Kerri Pomarolli is a talented, funny, creative, enthusiastic actress/comedian who describes herself as an “out of the closet Christian.” She is a regular on Jay Leno’s Tonight Show and she is featured in the documentary Hollywood on Fire, about the the successes and failures of faith-driven actors, directors, producers, music artists, and executives. It presents “a different view on how Christians in the entertainment industry encounter secularist and Hollywood skeptics, yet do not compromise their faith.” It was a great pleasure to get a chance to talk to her.
What were some of the movies that influenced you when you were growing up?
I was one of those kids roller skating in the basement to “Grease” and “Annie.” At age 3 or 4 I told everyone I was going to Hollywood. I grew up on the classics, Cary Grant, William Holden — I loved his movie “Picnic,” and when I got older I got to be in the play. I had a wealth of knowledge of classics like “All about Eve” and stars like Angela Lansbury. The classics were not just kids movies but good family movies and that’s sort of been lost now. Everything is either a kids movie or an adult movie. And TV too — when I was growing up the sitcoms were for families, but now there are kid-specific channels and programs and the other sit-coms are more for adults and not for children or for families to share.
What do you look for in a project or part?
I came out here and had certain rules for myself as an actress and a Christian. At first, I thought of it in terms of “as long as my character isn’t doing anything bad,” it was all right but that evolved as my faith has evolved. A project can look clean but then you look behind it and it is not. There can be integrity issues behind the scenes. If integrity isn’t there on screen and behind it, it isn’t the right project. It has to be something that as a person of faith I feel like God says, “This is you, this is your task.”
I love working on the Leno show. He is great. It is pretty PG rated. They treat you with such respect there, too. The crew has been with him for 20 years, which really says something. I have never compromised my faith in my work on the show. The casting director is a Christian. I hear the new show will be more like the Ed Sullivan show, and I think it will be great.What is your dream project?
My book Guys Like Girls Named Jennie is being turned into a screenplay. It is a Christian romantic comedy, a really real romantic comedy, the kind of project a 14 year old girl or a 35 year old woman can watch. I’d love to play myself!
Instead of just complaining about sex and violence, Phillips says, Christians must make films that reflect their own values. He says he started the film festival five years ago when he realized that Christians were losing the hearts and minds of the young.
“What is the single biggest influence on our families?” he asks. “I wish I could tell you the biggest single influence were churches, but that regretfully is not the case. The truth of the matter is, it is the media the people take in which are shaping and forming ideas.”
If Christians want to compete in the world of ideas, he says, they have to make great movies. This festival is putting up a $101,000 top prize — the largest in the United States, and larger than Cannes or Sundance — to help them get there. Phillips says this is only the beginning.
The winner of that award is a movie called “The Widow’s Might,” a timely story about a community support for a woman who lost her home to a foreclosure. It was written and directed by its star, 19-year-old John Robert Moore.
This is all enormously encouraging. I hope that the combination of spiritual and financial returns from producing films with messages of faith, hope, compassion, and integrity will inspire the production of more films for people of faith.
The most important moment in Bill Maher’s new documentary about the dangers and hypocrisy of religion is at the conclusion of his visit to a tiny trucker’s chapel. As he does throughout the movie Maher challenges the very notion of faith. One of the worshipers is so offended he walks out. But another explains he had once worshiped Satan and lived a life of carnal pleasures until he found Jesus. Maher of course shakes his head in disbelief that anyone would find that an improvement. But they pray together, or at least Maher stands in a prayer circle and listens as the others pray, thanking God for Maher’s visit, for allowing them to hear the voices of others. And then, as they say goodbye, Maher says, “Thank you for being Christ-like and not just Christian.”
Maher, the trenchant, provocative, sometimes outrageous stand-up comic turned political commentator, believes weapons of mass destruction have made humanity more powerful than we are wise (no argument there) and that religion, specifically the aspect of religion that relies on faith rather than reason, is more likely to catapult us into destroying ourselves than it is to inspiring us to listen to what Maher would probably not refer to as our better angels. Maher and his sister were raised Catholic by a Catholic father and a Jewish mother, going to church every Sunday until it abruptly stopped when he was a young teenager. He continued to believe somewhat half-heartedly, even bargaining with God in a dire circumstance at age 40. But now he is not only a non-believer, he is an evangelical one. He advocates non-belief. One of the most unintentionally amusing elements of the film is how much in structure it resembles Christian testimony. In his own way, he is saying, “I was blind, but now I see.”
Despite his deep commitment to logic and reason (one might say he has a lot of faith in it), Maher never really makes his case. Instead of doing serious and thoughtful research, instead of presenting us with (admittedly less entertaining) data about the influence of particular religious beliefs or institutions, instead of investigating the good works of people inspired by religion or the benefits of faith-based programs, instead of trying to understand the appeal of religious faith, he seeks out the people on the fringes and pretty much makes fun of them. There is certainly plenty to expose in the hypocrisy and virulent influence of various religious groups and practitioners, but he stays away from that for the admittedly more entertaining selection of fringe people and groups. At least he is even-handed. He goes after Christians, Catholics, Scientologists, Mormons, Muslims, and Jews. And he is wide-ranging. He visits (and is escorted off the premises of) the Vatican, the Dome of the Rock, the Wailing Wall, and the Holy Land Experience (that’s the theme park in Orlando, Florida, not the Mid-East).
And so the movie works far better as anthropology than argument, just because some of the people and places are fascinating and exotic. But it is filled with cheap shots and low blows. It is easy to make an obvious charlatan who sells himself to his followers as the literal messiah look like a con man. It is easy to make a couple of Orthodox Jews look silly for trying to create inventions to help people comply with the strict limits of Shabbat. And it is easy to try to trap believers with the Bible’s inconsistencies (especially when you have the final edit) about the differences between coincidences and miracles or the relevance of some Biblical references more than 5000 years later. Maher finds a scientist who (unlike 93% of his colleagues) believes in God and another one who says he can prove that religious belief is a neurological disorder.
Of course, Maher is preaching to his choir. Even if he was able to put together a very linear and thoroughly documented argument he would not persuade anyone because faith is not about persuasion. It is always worthwhile to consider challenges to belief because by helping define what we don’t believe we better define what we do believe. The strength and value of our faith is best proved when it is unafraid of heresy.
The film’s message is most that on a sign one character holds: “Don’t believe anyone. Including me.” And Maher is like the assimilated atheistic Jew in a story I heard recently from a rabbi. It seems the Jew sent his son to a school called Trinity because it had an excellent reputation and a secular curriculum. But the son came home and said, “Do you know what Trinity means, Dad? It means the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” The father was furious. “Now listen to me, because I want you to remember this. There is just ONE God! And we don’t believe in Him!”
Scott Derrickson is a rarity in Hollywood — a committed Christian director who openly admits that his films reflect his religious views and serve as a kind of testimony. I spoke to him about his latest film, the remake of the 1951 Cold War classic The Day the Earth Stood Still. He was nice enough to begin by saying that he is a fan of Beliefnet.
I am glad to be talking to a website about messages and ideas. I read the site and like it very much. I have an ever-growing feeling that movies should have messages that trust the audience and do not give all the answers. I am resistant to being told what to think or how to vote. This movie has a lot of things to say but it is less a message than a very American perspective about America and human nature itself. We have this dual side to our nature, destructive and creative and at the same time as individuals and as a nation and as a species we have to make mistakes and evolve and grow. If you can get something like that into a big Hollywood popcorn movie without sounding preachy, that is a great thing. Did you see the original film as a child?
The first time I saw it was in college. It was very much a product of its times, the Cold War, the bomb, the U.N. This is the story for a new time and a new era; this is a post-September 11 movie, a movie that acknowledges being in a country that has experienced a bit of a disaster. How does this movie address its moment in history?
I knew that the movie would come out when we would have elected a new President but before he took office. This campaign was different — no one made a big deal about the race issue until Obama was elected and then everyone on all sides agreed that it was something to celebrate, a step toward healing the deepest wound in American history.
I read something recently: “We’re now living in a time when we saved our banks but destroyed our biosphere.” The movie is a reflection of that idea, of these messes that we’ve gotten ourselves into, but it is not cynical or pessimistic, it has a refreshing sense of optimism, of radical change for the better coming to the world at large. Things have gotten bad enough that we are going to roll up our sleeves, start admitting our mistakes and start dealing with them.
Speaking of Disney’s HSM juggernaut, Faith Fims’ new DVD release “Sunday School Musical” is out this week. I have not seen it yet, but the trailer is very appealing. I love church choirs!
