Read more of Kim Lawton's interview with Dick Staub, author of THE CULTURALLY SAVVY CHRISTIAN:

Q: How would you describe the relationship between God and Hollywood right now?

A: Well, the relationship between Hollywood and Christianity has been going on for a long time. [In] earlier days, it involved the great classics like Ben Hur and The Ten Commandments. Religion has been appearing in Hollywood films, but more in a kind of a negative light until recently with The Passion of the Christ. What happened is Hollywood discovered there was money to be made off of those pesky Christians. The reality is American evangelicalism set out to become part of culture 40 years ago, and what's happened more recently is that American evangelicals have been identified as a voting bloc. So you had Jerry Falwell with the Moral Majority. You had Pat Robertson with the Christian Coalition, who suddenly began realizing there are a lot of people who identify themselves as evangelicals, enough to actually garner some significant votes. And what happened with Passion of the Christ is that kind of idea that Christians represent a political bloc became recognized as a purchasing bloc of tickets. And so Hollywood didn't really have any kind of newfound interest in religion. They just looked at this as a niche where they could make some money, much as a lot of the record labels started buying contemporary Christian music labels, because there was money to be made. That particular segment of music was actually increasing in sales, while the rest of the music business was declining. So what people in Hollywood hoped was that they would find a formula that would kind of be a cash cow, kind of printing money off the backs of religious people. It hasn't turned out that way so far.

Q: Why not?

A: The reason Hollywood hasn't be able to cash in on the evangelical market in terms of film-going and ticket purchases is kind of complicated. At one level, it's the basic disconnect between Hollywood and religion, in which people in Hollywood have no clue how religious people, conservative religious people, think. Therefore they have no idea how to green light a film that would actually make sense to religious people. There's also, within the American evangelical movement, there's been an anti-Hollywood bias so that Michael Medved, who's a Jew, wrote Hollywood Versus America and it was widely embraced by a large segment of the evangelical community, who basically viewed Hollywood as the enemy. And so when Hollywood comes out and says hey, we're making films that you like now, there's a basic distrust on the part of a lot of evangelicals. But then to further complicate matters, there's a group of us that call ourselves Christian who believe that the issue for people of faith ought to be actually making good films and enjoying good films, regardless of who makes them. And so we tend to be resistant to the idea of, you know, feel-good movies representing Christianity, because Christianity really at its most radical form is not just a feel-good religion. So if you look at a movie like Facing the Giants -- and I like [writer/director] Alex Kendrick a lot personally, but it wasn't a well made movie, and it was a Pollyanna-ish view of what happens if you love God. I mean, everything turned out right. The guy made the field goal. The woman who was, you know, unable to bear children suddenly gets pregnant. I mean, there was storyline after storyline that was all great. Well, this isn't truth, and so there are a lot of us within the Christian movement who don't want Hollywood to make these feel-good faith movies. We'd rather have really good films that tell important, redemptive stories, regardless of who makes them. So it's a complicated mix of reasons why so far the Hollywood formula isn't working.

Q: This audience is so diverse. Isn't it hard to figure out what kind of movies Christians want?

A: The evangelical audience is very diverse. There used to be, even the political calculus, there was this idea that all evangelicals voted Republican. The nasty little truth is that in the last election about 40 percent of evangelicals didn't vote Republican. So the first problem you have is getting this idea of a monolithic religious bloc -- that we all like the same kind of movies. When Hollywood sets out to make family-friendly movies, G and PG movies, they're in fairly safe territory, because groups like Ted Baehr's Movieguide have been gathering data for the last 10 years showing that Americans in general, regardless of religious or irreligious, Americans who have children would like to see movies that are great kids movies. But the problem is [the animation studio] Pixar is already making great kids movies. I mean, [we] don't need Christians to come along and make inferior movies that have the label "faith-friendly" on them and suddenly now families are going to flock to these bad movies, so there's already a niche of family movies. And, you know, if I was advising Hollywood I'd tell them just, if you want to get to the family niche, back Pixar, and Disney's in a resurgence right now in their animation division. Make great movies for kids and for families, and that is a great niche. What I'm saying is people of faith are not the only people that want good movies for families. Then when you get to the issue of Hollywood trying to deal with actual issues of faith, if you look at Evan Almighty as an example, to take a classic biblical story like Noah's Ark and try to turn it into a comedy is just kind of dangerous territory if what you're trying to do is appeal to conservative Christians, because conservative Christians tend to take the Bible stories pretty literally and very seriously. It was one thing for Cecil B. DeMille to make movies that were about biblical stories and tell them the way the Bible tells them. It's another thing to have Steve Carrell playing the role of this kind of modern Noah who's a wacked out guy. It was a heartwarming movie, but it really wasn't a particularly faith-friendly movie. And I know guys like Jonathan Bock and Grace Hill Media promoted it to the Christian audience, but essentially it didn't work. It wasn't a success at the box office, and I think I've just suggested some of the reasons why.

Q: But even a movie like Amazing Grace was a disappointment at the box office.

A: Amazing Grace is kind of in a different category, because it's an example of a movie that was basically -- it was a pretty good movie, and it was a true story, and it was an inspiring story. But the problem with that particular movie is it's a story about the emancipation of slaves, and it was told kind of less engagingly than, for instance, Amistad. So, I mean, it's an important story, and I happen to really like that movie. But it didn't connect with the evangelical audience. There's another reason with that particular movie, and I'm sorry to say, and that is within conservative evangelicalism social justice issues have not been an important part of their platform. I mean, they've been much more concerned about abortion and gay rights than they have been about the issue of slavery or the issues of people in our culture. Now that's a conservative group within the evangelicalism, but this is an example of how if you try to take a movie about a Christian, which is, you know, what Amazing Grace was about, the wonderful story of William Wilberforce. It happened to be a Christian story that connected better with people on the Democratic side or the "liberal" side of the political spectrum than conservatives. So it had its own problem in terms of connecting to a religious audience, and I say that as a person who thinks that social justice issues are important, and [I] really like that film.

Q: Was there also a problem on the business-side of Hollywood in terms of distribution and marketing?

A: The bottom line in Hollywood is always money, and [Amazing Grace] didn't get widespread distribution. It started out small, and the concept was it would grow and gain steam and gather momentum. But it obviously failed to do that. They relied a lot on word of mouth for that film. I personally thought the trailer for the film wasn't very engaging. I mean, Albert Finney in that movie, in the character of John Newton, was totally compelling, and they didn't use him effectively in the trailer. So they tried to tap into the sentimentality of the song Amazing Grace in the trailer, as if all you have to do is slap a good old hymn on a movie trailer, and Christians will flock to it. It just doesn't work that way, so it wasn't a great trailer. The movie was better than the trailer, and it didn't get outstanding word of mouth, except there was one particular group within Christian circles called the International Justice Mission that arranged for screenings around the country. But, you know, here's another example. You talk about distribution and marketing. The idea that you're going to be able to turn to churches as a source to promote, you know, movies is a stretch. Churches exist for a lot of reasons, but they don't exist so that Hollywood can make more money off of movies or the people trying to represent Christians to Hollywood can be more effective in their job. People don't go to church to learn what movies they should be going to. So the church is a great distribution strategy in terms of there's a lot of outlets. There's a church, you know, within every square mile. But in terms of the actual purpose of the church, the church doesn't exist to promote movies. So how do you get to Christians, then, if you're a film promoter? And that's one of the problems of that movie.

Q: The Nativity Story was also a disappointment. What happened there?

A: The Nativity Story is interesting, because a lot of people didn't like The Nativity Story the movie. They felt that the angelic scenes were kind of lacking in drama. The thing I liked about the Nativity Story personally was that it actually had more of a Middle Eastern feel. You know, people forget Jesus was Jewish. He was a Mediterranean Jew, so there's a real interesting connection to the culture of Jesus' time that came across in Nativity Story better than in, like, The Greatest Story Ever Told. So there were some things going for Nativity Story. But it, again, it didn't catch on with Christian audiences. They already know the story. They didn't feel the movie added much to what they know about the story and didn't tell it in any kind of dramatic way, and in some ways even seemed anti-climactic in terms of the miraculous appearances of angels. So, again, if you want to appeal to a film-going Christian audience you've got to make really good films, because they're comparing your film not to other Christian films like Facing in the Giants. They're comparing them to big-budget Hollywood productions, and you can't rely on the fact that it has biblical content to get a Christian who's not a filmgoer to get motivated enough to go to the theatre.

Q: What are some good example recently of people doing this well?

A: Well, essentially this is where I'm a contrarian within this discussion about faith and culture, because I've been tracking since the '60s the way the conversation about the spiritual has moved into the popular culture, into the films and into the music, you know, that we're listening to, and so I'm really interested in stories well told that have deep redemptive purpose and meaning. I'm less interested in whether those stories have, you know, people swearing or violence or nudity in them, and so I look at Hollywood films as a superficial exercise. I mean, essentially they're about entertainment, which means diversion. They're about amusement, which means mindless. They're about celebrity. Paris Hilton? I rest my case. So if you look at where Hollywood has gone, it's actually very superficial in a lot of its offerings. American Christianity, which evangelicals tried to change and enter culture, has become just like that. I mean, American religion is also diversionary and amusing, mindless. It also has its own celebrities. I think the problem is that great stories have a hard time getting out in Hollywood, and the whole American population isn't as interested in stories that have great art or ideas. So the problem is a fairly significant and deep one. I say all that as a ramp-up to things like I thought the movie Millions was a great story, well told. It had a redemptive story line. It didn't trot out the Gospels, and people aren't reading Scripture and praying in it. But it's a story of redemption, and therefore I consider it a movie that's worth seeing and worth going to. The superficial way that Hollywood tells most stories simply takes something profound like the Christian faith and trivializes it. So why would I be interested in that kind of product? I don't really think Hollywood, when it's turning to these new Christian film makers, they have very much to work with. An example of a film that actually was a substantial film that did get at spiritual themes would have been The Exorcism of Emily Rose, which is written by a Christian filmmaker. That was a really, really interesting film. But it was a dark film. It wasn't light. It wasn't breezy. It wasn't a feel-good movie. But, you know, we're coming up on the Easter season, and Jesus died on a cross. I mean, the Christian story has a resurrection, but it also has a lot of messiness in it. It has a lot of reality in it. So if you want to tell the Christian story, it's not just a feel-good story. It's a story that has substantial pain and suffering and sorrow in it, just like our lives do, which is why Christianity properly understood is a lot more like a Sundance film, that edgy and kind of an indy film, than it is like a Hollywood production. I was at the Sundance Film Festival recently, and Robert Redford said, "Art is the language of the soul." And when you go to a Sundance film and you hear the soul of the artist, the filmmaker, what you hear is, "We're troubled with the meaninglessness of life. We're looking for satisfaction and significance in our relationships." You're hearing the real stuff of human life. Eighty percent of Sundance films will never make it to the big screen, because whereas a Sundance film is about afflicting the comfortable, Hollywood wants to make films that comfort the afflicted. I happen to be on the side of the equation that thinks the Gospel of Jesus Christ is more about afflicting the comfortable than it is comforting. It's more about afflicting the comfortable than it is just making us all feel good.

Q: Do you see any themes of redemption and the other spiritual themes you're talking about in the Oscar nominees for best picture this year?

A: Well, the Kindlings Muse is a show that we do that's actually based on C.S. Lewis and the Inklings. They used to sit around at a pub and talk about ideas, and the Kindlings Muse today (February 7, 2008) is about the five nominees for best picture and the theology of those films. Andrew Greeley, the Catholic sociologist, said that popular culture is a theological place. It's a place where we can encounter God. Phyllis Tickle of Publishers Weekly said that there's more theology conveyed in one hour of television than in all the mosques, synagogues, and churches combined. So what we do is we take a film and we look at its belief system. What does it say about God? What does it say about man? What does it say about our greatest need as humans? What does it say about resolving our biggest problems? I tend to see theological themes in every film. For instance, if you look at No Country for Old Men, this is a dark, dark story that essentially gets at the issue of the darkness in every human being. The Coen brothers take our hero, who actually is stealing money from a drug exchange that went bad, so the good guy is actually a bad guy. And so everybody in the film is bad at varying degrees. I see that as a commentary on the fact that evil exists in all human beings, which interestingly is what Alexander Solzhenitsyn said. He said the problem with Christianity if we understand it to mean that there are good people over there and bad people over here and what we need to do is separate the good from the bad people, you can't do it because he, Solzhenitsyn, said evil resides in every human being. That's the point of that movie, No Country for Old Men. Juno is a story of a young woman wrestling with a very significant moral issue and dilemma, and she comes to a conclusion that has a level of responsibility to it and redemptiveness to it. So that's a theme of a human dilemma, a moral problem, the theme of redemption and something good happening. These are films that are getting at some important issues in life and dealing with them seriously but entertainingly, as opposed to films that are just kind of glosses or trying to have feel-good endings.

Q: There was a lot of chatter when Fox Faith was announced, a lot of fanfare about a big studio putting lots of money into faith-related films. But some question how much money they're really spending, and their films seem to be going straight to DVD. What's your take on all of that?

A: When the movie Facing the Giants came out, as you know, it had a total production budget of $100,000. It was picked up by a major studio who put, you know, triple or quadruple the amount of money that they'd taken to make the film into marketing the film. And obviously, when that film first came out, before it even hit the theatres, I said that my greatest fear was that Facing the Giants would be a great commercial success, because what Hollywood will do is try to buy low-budget films made by people of faith and market them to people of faith, thinking that people of faith will shell out money for bad movies, movies that aren't that well made. And, sure enough, that's what happened. Facing the Giants did a great box office. The production costs were very low, so the profit margins were really high. So Fox Faith, instead of looking at the religious market as people who are savvy filmgoers that want to see great films, great stories well made, they wanted to go bottom feeding and kind of find inexpensively produced movies by people who were people, you know, of faith, who would make movies for people of faith, because, after all, they all think the same way. I mean, here's the problem. There was an article in the New York Times a few years ago, and it was about Biola, a Christian university which was starting a film program. And they pointed out that here's a school where when it was first founded you weren't allowed to enroll in the school if you attended movies. And then they started a film program if you would make gospel movies, and now they announced that they were going to start a film program, and overnight had 200 majors in film. And in the article the New York Times writer said evangelicals have discovered that film is very influential in culture, so they want to make films to influence culture. Great filmmakers don't make films because they want to influence culture. They make films because they love to make films. They love film, and they love great stories. You know, Steven Spielberg was a storyteller. If he would have been a cave man he would have been drawing pictures on the walls of the cave. Inside himself he was a filmmaker. So what you have now is a whole generation of evangelical kids who've been told if you want to influence the world make films, and they tend to think propaganda when they think films, so they don't make great films. Now I'm generalizing, because Biola actually is producing some decent filmmakers now. There are some good students that know how to tell the story well. But the evangelical world is packed with people who want to have influence but don't want to pay the dues in their given discipline. They don't want to become the kind of disciplined writer that will write a serious work of literary fiction. They don't want to pay the dues of somebody who's actually going to learn the craft to make a great film. They actually don't feel the need to make great music, because they've been able to make money off of music that's imitative of the culture, and so the evangelical culture has failed to produce an intellectual and an aesthetic attitude and mindset.

Fox Faith, you know, was born after Passion of the Christ, and if you think about Passion of the Christ, I mean I remember I was on the air as a radio talk show host, and I got this email blurb that somebody was making a film that was going to be in Aramaic. They didn't say it was Mel Gibson. And I actually went on the air like a year before we found out it was Mel Gibson and said, "Can you believe somebody's going to make a movie based on an exotic language that hardly anybody speaks anymore?" And we made it a big joke segment. Well, of course, then we found out it was Mel Gibson. The movie was the Passion of the Christ, and it was a pretty high-budget movie that was well made. I mean, Mel Gibson said, "Billy Graham's an evangelical, and he preaches. I'm a filmmaker, and I make films." So it was a fairly high-budget production film. It was well made, and obviously it was a huge box office success. But what happened then is that companies like Fox looked at it and said, well, we can make movie off of religious markets. We don't know how big they are. We don't want to take a high risk. And then something like Facing the Giants came along. It only cost $100,000 to make, and it did millions in the box office. And so what happened is companies like Fox Faith, rather than saying we're going to actually make really good movies with great production values and, you know, modest to high budget, [instead they said] let's make films that are more along the lines of made-for-TV but a little better and see if we can, you know, distribute them on the big screen, and Christians will flock to them. Well, Christians didn't flock to them. And so the business model was based on something that has not been demonstrated in Hollywood. I mean, obviously there're examples of low-budget films like Blair Witch Project that did great at the box office [and] that were low budget. But generally to make a good film you've got to spend money, and Fox Faith has not spent good money. Therefore they're not making good films. Therefore they're not successful.

Q: What about taking them straight to DVD and not even trying for the big screen?

A: If you make a movie that distributors view as sub-par in terms of its filmic quality, why is the distributor going to take the risk of using some of its space in its theatre to distribute a film that is more like a made-for-TV movie? It just doesn't make sense from the distributor's standpoint, and as a result, a lot of those films are just going straight to DVD.

Q: But they are still making money on DVDs.

A: Well, there is the problem. As long as Hollywood sees that they can make money off of inferior art, they'll keep making inferior art. And there is a segment within the Christian community that is aesthetically blind and deaf that will buy that product. So our issue is, from my standpoint, I'm about recapturing the intellectual and artistic legacy of Christians. I mean, let's not forget for centuries it was Christians that made the culture: Dostoyevsky, Michelangelo, people like C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. These are people of faith. Tolkien wrote Lord of the Rings. It took him 30 years. If a marketing company were to come and said we think this might be a good book but take out Middle Earth, you know, he wouldn't have done it because he was an artist. He was an intellectual. Those were Christians who took art and ideas seriously. Right now we're in a superficial age in which both American culture and American Christianity are suffering from the unbearable lightness of superficiality. It's been said that American Christianity is 3,000 miles wide and two inches deep, and so a shallow Hollywood meets shallow religious people and exchange money. Yeah, you can make money on it. But in terms of actually lifting all the boats, Hollywood and religion are in the same situation. These things will never satisfy our souls. They'll never stimulate our minds. They will continue to amuse us to death, in the words of Neil Postman. So I'm an advocate for better ideas, better art transforming both Hollywood and the Christian community into what we should be as culture, that is, about art and ideas.

Q: Do you have any comment on the apparent failure to turn Anne Rice's book CHRIST THE LORD: OUT OF EGYPT into a film?

A: I interviewed Anne Rice on that book, and obviously it was a huge risk for her to do it after her vampire movies, to turn around and proclaim that she was wanting to tell stories about Jesus. But it had a particular problem for conservative Christians in that she was dealing with the childhood of Jesus, and she drew on what's called the infancy Gospel of Thomas, which is an apocryphal gospel. Conservative Christians don't accept the infancy Gospel of Thomas. They don't accept that kind of fabrication. The fact that Anne Rice wove that into the story CHRIST THE LORD created a problem for conservative Christians, so it doesn't surprise me that the more they probably tested the receptivity of that book CHRIST THE LORD among a conservative Christian audience, which represents the biggest niche of American Christians, that story would not fly with that audience, and so it doesn't surprise me that that project ran into trouble.

Q: To produce the kind of stories you're talking about, well told, well done, well made films that attract people, that's hard work, isn't it? It takes money, and it takes a lot of skill.

A: Well, it goes without saying that if you want to produce a thoughtful, well made film and a story well told, because film is a collaborative effort you have to have hundreds of people who have an artistic integrity and intellectual integrity who are committed to making really good stuff to produce good stuff. Hollywood is not of a mind to make that kind of product in general anyway, and Christians, because they have been kind of intellectually and artistically dulled and lulled into conformity to a superficial culture, are not really clamoring for that product. So the result is, you know, making low-budget films is going to produce an inferior product and is not going to be a successful venture, as far as I'm concerned.

Q: Talk a little more about your concerns about Christians becoming a niche marketing audience for films.

A: The concern I have about Christians being treated as a voting bloc or as a marketing bloc is that, having been in broadcasting for 15 years, I have to say I've heard journalists talk about evangelicals as a voting bloc and a marketing bloc. I've never once honestly heard a serious journalist refer to Christians as an intellectual force or an artistic force in American culture. So the degree to which we continue to perpetuate this notion that Christians are, you know, it's worth it to exploit Christians because they have money and they have votes, is a problem to me, because I'm about the reformation of both culture and the Christian faith. I think we're at a low point in church history. I think we're at a low point in civilization in terms of the dehumanization of the typical American. And I think we're all paying a price for it. There's an old story of three rabbis in a boat, and one of them starts drilling a hole under his part of the boat, and the other rabbi's saying, "What are you doing?" And he says, "Well, I'm drilling a hole under my part of the boat." And they said, "But we're all in the same boat." And I think intellectually and artistically we're all in the same boat in this culture. We're producing a superficial culture that can't satisfy what we've been created for, which is a rich intellectual, relational, spiritual, and creative life. And so the whole notion that we ought to be satisfied with marketing and making money off of bad films because religious people will buy them is distasteful to me. It's where we are in American culture. But, you know, Andy Warhol said money is more American than thinking, and that's where we are. As people of faith, if you serve, you know, God, who you believe gave us this great intellectual and artistic capacity, we ought to aim higher. We shouldn't be satisfied to be, you know, a dumb marketing bloc for filmmakers.

Q: Was there anything else you wanted to add?

A: My most recent book is The Culturally Savvy Christian, and the subtitle really gets at what I believe about the issue of faith and popular culture: "A Manifesto for Deepening Faith and Enriching Popular Culture in an Age of Christianity Lite." I think we're in a spiritually deficient age, an age of Christianity-lite. I think we're in a superficial popular culture, and I think we need to create a richer culture, a richer intellectual life, and a richer and deeper Christianity. So the whole conversation about faith and popular culture is laid against the backdrop of people who accept the idea that it's okay to make money off of bad films marketed to superficial Christians in a superficial culture, and I think the whole formula is dehumanizing.

Q: How should I identify you religiously?

A: Dick Staub is a follower of Jesus. But here's my basic theology in a nutshell: [Dutch scholar] Hans Rookmaaker said Jesus didn't come to make us Christian, he came to make us fully human, and I think a full human being is a human being that is intellectually, spiritually, creatively, morally, and relationally alive, and the reason I think America is superficial both in its religion and its popular culture is I think we're intellectually, spiritually, creatively, morally, and relationally superficial, and we were made for something more. So the idea of discovering what it means to be fully human is, I think, what Jesus was about, more than simply are you a Christian or not, and when we think in terms of Christian and not Christian, then we start thinking of Christians as just another voting bloc or another purchasing power, instead of people who like every other human being want to experience a fully human life.