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EDITOR'S NOTE: This is part 2 of a three-part series on Smith County-based Center for Creative Media and Teen Mania. Next week, part 3 will feature the Battle Cry event being held in Dallas this weekend.

Story By Patrick Butler
Religion Editor

GARDEN VALLEY - It may be the coolest workplace ever for God-believing teens or 20-somethings with a creative bent. Colorfully painted rooms accented with mood lighting and computers lined wall-to-wall. Flat screens are pulsating with graphics while Christian rock music plays continuously in the background.

"Old" people - those over 26 - are in short supply. There are no dress shirts and ties. The stairway in the main room is painted in an abstract art-like fashion. Notes, posters, paintings, stencils and advice are plastered over the walls. Unintimidated kids plow into their production tasks with vigor. The place has the feel of a platonic love-in with a purpose.

Welcome to the Center for Creative Media, a division of Teen Mania. The Smith County Christian ministry is chock full of young barely restrained talent bearers in rooms where TV, DVD, moving graphics for live events and productions for the Web are conceived and created. Programs are written shot, scheduled, sweetened, edited and distributed by 90 teens, or a bit older, for their peers.

A weekly television "magazine" is produced for 14 satellite and cable networks each week. Music videos are made for MTV, YouTube and MySpace. Live television broadcasts that reach beyond the borders of the United States are set up and pulled off.

The question is "can teens really do it" when it comes to big-time television production and do it well? Or is this just a Max Headroom daydream of kids with minicams and no connections, no direction home?

COMPASS

That could be tempting to think, and easily dismiss the religious media effort as yet another weak and laughable attempt at "being relevant." But the CCM is not a group of wanna-be video campers lost in the murky media woods without a compass. The center's leader is Doug Rittenhouse, 47, a repeat Emmy-award-winning producer from Los Angeles.

Rittenhouse came to Garden Valley in 2003 from his last gig as a producer for MTV's "Behind the Music." He carries a vision of turning teens into production-savvy professionals, of developing media skills in kids who can jump into the heavy riptides of commercial television or film and survive.

"The goal of Hollywood is to be successful and they respect you if you can do your job," Rittenhouse said Tuesday. He made his comments while sitting in his office at the center, in front of a ceiling-high chalkboard scribbled with notes. There is room at the professional production table, he said, for committed Christians. But only "if you're good."

"In Hollywood, if you do it right and you're creative and you do it well enough to be a hit, they don't care what you are," he said. "If you're good and bring it to the table, people are a little more tolerant of your views. No one is making fun of (the film) 'Narnia.'"

Significantly, Rittenhouse has up-to-date tools to back his stable of youthful, hungry talent. Enhancing his 20-plus years in production, the Garden Valley center has seven "offline" MTV-style nonlinear edit bays. The machines feature Avid editing programs, a longtime TV and film industry standard. Other rooms are dedicated to motion graphics via the Maya 3-D program. Others feature "online" (high-resolution) editing, and yet others are dedicated to writing, shooting and special effects. The center's computer banks have more than eight terabytes of media storage. Everything has been thought of from conception to completion.

On Saturday, a professional 53-foot television production truck hired by the center will broadcast the Teen Mania "Battle Cry" event live from Reunion Arena in Dallas. "Battle Cry" then tours the nation. Center for Creative Media interns will man the cameras.

ANYTHING YOU WANT

At the center, 90 interns and 13 paid staffmembers have been busting their chops for weeks preparing big screen presentations, clips, graphics and more for Battle Cry. Footage from the Dallas event will be used for future DVDs, music videos and anything the writing staff can come up with, including flooding the Internet with the message they all believe in: Jesus is Lord.

"It's a sweet job," said Ari Burt, 22, an intern from Virginia, seated at a cool-looking bank of computers. "I can touch the world from the clips I post. I get a lot of response from everywhere, kids talking about what they're facing, how they're doing. It's pretty touching, really."

Ari is still an intern, but he's already training Brian Perryman, 19, from Florida. Brian says he came to the center because "it was affordable" and his parents recommended it. He takes notes while the pair peer into the glow of the computer screen.

"This program is kind of tricky, sure," confides Ari to Brian, "but once you get the hang of it, you can do just about anything you want."

Rittenhouse looked out the door of his office, surveying his teens working busily at their tasks, trying to meet deadline crunches, just like the "real" world.

"It's all about the kids," he said.



CHRISTIAN 'BUBBLE'

Rittenhouse, 47, came up through the ranks of TV and music-video production the long, hard way: As a Christian working in LA's production mill where making hits - and money - was what really counted. It was hard to find good help in Hollywood, he said.

"As a producer I found I couldn't hire good people in Hollywood, whether they came out of USC, UCLA (film schools) New York University, the University of Miami - wherever they had a good program. The bottom line was eight out of 10 of them wouldn't make it. They may have had a college degree, but they weren't really trained on how to be in production."

He wasn't too excited, he said, about leaving LA and teaching Christians the skills he'd picked up.

"The last thing I wanted was to create a Christian 'bubble,' turning out potential professionals who would fade under the heat of what it really took to be in the business," he said.

But God intervened in his thinking.

"I was on a mission trip with my wife, Gail, to the Ivory Coast in 1999," he said, "and God just wrecked me. He changed our perspectives. He just took my heart and reshaped it and I've not been the same since. It opened up a sphere of God, and the world, that I had not seen. I thought there was some role I could play in this."

After the trip, Rittenhouse was hired at MTV's "Behind The Music." He has no regrets.

"MTV or not, it was a great gig," he said. "We would work on one show for 13 to 17 weeks and then move on to another. Great people, great creativity, a great time."

In his career Rittenhouse has won three Emmys and been nominated for 12. He did 12 episodes in 4 1/2 years with "Behind The Music." He was once assigned to interview the singer Tiffany.

"I was less than excited," he laughed. "Here was a one-hit wonder most famous for divorcing her parents. What was I going to spend an hour doing?"

But Tiffany turned out to have a testimony.

"During her interview," Rittenhouse said, "Tiffany mentioned that her bodyguard, who'd recently died of cancer, had been a Christian. She said 'Frank was my spiritual guide and mentor who explained the difference between religion and relationship with God. He was the one responsible for leading me to Christ.'"

Rittenhouse was stunned.

"I couldn't believe what I was hearing," he said. "It was like, 'Are you kidding me? Were we rolling? Did we get that on tape?' When that show was put together her story of coming to spiritual reckoning in her life was in it. And her story played over and over and over again on TV."

It was a valid story, he said.

"Why does the story of Cat Stevens becoming Yusef Islam get a two-hour special, and someone coming to Christ doesn't? It's just as valid. We ran it."

He looks at his years at MTV as God's purpose in his life.

"My goal was not to convert MTV," he said. "My goal was to go in and just be the person God had me to be."

As a result of the Ivory Coast experience, Doug and Gail Rittenhouse dove into missions.

CHEESE BALL

"We got heavily involved in missions," he said. "The stories were in front of me and I began to see the power of the medium. What God does around the world does not get enough attention. I said, 'you know what, God? You've put me in some unique situations.'"

It was in this context that Teen Mania founder Ron Luce made Rittenhouse an offer he apparently could, and did, refuse.

"Ron asked if I'd come to East Texas to train Christians in production. At first I said, 'no.' For one, the money thing (production requirements) is a conundrum that no one seems to know how to crack. Oftentimes we're willing to settle for making what we think we can, with the money we're given and it's not really good. It's cheese ball. There are not enough good, qualified people in (Christian) production. I didn't want to do this halfway."

Luce persisted.

"I told Ron my concerns, that I wanted to decrease that eight out of 10 washout average," said Rittenhouse, "and he eventually agreed with those goals."

But why consider a career change from LA to East Texas? Had his career in LA been coming to an end anyway?

"Oh, good grief, I'm not even close to retirement," Rittenhouse said. "I'm not close to being a professor. If I thought coming out here was going to pasture, I wouldn't have come. This is definitely the next step for me."

Later, standing after a long day in the writing room where kids had chattered away exchanging ideas, Rittenhouse waved his hand again.

"The dream is here," he said. "I wanted to work with a bunch of folks who would be exciting and have lots of vision and energy. That's the good part about this. When you're working with a bunch of young filmmakers that really try, you get a lot of great ideas."

He laughed and shook his head again.

"When you're working with 90 artists, things can get exciting."

The goal of the Center for Creative Media is to create professionals who can survive in the brutal media markets of the United States and beyond.

"When they leave here in two years," Rittenhouse said, "they should be able to go with their settings and their track balls or whatever to an edit suite in LA, get into their seat and BAM, get into whatever it is they've been hired to do."

ROLLING STONED

Teen Mania does have its national critics.

A scathing 2007 article in counter-culture born Rolling Stone magazine heaved huge bricks at the "Battle Cry" event, calling it "the most furious youth crusade since young sinners in the hands of an angry God flogged themselves with shame in 18th-century New England." The article negatively stressed the "militant" aspect of Ron Luce's message to recruit a teenage "army of God," make their voices heard and be aware of "the alarming influence of today's 'culture terrorists.'"

"They (culture terrorists) are wealthy, they are smart and they are real," the article quotes Luce saying at a Battle Cry in San Francisco.

"The Rolling Stone article was pretty tough," Rittenhouse admits. "It's a shame what people don't understand. If they're not Christians, they don't understand. Sometimes they're battling the same things we do."

Luce held a Teen Mania rally at Times Square, New York in February.

About 500 teens demanded political leaders to address Internet pornography, international sex trafficking, drug abuse, violence in schools and media, and for the elimination of debilitating poverty and AIDS. Hanging near Rittenhouse at the center as he gave a tour was a "Battle Cry" banner that proclaims, "The Fight To Save Our Generation."

"In a sense it's not fighting," Rittenhouse said." It's being weak and really understanding that God has an answer to those things. But if you're not looking for the answer, you're not really going to be receiving of it, are you? Perception often comes from where you're standing."

BOTTOM LINE

The center has produced music videos for bands showcased on MTV, for the Christian rock band Skillet and for the recent Casting Crowns national tour. Skillet's video was shot in Tyler.

The Casting Crown's piece was shot in Lindale and Van. The group Pillar put its Center for Creative Media-produced video "Frontline" on MTV and is posted at MTV.com.

That's today's mission field, said Rittenhouse.

"How come we willingly send our Christian children to the underground church in China, or Saudi Arabia or the Sudan as missionaries, knowing full well that they might die, be martyred or maimed in the name of Christ and we say 'God bless you' and 'Lord, please protect them.' We honor that."

"But talk to parents about sending their kids to Hollywood and they will have a conniption fit. They say, 'Don't even talk about sending my kids to Hollywood.' Why on Earth do we have that mind-set? Then we wonder why our voices are not represented in the media."

Rittenhouse says he (and the center) is in the right place, at the right time.

"Our lives have been about living for him, being in ministry and having a heart for the nations that has never stopped. What God does around the world does not get enough attention and I think his love needs to be shared with people who don't know, because they're hurting."

For more information, visit the Web at centerforcreativemedia.com.