The Shack movie is being finalized for it’s March 3 release. A trailer should be out in the next week or so, hopefully sooner. There are lots of moving parts to get all this through the studio machinery.
On a less complicated note, this weekend the producer and screenwriter of the movie adaptation of So You Don’t Want to Go to Church Anymore were in town. We recorded a video (pictured above, and now being edited) for use on a crowdfunding page we will be setting up over the next few weeks. What a joy it was to reconnect with both of them and their passion for this story. This story was never even supposed to be a book. It started out as a website, but people said they wouldn’t read it off a website, so we printed it up into a book and though it has been free since we wrote it, it has sold over 400,000 copies. That was shock enough, I never dreamed it could be made into a movie. It isn’t a dramatic story in a visual medium. It’s thirteen conversations between two men and that doesn’t make for a compelling movie. All the drama of the story goes on inside. So, we’ve adapted the story, added a lot more plot between the conversations and now it is a compelling and sometimes humorous story.
Jake is playing a game and doesn’t even know it. But when a crisis at work and a desperate need at home challenge his faith, it gives Jake a chance to reconsider everything and find his way out of the game into a vibrant connection with God that has interesting implications in his life. Now with a screenplay completed that is generating some buzz in the industry, we are ready to see if we can find the funds to shoot the movie.Ninety percent of the stories that make it this far never get made into a movie, because finding the money is the hard part. We already have some solid interest on the investment front, so our producer is saying now there’s a 90% chance this movie will get made.
But we don’t want to do this on investment dollars alone. He also wants to have some dollars in the movie that are strictly from people who have a passion for the story and that can give us a seat at the table to help protect it’s message. So we’ve come up with the idea of seeing if there are people who love this story enough to help us raise part of the funds through Lifestream Ministries. Not only will that give you a tax-deductible receipt, but Lifestream a stake in the movie. If it generates a profit, our share of return will go to help fund our various projects in the world. For those who contribute we will also be offering an escalating array of gifts to connect them with the movie process. That will include free DVDs when the movie is completed, autographed copies of the book, and a free subscription to an insider mailing list as the film develops . People can even become co-executive producers and join me for a day on the set to see how it’s all done. But mostly this will allow us to keep shaping the story to have maximum impact in the world.
That web page will be up in a few weeks, but I thought I’d give you a head’s up if you wanted some time to think and pray about joining our team. If you’re curious to know more, you can listen to a podcast I recorded with producer and screen writer while we were still hammering out the story a couple of years ago. You can find it here.
