Movies, morals and marketing

Following the success of "The Passion of the Christ," which was driven in large part by church group sales, Hollywood decided to market more aggressively to the Christian moviegoing public. But, according to a recent article on the Christianity Today web site, that effort hasn't been as successful as hoped and may have even backfired in some cases by scaring the secular public away from movies.

The highest-profile effort to market to the church came from 20th Century Fox, which started a division called "Fox Faith" just to market movies with religious content or based on books from the religious marketplace.

Although the Times-Gazette is generally considered too small to be on the radar of most Hollywood studios, and we don't usually get screener copies or press kits about new movie releases, we have been on the mailing list for Fox Faith. I'm guessing that the company intentionally added smaller newspapers to its marketing plan in the belief that small towns would be especially friendly to its content.

One of the movies that I was able to screen as a result of this was "The Ultimate Gift," which I reviewed the week of its release. The studio sends you a bare-bones DVD with the words "PROPERTY OF 20TH CENTURY FOX" superimposed on the screen for the entire movie, so that you don't try to pirate the film.

The cast of "The Ultimate Gift" included James Garner, Brian Dennehy and Abigail Breslin. This was one movie singled out by the Christianity Today piece as having potentially been hurt by the Fox Faith connection. People who might have sampled the movie otherwise had been tipped off, as it were, that the movie was inspirational and had a message to it. Is that why the movie didn't do well at the box office? Could be; some people like a movie with a strong moral to it, but others think that's heavy-handed and that the movies are for escape, not enlightenment.

In fact, the producer of the movie blames its lack of success on the fact that it was moved to the "Fox Faith" label.

Popular culture can have a powerful impact on society, and there's no doubt that people of faith need to be involved in it. But I think the church hurts itself by trying to build a wall around "Christian" novels or "Christian" movies or "Christian" rock or "Christian" television, and by trying to shoehorn artists who happen to be Christian into unreasonable expectations about what they are allowed or expected to do, and limits on how fully they can present the reality of a fallen world.

And I think the best movie messages aren't intentional or obvious -- they don't exist because someone decided to bludgeon you with The Moral of the Story. Instead, they simply ooze naturally out of the story because a good story is a reflection of how the storyteller thinks about the world.

That kind of storytelling may be harder to sell in the form of group-rate tickets to the quote-unquote "Christian market." But I think it will have a lot more of an impact in the long run.

John I. Carney is city editor of the Times-Gazette and covers county government and other topics. His home page is lakeneuron.com.