When Barbara Nicolosi first arrived in Hollywood to undertake a career in screenwriting, she discovered that being a Christian wasn’t exactly in vogue.
“I figured out pretty fast that the only people still in the closet in Hollywood were the Christians! It was a combination of things. The baby boomers were kind of militantly anti-spiritual & anti-religious. They were still in control back then.”
“But the second thing was just a conviction that was growing in so many people that Christianity is basically what’s wrong with the world.”
“Because of that, you had the Christians who were working in the industry – nobody would know they were Christian! But we had a couple groups where we’d go, and you’d walk in, and there would be like three hundred other Christians from the industry. And you’re like, ‘I’m not the only one!’ And you could always tell the new people at Intermission meetings because they’d be standing in the doorway crying!”
In the 2000s, things began to change in a real way.
“That is no longer how it is, and I think that Act One is part of why it isn’t – and there’s a whole bunch of other organizations – but, at a certain point, Christians decided that we needed to be half as bold as the gay community was. Just saying, we’re here! You have to kind of own who you are.”
So what is the lay of the land for people of faith in Hollywood in 2017?
“I think that there are definitely ten percent of the people here who do, in kind of a messianic way, think that they need to weed out Christianity from the world. But most people are not! Most people are just artists, professionals. People who love storytelling and all the different aspects of it – hair and makeup and set construction and location scouting and casting. And they’re really just here because this is the center of that world.”
“So things have changed quite a bit, and I think that part of it was Act One’s strategy to put young people into the middle of the industry as interns. We’ve been doing that for sixteen years. We have our students go into internships in the top production company studios, networks, and some of the smaller ones at the unions, and after a while people are like, ‘Wow! These kids are really good!‘ I think we were part of that. We weren’t the only reason, but I think we were part of that.”
Barbara Nicolosi is a veteran screenwriter working in Hollywood for over two decades on such projects as the famed The Passion of the Christ. She is also a professor in the Honors College at Azusa Pacific University, and she’s founded the Act One program, which helps to equip and develop young media professionals of faith.
On the Road with Barbara Nicolosi
