Day 11 – A League of Your Own

Day 11.  Somebody out there on the interwebs needs this one today.

And even though I don’t need it today, as in right this second, I’m bookmarking this link because every one of us comes to this crossroad. You know the one — where we have to decide if we’re continuing on with the dream or if we’re just going to lay it down cause stuff got too hard. Too overwhelming.

To start, here’s a clip from “League of Their Own” where Jimmy Dugan (Tom Hanks) is about to lose his star player, Dotty (Geena Davis):

“If it was easy, everyone would do it.  It’s the hard that makes it great!”

That’s the Word of God for someone here today.

There’s a scene in “The African Queen” after their long, long journey down the river where they’ve had to resort to pulling the boat through the tall reeds to reach the mouth of the river. They’re battling leeches, they’re battling enemy soldiers, they’re battling the heat and exhaustion and with no end in sight to their circumstance, they can’t go an inch further and pass out on the boat’s deck. At that point the camera cranes up and we discover how close they were to their goal. Literally a few more feet of tall grass and they would have made it.

I think of that a lot. How many times do we give up because we lack the vision, we have no clue where the end is and sadly, we’re right upon on it.  Right there!  In the film, the rain begins to pour down which not only revives our two heroes, but lifts their boat in the swelling river and carries it the last few feet to their destination…Lake Victoria.  If you haven’t seen the film, watch it, it’s a classic, or wait a couple years, I’m sure it’ll be remade with Ashton Kutcher and Anne Hathaway.

You’ve probably also seen this powerful scene from “Facing the Giants” because it’s been played in every church in North America so often, it’s almost earned canonization in the New Testament. But it still gets me because we all need a coach that is driving us harder, pushing us farther than we think is possible.  Hopefully, you have that person in your life.

If we’re going to attain impossible things, we’ve got to develop a certain set of emotional musculature that simply will not allow us to quit. Have you got what it takes to be a scriptwriter? A filmmaker? A producer? It requires a certain amount of bravado. I’m talking Marines type of bravado. What’s that t-shirt they wear?

“Pain is just weakness leaving the body.”

It’s time for someone to get up and get moving again today! I’m serious…don’t make me cross the interwebs and kick your heiney. Just take a step. Then another step. And another.

How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.  With duck sauce.

Let’s write a movie!

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StuffChristiansLike on Movies: Facing the Giants

by Jon Acuff

I haven’t seen the new Batman movie yet, but unless I weep during the entire time at its brilliance, am served a bottomless bag of cotton candy and get to take home my own live bat, I am not sure it can live up to my expectations. I know I will like it, there’s just been so much hype that I think it will be difficult for it to be as good as I think it should. The same thing happened to the movie “Facing the Giants.”

I was late on that movie. I waited a long time to watch it. And inevitably, whenever the words “movie” “face” or “giants” came up in conversation, one of my friends would say, “Have you seen ‘Facing the Giants’ yet? That movie will change your life.”   

That’s a tough expectation to live up to. Unless the movie is called “A preview of how Jon Acuff will die in a bear accident” and then I watch it and learn some moves against that exact bear that was going to kill me, I’m not sure most movies will radically change my life.

Don’t get me wrong, I think movies can change our lives or at least impact us in powerful ways. I wrote a piece about how I felt like I saw more of Jesus in the movie “Man on Fire” than I did “the Passion of the Christ” and that meant a lot to me. But when it came to Facing the Giants and the faith sculpting exuberance people had described it with, I felt like there was no way it could deliver.

And then people started disclaiming it. Any time I asked about the movie someone would say, “It was just a youth group movie. They made it for a nickel and shot, edited and packaged the whole thing in 17 minutes.” That made me feel like when I watched Facing the Giants there would be people playing multiple characters by wearing mustache disguises and that microphones would be hitting people in the head and that the soundtrack would just be a hobo mournfully humming.

But there wasn’t. I thought they did a great job with what they had. I thought it was a great example of Christians trying to do a lot with a little. I thought lots of people were touched and challenged by that film and that’s a really cool thing despite my desire to be a Christian culture snob. Was it the best story I ever saw or the best acting? No. There were a few scenes where they didn’t take the time to let the rhythm of life develop and instead would say things like “the roof is leaking, the car is broken, I’m infertile, you’re losing your job, the football team keeps losing and the mongoose is back.” I added that last one but you get the point. I spoke with my friend Daniel Millican, who directed “The Imposter,” about this and I don’t think I’m crazy for thinking the story needed more time to unfold.

But writing a movie is difficult. I’m working on a script right now and it’s challenging. So I thought it might be good to suggest a few Christian movies we could make that would have more serious scripts. Movies that are deep and interesting, heart wrenching yet ha ha funny too. So I took some popular movies and tried to “God them up.” Here is what I came up with:

 

1. Samson vs. Goliath vs. Predator

The “Alien vs. Predator” movies seemed to do pretty well so why not make a movie where the strongest people in the Bible fight to the death. What’s that you say, “The Predator wasn’t in the Bible and didn’t live in ancient times?” That we know of friend, that we know of. (In case you are wondering who will win, it will be the Predator. He has a rock shooting device on his arm and then shaves Samson bald with a laser beam. Whole thing takes like 30 seconds. It’s a short movie.)

 

2. Red Gideon

“Red Dawn,” a tale of the high school students fighting Russian soldiers that invade America, was probably the greatest movie ever. I watched it approximately 900 times growing up and even writing these sentences makes me want to yell, “Wolverines!” So what if we combined the story of Gideon with the movie Red Dawn? That would be beautiful. During the scene where Gideon has to eliminate his men, God would say, “Take half the men and only one member from the brat pack. You can’t have Charlie Sheen or Thomas C. Howell but I will give you Patrick Swayze.” Goosebumps, gang. Goosebumps.

 

3. Jonah & Jaime

What if instead of the remake they did of Starsky & Hutch we made a movie starring Jonah and the whale that swallowed him? By the way, that whale is named “Jaime.” They would have to be fighting crime in San Francisco because the whale needs water every now and then. It would be awesome. When they’re fighting bad guys Jaime would open his mouth and Jonah would send a roundhouse kick out from his belly. And can you imagine how majestic it would look to have that whale doing those big jumps that they do in car chase scenes through the streets of San Francisco? Wow.

 

4. The Disciplinators

In this movie, there’s been a translation problem in the Bible. Someone wrote down “Glove your enemy” instead of “Love your enemy.” So a gang of disciples, calling themselves “the Disciplinators” goes around slapping everyone they don’t like in the face with gloves. It sounds slow, but I think that a glove slap is kind of the polite equivalent of seeing someone get hit in the groin with a wiffle ball. I promise, it would not get old. We would slow the slaps down, like the Matrix, and you’d be able to buy an official glove on our website.

If you are wealthy and would like to produce any of these movies, please let me know. I’m not going to lie to you, we might lose a few whales during production but there won’t be a dry eye in the house when in the final scene of Jonah & Jaime we watch Jaime do battle to the death with the whale from that movie, “Free Willy.” As the credits roll, we’ll play “Friends are Friends Forever” by Michael W. Smith as Jonah sells Jaime’s heroic corpse to a seafood restaurant. I mean, he was a whale after all. 

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(reprinted with permission)

Interview: Ken Carpenter

 

(NOV 27, 2007) An article by Sarah Greek writing for Regenerated Magazine and RegenerateOurCulture.com.  As their site is down until Spring 2009, I will post this entire article during their online absence.  Hopefully they will be back up and running soon to continue their contribution to the great cultural debate at large.

Interview: Ken Carpenter
by Sarah Greek

Ken Carpenter is making waves in the Christian filmmaking industry. He shares his story in this fascinating interview.

Ken Carpenter, the founder of Franklin Springs Family Media is an award-winning Christian filmmaker based in the Nashville area. He’s done production work for such leading names as Michael W. Smith, Max Lucado, Jeremy Camp, and Casting Crowns.  Mr. Carpenter is quickly building a name for himself in the Christian media, but he’s most proud of the family he’s building. He and his wife Devon are the parents of eight blessings, whom they homeschool. Mr. Carpenter agreed to share some of his thoughts with ROC, and we were able to catch up with him on his way out of town for some production work. Here’s what he had to share:

Sarah: Thank you for taking the time to share your wisdom with the ROC readership. How and why did you first get started in media and filmmaking?

Ken Carpenter: Truthfully, I basically bounced around between several very unfulfilling runs at jobs in the real world before God miraculously swung open a door for an entry- level position at a Christian film company in Pasadena, California. I had attended a rather strict evangelical college in the Midwest, where we not only did not have a film studies program, but we were prohibited from attending the motion picture theater. 

While I was there, though, I did begin to become captivated with the notion that somebody somewhere made a living telling stories with moving pictures. From where I was at the time, though, that might as well have been on another planet (this was before the digital revolution that made filmmaking so accessible to everyone).

While I was at college in Illinois, my parents moved to Los Angeles, and I followed them out there after school, which moved me in closer proximity to the film industry. The Lord knew the desires of my heart, and He orchestrated my arrival in the film business in His sovereign timing. I worked for two companies for a total of a year, and Ive been on my own ever since then. Ive been at this for almost 20 years now.

Sarah: Your documentary A Journey Home  won Best Documentary at the 2005 San Antonio Independent Christian Film FestivalCould you tell us about this film?

Ken Carpenter: I am so grateful that God allowed me to be a part of this project. I learned so much from Tommy Waller and his wonderful family (the subjects of the film) during the process of making this film. The story is about Tommy Wallers incredible transition from working 80 hours a week at Fed Ex to totally re-ordering their family life so that he could be home with his wife and children.

They moved from a typical suburban lifestyle to adopt a plain lifestyle (i.e. no electricity), living among the Amish and Mennonite. In a world where a lot of us take small steps to be better parents, Tommy Waller took a giant step. The fruit of that step was tremendous growth in their family. They became so unified, to the glory of God.

What was really exciting, though, was to see how the Wallers began to affect the lives of people in a local community when they began to sell their organic vegetables in that village. And then, as the story unfolds, we see that their influence ultimately reaches across the globe in a pretty dramatic turn of events in their lives. I had known the Wallers for a year before we began filming, and then we spent about a year and a half on the film. The time I spent with them had a profound impact on me personally, one that has borne good fruit in my family life.

Sarah: At the beginning of this year, your family was featured on ABC Nightlinein a special about what ABC referred to as “The Quiverfull Movement” – trusting God for the number of children you have. Could you tell us about this appearance and the impact it had?

Ken Carpenter: The Nightline experience was one that I look back at with much gratitude to the Lord for His hand on the process. It’s a little unnerving to have a New York news crew come to one’s farm in Tennessee. Talk about feeling vulnerable…. But the whole process turned out to be a very positive experience.

They were very kind and gracious, and while they did ask some tough and very pointed questions, I thought they were very evenhanded in their editing of the piece. Our family was just in New York City a few weeks ago, and the Nightline people treated us to a very special day of behind-the-scenes touring at the network. While our political and religious sensibilities are pretty disparate, they were very kind and very professional.

The response to the story has been very positive. Basically, I think many of us are just starved to see honest portrayals of Christian families in the media. I’m humbled and grateful that God used our family in this small way to hopefully encourage other families.

Sarah: You are currently working on a documentary about the life of Stonewall Jackson. What do you want this film to accomplish?

Ken Carpenter: Were very excited about the Jackson project. Our primary objective is to shine a light on a man that I’ve come to believe was a great American hero. I grew up in the North (and now reside in the South). I was a product of a government school education that essentially taught that the North was all right and that the South (and anyone associated with it) was all wrong.

What I’m coming to learn, however, is that the circumstances surrounding the war (in the context of the mid-1800s) were very, very complicated. I’ve definitely come to see that not all who fought for the South were taking up arms for the purpose of preserving slavery.  While slavery was perhaps the darkest chapter of our nations history, I’ve come to learn that there were men of tremendous principle (such as Thomas Stonewall Jackson) who, while fighting for their homeland of Virginia, took very deliberate and compassionate and evangelical steps to better the plight of enslaved people.

Jackson is still regarded as one of the greatest military geniuses of all time. What we hope to make more known through this film is that he was a great Christian warrior who set a strong example of what can be accomplished through a life of steadfastly following the Lord.

Sarah: Please tell us about your long-term goals, specifically for Franklin Springs Family Media. What’s next on your agenda after completing the Stonewall Jackson documentary?

Ken Carpenter: At Franklin Springs Family Media, we want to build a catalog of titles over the next few decades that becomes a trusted source of excellent stories that encourage, entertain, and edify families.

In the short term, were about to release a concert DVD of a live concert with Charlie Zahm, who sings traditional Celtic, Maritime, and Early American melodies. We shot this in High Definition in Maryland last month. Were also in production on an instructional DVD for young filmmakers. And we’re doing one about agrarian lifestyles. Additionally, were about to start a project about family entrepreneurial endeavors. Plus weve got several more on tape just behind those. It’ll be busy around here for awhile!

And then down the road, were hoping to become more involved in narrative programming. We’ve done some dramatic television in the past, and we’re eager to return to the drama genre. 

Sarah: In our website’s About Us section, we have a quote from your speech at the SAICFF . You mentioned building a “replacement industry.” What is your vision for the Christian filmmaking industry?

Ken Carpenter: That’s a big question. There’s so much happening in the Christian film arena right now. At the very least, it’s going to be fascinating to see what unfolds in the next several years. I recently directed a half-hour behind-the-scenes documentary about the making of Facing the Giants . It appears on the collector’s edition of the Facing the Giants DVD. That experience certainly gave us a great view of what can happen when things align in a good way.

What I know is that there are doors open now that have never been open. If we work together to create excellent films that honor God, I believe the future of Christian filmmaking is very bright. 

Sarah: Quite a few of our readers are interested in the Christian film industry. What advice do you have for these young people? How should they get started?

Ken Carpenter: Carpe diem. Seize the day.  The new technologies those that make filmmaking so entirely accessible to whomever wants to try it afford young people opportunities that I couldnt have considered years ago. 

Getting started is easy. Pick up a mini DV camera, a firewire cable, some affordable editing equipment (if it didnt already come bundled on your computer) and have at it.  I’d encourage young people to avail themselves of books, lectures, and other resources that teach them about the technical aspects of cinematography, lighting, and other areas of filmmaking. Then put that knowledge to work on short films they can make in their local community.

I always say it’s like someone who wants to succeed in athletics. If you want to be an accomplished basketball player, you shoot a lot of free throws. If you want to be a filmmaker, get out and practice filmmaking. That’s how you learn. Every short film is a great learning experience.  

It’s a great time for young filmmakers. I’m eager to see what this next generation of Christian filmmakers is able to accomplish.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:  Sarah Greek is an 18- year-old student from Missouri. A graduate of TeenPact and Worldview Academy, she is passionate about making a difference in the culture for Christ. Her interests include literature, photography, politics, pro-life work, and traveling. More of her writing can be read at her blog, Excelsior!

(http://www.stillhigher.blogspot.com) .

Copyright © 2007 Regenerated Magazine and Regenerate Our Culture. 

Christians in Cinema: Alex Kendrick

(MAY 20, 2007) Angela Walker with ChristianCinema.com sits down with Alex Kendrick who is the Producer/Writer/Director of Facing the  Giants to talk about life in the film lane.

Christians in Cinema: Alex Kendrick

(EXCERPT) Days before the national release of Facing the Giants, Alex and his wife Christina welcomed their 5th child, Caleb.  This is Alex’s 53rd interview since the film gained media attention, yet he took time to talk about his film, his family, and his passion for God. His consuming goal? For God to be glorified.

Hollywood Set to Honor Faith-Based Movies

(FEB 7, 2007) Randee Dawn of the Hollywood Reporter writes about the growing effects that Faith-Based films are having on Hollywood as Studios begin to ramp up their new production slates to include more “Christian” films.

 (EXCERPT) “Hollywood does not understand the people who live between New York and California,” says [casting director Reuben] Cannon, who was the first to describe [Tyler] Perry’s oeuvre as ‘gospel cinema’.  Now that I live in the South, religion is probably the biggest activity here. The Bible Belt is not just a name. It is real. Hollywood just hasn’t catered to the Christian faith-based market because it hasn’t been necessary.”

READ the Full Article by Randee Dawn on www.BackStage.com:

http://www.backstage.com/bso/news_reviews/film/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003547509

Trailer-ProvidentFilms-FacingtheGiants

ProdCo: Provident Films, Sherwood Pictures
Title: Facing the Giants
Distrib: Samuel Goldwyn Films, Destination Films