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In the early 1990s, Phil Vischer and his Big Idea Productions carefully watched the developing trends in family entertainment. This culture-watching led to the enormously successful home video series VeggieTales. But shortly after releasing its first feature film, Jonah, Big Idea declared bankruptcy and sold all its assets to Classic Media LLC. Since then, Vischer has written Me, Myself and Bob (Thomas Nelson), about the faith lessons of Big Idea's collapse, and has returned to watching cultural and technological trends to discover how to best help Christian parents in this much-changed media landscape.
Can you watch Jonah now knowing all that happened afterward?
No, it's pretty messed up. We laid off half the studio the morning after our premiere party. I don't know if you could soil a memory more than that. It was brutal.
When I watch the movie now, I can smell my ambition—the drive to do as much as I could with Big Idea as fast as I could. We were in financial trouble actually before we went into production. The movie became about me wanting God to put a stamp of approval on my ambition. And he didn't. He declined my invitation. Sometimes the best way to grow is to lose and to fail—dramatically and publicly.
Before Big Idea was sold, you wrote the second VeggieTales movie, The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything. It was made and released by the new owners in 2008. But a major thing in Christian film happened between the two VeggieTales films—The Passion of the Christ. How did that change Hollywood?
It's a different world. So many doors are open. It's very easy to pitch your idea thanks to Passion. The new Big Idea owners invited me to come to L.A. to pitch the story of The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything to Universal. (I was working on contract for Big Idea as a writer and voice talent.) Doing that pitch was bizarre because three years earlier, we couldn't get any of the majors to show any interest in Jonah. That was pre-Passion. In fact, when I got to Universal for Pirates, there were 15 executives in the room to hear the pitch. One commented, "We didn't get this many people together to take the King Kong pitch!"
After I walked them though the whole story, the head of marketing says, "That's really great. But, do you think it's Christian enough? Because if it needs to be more Christian, we're fine with that."
I thought, What alternate universe did I just wake up in? It's a very strange world in the sense that everyone in Hollywood is looking for Christian movies.
However, no one knows what a Christian movie is. This confusion has created a cottage industry of Christian experts working on behalf of studios to help them find Christian movies or help them figure out how to make Christians come to their movies. It's like Hollywood discovering that Lithuanian movies are wildly popular—but no one in Hollywood speaks Lithuanian. So, suddenly there's an industry of Lithuanian translators who watch movies and tell Hollywood if they are any good. Right now, we have people making a decent living telling studios, "Oh, this is a good Christian movie and here's how to get it to them." It's a bizarre time.
Were you tempted to add more overt God content in Pirates after Universal said you could?
I was trying to build a parable for the Christian life in a little movie about three lazy pirates. Because it's a parable, I couldn't have a literal God. When Jesus told the parable about the vineyard owner, he didn't mention God because he was already there metaphorically. When you're in Narnia, you cannot talk about Jesus because you're living in allegory.
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