On a movie mission

Barbara Nicolosi loves movies. She just doesn’t love how they deal – or, to be more precise, how they don’t deal – with the reigning passion in her life: Christianity. Yet like the person of faith that she is, Nicolosi refuses to give up.

The 42-year-old screenwriter, Hollywood development director, and regular consultant on both film and television projects will address her passion for film as part of Gonzaga University’s Bellarmine Lecture Series at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday at the Gonzaga Law School Barbieri Courtroom. Her topic: “Why Movies Matter.”

Nicolosi, who has been in Australia “working feverishly” on a screenplay, answered a series of e-mailed questions, from which this story was crafted (a full transcript of the interview is posted with this story at spokesmanreview.com). One primary question was: What does Hollywood have to offer the Christian audience?

“Not much right now, for a lot of reasons,” she says. “But mainly because the art they are making for that audience is coming from people who aren’t believers. It’s a kind of arrogance that the industry doesn’t practice in crafting product for any other group.”

For example, Nicolosi says, “They wouldn’t dare make a movie for the black audience that wasn’t written and directed by black filmmakers. Or could you imagine a hospital show in which no doctors were consulted? But they will continually craft TV shows like ‘Book of Daniel’ and ‘Revelation’ and movies like ‘Constantine’ and ‘Kingdom of Heaven,’ which are all about Christians, and yet no happy Christian was involved in the production process.”

Her conclusion: “There is a snotty, influential crowd in Hollywood that doesn’t want to work with Christians because they think they know how we vote politically.”

Originally from Rhode Island, Nicolosi, a former nun who spent her several years in a convent (the Daughters of St. Paul), earned a master’s degree in television and film from Chicago’s Northwestern University. Besides having written screenplays, Nicolosi teaches screenwriting at Azusa (Calif.) Pacific University and is founding director of Act One, a nonprofit organization that trains “people of faith” for careers in mainstream movies and television.

She came to Hollywood following her tenure at Northwestern to work for Paulist Productions, the Christian-based film production company founded by the late Father Ellwood “Bud” Kieser. During her time there, Nicolosi discovered that much of the material being written by and for Christians was, as she describes it, “dreadful.”

As she said in a 2003 interview with the online magazine Godspy.com, “It occurred to me that Christians were not being martyred by Hollywood. We were committing suicide.”

In 1999, she and a group of other Christian writers – from, she says, several different denominations – founded Act One. One thing the organization is known for, Nicolosi told Godspy.com, is its “intensive, four-week boot camp … that focuses on mastery of craft, entertainment, ethics and spirituality.”

Her love of movies began early. In her e-mail from Australia, she explains how “she grew up in a family with a great appreciation for the arts. … My father’s theory was that if you exposed children to beautiful things, they would lose their taste for barbarism. So, my folks made an effort to watch great films with us.”

Which meant that instead of watching Saturday-morning cartoons, she and her father would watch Laurel and Hardy comedy shorts. And as a teenager, while her friends were watching “Animal House” and “Halloween,” she would watch ” ‘Giant’ and ‘Gone with the Wind’ and ‘Dr. Zhivago’ and ‘Rear Window’ – and so many more!”

Nicolosi’s faith is strong. And no-nonsense.

“Religion is a response to a call that echoes in your heart,” she says. “If you don’t hear it anymore, it is because you have perverted your nature. Plato – hardly a puppet of the Christian Right! – noted that human beings have an instinct for immortality and eternity. That people feel the tug of life after death isn’t a plot by the pope to get us to put money in the collection basket. It is who we are. Self-destruction is running from that nagging echo.”

One thing she fights is the perception that a Christian movie audience can be reached cheaply.

“The word now is that Fox is going to green-light 10 movies for the Christian audience at a cost of about $40 million,” Nicolosi says. “Well, in a day in which the average studio movie costs close to $50 million, that means that Fox has decided that the Christians can be had on the cheap. Ask a woman how she feels about a guy who thinks he can win her on the cheap…”

And besides her own strong ties to Catholicism – “I am a Catholic,” she says. “A happy one. Which means I cleave to the teachings of the Church that have carried us through 2,000 years of basically being mercy, light and consolation in the world of men” – she works in Hollywood because she believes that, ultimately, she can make a difference.

“I love a great movie,” Nicolosi says “– one that is a harmony of harmonies, in which each of a movie’s many art forms are executed well and then married with the others in a complementary way – and all serving a great theme. That’s why I work in the movie business. My driving hope is that I might at some point work on a project that will be inspiring to people. Something that will last.”