The Spiritual Cinema Circle:
Positive Alternatives for Movie Go-ers

A Conversation with Film Producer Stephen Simon

We’ve said it often enough ourselves, here at the HGJ offices, ‘There’s nothing good on TV tonight.’ Despite hundreds of cable channel offerings, it’s unusual to find a show or movie which makes you feel good or provides great food for thought. Enter The Spiritual Cinema Circle, the brainchild of Hollywood veteran film producer, Stephen Simon. A DVD of the month club, the Circle gathers together some of the finest short, feature and documentary films that are being made today in the genre of spiritual cinema. For a fairly low monthly fee, a member receives 3-5 movies to view and keep to create a permanent library of their own, or to pass on to friends. “Spiritual does not mean religious,” Stephen shares, “so for example, “Passion of the Christ” wouldn’t qualify as one of our choices, but movies like “Ghost” would.

In terms of his motivation for founding the Circle? “I don’t see myself as a metaphysical missionary. I’m not out to change people’s minds and we’re not out to change the world. What I do want is to provide entertainment that inspires, empowers and uplifts people, the people who are looking for it.”

Stephen Simon is best known for his acclaimed work as producer or executive director of twenty-five films like “Somewhere in Time” and “What Dreams May Come.” “I literally got into the film industry to make “Somewhere in Time.” In 1976 I begged my way into a job so that I could learn producing and eventually produce this story which touched me so deeply. Spiritual Cinema is the area that I’ve always been most fascinated with. However, Hollywood has never recognized this as a genre and I never felt comfortable in the film industry because it has a completely different orientation than my orientation toward film and towards life. I couldn’t do what I wanted to do there.

“Then I discovered “What Dreams May Come.” It took me twenty years to get that film made. And it is one of the proudest moments in my professional career. But it was a big Hollywood movie which cost over $80,000,000 to produce. It did all of the things I wanted it to do. But I just didn’t want to be in that arena fighting those battles any more.”

Stephen goes on to explain how a phone call, after the release of the film, changed his life forever. In 1998, right after the film hit theaters, he was contacted by a theater owner in Milwaukee who’d heard from the father of a young woman name Amanda Weber. Amanda was 17, had a rare form of cancer, and was in her final days of life. She wanted to see the movie but was too ill to go to the theater. They wanted to know if there was any way she could see the movie in her home. “I arranged for Polygram to send a copy to them on video, which you can imagine studios don’t particularly like to do the first week that a film has come out.

“A couple of weeks later I got a phone call from Amanda’s father and that’s when my life changed. He’d had a bunch of her friends come in and watch the film with her. ‘Stephen, I have to tell you,’ he said, ‘I did not watch the movie; I watched my daughter watch the movie. And when it got to the painted world sequence, I literally saw all the fear she had been experiencing in recent days, all the fear in my daughter’s face, just disappear and she became very peaceful. And the next day she asked to be taken out to a park to see all the fall colors, and the day after that she died very peacefully.’ And Chuck said to me, ‘Listen, I don’t have any idea whether this movie is a good movie or a bad movie according to the critics. I have no idea if it’s doing any business or not. Frankly, I don’t care about any of that. I just want you to know that it changed the last two days of my daughter’s life, and that my friend, is the only success that you should ever want.’ And everything changed in that moment. And I just said, you know what, that’s it. This is all I’m going to do and I can’t do it in Hollywood.”

It took Stephen a few years more to extricate himself, but he did and moved to Ashland, Oregon, which he purports is “a very spiritual community,” where he’s focused on making smaller films, his newest being “Indigo” (see page 10) and growing the Spiritual Cinema Circle venture.

Commitment to community is also a priority with Stephen these days and it is evident in how the Circle is set up. “It’s very important to us that this be a community, that it be a family. We have over 100 communities around the world that get together once a month to discuss the films. That is our audience-based community. They’ve created a support system of people in their community who care about this kind of subject matter. Because anyone who’s on a spiritual journey, I think, knows that it’s very challenging to do that alone. So, you really want to have people around you that have a like purpose in mind.

“The other 20% of our communities are what we call our artistic based communities. These are communities that actually are in the process of wanting to make movies in this genre, and are made up of a community’s writers, actors and directors. We have those in about 15 or 20 different cities around the world. For instance, the Los Angeles community is in the process of actually making their first film which was completely generated, financed and crewed within the Circle community. Which is what we hope will happen more and more as time goes by.”

Launched in the March of 2004, the Spiritual Cinema Circle has caught on very quickly with subscribers in over 60 countries. There is also a philanthropic bent to Stephen’s plan. For every membership purchased, a tree is planted somewhere in the world. Almost 100,000 trees have been or are in the process of being planted. “We want people to know that at least part of their funds are going towards an environmental issue. The environment is something that is very important to all of us, and it’s one thing to say you’re going to do something about it, it’s another thing to do it,” Stephen adds.

And what’s on the horizon for Stephen Simon? “I’m going to make the film version of Conversations with God. This is something that I have been wanting to do for a long time and Neale Donald Walsch will star in it. It’s a very empowering, beautiful and touching story that addresses issues I think need to be addressed in film today. I hope it will be be, for the spiritual community, what ‘The Passion of the Christ’ was for the religious community.”

To learn more about the Spiritual Cinema Circle,
visit: www.spiritualcinemacircle.com

“Indigo,” a collaboration between Stephen Simon, Neale Donald Walsch and James Twyman, was released in theaters January 29, 2005—a dramatic film about a 10-year-old Indigo child that helps to heal her disintegrated family. It recently won the Audience Choice Award at Santa Fe Film Festival. For showings & locations visit www.indigothemovie.com.