MARTIN'S TBN WATCH
by Martin Wagner, your smilin' A.E. cohost

Hi, ACAers! Welcome to my new monthly column for the web site, where I keep you up to date on the funniest thing to hit cable since porno: Trinity Broadcasting Network!

As 2K1 approaches, suprisingly few of TBN's notables seem to be saying much about the embarrassing fact that the world hasn't ended and none of them have been raptured away. Indeed, as 2000 passes into history, it's show-me-the-money business as usual at the House of Crouch. At the forefront of this is TBN's ongoing fantasy that it is now a movie studio, a delusion similar to the one suffered by Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels.

Now of course, in this our free America, anyone with the vision and the will to lose money can make an independent movie. Hell, even I'm trying to do one, proof that even an atheist can unplug his rational mind as easily as anyone. What makes TBN's cinematic efforts so laughable, however, is the fact that, artistically, the results are strictly amateur night, a problem only exacerbated by producer and Number One Son Matt Crouch's insistence that his meager opuses (opi?) are transforming the sin-blemished face of Hollywood. After all, Matt says, the only way to get Hollywood to realize Xian fundies want Xian fundie movies is to make a few Xian fundie movies and let the BO (that's Variety-speak for Box Office) speak for itself. "When we were just protesting," Matt says, referring to the hysteria over 1988's The Last Temptation of Christ, incidentally one of the most devout movies about Jesus ever made, "all we did was make [Hollywood] mad." On the contrary, I think the picket lines took a film that in all likelihood would have died in the art houses and turned it into a right BO blockbuster, to which Universal could have felt only delight.

In sharp contrast to the Scorsese opus (which I like very much, by the way), no one gave a shit about The Omega Code, TBN's 1999 apocalyptic "thriller" which took the Bible Code seriously in its premise and then got stupid from there. Yes, there was a bit of buzz about Omega's opening weekend BO (in this case, I don't necessarily just mean "box office"), wherein the film placed at #10 with the #1 per-screen average of the top 20 films, which that weekend included Fight Club and Anna and the King. (Per-screen average refers to how much money a movie has taken in per individual theatre, rather than overall. Since not all movies play on the same number of screens nationally, you can easily have the top per-screen average and not be the #1 movie.)

Still this phenomenon, after the initial suprise, was quickly dismissed when it became clear it was simply the result of TBN ballot stuffing. Pastors and members of TBN affiliate churches would dutifully drive to one of the 300 theatres showing Omega and use their Visas to buy out the house, an impressive sacrifice I'm sure most directors would love to see their fans make. (450 or so seats at $8.00 a pop; you do the math.) Then they'd pile everyone in the church bus and subject them to 99 minutes of Casper van Dien, a torment worse than any envisioned by Heironymous Bosch, I can tell you. "The church bus bubble" was quickly popped and Omega slid into video oblivion, as forgotten by Hollywood as Molly Ringwald.

Undaunted, and convinced they'd blown Tinseltown's doors, Matt Crouch and his oddly monikered Gener8Xion Entertainment immediately did what all real Hollywood studios do with their biggest films: get a sequel into development. That film, Megiddo, has evidently now wrapped, and TBN is even more ecstatic about it than Omega, offering up the usual predictions of breakthrough fame for its August 2K1 release. This'll be the one to "wake Hollywood up," apparently oblivious to the fact that Hollywood has been quite pro-God for some years now, if such films as the anti-science The 6th Day and TV shows as Touched by an Angel are any hint.

I've seen a few clips of Megiddo on TBN, and, to be fair, it does look better than Omega. But only just. For one thing, unlike Omega, the film stars actual actors, like Michael Biehn--best remembered as the tough Cpl. Hicks in Jim Cameron's Aliens--and Diane Venora, a fine actress seen in such films as the overlong police procedural Heat, the Leo version of Romeo & Juliet, and one of my faves, the lycanthropy howler Wolfen. Also, there is a sharp increase in production values, particularly in cinematography (though I did see one bad continuity error in editing in one particular clip). Still, though the film looks less like a bad Showtime reject than Omega, it definitely plays like a relentless downer. Set during the fabled seven-year Tribulation period, the overall tone of the movie is one of unrelieved gloom (at least in the clips I've seen), and without exception every line of dialogue is a miniature sermon. With this bleak combination of despair and preachiness, one can easily imagine mainstream audiences avoiding this even more than they did Omega. People want religion (unfortunately), but they want it upbeat; they don't want reminders of the agony to befall sinners over which fundamentalist Christianity so creepily fetishizes. Cool logo, though.

But that's not all TBN Films is up to, oh no indeedy! In the spring, even earlier than Megiddo, they plan to release a little thing called Heart of a Champion, starring none other than the World's Cheesiest Living Human, Carman. For those of you with better things to do with your brain cells than subject them to TBN, Carman is a jaw-droppingly talentless and charisma-free singer who fancies himself a combination of James Bond, Tom Jones, Elvis and whatever mainstream pop star is hot this week. His most hilarious achievement is Mission 3:16, a Bondish music video contrivance which features him driving a sports car recklessly around to no apparent purpose. And yet, a side-splitting title card at the end of the vid assures us that the "mission" has met its goal: "Millions of people have been been saved."

Heart of a Champion is some kind of boxing movie, and beyond that, I don't care to speculate, except to wonder how TBN possibly thinks they can wangle theatrical bookings for it. Intriguingly, rather than dip into their $80 million war chest to pay for the thing, TBN had Carman try to sell one of his bad CD's via an 800 number to raise the prospective $8 million budget. This led to one of the crassest episodes of "Praise the Lord" all year, in which Matt Crouch and Carman's manager announced that they wanted TBN "partners" to call up over a given weekend and buy at least 2.5 million copies of this digital doo-doo. Why? Why, to get Hollywood's attention of course! (That sales goal, by the way, was arrived at by the fact that boy-band N-Sync had recently set the record for first weekend CD sales of 2.4 million, and TBN can do better than that, for sure! Carman must be deluded beyond the dreams of analysts if he thinks he has more fans than N-Sync.) As Matt Crouch put it, without a molecule of irony, "After all, their [Hollywood's] God is money."

Evidently, the scheduled weekend came and went, and the subsequent deafening silence on TBN regarding the big 'thon leads me to suspect that maybe, just maybe, they fell short of their sales goal. What's happening with Champion is anyone's guess; I hope it goes the way of all lousy low-budget film festival stinkers, of course, but if Jan Crouch's big pink wig is anything to go by, taste has never been known to previal at TBN.

Finally, Matt Crouch isn't the only TBNer to fancy himself a Hollywood player. Grinning, helmet-haired Jack van Impe has gotten into the act. Van Impe is best known for his long running show in which he retrofits current headlines to "prove" they fulfill Biblical end-times prophecy, while his lovably ditzy cohost and wife Rexella listens in awe with an expression that looks like a string of Chinese firecrackers has just gone off in her skull. Van Impe Ministries' latest film, imaginatively titled Revelation, looks exactly like the sort of thing you'd see on TNT at 3 a.m., despite a reported budget of $9 million. Starring a host of has-beens--oh, I'm sorry: "A-list actors"--like Gary Busey, Margot Kidder, and Howie Mandel, the press release for Revelation's upcoming DVD release hints at the hilarity within. "Utilizing a stunning array of computer-generated special effects, the Bible's final book comes to life in an action-thriller that has left theater audiences from Seattle to Virginia Beach with pounding hearts and sweaty palms." Sounds like the Whore of Babylon might get a lot of screen time in this one, kids! I'm sure it went over big with "theatre audiences" in that mecca of Tinseltown decadence... Virginia Beach!

Next month's column will be posted 1/28/01, so I'll see you all again then. And don't forget to watch Jeff Dee and myself on Atheist Experience every Sunday morning on TimeWarner Cable Channel 16 in Austin!

Go without gods,

Martin Wagner
© 2001
martinwagner66@excite.com

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UPDATE MAY 15, 2001: DID TBN RIP OFF THE OMEGA CODE? Click here for information about a lawsuit alleging that TBN swiped the storyline of their movie from the manuscript of an unpublished novel titled The Omega Syndrome. Some scandalous stuff included. Thanks to a diligent TBN Watch reader for providing this link.

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