ANAHEIM, Calif. — Eight years ago, as writer-director Jon Erwin was researching an unrelated movie project, he stumbled across a 1971 issue of Time magazine, which featured a psychedelic purple picture of Jesus under the headline, “The Jesus Revolution.”
Erwin, who with his brother Andrew Erwin, has a deal with Lionsgate to release faith-based feature films, knows plenty about modern-day American Christianity. But the Time magazine cover, and the story he read after buying a vintage copy of the June 21, 1971, issue on eBay, stopped him in his tracks, he says.
“It was this 10-page spread of this spiritual awakening that was sweeping the country in the most unusual places,” the 40-year-old filmmaker says. “In a lot of places that the established religion would say were off-limits – mainly with hippies. And it was this buoyant, positive, hopeful account of Christianity. A beautiful article.”
Then Erwin realized “The Jesus Revolution” issue came just five years after the same magazine had published one of its most iconic covers, its first-ever without a photograph: instead, in red ink on a black background, it posed the question: “Is God Dead?”
“I’m a storyteller, I’m a filmmaker,” Erwin says. “So what happens between these two covers, and what was so undeniable in American society that Time had to give Jesus the cover and coin this phrase ‘Jesus Revolution’?” I couldn’t get it out of my mind.
“And you know you’re supposed to tell a story if you can’t stop thinking about it, so as we were filming these other films, like, ‘I Can Only Imagine’ and ‘American Underdog,’ I just really wanted to make this ‘Jesus Revolution’ movie.”
That movie, titled simply “Jesus Revolution,” finally arrives in theaters this week. Where the Time article looked at the big picture of the Jesus movement all across the nation, the film zooms in a small piece about how an Orange County pastor who’d welcomed youthful believers into his congregation was baptizing hundreds of young people in the waters off Newport Beach..
Some of the movie’s real-life characters are familiar names in Christian and Southern California culture. Chuck Smith, played in the film by Kelsey Grammar, was the older pastor of Calvary Chapel, while Lonnie Frisbee, the young, charismatic Jesus-loving hippie played by Jonathan Roumie, was the hippie-turned-evangelist who did the first seaside submersions of new converts.
Greg Laurie, played by Joel Courtney of Netflix’s “Kissing Booth” franchise, was a Newport Beach teenager who moved from the counterculture into the church, before launching his own Harvest Christian Fellowship in Riverside. Much of the film is told through the eyes of Laurie, who served not only as a producer of the film, which is based on his book of the same name, but also as a resource for Courtney throughout the production.
“He pretty much gave me an all-access pass to his phone number,” Courtney says of the real-life Laurie behind his character. “He’s like, ‘Any day, any time, call me, text me. I would love to tell you about the ’70s. I’d love to tell you about whatever was going on in my life that would help you do what you need to do.’”
Love and Jesus
Co-director Brent McCorkle, who also handled the music of the film, says he sees the movie as “a love letter to Christianity,” and a story he hopes can steer modern Christianity back toward some of the peace and love that made it so appealing to the young people of the Jesus Revolution.
“Across the political spectrum, we’re being taught and ingrained in a pattern of hatred and ostracization of the other,” McCorkle says. “And I’m tired of it, man, I’m sick of it. I don’t want to live this way.
“Christianity mentions the word ‘love’ in its text more than any other world religion, and yet the way that it presents itself, it’s not that, often times,” he says. ‘I think it could be one of the most loving, powerful weapons of change wielded on the planet. But we have to get back to the general tenets of Christianity.”
McCorkle says he understands why the hippies of the Jesus Movement both were attracted to the teachings of Jesus and dissatisfied with the conventiona worship that prevailed at the time.
“To be frank with you, there was a time that I ejected out of Christianity,” he says. “I’m a pastor’s kid, but I needed to get completely out of it to actually fall in love with Jesus and what he did.
“I see a time that we need to kind of hold these things up like snow globes and see what needs to change or maybe even be shattered and broken and rebuilt,” he says. “I think this younger generation, man, if they would actually look at the power of how Jesus conducted his life – some of the things he did and the people he chose to hang out with – man, I think our world would change.”
‘Greg’ and Greg
Courtney was one of the first actors to commit to the project, auditioning for it in January 2020 right before movie production ended for months as the COVID-19 pandemic erupted.
“I loved the script – it has this heart to it that just really captures my attention,” he says. “And I was just floored by the themes of faith and hope and love, and this idea of community and family, and themes that are personal to me in my faith as a Christian that I treasure so dearly.”
Like Erwin, he wasn’t familiar with the Jesus Revolution of the late ’60s and ’70s, and only knew the counterculture and its intersection with the established culture from history classes. So he, like Erwin, researched the subject both by reading and conversations with Laurie, whose life Courtney was acting out on screen.
“He’s texted me so many times,” Courtney says. “And he’s had nothing but good things to say, even down to the wardrobe. He’s like, ‘I had something just like this I wore all the time.’ Or, ‘You know, this shirt’s a little more flashy. I would have worn this back when I was doing drugs.’
“I’m like, ‘Ah, we’re spot on. The hair and makeup team, the wardrobe team, the production team,” he says. “(Greg’s) like, ‘I am transported back to my childhood.’ It was cool to see him almost reliving it.”
Songs and sounds
The production values that impressed Courtney in recreating the period of “Jesus Revolution” also extended to the soundtrack that McCorkle put together. Unlike some faith-based movies, “Jesus Revolution” includes more pop and rock tunes of the day than contemporary Christian music.
“Jon had a directive, and I thought it was so great,” McCorkle says. “He’s like, ‘I just want to feel like we dropped a camera into 1969.’ And I was like, ‘Wow, let’s go!’ So music was a huge part of that. But I have expensive taste.” (Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Don’t Stop,’ which plays near the end of the film, surely doesn’t come cheap.)
McCorkle, who considers himself a musician for whom filmmaking is his day job, says he put together an eight-hour playlist of music of the period and used that to plan for the ultimate soundtrack of the film.
“I also wanted – and they let me do this – the Christian music to only come from the band,” he says of the real-life Love Song, which provided rock and pop faith-themed music during those early Calvary Chapel crossover services. “You’re literally watching contemporary Christian music being birthed as we’re playing the film.
“So I didn’t want to pepper like modern CCM or have covers or something that felt inauthentic to me,” McCorkle says. “So we use secular music from the period, which is what we would have been feeling like had we been in 1969 when this was happening.”
Holy waters
While the classic cars and shag carpet, bell-bottoms and peasant blouses — and fake sideburns pasted on Courtney throughout the shoot — give “Jesus Revolution” a perfect period touch, the production fudged locations by shooting most of the movie in Alabama instead of Southern California.
Except for one key location, Pirates Cove in Newport Beach, the site of countless baptisms by the beach for the real-life Jesus People. To Courtney, who as Laurie is baptized by Frisbee, and then baptizes other converts, it was humbling to shoot in the actual spot.
“Pirates Cove is exactly where Greg and Cathe (Laurie’s wife) were baptized,” he says. “This is the same beach they’ve been baptized. They’ve taken people to this beach to baptize them. There have been incredible stories seen at that wall of stone with a little tiny, very scary path that leads down to that beach.”
To Courtney, the scene where he portrays the moment that Laurie accepts Jesus and is baptized was the most powerful moment of his time on location.
“It was golden hour, so we had like 15 minutes to film it,” he says of the late afternoon shoot. “We were talking with Jon Erwin and Greg Laurie and the beach and they were like, ‘Wait, so when you go out there, what are we gonna do? Because once we dunk him, he’s all wet and we can’t reset it.’
“We were definitely chasing the tail-end of that light, but we got it, and it’s one of my favorite scenes in the movie. And I hope people really connect with it.”
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