I don’t remember how I first stumbled on Stephen Simon’s web site, www.mysticalmovies.com, but I was instantly hooked. On his site, Stephen, an academy award- winning film producer, reviewed recently released movies he felt belonged to an as-yet-unrecognized genre, a genre which he labeled “spiritual cinema ”– and encouraged his visitors to see these films in small groups of friends and family and discuss them together.

I felt enriched and enjoyed his values-oriented insights and perspective on Hollywood’s current offerings, and was excited to discover he was the guiding light behind two of my very favorite movies, the reincarnation/time-travel love story, Somewhere in Time, and the life-between-lives epic, What Dreams May Come. He has been involved with the making of a host of other popular films,including Smokey and the Bandit,The Electric Horseman,and four Neil Simon movies, including The Goodbye Girl and California Suite.

But it was the idea of combining community, good movies, and spirituality that struck a chord in me.

I followed his postings for several months, and then his concept of small, spiritually-minded groups going to the movies or renting videos together morphed into an even larger vision – Spiritual Cinema Circle – a subscription service, similar to the “book-of-the-month club,” that could deliver the very best of spiritual cinema to your door. Every year there are excellent spiritual films made,of which the general public is not aware.Some are short features,some foreign films,and some not released by the major studios. Many have won awards at film festivals,but the general public never learns about them. Major distributors aren’t interested in the most heartfelt,soul-satisfying movies, because they consider them financial risks and not commercial. Even independent distributors often overlook these quality films.

From Stephen,an industry insider, I was told that concessions as much as anything else provides the fuel that drives the mainstream movie business.“Big, violent action movies,”he acknowledges,“bring in audiences that eat those huge $7 boxes of popcorn and those 32-ounce $4 cups of soft drinks.That ’s why theater owners want them,and that ’s why Hollywood makes them.”

A passionate storyteller (Somewhere in Time is one of only three to have its own fan club!),Stephen is a man with many contacts throughout the film industry and is a frequent speaker at major film festivals around the world.In April 2004,on his web site,Stephen introduced his latest innovation, Spiritual Cinema Circle,as an option for movie buffs who want to combine their spiritual interests with their movie experiences.For about $25 a month,subscribers would receive two DVDs containing 3-5 features,documentaries, and shorts representing the very best of spiritual cinema.“The movies you ’ll see as a member are made with love and passion,”he promised,“not just to sell popcorn.”

I wanted to interview Stephen Simon for Venture Inward because I felt many readers would benefit and truly appreciate learning about Stephen and his new endeavor to provide us with good adult films that feed the soul. Movies have been such an important part of our culture and in our own lives. Every one of us has our own personal “library ” of special film experiences that have impacted and inspired our lives. For me, Field of Dreams, with its “out of time ”reconciliation of the hero’s father-and-son issues, stands out in my memories. And whenever I even think about O Brother Where Art Thou, with its quirky characters, bizarre mythic storyline, and soulful music, I relive my original delight with an inner chuckle.

Robert Krajenke: You are the producer of two films that I dearly love, Somewhere in Time (SIT) and What Dreams May Come (WDMC). One deals with time travel, rebirth, and deep, passionate romantic love. The other has life after death as its theme, and the deep, profound bond between soul mates, and rebirth. Are these areas of special interest for you?

Stephen Simon: My interests are expanding. And certainly with SIT and WDMC, that was a fascination with me. I am always going to be fascinated with that, but I am interested in other areas as well that deal with various aspects of spirituality – the aspect of family, of choice, and of forgiveness, which is the subject matter of the recent movie, Indigo which I directed and produced. I am very interested in the Mary Magdalene myth, and I am going to do Neil Donald Walsch’s Conversations with God as a film late this year. There is a fascinating message in there about overcoming adversity and how we all have the capacity within us to talk to God, or Goddess, however you want to call it.

Q: Edgar Cayce was one of the greatest time travelers of all. Are you familiar with him?

A: Sure, of course. I’ve read a lot of Cayce books over the years. I’ve always been fascinated by Atlantis and I must have re-read his readings on Atlantis hundreds of times.

Q: Is that a film you would be interested in making?

A: At some point, I would love to. No one has ever been able to do Edgar Cayce for all kinds of reasons, or do it well. There is a fabulous movie in there somewhere, and I hope someday somebody will do it, and maybe it will be me.

Q: Stephen, what first attracted me to your web site was the spiritual perspective of your reviews, and the idea you had of creating community around films. Has community always been important to you?

A:Yes, I think that is the single most important thing about being on a spiritual path. It’s very hard to do that alone, very hard, even if its possible, and I am not sure it is possible because you need the perspective of people that have the same frame of mind you do,I think,almost in anything.

Q: When you first introduced Spiritual Cinema Circle, I had the sense of a morphic field being created, another initiative, like the Harmonic Convergence or your friend James Twyman’s Peace Initiatives, and many others who use the Web to organize energy around a specific issue, planetary configuration,or political or social concern in order to raise consciousness and initiate change. Quantum physics now recognizes the phenomenon of “the critical mass ”– that when it’s reached, rapid or instant change occurs, and all these initiatives, including yours, are focused on creating a more spiritually aware, connected, harmonious world. It seems to me, your efforts are part of this planetary impulse.

A: Nothing we are doing now would be possible without the Internet; SpiritualCinemaCircle.com could never exist without the Internet. I never could have pioneered the idea of calling spiritual cinema a genre without the Internet. And you are quite perceptive to notice that this world-wide spiritual community is now connected through the Internet. Again, that is the essence of community. It is very important not to feel that you are living and working and thinking and believing and breathing out there in a void. And what has happened to the teachings of people like Jimmy Twyman, Neale Donald Walsch, Marianne Williamson, Deepak Chopra, and others, is everyone can now communicate through the Internet. To my mind, the Internet is the single most important thing that has helped the proliferation of spirituality in the world.

Q: Again, t gets back to community.

A: The concept of community is critical. It is important for the viewer and also for filmmakers, and we are encouraging filmmakers now to submit their films to Spiritual Cinema Circle so they will be part of the community. The ultimate goal is to have a community of filmmakers around the world – writers, producers, directors, actors, electricians, grips – to make these movies together so that we never again have to make movies we don’t believe in, simply to make a living. That’s our goal.

Q: And the Circle makes it possible for us in the audience to find or start a movie group if we want to enjoy and discuss these spiritual movies with others who are like- minded.

A: People can go to SpiritualCinemaCircle.com and find a community near them.We have 150 active Circles and 100 more forming, mostly in the United States, but also all around the world. If you want to form one, get in touch with our international community coordinator.We have all the spiritual cinema asks two eternal questions: Who are we? and Why are we here? and allows us to answer those questions for ourselves. guidelines and suggestions at SpiritualCinemaCircle.com.

Q: What is your take on the state of consciousness in Hollywood today?

A: It has really deteriorated, and it didn’t start at the highest place to begin with. The climate in the Hollywood film business over the last 20 years has deteriorated just terribly, for a lot of reasons. The primary reason is the corporate takeover of every single studio in Hollywood over the last 10 years, and the installation of managers rather than creative risk-takers. Because of that, the costs have just skyrocketed and the focus has really become blockbuster movies. All they want to do is make huge successes. There is nothing wrong with that as long as there is a balance. But the studios have lost the balance because they are no longer being driven creatively by entrepreneurial, passionate filmmakers who want to make films for a large variety of audiences.

Q: If corporate greed and popcorn sales are the forces producing most of the films we get from Hollywood – what is the impulse behind spiritual cinema?

A: Part of the reason I moved out of Los Angeles in 2001, a city in which I was born and lived and worked my entire life, was that I was convinced that a new paradigm of film- making was not going to get birthed within the belly of the beast.Look, I love a lot of those Hollywood films. There is nothing wrong with making movies like Spiderman.Let Hollywood make those movies, that ’s wonderful. And then there will be those of us around the world who, in independent filmmaking, are going to make movies with a different distribution system, a different way of marketing, a different consciousness that does not use Hollywood distribution in any way. And that is what spiritual entertainment is now all about.

Q: But some good movies manage to get made each year.

A: Hollywood has in the last 10 years broken a pact that it has had with audiences forever, which is that it would make movies for everyone. That is almost never the case anymore. Usually, the movies that have interesting adult subject matter are squeezed into October, November, and December to qualify for academy-award consideration and prestige. The other eight or nine months of the year we rarely get anything other than large action films, big dumb comedies, big partner comedies, big star vehicles and things like that. Classic storytelling has all but disappeared from Hollywood. As a result a lot of people have stopped going to movies as a habit. They will go to a movie if a bunch of friends tell them it’s a good movie. But people don’t go once or twice a month anymore.

So there is a huge disenfranchisement of filmmakers whom we hope to bring back through the Spiritual Cinema Circle by making spiritually-oriented films. I hope we can actually go back to what I call a shamanic version of movie-making, the kind of 21st-century version of sitting around a campfire, passing down the myths and cultures of one generation to another.

Q: Oh, I love the sound of that – shamanic storytelling.

A: It is the electronic equivalent of doing that, and that means you need a great storyteller and a great story. That’s what spiritual filmmaking can really be about, which is not dependent on movie stars, or large costs, or huge special effects – just a return to great storytelling. That is what we hope to do with spiritual films for the next several generations.

Q: In your book, The Force Is with You: Mystical Movie Messages That Inspire Our Lives, you discuss over 70 films and conclude that these and scores of others constitute a distinct but as-yet-unrecognized genre of film, a genre you call spiritual cinema.

A: Spiritual cinema asks two eternal questions: Who are we? and Why are we here? and allows us to answer those questions for ourselves. Films such as It ’s a Wonderful Life, 2001:A Space Odyssey,Field of Dreams,and Ghost illuminate the landscape of our evolution as humanity and stir us to remember who we can be when we reach beyond the seen into a realm where we engage the magical aspects of our human potential.

Q:Why is it important to have spiritual films recognized as a distinct genre?

A: So that people know what they are and can actually find them, and that people realize there is a market for this. When something is defined as a genre, it means that there is a built-in audience that will go to films with that subject matter. To use a silly analogy (but it works), teenage horror movies like Scream and Nightmare on Elm Street don ’t require big-name movie stars; they don’t require big budgets, because everybody knows that there is a particular market for those films. Once spiritual entertainment – spiritual cinema – is accepted as a genre, then, ipso facto, it means there is a built-in audience. That’s why it is so critical that we come together and we call it spiritual cinema.

Q: Do you consider religious films such as Mel Gibson ’s Passion spiritual entertainment?

A: The mainstream media almost always uses “religious ” and “spiritual ” as synonyms. It is important to distinguish between spiritual entertainment and religious entertainment.“Religious ”reflects the teaching of an organized religion that, in general, presents specific rules and rituals that must be followed to experience a connection with the divine, usually a supreme being, almost always male, that is outside of humanity. “Spiritual ” entails a more personal, inner-directed and individual experience of the divine, which is generally represented as more of an integral aspect of our own humanity. Spiritual cinema essentially focuses on the empowerment of the god within each individual, whereas religious film focuses on God as an external power.

Q: And people are hungry for this type of entertainment?

A: There are several video stores in the US today that are building Spiritual Cinema Circle sections in their video store. It was pioneered in Southern Oregon by DJ ’s Video, a massive store that began in the 1970s, when videos first became available. DJ’s has about 50,000 titles. The owner of the store read my book and realized that she not only had all the movies I listed, but 300-400 other titles that fit under the spiritual cinema category. We worked with DJ ’s, and they built a section in the store with 400 –500 movies that are called spiritual cinema. The owner told us as soon as she gathered these movies in one place and categorized them as a genre, movies that had sat neglected in various sections were suddenly flying off the shelves.

Q: Yes, I can see myself heading for that section of the store.

A: There is a huge audience that wants this type of entertainment and wants it classified as spiritual entertainment, that’s why it is so important.

Q: What do you see in the future for Spiritual Cinema Circle and the genre?

A: The primary goal right now is to have more and more films and filmmakers participating in the Circle. Beyond that we will be producing and distributing our own films, and beyond that we will distribute and market films theatrically in this genre. We want to become in spiritual entertainment what Disney is in animation. When you see Spiritual Cinema Circle on a movie, you ’re going to want to see it because you know what we are doing. If you see Disney (now Dream - Works) on an animated film, you know what to expect. Eventually we will be like any other distribution company. We will finance, produce, market, and distribute movies into theaters and into people’s homes all around the world.

Q:Stephen,“The Force ”is with you and all that you are doing. Thank you for your time.It is deeply appreciated. Simon

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Robert Krajenke