Hooray for Holywood!

Message to Hollywood: Faith Community Wants Wholesome Films

Listen up all you Godless, secularized Hollywood types. You're missing out on the big show. You're missing the milk and honeyed jackpot here. You're out of lockstep with the proverbial manna from heaven that's right before your fingertips. If you'd only just give up your liberal ways and come over to the Good side. There's a genre out there you've not yet taken kindly to: Good old wholesome god-fearing American movies. That' right. There are quivering, angry, red-faced screams of bloody righteousness to feed. There are leaping lambs of faith flocks to bugger. You're certainly going to miss the raptureganza if you don't get on board. Sharpen your crucifix and dip it in blood, wrap that barbed wire chain around your leg, there are plenty of neo-gothic screenplays to write. And what better way to write them than in the throes of heavenly mortification? You know you've been itching to go all Benedictine for a few months in your basement-level studio apartment and bleed out your soul into a screenplay like that. But you've got to have values, man. Values. It seems everyone who has values, from Cadillac Catholics, to geriatric John Birchers, from diamond studded fundies, to messianic egocultists, wants wholesome movies. It's all about values. Movies full of persecuted Christians like themselves. Movies of martyrdom values. Got to get in with that values crowd. It smells just like heaven. Call it Cruci-Fiction, perhaps. Better yet, why not just rename it Holywood?

Message to Hollywood: Faith Community Wants Wholesome Films

Taking Gibson's marketing strategy one step further, Sony's Christian-themed Left Behind: The War at World, starring Lou Gossett, Jr. -- the third in a series based on the best-selling novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins -- was only screened to faith flocks, who had previously snapped up 70 million copies of the novels. They responded by purchasing/renting $4.8 million worth of videos, with even more DVD sales expected. (DVDs currently account for 80% of industry sales.)

Pastor Edgar said he screened Left Behind to a packed house, noting it had created quite a "buzz," and is "looking at" screening more films, whether overtly spiritual or not. His goal, he said, is not profits but the conversion of souls and, in fact, he only asks for an offering at screenings.

As to whether the faith community will actually "buy" uplifting, all-American films without specific spiritual content is an open question.

Yes. That's it. Uplifting, all-American films (with subtitles, of course) without specific spiritual content like The Passion of the Christ. Now, personally, I'd rather watch a horse flogged to death, but that's not very American is it? Maybe more French. They eat horses in France you know.

Uplifting. All-American. Non-specific spiritual content. That's the name of the game. That's where the jackpot lies my heathen brethren.

You can't get any more non-specific as far as spiritual content (or otherwise) than the Left Behind movies. Hating the UN is about as all-American as you can get. It's in the Bible, you know. It's written in the apple pie. So is the idea that all the wholesome folks will disappear in a twinkling of an eye, leaving behind the evil and the not-so-good, with the latter forming small militia cells to harass the UN turned Global Community, battling the evil foes and converting the willing until ultimate fighter Jesus comes back to open up a can of whup ass on the Antichrist. It's as all-American as a video game. It's all in Revelation. Of course you don't know that, you're liberalized barbarian scum and don't read the Bible. Hillary's in there too. You know the lines: "Then I saw a beast come out of the sea with ten horns and seven heads; on its horns were ten diadems, and on it heads blasphemous names. The beast I saw was like a leopard, but it had feet like a bear's and its mouth was like the mouth of a lion." The spitting image. Uncanny, isn't it?

Faith community. Godless. Righteousness. Liberals. Values voters. Evildoers. Wholesome. Paranoia. Mortification. Faith flocks. Persecution. Secularists. Uplifting. Martyrdom. Violence. All-American. Cruci-fiction. Non-specific spiritual content. Holywood. These are the buzz words you should be using if you want to cash in, Hollywood. Now let's get out and do some good works.

While we're on the topic though, we might as well throw around some ideas for some wholesome, All-American, Bible based, godly flicks.

You might not know but Biblical literalism is all the rage. You have to be authentic. Like keep it real. But why just play around with Revelations? Why meander about the Gospels? We should start in Genesis, of course, when keeping it real. It shouldn't be so hard since all this occurred just a few thousand years ago:

"Adam again had relations with his wife, and she gave birth to a son whom she called Seth ..." Wow. Now that's some spicy stuff considering it says in the Good Book that Adam was 130 years old at the time he had relations with his wife Eve, who give or take a rib or two was about the same age. That would certainly make for some wholesome family entertainment.

And a few pages later we find the famous Noah, who, at 600 years of age gets drunk and naked (the old salty dog) and passes out. His son Ham sees him naked and goes to tell his brothers, but the rest of them don't look upon their father. What is Ham's punishment for seeing his naked, 600 year old father? His son Canaan becomes a slave, of course. Who wouldn't be tempted to take a look at a 600 year old naked man? How often do you see something like that? What dramatic tension. Who would have thought of that? Sheer genius. Making Ham's son a slave to Ham's brother Shem! That Genesis was a ballsy guy, writing like that. Not sure if it would play so well on the big screen, but maybe an independent or a made-for-TV movie.

That's not all. Who can forget Lot's hospitality to the two angels who come visit him in Sodom and Gomorrah? If you want literal, you've got to film this. Here we have two angels visit Lot, who bunks them up for the night. The townspeople, wicked liberals that they are, surround Lots house and ask: "Where are the men who came to your house tonight? Bring them out so we may have intimacies with them." Lot, not wanting to play the poor host, responds: "I beg you, my brothers, not to do this wicked thing. I have two daughters who have never had intercourse with men. Let me bring them out to you, and you may do to them as you please."

But you get the picture. Please come up with your own ideas for wholesome, godly, all-American films and post them below. There are movies to be made. The beast must be fed.