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Christians in the City Taking on Hollywood
Barbara Nicolosi, a Catholic, is one of the founders
of Act One, a Christ centred film school that helps prepare Christian
writers and Executives for the Hollywood jungle.
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Q: Why was Act One Established? Barbara: It was founded on 25th January 1999 - co-incidentally the feast of the conversion of St Paul - by a group of Hollywood screenwriters from a variety of Christian backgrounds. It was a response to the overall dreadful dramatic writing that we were seeing coming into the industry from godly people. It was clear that people of faith were failing in their attempts to find inroads into the entertainment industry. Act One was founded to be a bridge for people who want to come to Hollywood to do good and not harm to the global audience. We identified four principle problems in Christian writers starting out in the entertainment industry that invariably stop them from ever getting a legitimate hearing for their work : a lack of artistry and a failure to understand the real power of the medium; a lack of respect for the industry and its professional standards; the absence of a network of like-minded professionals to form, mentor and hire the next generation, and the lack of a specific Christian spirituality and ethics to address the particular challenges of the artist's vocation. Act One is designed to address these four problems. Q: How do you help prepare Christians for jobs in mainstream Hollywood? Barbara: The keynote programme of Act One is a four-week boot camp experience that focuses on mastery of craft, entertainment, ethics and spirituality. The programme is the initiation into the community of Act One writers and producers, and is followed up by continuous mentoring and ongoing formation. When a writer has achieved a certain level of proficiency - and if they are a good ambassador of the Gospel - we are very happy to help them obtain entry-level jobs in the business as well as writing assignments from our network of production companies. Act One also operates a Script Critique Service for writers who may not be able to attend Act One, but who would like the principles of the programme applied to their work. Q: How does faith relate to the artist and the writer? Barbara: As Pope John Paul II noted in his 1999 "Letter to Artists", creative people have a special relationship with God as beauty. As they pursue beauty, they instinctively move into solitude and seek to connect with the transcendent as the source of their creativity. This is why everybody in Hollywood describes himself or herself as "spiritual". Of course, they are also quick to say they are not religious. Part of Act One's message to the industry is to try and reveal how being spiritual but not religious is an absurd and futile effort. Q: What has been Act One's growth trend? What are the reasons for its growth? Barbara: Act One has grown from a faculty of four professional screen and television writers to about 80. We have trained more than 300 young writers and executives, about half of whom are working in the entertainment industry in all different levels. They form a wonderful new community of thoughtful, prayerful artists who are passionate about Jesus and the power of the screen art form, and who support and encourage each other to produce work that will be good for the world. We have grown because God is responding to the collective cry of his people, which has been rising up in groans about the terrible state of the arts in the last century. Act One is a smart, effective and long term strategy that emphasises the training of people over the production of projects. We are attracting attention because we are seeking to engage the culture as our own - instead of rejecting it and cursing it, which has been the strategy of many Christians towards the media since at least the Sexual Revolution. We aren't trying to fix Hollywood. We are just a group of artists who want to represent our worldview in the mainstream. We want to make movies that we want to see, and we will. We are attracting attention because we are pretty much the Church's only game in town that is trying to do what we are doing. Q: What advice do you have for Christian artists and writers who are seeking mainstream jobs in and outside of Hollywood? Barbara: For the writers, the best advice I can give is to apply to Act One. It is a very competitive programme and if you get in, it will be a sign that you have talent and potential. For those who want to be actors, producers and directors, I would encourage them to aspire to the mastery of their particular craft.Too many people come to Hollywood and focus prematurely on getting an agent and breaking in. The first step to breaking in is to have something to market that people will want. It has to be more than just talent - although minimally you have to have talent to work in this field. It's unfortunate that we don't have any film schools in the Church that are competitive with the best secular schools. Going to one of the top film schools is a tremendous advantage, but they also tend to be bastions of Marxism and the most radical left wing agendas. It's a hard call as to whether it is worth it to go and learn your craft at a place where everything you believe will be fodder for professorial ridicule. On another level, anyone who comes to Hollywood should have their spiritual act together. This is a very difficult place to make your living, primarily because it is so dependent on being an entrepreneur. Everyone who is working is thinking of the next thing they will have to sell. Everyone who isn't working is trying to get somebody to buy from them. This turns every relationship into some kind of transaction. It adds a rejection factor to everyday life here that most people outside of the business don't experience in a decade of work. Finally, this is a thoroughly secular environment in which many of the operative values - power, celebrity, mammon - are completely antithetical to the gospel. You have to have a close personal relationship with Jesus and a strong sense of vocation to weather this mission field. Q: In what ways have you seen Christians influence Hollywood? Barbara: There aren't a lot of happy, committed Christians in places of real power in Hollywood, who can green light or approve what goes on the screen. But there are a lot of people on the front lines who go to work every day and find clever and creative ways to keep damaging content off the screen. These are victories known only to God. In the last five years, however, the landscape has really started to change probably because people in the arts seem to have exhausted themselves with unbelief. I got a call from one such woman, one of the top ten women in television. The gist of her call to me was that after 20 years of a completely secular life in mainstream show business, she wanted somebody to talk to her about Jesus. The attack of 9/11 certainly played a role in this woman's search for meaning, as it has for countless others, particularly in the American entertainment industry. But beyond the simple urge to seek answers to the murderous hatred of Islamic terrorists half a world away, this woman was reflecting a positive sea change that is sweeping through the American baby boomer generation in general and the Hollywood entertainment industry in particular. After 40 years of being raved by the licence of the sexual revolution and just as many years rejecting any and all connection to any authority - whether it was the Church, state, or just the simple wisdom of the ages - there is a growing exodus in search of rest. They are exhausted with unbelief and its ideological stepchildren: hedonism, cynicism, alienation and isolation. Q: Has this had an effect on the films that are being made? Barbara: Most of the major prime-time dramas have been exploring more and more overt religious themes. Any prime-time special that features any kind of religious angle is certain to garner good to great ratings. The cinema side has also been experiencing a spiritual awakening. "Bruce Almighty" was one of the top five movies of 2003. "A Walk to Remember", a positive portrayal of a Christian teenager brought in a huge profit at the box office. And of course, the box-office success of the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy and "The Passion of Christ" (which in Hollywood, we all just call, "The Movie") are the stuff of industry legend. Other recent films while not being overtly religious, do demonstrate a profound rejection of the lies of postmodernism. Films like "In America", "Lost in Translation", "Changing Lanes," "In the Bedroom" - are just a few examples of this new exhaustion with the legacy of unbelief. From a creative standpoint, this is a happy trend for filmmakers like us who unite our passion for cinema with a passion for God. Any producer can get a hearing from Hollywood right now if they say, "I have a movie for the audience who loved 'The Passion'". Of course part of this is because nobody in Hollywood understands who the audience for "The Movie" is, and what it was about "The Movie" that they loved so much. Q: How important do you think this open door is? Barbara: There is warning for us religious filmmakers in this moment. While this new openness to spiritual truths is an exciting opportunity, it also carries a huge creative challenge. The fact is, movies about transcendent realities, that are not really great works of art, tend to be really, really terrible. Movies about faith and spirituality that are not haunting and profound, tend to be insulting over-simplifications. Movies about the conflict between good and evil that are not intense and gruelling, tend to be sickeningly sentimental and easy. Movies about the search for meaning that are not probing and insightful tend to be laughable and pretentious. This kind of movie is best made by those who are mature as filmmakers and believers. One of the reasons "The Passion" is such an overwhelming film is because it has both technical mastery and profound content. Despite Hollywood's eagerness to serve "the audience of the Passion" we aren't going to see another film like it until we see another filmmaker who, like Mel Gibson, actually believes this God stuff. Q: How can the Church help artists? Barbara: First by helping provide a specific spirituality for artists. There are very specific spiritual challenges that creative people have to go through to bring, what Pope John Paul II called, "new epiphanies of beauty" into the world. Their first cross is their craft which will demand many sacrifices in time, labour, study and isolation. In order to bring beauty into the world, an artist will have to descend to the darkest, loneliest places in themselves. Their art will have more power in so far as it is, what writer Flannery O'Connor called, "a wrestling with their angels and demons, not certain if they will come out of the struggle at all." Artists have to abide in the suffering of insufficiency, that the work of their hands is never as potent as was their original vision. Their lives will be characterised by instability, poverty and then possibly the burden of celebrity. In an average year, a professional writer, singer or artist will face more rejection than most people do in their lifetime. It is a lonely and painful process especially because artists tend to be more sensitive souls as it is. Many of them find ways to cope in drugs, sex, alcohol, because they have no Jesus to whom they could bring their burden. We need to help these artists carry the cross of the vocation to beauty. We need to give them spiritual strategies, a practical theology, ethical training and then, we have to be big enough, to let them be who they are - a little crazy, a little needy sometimes, but also the bearers of many wonderful gifts to the whole world. Q: Is there anything else the Church can do? Barbara: Hollywood needs help from us in crafting an ethics of art and entertainment. Without giving artists a list of "Thou Shalt Nots" that they will just ignore anyway, we can still have an impact by reminding them of the huge potential for good that is in their hands through the cinema. The cinema can make people want to be heroes. It can connect us to each other through the pathos of drama and the joy of comedy. The cinema can draw us into solidarity with those who suffer and lead us to want to make a better world. The ethical question to put to artists is, "If you have the power in your hands to do all these good things, isn't it an ethical problem if you choose not to do them? Isn't that the secular man's biggest complaint against God - that he doesn't use his power to circumvent evil? We need to help the industry move from the famous "right
to privacy" towards a sense of sacredness for the human person
that is both the object and then the receiver of cinema. The Church
could posit a definition of healthy entertainment that would flow from
the desire to promote authentic human freedom and development. What
kind of cinema helps humans grow? What kind of cinema coarsens the human
soul and retards our development? The corporate machine that drives
Hollywood will never stop to brood over these questions, but the artistic
community, which also has tremendous power is hungry for guidance, and
has a passionate longing to make a positive impact on the world. There
are many opportunities for the Church in this moment. The only question
is, do we have the energy, hope and pastoral love to take them? Edited from an interview by Barbara Nicolosi in Zenit
and a talk she gave at the Catholic University of Valencia in May 2004,
also reproduced in ZENIT, the Catholic International News Agency.
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