Here’s today’s dispatch from the crossroads of faith, media and culture.<\/p>\n
<\/em><\/strong>I recently had the opportunity to speak with a man named Jerry Zandstra who just may be the definition of the modern-day Renaissance man<\/a><\/em>. As the president of his JLZ Group<\/a>, the married father of three sons offers clients his expertise as a political and business consultant and can often be seen on cable news programs offering his insights on the events of our times. As the CEO of American Epic Entertainment he’s impacting the culture by producing family and faith-based films that package positive moral themes within captivating stories (to put it another way, parables).\u00a0 The endeavor is an unusual but logical outgrowth of his calling as an ordained of the Christian Reformed Church in North America. He also plays the part of the female lead’s dad (who happens to be a minister), adding the job description “Actor” to his already eclectic resume.<\/p>\n Here’s a look at the trailer for the film (now a big hit on DVD). My interview with Mr. Zandstra follows.<\/p>\n http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=2p4Cs_QkwsM<\/p>\n JWK: <\/strong>What was the genesis of The Genesis Code<\/em> come to be?<\/p>\n JERRY ZANDSTRA: <\/strong>My business partner (Michael Leighton)\u2026had a long career in Hollywood. He had written a number of things. I came to work for him four or five years ago, first of all as sort of help to the screenwriters…just on history and ethics and so on. I eventually became vice president of the company (American Epic Entertainment). So, Michael and I became friends and partners. He, kind of, at one point had walked away from his faith, primarily because of science. He was just a crazy smart guy. I mean a super-high I.Q., into quantum physics and quantum mechanics and all these things.\u00a0 I\u2019m a pastor. This movie sort of started with our conversation \u2013 me coming from the theological side, him coming from the scientific side.\u00a0 This was really kind of the story of him coming back to (faith) which was fascinating to be part of.<\/p>\n JWK: <\/strong>Was this conversation prior to your joining the company with him or after?<\/p>\n JLZ: <\/strong>It was after.\u00a0 What he had in mind was making kind of wholesome, family-friendly movies. I don\u2019t think he intended to make faith-based movies.\u00a0 One kind of led to the other, so we ended up really making this story.<\/p>\n JWK: <\/strong>So it grew out of a conversation between you too.<\/p>\n JLZ: <\/strong>Yep.<\/p>\n JWK: <\/strong>Almost like My Dinner with Andre<\/em><\/a> where these two guys had a dinner conversation about all the mysteries of life.<\/p>\n JLZ: <\/strong>Yeah.\u00a0 So, you want a movie to be entertaining and all the rest of it. We really set the movie between college students. One is a young woman (played by Kelsey Sanders) who is actually the daughter of the character I play in the movie.\u00a0 She\u2019s a committed Christian and a paleontology student. She works for the school newspaper and is sent to do a story on a university hockey star (Logan Bartholomew).\u00a0 He\u2019s what you\u2019d figure, kind of full of bravado. Just like you\u2019d figure a 21-year-old kid would be who was the star of his team .\u00a0 She discovers, sort of tangentially, that he is really struggling. The problem is his mother is dying. She\u2019s terminally ill.\u00a0 She (Sanders’ character) suggests faith and he…rejects that totally.\u00a0 He is an engineering student and he says \u201cLook, The Bible has been proved wrong over, over and over again \u2013 especially the opening chapters.”<\/p>\n This is, again, Michael, my partner\u2019s story. (He felt) \u201cYou gotta reject the whole book. If the first couple of chapters are wrong than why would be believe anything else.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s (also) sort of the budding love story between these two and, in the meantime, this young\u00a0 woman is basically told by her professors that she\u2019s far too open about her faith in her science classes.\u00a0 She\u2019s told \u201cLook, if you want to go to grad school, here\u2019s the deal. It\u2019s time to put that behind you. You know, it\u2019s great. Religion is great but it has absolutely no place (at) a university \u2013 specifically in science.\u00a0 So, if you want a letter of recommendation from me and you want to go to grad school you need to rethink your position here.\u201d Which is somewhat reflective of my own experience in\u00a0 school. When I did my PhD\u2026one of my prof\u2019s told me \u201cYou\u2019ll never teach here. Your research will never be taken seriously here.”<\/p>\n JWK: <\/strong>You were studying science?<\/p>\n JZ:\u00a0 <\/strong>No it was public policy and public administration.<\/p>\n JWK: <\/strong>And they thought that your religion would conflict with that? That seems a stretch.<\/p>\n JZ:\u00a0 <\/strong>The prof said to me \u201cYou are a public Christian. You\u2019re an ordained pastor. Everyone here knows that. And so your research won\u2019t be taken seriously and you\u2019ll not be offered a university position at a secular university because (you\u2019re) a pastor.\u201d\u00a0 So, that kind of shows up in the movie.\u00a0 She faces that challenge while he faces the struggle of figuring out his faith.\u00a0 It\u2019s a neat story. It\u2019s got some great actors.<\/p>\n JWK: <\/strong>Yeah, the cast is quite strong. \u00a0The two students are newcomers though, right?<\/p>\n JZ:\u00a0 <\/strong>Logan Bartholomew has been in a number of made-for-TV movies (including three of Hallmark’s Love Comes Softly<\/em> films).<\/p>\n JWK: <\/strong>You also have Ernest Borgnine, Louise Fletcher, Fred Thompson and Rance Howard. That\u2019s Ron Howard\u2019s father, right?<\/p>\n JZ:\u00a0 <\/strong>Yeah. Rance is a great guy.<\/p>\n JWK: <\/strong>You also have Ben Murphy from one of my favorite old TV shows, Alias Smith and Jones<\/em>.<\/p>\n JZ:\u00a0 <\/strong>Yeah, exactly.\u00a0 A lot of people recognize him. A lot of people recognize\u00a0 Catherine Hicks too. She played the mom on 7th Heaven<\/a>.<\/em>..She was just a gem. She\u2019s just a fantastic person.<\/p>\n JWK: <\/strong>So the cast gelled?<\/p>\n JZ:\u00a0 <\/strong>Yeah, I mean it\u2019s always a challenge because some of the folks, like (Ernest) Borgnine and so on, are in a limited number of scenes. They\u2019re not there for the full five weeks (of filming) like the principal cast members are.\u00a0 But, yeah, I was really impressed with the kids in particular.\u00a0 Adam Chambers…plays my son. My goodness (he was good).<\/p>\n JWK: <\/strong>This is your acting debut, isn\u2019t it?<\/p>\n JZ:\u00a0 <\/strong>Yeah, (laughing) this was a terrible idea.<\/p>\n JWK: <\/strong>How did that come about?<\/p>\n JZ:\u00a0 <\/strong>Well, there\u2019s a scene that takes place in a church\u2026The pastor happens to be preaching on Genesis 1…It\u2019s actually a sermon that I preached, I don\u2019t know, 15 years ago. And so my partner Michael said \u201cWell, why should we hire an actor? I mean who\u2019s gonna be better at this than you? You\u2019ve been doing this for 20 years.” (I said) \u201cYeah, well, this is a little different.\u201d He said \u201cNo, no, no\u2026.Let\u2019s just give you a try and if you don\u2019t (work out) we\u2019ll have (someone) on standby.\u201d\u00a0 So, I agreed to probably a 60-second cameo. And then the script changed. We got a little closer to shooting\u00a0 and he said \u201cYou know, I think I\u2019m gonna make the pastor the father of the female lead.\u201d<\/p>\n JWK: <\/strong>To consolidate the characters.<\/p>\n JZ:\u00a0 <\/strong>Yeah\u2026I said \u201cAaah, my acting career ended in the seventh grade in a rendition of The Emperor\u2019s New Clothes.”\u00a0 <\/em>He said \u201cYou\u2019ll be fine.\u201d\u00a0 The director did a good job. He said \u201cNo voice lessons, no acting. Just be yourself and ignore the cameras.\u201d By the time it was all done, I was the third lead which I never would have agreed to.<\/p>\n JWK: <\/strong>Any plans to continue the acting career?<\/p>\n JZ:\u00a0 <\/strong>I don\u2019t know.\u00a0 I was basically playing myself. (I watched) Catherine Hicks \u2013 she plays the university prof who is really nasty to my daughter.\u00a0 We\u2019re talking before (a scene) about her kids and her faith…She\u2019s just a wonderful woman but she plays a really nasty college prof and, all of a sudden, the director yells “Action! and she just changes \u2013 so much so that we had to stop. I said \u201cWait, wait, wait. I\u2019m sorry. I was not expecting that.\u201d So, I can\u2019t do what they do.\u00a0 What they do is really incredible. I have a really profound appreciation for what an actor can do.<\/p>\n JWK: <\/strong>Did Michael Leighton (who also wrote the script) come to faith while creating this story?<\/p>\n JZ:\u00a0 <\/strong>He did. He actually passed away unexpectedly last August 13th<\/sup>.\u00a0 I was out in LA for something and got a call early in the morning. He died unexpectedly in his sleep.<\/p>\n JWK: <\/strong>How sad. How old was he?<\/p>\n JZ:\u00a0 <\/strong>He was 63. Not that old.<\/p>\n JWK: <\/strong>So, that must have been a shock.<\/p>\n JZ:\u00a0 <\/strong>That was a shock…I\u2019m now the president and the CEO which, again, is not what I intended for my life — but here we go.<\/p>\n JWK: <\/strong>So, the movie’s available on DVD now.<\/p>\n JZ:\u00a0 <\/strong>It came out into the Christian market in March. We gave it a two month introductory thing and then we opened it up to US and Canadian retailers on May 8th<\/sup>.\u00a0 It\u2019s been phenomenal. Our distributor told us \u201cIf you can get your Amazon ranking…below 10,000 that would be awesome.\u00a0 So, we did some marketing campaigns that are sort of unique \u2013 not through the distribution company but on our own.<\/p>\n JWK: <\/strong>Using churches?<\/p>\n JZ:\u00a0 <\/strong>No, more political techniques. I\u2019m still pretty heavily involved with politics. So, the first weekend we unleashed this whole marketing blast. It was on a Saturday I think. On Sunday, the distributor called me and he said \u201cLook, I know it\u2019s a Sunday. I know you\u2019re a pastor and you preach today and I know I\u2019m not suppose to call you today but what the heck are you guys doing?!”\u00a0 We shot up to Number 1 in Faith and Spirituality and Number 1 in Kids and Family which is a huge category. We ended up for the first week, almost two weeks, being between Number 6 and Number 20\u00a0 of the top DVDs on Amazon which was phenomenal.\u00a0 We were just shocked.\u00a0 Now, our big push is to support the retailers. So, we\u2019re in Walmart and Target across the country.\u00a0 We\u2019re in a number of LifeWay Family Christian Stores and a bunch of grocery stores. I don\u2019t even know all the retail outlets (we\u2019re available in).<\/p>\n JWK: <\/strong>Can you tell me about your marketing techniques? Or is that confidential?<\/p>\n JZ:\u00a0 <\/strong>They\u2019re not new to the world of politics. They are definitely new to the world of filmmaking and film marketing. We caught everybody so much off guard that on our opening day at nine o\u2019clock Amazon ran out of DVDs.<\/p>\n JWK: <\/strong>That\u2019s an amazing story.<\/p>\n JWK: <\/strong>I noticed…the Butterfly Nebula<\/a>…in the background (of some of the film’s marketing).\u00a0 Does that have any significance?<\/p>\n JZ:\u00a0 <\/strong>One in the sense that there\u2019s a lengthy scene that takes place in a science museum where these science students…put together this presentation about the relationship between faith and science. They\u2019re taking a look at some of Einstein\u2019s Theory of Relativity<\/a> and time dilations<\/a> and saying \u201cWell, this is what Einstein was saying\u00a0 and this is what Genesis is saying.\u00a0 Where does this take us? Are there some connections?”<\/p>\n …I\u2019m not saying that the scientists and the theologians can put their pens down because we solved this ourselves.\u00a0 It\u2019s much more of a way of saying \u201cWell, this is interesting the way these two things (science and the Bible) connect.\u201d\u00a0 The reaction to the film has been fascinating. I talked to so many parents who said \u201cYou know, (we’ve) spent 18 years raising our child to be a believer and, wow, two semesters at the state university wiped that out. The kid came home and tossed off everything.”\u00a0 It\u2019s really been a neat experience to see parents watching this with high school kids and college kids and thinking through it.<\/p>\n …<\/strong>It\u2019s been interesting because the reaction from both extremes has been fascinating.\u00a0 The Young Earth folks \u2013 the 6,000-Year Earth folks \u2013 have been extremely critical \u2013 as have many in the scientific community. They think \u201cLook, theology doesn\u2019t even get a seat at the table in scientific discussion anymore.\u00a0 And I think \u201cWell, that\u2019s kind of unfair. You know, you guys are supposed to be so open minded. It\u2019s weird that you\u2019re gonna close off an entire group from this discussion.”<\/p>\n JWK: <\/strong>What do you hope the film accomplishes with the audience?<\/p>\n JZ:\u00a0 <\/strong>First and foremost, I hope it entertains. I hope they like the story\u2026It\u2019s sweet. There are some very emotional parts\u2026and if we can (get them to) think a little bit or discuss or talk…that\u2019s all just icing on the cake. And that\u2019s kind of what\u2019s happened.<\/p>\n Tomorrow:<\/strong> My review of The Genesis Code<\/em>.<\/p>\n Encourage one another and build each other up \u2013 <\/em>1 Thessalonians 5:11<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Here’s today’s dispatch from the crossroads of faith, media and culture. I recently had the opportunity to speak with a man named Jerry Zandstra who just may be the definition of the modern-day Renaissance man. 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