Left Behind III will be playing in almost 3,000 churches this weekend, after which it will be coming out on video, and CT Movies editor Mark Moring posted his interview with producer Peter Lalonde today.
One thing that intrigues me is Lalonde’s description of the role that church-based movies played in his conversion:
I’ve heard that your experience of seeing The Prodigal in 1983 changed your life. What did you learn about the power of film that day?
Peter Lalonde: I was broke. I loved films and this one was free! I had never really been in a church, but I went with a friend. The movie was interesting and challenging, but it was really the pastor’s ten-minute message afterward that sent a thunderbolt through my heart. I did not go forward [to accept Christ] that night, but I was drawn back. And again. On the third Sunday, I got saved.
This intrigues me because it differs slightly — though not irreconcilably — from what he told me when I interviewed him over seven years ago, when his first “movie” came out:
PETER LALONDE is hoping for a revival — but not the sort you might expect. As the co-writer and co-producer of the new straight-to-video film Apocalypse, Lalonde wants to bring movie nights back to church.
Lalonde knows the power of evangelistic films first-hand. The first time he ever walked into a church, he says, it was to see one of the films in the end-times series which began, back in the 1970s, with A Thief in the Night.
“It was the first time I really heard the gospel preached,” says Lalonde from his This Week in Bible Prophecy headquarters in St. Catharines, Ontario. “I became a believer within a few months thereafter.”
In the interview, Lalonde also makes an intriguing allusion to anonymous “third parties” who, he claims, forced the filmmakers to downplay the evangelistic content; now, however, he says he and his team are “solely in control”. I’m going to guess this is a reference to Namesake Entertainment, the company that bought the rights to Left Behind in the first place and then signed on Lalonde’s Cloud Ten as a production partner for the first two movies; relations between the two companies evidently soured, and for a while, at least, they were both talking about producing separate (and apparently rival) TV shows based on the films.
Note, BTW, how the Namesake FAQ said, as recently as April 2004, that the company’s logo was missing from Left Behind II: Tribulation Force because “Namesake agreed to allow Cloud Ten Pictures to produce Tribulation Force independently.” And note how, these days, the FAQ says something a little more final: “Namesake has relinquished rights to Cloud Ten Pictures, allowing them to produce the other Left Behind films independently.”
OCT 19 UPDATE: Thanks to Tim Willson for referring me to the Crosswalk interview with Lalonde, and for suggesting that Lalonde and/or his interviewers may be confusing The Prodigal Planet (1983), the fourth and final installment in the Thief in the Night series, with the Billy Graham film The Prodigal (1983). Both films came out in the same year, so that’s certainly possibile!
OCT 20 UPDATE: Just received word that the film will be screened here in Vancouver, at Harvest City Church, tomorrow night at 7:30pm. It occurs to me that I’ve never seen any of these films with an audience, so it might be worth checking out. We’ll see.
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