The Church of the Masses

The Church does not believe in talent anymore.  We think the most important thing is that everyone feels welcome.  So we sit at church and suffer through Doris and Stan, who can't sing, because we don't want to be mean.  They would never get a job in Hollywood, because Hollywood has integrity about the beautiful.  Or if it's not "the Beautiful" in the classical sense, at least, they value the non-lame.

So when you speak of a tension of values, well, there is the value of the Beautiful, which Hollywood understands and the Church does not, and then there are the values specifically of what is good for human beings.  What is it that leads them to their fulfillment, their ultimate destiny, fulfilling their nature?  Those things are missing, content-wise, in what you're seeing in a lot of the media. 

But in the end, which is more harmful: true words cast in an ugly frame, or untrue words cast in a beautiful frame?  I think Hollywood will get people into heaven faster.  Even if they have the message wrong, people in the end will turn off some of that.  What will really impact them will be the harmony, the wholeness, the completeness of a work.

So for example, a show like Friends, which might make light of pornography, is ultimately not as dangerous because it's very well-produced, well-acted, well-written.  It's funny.  It works as a whole.  Whereas you can have a minister in front of a Bible on CBN with a bad toupee, lit garishly, and saying lovely things, but the message is that Christianity is uncreative, banal, boring, undynamic, and irrelevant.              

So I'm deliberately not giving the easy answer.  One of the things I do in the Church is, whenever Christians ask me to condemn Hollywood, I always condemn the Church.  People always ask me if I am surprised by how many gross things Hollywood produces.  Being here, and knowing how few people in Hollywood talk to the Living God in any conscious way, I am actually amazed at how much good they do.  They do much more profound things than we give them credit for.

Things are changing, too.  The boomers are dying and ceding power, and the power is going into the very troubled, introspective hands of the Generation Xers, people like Jason Reitman, who made Juno and what I consider this year's best film, Up in the Air.  These folks are completely ambivalent about the promises of the sexual revolution.  They don't have other options, but they know the way they were raised was wrong. 

You're starting to see this in so many movies.  I think four or five of this year's academy award nominees are very hopeful pictures.  They're seeded with hope, not infected with the kind of cynicism that the boomer generation had come to.  The boomers, after exhausting themselves with every kind of sexual license and permissiveness and me-centeredness, basically had come out with a "whatever" attitude in their movies.  That is not the spirit of the Gen-Xers.

Do you have advice or words of encouragement for people who want to get into the game, but they are afraid to give everything up and move to Hollywood?

If you're young enough, I would ask: "Why don't you throw your hat in the ring and get the best training you can get in the field you're interested in?"  You need to discern if you have talent, and what level your talent puts you at.  Maybe you're a talented singer, but you're only in the top 15%, so that means you should sing in Denver.  If you're in the top 10%, you can sing in New York or Chicago.  And then if you're in the top 5%, you can sing in Broadway.  It's the same thing in the movie business.  This is the major league out here, but there are many places to be an actor, and you want to become as good as you can.  So find the top school you can get into, and get yourself in there. 

I would also say to get your act together first, spiritually and morally.  This is a very competitive, demanding field.  Creative people can ask you to make choices that will define you, in a way that working for an insurance company may not.  Where you have a lot of power, you're going to have requisite dangers and temptations.  But this is no reason for us not to be in the middle of it.  We need to get rid of the fear.  Let's stop cursing the darkness and make something beautiful for the people of our time.  That will go a long way. 

But there's no secret way to get in, for someone who believes in Jesus.  That's something I combat all the time.  I have people contacting me constantly asking if I can help their kid start out.  I say, No, not really.  What's your kid done?  "He just graduated high school."  Well, no, I can't do anything for that.