What It Takes to Deliver to Audiences

In the past three years Christians have seen the cultural landscape shift. Before Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ, Hollywood ignored the Christian audience because it failed to realize that there was one worth pursuing.

Yes, there had been occasional efforts by studios reaching out to churches to entreat them to see a faith-not-unfriendly feature, or by brave marketers who knew of the church demographic and sought to connect family-friendly films to the huge potential audience they believed was out there waiting to be wooed.

But the post-Passion landscape sealed the deal: on a production cost of $30 million, the film made over $611 million worldwide, and for the foreseeable future, Hollywood has seen the light and has sought to find stories that can be marketed to the faithful. It has also allowed Christians in the filmmaking world to know that they have a better chance to pitch their ideas to those with money and resources to bring their visions to life.

But all sides seeking to bring the Christian audience to their films have to address certain basic questions about the kinds of stories they will tell and take into account the attitudes that have historically shaped the cultural habits of believers over the years. And everyone, filmmakers and audiences alike, will need to confront what it means to entertain and be entertained.

Christians, particularly evangelicals, have for a very long time had problems with the concept of entertainment, or have at least been ambivalent on the subject. Leaving aside the historical instances of the church banning the theater and condemning actors, we could look at the nineteenth-century American church alone to find the precedents for mistrust and rejection of the arts. The great revivalist Charles Finney loudly condemned the enjoyment of pretty much anything outside the walls of the church or one’s prayer closet:

I cannot believe that a person who has ever known the love of God can relish a secular novel. . . .Let me visit your chamber, your parlor, or wherever you keep your books. What is here? Byron, Scott, Shakespeare and a host of triflers and blasphemers of God. (quoted in Pop Culture Wars, by William D. Romanowski)

This brand of pietism, or the devotion to worshipping God to the exclusion of extending the lordship of Christ to all areas of life, kept believers in many churches out of the cultural mainstream in an effort to be holy. And of course it also kept them from participating in the production of the culture consumed by everyone else, thereby reducing the redemptive contributions they could have made. By the time the avalanche of new twentieth century media began with the coming of film, radio, and then television, most Christians were AWOL—but safe in their churches. That’s when the culture came looking for them.

The twentieth century saw a long, slow change in the entertainment habits of evangelicals. Television brought secular culture into the home, and many in the next generation grew up on the same programming as their neighbors. Their parents and grandparents could still queasily recall pastors warning them of the dangers of time spent in the darkened movie house: “Would you want to be found in a movie theater when Jesus comes?” But a cohort has grown up never hearing such admonitions, and one could almost think that the current crop of youth went from the cultural separatism of their elders directly into a comfortable and uncritical embrace of all media.

Now that we have church video departments making professional grade productions for megachurch services and pastors using Spider-Man movies for sermon illustrations, has the church fully embraced entertainment as a good thing? There is still the sense in the church that admitting that entertainment is “okelly dokelly” goes too far, that movies and television must be at least safe for all viewers and somehow useful in promoting wholesome values to justify their creation and consumption, and even better, that they should somehow include some sort of evangelistic appeal to be true entertainment.

What do we mean by entertainment? Let’s look at the American Heritage definition:

1. To hold the attention of with something amusing or diverting. See synonyms at amuse. . .. 3a. To consider; contemplate: entertain an idea. b. To hold in mind; harbor: entertained few illusions.

As you can see, there are different aspects of the word that arise from its entymology that means something like, “to hold among,” suggesting that both definitions 1 and 3 are holding something before the mind for its consideration. The first stresses the play or amusement meaning, and the other a more contemplative action. In fact, I think both functions are at work in the cultural activity we call entertainment. By holding before our minds stimulating content, we are open to contemplating whatever themes and meanings appear in that content. In other words, we must be entertained by something before we entertain its meaning, its “message,” or its ideas. I have illustrated this before in a column on James Bond; the thrilling Bond films were so attractive as entertainment that audiences were open to contemplating the explicit and implicit themes of the sexual revolution conveyed by the films.

If this understanding of entertainment is valid, then it follows that entertainment itself is not inherently and necessarily a bad thing—it becomes a question of what we are entertaining in our entertainment. It becomes the responsibility of the individual to try to discern the meaning coming through the content, the subject of a whole other article. The point here is that entertainment is not necessarily a frivolous use of our time. Even light-hearted and light-headed content of no discernible gravity can be a gift briefly diverting us the pressing routines and stresses of life. Other stories, songs and shows may challenge us with their complexity and heavy themes and great art has arisen from works that grip the mind and emotions. And that’s where the majority of entertainment falls: somewhere in between the light and the weighty.

Those wishing to produce and market films to the large Christian audience looking for movies that aren’t hostile to their deepest beliefs should keep in mind several elements that set such stories on a promising path.

Compelling stories: Script adviser Linda Seeger, in the great book of essays, Behind the Screen: Hollywood Insiders on Faith, Film, and Culture, argues that usually the best stories aren’t prescriptive tales of virtuous characters modeling exemplary behavior, nor are they descriptive stories that dramatically illustrate the reality of sin, corruption and downward trajectory of a flawed character. The latter story type can find itself falling into the traps of glamorizing the darkness of sin or focusing any dramatic resolution on purely human action. Rather, Seger recommends combining both modes into what she calls the “transformative arc” whereby characters realistically confront their inner and outer conflicts while the story leaves dramatic space for the mystery of grace abounding in the midst of sin. Here characters find some level of redemption not based solely on their own efforts.

Quality on all levels: Here’s one of the most challenging aspects of filmmaking—making your work stand out from the “good enough” fare. Director Scott Derrickson found out that this was the only way he could fulfill his calling to work in Hollywood. Also writing in Behind the Screen, Derrickson, director and co-writer of The Exorcism of Emily Rose and a Christian, states that quality is exemplified through excellence and marketability. Excellence in all you do means learning the art and craft of film so that studios will want to produce your films and you may thus continue to find work. The second area, marketability, recognizes that your stories must appeal to a sizable audience who will ensure the success of the film. This requires understanding your audience and telling stories that will engage them.

To expand on the area of quality, in filmmaking, it also means that we give the audience their money’s worth. In terms of entertainment value, it means telling a story that is appealing on its own terms, not as a means of selling a sermon. Watch some of your favorite films and note that not every second is devoted to delivering a “message” but rather creating a world of interesting characters, incidents, and plot elements that enrich the film-going experience. But when the film is over, you know that certain themes and meanings have been affirmed precisely because the weave of the cinematic fabric has all worked toward carrying the audience through the story.

A film doesn’t have to have sky-high production values to impress us. The Passion of the Christ cost just $30 million, but Mel Gibson and his crew knew how to make that middle-sized budget look like a lot more. In other words, you don’t always have to spend $100 million to get blockbuster returns.

We also know when, despite how good a movie looks, something about it doesn’t quite work. Characters act for no clear reason and when they change it seems unmotivated. Plot logic is lacking or unbelievable. “Message” films can fail easily here exactly because we have an absence of story and character richness that leaves the preaching to carry the film. The independently produced film The Gospel, a contemporary re-telling of the parable of the Prodigal Son set in a black church, looked great, but the drama was flat or forced, and its happy ending seemed more magical in its easy resolution than miraculous in the sense of divine intervention in the midst of human conflict.

Another example: The Nativity Story was marketed to the church audience as a sincere presentation of the birth of Christ. Watching the trailer gave me the impression that it was a latter-day return to the 1950s ad 60s era of reverent-but-dull biblical epics, and that was indeed the response of many critics, such as Entertainment Weekly’s Owen Gleiberman, who remarked, “The Nativity Story is a film of tame picture-book sincerity, but that's not the same thing as devotion. The movie is too tepid to feel, or see, the light.” Audiences seemed to agree—the $35 million dollar film made just $45 million—not enough to cover the marketing and distribution costs to do more than break even.

But there are examples of films that succeed in their pro-redemption themes with compelling narratives and rich characterizations. To illustrate, I’ll end by discussing the films of Tyler Perry, a playwright, actor, and now film director who weaves tales set in Atlanta’s black community. Though his stories are true to a particular socio-ethnic culture, the themes of forgiveness and restoration are universal.

Perry, raised by his mother in New Orleans, set out to write plays but, after a lean period of living out of his car, finally hit on a character that sparked his tales of uplift with raucous humor. Madea—an outsized silver-haired, pistol-packing aunt, full of sass and biting wit—was the catalyst that brought comic relief to his melodramas of broken families, abusive boyfriends, and class conflict within the African-American community. Madea, outrageously played by Perry in make-up and a fat suit, pulls the stories out of despair with her hilarious barbs and hard-nosed refusal to let those she cares about stray into failure. Perry knows that audiences respond to colorful characters, and thus his films show people at both their worst and best. Because we’ve seen their struggle with darkness, the light they turn to is that much brighter.

Perry’s stories break the rules of modern mainstream storytelling with some characters seeming like arch stereotypes rather than real people, yet his core audience recognizes and loves these inter-class conflicts set in the black community. His latest film, Daddy’s Little Girls (which comes to DVD on June 12), bravely made without the Madea character, features another fractured family—this time a mechanic fights to keep his treacherous ex-wife from taking his daughters to live with her and her gangsta boyfriend. An upscale female lawyer he is chauffeuring decides to help him with the case and therein lies the romantic/comedy cum family melodrama mix. Perry’s audience has returned and embraced his third film even without Madea’s help. What they really love about the films is that he takes the challenges of the black community seriously and demonstrates how the church is singularly positioned to offer transformation both for individuals and their community.

The best sermons we hear are usually those that, for a moment, take us into stories of characters in conflict. We get caught up in the tale, wondering how it will turn out, though sometimes we don’t always catch its meaning and we must ponder it for awhile. That’s how Jesus spoke to His followers: “Indeed, he said nothing to them without a parable.” But cinematic parables, told through film, television and other media, can take us out of ourselves for a while and bring us back with a glimpse of something true, with a smile, or a tear, or both. That’s entertainment.

Alex Wainer teaches communication and mass media at Palm Beach Atlantic University. He is also a regular contributor to The Culture Beat. He can be reached at commdocalex@netscape.net.