Hollywood rosary group seeking conversion

By Peter Finney Jr.
Clarion Herald

Striking just the right chord of disdain and mockery, Nathanael, who might have been 2,000 years ahead of his time as a social media troll, gave his now-famous response to Philip’s wild claim – call it the fake news of the time – that he had “found the one about whom Moses wrote in the law … Jesus, son of Joseph.”

“Can anything good come from Nazareth?” Nathanael chirped, two millennia ahead of Elon Musk and the social media platforms that have elevated the anonymous, ad hominem attack to an art form.

It’s funny how the world turns, but Michael Forbes, a former seminarian who grew up a quick camera pan from 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. Our children all have professional degrees and are doctors and lawyers. They’re coming along nicely.

“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,” making a Hail Mary attempt at changing 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’s 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.”

In another life, the former Navy officer was the chief research officer for shopping.com, which was among the very first to figure out how to sell multiple categories of goods at discount prices on the internet.

“They told me I was really good at ‘early pattern recognition,’” Forbes said.

When the company was sold in the 1990s, many of the top executives jumped to amazon.com to work for Jeff Bezos in Seattle.

“We put into his mind that he could be selling a lot more, a whole lot more than just books,” Forbes said. “Just imagine Wal-Mart all over again, drop-shipped worldwide. To his credit, he continued to build it out further and further.”

Ironically, Forbes does not own a cellphone. He counsels parents to give them up and ditch Alexa-style devices inside the home because they are insidiously intrusive and provide data that become a salable commodity. But, he 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).

One of the participants in the twice-weekly rosary group is Deacon Ed Merritt, a permanent deacon who serves at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church in Belle Chasse and is a senior director at WWL-TV.

“It’s a great place for faith sharing, and it’s also a good thing to strengthen each other,” Deacon Merritt said.

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.

The Mary’s Town Zoom rosary is prayed Mondays at 9 p.m. and Thursdays at 11 a.m. CST. To join, send Forbes an email at [email protected], and he will send a link to the upcoming rosary.

[email protected]