Blue Like Jazz movie: the hail mary works

A few months ago, I posted about Steve Taylor doing a Blue Like Jazz movie. Gonna do some sudden follow-up on this.

Today, while procrastinating on a freelance gig, I found this article at the Atlantic, Blue Like Jazz: The Quest to Get Christians to Laugh at Themselves. The article compares the Evangelical Christian community's pugilistically earnest film attempts with Jewish and Catholic films, and portrayals in said films. So, ok, interesting.

It also tipped me off to the late breaking news on the Blue Like Jazz movie. I don't really have the time to build this up like this story deserves, but it's a good story, so I'll just cut and paste from the Atlantic article:

After a year of fundraising, Miller—who's written a total of five Christian-themed books and is part of an Obama task force on absentee fathers—was still $125,000 short. He decided to give up. Last month, he wrote a post on his blog declaring the project dead. Blue Like Jazz would not be made into a movie.

But it didn't stay dead for long. Two 24-year-old Miller fans launched a page on the crowdfunding website Kickstarter to solicit donations, and within a week and a half, they'd raised enough money to make the movie. Miller and his supporters then set a new fundraising goal: $200,642, so the film would beat wannabe Facebook-killer Diaspora as the highest-grossing project in the history of Kickstarter. Late this week, with just three days to go before fundraising ends and filming begins, the movie surpassed this milestone—as of Friday morning, backers had given a total of more than $203,000.

Holy shit. $200k isn't a huge number in movie-making terms, but the solid gold nugget in the middle of this interesting bit comes later in the article:

The movie's inability to fit into a pre-existing category helps explain why Miller and his collaborators had so much trouble coming up with the money to make the film. "You're sort of pissing off both sides," Miller says. "Hollywood hates it because we don't have our head up our ass, and the church hates it because we don't have our head up our ass."

200k+ worth of Christian-owned dollars said they're tired of movies made by people with heads in asses. That's news, friend. The real test will be how many Christian-owned dollars show up at the theater/DVD outlet. But this is a fine score for a pre-test.

Reminds me that there's an audience for my projects too.

There's one day left to donate at this point. You can still get in on the fun. Only $3000 gets you dinner with Steve Taylor and Don Miller. As a lifelong cheapass, I'd fork out that money if I had it.

Also, just go visit Don Miller's blog because there's some interesting stuff there.

The continued work of awakening

I dreamed last night that I heard Steve Taylor died, so I Googled him to find out if it was true, and to my horror -- surprise twist! -- there was no mention of Roland Steven Taylor on the Internet at all.

Now that I'm up, I don't know why that was horrific, but in dreamworld, this was like taking the final exam for the class you forgot you signed up for. OMG serious.

On awaking, I immediately went downstairs and let the dog out and checked my email. Sometime later in the morning, I checked on Steve. Nobody panic.

If you knew me well in college, you knew I was pretty into Steve Taylor. He was funny, clever, pro-Jesus, and he could do it all in song. My personal ambition sleepwalked through college... I couldn't say I wanted to do what he did. But Steve Taylor was a noise the direction of wakefulness.

Around the time I graduated, he released his best album, Squint, and then traded performing for producing. It was the mid-90s, we were all becoming different people at that point. I started working on Dungeons & Dragons for a living then. We've all been there.

In the mid-aughts I checked in on Steve again, and found he'd gone to movie making. He made a flick starring Michael W. Smith of all people, called The Second Chance. It's a buddy movie about a white suburban pastor and a black inner-city pastor. It's in my Netflix queue now, I'll let you know what I think at the end of the month after I watch it.

And today? Now? He's in Portland working on a Blue Like Jazz movie.

BLJ's author, Donald Miller, is someone else I would have wanted to emulate if his books had been around in college. I'm sort of glad they weren't. They could have misled a sleepwalker.

These days, I get a prickly feeling on my neck when I consider trying to create some piece of art for an explicitly Christian audience. It seems as though it would be easy for me. And financially rewarding. I could do funny, touching memoir for the saved set. I could do a passable Don Miller.

But as I start down that road, I think of Jesus talking:

If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that?

A whole chunk of text there, Matthew 5:43-48, has kept me up nights. That bite's got a lot of hard-to-swallow. Jesus tells you to be "perfect" in there. He tells you the rough truth that God makes the rain fall on the righteous and the unrighteous. And to me, he says that writing books for my brothers and sisters is not particularly what I'm called to do.

Look, God has a whole lot of things for a whole lot of people to be doing. I still love Steve Taylor's music and wit, and Don Miller is a decent writer. Don't hear me saying that what they've chosen to do is wrong or subpar or Not In God's Will.

But as my personal ambition rubs away eye boogers and stares into the bathroom mirror wondering when it shaved last, those noises... they're not for me to follow. I don't want to greet my brothers for a living. There's too many other people out there who need introductions.

I am glad Steve is alive, though. Check out his movie blog.