A Shepherd of Movies Into the Religious Flock

Jonathan Bock, film promoter, worries about movie reviews in unlikely places: Christianity Today, Contemporary Christian Music magazine and “Focus on the Family” radio broadcasts among others. Bock specializes in gaining mainstream films a higher profile and more favorable press in the religious media, an area long ignored by most of Hollywood.

His latest and most high-profile project is “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” the Warner Bros. film that--like the J.K. Rowling books that spawned it--has come under attack by some conservative Christians for its story of witchcraft and wizardry.

“The strategy was to let religious America know that it’s OK to jump on the ‘Harry Potter’ bandwagon,” said Bock, a 31-year-old freelance movie publicist.

Douglas LeBlanc, an associate editor of the 145,000-circulation Christianity Today, attended an advance “Harry Potter” screening in Chicago through Bock’s contacts.

“I sat practically with my arms crossed, concerned that it would be a movie that said, ‘Hey, isn’t the occult cool!’ ” said LeBlanc, who writes film reviews for the monthly magazine. “I was won over in 20 minutes.”

The film has already grossed more than $129 million in its first week of release. The criticism the “Harry Potter” books have encountered doesn’t seem to have hurt the film with Christian audiences--and the studio credits Bock.

“He uncovered a great deal of support for the picture within the Christian community,” said Debbie Miller, a Warner Bros. senior vice president in charge of publicity and promotions. “It’s been very valuable to us.”

Bock, a churchgoing Presbyterian from Santa Monica, looks the part of a hip Hollywood promoter: goatee, stylish clothes, easy smile. He believes that studios haven’t learned to reach a vast segment of the market. “Any marketing department at a studio can tell you what a divorced Native American single mom with two kids wants to see,” Bock said. “But they don’t know what kind of movies that Catholics, Jews or Protestants want.”

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For “Harry Potter,” Bock gathered quotes from influential conservative evangelical leaders--including heavyweight Charles Colson--and took them to Christian media as evidence that most of the church world endorses the movie’s themes.

He also plied the media with movie press kits and advance screenings, not exactly cutting-edge promotion, but the kind of Hollywood treatment that Christian magazines haven’t typically gotten.

“It’s very difficult for a publication of faith to break into the movie industry and get to know the people, the artists and actors,” said Matthew Turner, editor of Nashville-based CCM (Contemporary Christian Music) magazine, a 75,000-circulation magazine known as an Entertainment Weekly for the Christian world. “He’s getting us to cover major movies from a faith perspective, whether we’re 100% behind it or not.”

Bock’s year-old company, Grace Hill Media in Santa Monica, has developed a distinctive niche in the movie industry, working on films such as “Pay It Forward,” “K-PAX” and “Family Man” that have either a religious character or a tone that the studios hope the faithful will find appealing.

Bock’s sales pitch to the movie studios is based on simple math: On any given weekend, the number of people who attend religious services--roughly 122 million--is vastly greater than the number who go to the movies--and that kind of ticket-purchasing power can be tapped. Warner Bros., Disney and Universal have hired him to promote movies.

Miller at Warner Bros. said Bock is a “pioneer” who is setting “an incredible example for other studios that the religious market is a really, really important area that’s not to be ignored.” She added that Bock is the only person she knows of in Hollywood filling this niche.

A former sitcom writer (“Hangin’ With Mr. Cooper”), Bock worked in the Warner Bros. publicity department. After helping promote movies such as “The Matrix” and “Lethal Weapon 4,” he asked his bosses if he could try to tap directly into the religious market by highlighting the moral themes used in “My Dog Skip” and “The Green Mile.”

The campaigns intrigued the studio enough to allow Bock to form his own company and sell his services to Warner Bros. for its release last year of “Pay It Forward.” The movie grossed a modest $35 million, but the studio executives were “surprised and very pleased by the response” within the religious world, Bock says. Churches even started mimicking the film’s premise by giving congregants $100 bills and asking them to “pay it forward” to help someone in greater need.

Bock says that if religious people back movies with spiritual themes, more will be made. “The studios are just beginning to see the tip of the iceberg,” he said.

The recent success of evangelical Christian films such as “The Omega Code,” and “Left Behind: The Movie” give a hint of the potential box-office windfall that mainstream movies could earn if they tap into religious sensibilities. These films, however, were produced and released by a religious organization and a specialty production house, not by the Hollywood studios.

“The Omega Code,” funded by Trinity Broadcasting Network in Orange County, opened at No. 10 at the box office its opening weekend in 1999 and took in $12.5 million at the box office, the highest gross for a Christian film. “Left Behind,” produced by Cloud Ten Pictures, sold more than 2.5 million video copies in 2000 before its theatrical early this year.

The effort to attract niche audiences isn’t limited to religious fare. African American movie audiences have flexed their box-office muscle in recent years by enthusiastically supporting such films as “Waiting to Exhale” and “How Stella Got Her Groove Back.” The L.A.-based First Weekend Club selected certain African American films to back during their first weekends of release, resulting in impressive box-office numbers.

“A lot of this is circular,” Miller says. “When an audience supports a film, it gives studios a lot more incentive to green-light a movie.”

Bock is at work on two more films--Warner Bros.’ “A Walk to Remember” (opening Jan. 25) and Disney’s “The Count of Monte Cristo” (opening Feb. 1)--and a TV movie, ABC’s “Judas and Jesus,” which is to be shown at Easter.

In “A Walk to Remember” the central character is a Baptist minister’s daughter, played by singer Mandy Moore, whose Christian values and morals rub off on her boyfriend. It’s already creating a buzz within the Christian media. Bock already has arranged for advance screenings and interviews with Moore and others from the film.

“In that respect, Jonathan can really build an audience for a movie like ‘A Walk to Remember,’ ” said LeBlanc of Christianity Today.

Bock said he hopes so.

“The studio is paying close attention to whether people of faith are a viable market for them to be involved with,” Bock said. “And ‘A Walk to Remember’ will be a good barometer of it.”