From Hollywood to Mississippi

by Stephen Jahn

Armed with inside experience of the television business, this producer-turned-pilgrim appraises Babylon's electronic arsenal aimed at your students.

In terms of investment alone, the Golden Globe Awards telecast live from the Beverly Hilton Hotel was extraordinary. Chrysler had invested fourteen thirty-second spot commercials to the tune of $50,000 per commercial—$700,000 in all, which qualified Chrysler as a co-sponsor and guaranteed its position in the thick of the competitive television rating.

As executive producer of the Hollywood Foreign Association Golden Globe Awards, I was architect and contractor for the production.

Minutes before the telecast began, I sat before a TV in a hotel suite with the network agency and sponsor executives to make sure that celebrities, presenters, program, and commercials in the live broadcast came off with precise timing. Nelson Riddle and his orchestra wound down a musical number; John Wayne, Raquel Welch, and Melanie Griffith rehearsed last-minute cues with the director; publicists and Chrysler executives frantically paced the floor in anticipation of the evening's telecast and of the results, which meant big bucks to winners and clients alike.

I felt a bit overwhelmed with the Golden Globe Awards for I was accustomed to writing and producing children's and young people's programs and specials… “The New Zoo Revue” children's series, and “The Desi Arnaz, Jr., Special” with the likes of Sandy Duncan, Robert Young, and Richard and Karen Carpenter.

But the Golden Globe was prime time, with all the stress, headaches, and endless details that accompany a live broadcast of that magnitude. As the traditional forerunner of the Academy Awards, the Golden Globe Awards guaranteed a large share of the television audience, accordingly high ratings. Fantasies of self-adulation-manifested in awards programs such as these-spell big money to actors, fat contracts with the studio and sponsors, larger audience, increased product sales, and climbing advertising revenues.

This was and still is the Hollywood that youth ministers condemn or commend (at least for a few quality films each year) to their youth groups. From my twenty-five years in Hollywood's entertainment Industry as writer, actor, producer, and consultant, I've discerned four tenets in television-business dogma:

From service to science. TV and its advertising graduated from a service to a science because of growing sales sophistication, the medium's technology and TV's mushrooming popularity in the sixties.

Frequency. This is, the power from pounding away at the viewer equals big profits. Brand or product identification, awareness, and volume of sales with consumers are determined by how frequent a commercial or sponsor name is run on television.

Positioning and adjacency. Exactly where a Commercial is placed in a program determines the amount of audience awareness. A commercial adjacent to the introduction or exiting of “The Simpsons,” for instance, has stronger audience penetration than a commercial in third or fourth position.

Program Positioning. Commercials positioned in blockbuster programs like the Academy Awards, the Super Bowl, or “Murder, She Wrote” return the best on their investment because of the share of television audience and built-in high ratings.

By these tenets the Golden Globe Awards easily achieved its objectives to entertain and sell. The results were a rating blockbuster. A half sponsorship by Chrysler paid off with a thirty-percent share of the television audience.

Since those years of media madness, a three-year pilgrimage in missions service at Mendenhall Bible Church in rural Mississippi gave me a much-needed period of contemplation. In every sense, Mississippi was a long way from the Warner Brothers Studios Production offices in Burbank. I had a lot to sort out: the demands of the entertainment industry, my Southern California culture, and my church life. That season of reflection allowed me a deeper walk in my faith and a redirection of my life's purpose.

It was a severe contrast in lifestyle during those three years. My adopted town reflected a conservatism typical of the deep South, and the community of Christian people with whom I lived at or below the national average income level—both these traits were an austere dose of reality to one just arrived from the comfortable environs of West Los Angeles where I daily hobnobbed with Twentieth Century Fox and ABC Television executives.

I was hardly prepared spiritually and emotionally for the adjustment. Yet because of my involvement with the church community at Mendenhall, I eventually

understood another set of tenets, tenets of another world whose truths stripped away the facade and veneer of my life in the fast lane of the television industry.

Television's perception of life is mythical. Television programming and advertising are a sales medium that craftily and powerfully present entertainment and images, shrewdly portraying a tantalizing misperception of life that is more fantasy than reality. When put in a spiritual perspective, the myth targets the lowest levels of human nature.

Our society has bought this mythical perception of life without understanding the consequences of the message. Yet the appearance plays to our senses as exciting appealing, and desirable, although even casual viewers realize the emptiness of the medium. Darth Vader is alive, well, and doing just fine manipulating this myth-as-life upon America's households in a countercultural warfare, in which the love of money, sex, power and possessions have tipped the delicate balance of values, morals, and standards that a God-conscious American used to live by. The Force is very much with us in the power of the Holy Spirit. But God's grace and power has been reduced to cheap grace by a nation of church goers who have bought into the myth and consequently put God, relationships, “Beverly Hills 90210”, and “Hard Copy”, all brought to you by I-love-what-you-do-for-me Toyota.

Beyond the issue of program and commercial content, TV simply is sensory overload. The frequency and availability of television has monopolized our choices–most ominously, of young people. “A man with a sense of God and all good intentions sits down after dinner to watch television and ends up going to bed hours later with all the messages and images of the world contaminating his mind”, writes Christian gadfly and London Times journalist Malcolm Muggeridge. “Is it any wonder that people in America misunderstand the mind of God?”

You know the messages Muggeridge is writing of—“Just do it”, “The heartbeat of America”, “You deserve a break today”—the words are as familiar to us as the national anthem or your high school class song. The melodies stir images of Bo Jackson in Nikes, Chevy trucks, golden arches. Like ice cream, Coke, and baseball, such slogans have become part of Americana. They are evidence of the media we have befriended and by which we live. Television has reshaped our lifestyles, repositioned the world around us, and pacified our minds and souls like no other medium has done.

So how do you deal with the television habits of your students and their families?

Back off a bit. To be sure, there are lots of quality programs that satisfy the desire for entertainment, education, and newsworthy current events: “The Cosby Show”, “Family Ties”, “Facts of Life”, “Hallmark Hall of Fame”, “60 Minutes”, “20/20”. Then there's the Rose Bowl, the World Series, the Final Four, and other traditional American sporting events that make for family and fellowship viewing.

Live within limits. But, are adults and parents abdicating responsibility and relational values with young people by allowing too much of the tube? Media guru Marshall (“The medium is the message”) McLuhan wrote prophetically during the sixties about the coming age of change and communications.

The whirlpool of information fathered by electric media movies. Telstar, flight-far surpasses any possible influence Mom and Dad can now bring to bear. Character no longer is shaped by only two earnest, fumbling experts. Now, all the world's a stage. Electric circuitry has overthrown the regime of time and space and pours upon us instantly and continually the concerns of all other men. It has reconstituted dialogue on a global scale.

In other words, character is no longer influenced by relationships, but by a medium of communication and change, without respect for limits because of the accessibility of information, public opinion and profit. What once defined stability in our culture—family, neighborhood, children—have been replaced. Some have observed that the inmates are now running the asylum.

WE ARE IN THE BATTLE OF POWER AND PRINCIPLES

The tube is here to stay, along with more Calvin Kleinistic commercials—and with no guarantee that the quality of either will improve.

A movie theater exists in Hollywood with electronically monitored seats to test the sensory responses and reactions to series, commercials, performers, and programs. The supposed intention is to determine what sells and what doesn't, what will increase profits and what will jeopardize earnings. We are supposed to be economic targets.

The truth? To paraphrase Paul, this is no mere ratings skirmish, no simple battle for your dollars. It is combat on a cosmic scale, for which teenagers need all the support and direction they can get from informed and caring adults.