John Ratzenberger is both a tireless worker—with dozens of films such as Pixar’s A Bug’s Life and several TV series to his credit—and a tireless activist. Success may appear to have come easy for the man most of us remember as either Cliff Clavin or Toy Story’s Hamm, but Ratzenberger himself wouldn’t chalk any of it up as mere happenstance. “As I was traveling for my Travel Channel show John Ratzenberger’s Made in America,” he says, “what I wanted to celebrate was the Judeo-Christian ethic of ‘get up in the morning, put your hand to something useful, and be responsible for yourself.’ … I figured someone’s got to be the Paul Revere and shout from the rooftops that it’s okay if your kid goes into vocational training.”

Whether you apply the idea of “evangelical tool” to film or any other medium, the idea is problematic because even the Bible itself doesn’t view itself as a tool. Filmmaker Mark Freiburger keeps a good balance between medium and message. “I fell in love with film for film’s sake,” he says, “and went to a regular liberal arts conservatory to study film for four years. And it didn’t dawn on me until making Dog Days of Summer—when I started meeting all these other Christian filmmakers who were thinking of movies as evangelical tool—that film could be used for something else: that I could be making films that make a difference.”

Michael Jacob’s highly entertaining feature documentary Audience of One has been on the mainstream festival circuit for more than a year now, garnering rave reviews and awards—and yet failing to snare a distribution deal. The film traces the efforts of San Francisco pastor Richard Gazowsky to fulfill his calling from God: to write, produce, and direct a $200 million sci-fi Bible epic called Gravity, and thereby establish a film studio that will crank out forty-seven feature films a year. I screened the film on DVD recently, courtesy of the film’s producer, and found it to be engaging, witty, and cautionary—enough so that I felt you ought to know about it despite its unavailability. To help Audience of One get more exposure, I arranged to speak with the film’s director, Michael Jacobs, over the phone.