Putting faith in writing

It’s the Tuesday night of the recall election, and five players are engaged in a spirited debate in a classroom at the First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood. Only these aren’t political operatives, they’re five of Hollywood’s more successful practicing Christians, and they’re discussing the fine line they walk in trying to enlighten as well as entertain.

Sitting before an audience of 16 students in the Act Two program for Christian screenwriters, Dean Batali (writer/co-executive producer, “That ‘70s Show”), Lee Batchler (co-writer, “Batman Forever”), Jack Gilbert (former workshop director of the Warner Bros. Writers Workshop), Ron Austin (writer, “Matlock”) and Act Two executive director Barbara Nicolosi are debating the meaning and merits of spiritually charged yet provocative movies like “Magnolia.” Although it has a lot of profanity, themes of sexual abuse, family dysfunction and misogyny, the instructors believe the film offers amazing lessons -- that it is an example of a film with flawed characters who seek and find redemption and forgiveness.

For an hour, questions and answers fly as the panel discusses such issues as when and how moral ambiguity can be helpful or go too far, and whether spreading a Christian message is better served by writing explicitly Christian characters or by conveying moral values through secular characters. While these debates have raged for years in church circles, Act Two and its parent program, Act One: Writing for Hollywood, have generated a great deal of interest in the past five years thanks to the caliber of faculty members and such bold credos as “it’s better to tell an R-rated truth than a G-rated lie.”

Despite the sometimes impassioned differences among faculty and students, one thing is clear: A new and savvier generation of Christians is hitting Hollywood, one that’s come a long way from making apocalyptic thrillers and “altar call” films that ministries such as Billy Graham’s sometimes used to convince people to accept Christ into their hearts.

“We all seek to incorporate the Christian worldview into movies and television, but we discuss how to naturally get our point of view in our work,” said Batali afterward. “We don’t want our art to be agenda-driven, but we do have a valid worldview that should be part of the cultural conversation.”

Act One’s voice in that conversation has become louder since the program’s inception in January 1999 by members of the Christian entertainment fellowship organization Inter-Mission, which, along with the unrelated Actors Co-op theater group, is housed at First Presbyterian. From the start, the goal has been to offer a monthlong, daily series of interactive lectures on screenwriting by working industry professionals rather than a dry academic approach, to show students that thriving careers are possible for churchgoers worried about anti-religious discrimination in Hollywood.

Nearly five years later, the program has taught 210 students at classes in Los Angeles, Chicago and New York. Along the way, a course track focusing on TV writing careers, a screenplay critique service, writers’ groups and a thriving online information community also have been established. Applicants for admission to Act One submit a variety of writing samples for consideration, while Act Two participants are selected from writers of completed scripts from the “best of the best” Act One graduates.

Gaining recognition

During the week before the recall, a camera crew from the American Movie Classics cable network shot a documentary on the program and Dominos Pizza founder Thomas Monaghan played host to Nicolosi and other board members and associate director Zena Dell Schroeder for a fund-raiser for Act One at his Ann Arbor, Mich., estate. Perhaps most impressive, representatives of Act One have entered the hallowed halls of Congress to present testimony on their work in the cultural maelstrom.

“One of our alums works as a speechwriter in the Bush administration, and he talked us up on Capitol Hill and we got invited to give a program on ethics and entertainment creation, and how to approach Hollywood to gain a more favorable response in terms of inviting the industry to consider the social impact of its work,” recalled Nicolosi, who has overseen Act One since its inception. “More invites kept coming up and we met with senators, Capitol Hill staffers, the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives and had lunch at the White House. But everywhere we went, we told everyone to praise the good the industry does rather than focus on the bad it does.”

Nicolosi learned the difference between didacticism and diversion through her background as a master of arts graduate of the Northwestern University film program and a varied career as a director of development, project consultant and reader for the prestigious Humanitas Prize competition, which honors work that explores the human condition. She felt that “Hollywood writers often made films that were superficial and that were, at best, good saccharine.”

According to Gilbert, the former Warner Bros. Writers Workshop director, the key to the program’s effectively combating the sticky-sweet bromides of fare like “Touched by an Angel” or the heavy-handed hellfire-and-brimstone approach of films like “Left Behind” is that “we teach that you have to approach both the artistry and the spirituality of what you do at 100% each, not half and half.

“When you have a dual total commitment to your craft and your relationship to God, the quality of stories really improves and their palette of ideas moves far beyond just evangelistic stories,” Gilbert said.

“Before, movies and TV were treated as merely means to an end of spreading salvation by Christians, but today you could say a movie like ‘Lord of the Rings’ has a right to exist for its own sake,” although many Christians interpret the tale as a Christian allegory.

Value in the struggle

THE success that Act One is enjoying doesn’t mean its faculty is immune to criticism -- particularly from the Christian right, which might ask a person like Dean Batali what he’s doing on “That ‘70s Show,” in which teen characters often smoke pot and engage in premarital sex. Yet it is in the midst of these shows, which some might perceive as the sort of “problem programs” Act One should criticize, that Batali finds the struggle is even more important.

“On television, we don’t usually choose the shows we’re on, we’re offered very little, and a person of faith’s point of view is not needed on ‘Touched’ or ‘7th Heaven’ but it’s more valued on a show like ‘ ‘70s,’ ” he said. “I tend not to suggest stories that center around the sex and drugs of our show; I find the themes that are a little richer, and I’m proud of the things that people often overlook, that our characters really care about each other and that our main family is an intact one.

“It’s less about the specific stories that I write or suggest,” he added, “and more about the tone in which I choose to write them.”

In the end, Act One associate director Zena Dell Schroeder believes that as Christians learn to “raise the bar” artistically, they will meet with more success at the box office and in television ratings and earn a more influential position in Hollywood and popular culture. And that, in turn, should help the Christian church at large have a greater understanding of their efforts to find a place in the modern world.

“Why has this program taken off? Because the church is finally catching on to what this is -- that there’s strength in numbers and that we’re establishing a community that gives support and counseling, career strategy, spiritual formation to each other and that’s made all the difference,” said Dell Schroeder.

“They’re finally realizing that they can’t just leave the field of entertainment alone, that they’ll have to embrace it and work in it in order to see any changes at all.”