CHRISTIAN TELEVISON AND FILM EXPERT SAYS
HOLLYWOOD IS “STARTING TO LISTEN”
TO THE AMERICAN VIEWING AUDIENCE
By Michael Ireland
ANAHEIM, CALIFORNIA (ANS) --
In the Golden Age of Hollywood, the Church was very
active in the entertainment industry in the United States, said Dr. Ted
Baehr, chairman of the Christian Film and Television Commission, a
non-profit organization committed to educating the entertainment
industry and the general public on the media’s impact on its audiences.
(Pictured: Ted Baehr at
MovieGuide® Faith & Values Awards Gala 2005).
 In an interview with Peter Wooding, senior news editor of
Britain’s United Christian Broadcasting (UCB) at the recent National
Religious Broadcasters’ convention in Anaheim, California, Baehr said
the Church withdrew from the movie and entertainment business in the
’60s.
Baehr told
Wooding that in the mid-’80s, after his involvement in producing “The
Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” on CBS television, while he was head
of the organization that made it, he started saying “Hollywood needs to
be more redemptive.”
“So I started
putting together a great board of people, registered as an advocacy
group in Hollywood and getting the Templeton Foundation to award a
prize of $50,000 for the movie with the most redemptive content,” Baehr
said.
“(So) we try to
commend the good. We try to help studios. We were talking to people
this morning about reading their scripts, looking at their business
plans, helping with their productions. We do a big gala and give them a
Report to Hollywood on economics. Then also I do the other side, which
is working with the most important person in Hollywood, which is the
15- to 24-year-old in England and America, whoever it is that goes to
movies.”
Baehr said he
tries to provide families with media wisdom, good movie reviews that
cover everything with they want to know about what Hollywood is
producing, but: “We don’t do ‘thumbs up’ or ‘thumbs down. We’re not
telling people go or not go; we’re trying to give people a broad tool
so they can make their own decision based on their level of spiritual
maturity and their level or wisdom.”
Wooding asked
Baehr if Hollywood is listening, and if producers are becoming more
family-friendly and having more Christian values in their films and on
television?
“They are
listening very, very much, because we’ve gone from one movie with
positive Christian content to about 45 percent movies, and this is
quite extraordinary, and from 82 percent of the movies being
restricted, R-rated --that’s what we call them in the States -- to
about 40 percent, so we’ve had a turnaround. Not that the studios have
suddenly got religion or, you know, reached revival.”
Baehr said
there are all sorts of people working in the many studios in Hollywood,
including Christians, Jews, homosexuals and Muslims.
“But they’ve
found out that this is a large marketplace, and every year there’re
more films like ‘The Passion of the Christ,’ which was the third
biggest grossing film. But if you look at the top three films in the
United States last year, all three of them were written by a Christian
and directed by a Christian, and they did extraordinarily well around
the world.”
Baehr cited
“Shrek 2,” written by a man who went to Hollywood to be a minister.
“You’ve got some pretty incredible people doing some great work, and
people love it around the world, (but) they’re getting values.”
He said the
values portrayed in the movie focus on seeking the father’s blessing,
the father not giving his blessing but then learning that he has to
forgive, and exposing selfishness and envy, and learning to love your
wife as yourself. “There’s a lot of good stuff going on there, and it’s
wonderful to see the changes that are taking place.”
What was it
like in Hollywood around the time “The Passion” came out? What was the
impact of that film like?
“In every area
of the world, there are small number of people who like to make a lot
of noise and get angry. So there was a lot of outcry against ‘The
Passion.’ But the fact of the matter is I talked to several studio
heads, and I shouldn’t give the names of the studios—there are only
seven major studios—and many of them said they were very happy that
‘The Passion’ was coming out. They meant this sincerely, because
they’re in my book, ‘So You Want to Be in Pictures,’ talking about
their faith and values. There were a lot of people very happy about it,
and it did extremely well, and 20th Century Fox is distributing the
videotape. They’re very happy about it, and it’s being re-released this
year with an edited version that’s a little bit more broad-audience,
less R-rated, so there’s a lot of good things going on.”
Baehr said the
Academy Awards -- unlike the British Film Awards, which are unique and
well established -- were started by the studios to promote ‘studio
product’ during the Golden Age of Hollywood.
“They promoted
‘Ben-Hur’ and ‘Ten Commandments.’ (But) they drifted in the ’90s. They
got disengaged from their past, they started doing quirky little films,
and the Foreign Press Association, which does the Golden Globes, now
see that their choices affect the Academy Awards, so the Academy Awards
really are almost an ‘also ran.’ They’ve become almost a secondary
award, and they’re losing audience and everything else.”
Baehr said he
has received calls from Business Week and the Philadelphia Enquirer and
New York, from different big papers across the country in the United
States, talking about what’s happening to the Academy Awards.
The Academy
Awards, he said, “either have to find their purpose like the British
Film Awards, or they need to say, ‘Well, we’ve been outdone by the
Golden Globes and we need to shut up and close up shop.’
“They’re adrift
right now, and if you look at the best pictures for the Academy Awards,
out of the five best pictures, many of them are tiny little films. I
mean, one of them made $8 million at the box office; that’s about a
million people in a country of 295 million people. That’s almost
insignificant. That would be like being less than .1 percent of the
British population going to see a film and everybody promoting it at
the British Film Awards. You do not do that. Actually, you chose some
of the bigger films -- you’re almost doing what the Academy used to do.”
Wooding asked
Baehr why he thought “The Passion” didn’t get more Oscar®
nominations, and if he was surprised?
“Well, I sort
of implied this in my answers, that these guys have gone off the rail,
they’ve become so pseudo-intellectual and so artsy that they’re being
they’re making themselves irrelevant -- I don’t want to be mean to
those guys, it’s a large group -- but they’ve really lost their way.
(For) many years the paper that everybody reads in the industry, the
Los Angeles Times, was saying, you know, ‘Look, Toy Story, that should
have been the best film. That really was the best film of the year.’
They should have been considering something really good, but they’ve
gotten a little quirky and a little irrelevant, and probably the
Academy members are made up of ‘young Turks’ that wouldn’t give an
award to ‘The Passion’ even if it did a billion dollars worth of
business, which it almost did. So God bless them, hopefully they’ll
grow up.”
Baehr talked
about the movie “Hotel Rwanda,” which was considered by the recent 13th
Annual Movieguide® Faith & Values Awards Gala for the Grace
prize and for the mature audience award.
“It’s a
wonderful movie. It is up for a couple of Academy Awards. Don Cheadle
is up for best actor. He is a terrific actor. So is Jamie Foxx in
‘Ray.’ There are some good people there. In fact, I think Jamie Foxx
may be the best actor they’ve had in a long time in Hollywood. He did
one program that he’s up for an award with us. ‘Hotel Rwanda’ is a
really interesting film because it espouses so many values that you
don’t usually see in films. It espouses compassion and caring just like
‘Schindler’s List,’ but it also exposes the foolishness of the U.N. and
exposes the heartlessness of the international community, including the
United States at that time, so it has a lot of good, strong values in
terms of faith and belief.”
He said actor
Don Cheadle is a committed Christian.
Baehr commented
that while some of the other key actors in the movie were promoting
themselves to the Academy Awards for the Oscars®, Cheadle was in
the Sudan working with refugees.
“He spends a
lot of time helping people, so he not only has faith but he puts feet
to his faith and tries to do things that are really substantial,” Baehr
said.
Baehr also
spoke about the annual MovieGuide® Awards, which are “getting
bigger every year.”
“We give out a
prize from the Templeton Foundation, which presents one big Templeton
prize for humanity, which went to Mother Theresa. It’s always given out
at (the British) Parliament every year. We give the Templeton Epiphany
Prize for movies and television and there’re just some great movies
that are up for it, including -- we’re not afraid to say -- ‘The
Passion’ is up for it, ‘America’s Heart and Soul,’ ‘I Am David,’
‘Ladder 49,’ an incredible movie with John Travolta with five church
scenes in it and a beautiful reflection on faith, and ‘The Reckoning,’
which is a British film that was absolutely terrific; it was set in the
medieval mystery plays.
“Then for the
TV nominations for the Epiphany Prize, we’ve got ‘A Christmas Carol’ --
every year there has to be a new Charles Dickens Christmas Carol that’s
done and this was a musical with a big American star, Kelsey Grammar --
‘Doc: Happy Trails,’ ‘Love’s Enduring Promise,’ ‘Patrick,’ ‘The
Question of God’ -- some great programs.
“Then for
family films -- and I’m doing these in alphabetical order, so this is
not the order that they’ve won -- it’s ‘America’s Heart and Soul,’
‘Cinderella Story,’ ‘I Am David,’ ‘The Incredibles,’ and ‘Miracle.’
“The
interesting thing (is that), I can read off these names and certainly
anybody can go to www.movieguide.org
and find movies that will reflect what they want their kids to see and
what are really ‘broad-audience.’ But the interesting thing is (that) a
lot of studio heads come, a lot of the Press comes -- they say there’s
more press this year than ever before -- and people just love coming
and having a wonderful redemptive time with films that are positive and
uplifting. These are the biggest films: ‘The Incredibles’ and ‘Shrek 2’
and ‘The Passion’ are the three biggest films of the year. If you look
at our choices, the people already voted for these films at the box
office.”
Wooding asked
Baehr whether, as he is mixing with people in Hollywood, they ask about
his Christian faith? Do they want to know more?
Baehr
responded: “We get a lot of people not only asking about faith, they’re
asking about connections with faith. Every year at the event I hear
surprising stories at our annual awards gala where people come to
Christ. Some of the people who have been most instrumental in it
finally come to Christ; one of them is a big-name television star who
is sending out evangelistic emails. So we get a good representation.”
If you want
more information, go to www.movieguide-awards.com
or
www.movieguide.org.
| ** Michael Ireland is an
international British freelance journalist. A former reporter with a
London newspaper, Michael is the Chief Correspondent for ASSIST News
Service of Garden Grove, CA. Michael immigrated to the United States in
1982 and became a US citizen in Sept., 1995. He is married with two
children. Michael has also been a frequent contributor to UCB Europe, a
British Christian radio station. |
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