Hooray for Godlywood

Hooray for Godlywood
By Christopher W. Davis 4/22/2009 11:57:37 AM

Not much happens in Albany, Georgia. Or so it seems. Yes, the town is the commercial center of southwestern Georgia, the birthplace of Ray Charles, the site of Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1961 “America’s shame” speech that led to his arrest, the pecan and quail-hunting capital of the world. But for the most part Albany has escaped the glare of national attention. So it was something of a surprise last fall when the associate pastor of one of the town’s 106 Baptist churches found himself on the phone with a newsman from The Hollywood Reporter.

The journalist was looking at the latest list of new movies, and here was this mini-budget, Christian film, Fireproof, coming out of nowhere—from the Sherwood Baptist Church in Albany, Georgia, of all places—blowing everyone out of the water by opening at No. 4, beating out even Spike Lee’s hyper-hyped $45 million World War II epic, Miracle at St. Anna.

“Who in the world are you guys?” he asked, bewildered.

The associate pastor, Alex Kendrick, smiled. He loves it when the power of prayer stuns people.

In the past six years, Alex, 38, and his brother and fellow minister, Stephen, 35, have made three micro-budget movies that are redefining faith-based films—Flywheel (2003), a morality tale about a used-car salesman who saves his business by turning it over to God, Facing the Giants (2006), in which an underdog high school football team wins the big one with coaching tips from Scripture, and Fireproof (2008), in which a troubled fire chief rekindles his fractured marriage through faith. Together the three have grossed more than $55 million at the box office, and DVD sales have broken records at Christian bookstores. Plus, a book on marriage, spun from Fireproof, has been on The New York Times best-seller list for months.

Total costs for all three films? A mere $620,000, a figure well below what most big-time Hollywood producers spend on catering costs for just one movie, let alone three. That’s because most producers don’t have a 3,000-member congregation volunteering to work in front of or behind the camera. Sherwood members learned lighting, sound, makeup, costumes, sets on the job. They made up the cast. And the Kendrick brothers handled the writing, directing, producing, and editing. Alex even starred in the first two films.

While production values were admittedly rough in the first film, they grew solidly by the third without losing the homespun quality audiences seem to like. “People connect to these stories,” says Kris Fuhr, a marketing executive at Sony’s Provident Films, Fireproof’s distributor. “People look up on the screen and not only see themselves, they see their neighbors, friends, and coworkers.”

The films get high ratings on movie Websites. They have been credited with saving marriages, inspiring upset football victories, and reforming sleazy businessmen. They helped refine a grassroots marketing method for Christian films with hundreds of sneak previews at churches around the country—an effort that created a sense of “cause” around the film. And, happily for Sherwood, they have Hollywood clamoring for more. “I would love to have them deliver a picture or two every year,” says Meyer Gottlieb, president of Samuel Goldwyn Films. “That would be terrific.”


So, as the reporter from Hollywood asked, who are these guys—these Christian Coen brothers—and how did they do it? Their tale is one of perseverance, luck, an uncanny knack for storytelling, and faith. Mostly faith. “I think it’s because God helped us because we prayed,” says Alex. “We’re just hometown boys with a video camera. Logically it doesn’t make sense that the movies are working the way they are working.”

Their story opens in Smyrna, a suburb of Atlanta. In 1977, the Kendricks—Larry and Rhonwyn and their three sons, Shannon, 11, Alex, 8, and Stephen, 5—moved next to a family with children the same age and a father with a camcorder. The gang started filming skits, and commercials for made-up products—Stephen, for example, sweltering with rake and hoe in the hot sun to promote “Okra Cola.”

When video cameras became popular in the 1980s, the three Kendrick brothers advanced to secret agent movies that involved more kids from the neighborhood. They created numerous chase-’em-down-and-beat-’em-ups, plus an imaginative thriller called Mr. Tapeball, about an enormous ball of tape that takes over a church, devouring the ministers one by one. In lieu of book reports or science projects, they made movies and more movies.

But when it came to college, none of the boys chose film school. Shannon got an engineering degree from Georgia Tech and Alex and Stephen decided to join the ministry. They both went to Kennesaw State University, and they both landed jobs at the 5,000-member Roswell Street Baptist Church in Marietta. Alex worked with college students, Stephen oversaw the middle school kids. Both used filmmaking as a teaching tool.

Photos: Quantrell Colbert
Michael Catt, Alex Kendrick, and Jim McBride stand in front of the fire station where they filmed much of Fireproof.
In 1998, a friend from Sherwood Baptist Church in Albany, Georgia, invited Alex to share his video skills at a Christian summer camp. Alex’s creative energy caught the attention of Sherwood’s senior pastor, Michael Catt, who was reshaping Sherwood using Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Church as a guide.

Pastor Catt wanted to find a balance of worship, discipleship, fellowship, ministry, and evangelism—and hoped one day he could take the gospel to the world.

During their first interview, Alex told Catt that his dream was to make full-length movies, to minister through film. From the dawn of time to today, Alex said, everybody liked hearing a good story. Nothing had changed except the avenue for telling them. Movies could be the ideal tool for Sherwood’s mission to reach the world.

Catt agreed, but for the moment he wanted Alex to run the church’s 24-hour cable TV station. That sounded impressive, but the “channel” was little more than a PowerPoint scroll of community announcements. Alex started producing inspirational programs as well as Christian versions of funniest home videos.
Then in 2002, a year after Stephen Kendrick joined his brother at Sherwood, Alex convinced Catt to make a movie. The audience would be the congregation, viewers of the TV station, and maybe people at a local theater. All he would need was a camera, some lenses, a new computer to edit on, and a few lights from Home Depot. He could pull it off, he said, for under $20,000.

Catt agreed, on two conditions. “First, you can take no money out of the church budget,” he told Alex. “So if this is of God, then you will have to pray the money in. Secondly, it cannot interfere with your ongoing job.”

Alex conceived a screenplay about a crooked used-car salesman who is having trouble in his business—and at home—because he is a cheat. His heart is not working properly; he’s like a car with no flywheel, the weighted disc that keeps engines running steady and even.

Catt loved the idea. But he allowed no soliciting for funds or announcements at services. The Kendricks could only post a notice in the prayer tower, a room where church members can visit to pray at any time. Amazingly, the $20,000 goal was soon reached, Alex got the green light and Flywheel started rolling.
Alex held no auditions. He simply invited church members with a taste for drama to help out. Shooting on Saturdays and lunch breaks, Alex cast himself in the lead role by default: He was the only person who could make himself available whenever the director wanted—because he was the director. The shooting schedule was haphazard. Alex would call around in the morning: “What are you doing from 11 to 1? Can we finish that scene we started three weeks ago? What were you wearing again?”

Once filming ended, Alex started stitching scenes together on his new computer. But he didn’t like what he saw. Stephen, who had been too busy to help much beyond offering plot ideas, saw that his brother was discouraged and stepped in. He quoted Psalm 127:1: “Unless the Lord builds the house, its builders labor in vain.”

In other words, he told his brother, nothing can be successfully completed without the help of God. Pray and then finish the movie.

While Alex continued to edit, Stephen got a local theater to agree to give Flywheel a five-day run on one of its 16 screens, as “a good investment in the community.” The date was set for April 9, 2003. Stephen started putting up billboards announcing the movie all over town.

Then, with just three weeks to go, the storage disc, with 30 minutes of edited film, was knocked off a table and broken. They had no backup. At least 60 hours of work were lost. The brothers prayed, as did members of the congregation. Then Alex went back to editing, getting little sleep for the next 21 days.
He finished at 6:30 a.m., April 9. He burned a DVD and rushed it to the movie house, never watching it from beginning to end. At 1:00 p.m., cast and crew showed up for the first screening. As Alex prayed that the movie would make it to the end without messing up, he saw people all around him crying and laughing in all the right places. They rose and cheered at the end. Is this really working? he wondered.

It was. Flywheel ran for six weeks in Albany, outlasting 12 Hollywood feature films, and going neck and neck for the highest ticket sales with Jack Nicholson’s Anger Management, which was on three screens. Most encouraging were the phone calls and e-mails; a used-car salesman making a stand for what’s right, come what may, struck a chord. People admitted they had gone to the movie to see how embarrassing it would be but were transformed. Flywheel made them think, made them want to change their ways, made them want to start running their businesses honestly and get right with their families and with God.

But when the brothers tried to get wider distribution, they were told that Flywheel didn’t have a Hollywood “look.” Eventually they found a fan in David Nixon, who owned a studio in Orlando that made commercials for DisneyWorld. Nixon thought Flywheel’s production quality, lighting, and sound were all terrible, but the storytelling moved him. “Guys, I’m sitting here crying like a baby,” he told the Kendricks. “I want to help you make your next movie.”
Six months later, they sent him a script for a football film called Facing the Giants. He read it, Nixon recalls, jumping up and down, cheering, laughing, crying. Afterward he called Alex and Stephen, and offered to find them experts in photography, sound and lighting. Those experts would cost $80,000 to $100,000.

Sherwood’s earnings from Flywheel had gone into the church’s general fund, so the filmmakers were financially back to square one. But word got out and checks soon started to arrive, including an anonymous one for $20,000.

The idea for Facing the Giants was based on the story of a man in a wheelchair trying to figure out how to help his son kick an impossibly long field goal—a thinly veiled invocation of their father, Larry, who suffered from multiple sclerosis for more than 20 years. Even though he was disabled, he had managed to found a successful Christian school and, in the process, inspire his sons. Where Flywheel dealt with honesty, Giants would be about facing the twin fears of failure and disgrace.

Again, by default, Alex played the lead role, this time of a despondent, losing high school football coach who turns around a miserable season and wins the state championship against a big, bad juggernaut of a team with a take-no-prisoners coach (played by executive minister Jim McBride, a burly former Marine and pro wrestler).


David Nixon’s professionals came to Albany and slept on the floor at a small missionary house. On their first day they ran a boot camp, breaking volunteers into groups: If you want to learn lighting, go over there, for make-up, that room, for sound, back there.

These seasoned pros had never been on a movie set like this. Each day began with prayer. Church members brought picnic baskets of fried chicken and sweet tea. There were no prima donnas, no hissy fits, no storming off the set. Every obstacle was met with a pause and huddle for prayer, and more often than not, it seemed, a solution would appear. At the end of six weeks it was like the end of summer camp, everyone crying, no one wanting to say goodbye.

Alex Kendrick and Michael Catt took Facing the Giants to some distributors in Hollywood. Their best offer was a deal to go directly to DVD, with no theatrical run. They went home discouraged, feeling a door had been shut.

A few days later Stephen called Provident Music Group in Franklin, Tennessee, to get formal permission to use a popular Christian rock song that was in one of the scenes. The money Provident wanted—“tens of thousands,” Stephen said—took his breath away. “We’re a church,” he pleaded. “The movie’s a ministry! Can’t you give us a break?”

They would have to see the movie first. When the DVD arrived, Terry Hemmings, president and chief executive of Provident, said he would give it a few minutes while he ate lunch, but that he had a one o’clock meeting. After 15 minutes, he canceled his one o’clock and called his staff in to watch with him. After 30 minutes, he told his assistant to book him a flight to Albany. By the time the movie was over, he called Stephen Kendrick, who was fishing with his son.

“We’re in,” Hemmings said simply.

“In?” Stephen asked. “What does that mean?”

“Not only can you use our song but we will help you get distribution.” Could Stephen please send a DVD to Provident’s parent company, Sony? He didn’t mention the company is one of the largest moviemakers in the world.

The Kendricks were hoping to get the movie released in as many as 15 theaters around Atlanta; Sony executives thought 441 theaters nationwide was more like it. As for publicity, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) handed them a miracle. It gave Facing the Giants a PG rating. Dumbfounded, Provident asked why. Too much proselytizing, they were told. Parents might get upset.

A firestorm erupted in the media, especially on talk shows like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Michael Reagan. Were we now adding Jesus to profanity, violence, witchcraft, drug use, nudity? Was being Christian now the new sin? The Los Angeles Times asked: What does PG stand for? Pro-God? Too much God in a movie?

The MPAA tried to backpedal, claiming the PG rating was for the football violence and the adult theme of infertility (one of the coach’s fears is possible sterility). But that didn’t quell the protests. The controversy stirred up so much publicity that some accused the church of fomenting it. But Stephen Kendrick insists, “We never complained. We were just watching it happen. We weren’t manipulating, we were praying.” In fact, the whole congregation had been praying. One day Provident’s overwhelmed publicist was on the phone joking with Stephen, “Tell your church to stop praying!”

On September 29, 2006, Facing the Giants opened nationwide, and before its 17-week theatrical run ended, it was on 1,010 screens, earned $10 million in theaters, sold over 2 million DVDs, and became the No. 1-selling product in Christian bookstores. It touched the lives of three million people in 56 countries, in 13 languages. Coaches of Arkansas and Mississippi State credit it with inspiring their upset victories over Auburn and Alabama respectively in the 2008 college football season. And its most celebrated scene—“The Death Crawl”—is a hit on YouTube and has become a staple in motivational seminars across corporate America, including those of Wal-Mart, Mary Kay, and Beth Moore. The scene depicts Kendrick as the coach pursuading one of his more dispirited players to crawl the entire 100-yard length of the field with another player on his back—blindfolded. The boy perseveres, learning the spiritual lesson of endurance and trust.

One day before Giants was released, Alex got the idea for their next movie while jogging. He wanted a film that didn’t just make the audience feel good, but also had an impact on culture. It would be about divorce, a tool for marriages in distress. A man would try to win back his estranged wife’s love by following a 40-day program in a book called The Love Dare. The plan would take the couple small step by small step (spend the day saying nothing negative, today do one nice thing) to a mastery of unconditional love.


Stephen loved the idea. He had been ministering to people with troubled marriages for years. But, he said, this couldn’t be a “chick flick.” They needed to connect with men, as they had with the first two films. They would make the main character a man’s man—a fire chief. They went to the local firehouse and began learning about the lives of firefighters, who have one of the highest divorce rates in the country.

The brothers decided to call the movie Fireproof, and to link marriages to the buddy code in firefighting—never leave your partner behind, especially in a perilous situation.

No fund-raising this time. Provident Films fronted the movie $500,000. Production quality improved immensely. They were also able to add star power: Kirk Cameron, from ABC’s 1980s hit sitcom, Growing Pains. Cameron, who was now focusing his career on independent films with religious themes, took no salary. But the church agreed to make a sizable contribution to Camp Firefly, a camp for kids with terminal illnesses and their families that Cameron and his wife, Chelsea Noble, founded and have run for 20 years.

The film company still prayed on the set and still maintained the volunteer feel of a community project. But to market this movie, Michael Catt decided to host two screenings of Fireproof, each with a total of 4,000 pastors and their wives, at the annual Southern Baptist Convention in Indianapolis. “Those are 4,000 megaphones that go out and say, ‘I just saw this movie,’ ” he says. Provident’s PR machine then kicked in, and more than 250 similar screenings followed, with an average audience of 500. “It feels like there were a million people,” Catt says. And it paid off big-time.

From all over the country, requests for advance copies of the movie came cascading into the little church in Albany, Georgia. Everyone wanted to show the movie to their groups. Catt told them they had to wait until September.

And so it was that Fireproof came roaring into 839 theaters on September 26, 2008, ranking No. 4 in box-office sales nationwide, blowing past such multimillion-dollar releases as Miracle at St. Anna and Choke, holding on to earn $33 million at the box office, and finishing as the No. 1 indie feature of 2008.

Booksellers, meanwhile, started being flooded with requests for copies of The Love Dare, which was little more than a blank-paged prop in the movie. Demand was so strong that the Kendrick brothers had to sit down and write it in a hurry. Published by B&H Group of Nashville, the book came out October 12 and spent the next three months jumping back and forth between No. 1 and No. 2 on The New York Times best-seller paperback advice list.

Sherwood does not discuss its share of movie income. But executive pastor Jim McBride does point out that after theater owners, distributors, advertisers, promoters, and others take their cut, there is a lot less left for the church than one might expect. Even so, he says, there has been enough to help pay down debt for Sherwood’s Generations campaign, an outreach program aimed at youth. Included is a new $5 million sanctuary and a $4 million sports park open to the public. It features tennis courts, jogging trails, fishing ponds, horse stables, baseball diamonds, and a bright white 10-story-high cross.

The moviemaking ministers of Sherwood won’t say what their next film will be about or when it will come out. But they will continue creating films with volunteers—people of faith—and the Kendrick brothers are not giving up their day jobs at the church.

“Our goal is to touch people’s lives with a message of faith, hope, and love,” says Stephen Kendrick. “Christians are almost never portrayed accurately in movies. They are always these backwoods, narrow-minded, judgmental, hateful, weird people. And we’re thinking, Here we live with awesome, wonderful, loving, patriotic people.”

His movies say, “Here’s who we really are,” he says. “Here’s what we believe, here’s what happens in our lives. God works. He answers prayers.”

~Adapted from: http://www.purposedriven.com/article.html?c=132174&l=1~