Faith and Film: An Oxymoron?

Found a great interview online between Adam Holz and my friend Barbara Nicolosi, talented screenwriter and founder and former executive director of the Act One Program: Writing for Hollywood – on whose faculty I have served for more than a decade. I have strong feelings about this topic, as you may have gathered from previous posts.

But I could not have answered these questions any better than Barbara — so I repurpose it here for your benefit.  For those of you who identify yourselves as people of faith, especially those of you who work in (or aspire to work in) Hollywood, I urge you to read carefully.  Your survival in Showbiz depends on it.  If you’re not a person inclined to matters of the spirit, please drill down deeply into this material anyway. It will help explain how crucial an exploration of the soul is to the craft of screenwriting.

Onto the interview…

Christians and Hollywood. It may seem like a paradoxical relationship—maybe even a mutually exclusive one, more like oil and water than toast and jam. But an increasing number of Christians have committed themselves to being a part of what Tinseltown is right now—many of them hoping to influence where it will go tomorrow. Barbara Nicolosi is one of those Christians. For more than a decade, Nicolosi has been working to train Christians screenwriters and executives via a program she helped found called Act One. She’s also a screenwriter and adjunct professor of cinema at Seaver Graduate School at Pepperdine University, as well as the co-editor of the 2006 bookBehind the Screen: Hollywood Insiders on Faith, Film, and Culture. She blogs regularly at Church of the Masses. I spoke with her about the complicated intersection of Hollywood and faith.

Adam R. Holz: Barbara, start us off with a quick recap of what Act One is.

Barbara Nicolosi: Act One goes back to 1999. It was an organic effort started by a group of Hollywood professionals who were all believers. We were grieving together at one point about how many Christians come to Hollywood and really commit suicide, metaphorically speaking, and then they think they’re being martyred because of their faith. The idea was that many Christians were approaching the business without a lot of professionalism. They weren’t approaching it with any real sense of the industry standards. And very little regard for the art form itself. A lot of times Christians come in and they don’t really love the medium of film and television. They’re coming to use it as an agenda-driven thing. So we decided we wanted to create a program that would help Christians make a better start. We also included a lot of ethics and spirituality and spiritual formation content because we saw that many weren’t prepared for the dilemmas that come up for believers in the business. We wanted to give our students a better leg up in those areas.

Holz: Were you already in Hollywood and writing screenplays at that point?

Nicolosi: Yes. I was a writer, and I was working in a production company as a director of project development. Pretty much everybody in the core team of Act One was working in the business. It was kind of the litmus tests we had. We didn’t want anyone guessing at what was involved in being in Hollywood. We wanted people who were speaking from the battlefield. And so we started this thing 11 years ago, and now we’ve trained over 1,000 young people. About five years ago we started training executives and producers, executives who want to work in network studio production companies and on the creative side. Eventually, we would love to start a program for actors and directors. (Anyone who wants to see what we’re up to can go to actoneprogram.com.)

Holz: Right or wrong, many Christians tend to see Hollywood as a godless wasteland that pumps out garbage for the rest of the culture to consume. As a Christian within the industry, though, you have a perspective that very few people have. How would you describe the climate in Hollywood for Christian moviemakers today, and what are some of the ways you see them making a difference?

Nicolosi: I think it’s a really great time to be a Christian in Hollywood. Because with the change in the generations—with the Boomers stepping down and now the Gen Xers and Millennials stepping up—there’s tremendous openness to hear new stories, stories that have some hope. I think we saw the Barack Obama campaign make a lot of hay out of the concept of hope, but he really latched onto something that people are feeling. Namely, the need for some hope. In contrast, the end of the Boomer experience has a lot of cynicism [in the movies they've made]. They’re not very happy with where their lives are and the lives that they’ve lived. But now their kids are wanting some reasons to be heroes. They’re wanting reasons to be committed. They want to be in relationships that last. It seems to me as Christians, if we can master the craft of the art form, there’s an openness now to give meaning to people. To tell stories that would help them to live their lives differently than their parents did. Stories that give them some reasons to be a hero. It’s as if they’re saying, “Give me some reason to make a sacrifice, and convince me that I’m going to be glad at the end of my life that I did that.” So, I think this is a natural thing for Christians. And now that the Christians have been organized in Hollywood for the last 15 years or so, there’s a tremendous network of believers in the business.

Holz: What are some examples that show the contrast between the generations of filmmakers?

Nicolosi: If you look at Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York or The Departed orThe Aviator, these movies basically say that life is a cruel joke because everybody is caught up in the system, the system is corrupt and evil, and in the end there’s nothing you can do to change it. At the end of The Departed, for instance, the hero gets killed for his trouble. And it just feels like a total waste. You see similar themes in movies like Mystic River from Clint Eastwood. Several other films of his have also reflected this type of cynicism (though not Gran Torino). What they’re saying is that we haven’t been happy, therefore human happiness is not possible. Now let’s look at some of the new filmmakers, the Gen Xers, who are beginning to make a mark—like Jason Reitman, who made Juno. My college students had two favorite movies in the last year: Up and Juno. Both of these movies are positive. If you’ll remember, Juno is about a 16-year-old girl who gets pregnant and carries her baby to term. She says in the movie, “It might be the greatest thing I can do with my life to give the possibility of parenthood to somebody who wouldn’t have that.” And she’s willing to sacrifice nine months of her life to do that. That makes no sense to the Boomer generation. In this year’s Up in the Air, Jason Reitman’s Academy Award-nominated film, he has a Gen Xer just basically looking in Boomers’ eyes and saying, “I don’t want to be you.”

Holz: How does that play out onscreen?

Nicolosi: George Clooney and Vera Farmiga play two people who’ve decided that that the best way to live is to not have any commitment. Just have as much sex as possible and then run. And this 23-year-old character looks at them and says, “I don’t want to be you. I want to be committed.” Those are just a couple examples. But I’m seeing it all over. The movie Preciouswas an indictment of the Boomer welfare state. That film has a Millennial saying, “I don’t want to be you” to her mother and walking away.

Holz: That’s a difficult film to watch. But I don’t think anyone can argue with the fact that it’s inspiring.

Nicolosi: It’s a very hopeful film, which makes no sense because of the harsh, really graphic nature of the brutality that the star, a teenage single mom, suffers. Her mother is the product of the welfare state. She’s the consummate product. And the movie condemns that lifestyle, and she walks away. She’s going to have a tough life. But she hopes for a good life.

Holz: What would you say it looks like to be a biblical and discerning moviegoer?

Nicolosi: I would say that there are two wrong ways to live as a disciple in the 21st century. The first wrong way is to be what I call a “cave-dwelling Christian.” These are literally the ones who are hunkered down, those who proudly say, “We don’t watch television, we don’t ever go to the movies, it’s all garbage. We’re trying to shut out the world.” To that mindset I would say, We’re supposed to be yeast in the world. We’re supposed to be telling all of creation the Good News, not ducking our heads down hoping we don’t get caught in the crossfire. There’s nothing heroic in the vision. In fact if Christians do nothing, it allows the forces of darkness to have free rein. So I believe that’s the wrong way to live. The other wrong way is what I call being “Teflon Christians.” These are the ones who say, “Ahhh, it’s just a movie. It’s just music. It’s just a video game. The kids are just having fun, and I don’t wanna think about it.” These people will let their kids go unaccompanied to see movies like 300 and Watchmen and never trouble themselves to find out what they’re taking in. We live in a very complex moment right now. To be a Christian and a disciple in the 21st century means you have to be adept at learning. You have to walk through the mire and find the good stuff there and point to it and hold it up. In City of God, St. Augustine said, “Evil is taking something complicated and making it simple so it’s easier for you to deal with that way.” We’re living in a time where we have to be alert. Our sanctity is going to be found in this careful process of finding the good, pointing to it and holding it up for other people, patiently watching stuff with our kids, teaching them to look for meaning, teaching them to look at method, unveiling agenda where it’s present. We don’t have the luxury of going to the movies, like maybe our grandparents did in the postwar period, and just munching on the popcorn.

Holz: Christian filmmakers often include an evangelistic or a theological message in their movies, messages that are impossible to miss. Do you think this is an effective way to communicate our faith via film?

Nicolosi: When you want to put a sacred or transcendent message in a movie—let’s say one that’s going to mention God or the life of the soul—I think it has to be so beautifully done that people will feel that you’re sharing something that’s beautiful, not something that’s trying to get them to do something.

Holz: Or to convert them?

Nicolosi: It’s not agenda driven. What you’re doing is sharing a beautiful insight. And even if your audience doesn’t share that insight—or if they haven’t had it themselves—they can say, “Wow, that’s really cool.” So I think that’s the secret for us to talk about these things we’re really burning to talk about. But that takes a tremendous amount of skill and practice. When my students come in and say, “I want to write the next Passion of the Christ,” I tell them, “Why don’t you just write a really good short film right now about a father and a daughter and leave the God stuff out the picture because you don’t have that ability. You shouldn’t take on the life of the Spirit until you’ve kind of mastered the basic stuff.” I think a lot of times Christians are biting off way more than they can chew, and their talent and training just isn’t up to what they’re attempting. It ends up that they make the work look banal. It’s over simplified. It’s badly done. It just ends up making you wince. I wince terribly when I watch us talk about God in our movies because it feels so oversimplified. This is the kind of work that Flannery O’Conner condemned very often.

Holz: She was a Catholic writer?

Nicolosi: Yes. Certainly one of the greatest short story writers of the 20th century … maybe ever. But she also happened to be a very strong Catholic who was committed to her faith. She said that for Christians to place an overemphasis on innocence is inexcusable because we know what’s in the heart of men. This is a very complex thing we’re doing here—living human life—and when Christians reduce it to simple platitudes, it’s kind of disgusting.

Holz: Still, for the sake of argument, isn’t it better to make something that’s nice than nothing at all? Or something that’s not nice?

Nicolosi: Someone once told me that the word nice comes from the same Greek root word that means stupid. I see a lot of Christians trying to create nice movies that would be better left undone.

Holz: What, then, does a beautiful movie look like?

Nicolosi: It involves a mastery of craft in which the artist encounters the world. And because it’s filtered through their talent and their training—they’ve practiced it many times—they’ve actually got something to say. It’s probably going to come out in a metaphor, because that’s what artists do.

Holz: Is it something like what Jesus was doing with His parables?

Nicolosi: Yes. That’s where this idea comes from. Having said that, I do think there are some values we have as Christians that need to be articulated in the mainstream marketplace, values that flow out of the theological truths of our faith. If Christians went missing tomorrow from the marketplace of ideas, for example, what would be missing? I think we can nail down some of these values that we bring to the table. For example, one of them would be the sacramental quality of life. For Christians, everything we see is a sign of everything we don’t see. There is order and meaning behind all of material life. … That is a Christian value that would be missing.

Holz: It seems like that value is especially important in a postmodern age in which people say, “There is no truth. It’s all up for grabs. Pick and choose what you want.” Because of that view of reality, our minds have ultimately become pretty chaotic.

Nicolosi: There are absolutely no absolutes in postmodernism. In contrast, another important Christian value is our conviction that good and evil are not equal. We believe good is much better than evil is bad, even though it doesn’t always look like that on the surface. Our movies, our stories, need to reflect that truth. Another value would be the ironic juxtaposition of joy and suffering, of hope and suffering. Christians can hold in their hands hope and suffering simultaneously with no sense of contradiction. The cross is the greatest sign of that. And so we can talk about how grace is always being offered. These are Christian values that should infuse our stories.

Holz: If you could say anything to Christians who see only a few films a year and who are generally cautious when it comes to the world of movies, what would it be?

Nicolosi: What you need to do is find critics whose sensibilities you trust and then regularly listen to them. Because the truth is, God is sending the Holy Spirit and He is inspiring artists and storytellers today to tell stories that we need to hear as people of this moment. I think Christians need to see themselves as people of this time and moment and stop thinking that we’re standing outside the culture. We aren’t. We’re in it.

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2010
08/21
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A eulogy for my Dad – Bob Bird, “The Music Man”

My Dad, Robert Vincent Bird, was born on April 28, 1933, in Sterling, Colorado. He passed away of congestive heart failure, in his sleep, on July 20, 2010, at home in Riverside, California.  He was a son, brother, husband, father, uncle, grandfather and a friend during his 77-plus years.

Those two dates, April 28, 1933 and July 20, 2010, now represent the bookends of the life he lived.  But the dash in between those two events is a novel full of stories, sights, sounds, music, highs, lows, joys and pain, accomplishments and a few failures, profound breakthroughs, dramatic plot turns, epiphanies, lots of laughter and above all, love.

As a boy growing up in the midwest, little “Bobby” as folks back then knew him, had an abundant mop-head of curly white blond hair.  (By the way, the hair stayed blond for nearly eight decades without the help of Grecian Formula – something at least one of his three sons can’t claim).

As the oldest of four children of Vince and Connie Bird who were career Foursquare pastor co-pilots in ministry, Bobby was both held to high standards and perhaps just a little spoiled as the apple of his father’s eye.  He had all the interests of a typical boy growing up during the waning years of the Great Depression. He built a crystal radio set and loved tuning in radio broadcasts from places near and far under his covers at night. He had a paper route, sold flower seeds, had a love for debating people and a fascination about the world around him.  Pastors’ kids have a peculiar set of pressures they live with.  For the most part, he towed the line and didn’t get caught doing anything his Dad would have to apologize for from the pulpit.  But he admitted later in life, that he occassionally donned a hooded jacket and snuck out to smoke a cigar, or to play cards, or to commit the worst of all infractions for pastor’s kid in those days – go to the movies.  The first movie he snuck into:  “Lassie.”

As Grandpa Bird moved around from church assignment to church assignment during those years – mostly in the state of Kansas – Dad and his younger siblings, Patricia, Dan and Connie, grew up in towns with names like Parsons, Burlington and Topeka where Dad finished his Junior year of high school before one more church assignment took the Bird family to Kenosha, Wisconsin.  It was a tough move for Dad.  He had really found himself at Topeka High where he played football and fell in love for the first time.

But in Kenosha, at Mary D. Bradford High School, his senior year was full.  He was a clasmaate of Alan “The Horse” Ameche who later went onto win the Heisman trophy.  And Dad’s singing and oratory skills blossomed as a member of the choir, drama club and debate team and he actually won a Wisconsin State debating title – an honor which earned him a trip to California and a national debate competition at Pepperdine University.

Not much later, he returned to Los Angeles to attend Life Bible College, where both of his parents had been members of the first graduating class.  It was during his four years there that his interest and drama and debate resurfaced and he flirted with another idea. What if after Life Bible College he could attend USC’s film school?  But that idea soon gave way to the call of following his father into the pastorate.  And it also paled in comparison to a pretty, perky, confident young lady who sang in the Angeles Temple choir.  Rachel Marian Benson was her name and she stole his heart.  He proposed to her one month after they met following a date to the opera.  She made him wait three terrifying days before saying “yes” and they were married three months later in a wedding extravaganza that could have rivaled any Hollywood nuptials.

The reason for the rush?  Somebody had the bright idea that Bob and Rachel should piggyback their wedding along with the previously scheduled wedding of Dad’s younger sister, Pat, and her fiance, Dave Risser.  And on January 29, 1956, the two couples tied the knot at Angeles Temple in a double ceremony.  Because of the strong family connections of both the Bird and Risser clans to Foursquare, it was estimated that over 2,500 people attended the wedding.  Countless thousands more witnessed the event by hearing it on radio.  That’s right, their wedding was the Sunday night broadcast on KFSG.

After graduating from Life, Dad and Mom returned to the midwest where Dad received his first church assignment at the Foursquare Church of Galva, Illinois.  The 30 members of the congregation gave him a warm welcome, and it was during his six months there that his first son was born.  That would be me.  But Dad struggled as a young pastor of a tiny church barely able to afford his salary.  He said later that he felt perhaps he had misread his calling to be a pastor.  And he soon resigned – a decision his own father struggled to accept at first, but later grew to understand.

Dad and Mom moved back to Kenosha, Wisconsin, where their second son, Patrick, was born, and Dad worked at American Motors and attended the University of Wisconsin for a few years.  But once again, Dad felt an urging to go west.

During his debate and drama years, he had been told many times that he had a voice for radio. And in 1960, Dad and Mom moved back to Los Angeles with their two young sons.  Dad enrolled at the Columbia School of Broadcasting, and by 1961 he had his first job in radio as an announcer for the Christian radio station, KHOF-FM (which you might now know as KKLA).  And during the next dozen years, Dad served as a radio announcer and engineer at several other California radio stations, including back at the station that broadcast his wedding, KFSG, and then at KSBW in Salinas, and finally KRKD back in Los Angeles which eventually turned into KIIS-AM.  During his time at KIIS, he spun soft rock, easy-listening records and was known by his on-air name, “Bob Bird, The Music Man.”  He did voice-over work for numerous TV and radio commercials and even recorded his oldest son narrating Public Service Announcements for Smokey the Bear and US Savings Bonds that he then aired on the radio – bragging rights which won me many a bet from disbelieving neighborhood friends when they heard my voice come over the radio.

It was during that period that third son, Dennis, was born in 1965.  And so was Dad’s love for the outdoors, and especially sailing.  Some of his three sons’ best childhood memories were spent on the little 14-foot Lido sailboat Dad bought and captained in Los Angeles Harbor and every summer for two weeks on the pristine waters of Huntington Lake in the Sierra Nevadas.  Combine that with camping and hiking and then later also sailing on three wheels on a dry lakebed, and you have the makings of some very cool vacations and weekend outings – which became magnets for all our boyhood pals, as well.

But by the early-1970s, Dad was growing restless in his work in radio. The constant turnover of personnel and the ratings-driven nature of the business began to eat at him.  But he was also feeling a familiar tug on his soul that he needed to do something more meaningful with his life.  And in 1977, he completed a B.A. degree in religious studies at Azusa Pacific University, followed by graduate work at Fuller Seminary and a M.A. in theology, also from APU.  That training led him for the next two decades to dedicate his time and talents to hospital chaplaincy work, first at Whittier Hospital, then Kaiser Hospital of Los Angeles, and then finally for a dozen years at St. Joseph Hospital of Orange. He was certified in Clinical Pastoral Education, Mediation and grief counseling, and ordained as a deacon in the Episcopal Church – skills that aided and comforted thousands of hospital patients, their families and even the doctors and medical staff at each of the hospitals where he served.

The last time I checked, the mortality rate in America is… 100 percent.  And we’re all headed for the hospital, Lord-willing later rather than sooner. And that was something Dad knew well, both personally in his own physical struggles, and on behalf of those he served.  Providing comfort and care, a listening ear, and shoulders to cry on was work that brought him deep joy, standing alongside people and their loved ones at the most vulnerable time of their lives.

Dad continued to serve at St. Joseph’s until physically he was unable to keep up the demanding schedule at what he called “the building that never sleeps,” and he officially retired in 1999.  But Dad was a lifelong learner.  In fact, he really never left college.  During his entire adult life, he read and studied and contemplated as if his life depended on it.  He consumed knowledge and savored learning.  His library was full of the books he read and the college courses he continued taking on video tape.  Theology, psychology, autobiographies, historical fiction, thrillers – pretty much anything that would contribute to his understanding of himself, of others, of the world, of the human condition. He was reading a book reccommended to him by one of his grandsons the week of his death.

None of us would deny that his physical struggles defined a large part of Dad’s last decade.  He was a man who survived speedbumps, dodged bullets and cheated death many times.  He suffered from Diabetes from the age of 35 on.  He survived a heart attack and a stroke, and not one, but two heart bypass operations. He was beating two types of cancer, and for the last year, life-saving dialysis served as his kidneys. He was described by one of his doctors as “the most complicated patient” he ever treated.  And he faced the daily grind of his various maladies with grace and patience, without complaining.

Sure he had a few regrets.  Don’t we all?  And he had a bucket list… you know, those things you hope to accomplish before you “kick the bucket.”  He would have loved to ride a motorcycle again.  Mom made him promise never to ride again after he laid one down in the road early in their marriage and had a pin that held his ankle together.  He would have loved to get out in a sailboat one more time.  He would have loved to take a cross-country train trip.  He would have loved to reach his 60th wedding anniversary with Mom.  He would have loved to live to see his sons accomplish all their goals in life. He would have loved to live to see his grandkids get married and have children of their own.

You’ve heard the phrase, “don’t miss the forest for the trees.”  But sometimes the opposite is also true.  When you’re looking at the whole forest of a man’s life, it’s also easy to forget some of the trees.  There are probably a few things you didn’t know about Robert Bird.  For instance, how in 1968, he was on duty at KRKD when his colleague, reporter Andrew West, captured the now-famous audio tape of the assasination of Robert F. Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel

Or how in the mid-1970s, he took a rag-tag group of boys, some of them troubled teens, and started an Explorer Scout troop to rehabilitate a 35-foot wooden sloop sailboat, and a delapidated 40-foot catamaran that were stored in a junkyard at the Alameda Naval Station.  He led the troop in a rehab project that got the boats ocean-worthy again and in the process taught them how to sail.

Or how in the early 1980s, he was one of the first Chaplains to minister directly to AIDS patients, and how he ended up baptizing one young AIDS sufferer in the pool at USC County Medical Center because no church the area would allow him to use their baptismal for fear of spreading the virus – a story captured in the Los Angeles Times and Christianity Today magazine.

Or how in 2000, as an expert in grief counseling, he was recruited to be part of the Red Cross emergency team that ministered to the families of the 83 people who died in the Alaska Airlines Flight 261 that crashed into the Pacific Ocean.

Or how exposure to his work in radio provided the inspiration and nurture for my career in journalism and then film and television writing and production.

Or how in the last year, as a patient himself at the St. Joseph’s Dialisys Center, he continued working his hospital chaplain’s muscles with the nurses and patients there, and reached out to one man in particular who had just lost his wife and was struggling with his will to go on living himself.

They tell us in mathematics, that two-plus-two always equals four.  But I believe when it comes to the math of human accomplishment, the total is always greater than the sum of its parts because the legacy of a life well-lived goes on forever.  Dad’s legacy will keep growing, spreading, mushrooming in a geometric pattern for generations to come because he leaves behind a wife of 54 years who (I’m biased) could still be president of the United States.  He leaves behind three sons who love their wives and are raising their children to love God and love others. He leaves behind 11 grandchildren who are not afraid to dream big dreams. And he leaves behind siblings, family members and friends who are better for having known him.  And he leaves behind thousands of people we may never know whose lives he intersected at a time when they needed the comfort of a savior and Dad did his best to be that comfort for them.

And I’m pretty sure, in the early morning hours of July 20, when he passed through that veil between here and eternity, he got the “attaboy” that we all hope to get one day. Well done, good and faithful servant. Well done.

Delivered at Robert Bird’s memorial service on August 14, 2010, at Florence Avenue Foursquare Church in Santa Fe Springs, CA

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2010
08/15
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Not Easily Broken… your backstage pass

I don’t know about any other working film or TV writers, but there have never been any writer groupies waiting outside the soundstage for me. Honestly, I’m okay with that, for three reasons. First, I look like Larry Bird’s ugly older brother, so I know it would never happen. Second, even if in some strange alternate universe, it ever did happen, I would have no idea where to go with the opportunity. And third, I’ve been happily wed to my wife for 29 years, and I totally married out of my league, so I’m not looking to mess that up.

But the one area of my life where I know some young aspiring writer thing might actually throw herself at me is the area of what’s stored on my hard drive. That is, those file folders full of documents related to the various film and television projects I’ve worked on. Treatments, outlines, drafts of scripts, notes from the studio. The good, bad and ugly. The juicy details of the development process.

So, here at Brianbird.net, I intend to open up the .pdf vault from time to time for the few of you desperate for inside knowledge. I do so for your reading and educational enlightenment, and I hope in some cases… your pleasure. (These resource posts will also end up in the READING ROOM section of the site).

Not Easily Broken

First up is an array of .pdfs from my film, Not Easily Broken, a relationship drama released in 2009 by Sony/TriStar.  The film was directed by Bill Duke and starred Morris Chestnut and Taraji P. Henson, fresh off her Academy Award-nominated role in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

I was approached in 2006 by Sony and Bishop TD Jakes who wrote the novel on which the script was to be to based. Below are some of the written stepping stones along the way, including additional documents so you can travel the development process with me.

After I turned in my first draft of the treatment, the studio felt we needed “more testosterone,” so that’s when I pitched a story element not in the novel that allowed us to get our main male characters, played by Chestnut, Eddie Cibrian, comedian Kevin Hart and Wood Harris, strutting around without their shirts on: street basketball. (You’re welcome, Ladies).

During a particularly enlightening notes session with Bishop Jakes and Director Bill Duke, we determined that we still needed more “man-stuff” in the script and it came to me that what they were really asking for was a male version of “Waiting to Exhale.”  When I pitched that archetype to them, the lights went on for all of us. The Bishop, who had written another book called He-Motions, said he believed that the stereotype of strong, silent males never telling each other their emotional business was completely inaccurate. So I went back to work and came up with a bunch of new material in the script where, in fact, our guys did confide their deepest fears, feelings and burdens with each other. And the scenes became some of my favorite, and funniest, in the film.

There were a few additional scenes I wrote on set during production. Here is one Bill Duke asked me to write because we needed some comic relief in what was clearly a relentlessly dramatic third act. I wrote this in about an hour and Kevin Hart, playing the character of “Tree,” used it as a jumping off point.

And finally, during the marketing wind-up to the release of the film, here is a post I was asked to write for the Bishop’s blog.

In conclusion, perhaps it goes without saying, but please don’t try to sell or stage your own version of Not Easily Broken. The powers-that-be might frown on that, and lawyers would send me and you annoying, nasty letters.

Happy reading… I hope.

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2010
07/11
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In remembrance of a young filmmaker

This is a post that I shared with the Facebook Universe back on July 15 of 2009, before I had this forum available to me.  I repurpose it here mostly as a reminder to myself of an important life lesson. I hope it hits the spot emotionally for you, as well.

When I received the email Sunday morning, July 12, 2009, I felt a little tear in the universe.  Just two weeks earlier, I had spent hours on the phone with my friend, Kerry Brown, going scene by scene through his director’s cut of his first independent film, “Leaders.”  We talked about pacing and how to cut around some not insignificant sound and continuity problems and moments where his actors felt they knew better than him how to play those moments — which clearly they didn’t.  But mostly I told him how proud of him for not giving up on his 9-year dream to direct a film he first conceived in Act One as a member of the Class of 2000.  It was a script I mentored him through way back then, and then again a year ago when he found an angel to put up enough money for him to make it more than a student film.

Kerry was a frail young man physically. He had suffered from a relentless pulmonary condition and congestive heart failure for a long time. But he was not frail of spirit or optimism. He was a spiritual lion. A devourer of scripture. Conan the Interceder. Because of his physical condition, he was not always able to work, so during his sick days and all those midnight oil hours, he wrote scripts. Several completed screenplays. Epics like his script about the rise and fall of Atlantis, and another battle royale between heaven and hell after the fall of Lucifer to earth. He learned the challenges of trying break through the iron gates of Hollywood from a Chicago vantage point. Sometimes his dream dimmed during his post-Act One years because nothing seemed to be working for him. He experienced what we all experience no matter what our level of achievement. That Hollywood is not called “Show Friendship,” it’s called “Show Business.” That it is junior high with money. That you have to start out with the understanding that getting a film made is nearly always impossible. And that the only way anybody ever gets one made is by chipping away little by little at the impossibility until one day they wake up and they are saying, “Action.”

“Leaders” is not a perfect film. Kerry was beset by all the problems any filmmaker is hit with, no matter what the budget. Production issues. Location issues. Weather issues. Actor issues. But there is a raw power to this little film because it bubbled up out of his heart as a young African-American man raised in marginal circumstances in a big American city. He had an unmistakably good eye for composing his shots and moving the camera. And there is an autobiographical thread here as his hero, “Hope,” tries to survive the tides of sex, drugs and violence of life in the projects while clinging precariously to his faith in God. He did not shy away from the profane, or the sacred, so this is not a vanilla film. It’s red. Red on white.

I told Kerry I wasn’t sure if there would be a buyer for his film because it’s a little too raw for a faith-based church marketing campaign. And it’s a little too faithful for the schizophrenic home video distributors who can’t decide whether they are in or out of the faith business. But I told him I would try to help him find somebody to take “Leaders” to market when it was ready for prime time. He didn’t flinch at my long list of notes or that there was still a lot of impossibility at which we would have to chip away.

However, he did tell me that he might have to work with his editor, Joel Kapity, from a hospital bed. He was never quite sure when the lungs would fill or the fluid would build up around his heart. He said it with such a gleam in his voice, I thought he was joking. And then I received the email from his mother, Jayne Johnson, on Sunday, with the very sad news that Kerry had passed away on Thursday. His heart had finally given out at just days after his 29th birthday.

I don’t know now how to compute why God takes some, and leaves others who don’t deserve to stick around. Or exactly how to resolve the idea of a young man who fought great odds in his life to reach a dream that at least by the world’s measure of success he didn’t live to see finished. Or what becomes of his very personal little film. Perhaps the digital age will preserve Kerry Brown’s eye in democratic cyberspace for a thousand years. But I do know this. He blessed my life more than I’m sure I blessed his. And I’ll always be thankful for the way he signed off all our calls or emails: “I love you, Mentor.”

Perhaps it is Show Friendship after all.

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2010
05/05
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How to cure ageism in Hollywood

There’s a disease racing through the Hollywood community, and for its victims, the side effects can be ugly.

  • Your hair color changes suddenly.
  • Your lips look like somebody took a bicycle pump to them.
  • The skin on your face gets tighter than a bongo drum.

You’re probably way ahead of me.  The disease is called Ageism — a syndrome that runs rampant in Showbiz and seems to attack people in their mid-forties.

It works this way. Television networks make their revenue by selling advertising. Advertisers want young eyeballs on their commercials because they believe younger viewers are more impressionable than older viewers whose buying habits they believe are set in stone.  So the networks want to make programming that appeals to young viewers. How do they do this?  They hire young buyers who they believe can relate to and understand youth culture.  Those buyers believe youngish writers and have a better feel for how to create culturally relevant shows populated by lots of good-looking 20-something actors. Same thing happens at the movie studios. Want theater seats filled with teenage boys?  Hire a writer who is still using Clearasil.

The result is that yesterday’s stars can turn in today’s underemployed — whether they’re in front of the camera as actors or behind the camera as writers, producers and directors. And the impact of that equation is that Beverly Hills plastic surgeons get rich, the Just For Men flies off the shelves and $70 million class-action lawsuits get filed against agencies, studios and craft guilds.

Now I would never deny the existence of Ageism or that it hurts thousands of working professionals in Hollywood. But if you’re a tastemaker or a culture-shaper in that over-45 age group, as I am — or if you’re a creative on the outside looking in and your biological clock is ticking — I want to share a cure I found with you.

It’s called Vitamin BE YOURSELF.  It means…

  1. Not trying to change your appearance. You don’t have to join the Lipo-Botox-Grecian Formula Club, which (let’s be honest) only makes you look desperate and you’re not really fooling anybody with that jet black hair anyway. Instead, if you feel you need to look younger, do it with fitness and healthy living. Face the aging process honestly and gracefully. Don’t waste precious time you could be using to be productive on trying to turn back the physical clock.
  2. Shining, not whining. I’ve encountered too many once-successful Hollywood talents who shrivel up into little husks of bitterness because they’re not working as much as they used to. They say it’s unfair they’ve been passed over in favor of younger talent. In my humble opinion, the answer is not to kvetch about it. The answer is to start shining again. Go back to what made you successful in the first place. And that was the work. I have purposed to never, ever blame ageism for any lack of opportunity. I don’t deny it exists. I’m just not going to give it any power over me by spending one quark of energy on it.
  3. Being young at heart. It’s time to inject your attitude and work with the creative hormones of your youth. Instead of railing against the odds you feel are stacked against you, blow past them with the kind of work surprises people. The kind of work that says you’re relevant, current, hip, with it. The kind of work that makes the buyers believe the next Diablo Cody is going to come walking in the door.

82-year-old Alvin Sargent wrote Spiderman 2 & 3

If you’re a writer, it means returning to what made your scripts competitive back in the day — RESEARCH.  How does a teenager talk nowadays?  Go the mall, use your powers of observation. Forget about the dusty references that made you cool back in the day.  They don’t work anymore. You want to compete with younger talent?  Get a better grasp of their culture than they have themselves, then add the depth of your life experience and the power of your pen which has been honed over time. The hot, young wunderkind doesn’t hold a prayer against you if you pull out those weapons.

Yeah, I realize you have to get in the door, and the studios and networks all have their little black books of who’s hot and who’s not. But the last time I checked Alvin Sargent was 82-years-old, and if writing the screenplays for Spiderman 2 & 3 isn’t hot, nothing is.

So what’s the cure for Ageism?

Forget about the class-action lawsuits. Have some class… take some action. Kick some young butt.

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2010
03/12
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Welcome to Fantasy Island, Part 3

In my last two posts, I told you the story of how my Hollywood career got started.

In Part 1, I discussed how in 1984 my wife’s great-uncle, Don Ingalls, a long-time Hollywood writer-producer, had opened the door for me to pitch and write an episode of Fantasy Island.  In Part 2, I described how the script, Final Adieu, I wrote for Fantasy Island was so well-received that it received an immediate production order and I received a commitment of a writing job the following year if the show got picked up for an eighth season.

My Ethiopian Fantasy Island adventure

Watching my episode air that April of 1984, I had a swagger in my literary step. I had my first credit on network TV and a 24-share in the ratings, which meant approximately 25 million people were watching my episode.  Today that would be American Idol territory, ratings-wise.  I took home a check for that script for $13,883, which was a fortune for us back then. I think it probably represented almost half of what I was making annually. And best of all, Don Ingalls had indicated there might be a story editor position in my future.

Well, as it turned out, Final Adieu was exactly that. My episode was one of the last three to air because Fantasy Island got cancelled about a month after my show was produced.

Don Ingalls had been so incredibly generous to me.  He went on to become a writer-producer on the series, T.J. Hooker for a few seasons before retiring from the business after a legendary career. He tried to open another door for me on his new show, but the circumstances had changed and it just never came to pass.

So I continued my day job as a journalist, had a few babies with my beautiful wife, Patty, and continued to dream about the possibility of another opportunity, but I soon began to realize that Fantasy Island might have been my one — and only — cup of coffee in the TV big leagues.

Four years later, in 1988, I was in Ethiopia working on a documentary for the relief organization World Vision, and I was staying at the Hilton Hotel in Addis Ababa. One night I was watching Ethiopian television in my room, and  I turned the channel and landed on something that made my jaw hit the floor. Not only was it an airing of Fantasy Island, but it was my episode, Final Adieu. The show had been subtitled in the Amharic language.

Now this might not seem all that earth-shaking to my young friends from the digital age, but in 1988, it was a stunner.  I had certainly gained a little perspective in four years. After all, one episode of a show does not a legend make, and I had come to realize that as fun a show as Fantasy Island might have been, it wasn’t exactly going to rock the world with existential meaning.

But then something else dawned on me: if a slice of Americana like “De Plane, De Plane” was  being exported all over the globe, then the converse had to be true, as well.  In other words, that meant there might also be a hunger out there for for life-and-faith-affirming stories.

It was a crystal moment for me.  I don’t mind saying I dropped to my knees and said a prayer:  ”God, if it’s your will for me, put me back in that game.”

A year later, I was working as a story editor on a CBS situation comedy called The Family Man.

And ten years later, I was a co-executive producer and writer on the show Touched By An Angel — a show which was being broadcast in more than 200 countries.

But those are storylines for another time.

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2010
02/25
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Welcome to Fantasy Island, Part 2

Sometimes I get asked by aspiring writers and producers how my career in film and TV got started. While there are undoubtedly as many paths to success as there are successful people, that old saying “it’s who you know that counts” is actually true in Hollywood. The word “nepotism” comes from the Greek word nepos, which means “nephew.” And in my case, that shoe fits… literally.

In Part 1, I discussed how in 1984 my wife’s great-uncle, Don Ingalls, a long-time Hollywood writer-producer, had opened the door for me to pitch and write an episode of Fantasy Island.

Here’s Part 2 of how it all started for me:

When I was ten, I remember watching an episode of a new science fiction series, The Invaders, with my father. After it was over, I have a vivid memory of sitting there, awestruck, and saying a simple little prayer:  “God, someday let me be able to tell a story like that.”  

And now years later, that prayer was being answered with the opportunity to write a story for a slice of Americana, a morality tale about a mysterious island resort where your deepest desires are granted, for better or worse. And for the guests, a visit to Fantasy Island did not come without a cost. A “be careful what you wish for” subtext right out of Proverbs was woven into every episode.

What Don Ingalls and the show’s other producers wanted from me was a story about a single woman who desires to break off an illicit affair. That was the hook I was given and here was my take on the story: Our heroine comes to the island looking for the courage to break off an affair with a married man after his many failed promises to divorce his wife.

But how would Mr. Roarke grant this fantasy?

I decided that he should bring both the man and his wife to Fantasy Island under false pretenses and that our heroine should decide to seek out the wife and confront her with the sordid truth. But before she can even do that, she is befriended by a lovely paraplegic woman injured years earlier in an auto accident who has also come to the island for her own fantasy.

The disabled woman encourages our heroine to do the right thing, but when she goes to blow the lid off the affair, she discovers (you probably guessed it by now) that the wheelchair-bound woman is actually her rival, unaware of her husband’s infidelity. Our heroine decides to take the high road and spare the woman’s feelings, but the experience has finally given her the courage to tell the man to hit the bricks and to stop being such a hound.

Two weeks later, when I turned in the script, I felt cautiously optimistic that I had nailed it. And when Ingalls’ next call came, the news was good. Not only had I delivered a very shootable draft which would immediately be going into production, but there was talk of bringing me on board the show’s writing staff the following year as a story editor. That is, if the show was picked up by ABC for an eighth season. That turned out to be a big “if.” Fantasy Island was cancelled just two months later. My episode was one of the show’s final three broadcasts.

But my first cup of coffee in the big leagues had taught me a few things.  First, Ingalls told me that the producers had a back-up plan in case I crashed and burned on that script — another script ready to go into production.  Had I known that ahead of time, I probably would have… crashed and burned.

Secondly, nepotism only opens the door.  You have to do the work and show yourself approved to keep it open, Nephew or not.

NEXT UP — Four years later, my Ethiopian Fantasy Island moment…

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2010
02/16
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Welcome to Fantasy Island, Part 1

Sometimes I get asked by aspiring writers and producers how my career in film and TV got started. While there are undoubtedly as many paths to success as there are successful people, that old saying “it’s who you know that counts” is actually true in Hollywood.

The word “nepotism” comes from the Greek word nepos, which means “nephew.” And in my case, that shoe fits… literally.

So here’s Part 1 of how it all started for me.

At 10 p.m., April 14, 1984, I had my first cup of coffee in the big leagues. That’s a metaphor used by minor-league baseball players for the first time they are called up to the Majors. Of course, in my case we weren’t talking about that national pastime. I was 26 years old, and that was the night I became a television writer. As my family and friends huddled around the TV screen, veteran actor Ricardo Montalban, dressed in his trademark white Panama suit, toasted a seaplane full of arriving visitors: “My dear guests… I am Mr. Roarke, your host.  Welcome to Fantasy Island.”

And there, for 13 million American viewers to see was my first network credit. I don’t mind saying, the experience of seeing “Written by Brian Bird” on national television was, as we might have said in the 1980s, “most excellent.”

I had graduated from journalism school four years earlier and had been working as a newspaper reporter for The San Gabriel Valley Daily Tribune, and then as a public relations officer for the Christian relief organization, World Vision, when I had a conversation with Don Ingalls, my wife Patty’s great-uncle. Ingalls had been a Hollywood producer for three decades and at the time was one of several writer-producers of Fantasy Island. He explained that he had read some of my newspaper and magazine pieces, fortuitously promoted by my lovely wife at a family Christmas gathering. He wondered if I had ever given any thought to trying to write for television.

I was stunned and intrigued. Although my career had been pointing toward news and non-fiction writing, as a son of the TV Age, I had to admit the prospect of developing my fictional muscles was tantalizing.

Like tens of millions of other American Baby Boom families, my family loved the tradition of gathering around the television set several nights a week. This was the era of TV Dinners and the innovation of the color television tube, and we spent many prime-time hours together around our Magnavox Magna-Color with its amazing 19-inch screen and pecan wood console.

There we sat, week after week, captivated by the rugged individualism of Ben Cartwright his three sons on Bonanza, and thrilled to the adventures of the Impossible Missions Force on, you guessed it, Mission Impossible. We laughed at the antics of a family of Munsters who felt sorry for their very plain niece Marilyn and couldn’t understand why people were constantly staring at them. And we found wish-fulfillment in the good fortunes of a poor mountain man named Jed who struck black gold and moved his clan to the hills of Beverly in, of course, The Beverly Hillbillies. And while the Vietnam conflict and the cares of the real world swirled around us, there was a sense of safety and comfort as our TV heroes took care of business and righted the wrongs of the world.

When I was ten, I remember watching an episode of a new science fiction series, The Invaders, with my father. After it was over, I have a vivid memory of sitting there, awestruck, and saying a simple little prayer: “God, someday let me be able to tell a story like that.”

(TO BE CONTINUED)

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2010
02/13
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The audience is listening… for their own heartbeat

After watching many good and bad inspirational Christian films I began pondering what story structure elements make for a successful inspirational film.  My observations are that the good ones use empathy, underdog status and flawed characters with ambitious personal and spiritual goals to hook the audience.

Inspirational films that aim at changing lives have life lessons in them. Definition of Inspire: “To affect, guide, or arouse by divine influence; to stimulate to action; motivate; to breathe life into.”

I’d really like to hear your views on this. Maybe this could help other filmmakers trying to make inspirational faith-based films, as this seems to be a surge of these films lately.

– Craig,                                                                                                                                                            Capetown, South Africa


It’s a good line of digging, Craig. But I think you could ask the same questions about all filmmaking — faith-based, secular, agnostic, red, blue, green or anything in between.  What makes for a good faith-based film are probably all the same story elements and techniques that make any film a good film.  And the opposite is also true.  Cheese is cheese — whether it’s a lo-fi apocalyptic, evangelistic thriller or M. Night’s The Happening.

In films of faith, I think it’s a good habit not to analyze the story on whether it hits a certain set of expected high notes. Yes, that underdog quotient and sympathetic plight are good ways to make the audience care about your protagonist’s quest, but I would argue that those are important story streams for any good film adventure. That’s because they are universal human themes that have been used in story-telling for thousands of years.  Check out the Epic of Gilgamesh, an ancient Sumerian poem written 2,500 years before Christ, for a reference point.

For me, the bottom line is we just need to learn how to be better story-tellers, and one of the best example we have to draw on are the parables of Jesus. He captivated crowds by using real-life, human situations, emotions and dilemmas his audience could all relate to in order to communicate eternal truths. He plucked strings in his followers’ souls, and they reverberated with themes of rescue, sacrifice, courage, nobility, grace, redemption and resurrection.

I believe people’s emotional strings reverberate in the same way even today.

So pluck away.  Help the audience care about your characters’ quest by making it their quest.

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2010
01/26
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What the heck is BRIANBIRD.NET?

My name is Brian Bird, hence the eponymous name of my blog and website. And for the last 25 years, I have been a film and television writer and producer in Hollywood.  I have written and/or produced a dozen films and nearly 250 episodes of network television. You can see my credits here.

I am also the husband of one wife (29 years) and the father of five children, which makes me sort of an oddball in Hollywood — a business which can be particularly harsh on marriage and family. I believe in God and I believe in the power of Story to affirm life, faith and the dignity of all people.

I offer all these professional and personal credentials not out of hubris, but to show you that even an average schmuck like me can rise out of obscurity and actually find success in one of the most competitive businesses in the world.  And live to talk about it.

When I began contemplating joining the online revolution, I asked myself two hard questions:

  1. Am I really committed enough to keep this website fresh and meaningful?
  2. Will there be anybody out there listening?

Well, to the first, I guess you’ll ultimately have to be the judge of that.  I will absolutely do my best to make this site the most helpful, hopeful journey through the screenwriting and filmmaking trade as I can.  I pledge to bring you tools, tips, training, resources, shortcuts, insider knowledge, battlefield strategies and answers to your questions. I will blog about my own creative and not-so-creative experiences, and offer my opinions about life, art, religion, politics and culture.  I will speak out of school if I have to and tweak noses when they are out of joint. And I will be generous with my praise because God loves a cheerful giver.  And I hope that all of this will encourage you if you’re floundering in the middle of this very capricious business, or open some doors for you if you’re standing on the outside with your heart on fire.

To my second question, I can only point to a recent experience that was very humbling for me.  A young writer I’ll simply call “Pete” found my number somewhere and called to ask if he could have 30 minutes of time.  It’s not something I do very often because frankly I could spend 40 hours a week meeting with new writers hungry for advice.  However, in this case I said yes.  So we met and had coffee and some nice meaningful conversation, and I could tell that this young man was going places with his talents.  I later found out that he drove all the way from Northern California for 30 minutes of my time.

So, it is for the Petes of this world that I offer this website.  I hope somehow it enlightens you, helps you hone your skills, makes you laugh once in awhile…  and blesses your socks off.

And I look forward to hearing from you often in the comment box, or at info@brianbird.net.

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2010
01/22
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