Trust us when we tell you how unusual it is to find an independent film company in its fourth decade. And believe us when we say it’s about as common as finding a film house staffed with people trying every day to figure out what Jesus would do.
“I started IMS Productions 34 years ago as a Christian experiment,” Max Paul Franklin says of his firm. “One of the things that really affected the direction of this company was the book In His Steps by Charles Sheldon. It’s the one about the concept What Would Jesus Do?”
The IMS legend has Franklin starting his new company out of the driver’s side of a Volkswagen, meeting prospective clients at local coffee shops because he had no office and rapidly parlaying his skills as cinematographer and director into a hundred thousand dollar debt, give or take.
But that was then. In the intervening years Max Paul Franklin has shot cameras of every sort from the deserts of Saudi Arabia to the high villages of the Andes to the streets and alleys of Hong Kong. He was in Moscow as the government changed in 1991, in the killing fields of Rwanda a few months after the genocide, and made a winter crossing from Turkey to Iraq in 2005. All the while pursuing the driving question: “What would Jesus do?”
It didn’t take long to figure out it’s a question best answered collectively. “Sheldon’s book, and several other factors, led our company to embrace a most exciting principle — the veto,” Franklin says. “Whatever project comes in the door, every fulltime staff member has the opportunity to veto it.” Stick with us here; there’s a method in this madness (remember: he’s survived more than 30 years in an industry noted for post office box enterprises.
Whatever project comes in the door, every fulltime staff member has the opportunity to case a conscientious veto.
Franklin is warming up now: “It may be due to the subject of a commercial that we’ve been approached to do or the wording in a sales film. Each person has to vote with his or her conscious. One staff member might be excited about the prospect of doing a big budget commercial for say, the Colorado State Lottery. But another might not feel comfortable with that and recommend that we decline. In our company, we don’t vote on that. If one person isn’t comfortable, we shut it down. It’s not a majority rules. It’s a veto.”
If you’re thinking this calls for special care in hiring, you’re exactly right. “I don’t try to talk the employees out of their beliefs. And they don’t try to talk me out of mine. They’ve thought about it, and they know that their veto can have financial consequences to our company. Or the veto may have the effect of causing a client to never call us again. But on the flipside, it also means that every client can expect a 100% commitment from everyone on the team.
“A client who first worked with us about 25 years ago recently told a story to some of our new staff about the restaurant commercial we almost did for him in our early years. I had seen the storyboards but had not grasped the emphasis on alcohol consumption. One of the commitments I made when I started this company was that I wouldn’t do beer or cigarette commercials. So, this kind of fell in a gray area. It wasn’t a beer commercial. But what was it exactly? Well, one of the staff came to me and said, ‘Oh, it’s very clear; we shouldn’t do this commercial.’
“Well, I had already bid the commercial and accepted the down payment to do it! And I was terrified because we really needed the work and it was an important client who had never worked with any other production company but ours.
“So I had to call their creative director and tell them we couldn’t do the spot. And he said, ‘Well, what are we going to do?’ And I said that I would make some calls and find a company that specializes in food photography that could do his commercial even better than we could—and (gulp) that I would pay the difference.”
Who needs reality television with that kind of drama? Franklin finishes the story with a flourish: “Now, over two decades later, he’s in the next room, reviewing the most recent project we’ve produced for him.
“It really goes back to who’s driving the bus and who’s really in charge of our company? It’s my core belief that when God is done with this company, He’ll have us go get day jobs. But until then it’s our privilege to serve our clients and each other with integrity and transparency.”
