Filmmakers seek out Christian critics

HOLLYWOOD -- A blurb in the print ad for the 20th Century Fox movie "Everyone's Hero," which opened last week, gave the animated feature five stars, declaring it, "A triumphant home run for families!" It's from a critic you've probably never heard of. In fact it's a critic who is not, technically speaking, a person: the Dove Foundation. And no, it's not related to the soap company, though it is squeaky clean.

The Dove Foundation is a Grand Rapids, Mich., nonprofit with Christian roots, and its ties to Hollywood are growing so deep these days that its opinion can send a movie back to the editing room before its release.

Weeks before "Everyone's Hero" was released, the film's production company, IDT Entertainment, hand-delivered a copy to the Dove Foundation. When the Dove staff told IDT that the "Oh, my gods!" in the film might offend the 1.9 million people who consult the foundation's reviews, IDT changed each "Oh, my god!" to "Oh, my gosh!"

"That's an example of how seriously we took the opportunity with that market," said Amorette Jones, head of marketing for Starz Media, the new name of IDT. "We didn't want anything in the film that would be offensive in any way."

While mainstream movie critics are widely believed to have dwindling sway over audiences, Hollywood is courting a new group of reviewers who live in Michigan and Indiana and Colorado. These reviewers count the "F-bombs" in a picture and alert their constituencies to genitalia jokes and gay characters. With the phenomenal success of "The Passion of the Christ" and "The Chronicles of Narnia," Hollywood is targeting this crowd, who, they have learned, can deliver a box-office bump.

Studio executives say their outreach to these groups should be seen as smart marketing rather than bowing to a conservative Christian agenda.

"People have recognized in Hollywood that it's good business to be in the family entertainment business," said one studio executive who did not want to be identified for fear of alienating critics.

"Whether it's Focus on the Family or Rick Warren, the author of 'The Purpose Driven Life,' there are gigantic religious groups that follow people that have a voice. It's a group that understands who their constituency is better than film critics at large ... They are very, very driven and very focused. They are not a silent majority. They're very active."

For these reasons, the nonprofits are being invited to far more screenings than their small staffs have time to attend, a predicament that five years ago would have been unthinkable.

"They'll send us to a movie, and we say no a little bit more than we say yes," said Jeffrey L. Sparks, president and chief executive of the family-oriented Heartland Film Festival in Indianapolis. "We're getting early versions of the scripts because they want to see if we're interested."

Traditional critics restricted

Traditional movie critics have been restricted from a record number of advance screenings this year, among them Columbia Pictures' "The Da Vinci Code" and New Line Cinema's "Snakes on a Plane." And as the films that critics have panned, such as "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest," break box-office records, studio executives and filmmakers can't resist lambasting critics as out of touch with the mainstream. A good review from the faith and family community, on the other hand, can save an otherwise forgettable film and even rally large enough crowds to make a hit. The Sony film "RV," with Robin Williams, might have bombed if it had been up to critics. Instead, after a targeted campaign by faith-based marketing firm Grace Hill Media, the picture has earned a respectable $71 million since its April release.