At the start of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, we find C. S. Lewis’s mythical world of talking animals, satyrs, fauns, centaurs, and dwarves trapped in the Hundred Year Winter – a time where evil reigns and creativity has given way to cruelty. And so it remains until a mighty lion messiah roars onto the scene to awaken warmth and hope.
Philip Anschutz is no messiah, but he has made it his ambition to lead Hollywood out of a cynical and amoral ice age. Will this self-made Colorado billionaire become modern entertainment’s rescuer, a lion-hearted savior of American film?
Anschutz is a spectacularly successful oil/railroad/fiber-optic/sports/entertainment magnate. He is also an evangelical Christian and father of three children who got so fed up with the tawdry state of Hollywood fare that he decided to get into the business himself by launching two film companies. He has spent a reported $150 million to $200 million to turn the first book in Lewis’s beloved Chronicles of Narnia series into one of the biggest film releases of this holiday season. The plan is to eventually translate all seven books into high-quality films.
Narnia is a land of myth and fantasy, human moral struggle, and larger-than-life heroism. Beneath the surface it presents an unmistakable allegory for the Christian life, infused with the theological insights of its deeply believing author. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe film project is the highest-profile sign of what may be a major cultural shift in Hollywood, made possible not only by big-bucks investors like Anschutz, but also by other brave producers within the film world, and by a public that keeps telling the industry it is not satisfied with most of the fare it’s now being offered.
Patron of hard cases
“The movie business is not a very good business in many ways. No one with any sense would get into it,” said Anschutz at a Hillsdale College speech in February 2004. It was a rare public appearance for the publicity-shy executive, who hasn’t granted an interview in 30 years. “My friends think I’m a candidate for a lobotomy, and my competitors think I’m naive or stupid, or both.” It’s easy to see why conservatives, in particular, would be dubious of his plunge into Hollywood, with its blend of debauched fare and radical politics. But Anschutz has been taking on lost causes for most of his life.
Take Step 13. Based in Anschutz’s hometown of Denver, it is a home for alcoholic men who have hit rock bottom. The tough-love, faith-based rehab program struggled to stay afloat until one day when Anschutz literally showed up on director Bob Cote’s doorstep, unannounced, and wrote a check to build the facility’s chapel. Ten years later, Anschutz donated hundreds of thousands of dollars when Step 13 lost its lease, to help buy a home for the organization. (See “Rocky Mountain Sheriff,” TAE, October/November 2002.)
In the business world, Anschutz’s pattern has been the same. He has consistently taken on high-risk industries that most others have shied away from. Turning underperformers into massive moneymakers is what elevated him from child of a bankrupt home to #28 on the latest Forbes 400 list of the richest individuals in America.
A few years ago, Anschutz started gobbling up movie-theater chains, a move that had industry analysts baffled. Cinema attendance had been in steady decline for years, and the survivors were in cutthroat competition with each other, as well as with cheap DVDs and digital cable that had audiences staying home. Experts had declared the business all but dead.
Anschutz disagreed. During the 1990s, he had bought old railroads cheaply, then coaxed a golden new revenue stream out of them by selling rights-of-way for new fiber-optic lines alongside his trackbeds. Now he saw the same technological innovation – fiber optics – giving movie houses a fresh hold on profitability. He poured more than $700 million into buying three theater chains that had filed for bankruptcy: United Artists, Regal, and Edwards, giving him control of 6,273 screens, or 18 percent of the market, the country’s largest string of cinemas.
Anschutz’s master plan is to convert all of his theaters to digital technology – eliminating the cumbersome celluloid film reels that have to be shipped across the country, manually operated, then shipped back. If theaters could simply download their films as computer files and then project them through computer-controlled routers, there could be large cost savings. This scenario is especially practical for Anschutz, given that his company, Qwest, already owns a significant chunk of America’s backbone of fiber-optic lines. (High-resolution films require large telecom “pipes” to travel from locale to locale.)
Taking a higher road
But Anschutz’s big movie gamble is based on more than just fresh technology. The cause of declining ticket sales, Anschutz reasons, isn’t just the ease and convenience of home viewing. It’s also the deteriorating content of Hollywood’s products—which are too often vulgar, violent, sexualized, dark, and depressing. For many American families, especially religious ones (who are a much bigger fraction of the population than entertainment executives have ever acknowledged), the movie theater is no longer a pleasant or even safe place to bring children. This major bloc of the market has been ignored by Hollywood.
Producers have “misread what audiences want,” says Craig Detweiler, professor of mass communications at Southern California’s Biola University. “Audiences have proved more discerning of quality than Hollywood expected.” Thus, the repeated syndrome of movie elites underestimating the public appetite for higher quality and family-friendly entertainment, while overestimating the appeal of R-rated dross. (See “Stupid Hollywood,” SCAN, TAE, July/August 2005.)
Enter Anschutz, the man who’s made billions by spotting missed economic potential. In his Hillsdale speech, he asked: “Is this preponderance of R-rated films simply—as we hear so often—a response to the market? I would say not, considering that of the top 20 moneymaking films of all time, not a single one is rated R, and of the top 50, only five are rated R—with the remainder being G or PG.”
While conservatives have groused about Hollywood’s cultural pollution for decades, Anschutz is putting his money where his convictions are. “You need to bring your own money and be willing to spend it,” he told the audience at Hillsdale. “Otherwise, Hollywood doesn’t see you as a serious player.”
Anschutz’s aim is not to promote a political agenda, but to make good movies. His two film companies are “not political in any way,” concludes Govindini Murty, an actress, screenwriter, and co-director of the Liberty Film Festival. “They hire liberals and conservatives. Art is their foremost priority, making movies that everyone in the public can enjoy—not niche movies only for young males, or people on the extreme left or right.”
In other words, Anschutz’s companies are targeting the vast mainstream audience that Hollywood has increasingly alienated over the last four decades. This is no charity exercise. Anschutz is looking to make a buck—lots of bucks, actually. As author and film critic Michael Medved puts it, he’s “testing in a wonderful way…the theory that it is possible in Hollywood to do well while doing good.”
Jumping in
“You’re only going to get one shot at this. There can’t be any false steps.” That’s what Anschutz reportedly told Michael Flaherty and Cary Granat when he bought their nascent film company, Walden Media. The idea behind Walden, whose motto is “Recapturing imagination. Rekindling curiosity,” is to translate beloved children’s books into silver-screen hits which will, in turn, send millions of new readers back to the classics. Past productions include Around the World in 80 Days, Because of Winn-Dixie, and Holes, while future projects include How To Eat Fried Worms and Charlotte’s Web.
Granat and Flaherty had a great idea, but little else, when they first began. The two had quit their jobs and emptied their bank accounts to get the company started, but they lacked the seed money to actively acquire titles and start development—until Anschutz arrived. The billionaire read Walden’s mission statement, and was sold. He made the company one of two production arms under the umbrella of the Anschutz Film Group.
But Anschutz is not content to be merely the money man. “A lesson I’ve learned,” Anschutz said at Hillsdale, “is to keep firm control of the creative process.… You need to control the type of writers you have, the type of directors you get, the type of actors you employ, and the type of editors that work on the final product. You have to control the way the film is marketed.”
For 13 years, director Taylor Hackford couldn’t find anyone to buy into his vision of a movie based on the life of Ray Charles—until he met Phil Anschutz. Anschutz is “a conservative Republican and he knows I’m a liberal Democrat,” Hackford told the Associated Press. Yet “he was able to force me into a place as an artist where I ended up making the film the way I wanted,” but with a PG-13 rating, the loosest that Anschutz will allow on any of his productions. At his financier’s insistence, Hackford pulled all four-letter words from the movie, and tread carefully around Charles’s drug addiction and womanizing. That didn’t hurt the film, which was nominated for Best Picture and yielded an Oscar for Best Actor for star Jamie Foxx.
The box-office results of Anschutz’s experiment have so far been mixed. “Phil has had success with movies like Ray, Holes, and I am David,” Medved observes. “And he’s had some flops like Around the World in 80 Days.” That’s not uncommon for any Hollywood studio, of course, where dry holes are part of the business. The real test for Anschutz will be the worldwide receipts of his boldest undertaking of all—Narnia.
Going big time
The movie rights to C. S. Lewis’s enduringly popular fantasy series had previously belonged to Paramount. That studio abandoned its movie effort in the mid 1990s, though, after multiple failed attempts at production. Several bidders then tried to pick up the option from Lewis’s estate, and Anschutz got personally involved on behalf of Walden. Douglas Gresham, Lewis’s stepson, told the Los Angeles Times that he ultimately settled on Walden because of his admiration for Anschutz. “I believe he’s a man of faith, probably someone who’s had some realizations in his life, and is trying to carry them out,” concluded Gresham.
The project took off in Anschutz’s hands. He hired as director Andrew Adamson of Shrek fame—an expert in the digital animation needed to bring Lewis’s fantastical characters to life alongside live actors. But perhaps the biggest coup of all was establishing a partnership with Disney to handle distribution.
For Disney, whose reputation as a producer of family favorites has taken a beating in recent years, The Lion is viewed as an attempt to regain respectability—and market dominance. The Narnia franchise, notes Detweiler, comes with “millions of readers and time-tested characters.… That’s what turned Disney into what it is. To some degree, Walden and Anschutz are helping Disney reclaim its legacy.”
Disney hired Motive Marketing, a California PR firm specializing in cultivating Christian audiences, to direct a faith-based marketing campaign. According to World magazine, the effort marks the most extensive outreach to faith and family groups that Disney has ever undertaken.
Disney also established its usual litany of Narnia-related corporate tie-ins with the likes of McDonald’s, General Mills, Virgin Atlantic, Oral-B, Kodak, and more than 50 other licensees. The company envisions a generation of kids walking to school lugging Lionbackpacks. If that happens, Anschutz’s vision will have proved prophetic, and Hollywood will likely become a bit more open to favorable depictions of faith in film.
After many years of shying away from religion, Narnia marks a radical departure for the filmmaking industry. The closest Disney has come to such overt religiosity is 1998’s The Prince of Egypt, based on the life of Moses. But it’s depictions of Jesus—literal or allegorical—that work up the ire of Hollywood’s rabid secularists, and while movies for gays, teens, inner-city youth, and other niches are common, cinematic approaches to devout Christians have been verboten for a generation now. In expanding its reach to include religious or culturally conservative viewers, Disney is taking a fresh leap of faith and seeking to brake the long downward spiral in the mass appeal of movies.
A thaw in the ice age?
Disney is not alone. There have been several big films in recent years that have treated faith more favorably, such as Signs, The Exorcism of Emily Rose, and The Lord of the Rings. (At the same time, a majority of pictures still slight religion—see NOW PLAYING, page 48, for a current egregious example.)
Still: While they remain outcasts, cultural traditionalists in Hollywood are no longer the complete oddities they once were. The conservative-oriented Liberty Film Festival drew 3,500 people in October, including a respectable number of established producers and writers. “It used to be that people in Hollywood wouldn’t be caught dead at something identified as conservative,” notes Medved. “So this is a very important softening.”
Some of the shift is generational. As Murty explains, “Up until the 1960s Hollywood was pretty much evenly divided between liberals and conservatives…. But in the 1960s, a new group came into power, the new Hollywood…Scorsese, Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg—very talented filmmakers, but all to the left.” They were followed by another group—the Oliver Stones and Warren Beattys—which was even more radical. It’s a pattern that swept many American institutions: with the ascent of the Baby Boomers came the orthodoxy of the 1960s counterculture. But as in other places like the news media, churches, and academia, the ’60s old guard has peaked and is beginning to move on. “As that group gets older,” says Murty, “things are swinging back toward the center.”
Which is where American audiences are. Biola’s Detweiler observes “a shift in the cultural winds.… Young people are more conservative when it comes to issues of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. And so moviegoing…has become more family-friendly.”
The difference is visible not only in some of the products, but also in the way they’re promoted. Companies like Motive Marketing and Grace Hill Media have sprung up specifically to assist studios in advertising films—all films, not just religiously themed ones—to the Christian subculture that corporate America too often overlooks.
Following the money
There are overlapping reasons for Hollywood’s increasing tolerance for religious and culturally conservative audiences. Chief among them is the stunning success of The Passion of the Christ in 2004. The lesson of The Passion’s profits was that the yearning for an openly Christian movie was so strong that even a jarringly explicit one filmed entirely in Hebrew and Aramaic could become a runaway hit. Tinseltown’s anti-religious venom proved to be dreadful business. Some producers learned the lesson.
But the shift is about more than just The Passion. J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings “showed Hollywood that a wonderful story, well told, that had thickness and depth and spiritual possibility resonated deeply with large sections of the American public,” says Rob Johnston, professor of theology at Fuller Theological Seminary. The converse is also true, which is another reason for Hollywood’s recent struggles: The market for nihilistic, cynical, and salacious films is pretty much saturated.
The 2004 Presidential campaign, which exposed America’s cultural divide and introduced “values voters” to the mainstream media, also made clear that Hollywood activists were speaking a language that resonated with a minority of the population. And the portion of America being left out was the part that produces most children (read: young moviegoers). Even a Malibu narcissist can do that math.
Bridging the cultural divide
It will be interesting to see how cultural liberals react to Hollywood’s efforts to find some common ground with Red America. Well before the release of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, there were hints of discontent among those whose tolerance extends to almost everything except religion. When Florida Governor Jeb Bush named Lewis’s book as a selection for his “Just Read, Florida” campaign, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State protested, objecting to its religious content. Likewise, advance media coverage of the Narnia movie has featured many ominous references to Anschutz’s involvement, invariably invoking his Republicanism as a cause for suspicion. Never mind that his films have been as scrupulously apolitical as they have been family-friendly, or that journalists almost never point to the political affiliations of Hollywood liberals when assessing their products.
Nor will The Lion get a free pass from cultural traditionalists. There are legions of ardent Narnia fans who will settle for nothing less than true fidelity to the story’s literary foliage and Christian roots. Reportedly, though, the film production has been exceptionally faithful to Lewis’s tale, and has not flinched from his depiction of even the famous resurrection scene.
A minor cultural flap took place in October, when Focus on the Family e-mailed editors of Entertainment Weekly to inform them it planned to give Narnia the group’s imprimatur. Given Focus on the Family’s well-known political and social conservatism, the missive disturbed some of the decidedly secular folks at EW. “Sure, the prospect of 2 million ticket buyers [the number of Focus constituents] is alluring,” the editors remarked. “But is the endorsement of a potentially polarizing political/religious interest group worth it?… Aggressively publicized thumbs-ups from groups like FOF could turn off secular audiences.”
The article then presented a series of quotes from Disney officials trying to downplay any Christian connection. Disney pointed out that less than 5 percent of the film’s marketing budget is aimed toward religious groups. “We’re simply showing the film to as many different people as possible,” said one company spokesman blandly.
“The potential tragedy is that this story might become politicized,” notes Johnston. That would violate Lewis’s intentions, he says, and scare studios off other religious projects. Appealing to both sides of America’s cavernous cultural divide isn’t easy.
Disney has tried to walk the line by essentially pitching two different visions of the film, depending on the audience. Barbara Nicolosi, executive director of Act One, a group that trains Christians for careers in secular Hollywood, reported on her blog that when she attended a screening for religious leaders, Disney officials happily stressed the film’s religious content. “We wouldn’t think of doing it any other way,” she quotes one executive as saying after a minister praised the movie for being true to its Christian identity. “We aren’t going to shy away from religion at Disney. After all, who ever decided that going to church was a bad thing?”
But in more secular settings, the company had a different message. Disney’s senior vice president of publicity, Dennis Rice, told theLos Angeles Times that “everyone has his own take on the book, to which the movie is faithful. Rather than embracing any interpretation, we’re remaining neutral, adopting the Switzerland approach.” In the same article, Douglas Gresham, C. S. Lewis’s stepson and a co-producer of the film says, “We never set out to make a ‘Christian’ movie. The book taps different veins in different people.”
An Anschutz effect?
Of course, Disney is just the distributor. Walden and Phil Anschutz and the Lewis estate kept control of creative decisions on the film. And they have shown no signs of selling out either stylistically or philosophically.
Medved discounts the idea that there is any risk of this film (or any other forthcoming Hollywood output) going too far in the direction of religion. He notes the hollowness of the protests against The Passion. “Frankly the people who initiated that backlash—so-called Jewish defense organizations—were more wounded than the movie. It would be fair to worry about a backlash against Hollywood if every movie had some sort of religious theme to it. But we’re a very far way from that.”
So the decades-long winter in Hollywood may be coming to a thaw. Anschutz the lion is on the move, and the satyrs, fauns, centaurs, dwarves, and other creatures who make today’s entertainment magic have sensed that something is afoot. Could a springtime in American film be at hand?
Chris Weinkopf, a contributing writer for The American Enterprise, is editorial page editor of the Los Angeles Daily News.