Hollywood's God Squad, Grace Hill Media

By Steven Kotler

NOTE: This weekend's "Evan Almighty" is being called the most expensive comedy ever made, with the Los Angeles Times today claiming Universal has spent "more than $200 million" on its production and marketing. Spearheading this effort in the Christian community is Grace Hill Media, a small but mighty marketing shop with great contacts among Christian pastors and bloggers. What follows is Hollywood WireTap's profile of the firm as it worked on Sony's "Da Vinci Code" last year.

Well, the controversy is upon us. Two years in the making, Sony's "The Da Vinci Code" has finally arrived in theaters, but unlike the vicious backlash that surrounded other "heretical" fare like Martin Scorsese's "The Last Temptation of Christ" or Mel Gibson's "The Passion," this film's fuss seems rather stage managed.

And that's because it is.

The puppeteer was Grace Hill Media, a Los Angeles-based PR firm that specializes in targeting America's faithful. The theory � proven by the $600 million that went into Mel Gibson's pockets from "The Passion" � is that America�s religious community is a tailor-made target audience. And Grace Hill, an outfit with a large database and some fabulous networking skills, is currently the reigning market leader for reaching this audience.

Grace Hill principal Jonathon Bock cut his teeth working pics like "Bruce Almighty," "Elf," and "Signs." These days almost all the major studios are using the firm. (Bock, a deacon at Bel Air Presbyterian Church, got his start as and assistant to Mark Reina, a former senior VP of publicity at Warner Bros.) And studios are using Grace Hill for more than core Christian fare�family films like "Almighty" and "The Chronicles of Narnia." The company has also worked on "Walk the Line," "Cinderella Man" and the entire "Lord of the Rings" trilogy.

Fox used Grace Hill on Ridley Scott�s recent Muslim-friendly Crusades tale "Kingdom of Heaven." Without Grace Hill's kind of cross-marketing promotion, the film might have angered the Christian Right. But the film was massaged (based on feedback from Christian consultants) to try to work both ends of the religious spectrum.

One of the firm's tools to this end is a top-down marketing approach. Grace Hill takes a page from "Passion's" campaign, when Icon Productions realized they could use priests and pastors to push their product during Sunday services by offering them block tickets at a discount.

The firm also works the bottom-up angle as well.

When Grace Hill markets a film, one of their first tactics is to contact heavyweight Christian pop-culture blogging sites like �Hollywoodjesus.com� and �Holycoast.com,� providing free screenings in exchange for mention on each blog. In the case of Universal's "In Good Company," Grace Hill also extracted a direct link to the film�s trailer.

The internet has created a tight knit religious community, more organized an in touch than ever before. But by hiring Grace Hill to work on a film like "The Da Vinci Code," Sony is not only trying for pro-active damage control, it's also seeing just how malleable this tight knit community might be.

The religious right has spent the past fifty years feeling very isolated from mainstream America, which allowed Christian leadership to take advantage of Hollywood for fundraising possibilities. As one insider who was at Universal during the �Last Temptation of Christ� debacle in 1988 says, �that movie was used by certain very right wing evangelical groups as a fund-raising tool, to bash Hollywood, which is what I think happened. They attacked a movie that wasn�t there. They didn�t care because the more outrageous claims they could make the more money they could raise.� These days, not only does Grace Hill try to prevent this kind of backlash bake sale, but by using a grass roots approach they�re offering the Christian community something they�ve never before had: a seat at the table.

In the intervening years, that seat has grown into a whole couch. Dr. Larry Poland, the executive director of Master Media International, an organization that provides professional consulting to media leaders so they can understand the Christian community as a potential marketplace, says, "The evangelical community has gotten savvy and secure in their position. They're no longer intimidated by Hollywood."

In fact, they've been embraced. Some say co-opted.

And Grace Hill's genius reflects this. Some call Bock a Judas for breaking bread with Hollywood. Others say he's a true Christian trying to defend his faith and using studio dollars to do so.

As one evangelical insider (who wishes to remain anonymous for fear of, well, angering Grace Hill) points out: "They knew it was impossible to stop this movie from coming out or � with Ron Howard directing and Tom Hanks starring � from being a success. So they posed a simple question: since this is going to happen, as Christians, how can we use this to our benefit? Their answer was to engage Christians ahead of time. They got Sony to pour tons of money into the website davincidialogue.com. They included Christians in the discussion, but the subtext was you really need to see the movie to really understand the discussion. Sure it was manipulative, but it was also a fresh approach."

But this approach may be something of a devil�s bargain. Barbara Nicolosi is the executive director of Act One: Screenwriting for Hollywood, a lengthy screenwriter-training workshop described as �an offensive strategy in the culture wars.� The group's faculty has included people like Barbara Hall (�Joan of Arcadia�) and director Randall Wallace (�We were Soldiers"). Nicolosi has talked with Grace Hill's Bock about why he accepted �Da Vinci� as a project.

�Jonathon believes the Church has nothing to fear from discussion,� she told V Life in 2005. �He feels that people talking about who Jesus was and why he is still important 2000 years later is worth something, even if the thing that�s spurring the discussion is a project like Da Vinci which says Jesus isn�t divine and the Church is basically evil. I think the book is particularly repulsive, but I agree. I would rather have people talking about Jesus than ignoring him.�