Reel Appeal

Many charities dream of advancing their cause on the big screen, where the payoff, and risks, can be huge

Special Olympics encourages mentally disabled people to take risks and pursue intense athletic competition. The charity took a risk of its own when it decided to work with Bobby and Peter Farrelly, the writer-director pair responsible for movies like Dumb & Dumber and There’s Something About Mary.

The Farrellys wanted to produce a movie about a character who tries to rig a Special Olympics pentathlon, figuring that a person who didn’t have a disability could act like he had one — and outdo the disabled athletes. They asked the charity’s board if Special Olympics would allow its name to be used and would play other roles in the film’s production.

For Special Olympics, the opportunities were great: a chance to get plenty of free visibility and earn money through events tied to the movie release, as well as through subsequent releases on DVD and television and international distribution.

But if things turned out wrong, Special Olympics and the people it serves could be demeaned. Some people on Special Olympics’ board believed that the Farrellys had already done just that by portraying a mentally retarded character in There’s Something About Mary as a violent person.

Nevertheless, the charity decided it was worth the experiment and agreed to help the Farrellys produce The Ringer, which was released Christmas weekend and will be available on DVD in May.

While not many charities get to play a starring role in a movie, film is becoming an increasingly important tool for causes of all kinds.

Some groups hope to advance their missions — and fund raising — by getting movies to call attention to an issue, while others are hoping that making movies can generate revenue that can be used to finance their charitable works.

At the same time, studios and celebrities appear ever more eager to gain good will by lending their name and star power to causes they find worthy. That attention is helping many charities raise money and attract supporters they might not have reached otherwise.

“Filmmakers want to have any impact on the community and the world generally, and the only way they can do that effectively is to reach out and collaborate with nonprofits,” says Shira Golding, director of education and outreach at Arts Engine, a New York City group that encourages collaboration among filmmakers and nonprofit groups. “What they’re bringing to the table is the film, and charities are bringing an understanding of the issue and reach, since they presumably have a constituency. It makes sense to work together rather than independently, for real change to happen.”

Reaching Young People

While Special Olympics had collaborated with other filmmakers on movies made for television, The Ringer was the first theatrical motion picture that the organization participated in, says Kirsten Seckler, director of media and public relations at Special Olympics.

What appealed most to the charity was that the movie offered “a great opportunity for the doors to open to the youth audience,” she says.

It was an audience that the group was eager to reach, she explains. “We’ve found that while our athletes have a great time when they come to Special Olympics events, in the regular world — at school, at work, in the mall — they’re often not accepted,” Ms. Seckler says. “They’re looked through, shunned, misunderstood, and feared. We wanted to share with the world everything we know about our athletes: that they’re special, fun, capable, talented people who can be everyone’s friend.”

After some deliberation by the board, Special Olympics not only agreed to allow its name and likeness to appear in the film, but also provided 150 athletes who served as extras. In addition, the charity allowed the filmmakers to shoot crowd scenes at the organization’s world Olympic competition in Ireland.

The movie included scenes of other Special Olympics events that the producers staged and re-created. To ensure that everything would be portrayed accurately, the charity negotiated script approval, and also had a technical director on the set throughout filming.

However, “we didn’t have final approval of the movie, so there were some risks involved for us,” Ms. Seckler says. “But knowing the players, knowing the greater good of attitude change that could come from this, we did take that bold risk as an organization, and we collaborated with them.”

‘Broad Awareness’

So far, the gamble has paid off. In the month after the movie was released, the organization’s Web site attracted 150,000 more hits than it usually does.

The social-networking Web siteMySpace, which is popular with teenagers and young adults, had a section for discussing The Ringer that has attracted 400,000 visitors, most of whom posted positive comments about the film, Ms. Seckler says. In addition, she says, more than 1,000 newspapers printed articles about the film and the involvement of Special Olympics.

Special Olympics has used the movie as a fund-raising tool — it sold tickets to the benefit premiere in Los Angeles in December and hosted special screenings to cultivate more donors. The Los Angeles benefit alone raised $60,000.

“This was a great step in reaching a broad audience of people,” says Ms. Seckler. “In today’s mass-media world, it’s so hard to reach people, who are being inundated by so many messages. We think that this has given us the most broad awareness that we’ve ever gotten.”

Even when a charity is not directly tied to a movie’s plot line, it still has plenty of opportunities to benefit from the release of a film.

The Children’s Health Fund, a charity in New York City that provides health care to children nationwide, got a big lift after Lucasfilm and 20th Century Fox selected the organization to benefit from the New York premiere of Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith when it was released last spring.

The charity raised $330,000, after expenses were counted, from the premiere. Karen Redlener, the charity’s executive director, says beyond the money the charity also was able to benefit from “increased public awareness about our organization, and we reached a whole new audience of people not previously aware of us — Star Wars fans, people that are interested in and pay attention to the movie industry and celebrities.”

The Children’s Health Fund had long been aggressively looking for opportunities to benefit from a premiere. It sent letters to major film studios, asking whether opportunities were available. Eventually Lucasfilm responded by saying it was looking for children’s charities in major cities to benefit from the premiere of Star Wars III.

The charity filled out an application provided by the production company, in much the same way that the charity would apply for a grant.

The Children’s Health Fund highlighted the organization’s past experience at managing big, high-profile events, and also discussed how it would make the most of the red-carpet event, such as finding ways to get attention from the news media and holding a party after the event.

Lucrative Tickets

The charity got the nod. Lucasfilm allowed the charity to sell every ticket in the movie showing — even the actors would have to purchase a ticket.

General admission tickets started at $600. The cost of tickets to the movie and a party afterward, which the charity arranged, started at $1,100 apiece; packages went up from there, topping out at the “Jedi Knight Package,” which cost $30,000 and included 20 tickets to the premiere and party, priority seating, and acknowledgments in the event program and press releases.

The event allowed the charity to raise funds from old and new donors alike. The charity put out an announcement about the premiere (along with information about the organization) on movie-chat Web sites and Star Wars-enthusiast sites.

The organization had a chance to tell its story at the event, where it showed a video explaining the work that it did.

Already, a trickle of money has come in from people who attended the premiere and decided to give again — 3 percent of them have made a second gift, and the charity says it hopes to encourage more to do so as the one-year anniversary of the benefit looms.

The Star Wars experience, though successful, was also a lot of work, says Ms. Redlener. “It does take an organizational infrastructure to take full advantage of this type of opportunity,” she says.

The charity dedicated four to five staff members to the project, part time or full time, for about nine months, and also hired a few outside consultants. “To maximize the opportunity, you need to have enough resources to do it really well,” says Ms. Redlener.

But even charities that do not have large staffs can find ways to capitalize on the money that the entertainment industry spends trying to find new ways to attract viewers.

YouthAIDS, a division of Population Services International, a Washington charity that focuses on educating young adults about the ways they can prevent the spread of AIDS, managed to reach 1.5 billion people through a collaboration with MTV.

Kate Roberts, founder of YouthAIDS, had been the managing director for Eastern Europe of the Saatchi & Saatchi advertising company. Through connections from her old job, she learned about Staying Alive, a 90-minute documentary that MTV was producing about the making of a concert series that featured Missy Elliott, Alicia Keys, and Dave Matthews performing in two concerts, one in Seattle and one in South Africa.

She decided to ask MTV if YouthAIDS could be involved with the concert series, providing the information and content on HIV/AIDS that would run during the documentary and bedistributed at the concerts, which also drew financing from Levi’s Jeans, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation.

MTV agreed, and asked YouthAIDS to be “responsible for all the messaging that ran throughout the documentary and concerts, for the logistics, and for briefing the talent on the project,” says Ms. Roberts. “It was a mammoth, mammoth exercise, but in one swoop it got YouthAIDS out to 165 countries, and we reached a lot of kids with a cool and upbeat message.”

The documentary was broadcast around the world, attracting new attention to YouthAIDS. Soon after that, VH1, the sister station of MTV, asked YouthAIDS to participate in a documentary on the effects AIDS has had on pop culture.

Starting a Movie Company

For some charities, working with the entertainment industry is not enough. Some groups want to become players in the business.

In 1998 Mart Green founded Bearing Fruit Communications, a charity in Oklahoma City that wants to use the entertainment and news media to encourage people to read the Bible and live its teachings.

Mr. Green, whose background was in the retail industry, started out by creating 30-second television public-service announcements that are aimed at persuading people to read the Bible, through a campaign called “This Book Is Alive.”

He soon decided to extend his publicity efforts by creating a motion-picture studio that would produce a major feature film and then channel the proceeds into other film projects that would be in line with Bearing Fruit’s mission.

The idea came when Mr. Green heard a lecture by Steve Saint, the son of a missionary who was killed by a violent native tribe in Ecuador that later renounced its violent ways. Mr. Saint returned to Ecuador with his own family to continue his father’s work. Mr. Green was inspired by the story, and thought it was a perfect vehicle to demonstrate living biblically.

“I pulled my car over in a Wal-Mart parking lot, and I thought, man, that’s gotta be a movie,” he remembers. “The next thing I knew I was calling Steve Saint and asking for the rights for the movie.”

Mr. Saint gave his permission, but said that Mr. Green also needed to get the permission of the tribe. “So I flew to Ecuador, got on the bush plane, and asked them for the rights to make a movie of their story,” he says.

The tribe turned him down. But a short time later, after members of the tribe heard about the school-shooting incident at Columbine High School in Colorado, in which more than two dozen students and faculty members were killed or wounded, they changed their minds.

“We used to live angry and hating, and now we don’t,” Mr. Green says the tribal leaders told him.

The tribe hoped to help heal violence in America by telling its own story.

With the movie rights to the story secured, Mr. Green hired writers to work on the script. New complications soon developed.

Mr. Green wanted to tell the story of the Ecuador tribe, and the writers were producing scripts that told the story from the perspective of the missionaries — such a story would play better in the multiplex, they said.

Finally, he decided to make a documentary telling the story from the South American perspective, in addition to the movie, which would betold from the North American perspective.

The documentary proved easier to put together. Beyond the Gates of Splendor was released in Oklahoma City, Houston, and Tulsa, Okla., in November 2004, and is now available on DVD.

In the meantime, work continued on the feature movie that would eventually be called End of the Spear. As the movie was developed, Mr. Greenformed a separate for-profit production company, called Every Tribe Entertainment, to produce the picture.

Bearing Fruit, the nonprofit organization that Mr. Green founded, donated $10-million to Every Tribe Entertainment to make the film, in the hopes that the film would be successful enough to produce other films that will encourage people to read and live by the message of the Bible.

Since the film was released in nearly 1,000 movie theaters in January, it has earned $12-million at the box office. Mr. Green initially had hoped the film would make $30-million, but that, he says, would be like “a first-year team wanting to win the World Series.”

He says rights to the movie have been sold in eight other countries, and television and DVD releases could bring in more money.

“We got a single as far as business is concerned,” he says. “We feel we hit a home run on the ministry side as we told the story from the tribe’s point of view and did it in a quality way.”

Now Every Tribe Entertainment is working on a film and documentary on the AIDS crisis in Africa.

Mr. Green believes that film has great potential for charities seeking to get their message across.

“We can reach more people through the movies,” he says. “Instead of telling you something, I can show you it, and it’s more emotional. People who go to church can’t remember the sermon from last week, but hey, can quote you a line from a movie they saw 20 years ago. What we feel, we remember.”