Imposing hope through Hollywood
Jordan Raynor sits down with Mark Fincannon, an Emmy Award-winning casting director, to talk about how casting a TV show works week-in week-out, the incredible story behind casting End of the Spear (the story of Jim Elliot), and how Christians can “impose hope” rather than their explicit faith in film.
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[00:00:05] JR: Hey everybody! Welcome to The Call to Mastery. I’m Jordan Raynor. This is a podcast for Christians who want to do their most exceptional work for the glory of God and the good of others.
Each week I'm hosting in the conversation with a Christian who is pursuing world-class mastery of their vocations. We’re talking about their path to mastery. We’re talking about their daily habits and how their faith impacts their work
Today I’m thrilled to share conversation with my new friend, Mark Fincannon. He's an Emmy Award-winning casting director who spent 40 years mastering his craft in Hollywood. He's worked the Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, David Lynch, Frank Capra Jr. just to name a few you. Mark and his team have been responsible for casting over 200 feature films, including Ray with Jamie Foxx. The Blind Side with Sandra Bullock and thousands and thousands of hours of television series, including Homeland, Dawson's Creek, One Tree Hill and Nashville.
Mark and I recently sat down to talk about how casting a TV show works week in, week out. Talked about the incredible story behind Mark casting the movie End of the Spear, the story of Jim Elliot and the five missionaries who were killed in Ecuador. We talked about how Christians can stop imposing faith in film, but start imposing hope and truth and redemptive storylines that are winsome to Christians and non-Christians alike.
Without further ado, here's my conversation with Mark Fincannon.
[INTERVIEW]
[00:01:47] JR: Mark Fincannon, long time listener, first time caller. Thanks for being here.
[00:01:51] MF: Oh man! It’s my pleasure to talk to you this morning, Jordan.
[00:01:54] JR: This is going to be fun. We’re recording this on February 7th. Oscars are in two days. We’re going to release this a little bit later on, but I'm curious if you want to be bold and make some Oscar predictions.
[00:02:05] MF: Oh! Well, I don’t have the list right in front of me, but I watched most of them. I think 1917 really stands out as certainly will win cinematography. Could conceivably win Best Picture. I've not seen Parasite. I'm not sure it should even be nominated, but it is one of the nominations. Evidently, it's just different enough that it stands out.
[00:02:28] JR: I had a friend tried to explain Parasite to me and he just gave up. He’s like, “I don’t even know what I just watched, but it was great.” Yeah, I loved 1917. I’ve been listening to the soundtrack. It's pretty much the only thing that I’ve been listening to as I I’ve been prepping for this latest batch of podcast episodes.
I'm really curious on the television-front, like do have shows that you're keeping up with right now?
[00:02:49] MF: Yeah. Well the two shows I work on I have to keep up with. I do a show for Fox called The Resident, which is a medical drama that airs on Tuesday nights at 8 o'clock. We’re in our third season and have a faithful audience there. So we’re hoping we’ll get a fourth season. You never know.
[00:03:05] JR: You never know.
[00:03:06] MF: It's that time of year.
[00:03:07] JR: By the way. When you find out – we’re in February. The season ends in – what? May? Something like that?
[00:03:11] MF: Yeah, it will end in May. We’ll finish shooting probably mid-March, but the series will actually end on the air mid-May and then we usually find out they do – the networks have a two-week period of time in the first two weeks of May where each day one day it’ll be CBS. The next day it’d be Fox. The next day it’d be NBC, and they basically announce their new seasons, so which is within that that first two weeks of May.
[00:03:35] JR: You don't have that much time then. That’s crazy.
[00:03:37] MF: No. You really don’t.
[00:03:39] JR: It’s such an interesting world. I mentioned in the introduction of to today's episode that you have had a long storied career in film and television. Can you take us back to the very beginning? How did you get into this thing?
[00:03:53] MF: Well, I didn't make sense, Jordan. It really doesn’t. I was born in North Carolina in a little town, Greensboro, North Carolina, which is in center of the state. Then my father worked for Wachovia Bank, which was a bank at one time. In fact, it was the bank of the State of North Carolina, but ultimately went through during the 2008 debacle. It kind of disappeared, became Wells Fargo ultimately.
But I grew up, I have an older brother, three years older, Craig, who’s my business partner actually, and a younger sister a year younger. Through the bank, my dad moved to even a smaller town by the name of Asheboro, North Carolina. My mom just wanted us to be cultured even in this small little Bedford Falls type town we lived in. I think population was 10,000. We had two elementary schools, one junior high school and one high school. Everybody knew everybody.
My brother had taken piano lessons. So my mother found a man named Gene Stroud, and he had a dance studio in a single room house in the center of downtown Asheboro, and at was six-years-old my mother took my sister and I dropped us off and I started taking tap jazz and ballet when I was six-years-old. It was me and 22 other girls.
[00:05:12] JR: I love it. I love it. First day in show business.
[00:05:15] MF: I can still hear the cadence, was heel, step, heel, step, flap, ball, change, step. That was the very first.
[00:05:23] JR: It’s amazing the stuff that sticks with you.
[00:05:26] MF: Yeah, moves. Ultimately, I grew up in that town and it was just an incredible. Like I said Bedford Falls town — like. It’s a wonderful life. In that town, became a Boy Scout and ultimately became an Eagle Scout there. My brother and I, we could just disappear after school and get on our bikes and ride through the woods and go out in the country. We were as far removed from Hollywood as I think any two young kids could possibly be.
When I was 10 years old, Dick Clark actually brought a knockoff movie called Killers Three. I say knockoff, because it was a knockoff of Bonnie and Clyde, and he started in the movie playing a character much like Clyde and we got to work as extras on that. To be in a small little town and our parents took us out to the sawmill, which is where they were shooting one evening. They had a shootout at the sawmill, and to be able to stay out till 11 o'clock at night and watch Hollywood stars shoot at each other, was something that we just never forgot and it was out of that that my brother found my dad's 8mm movie camera.
No sound, but great quality film, and we started making movies in our backyard. What’s so amazing about this, Jordan, is literally if you go back to the 60s, what did we see on television throughout the 60s is indicative of the two movies that I remember we made. One was called Snoopy Goes to the Moon, because throughout the 60s –
[00:07:01] JR: That was it.
[00:07:01] MF: We were on our way to the moon, and Peanuts was the number one influence for young girls. I would buy my sister a Snoopy every year. We put a Snoopy up on a doghouse and we put a fan and we blew his ears and we filmed in kind of trekking through the sky and then we had a little lunar module that we landed in the sand of our sandbox that looked like the moon surface and we just did – we found ourselves making movies with actual film, only just because we had nothing else to do and our dad had a little camera.
Of course, we did our war movies, because Vietnam was prevalent throughout the 60s and we would use M80s to blow up the hillside and we put on our plastic helmets that had the plastic leaves all over them and we got out the ketchup and had a lot of blood and having no idea that we would spend our lives doing that. That's just kind of what I remember as my childhood.
Because of that, we had to do a little bit of acting. Out of the fascination of acting, my brother ended up in the drama department at the school, and I then followed suit and I ended up doing some plays in high school and then I went off to college, majored in theater in college. Went to Catawba College in Salisbury, North Carolina and spent four years there just studying, directing, acting, doing wardrobe, doing lighting, doing a little bit of everything.
I’ve just been reviewing your book, Jordan, and I was a jack of all trades really, a master of none, at that point, but I kind of really realized that that's what the original four years of college is all about, discovering.
[00:08:35] JR: Yeah. That's exactly right. Good thing in college to try a bunch of stuff. When was the first time you got paid to do something in entertainment?
[00:08:44] MF: So, perfect question. When I graduated from college, my brother asked me to join him in Charlotte. We started promotional publicity company and a film came to Charlotte. It was a big movie for NASCAR called Stroker Ace, and it starred Burt Reynolds and Loni Anderson. They were two of the biggest stars in the world at that time.
We worked as extras on that, and then when that was over, we just thought, “Wow! That was a lot of fun. Let's keep running our promotional publicity company.” Then we heard through a whole series of stories that Frank Capra Jr., the son of the great Frank Capra, was scouting for a location for a Stephen King book to movie called Firestarter, and his executive producer was a world-renowned independent filmmaker by the name of Dino De Laurentiis. Dino De Laurentiis had gained the rights to that book and secured and drafted a screenplay. That they were looking for was a southern plantation home, because the story involves the government moving in and covertly working out of this plantation home.
They found this plantation home on the cover of Piedmont Airlines Magazine and Frank Capra went down to find this location in Wilmington, North Carolina. They fell in love with the location. So they set up a shop there. Well, my brother and I having heard through the grapevine that he was down there and because we had worked as extras, we knew that there would be nobody down there that knew how to secure extras. So we went down to, convinced Frank Capra Jr. that we could pull together all the extras that he needs for his movie.
[00:10:22] JR: Hang on. Hang on. Stop here. This is amazing. How old are you at this point?
[00:10:26] MF: 24.
[00:10:27] JR: 24-years-old and you just go to Frank Capra Jr. like, “Hey, we’ll figure out the extras. You guys don’t know North Carolina.”
[00:10:33] MF: Jordan, I got you back you up from there, because sovereignty of God is all over this. Because my brother and I had a promotional publicity company, one day the publisher of the Charlotte Observer called us. A man named Rolfe Neill. Rolfe said, “Guys, I like the way y'all think. I can advertise what I do through my print media, but I like the fact that you guys can reach out in other ways. I'm going to give a gift to the City of Charlotte.
I'm a huge Frank Capra fan. I'm bringing Frank Capra to Charlotte. I'm going to screen the movie It Happened One Night, which won all five Academy Awards, the only film to do that until Cuckoo's Nest, and I'm going to bring Mr. Capra here. I want you guys to work with me to produce him coming to Charlotte.” This was previous by four months to Frank Capra Jr. being in the state. The fact that we had met his father and worked with him gave us the courage to call Frank Jr. and say –
[00:11:33] JR: Yeah. You can be, “Oh, hey! I was just talking to your dad.” That’s terrific. By the way, at this point, Dino De Laurentiis, had he King Kong at this point?
[00:11:43] MF: Yes, absolutely.
[00:11:43] JR: Yes. He was already a big deal.
[00:11:46] MF: He was independent moviemaking today the model of fundraising, the model of every aspect of how they raise funds and put together projects was all established by the way Dino did it. Nobody did independent film storytelling like Dino De Laurentiis.
[00:12:02] JR: That’s fascinating.
[00:12:03] MF: What was amazing is during that movie, tragically, Dino had just come through a real crisis in his life several years prior to this. His one and only son had died in a helicopter crash on a film that he was working on in Alaska. He was out scouting locations and his helicopter went down. It just devastated Dino and ultimately his marriage of 30 years just didn't survive that loss.
So Dino working in his offices in New York ended up meeting this young girl that worked in his accounting office, and when he headed off down to Wilmington he said, “Martha, why don't you come down and work on the accounting office of this movie that I'm doing?” And they fell in love during the making of that movie and they ended up getting married, and Martha Schumacher became Martha De Laurentiis and she spent every day of the rest of Dino's life till he passed at 93 — they had two daughters of their own.
It’s a beautiful love story, but because they fell in love in Wilmington, that's why I have a career. Because she said, “Dino, it's not time for you to retire. It's time for you to take your resume from all over the world to the stock market.” He did that and created a company called De Laurentiis Entertainment Group, DEG, and they raised $270 million in 1984 in a three-day public offering.
[00:13:31] JR: Man! Unbelievable. De Laurentiis is largely to credit. Him and the Lord for your career. Listen, you’ve had this longer. We could spend three hours just talking through your story.
[00:13:41] MF: Yeah.
[00:13:41] JR: I’m really curious. If you were to sit down today and write a memoir, what would be the most entertaining story from your 40+ years in film and television?
[00:13:52] MF: Wow! Jordan, honestly, there are many, but I think I would have to say End of the Spear, which is a film that I did, which is the story of five missionary couples who left in the early 1950s to go into the jungles of Ecuador working for a ministry called Wycliffe Bible Translators. They were translating the Bible into the Quechua language, and many of your listeners will know this story. But for those who don't, ultimately, they met an indigenous tribal group that no one had ever made contact with and they had a positive healthy contact with that group, only to then five of the husbands of these couples were all spear killed by that tribe.
[00:14:35] JR: Is this Jim Elliot?
[00:14:36] MF: Yes. The Jim Elliot –
[00:14:37] JR: I didn’t realized that that movie was the Jim Elliot story. My best man of my wedding inspired by Jim Elliot's story is now a mission aviation pilot in Papua New Guinea. He is spending his life in response – I know he saw the film as well. Unbelievable that that’s all coming full circle.
What was your role in that film?
[00:14:59] MF: They had been trying – they wrote the point of view from the savages, not the point of view of the missionaries. They really wanted us to enter into a world of revenge attacks among indigenous people groups. Then out of nowhere comes contact with the outside world, and that outside world ends up bringing the love of God and the idea of forgiveness, which ultimately would stop the revenge attacks that had been going on century after century.
In fact, that's what happened. After the five men were killed, a wife and a sister within nine months actually moved in and lived with the tribe that killed her husband and brother and they transformed that tribe forever. They had for years been developing and trying to make the film. The casting was a huge deal. I mean, the vast majority of the cast were literally naked savages in the jungles of Ecuador. How do you go about casting that?
Well, Jordan, my life had changed so dramatically shortly after the story I’ve just told about being there with Dino and then making all those movies when I got a phone call one day that my college roommate of four years had been killed in a boating accident and his mother asked me to come and eulogize him. I got there and I was just too emotional. I couldn't do it.
It was up in the mountains of North Carolina and, of course, I was in the coast of Wilmington and my drive from the mountains back to the coast that my life changed forever because it was as if God were sitting in my car and just asking me those most poignant questions, “What makes you think you will ever feel comfortable to stand at a gravesite or in a church, a synagogue, or a funeral home and talk about somebody else's life, or eternal things when you don't have a sense of eternal things?”
I tried to say, “Well, I went to Sunday school. I grew up in this whole space,” but the fact is I didn't know that I know that I know, who God is and what he's done for me in my life. So I begged Him to reveal himself. By that evening, went and found a Bible and began to read the Bible, and the Bible literally, literally change my life.
Because of that, I began to read books and listen to radio shows and I had heard the story and I think I've been praying for the story for 12 years. But the last person on the planet should have gotten that phone call was me, because I was sit in a little town in North Carolina. The producers were out of Oklahoma and out of Los Angeles, but I had met a friend 20 years earlier who called me and there's so much more to this, we don't have time with this.
But, ultimately, when he called me, I knew that this was a story God was telling and I was just privileged to have a role in. But he literally told me, “You’re to call the producers and tell them you're the man and ask them to fly you to California and let's get this movie made.” Well, when you go into a producer’s office, you generally need to be able to lay out a game plan as to how you’re going to go about doing this.
[00:18:04] JR: Yeah, sure.
[00:18:04] MF: I joke about it with other casting directors, who would ever feel comfortable to go in and sit down with a bunch of producers and say, “Cut me a check. No problem. I'll go find 27 naked savages who are actors.” It just doesn’t make sense.
But because I had prayed for this so long I knew that the God who chose me to be a part of it just like he did all the other people in the production that he would give us the courage to find a way to make it happen. Four weeks later, I find myself in Panama getting in a canoe, going up into the rain forest of Panama and meeting the very first indigenous tribal group I've ever met in my life and I told them the story of what took place in Ecuador 50 years earlier, and the entire village started weeping and then they started breaking out into applause.
They said, “We’ll help you any way that we can,” but then they asked me this such humble question, they said, “But we have a real concern. What makes you think we can do it? Because we don't want to say we’ll do something for you and then let you down.”
[00:19:14] JR: Wow!
[00:19:15] MF: Yeah. I said, “Chief and village, I don't know how I got here. There've been movies like The Mission that we shot in the Philippines. There were other movies shot in South America, but I'm not in either one of those locations. I'm here with you in Panama. I was sitting in my home a month ago when I got the phone call to do this project. I believe the God that’s going to give me the courage and the strength and the abilities to pull this off is the same God that’s going to give you all the courage, the strength and the ability to pull it off and that he has specifically chosen you to do it.”
They all broke out into applause and we shook hands and committed to go about making this movie, and that was just one village. I ended up going to two other villages, for three total villages that we worked with that were all from the same tribal group called the Emberá, Indians of Panama, and we set out over the next four months to make this movie, this incredible movie.
[00:20:13] JR: That's amazing. I got to imagine that humble stance that they had is in stark contrast to a lot of the actors that you work with in Hollywood. That's got to be a different experience.
I’m really curious about the casting process and especially as it relates to hiring, right? This is like a really selfish question from me as an entrepreneur, you’ve had to hire employees for your casting company. How is hiring similar to and different from casting, making casting decision for a firm?
[00:20:17] MF: In terms of how I go about casting?
[00:20:44] JR: Yeah.
[00:20:44] MF: Well, I go to an agent. An agent submits their people to me. I go through – I literally get 800 submissions for every role I go out on. I can't see 800 actors. So I choose 30 or 40 of those actors and I ask them, I send them the scenes from the script of the role that I'm interested in them playing. Then they go into a professional taping service scenario with another actor and they play out the scene and tape and record that and then they post it to a software program that has been developed specifically for our industry.
I'm doing two television series right now. Every eight days, I get a script of the next episode. I then get on the phone with the producers and the director and we talk through the episode. I may have 10 roles in that episode that are doctors and nurses, surgeons. In the next eight days, I've got to go out to the agents, have actors audition for these roles, cut all that down, pick the three or four very best choices that anyone of them could play the role depending on how the director or the producers or the writers feel about them and then I present those choices and they all make ultimately a corporate decision on which actor they want to hire.
[00:22:03] JR: Wait. You’ve got a week to cast an episode of a show?
[00:22:09] MF: Every eight days we get a new script and we’re shooting eight days later the next episode.
[00:22:13] JR: Sure. That’s crazy. I didn’t realize television is that quick. I thought you’d have a longer runway than that. That's fascinating.
[00:22:22] MF: In the early days, before computers of course, we just had many, many, many actors coming into our office and we would read 70 actors in a given day and then turn right around and have them working three days later. Today, we’re able to just do that much more efficiently because actors can tape wherever they are. If they have a nice demo reel, which many of these actors do, they have a lot of their experience that is on a reel, from other shows they worked on, so you're able to kind of to discern really the depth of their talent.
[00:22:55] JR: One of the things that’s like interesting to me about casting is it’s so subjective, right?
[00:22:59] MF: Yeah.
[00:23:01] JR: I got to imagine that pursuing mastery of your craft looks pretty different from somebody like an athlete, where purposeful practice for an athlete is so clear-cut. You swing the golf club, you get immediate objective feedback on performance. That's not at all the case in your vocation. How do you rigorously get better at your craft? How do you pursue mastery at something that’s so subjective?
[00:23:26] MF: Well, number one is the actor that you're hiring has an ability to be able to step into a moment and a transformative thing happens. You don't see an acting performance. You just see a moment lived out in front of you.
[00:23:41] JR: What do you mean?
[00:23:42] MF: In general, that's what I'm looking for.
[00:23:43] JR: Yeah. What do you mean by that? Go deeper on that.
[00:23:45] MF: Well, there's three tips that I give actors to help them. Acting is not a performance. It's a transformance. When you study theater like I did, it was all about performance. You practiced and then you went out and performed. But in real-life, sometimes we perform for one another because we’re posturing or whatever.
But in general, real-life is just so real that you have to take it out of the performance approach and you have to say, “How can I just step into a moment and live in that moment as if that moment has never happened?” I don't know what the other actor is going to say or do and I don't necessarily know what I'm going to say or do until I react to the moment or to whatever it is they may say to me.
The best of the best of actors are able to – certainly, they know their lines. They know their dialogue, but the best are able to just be able to be fluid and to literally just step into a moment and you see a transformation. You see a transformative moment that takes place. That's hard to show in a video audition, but if you are really working with another actor in the room and the camera is close-up watching, you'll see that's a very real moment. That's not like an acting performance.
That’s just kind of a real moment. Ultimately for me, so much of my work has been doing real-life stories. I did a series called From the Earth to the Moon, which was an HBO series.
[00:25:10] JR: That was a Tom Hanks one, right?
[00:25:12] MF: Yeah, exactly. I remember that we had a 1,500 square-foot room that was just filled with boxes of every magazine, every periodical, every newspaper article from the entire 60s in this room. I remember, I just spent an entire week just sitting on the floor in there just going through and looking at faces and just doing research.
By the time I started casting the project, I had done due diligence to, really, in every way possible to step into that world, back into that world, live and breathe the faces that were what NASA looked like in the 1960s. So then when I went about casting, certainly they need to be great actors, but there's a certain feeling that NASA had that I had kind of stepped into. All projects are like that. I did Ray, the Ray Charles movie, and if you follow Ray all over the country, there's a lot of footage about his life and where he was and what his band was like and that kind of thing.
To be most successful, you just step in the every one of these scripts and you do everything you can to do all the research you can to step into that world so that as you start to meet actors, you start to see them kind of – it’s like a painting. You have an image in your mind and then you start to throw up some colors, and then all of a sudden you realize that color doesn’t quite work and you change it up a little bit, and it really is like painting a picture is telling a story.
[00:26:45] JR: So Master of One, I'm not sure if you've read this part of it yet, but I think it's in chapter 9 or 10, I take on the “Christian film industry”, pretty hard, arguing that entertainment that is made by the church and exclusively for the church is seen by nobody outside of the church, obviously, right? I think the most part, when Christian filmmakers prioritize the message of a film over mastery of the craft, it leads to some pretty bad films, right?
I talked about how C.S. Lewis used to say, “We don't need more people writing Christian books. We need more Christians writing good books.” Obviously, there're some parallels there for film. How have you thought about? I mean, you're in Hollywood. You're not doing really overtly evangelical films. Do you think it's important that you're just focused on making great films?
[00:27:34] MF: Well, that's been my journey. But for 20 years, I’ve also kind of worked behind-the-scenes to try and help in that space you're talking about, to raise the bar into this layer of mastery. What I have observed is, unfortunately, it is very difficult to get the kind of funding that your competition has. I mean, if they're spending $100 million and you're struggling to put together $1 million or $2 million, that's the first issue. Because you don't have as much money, you can't hire the experts.
The people that you're hiring don't really have the kind of experience, say, that I have or the people that I have worked with. That is improving. I worked on a film a couple of years ago that I'm extremely proud of in that space, called The Case for Christ. Though the title itself kept some people away, which is a shame, because the film doesn't really feel or look like most of the kind of Christian movies that we've seen out there in the last five years anyway.
[00:28:42] JR: Yeah. It did really well critically. I haven’t seen the film, but it did much better critically than most “Christian films”. What do you think made that film different?
[00:28:51] MF: Really, a terrific writer, a terrific director, a terrific support team, and really the grace of God. I got a phone call 10 days before they were going to start shooting and they had no cast, because they had hired someone who was from Los Angeles and they were shooting the movie in Atlanta, where the Los Angeles actor had come not knowing the acting pool in Atlanta. Had two or three days of casting, but none of the actors were really very good because that particular casting director had 10,000 submissions, how would that casting director know the best of the best?
Well, I've lived in this space now for close to 40 years. When I read the script, I think of the very best actors that I have in my kind of periphery that I’ve worked with now all these years and they would all instantly come to mind in these roles. I literally was able in 10 days to put the entire cast of that movie together, which is really unheard of, and they didn't even have Mike Vogel at the time who ended up playing the lead in the movie. We had a special hand on us to help us pull it off, but the support team were high-end professionals. They did have more money than most of these movies have.
Again, because the movie didn't make $40 million or $50 million like some of these have in a freakish kind of way, they're nervous to go back and spend $5 million on a film again. So now you're just right back to where you were. They’re doing it for $2 million and $3 million and they’re – It is a hurdle that I do believe there's some really talented people coming out of some of these schools that are Christians working behind-the-scenes that are eventually going to get their day. When they do, they're going to have the kind of support around them.
I did just executive produce a film that we shot in November that I think is going to look very, very different, though is a faith-based film, it’s not going to necessarily be a film that the church community may necessarily support just because we’re looking at that journey in America today in a very, very honest way, and sometimes that's not the prettiest thing to look at. Just like when we look at our own lives.
[00:31:02] JR: That’s exactly right. That’s real, right?
[00:31:04] MF: Yeah. If really honest and somebody really saw us in our worst times, we wouldn’t want anybody to see that. But we’ve done that with the ultimate hope that we can bring healing into those places. We can bring light into those dark places and we can begin the conversation as to how we can all help one another to live authentic, loving, caring lives.
[00:31:25] JR: Is it that how you make truth winsome is just by telling true, honest stories?
[00:31:31] MF: Yup. Certainly, with the stuff that we watch today as gruesome as some of the stuff may be or is raw as some of the stuff may be, why are we not – I mean, that's real-life. They choose to focus on the dark side. We are looking at the dark, but we’re bringing the light in, and the light is what changes. The light is what exposes, but then heals all of us. So that's a real goal that I have with the rest of my time.
[00:31:58] JR: Yeah. I love television. It's my favorite medium. I watch a lot more TV than I do films. Aaron Sorkin for me is the gold standard of writers.
[00:32:07] MF: Oh, incredible.
[00:32:08] JR: I think it's because he's content is so hopeful, right? The West Wing was this picture of what would it look like if the Oval Office was idyllic? What would a newsroom look like if we had the best people working in those roles? But it doesn't shy away from darkness, right? There is some darkness. There is sin. There is misgivings, but there's hope, right? I'm eager to see more people in Hollywood making those types of films. Because I think I'm sitting here asking a lot of the same questions our audience is. I'm frustrated at seeing the most critically acclaimed shows of my time being ones that have no hope.
I’m really curious, what can we as Christian consumers be doing, if anything at all to push Netflix, to push Amazon, to push these content kings to make great, hope-filled content?
[00:33:01] MF: Well, write. Write letters. Write notes. Find a way to contact them through social media, just saying the evangelical community not only in America but around the world is huge. I worked with Ted Barrett, Movie Guide, and have for years and years and years and he just continually year after year reveals the amount of money that are made out of family films and films that have redemptive stories and the evidence is there. It's as clear as black and white on the paper that the majority of money that's being made in our industry today is in that genre.
[00:33:37] JR: Why aren't these studios producing this? This doesn't make sense to me. These are businesses. They’re for-profit businesses. Why isn't more of this step getting made?
[00:33:45] MF: Well, sadly, and we’re talking about darkness and we’re talking about the darker truth, you now have a streaming service that knows what every human being is watching. If they’re producing R-rated material, gritty, raw material and they are seeing in their streaming services that that's what the people are watching, then to them, it's not like they're trying to systematically drive this.
They’re just saying, “Hey, 42% watches this kind of stuff. We need to make sure that we have 42% of that in this coming year.” Whether it’d be horror, whether it’d be – whatever it may be. Whatever aspect of the genre it is. Quite honestly, that's not an easy conversation, because it's really hard to look at the depravity of man, honestly and pragmatically, and that's what I think we’re talking about.
[00:34:38] JR: Yeah. No. That's exactly right. I was talking with Carly Fiorina recently about how politics is a reflection of culture in hearts and minds of people. I think Netflix is the same thing. Netflix is a for-profit business, a really well-run one at that. They're going to put out the content that we watch. If we want to change what Netflix is making, we need to watch good things, right?
[00:35:01] MF: Well, and I do think the fact that Disney+ has now launched and they’ve been so successful so quickly. I know personally, with my kids and my grandkids and they’re over here all the time and they want to go on the television and all that. I'm scared to death, because the protections on Netflix are just not there. They're not doing the common practices of families across America with children running around and all of them knowing how to work a remote control by the time they’re two and half years old.
It's causing people to kind of to push away from that. When you have an alternative source like Disney+ that really has positive, healthy programming across the platform, I think you're going to see a shift. Hopefully we are, because if someone has an alternative, I think they're going to go there.
[00:35:48] MF: Yeah, and Disney is the first real credible family friendly alternative to Netflix, right? I'm really curious to hear your perspective on who are the Christ followers in your world, in Hollywood, who are making art that are loved by both Christians and non-Christians alike?
[00:36:09] MF: I'm still discovering, trying to discover them every day. There's are agents that are working in Los Angeles behind the scenes. There's a an agent named Michael van Dyke who was at Paradigm for 14 years and Michael just left a couple of years ago to come and go out on his own because he really wants to – he was known as that faith guy even at Paradigm. When these projects would come along and they wanted to pitch to the network or to any of the streaming services, Michael was the guy. Now he's kind of gone out on his own and there's a real concerted effort going on behind the scenes even as we speak to bring together those world-class storytellers that are just telling different stories, the kind of story that we want to hear.
Those classic Ralph Winter, is a world-class producer who did all of the X-Men movies. He's been an outspoken Christian for many, many years and out front and vocal about it. Still working in even the X-Men space, but using his influence to influence and impact others. I just worked with Michael Carney who I have a tremendous amount of respect for. He's a director. They did a film a couple of years ago called Same Kind of Different as Me, which was Greg Kinnear and Renée Zellweger and it was a New York Times bestseller turned to movie, and you would have to have your own conversation with Michael because he’s somewhat got the heart of his story taken out by the studio system.
Jordan, honestly, when you start to hit the buttons of the emotions of people that are sitting in the theater and it's calling their bluff, they don't want to face that, and you were looking at elitism against homelessness, and that's where the clash was in the story and marriages were being lost because people are living in denial of what's going on around them.
He did a beautiful job and that, but he told me had a 99.9 positive response to his movie on a Friday night, and over the weekend they recut his movie and he didn’t even recognize it by Monday. There is a battle that many of these people are having to fight in this larger, kind of secular, for lack of a better word, space, that serves the masses.
[00:38:23] JR: Yeah. You make a good point that’s never going to change. We know as Christians that'll never change. We don't like to see sin. We don't I like to see our sin, more specifically, revealed especially through art, which can reveal it in such a painful way. That’s unfortunately something that can’t change. We can just hope that we can make films of hope and storylines of redemption that are winsome and attractive to the world.
All right, Mark, you listen to this show so you know the three questions I love to end every show with. I'm really curious, which books you tend to recommend or give to others most frequently?
[00:38:57] MF: Well, the Bible is an obvious one, and I do read it every single morning and it is my life and my wisdom and my thread. There are three books that come to mind. I don't know that it's okay for me to give you three, but one that really –
[00:39:09] JR: Oh, give them all.
[00:39:10] MF: Really impacted me profoundly, and it's an older book, it’s called What's So Amazing About Grace? By Philip Yancey. True stories all around the world where grace changed culture, grace change nations, and that is the number one trait that Jesus carries with him everywhere he goes, that no other prophet can actually claim, right? Jesus brings grace everywhere he goes.
What's so amazing about grace is, one, another one was written by Rory Noland, it's called Heart of the Artist and it really was a cry from Rory Noland started Willow Creek's theatrical side Bill Hybels. Bill Hybels wanted the best artist and musicians. He wanted to celebrate artists when he started that work in Chicago. So they reached out into the acting music community. They just literally brought artists into the church to tell stories, to music and tell story.
Well, Rory Noland after about 10 years did an assessment and he was dealing with such egos among the artists because everybody wanted the lead. Everybody wanted this and he was just dealing with the wrestling with the egos of the artist that he took a year off and say, “God, help me. How can I help artists get outside themselves and realize that the gift that’s been given them is for them to give away, not try and bring attention to themselves?”
This book, the reason I enjoyed it so much is that in that year he literally started in Genesis 1 and went through all of scripture, finding all the places that artists have had an impact on the world through biblical history. Starting with Genesis 4, which is Jubal, who play the lyre was the first musician in Genesis 4, and we get the term jubilation today from Jubal’s name, which is just amazing.
[00:41:01] JR: I didn’t know that. I got to check out that book.
[00:41:03] MF: It’s really a bit of a workbook for churches that are working with artists, but the principles and the scriptures that are in it are deep and profound and I've taught out of that book for many, many years.
Then finally, one, a book that just came into my life at a point when I had gone through the dark night of my soul and was having to really wrestle to the ground authentic forgiveness. I read a book called The Devil is in Pew Number Seven written by a girl name Rebecca Alonzo. It's her story growing up as a young girl and a tragic scenario in North Carolina of all places and how she navigated forgiveness of this really difficult journey that she lived through.
[00:41:52] JR: Those sound like great books. Mark, maybe outside of Hollywood or inside, who would you love to hear in this podcast talking about how their faith influences their work?
[00:42:01] MF: Well, there are a lot of those. But oddly enough, who came to my mind was Tony Hopkins. Anthony Hopkins – I mean, I don't know that journey. I'd love to know that journey, but I know he has come out to say he struggled with alcoholism and he goes to AA meetings. In fact he came to do a movie in Wilmington and every day, every other day, you’re not even supposed to know those things, but eventually he’s just so open about it. It's not like he tries to hide from it, but he's an AA member I think for 20, 30 years and I have to imagine that faith is a crucial part of his life and his sobriety.
[00:42:38] JR: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:42:39] MF: And what a phenomenal master of the art of acting.
[00:42:43] JR: He's phenomenal. I mean, we’re right up against Oscars. I loved his performance in the Two Popes. I thought he was brilliant, and that film was such a great film. All right, last question, Mark. You know who our audience is. These are people across a bunch of different vocations, just trying to do the best work they know how for the glory of God and the good of others. what one piece of advice do you want to leave them with?
[00:43:05] MF: "If people can't say what God is doing, they stumble all over themselves, but when they attend to what he reveals, they are most blessed." That's Proverbs 29:18. When Jesus left he said, “Guys, it's important that I go, because when I go, I can then send your helper, the Holy Spirit, to speak to you and guide you into all truth.”
I read in your book, Fred Rogers called it guided drift. I love that term, because it’s interesting because Fred Rogers had to figure out how to navigate in a secular world teaching godly principles without coming across overtly like he's trying to impose his faith on anyone. I watch the Roundtable with Tom Hanks just a couple of weeks ago that was done through the Hollywood Reporter, and Tom pointed out that in the 30 years that Fred Rogers was on that television show, he never once mentioned the name God.
But when we think of Fred Rogers, we think of the embodiment of love, care, compassion, someone that wants us to feel loved, feel valued, feel important. There's nothing I would rather do than to serve the way Fred Rogers served. I think one of the ways that we do that is that we need to quiet ourselves every morning and look around and listen to see what God is doing, then we will not stumble all over ourselves. When he speaks, we have to be faithful to do what he says, because that's what leads us to a blessed life, according to the Proverb.
[00:44:40] JR: We just had Fred's biographer, Maxwell King, on the podcast, and he was talking about Fred's daily routine of what he called rehearsing the day, where he would go and look ahead of his day, who he’s going to meet, and just pray for those people and remember that they were all made in the image of God. That's one thing that sticks out to me about Fred. The other thing is you just touched on it. Fred wasn't able to impose his faith given that he was on public broadcasting, but he was able to impose truth into each episode. I think that's what we’re called to. I think we’re called to impose and just tell really artistic, really compelling stories of truth and redemption.
Mark, I just want to commend you for spending 40 years doing that, being part of that, being salt and light in the world of Hollywood. Thank you for loving the world well by making great movies, great films, great television shows and thank you for following the call to mastery in your life and for your commitment to your craft.
Most of, all thanks for hanging out with me for a few minutes this afternoon, Mark. I appreciate it.
[00:45:46] MF: Listen, Jordan. Thank you. What you’re doing is filling a void that has been greatly, greatly needed and I just hope nothing but the best for you in serving what God has called you and the way he's called you to serve in these days. Appreciate you.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
[00:46:00] JR: I love television so much. It really is my favorite medium of communication. That was a joy for me to be able to talk to Mark. If I wasn't using this, maybe I'd be writing for TV somewhere. But, no. I’m making this and can’t imagine making anything else.
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