Few have done more for faith-based and family-friendly cinema than Dr. Ted Baehr, a man who spent his life in Tinseltown.
Baehr, whose parents were famous actors Robert Allen and Evelyn Peirce, has had a long career in Hollywood and is the founder of Movieguide, a powerful website providing movie reviews for families, articles, and plenty of additional resources.
He’s also the author of “Behind the Scenes of the Golden Age of Hollywood and Broadway: The Legacy of Robert Allen,” a book exploring his dad’s career and a powerful era of entertainment.
“My father — he starred in … 62 movies from 1926 to World War II,” Baehr said. “After World War II … he preferred Broadway. So he starred on Broadway from 1946, the year I was born, to 1986, and I led him to Christ, actually, seven years after I came to Christ.”
Baehr said he became a Christian after being on the “left wing,” seeing his life transform in incredible ways. The book discusses Allen and Hollywood more broadly, offering powerful lessons that can help people better understand what’s happening in entertainment today.
The Movieguide founder told CBN News the film “industry is very unstable.”
“It’s always been unstable,” Baehr said. “And people don’t understand the whole history of the movie industry, how it works, why it works, and this gives you a background of what you need to do if you go into it.”
As for his reflections on Allen, Baehr said his father’s legacy is worth exploring. And during a time when people don’t necessarily remember the stars of yesteryear, he believes the stories offer important lessons.
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“My father was a big star,” he said. “He won the box office award. That means he was really big in 1936, and it’s just wonderful to be able to pay tribute to him, and to look at the past, and to see the encouragement, and to see that he came to Christ.”
Baehr also discussed the ebbs and flows of Hollywood’s relationship with faith, noting how Christian themes were once prevalent in early entertainment projects before the industry drifted away. Today, though, he sees powerful glimmers of hope.
“In the 1950s, there was a lot of Christian films,” Baehr said. “And that’s because the soldiers came back … they wanted their children to have faith and values, which they grew up with.”
It’s been a bit of a rollercoaster since then, with faith starting to burst back onto the Hollywood scene in recent years as “The Chosen,” “House of David,” and other projects catch fire.
One of the fascinating factors at play is that edgy content doesn’t necessarily pay the bills. In fact, Moveiguide, under Baehr’s leadership, has argued that family-friendly content is actually what performs best at the box office.
“What pays the staff is movies with faith and values,” he said.
At the moment, Baehr said he is “so encouraged” to see what’s unfolding with faith and family-friendly projects right now. Much of the interest from the Hollywood perspective, he said, comes from demographic changes.
“The Wall Street Journal and other places … are saying more young men are coming to Christ than young women coming to Christ,” he said, noting some shifts towards faith in content could be aligning with this reality. “I believe that these young men are coming to Christ. I know it, and that is making a tremendous difference in the box office.”
Baehr hopes “Behind the Scenes of the Golden Age of Hollywood and Broadway: The Legacy of Robert Allen” will help readers remember the golden age of Hollywood, “when every movie could be seen by anyone.” He said the lessons from that time are profound.
“You could take your kids to the movie and not worry about it,” he said. “Even when they were subjects that could be a little tough, they were done in such a way that you could take your family to the movie.”
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