admin @ Sun, 2006-09-24 08:00
A blurb in the print ad for the 20th Century Fox movie Everyone's Hero, which opened Sept. 15, 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, it's been learned, can deliver a box-office bump.
"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. "There's only so much we can see... . Every week I have contact with some studio. We're getting early versions of the scripts because they want to see if we're interested."
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 crowds large enough 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.
Paramount Pictures' August release of the animated feature Barnyard - which Ty Burr in the Boston Globe called "manic, maudlin and borderline creepy" - has earned $67 million after another Grace Hill campaign.
Meanwhile, Warner Bros.' Ant Bully, which was released a week earlier and did not have a faith-based push, just some good reviews by mainstream critics - the Washington Post called it "an epic adventure" - has earned just $27 million.
For Judy Olson, a mother in Madison, Wis., the opinions of movie critics aren't relevant. Instead, she consults Focus on the Family's Pluggedinonline.com, which gets 900,000 visits a month, and the Dove Foundation's Dove.org before she decides what she and her 7-year-old son will see.
"It's far more important to me that our family values aren't going to be contradicted and that my son's not going to see something I will regret having exposed him to," she said.
The specificity of the reviews vary according to the group. The Dove Foundation's reviews note sex, language, violence, drugs, nudity and "occult." The review for the PG-rated Invincible, about a Philadelphia bartender who wins a spot on the 1976 NFL Eagles, noted "kissing," implied sex, the number of mentions of "hell" and "frickin'," and that several scenes take place in a bar. For the MGM PG-rated film Material Girls, the Hilary Duff movie about two "celebutantes," Dove's review notes there's one "geez" and a gay character.
In the same films, Pluggedinonline.com is more specific, noting in Invincible that the "Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders are shown in their standard tight-fitting shorts. (The camera never focuses on their notoriously skimpy tops.)" In Material Girls, the reviewer notes a scene of "sensual dancing" and reports that the gay character "is stereotypically depicted as effeminately gay and shown putting on makeup with female friends."
The Heartland Film Festival expects to show clips to attendees in October, Sparks said. Dove Foundation cofounder Dick Rolfe said his group will screen the movie in advance.
"They've gone from being a fringe element to people who are understood to have a great appreciation for what middle America is looking for in a film," said Jonathan Bock, founder and president of Grace Hill Media. Of all of the faith-and-family groups, the Dove Foundation appears to be making the deepest connections with Hollywood. Its seal is on many of the 20th Century Fox titles it approves, and the group sponsors a movie channel in children's hospitals.
All this may be thanks to Dove's Rolfe, a former public relations consultant who is regional vice president of Mastermedia International, an evangelical Christian group devoted to building relationships with national media. He has been doing that with studio executives since the 1990s, when Dove was unknown. "Our whole approach is to send love letters, not hate mail, to the studios," Rolfe said. "We began to be perceived as a friendly organization, a family advocacy group, not as a watchdog." In time, the foundation developed an influential board of advisers, including the late Steve Allen, radio's Dr. Laura Schlessinger, and Dean Jones.
Rolfe is careful to say that Dove doesn't have an evangelical Christian affiliation. He prefers the group be called "Judeo-Christian." Yes, its founders were Christian, but Steve Allen, he notes, was a secular humanist.
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