'God answers our prayers'

WITH an almost all-volunteer cast and crew, including a star who was a 1980s teen heartthrob, and a plot about a firefighter who saves his marriage by turning to God – it hardly sounds like a recipe for box-office success, let alone a bestselling book. But that's what the film Fireproof has spawned.

The movie features Kirk Cameron, an alumnus of the TV show Growing Pains (a hit in the US in the 1980s), as the firefighter, and it cost just $500,000 (about 280,000) to produce. Yet it opened in the US last month with $6.5 million (3.7m) in ticket sales, making it No 4 at the box-office, a few spots behind the No1 big-budget action thriller Eagle Eye and five spots ahead of Spike Lee's Second World War epic, Miracle at St Anna. At the time of writing it has made around $12.5 million (7.1m) in total, according to estimates by Media by Numbers, a box-office tracking company.

The movie has benefited from a targeted marketing plan and is the latest success for Sherwood Pictures, a tiny production company affiliated with Sherwood Baptist Church in Albany, Georgia. It was directed by Alex Kendrick, 38, written by him and his brother, Stephen, 35, with the church's senior pastor, Michael Catt, as an executive producer.

In the film Cameron plays Caleb Holt, a firefighter whose marriage is close to ruin. As he is about to get divorced, his father gives him a book called The Love Dare, a 40-day challenge that teaches married couples to use Christian scripture to learn to love unconditionally.

The film has received mixed reviews from critics in the mainstream media. Chris Willman in Entertainment Weekly rated it a C, while Neil Genzlinger in the New York Times wrote that the film's positives included "that rarest of creatures on the big (or small) screen: characters with a strong, conservative Christian faith who don't sound crazy."

Some religious groups, however, are supportive. Mitch Temple, writing on the website for Focus on the Family, says: "The brilliantly produced film radiates messages of authentic determination, faith and hope."

Alex Kendrick says that in 2005 "we were praying for an idea, and I was jogging around the block and was inspired to do a movie about marriage". He jogged to his brother's house with the idea. The pair had made movies together as children, but had absolutely no formal training or experience. After college and seminary they approached Sherwood Baptist, where they are associate pastors, about making movies for the ministry. Their first Sherwood film, Flywheel, was released in 2003, and their second, Facing the Giants (2006), about an underdog football team, eventually earned more than $10 million.

"For us, most of what is coming out of Hollywood does not reflect our faith and values," Kendrick says, "and so this is one way to throw our hat in the ring."

Catt, who has helped lead the church since 1989, says he has supported film-making of this type because Christians are often critical of mainstream entertainment without adding something positive to it. "It's easy to point fingers," he says, "but what we need to be doing is offering realistic alternatives."

As in Sherwood Pictures' previous films, the 1,200-member cast and crew was drawn mostly from the church's 3,000 members. (There was a handful of paid professionals, such as editors.) "We just announced, 'We're going to start on a movie, and if you'd like to volunteer we'll take you though a boot camp. There's a sheet outside in the atrium, and you can sign up,'" Catt recalls. The volunteers included his own family. His wife, Terri Catt, served as the casting director and was also in charge of costumes, while his daughter Hayley was the on-set photographer, and his other daughter, Erin Bethea, played the wife of Cameron's character. The amateurs were trained by professionals in lighting, sound, makeup and camera-work.

Even the leading man was a volunteer. Cameron's personal faith and acting career have become intertwined in recent years through his roles in films such as the Left Behind series. He approached Sherwood Pictures after seeing Facing the Giants.

"I'm not on a professional crusade to inject Jesus Christ into every project that I do," Cameron says by phone from Los Angeles. "But when a good project comes up that is about marriage and is based on what I think is really going to help marriages, and is worthwhile, I'll jump in with both feet."

Cameron, who has been married for 17 years and has six children, also says that his faith helped him survive in Hollywood. "As a teen idol who makes it to 37 without being stuck in a drug-rehab centre over and over, I'd say those values have served me pretty well," he says. Some of the proceeds from the film will go to Cameron's children's charity, Camp Firefly.

The movie is one of the more successful examples of a marketing strategy used for other faith-based films: taking the movie directly to its target audience. "It's an audience that has to feel and touch the fabric rather than 'take your word for it'," says Meyer Gottlieb, president of IDP/Samuel Goldwyn Films, which distributed the film.

The marketing was handled by Sony's Provident Films, which seeks out Christians at the grassroots level. Ministry leaders and members of the Christian media were invited to the set in Albany, and private screenings were held around the country. Advance sales also helped; on the first weekend of release 98 cinemas were in communities where at least 1,000 tickets had been presold, says Kris Fuhr, Provident's vice president for marketing.

The private showings also served as a catalyst for the early publication of the book The Love Dare, which was at first merely a plot device. The brothers decided to write the book while they were working on the script and this year signed a contract with B&H Publishing Group, a Christian publisher. Still, they had no plans to publish it until the movie was released on DVD. But at the early screenings, moviegoers requested copies of the book, so B&H decided to speed up publication and rush out a paperback edition to coincide with the movie's theatrical release.

The book, as it is in the movie, is structured as a 40-day plan for revitalising a struggling marriage. Each day starts with a quotation of scripture and a short lessons such as "love is patient" or "love is not irritable".

Marketing for the movie, as well as heavy promotion at chains, have helped fuel sales of the book.

For Kendrick, there is only one explanation for the successes of Fireproof and The Love Dare. "We're not trained and smart enough to make successful movies and write best-selling books," he says. "The only way that this could happen is if after we prayed, God really answered those prayers."

HOW HOLLYWOOD TURNED TO GOD

FOR years, Hollywood did little to woo the 30 million evangelical and fundamentalist Christians in America. They were almost invisible, except when they made a fuss over films they saw as sacrilegious, such as Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ (which was, ironically, a deeply religious film about Jesus's conflict between his humanity and godliness, which protesters would have realised if they'd bothered to watch it).

The film that changed everything was Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. Hollywood, on the whole, didn't take it seriously, and in some ways was right not to, given that the film is essentially an extended torture scene with an undercurrent of anti-Semitism. But, thanks to vociferous support from religious groups and an endorsement from the Pope (the headline-friendly claim that "it is as it was"), this shallow and peculiar movie became a substantial international hit.

Since then, Hollywood has sat up and listened. It went out of its way to woo evangelical groups when promoting The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion The Witch and The Wardrobe, hoping the film's Christian theme would pull in the Passion of the Christ crowd. It also lost its nerve over The Golden Compass, a franchise which spluttered to a halt after one film because of negative publicity about its anti-religious sentiments – blasphemous to fundamentalists, but too watered down in the film for fans of Philip Pullman's books. A compromised mess, the film satisfied almost nobody.

Elsewhere, studios have turned to religious groups for advice on how to modify movies so as not to offend Christians – such meetings reportedly led to the word "Jesus" being removed from dialogue in the thriller Flightplan, for example.

Ultimately, though, Hollywood follows the money. A sequel to The Da Vinci Code is on its way. The Catholic Church may hate Dan Brown as much as it loved The Passion of the Christ, but his books sell millions, and that's what counts.