Waxing Hysterical: When chasing the money means following God

So much for last weekend's idiotic LA Times piece about Hollywoood's bent against Christian values - Waxy says, God is making a comeback.

"Mainstream Hollywood, after decades of ignoring the pious," writes Sharon Waxman in today's New York Times, "is adjusting to what it perceives to be a rising religiosity in American culture." She gets several execs to acknowlege that the phenomena of The Passion of the Christ had an impact in getting Hollywood to notice the faith-based demographic - but before any God-fearering Americans start getting too excited, let's keep things in perspective. "There's definitely more of an awareness, but it's just another group to be marketed to, albeit a very strong one, with incredible grass-roots tentacles," said Russell Schwartz, theatrical marketing of New Line Cinema. Universal's Marc Schmuger is more direct about the way audience ideology dictates movie content: "In every fashion, you need to customize your message to your audience."



It's one thing for a studio (or, every studio) to respond to market trends and to try to create content that speaks to specific demographics. But I thought this was interesting: Taylor Hackford, director of Ray, admits that aspects of that film were diluted in order to appease a Christian financier. He's even resigned to the fact that this kind of thing goes with the territory - as a mainstream filmmaker and as an American, he's got both a bottom line and a party line to worry about. "It's impossible for Hollywood not to reflect the nature of the country, and Bush has made his religion clear," he says. "People in Hollywood aren't stupid. It flies in the face of what I believe, but you're still working in the movie industry, not the movie art form."

It's nothing new for Hollywood to respond to the ideology of the masses - Warner Brothers films of the 1930s, for instance, tended towards a populism directly in line with the times - but where do we draw the line? The question is begged: what happens when general opinion moves even farther to the right?  Or, conversely, if and when it bounces back to the left? Are filmmakers just expected to bounce along and follow the money, no matter what they might personally believe?