Al Dickerson began producing movies in Hollywood 20 years ago. Back then, he worked for a film company that routinely exported films. All it took to be able to sell a film to another country was a dramatic poster, Dickerson recalls.
If the movie poster featured a smoking gun or an explosion of some sort, then — blam, pow, just that fast — the movie would be grabbed up and sold around the world.
Even though it sold well, however, Dickerson was not as proud as he might have been about his work.
Forget violence and sex. Forget shallow but marketable thrills. Dickerson dreamed of making meaningful movies. He wanted to focus on the good in the world. He wanted people to be uplifted by his work.
Last Saturday, a film that Dickerson produced in 2005 received a Character and Morality in Entertainment award. The made-for-TV film is titled "The Reading Room," and it aired on the cable Hallmark Channel.
Ironically, Dickerson had never heard of the CAMIE awards until he was nominated for one.
When he learned more about CAMIE — and then when he learned he had won — he was pleased. Getting a CAMIE award caused him to stop and think about his career and his long-held goals. He realized how happy he is doing what he's doing right now.
As for Glen Griffin, the Utahn who invented the Character and Morality in Entertainment awards, he doesn't promise that these awards will change Hollywood in any huge way. But he does believe the CAMIEs offer encouragement. They encourage producers like Dickerson, and they encourage directors and writers and actors.
Griffin, who is a retired pediatrician, especially likes to encourage young actors. He is always happy to hand a CAMIE to a child, he says. He loves bringing the children and their parents up onstage in the Leonard H. Goldenson Theatre, the same place where the Emmys are held.
Griffin puts his arm around a youngster and presents the bronze statue and says, "This was a really good film." He tells the young actor that all these people in the audience hope the youngster will keep on choosing to do such good work.
The CAMIEs got their start eight years ago, when Griffin and some of his friends in Utah County were looking for a way to strengthen families, he explains. One of their ideas was a Web site called moviepicks.org, which lists "entertaining and uplifting motion pictures that provide positive role models for building character, overcoming adversity, correcting unwise choices, and solving life's problems with integrity and perseverance — realizing some lessons of life come with pain and sorrow."
Once a committee was in place to watch movies and make picks, it was a natural step to start rewarding the people who make the movies. For a few years, the CAMIE awards were held in Salt Lake City. Recently, they've been held in North Hollywood.
Over the years, Griffin has built an interfaith alliance on his board of directors. The board now includes a Catholic bishop, the Most Rev. Thomas G. Doran; Father John Bonnici; a Muslim leader, Dr. Muzammil H. Siddiqi; and talk-radio host Rabbi Daniel Lapin, as well as Alan Osmond of the Osmond Brothers, and radio personalities Sean Hannity, Michael Medved and Dr. Laura Schlessinger. John Schneider and Leanza Cornett (Miss America 1993) hosted this year's ceremonies.
The nonprofit organization continues to depend on donations and gifts, Griffin says. Last Saturday's ceremony cost $50,000 but would have cost twice that much without volunteers. Everything from the red carpet to the music to the crafting of the statues was donated, Griffin says.
Ten movies were chosen as CAMIE award winners.
Griffin's group tries to award a number of people who worked on each film. In all, 87 people — producers and directors and writers and actors — got CAMIE awards last Saturday.
Jon Voight is the best-known actor who came to claim an award. (He won for a CBS movie about Pope John Paul.)
"It was a lot of fun and a lot bigger than I expected," Dickerson said by phone from his office in Glendale, Calif. "The people who were there were of a like mind . . . a lot of us are fathers and mothers, and a lot of people even mentioned that when they got their awards.
"I hope that for the rest of my life I can be involved in making this kind of movie."
He also spoke of having had the experience of making all kinds of movies. The smaller the budget, the harder a picture is to make, Dickerson said. "You go through all these machinations, and then you ask yourself, 'Why did I do that project?' " Or at least, he says, that is what you ask yourself if you do movies that don't mean anything.
Dickerson started out as a musician, playing bass in a show band. Then he went back to college and studied film production and worked part-time at a television station and part-time as an actor/model. Eventually he became a production assistant on a movie and began to work his way toward being a producer. Later he married and had children (ages 3 and 5) and acquired a mortgage.
Having children made his career choices more important — and also more difficult, Dickerson said.
On the one hand, having a family makes him even more proud to be one of four producers working for executive producer Larry Levinson, who has a contract with the Hallmark Channel. At night, when Dickerson comes home and begins reviewing the film that was shot that day, he never has to tell his children to leave the room. There is never anything he is afraid to have them see. Also, his mother and her friends love the movies he makes for Hallmark and he is glad they can be proud of his work.
But on the other hand, Dickerson knows what it is like to be unemployed. A few years ago the production company he was working for went out of business. It took months before he found work with Levinson.
"I know guys who have mortgaged their homes to make pictures they want to make," Dickerson says.
Not him.
Having children makes him less likely to turn down a job. If he needed work and someone gave him a chance to make a movie about two guys robbing a bank and getting away with it, well, he says, he would not hesitate. He'd make the movie and feed his family.
E-mail: susan@desnews.com