Can anything good come from Hollywood?

Michael Forbes, a former seminarian who grew up near Hollywood and who was the creative brains behind the online retail platform called shopping.com (in a way, Amazon before Amazon), often asked himself a similar question: “Can anything good come from Hollywood?”

Forbes’ life is a movie script in itself. After leaving the seminary and marrying, he and his late wife Mary Jane, who died suddenly of a stroke in 2018 at the age of 53, fathered six children in their 25 years of marriage, five of whom had hemophilia, a serious blood clotting disease.

“I studied to be a priest, and I had always prayed every day that if God was to give me someone, I’d be OK with it – but it would have to be perfectly clear,” Forbes said. “When my wife suddenly died, I was devastated. [...] “But I was so shocked, and I don’t grieve really well at all. It takes a long time for me to grieve. So, within that context, it occurred to me that if I’m not going to pray any longer for myself, I can force myself to include others. I decided, ‘Let’s go big!’”

Since Forbes grew up close to many of the mainstream Hollywood studios, he felt compelled to take on the movie industry’s not-so-subtle rebuke of the American family. “I thought, ‘Why don’t we just pray for a change of heart of all the business leaders in Hollywood?’ because there’s so much filth pouring out of this particular city,” Forbes said.

On a weekly basis, Forbes and a few like-minded friends embarked on “rosary safaris,” as an attempt to change hearts by praying on the sidewalks outside the front entrance of each major studio and also outside the offices of the largest pornography producers in the world.

“Right across the street from Family Theater Productions (a faith-based producer of movies, TV shows, radio programs and social media) is the world’s most famous gentlemen’s club,” Forbes said. “By no means is it a gentlemen’s club.” Women are in and out until they are used up. “There are abortion clinics all over the place, and they’re driven there,” Forbes said. “We’ve prayed in front of all the abortion clinics. There’s a lot of people looking the other way.”

[...] Forbes decided to build his rosary crusade by using the ubiquitous power of Zoom to unite hundreds of people across the world in praying the rosary twice a week. The rosary is a central focus of Mary’s Town Productions (marystownproductions.com), a movement of prayer for the entertainment industry. The name “Mary’s Town” is derived from Los Angeles’ original full Spanish name –  El Pueblo de la Reyna de los Angeles (the Town of the Queen of Angels).

Forbes is direct when he looks at the power of Hollywood to shape culture across the globe.

“It’s a cesspool,” he said. “Right now, there are over a thousand cities all over the world that have more than a million people, and that means you’ve got a lot of people with technologies almost as cheap as dirt, creating small, Hollywood-esque media enterprises of different sizes, shapes and flavors. But, everything still borrows heavily from the imagery and objectives and trajectories of things ‘Hollywood.’”

Can anything good come from Hollywood? Since 2019, thousands of rosaries, and counting.

Peter Finney Jr., February 16, 2024

Clarion Herald