Claude Brodesser-Akner has a column in New York Magazine’s new culture blog (Vulture) recently in which he sounds a warning, in hushed conspiratorial tones, about an effort underway by Hollywood to use Evangelical/Christian organizations to spread the word of their faith-based films to Christian audiences.

Dear God, say it ain’t so!!!!

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Full disclosure, I am not an Evangelical… I haven’t even been inside a church for any reason other than to attend a wedding or funeral in some 20 years… but I’m just not sure what the big scoop is here. Brodesser-Akner seems to have discovered a vast conspiracy to… well let’s take the case of The Passion of the Christ.

It seems that in order to effectively sell the movie to Christian audiences, Mel Gibson approached Christian groups and churches and then released exclusive footage to them.  Those organizations in turn then showed the footage to their congregations, along with a friendly credit at the end advertising the church that brought them the footage.

Wow… that’s diabolical!!!

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But has Brodesser-Akner really stumbled on a brand new phenomenon?  How exactly is what Mel Gibson did in marketing The Passion any different than what Brett Ratner or Chris Nolan or any of a hundred other “fanboy” directors do when they release exclusive footage to Harry Knowles at Aint It Cool?

You know, every time Michael Moore puts out a new movie he takes it on tour across America’s college campuses hoping that the overwhelmingly left-leaning student bodies who see the film will take news of Moore’s latest work and evangelize about it across the fruited plain.  It’s no different than what Brodesser-Akner is talking about with regard to faith-based marketing.  No different.  And frankly, you’d expect that Brodesser-Akner would want to at least give Moore credit for thinking of it first.

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Except Moore didn’t think of it first, did he?

Hell, The Passion wasn’t even the first time Mel Gibson did something like this.  Way back in 1990, Mel made his version of Hamlet and marketed it in at least one very similar way.  In conjunction with the movie, Mel released a special companion piece which aired on HBO.  It was Mel in a high school classroom, showing the movie to teenage kids, and then acting out scenes from the movie with them to get them excited about the idea of Shakespeare.  It was a masterstroke of marketing genius… and there was nothing insidious about it.  It was just a marketing strategy.

alas poor yorick

But the implication in this piece is that we should keep a particularly close eye on what the Christians are up to because… well I’m not sure why, exactly.

And what about the suggestion that somehow David Cunningham, the director of In The Beginning, doesn’t deserve to direct this film because several historians declared that his previous film (The Path to 9/11) contained “flagrant falsehoods.”  Well gee, couldn’t you say the same thing about JFK, W., Nixon, Gladiator, Fahrenheit 911, Sicko, Frost/Nixon, Thirteen Days, The Hurricane, From Hell, The Alamo and about a million other “based on a true story” Hollywood movies?  Is Brodesser-Akner saying that Oliver Stone, Ridley Scott, Michael Moore, Ron Howard, Norman Jewison, the Hughes Brothers, and John Lee Hancock (or John Wayne if you prefer) should all be banned from the movie business?

And so what if Cunningham is connected to the Evangelical community?  Spike Lee directed the Malcolm X movie… don’t you think African-American audiences were more interested in seeing Spike’s version of the life story of a great African-American civil rights leader than they would have been if, say, Woody Allen had directed it?  Take a look at the grosses for Get Rich Or Die Trying for an example of how audiences react when an old white guy directs a movie about a young African-American hip hop artist.

Hiring directors who know, believe in, and are connected to their subject matter isn’t a new phenomenon.  It’s just smart business.

And as for the implication that Cunningham should not have been offered a movie because a previous film he directed was a failure at the box office…  well, surely no director has ever produced a flop and then been given a chance to direct again!?  (Hint: the director of The Nativity Story, who appears in Brodesser-Akner’s column, would never have gotten a crack at Twilight under those rules).

Look, I don’t care if Brodesser-Akner wants to take shots at this or that director, or this or that marketing campaign, that is certainly his right… but this is a thinly veiled attempt to make something that is perfectly normal seem creepy simply because Christians are involved, and so I am going to exercise my right not to take this piece very seriously.

Hollywood is using Christians to market Christian-themed movies?  How about this for a future column topic idea… “Water Wet; Sky Blue.”