Modern Mars Hill

That time of year is coming up, so it's time to put out this post. I get a little annoyed when I see b usiness ads, events, or sales that are based around the time of year or an upcoming holiday, but have no connection to the actual product or service. I understand a car lot doing a Christmas sale. But a car lot doing a Halloween sale? What does Halloween have to do with cars? I just saw an hair salon ad saying "Savings you can FALL into". Literally any business can use that and it would have just as much connection as it would for a hair salon. I'm happy to have seasonal promotions. But can you please find a way to make the season relate to your product/service?

Over the last few years, my brother and I have been brainstorming about how to make an epic movie (or series of movies) out of The Book of Mormon. We didn't want something simple. We want something epic - a grand adventure for the ages, like we sometimes say the Book of Mormon itself is. I've heard a lot of people love the idea, and I've heard a lot of concerns. I'd like to address some of the concerns and see if I can help. Perhaps you could help me address my major concern with making the Book of Mormon into a movie. If you have any more concerns, let me know. I'd love to discuss them. Concern #1: "It would be rated R." This is the single most frequent concern I hear. I even heard this from someone who played in the Bible videos. To be fair, it's a legitimate concern. There are plenty of lots of R-rated ancient war movies - from Gladiator  (2000), to 300  (2006) to the extended edition of The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies  (2014/2015). Th...

Have you ever seen a movie made by a Mormon and thought "I'm glad that movie was so clean and inspirational. It's a refreshing change of pace from Hollywood". Have you ever got home from that movie and realized "Wait a minute. The only thing that movie had going for it was that it was clean and inspirational. I guess that's all I was looking for, but if it were a normal Hollywood movie I forked out $10 to see, I would have thought it was awful." That's the case with basically every Mormon movie I watch. It's clean and inspirational, but it's really missing the quality I expect out of a normal movie. In my experience, Mormon movies are generally worse movies than movies made by someone who isn't Mormon. Now,  I'm not talking about a clean movie, or an entertaining movie, or an uplifting movie. I'm talking about a movie that uses the tools of storytelling and the tools of filmmaking to present a good story, well told. I'm talk...

There is a fallacy in supply and demand theory that all remotely relevant supply will equally fulfill a particular demand. While the idea seems reasonable, it's not accurate. Let's take an example from film. This could apply to visual arts, music, or any business. It's just easy to find the numbers on film, see what goes on in the making of the product, and theorize about what led to a particular success or failure. There's an argument that so many movies come out each year that any particular movie has (statistically) a less-than-0.7% chance of being a box office success (the math usually checks out). Deadpool was considered a box-office success. It made $783.1M on its $58M budget. In Hollywood, making 2-4 times your budget is considered a success. Deadpool made more than 13 times its budget. It was a passion project from a 1st-time director. Now, that doesn't mean that passion projects will succeed or that movies have a better chance of succeeding...