Baptists and Disney: Easter Truce?

By ELIZABETH JENSEN

April 21, 2000 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

NEW YORK — ABC’s Easter Sunday broadcast of “The Miracle Maker” has found unexpected allies in some Southern Baptist pastors who are calling on followers to suspend a boycott of network owner Walt Disney Co.--at least for one night so they can watch the film.

“The Miracle Maker,” airing Sunday from 7 to 9 p.m., uses 3-D, or clay, animation and two-dimensional animated drawings to tell the story of Jesus through the eyes of a young girl. Airing in the “Wonderful World of Disney” time slot, the film, which was released theatrically in some European countries, is designed to appeal to family audiences.

But the broadcast, which ABC has heavily marketed among Christian religious groups of all denominations, has posed a problem for some Southern Baptists and others who have been engaged in a several-year boycott of Disney, stemming from such factors as the company’s provision of employee benefits to same-sex couples, annual gay and lesbian events at its theme parks, and movies from Disney’s Miramax subsidiary with content that the groups decreed objectionable.

The Dove Foundation, a Grand Rapids, Mich., organization dedicated to supporting family entertainment--whose president and chief executive, Dick Rolfe, is opposed to the boycott--has led a campaign to drum up support for the movie, including enlisting some prominent Southern Baptist pastors.

“We’ve been doing as much as we could to support this,” Rolfe said. “ABC was a bit concerned that the Christian community might not respond to this, just on the basis of the boycott itself, so we wanted to make sure that didn’t happen, that people looked at this as a stand-alone effort.” Rolfe calls “The Miracle Maker” “one of the finest religious presentations done in recent memory.”

At least one prominent boycott supporter, Donald Wildmon’s American Family Assn., is still calling for followers to shun the movie. “A boycott is a boycott,” he says on the association’s Web site.

Still, the ABC film has found a good deal of other support among a wide range of Christian denominations. ABC says a radio host on Dallas’s KWRD issued a “prayer challenge” for the show to get a 20 share in the Nielsen ratings, or 20% of the homes watching television at that time. That’s the figure Judith Tukich, ABC’s director of special projects, mentioned when asked at a screening for religious leaders what size audience would make her happy.

Tukich, a practicing Protestant who first screened the movie for ABC, said she was so overwhelmed that she cried when she saw the film. “From a spiritual perspective I was excited, and artistically and technically it was just so well-made,” she said. The movie, several years in the making, was a collaboration between Russian and Welsh animators, and draws on recent biblical scholarship. Writer Murray Watts said he attempted to bring out the well-known story’s “tenderness and joyfulness.”

With no paid advertising budget to promote the film, Tukich, who took on the film as a pet project, put together a grass-roots marketing campaign, taking a page from the recent theatrical movie “The Omega Code,” which surprised Hollywood with a strong opening after word about it spread in the Christian community.

Such alternative marketing of mainstream fare has been used occasionally before, often to good effect: The WB network’s family show “7th Heaven,” for one, got a ratings boost after promoting itself among Christian media outlets. In that case, however, the network used a specialized marketing firm; Tukich, by contrast, spread the word about “The Miracle Maker” largely on her own.

She hit the Internet, targeting about 10 denominations such as Foursquare, Assemblies of God and Nazarenes. Contacts, including pastors and religious press, were invited to five screenings, in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Dallas and Atlanta. While she says she realizes that ABC doesn’t “necessarily bring a whole lot of credibility to the table from a Christian perspective,” her message to Christian leaders has been that “you’ve got to support this kind of programming; you can’t do this negative rap.”

Tukich talked to her own pastors at Van Nuys’ 10,000-member Foursquare denomination Church on the Way, which she says led to an endorsement by the National Religious Broadcasters’ Assn., which alerted its 1,730 radio stations and 245 TV stations. The Church on the Way has also been running radio ads for the movie--for free.

With no stars to promote the movie (although voices for the characters are provided by the likes of Ralph Fiennes, who plays Jesus), Tukich herself has made numerous media appearances, from TV’s “700 Club” show and the Trinity Broadcasting Network’s “Praise the Lord,” to PBS’ “Religion and Ethics Newsweekly” show and dozens of radio stations.

ABC’s movie, which is distributed by Artisan Entertainment (better known for “The Blair Witch Project”), is one of three movies looking at Jesus’ life on the broadcast networks this season, all of which have attempted to tap into the religious community for support. NBC screened its November “Mary, Mother of Jesus” for numerous groups, while CBS’ four-hour movie “Jesus,” which airs in May, got plenty of publicity when the stars and executives went to Rome for an audience with the pope.

ABC is hoping its movie will become a perennial Easter event on the network, depending on how it fares. Internally, the network is divided, Tukich admits; one executive doesn’t think it will fare well, others think it might do OK, and others are strong supporters. No target audience has been given, but Tukich says she expects it needs to do better than drawing 11% of those watching TV at the time.

* “The Miracle Maker” can be seen Sunday at 7 p.m. on ABC. The network has rated it TV-G (suitable for all ages).