Making Hollywood Moral
Ted Baehr, chairman of The Christian Film & Television Commission and publisher of Movie Guide ("MovieGuide is a ministry dedicated to redeeming the values of the mass media according to biblical principles"), was recently profiled by Don Wildmon's American Family Association Journal. Here are the highlights:
What do Jeff Bridges, Michael Douglas, Michael Reagan and Ted Baehr all have in common? These men were born heirs to the Hollywood hall of fame. All sons of movie stars, each man is staking a claim for himself somewhere on or between Pennsylvania Avenue and Sunset Boulevard.
Well, Michael Reagan wasn't so much born heir to Hollywood fame as he was adopted into it. (But hey, Ron Reagan, Jr was born heir to Hollywood fame and is staking a claim for himself somewhere in America. Why don't you mention him, AFA Journal?)
And since the area between Pennsylvania Avenue and Sunset Boulevard takes in a lot ot territory, I'd say Jeff, Michael, Michael, and Ted probably have more in common with some of the other people staking claims out there than they do with each other, since Bridges and Douglas are successful actors, Reagan is a second-rate conservative pundit, and Baehr is ... well, we'll find out more about Ted in a minute.
For Ted Baehr, chairman of The Christian Film & Television Commission and publisher of MovieGuide, this meant making the most of his family legacy by becoming an award-winning producer, writer, director, media personality and scholar.
He is the son of the late actor known as Bob "Tex" Allen.
Robert "Tex" Allen appeared in over 50 films, to include such gems as Raiders of the Living Dead (1986), Hells Angels on Wheels (1967), Meet the Girls (1938), and Rio Grande Ranger (1936); he was also in some good ones, such as The Awful Truth (1937). While he seems to have been a competent working actor, he wasn't exactly Lloyd Bridges, Kirk Douglas, or Ronald Reagan.
And is his son Ted Baehr actually a Michael Douglas or Jeff Bridges? (Heck, if he's an award-winning producer, writer, director, media personality and scholar, he might be bigger than either of them. But exactly what award to they give to media personalitites? The Blowhard, maybe?)
The IMDb doesn't have a listing for Baehr, and his bio at Ted Baehr's Movieguide® only indicates that "Dr. Baehr has financed five feature films, [and] produced many television and radio programs" without listing any titles. (However, we do learn that "Dr. Baehr" has a Juris Doctor from NYU School of Law. No higher degrees are listed -- so, it seems that "Dr. Baehr" is using a title that he's not really entitled to, since most lawyers don't call themselves doctors.)
The bio adds that Baehr was "president of the organization that produced The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, Witch and the Wardrobe, which boasted 37 million viewers and won him an Emmy Award." However, the IMDb production info on the 1979 made-for-TV version of "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe" indicates that FIVE production companies were involved in the making of this program, with Bill Melendez Productions and The Children's Television Workshop apparently doing most of the actual producing. I wonder if everyone who worked for each of the five groups mentioned in the production credits got an Emmy award.
Baehr's bio also claims that he produced "hundreds of programs for PBS television, as well as programs for other television networks" -- so it really seems odd that he isn't mentioned in the IMDb.
Anyway, if the AFA Journal wanted to be accurate, it should actually have said something like, "As for Ted Baehr, law doctor, he made the most of his family legacy (which consisted of having a father who was a fairly successful actor in B-movies ) becoming president of the Episcopal Radio-TV Foundation, which played a small role in producing a TV movie that won an Emmy. He's also done some writing for Christian community, has pointed out the dirty stuff in films , and claims to have produced 100s of programs for PBS, although nobody can verify this,"
But back the AFA Journal, which will now ask Baehr some questions:
AFAJ: [S]ome filmmakers justify the inclusion of profanity, obscenity and gratuitous violence in their work as a reflection of human reality. Do you think this is a Biblical perspective?
Baehr: The fact of the matter is film and television is not reality. If it showed reality, it would spend a lot of time with people sitting on the toilet. What Hollywood produces is an artifact. It’s a completely specious argument that this is reality.
I'm confused -- is Baehr saying that movies SHOULD show people spending a lot of time sitting on the toilet? Or he is saying that since movie makers select what they put in their films, they should always choose to leave out the bad words and violence, because hey, movies aren't reality anyway, so they should be nice and wholesome? (And what does it say about him that he believes that in the real world, people spend "a lot of time" sitting on toilets?)
AFAJ: Your Web site shows that "the number of movies with worthwhile redemptive content has doubled in the last few years." Why do you think there has been such an increase?
Baehr: I asked a couple of studio heads that. They said, "Well, it’s because you’ve shown us there’s a big marketplace." The most compelling reason is that this market exists. It was an under-served market, an under-utilized market, and we now have convinced the entertainment industry that they need to explore that market.
Or could it be because Baehr has been paid to say that recent films have worthwhile content?
Last year Christianity Today published a short piece which asked some questions about Ted's ministry, and the about his practice of taking money to promote some of the same movies he reviews:
Ted Baehr operates two ministries—Movieguide and the Christian Film and Television Commission (CFTC)—under the umbrella of his nonprofit organization, Good News Communications. Baehr's Movieguide reviews films to help Christians make wise media choices. The mission of the CFTC is to encourage Hollywood executives to make Christian-friendly films.
But Baehr also has a lesser-known for-profit business—Kairos Marketing, which promotes some of the movies he reviews. Baehr says Kairos has received money to promote six movies, which include Gordy (1995), Left Behind (2000), and Gods and Generals (2003). Baehr's wife, Lili, who keeps his books, says Kairos received about $99,000 for Gods and Generals, a film he praised in his reviews but which drew jeers from many critics. Baehr declined to say how much he received for other films, but points out that the full amount was spent either on promotional costs or on funding for his ministry.
In a rebuttal of the CT piece, Baehr said that "95 percent of the money went straight to promotions expenses, not to Baehr personally." So, he only got to keep $4950 personally for giving a good review to Gods and Generals. Nice work if you can get it.
Ethicist David Gushee, a professor at Union University in Tennessee, calls Baehr's paid promotional work unethical because Movieguide—the public branch of his ministry—presents itself as an independent, donor-supported, Hollywood watchdog. "There is no way morally a person doing that kind of work should be receiving money from that industry, because it's a patent conflict of interest," Gushee says. "He's at least responsible for making full disclosure of the various roles that he is occupying in the Hollywood industry."
Several film reviewers say they've never heard of a movie critic taking money to promote films. One prominent reviewer said that it's ethically "about as far over the line as you can go."
To say that Baehr wasn't pleased with the CT piece would be putting it mildly. He and his "ministry put out several responses, all of them rather unchristian. Baehr charged that CT was libeling him because they were starting a competing movie review service, and this proved that they were "were greedy, unethical, dishonest and corrupt.” He said that he was only doing what all the other critics do, and claimed that Roger Ebert reviews Disney movies even though he takes takes money from Disney. (Ebert's TV program is distributed by Buena Vista Television, which, while part of the Disney empire, isn't part of the Disney movie production business. And Ebert has never been paid from a film's advertising budget.)
And Baehr accused CT of being hypocrites because they print ads for books, and then sometimes they review those books. He got his friends, including Pat Boone and Joseph Farah to write denunciations of CT. (Farah's urges you to support Baehr by "contributing your own hard-earned tax dollars to support his wonderful ministry," which I thought was a nice idea, even though you will presumably have to fight the goverment for those tax dollars.)
In response to pressure from Pat and Farah and the evangelical community, CT kind of backed away from the charges, and apparently everybody forgot about Baehr's ethical problems . And so, Baehr is still asking Christians to donate to his ministry, and presumably is also getting paid by movie companies to promote their movies. (And he seems to have entered into some kind of relationship with Willowcreek Marketing, which makes and sells Christian films. His site features ads for Willowcreek's Home Beyond the Sun and Bugtime Adventures, and the Willowcreek site indicates that MovieGuide.org is one of its "partners in success." I don't know if Biehr will be reviewing their films, but even if he does, he doesn't seem troubled by things that would pose ethical problems for a lesser man .)
Oh, and If you're interested, Christian reviewer Tim Willson has a point-by-point analysis of Ted's various blasts at Christianity Today.
But back to the interview:
AFAJ: Despite this new audience, you claim in some of your writings that parts of Hollywood are still attempting to normalize perversion. What exactly do you mean by the normalization of perversion?
Baehr: Hollywood is made up of many different people. [You’ve got studio heads giving their testimonies] and then you’ve got people on the other side like Oliver Stone and Michael Moore who are set on destroying faith and values. You’ve got Liam Neeson and Bill Condon who just did [the movie] Kinsey and who are set on corrupting kids with a pedophile message.
Yes, I think I read somewhere that Neeson and Condon said they were set on corrupting kids with a pedophile message, so they made a movie about Alfred Kinsey, because research shows that kids flock to see serious dramas set in the 1940s about sex researchers.
The difficulty is you’re dealing with a medium that is extremely powerful in its communicative abilities. The media is extremely influential, and when people are pushing an anti-American agenda like Michael Moore or a pro-pedophile agenda like Bill Condon that agenda becomes a major influence on our society.
Since Moore make a movie which doesn't support President Bush, he must be pushing an anti-American agenda. And since Condon made a movie about a guy who collected data from a pedophile, he must be pushing a pro-pedophile agenda. And since Baehr headed a group which helped to produce a TV movie about a white witch, I guess he's pushing a neo-Nazi, pro-Satan agenda.
AFAJ: Based on almost two decades of research evaluating the impact of the media on both children and adults, what has been your most startling finding?
Baehr: None of it startles me. [But] the key in understanding all of this — the impact — is to understand that different people are susceptible to different types of influences. Seven to eleven percent, according to many of the studies that have been done, want to copy the violence in a film. They walk out of a macho Terminator film feeling like they want to be the Terminator. Thirty-one percent want to do the sex and often do copy the sex they see in the films. Then about 60% want to copy the things like occultism and the witchcraft. Everybody has a different level of susceptibility.
Wow, after seeing a film, almost twice as many people want to cast spells than want to have the movie-style sex? This certainly startles me!
AFAJ: What do you think is the key to being a Christian in Hollywood?
Baehr: Being a Christian in Hollywood is just like being a Christian everywhere. If people believe in the Gospel that they say they profess, then they’re going to change their actions entirely. They’re going to live in a completely different way. They’re going to live in a way that is honoring to God and a blessing to their fellow man.
And maybe, just maybe, they're going to put a disclaimer on their site indicating that they get money to promote the movies they're reviewing.
Nah, that would be taking honesty too far.
4:45:26 AM 
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