Reimagining the Nativity

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Friday, November 29th.

Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Nick Eicher.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: I’m Lindsay Mast.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: The making of a Christmas classic.

The Herdmans were absolutely the worst kids in the history of the world. They lied and stole and smoked cigars even the girls and talked dirty and hit little kids and cussed their teachers and took the name of the Lord in vain and set fire to Fred Shewmaker’s old toolhouse.

So begins the children’s novel, The Best Christmas Pageant Ever.

It’s the story of what happens when those horrible Herdman kids manhandle their way into the town’s Christmas theatrical. Hijinks ensue, and by the end of the book, well, we all learn some lessons about the true meaning of Christmas in a very honest and heartwarming way.

MAST: The book is laugh-out-loud funny. Author Barbara Robinson wrote it more than 50 years ago and it won the ALA Notable Children’s Book Award. In my family, it’s not just a Christmas read-aloud tradition. Doesn’t matter what time of year–My youngest often has the audiobook going–I think she has it memorized.

EICHER: The Best Christmas Pageant Ever is now a movie—bringing the Herdmans to life on the big screen.

They even set fire to Fred Shewmaker’s old broken down toolshed. To be fair, the shed was ugly and was about to fall over anyway. My father said burning it down was the only good thing the Herdmans ever did and if they’d known it was a good thing, they wouldn’t have done it at all. They were just so all-around awful, you could hardly believe they were real.

A couple weeks ago, we reviewed the film when it first hit theaters. The movie is directed by Dallas Jenkins, known best for his work on The Chosen. And today, we have a conversation with Jenkins about why he felt compelled to bring this story to the screen … and why he feels like this is the movie he was born to make.

MAST: Dallas Jenkins, welcome to the program.

JENKINS: Oh, thank you so much for having me. I'm so glad you've read the book, and are as excited as I am to get this movie out there.

MAST: Let’s start with your own history with the book. When did you first read it?

JENKINS: The more I've thought about it, I think it's actually closer to 20 years ago. My wife, Amanda, brought it home from Pottery Barn. She was there shopping and saw it on the counter. I think they were doing a little special board or something. And she's like, oh, yeah. I remember this book as a kid, and it was a TV movie in the 80s—kind of a short, little TV movie. And so we said, “Oh, let's read it to the kids. And so I was reading it, and pretty quickly, a couple things started happening. Number one, it's very, very funny. The story is just brilliantly written by the author, Barbara Robinson, who's, unfortunately, no longer with us, but so I was already laughing and going, Man, this is funny.

And then fairly early on, I'm like, this is a Jesus story, you know? And it's a Jesus story fairly early on, the Herdmans are the worst kids in the history of the world. But they take over this church's Christmas pageant, and they are, you know, through the course of the story, start asking all these questions because they've never heard the story before, and you ultimately find out that, because of their poverty and their outsider status, they're actually closer to the heart of the nativity story than even we are in our kind of suburban American church environment. And so we learn from them as much as they learn from us. And so as I'm reading the story, I get to the end of it, and in the last chapter, I am weeping like I am. I can't read. And my wife goes, Oh, let me, let me read it. And so she starts to read. She can't get through it because she's crying. So we just hand it back to each other. And so the Christmas tradition became to not only read this story to our kids every year, but for our kids to make fun of us for the fact that we could never get through without crying.

MAST: I do the exact same thing! Every time. So you read the book, you love it… and then what?

JENKINS: Yeah, after that first time, I said, I have to make this movie. So, I was searching for the rights, looking online, everywhere. I tracked down this group of guys who have the rights, and they said, Oh yeah, appreciate your passion, but it's already, you know, with a studio, and they're developing it as a different kind of movie. And I was like, man, and I had so many different opportunities over the years. The rights would expire at a studio, and I would reach out to them again and go, please, let me, let me do this movie. And they're like, Well, no, because I was, you know, I hadn't had the success of The Chosen yet, and they wanted to do a big studio project with these big filmmakers. So, I would check in every year, you know, praying that the movie wasn't getting made. And finally, just a couple years ago, the mom of one of the rights holders calls him up and says, You've got to watch this show called The Chosen. It is changing my life. It is so good. He goes, Oh, that's funny. The creator has been bugging me for years to try to get the rights to this story. She's like, you better do it with him. You better give him the rights. And so the mom, you know, I think she was in her 70s at the time, you know, he made him go watch the show, and he ultimately decided to, when the rights expired with the studio, to let me do it. And so we set it up with another studio, and I got to be the filmmaker.

MAST: So what about the story made you so passionate about getting it off the page and onto the big screen?

JENKINS: This movie, I sometimes call it a Trojan horse. On the surface, it's a best selling book that's been read in public schools all over the country. It's performed as a play all over the world. But beneath the surface, and in fact, not in a subtle way, it is the story of the Nativity. It is the story of how the power of Jesus and the power of church can actually truly change a kid's life, even a broken group of kids, and how they can also kind of teach us something about the story of God and the story of Nativity. So I'm just really, really excited about this story getting to the world.

MAST: Why do you say this is the movie you were born to make?

JENKINS: Yeah. I mean, the thing about The Best Christmas Pageant Ever is when people see it, they'll think, oh, wow, this is so different from The Chosen. Again, on the surface—the style, the tone, the time period, of course, it's very different from the first century and the way that we shoot The Chosen. But the theme is actually similar, and that is telling the story of Jesus that we've heard a million times, but through a different lens, not changing it, not changing the intention of it, not changing the character of Jesus and the Gospels, but telling it through a different lens, a different perspective. And just like people have said that they've experienced with The Chosen, and just like people say in the movie The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, it sometimes brings a story to life in a fresh way that they hadn't considered before, and re-engages and re-energizes their relationship with God. And that's what I think this movie can do that's similar to The Chosen.

MAST: We’ve come a long way from the Christmas pageants that you read about in this book and in the Ramona Quimby books–preschool angel choirs and shepherds dressed in their dad’s bathrobes and such. Your own work has brought the production level of Christian storytelling up by a few notches. Is there still a place for more quaint tellings of Jesus’ story?

JENKINS: That’s such a good question and absolutely. I think there’s something charming about the quaintness of it because that’s actually the story itself. And you see that in this movie, there's a moment, I don't want to give too much away, although, you know the title calls it The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, so you know things do work out. But Imogene Herdman, who's the meanest and the baddest of the Herdman kids, is portraying the part of Mary. And the tradition in that church Christmas pageant is for Mary to be dressed in white and to practically have a halo around her head, to be this sweet, you know, pretty little thing that's presented as almost perfect, right? Like in a lot of nativities that we see. And Imogene brings from home the table cloth, and she wraps it around herself. And she even says to one of the girls, if I'm going to play Mary, I'm going to look like the real Mary. And she brings to it the quaintness and the, you know, maybe poverty is too strong a word, but I think it's accurate. She brings to the story the truth of it, which is that Mary and Joseph and the stable and the animals and all that stuff are not we're not cutesy and sweet, and it wasn't also big and epic like we sometimes portray. So I think there is something to be said for that simplicity and the quaintness of it. And I think that when we can see the heart of Jesus through quaintness, and we don't need spectacle, I think that's actually closer to the heart of the story.

MAST: Dallas Jenkins, thanks for giving us your time today.

JENKINS: Oh, thanks so much for having me. Those are really wonderful questions and a great conversation.

EICHER: There’s a lot more to Lindsay’s conversation with Dallas Jenkins…and we thought this would be a great weekend to post it as families are out and about and perhaps looking for something to listen to when you’re ready for a break from Christmas music…so keep an ear out for that.

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