Hippies, church collide in ‘Jesus Revolution’
1971 Time cover on national movement inspires filmmaker
Eight years ago, as writer-director Jon Erwin was researching an unrelated movie project, he stumbled across a 1971 issue of Time magazine that 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 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 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 without a photograph. 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,” has finally arrived in theaters. Where the Time article looked at the big picture of the Jesus movement all across the nation, the film zooms in on a small piece about how a pastor who had welcomed youthful believers into his congregation was baptizing hundreds of young people in the waters off Newport Beach, California.
Some of the movie’s reallife characters are familiar names in Christian culture. Chuck Smith, played in the film by Kelsey Grammer, was the older pastor of Calvary Chapel, while Lonnie Frisbee, played by Jonathan Roumie, was the hippie-turned-evangelist who did the first seaside submersions of new converts.
Greg Laurie, played by Joel Courtney, was a Newport Beach teenager who moved from the counterculture into the church, before launching his own Harvest Christian Fellowship in Riverside, California.
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.
Courtney was one of the first actors to commit to the project, auditioning for it in January 2020 right before the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted movie productions.
“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.
“He’s texted me so many times,” Courtney says of Laurie. “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.”
The production values that impressed Courtney in recreating the period of “Jesus Revolution” also extended to the soundtrack that co-director Brent 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.”
McCorkle 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.”
While the classic cars and shag carpet, bellbottoms and peasant blouses — and fake sideburns pasted on Courtney throughout the shoot — give “Jesus Revolution” a perfect period touch, the production shot 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.
“Pirates Cove is exactly where Greg and Cathe (Laurie’s wife) were baptized,” Courtney 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 at 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.”