Stephen Simon, movie producer for "The Goodbye Girl" as well as the metaphysical classic, "Somewhere in Time" teamed up with screenwriter Barnet Bain, to create "Metafilmics," the first major motion picture company solely dedicated to entertaining audiences through metaphysical storytelling.

Their first movie, "What Dreams May Come," starred Robin Williams, Cuba Gooding, Jr., Annabella Sciorra and Max Von Sydow in an afterlife love story. Ron Bass, who wrote the screenplay versions of "The Joy Luck Club," "When A Man Loves A Woman" and "Rain Man," wrote the screenplay.

Stephen Simon and Barnet Bain believed that the public was underserved by not getting a steady diet of films which deliver conscious content. In "What Dreams May Come," Simon and Bain addressed the afterlife in a way that hadn't been done before but still appealed to a mainstream audience.

"The movie industry is the only major entertainment industry that is behind the times in recognizing metaphysics and the exploration of consciousness as a genre," says metaphysical movie producer Stephen Simon. "Yet as we get closer to the millennium, we sense that there is a worldwide yearning for this type of material."

"Metaphysically motivated movies give people hope. They allow you to see yourself as something really extraordinary and as a human being witnessing the potential of humanity," Simon continues. "If we do our job correctly, we hope that people will walk out of our movie like they did after Forrest Gump, feeling a little bit better about what it means to be a human being."

According to Simon, metaphysical films tout a higher success rate than any other genre, but are rarely copied or made to begin with. For example, the original "Die Hard" movie led to dozens of "Die Hard" rip-offs, but when movies like "Ghost" or "Forrest Gump" or "Field of Dreams" were made, they were "stand alones."

Ted Field, who owns the production company, Interscope, is credited for financially enabling the vision of Metafilmics to become a reality, as is Polygram, which was also responsible for both the financing and the distribution of "What Dreams May Come." After 19 years of trying to get this film made, Field was the first to offer financing....

"Amongst other things," adds Simon, "Metafilmics is about us expressing ourselves in a medium that is capable of worldwide impact; impact that is unprecedented around the planet. We now have the vehicle and the platform to deliver a level of impact that we believe will empower people."

Simon is quick to add that these movies are not polemics. Their main purpose is to entertain. "People do not like to be taught anything or be preached to when they go see a movie. Teaching has become the province of television because it is a much less intimate and vulnerable experience. Going into a movie theater with a group of strangers and sitting in the dark under a fifty-foot screen is an act of intimacy and vulnerability."

Bain agrees. "On the level of storytelling, after 100 years of filmmaking, the audience has developed an ability to enter into the particular world of a story, identify it, and abide by it in terms of its own rules and its own physics. The audience is able to suspend their understanding of their world, at least for the duration of that presentation, and is able to enter into the film completely."

"Further," says Bain, "When we tell a story that presents a new paradigm and a new physics to an audience that has come to this place in time and space where it can actually enter into that world, this represents a quantum movement in terms of the receptivity of the culture. We're presenting very esoteric ideas. So it is the convergence of a delivery system, our personal passion, and the ability of an audience to accept, in a very mainstream fashion, what were heretofore the most esoteric ideas that make Metafilmics ready for the time."

Shortly after the turn of the century, Simon predicted that there were would be new delivery systems for entertainment.... "The whole future of entertainment is changing and we are going to have technology which will allow the viewer to truly experience a movie in a new way. When that day comes," says Simon,"it is our passionate belief that the experience that people will want is not to have a gun pointed at their heads so that they can see the bullet coming; it will be to go inside and experience the wonders of what we feel in our meditations and in our dreams. That's what we see as the future we can help create in the world through Metafilmics."

Stephen moved on from Metafilmics and  moved out of California altogether in 2001. Relocating to Ashland, Oregon he finished THE FORCE IS WITH YOU: Mystical Movie Messages That Inspire our Lives, his book on the genre he coined as "Spiritual Cinema." He spent much of 2002 traveling the country on a speaking tour to support the book and to rally film lovers to help establish Spiritual Cinema as a genre.

In 2003, Stephen made his directorial debut, INDIGO, (starring Neale Donald Walsch) which was produced in Oregon with a $500,000 budget. INDIGO has since become a grassroots phenomenon with its one weekend worldwide release in January, 2005 grossing over $1.3 million. INDIGO is currently being widely distributed on DVD by Monterrey Media.

In 2004, Stephen co-founded The Spiritual Cinema Circle with Gay and Kathlyn Hendricks. The Circle, a monthly DVD subscription service that distributes 4 spiritually-themed films a month, became an international success and now has subscribers in more than 70 countries.

By late 2004, The Circle had become successful enough to venture into original film production so it acquired the rights from Neale Donald Walsch to make CONVERSATIONS WITH GOD into a movie. Directing and producing CONVERSATIONS WITH GOD was the culmination of a dream for Stephen who had wanted to make a film version of CONVERSATIONS WITH GOD since he first read the material in the late-90's, but couldn't find a financier to make a deal with Walsch for the rights. "My career has been marked mostly by my passion for three projects," he says. "It took me 3 years to get SOMEWHERE IN TIME produced, almost 20 years to get WHAT DREAMS MAY COME made, and now almost 8 years to get CONVERSATIONS WITH GOD to the screen."

Stephen currently resides near Portland, Oregon.

Article by Randy Peyser
Reprinted by permission of Conscious Life Magazine, September 1998 issue
Followup information taken from the web site at: www.spiritualcinemacircle.com.