The true glory of the script is that it’s so relentlessly old-fashioned. The FIREPROOF screenplay by director Alex Kendrick and his brother Stephen Kendrick is intelligently written, clever, funny, touching, and very well-structured. Since I’m a screenwriter, let’s start with the writing, for to quote another oft-ignored DeMille epigram, “If you don’t have a good picture on paper, you’ll never get one on the screen.”
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For conservatives, it’s a case study in how to sugarcoat a blatant and unapologetic conservative message in a bright package of satisfying entertainment. If Hollywood were not too blind to see, this picture is a virtual textbook on how to make an indie film that clicks with audiences.
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Fortunately, his unprecedented box office success kept him laughing all the way to the bank.Ī similar situation prevails with FIREPROOF, and even those who like the film have not for the most part done full justice to its many genuine artistic merits. He did this quite consciously as a patriot and a Christian, and for his trouble he was vilified by the liberal elites and cultural arbiters of his day. DeMille, “As long as I keep the audience sufficiently entertained, I can tell them anything I want.” Even in his non-Biblical epics DeMille always communicated the two underlying messages that were closest to his heart: American exceptionalism and the truth of our Judeo-Christian heritage, especially the reality of the age old warfare between good and evil. Or if told, they wisely ignored the advice.įor myself I have always subscribed to the outlook of Cecil B. However this fastidious aesthetic argument may ultimately fare at the Bema Seat, it’s a good thing nobody told the makers of FIREPROOF, last year’s most profitable film in terms of ratio between production budget ($500,000) and box office receipts ($33,456,317), that they were doing anything wrong. “A film can only be used for pre-evangelism,” he said, referring to preparing the non-Christian’s heart for subsequent illumination later from some other source. I have sat across the luncheon table from one of the most successful Christian screenwriters in Hollywood as he told me in no uncertain terms that a motion picture cannot be used for purposes of evangelism. This was most recently demonstrated by the tide of box office catastrophes produced by the knee-jerk left to protest “Bush’s War” on international Islamic terrorism.Įven though every film communicates on some level the underlying worldview of those who made it, there are those who have bought Goldwyn’s no-message concept to the point of condemning any self-conscious message at all as “preachy” and therefore wrong. Goldwyn’s primary meaning of course was that a film’s foremost obligation is to entertain the audience, a duty easily forgotten when filmmakers let themselves get carried away on a flood of didacticism. Surely this amounts to credible evidence, as if any were needed, that God has a sense of humor. What an irony then that the recent Christian marital drama FIREPROOF, as quintessential a message picture as ever flickered on a screen, has been successfully released by none other than Samuel Goldwyn Films. Probably the most oft-quoted Goldwynism, however, is his celebrated preachment against so-called Message Pictures: “If you want to send a message, call Western Union.” Every connoisseur has his personal favorites: “Include me out,” “Flashbacks are a thing of the past,” or “Don’t worry about the war, it’s all over but the shooting.” One of the greatest is, “I don’t want to be surrounded by Yes Men, I want people who’ll disagree with me even if it costs them their jobs!” My own personal fave driven home by long years in the Hollywood trenches is this one, “A verbal agreement isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on.”
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119 minutes.Years before anybody ever heard of Yogi Berra, the great producer and Hollywood pioneer Samuel Goldwyn became famous for a series of verbally maladroit pearls of dubious wisdom collectively known as Goldwynisms. Now Caleb Holt has to face his toughest job ever, rescuing his wife's heart. Caleb Holt (Kirk Cameron) lives by the old firefighter's adage: " Never leave your partner behind". Starring Kirk Cameron, Fireproof is the inspiring love story of a firefighter, his wife, and a marriage worth rescuing.