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Hi friends,
I spent last week in Atlanta, Georgia, one of the great cities of the South, where I attended two annual events. The International Christian Retail Show (ICRS) focuses on making products available to your local Christian retailer (gifts, books, music, DVDs). The Catalyst Conference for International Christian Visual Media (ICVM) concentrates on professional development for Christians working in film.
During the ICVM conference, I sat on a panel about film distribution. We discussed questions like "Is it better to have a film shown on television or in a movie theater?" "With digital downloads available, do you think people will still want DVDs of movies?" "Is it worthwhile to sell films in international markets?" The answer to all of these, and more, was a resounding "Yes!"
I encouraged filmmakers to do everything possible to reach their audience. The Internet is making video instantly accessible to everyone in the world. At the same time, thousands of people want the complete movie theater experience. There are others, like my dad, who may never go to a movie theater, but he collects DVDs to watch at home. I believe we should make movies available in every possible format that has an audience.
The week ended with the presentation of the Crown Awards. Members of ICVM vote for the best independent Christian films for the year. The Theory of Everything was this year's big winner. It won Best Evangelistic Film, Best Drama over $250,000, and Best Picture. We're proud of David DeVos and his outstanding movie. If you haven't seen it, get a copy and see what the buzz is all about!
Below is a complete listing of the Crown Awards winners for 2007. Brad Mix, who accepted the Crown Award for Full Range of Motion (Best Comedy) is our featured filmmaker this week. Read his interview below.
From the screening room,
Angela Walker
ChristianMovieNews.com
Best Evangelistic Film, Best Drama over $250,000, Best Film 2007
Theory of Everything
Best Drama under $250,000, Best Short Film
No Greater Love
Best Comedy
Tim Hawkins' Full Range of Motion
Best Children's
Paws & Tales: Closer Look
Best Series
Reflections on Psalm 23: For People with Cancer
Best Screenplay
Torchlighters: The William Tyndale Story
The Theory Of Everything - DVD
Envision the Possibilities
2007 Crown Award Winner for Best Picture (Gold)
2007 Crown Award Winner for Best Evangelistic Film (Gold)
2007 Crown Award Winner for Best Drama Over $250,000 (Gold)
Get this DVD in the Crown Drama Award Winners Collection and save!
Does God exist? Does science prove it or give us reason to doubt?
Doug Holloway (David de Vos), a family man on the verge of finacial and marital ruin, embarks on a journey to find his birth father, Dr. Eugene Holland (Victor Lundin). Dr. Holland is on a mission of his own - to prove the Holy Grail of physics - the Theory of Everything - that may prove the existence of God. His greatest challenge? Completing his quest before a degenerative brain disease (CJD) claims his ability to reason. Soon the two journeys become one as the men struggle together to rebuild their family and find new hope in God.
A moving story of family, faith, and theoretical physics, The Theory of Everything will inspire you to "Envision the Possibilities."
Read our exclusive interview with writer/director/actor David de Vos
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Featured Christian in Media: Brad Mix, Crown Video
by Angela Walker
Brad Mix and Family on a
Skiing Expedition
Bradley Ronald Mix (also known as “One-Take” Brad) is the current president of ICVM (International Christian Visual Media) and the Vice President of Crown Entertainment, headquartered in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.
His name was supposed to be Dallas, but he was born the day after JFK was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. His parents were so shocked by the events of that day that they changed his name to Bradley. In tribute to his parents and JFK, Brad’s eldest son is named Dallas.
Brad met his wife Sandy (who just turned 40 and looks awesome! According to Brad) in Bible College, when she was dating his younger brother. A few years later they met again in Edmonton, Canada, where Brad offered her a job in the family business (Crown Video). She came to work for him as an executive assistant, and they were married about a year later. After almost 17 years of marriage, they have 4 children: Dallas-15, Rachel-13 (the favorite child), Jessica-10 and Jace-9.
Brad has been Executive Producer for 7 productions. In that role, he has procured funding, negotiated contracts, and given creative input into several projects.
CC.com: What’s your company’s mission statement?
Brad: We started Crown Video in 1983, and Crown is an acronym for “Christ Revealed on World Networks.” Our mission was to make high-quality, Christ-centered video as affordable and as available as anything else in the marketplace.
Crown Video is in the process of changing its name to Crown Entertainment. We’ve been distributing Christian film and video products into the States for over 10 years, and internationally for almost as long.
CC.com: A lot of your product is comedy. What kind of guidelines do you have for what you’ll distribute?
Brad: For our Canadian distribution, we carry everything that’s out there. We have over 1200 titles and distribute at every market level: Christian bookstores, churches, direct to consumers, schools, whatever.
In the United States, we distribute about 50 titles. It’s stuff we license, which means we have a lot more money in it to market it properly. We’ve recognized it’s something we need to focus a lot more on, and that’s a tough decision to make.
We used to just carry any title, but now we have to be more selective, because we can’t always make it work financially. We receive a lot of inquiries, documentaries, for example, that are great, but we don’t think the interest or exposure is there. We also don’t choose things for doctrinal issues, from time to time. We’re fairly broad in our doctrinal scope, it doesn’t depend just on my own personal beliefs, but we do have some limits for what we will carry on a doctrinal basis.
CC.com: How do you decide if you want to help a filmmaker get a start in the business when their product is of a lower quality, or if you hold out for better stories, better production values?
Brad: We’ve had to make choices like that in comedy and teaching. There was a local pastor who had some out-of-the-box ideas that came from rigorous study of the Word. He did a small series and brought it to us. We loved it, loved his thinking, and thought it would be great, but the quality wasn’t there. It was really of a home-video quality, so we told him to bring us his next one. Well, he did and it still wasn’t quite good enough. So he brought us his third one, which we felt was acceptable.
He probably spent a couple of thousand dollars and edited it in a couple of days. The quality was still pretty low, but we felt it had a valid message and that it was good enough for us to distribute. Now that was a teaching video.
We’ve taken on some comedy that wasn’t very good, but we really believed their next one would be better. We decided to get on board with them and go on that journey with them. Now if the next one is not as good or doesn’t come, then we have a problem. We have an inferior product sitting on our shelf and it also hurts our credibility because our customers expect a certain level of quality and message. Those are hard decisions to make sometimes, but we’ve started to get a little more selective.
At the same time, even though we might not pick something up, we still develop that relationship with the artist or producer so when the next project comes along, we can be right there with them. ICVM is a great place for that to happen. People can come here with their projects – like a first-time-out with their film – and they can get some honest feedback. They can get encouragement and maybe even some help to make their next one better.
CC.com: As president of ICVM, would you give us some of the history of the organization, as well as your involvement in it?
Brad: The Crown Awards are separate of Crown Video (even though we want to make people think we are tied in). Our comedy “Full Range of Motion” won the Gold Crown Award.
Crown Awards were running before I came to ICVM. Filmmakers (16mm) and distributors started meeting in the 1960s with the Christian Film Association, made up of producers and film libraries scattered across North America. It was really a networking place for producers to bring films they had produced. They could then be plugged into these libraries, and churches could rent them. You remember all the evangelistic Sunday night films – they came from those libraries.
As video first came out, things started to change. The film libraries started to die, and we said, “You need to build a new structure, because it doesn’t work the same.” At first, they were renting them for $30-50 and selling them for huge amounts. It was very difficult, and there are producers who disappeared because they couldn’t make that transition from film to VHS video. That was through the late 1970s and through the 1980s.
When video came along, they made a Christian Video Association, so they had both a Film and a Video association. In 1993, those two groups decided to merge together and call themselves International Christian Visual Media. That was the first year I attended. Dr. Peter Allinger, of Galaxy Communications in Vancouver, Canada, who has since passed away, had phoned me a couple of times and said, “Brad, you really have to go.”
So in 1993, I came to my first ICVM here in Atlanta. We’d been dealing with many of these people for years, and I had never met them in person, so it was amazing.
Crown Video had gone through some really tough times in 1987 – 1988. Our manager quit and fired a bunch of people. I became the manager by default, so there was myself, the guy who ran our VHS duplication facility, and our receptionist. We had a lot of debt, relatively speaking, that we needed to take care of, and slowly we built it up to something that was viable.
By the time 1993 came around, we were doing quite a bit better, so my first order of business was to walk around to all these companies we’d been dealing with but hadn’t been communicating with. It’s one thing to not pay royalties so you can make payroll, but when you don’t communicate with the company, it’s not right. So we spent a lot of time rebuilding those relationships slowly but surely. I haven’t missed an ICVM since 1993, and some of those people we hurt earlier are some of my dearest friends today. That’s a really cool aspect of this conference.
CC.com: When did you become president of ICVM?
Brad: I was elected in 2005, so this is my second Catalyst Conference. I either step down at the end of the next conference or be re-elected. We’ve tried so many things to make it grow, and one way is to focus on the student side of things. We want it to grow organically, by relationship.
Bonnie Johnson and Gary Moore have been very successful in bringing a lot more actors and writers to the conference, and that’s a great area to grow in. I think we had as many as 185 here this year. Last year we were at 150, and a couple of years before that, we were at 115, so we have had some wonderful growth. This year we had the most newcomers I can ever remember having at one, so that’s a great sign as well.
CC.com: There’s a memorial fund established in your dad’s name. Would you talk about that some?
Brad: Last year, we opened the conference by giving tribute to 2 people who had influence on Christian film. One was the filmmaker Ken Anderson, the other was Ron Mix, my dad. He never made money from or was highly involved in the day-to-day activities of Crown Video. It was his idea, he helped fund it, and brought together the team to run it. That’s vastly different from a guy like Ken Anderson, who made over 100 films in his career. His whole life was creating film.
We have a family business that works in the above-ground storage tank facilities that store mostly oil. We have a family business with operations in Edmonton, Canada and Norco, Louisiana right outside of New Orleans, on the Mississippi River. He had a lot of work to do after Hurricane Katrina because so many tanks had floated off their foundations. He called me and said, “You have to come help me, there’s so much work to do.” I’d helped him before, but never for more than a few days at a time.
I went down in October of 2005 for two weeks, and he said, “You have to come back.” I was running Crown Video, of course, and it was hard to do both, but there was such a great need. There was so much damage and devastation – it was unbelievable. On the weekends, we’d actually go down into the lower Ninth Ward and drive through areas that were incredibly devastated.
In November, I went down and took my whole family for a couple of weeks. We had two jobs going, and I went to work every day, sometimes on the same site as Dad. It was an amazing time. I hadn’t spent that much time with him for probably about 20 years. I didn’t realize when we booked our tickets that it was going to be over Thanksgiving. I wouldn’t have gotten the tickets if I’d realized that, because I didn’t want to be down there not working.
It turned out that we spent Thanksgiving together, my dad, my youngest son, my youngest daughter and I, on an old swamp boat trying to fish in New Orleans. My wife and other two children had already returned home.
We lift the tanks 10 feet in the air and work under them in order to do the necessary repairs. Three weeks after I had returned home, Dad was working under a tank when the ground gave way. The ground was saturated with water from the flooding from Katrina. Dad was on a Bobcat, and when it gave way, the tank came crashing down and he was crushed underneath it. It was the toughest thing I’ve ever experienced in my life.
When I look back, I realize it was God’s grace that we spent that time together. I pulled my kids out of school, and our company paid for all the flights and expenses. I said, “Dad, you can’t afford to do that.” He said, “The company’s doing well, and family is important. Just come down. I just want to be with you guys.”
I told Sandy, “We need to pull them out of school and go down for a couple of weeks.” She said, “We can’t do that.” I said, “Yeah, we can. You know what? We can, it doesn’t matter.”
So we did, and my kids got to spend two weeks with one of the most amazing men in the whole world. He loved his grandkids like you couldn’t believe. It was so fun; he just loved to do stuff with them, and treated them like adults all the time. He did everything so wide open; hard and fast. He worked hard, and when it was time to play, he created things and they had so much fun.
At his funeral, the eulogy said, “He died as he lived, with his boots on and the throttle wide-open.” And he did. My whole world just crashed.
I was writing a book about him at the time, and I haven’t picked it up since. But I’m going to. It’s called, “My Dad’s Tougher than Your Dad.” It’s filled with stories about growing up with this unique guy who marched to his own drum, who was basically fearless. He loved God and loved his family with all of his might. It’s full of short stories about him that then transition to something spiritual.
CC.com: Are you running both companies now?
Brad: We were just bringing in a new partner when my dad died, and now we’re bringing in another. They’re each running a company, and it’s going just great.
CC.com: What are some of your favorite activities?
Brad: I love to golf. I have a 12-15 handicap now, I think. I used to have a 4 when I played a lot. I believe that my swing is every bit as good as Kevin Downes’.
CC.com: OK. I don’t know about Kevin’s swing. What’s your favorite food?
Brad: I think my kids would say nachos and hot sauce because I eat a lot of it. Three or four nights a week I grab it for supper. I use Pace sauce (a nice Texan hot sauce), and sometimes add in onions, chopped tomatoes, and cayenne pepper. I also have a salsa mix I use sometimes. I don’t share.
I grab my own bag of chips and my own bowl. Sometimes I’ll let my wife dip in it, but no one else. That’s my food. When I was at CEVMA (European ICVM), I got a Swiss bowl, and that’s my new favorite for cereal and salsa. I got the bowl and some slippers too.
CC.com: So do you cook, but are you mostly a nachos guy? What does Sandy think when she makes a meal but you eat nachos?
Brad: Honestly, she tries to feed the kids between 5 and 5:30, and I’m usually not home yet. So we eat separately a lot. I want to change that, because we have this table that’s over a 100 years old that could seat 16. I want to create memories with my family around that table.
CC.com: What are you reading right now?
Brad: I just finished reading “The Shack.” It’s amazing. Two-thirds of the way through, I told Sandy, “I think this book is going to change my life, but I don’t think I’m ready for it.” It’s just a continuation of the journey I’ve been on for at least a couple of years. It’s amazing. I want to buy a truckload and hand them out to people. I’ve talked to so many people that I think would love to read this book and let God unfold some wonderful things.
I’m also reading a book called “Samson and the Pirate Monks” by Nate Larkin. It’s about men getting together to be honest with themselves and with each other. And it’s about getting real about some of the issues we try to hide so that we can be better husbands and better men of God.
I’m in a couple of accountability groups. It’s great, because iron sharpens iron. We talk about all kinds of stuff: family, marriage, purity, everything.
CC.com: Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
Brad: I don’t know. I don’t have this huge vision, but I know that I want to build relationships to serve people. In my family and in our company, we’re on this journey together, and I want to see where it goes. We’re moving the business, Crown Entertainment, to Franklin, Tennessee, so we’ll be visiting there a lot. We want to continue to do well. God hasn’t called us to mediocrity, but to excellence in everything we do, not just creatively but in distribution also.
I want to take my my boys, to Kenya to climb Mount Kilimanjaro. Maybe take my whole family. They have these amazing tours and it would be an amazing family memory to build.
I’m looking forward to being in a position to being able to scale back and do my work but also hang out more with my wife. In the last year, I’ve been taking a day off per week to work on our other business. Sometimes I’m working at home, other times driving around to meet with accountants and lawyers. Sandy comes along with me, and I love that. I’d like to do more of that.
CC.com: Brad, thanks for your time. It’s been a long week and I know you’ve been busy. Thanks for your friendship with us at ChristianCinema.com, and I hope you get to Kilimanjaro soon.
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