confining ideology-as-entertainment to a niche marketplace has always been the preferable route. “The most extreme of us are portrayed as our norm,” says Jerry B. Jenkins, co-author of the wildly successful Left Behind series, an action-packed twist on the Book of Revelations. “We’d rather see our pictures as works by people who happen to be Christians and whose worldview—basically one of hope rather than fatalism or despair—is depicted in quality work.”

Oddly enough, the Left Behind saga offers an interesting example of this approach gone awry. The books became a movie franchise—with two sequels to date—under the guidance of Cloud Ten Pictures, an independent studio that specializes in spreading the Gospel. Made on the cheap with ultra-cheesy production value and only successful in the direct-to-video market (and church screenings), the films angered Tim LaHaye, Jenkins’ writing partner, to the point where he sued the studio for not making blockbusters out of the books. The lawsuit never went anywhere, but the studio is still trying to settle with LaHaye. “It’s been a long, ongoing concern of ours,” says André Van Heerden, Cloud Ten CEO and co-writer of the films. “The claims are baseless, but it has hurt our ability to do business. It’s something we wish we all could have avoided.” Jenkins, meanwhile, sides with his colleague. “The Passion of the Christ revealed the massive scope of the audience,” he says. “Whenever I see a big budget, special effects-laden picture, I imagine what might have been.”

Jews reigned supreme during the Golden Age of Hollywood, but the movies were regulated by Church creed. Most studio heads in the ’30s and ’40s bowed to the decrees of the Production Code Administration, whose seal of approval quickly became the industry standard. At its head, Republican National Committee leader Will Hays fought to imbue studio films with Christian morals. As Gregory D. Black explains in Hollywood Censored, Hays “brought the respectability of mainstream middle class America to a Jewish-dominated film industry.” Heavily active groups such as the predominantly Catholic Legion of Decency, which invented its own rating system, doubled his efforts, but they didn’t last. The PCA started crumbling in the ’50s, and in 1967 it was replaced by the MPAA. A new era of violent action and sexploitation on the big screen—that is, the ’70s—entered the arena of popular culture.

Concurrently, independent distributors began providing alternatives for Christian audiences. Billy Graham’s organization founded World Wide Pictures in 1951, resulting in the solidification of a genre known as “faith and family” films. The earnest drama of 1965’s The Restless Ones (the story of a pastor and his troubled son) created an instant hit and a considerably effective tool for proselytizing. “They were very didactic and straightforward with the Gospel message,” Ross says of the early World Wide Pictures titles. “It was the Billy Graham crusade on film, told in the context of a story.” Christian entertainment remained a minor phenomenon for several decades, followed by a major surge in fiction writing instigated by the success of Frank Peretti’s This Present Darkness in 1986. An epic tale of angels and demons at war in a backwoods college town, the book sold about four million copies in two years. In the ’90s, film rights to the novel were purchased by 20th Century Fox, and Chuck Russell, director of the Arnold Schwarzenegger project Eraser, began working on a script. But the movie’s conceits were too grandiose—a Christian Lord of the Rings, if you will, demanding massive special effects—and the studio wound up with a five million dollar debt.

Russell still managed to make a Peretti-esque spiritual thriller, the 2000 dud Bless the Child, but the results were less than satisfactory. “It was a horror film with apocalyptic Christian overtones like This Present Darkness,” says Chattaway. “Not a very good one, but it was interesting to see that film only a year or two after hearing about This Present Darkness.” Chattaway suspects that the unrealized adaptation could be divisive even within Christian community. “It comes out of a very modern Evangelical subculture,” he says, “whereas The Passion went back to the roots that all Churches have in common—Christ himself.”

There was a definite cogency to the Christian support for The Passion. Ross, who accompanied Gibson to numerous pre-release screenings of the film, recalls the community response as a spectacle that drew the attention of lingering curious types. “Their support primed the pump for mainstream audiences,” he says of the initial devotees. But the priming didn’t last forever. “There was a change, but not nearly to the extent everyone expected,” Van Heerden says. “That really was an exception that proves the rule that there’s a marketplace out there.”

Naturally, the core audience for Christian films has always been a specified bunch. Cloud Ten Pictures mostly profits from DVD sales, and Facing the Giants made it to theaters via Provident Films, the Christian distribution arm of Sony Pictures. Those examples of individual struggle and self-promotion barely differ from Gibson’s independent efforts to sell his work. If the former actor realized his professed desire to make more Bible stories, other Passion-sized success stories may have erupted from the power of his monstrous finances. But his much-publicized drunk driving arrest in the summer of 2006, which included a rambling outburst of antisemitism, heavily marred his credibility as a leading contributor to big-screen Bible narratives.

Gibson’s movie-star cash isn’t fueling the next Jesus-centered blockbuster, but there’s plenty of room for the little guy: Kendrick, for example, has hit no public image barriers. He declined to comment for this article, but his excuse works: The director is toiling away with Fireproof, his church-funded follow-up to Facing the Giants. Elsewhere, faith and family films continue to do good business. The animated VeggieTales franchise earns sizeable revenue with its impeccable blend of Christian morals and offbeat humor, while the success of other movies upholding religious values depends on community support. (The pro-life message of the independently released feature Bella, for example, attracted praise from numerous Christian organizations, whose support sustained its profit.) If the future of the business depends on systematic outreach, prospects are looking good. “Christian media is getting more popular,” says Ross. “As that media grows in quality and acceptance, the films done with excellence are making an impact.”

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