JoBe Cerny recorded his award-winning audio version of the Bible at Chicago's Cerny American Studio.
It took six years from concept to completion, not 15. It cost $5 million to create, not $500 million. It has special effects and epic scenes, but none of them are visible.
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Those vast differences aside, "The Word of Promise Audio Bible" is Carl Amari's "Avatar."
Released late last year by Nashville-based Thomas Nelson Inc., it is the costliest and most artistically ambitious audio version of the Good Book ever made. Last month it garnered four prestigious "Audie" award nominations from the Audio Publishers Association. Winners will be announced at the annual ceremony in New York on May 25.
Like many grand endeavors, this one almost sank before it soared.
"They looked at me and there was this long silence," Amari recalls of an initial meeting with Thomas Nelson executives six years ago, when he laid out the scope of his brainchild and the $1.5 million price tag for the New Testament alone. "And it was the most uncomfortable silence. And they said, 'Well, do you know the most we've ever spent on an audio New Testament?' '' I said, 'What?' And they said, '$12,000.' " He laughs. "They said, 'Carl, if we sell 25,000 pieces it's a best-seller.' And I said, 'Well, if we produce this, it's going to sell far more units than that.' "
The New Testament, which is far shorter than the Old Testament, was a good way of testing waters before committing to the whole shebang. Still, it was risky.
An independent producer of films and "Twilight Zone" radio episodes, Amari believed in the project so fervently that he was willing to bet his South Barrington house on it. The home was fully paid for when he took out another mortgage to put his money -- $1 million -- where his mouth was. Amari says Nelson chipped in another million or so.
Their collective gamble paid off.
So far, the audio New Testament (released in late 2007), the Old Testament and the recently unveiled complete Bible have sold a collective 600,000 units. Nelson says its newest box set was the "top sales-producing Bible" in the Christian retail market during November and December of 2009.
"I did not think of it as something that would be for monetary gain," says Amari, who got the idea while watching his friend Jim Caviezel play Jesus during the filming of Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" in Rome in 2003. "That was not why I did this. My motivation was to create an audio Bible that could help people and families."
SOURCE: Chicago Sun-Times
Mike Thomas | mthomas@suntimes.com
