Sitting around a conference table at their headquarters in Murray, Carl Bowers and Jon Millar openly admit what they're up to. Their objective is to hook schoolkids on their product and the first time is free.
No school is safe. No classroom out of their reach. Give them a child before he or she is out of sixth grade, and they just might have them for life.
"I guess we are pushers," says Bowers, smiling at the suggestion.
"But what we're pushing are values."
Meet the propaganda arm of Feature Films for Families, a Utah-based company that got started about 15 years ago when its founder, Forrest S. Baker III, became disgusted with Hollywood. After seeing too much sex and violence and hearing way too many F words, Baker founded FFFF as a distributing/production company for films not even your grandma could object to. The result is a Feature Films catalogue that contains the most wholesome, squeaky clean movies on the planet, each one rated V, for Values.
The challenge, of course, has been to get that product out to the masses. It isn't easy, competing with the publicity power of Warner Bros., Paramount, 20th Century Fox and all the rest.
So FFFF got inventive and came up with a school program that offers to send movies to school for absolutely nothing.
It's a simple plan. Feature Films calls elementary schools and tells them they can have as many DVDs as they want — up to one per student — for a weekend. After they're through with them, they can either send them back or keep as many as they want at a nominal $10-per-video fee.
The key, as Bowers, the company's vice president of sales and marketing, explains, is "having the teachers involved. If the teachers explain the program to the students, then it really works. Our founder (the aforementioned Forrest Baker) has a saying about the importance of teachers, 'Those who can, do; those who can do more, teach.' "
What the Feature Films folks want the teachers to teach is the value of values. By using wholesome videos, the message is delivered in a proactive — as opposed to a combative — way.
"If you just protest bad movies," says Millar, FFFF's schools program director, "that just gives the bad movies free publicity."
Which brings up another of Forrest's favorites: "We want to change the world, one school at a time."
Since early 2004, Feature Films has sent out free videos to nearly 7,000 elementary schools across America. Often, entire schools participate, receiving packages of 400 or more DVDs.
The return of the videos is based entirely on an honor policy. There are no late fees. And yet, amazingly enough, Feature Films hasn't lost its shirt. Bowers says that, on average, 85 percent of the DVDs are returned and 10 percent are purchased. Only 5 percent get lost in the shuffle. "We essentially break even," Bowers says.
But the benefits are nonetheless large. For one thing, awareness of the existence of Feature Films for Families continues to increase, letting the company stay in business. For another, values are taking root.
"We get letters all the time," says Bowers. "We hear about kids making good decisions after what they've seen. We heard from one boy who decided not to join a gang; we heard about a father who had left his family and made the decision to return. We get a lot of positive feedback."
Every pusher has his day.
Lee Benson's column runs Sunday, Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Please send e-mail to benson@desnews.com and faxes to 801-237-2527.