Movieguide is a Christian media review website that is part of the Good News Communications, Inc. ministry. It, alongside its sister site, The Christian Film and Television Commission, was founded in 1985 by Evangelical Christian and media critic Dr. Ted Baehr, his wife Lili Baehr, long-time friend Ken Wales, and former head of the Protestant Film Office George Heimrich in Altanta, Georgia, in hopes to cultivate a better media landscape for the nation's children and future generations.
Movieguide started as a radio program, then a TV program and finally as a bi-weekly magazine. Their mission is to "redeem the values of the entertainment industry, according to biblical principles, by influencing industry executives and artists".
Ted Baehr (born Millard Robert E. Theodore Baehr) was born in 1946 to screen actor Theodore Baehr (also known by his stage name Robert "Tex" Allen) and Evelyn Pierce. After studying at several universities in Europe, Baehr graduated summa cum laude in comparative literature and as a Rufus Choate Scholar from Dartmouth College. He then received a Juris Doctor (or Doctor of Law) degree from the New York University School of Law, where he served as Editor of the NYU Law School newspaper.
In 1975, at the encouragement of a friend, Baehr read the Bible, which changed the direction of his life and career. He applied to the Institute of Theology at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine and received his Doctor of Humanities degree from Belhaven College. He became the Director of the Television Center at the City University of New York. While there researching the impact of media in education, he also launched Good News Communications, Inc. Around this time, he met and started dating Lili, whom he would later marry. The couple has four children and resides in Southern California.
In 1979 he was elected President of the Episcopal Radio and Television Foundation and began conceptualizing The Christian Film & Television Commission and Movieguide as part of Good News Communications. He also served on the Communications Board of the National Council of Churches. It was during this time that through Wales, he met Heimrich, the former director of the Prostant Film Office, and was inspired to resurrect the activities of that group which, until it was closed in 1966, had participated heavily in "approving" scripts of the major Hollywood studios for compliance with the MPAA's self-imposed Production Code at the time, The Hays Code, which Baehr has been a stauch supporter of. In his will, Heimrich donated his Protestant Film Office files to the ministry offices, where they now reside. The ministry uses the same vision for positive change in those files to redeem the values of the mass media of entertainment according to biblical principles by influencing key entertainment executives to adopt higher standards and by informing and equipping the public, especially parents with children and families.
In the 1990s, Movieguide relocated its headquarters to the greater Los Angeles region, to be closer to all the Hollywood action. To date, Movieguide now has TV and radio shows that are broadcast in over 200 countries and a website filled with resources including movie reviews and articles.
Movieguide rates movies based on both quality and acceptability, which are as follows:
- Quality Ratings: (1 to 4 stars)
- * * * * EXCELLENT
- * * * GOOD
- * * FAIR
- * POOR
- Acceptability Ratings: (+4 to -4)
- +4 EXEMPLARY: Biblical, usually Christian, worldview, with no questionable elements whatsoever.
- +3 MORAL: Some minor questionable elements (media-wisdom is suggested to discuss).
- +2 GOOD: Moderately questionable elements – discernment required for young children.
- +1 WORTHWHILE: Caution advised for young children.
- -1 CAUTION: Caution advised for older children, including teenagers, and sensitive adults.
- -2 EXTREME CAUTION: Extreme caution for older teenagers and adults.
- -3 EXCESSIVE: Excessive sex, violence, immorality, and/or worldview problems. (Sometimes excessive content such as violence is in otherwise redemptive movies such as SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, but usually these are movies to avoid.)
- -4 ABHORRENT: Intentional blasphemy, evil, gross immorality, and/or worldview problems. (To be avoided)
The Quality ratings cover production value, entertainment quality, and technical or narrative accomplishment, while the Acceptability ratings include evaluation of moral and theological issues, based on a "traditional view of the Bible and Christianity." The content of a movie is evaluated for acceptability based on its "dominant worldview" (biblical, Christian, environmentalist, humanist, romantic, socialist, homosexual, false religion, New Age / Pagan, etc.) and on secondary elements, (hints of worldview, foul language, violence, sex, nudity, alcohol, smoking/drugs, miscellaneous immorality, or miscellaneous philosophical or theological problems).
Every year since 1993, Movieguide has hosted an "Annual Faith and Values Awards Gala" in Beverly Hills, California. According to Movieguide the purpose of the Gala is to "[encourage] filmmakers and television producers to bring the brightest, most uplifting and inspirational movies and television to audiences world-wide."The gala includes the presentation of:
- 10 Best Films for Family Audiences
- 10 Best Films for Mature Audiences
- The Faith and Freedom Awards (for promoting positive American values)
- The Grace Awards (for outstanding performances exemplifying God's grace and mercy)
- The Kairos Prize ($50,000 prize for spiritually uplifting screenplays by beginning or first-time screenwriters)
- The Epiphany Prizes ($100,000 prizes for the most inspiring film and television program)
- Special Faith & Values Crystal Teddy Bear Awards
The $100,000 Epiphany Prizes and the $50,000 Kairos Prizes are supported by grants from the John Templeton Foundation founded by the late Sir John Templeton, who personally discussed the creation of the Annual Movieguide Awards and the Epiphany Prizes with Baehr.
In addition to the awards, Baehr presents the "Report to the Entertainment Industry", an annual analysis of the past year's movies and their gross financial earnings in North America, internationally and in home video sales. The report includes articles about each of the Gala's award winners, an analysis of the Top 25 movies at the box office in North America during the previous calendar year, the top movies overseas earning $100 million or more during the calendar year, and an analysis of the top DVD sales for the previous calendar year. It analyzes these movies based on the various categories and letter codes of the Movieguide rating system. The report then presents statistics on various cultural topics including: Hollywood demographics, world religions, faith in America, charity in America, the family, children and media, internet, and media wisdom. The report concludes with the "Twenty Most Unbearable Movies" of the past year. Movieguide uses this analysis and statistics in the report to attempt to convince studio executives and filmmakers that producing "family-friendly" and "spiritually uplifting", "redemptive" and even positive Christian content can significantly increase the earnings of their movies while foul language, sex, nudity, violence, drug/alcohol/tobacco use, and non-Christian content will result in lower box office results.
All major movies released each year on the big screen in the United States, usually the top 250 to top 275 depending on how many movies the major studios in Hollywood and the major independents release, are included in the annual Report to the Entertainment Industry. The results are presented to industry executives at a Hollywood awards gala one week or so before the Academy Awards Ceremonies.
According to the annual report for 2010 movies, "Movies that fit Movieguide's high Christian, moral, biblical, theological, spiritual, production, aesthetic, and entertainment principles, values, and standards do much better than those movies consistently violating those principles, values, and standards."
Over the years, Baehr has used Good News Communications, Inc to petition Hollywood to end their ratings system, which he claims is vulnerable, flawed, corrupt, and panders to the major studios and filmmakers, and institute a "standards based entertainment code of moral decency" that is slightly updated from the Hays Code called "The Motion Picture and Television Production Code of Conduct and Moral Decency", claiming that ever since the Code stopped being used in favor of the ratings system, movie attendance went down (from 44 million tickets being sold per week in 1965 to 14 million a week in 1969) because there was no more moral standards, with films such as Midnight Cowboy, The Graduate, Woodstock, The Wild Bunch, Rosemary's Baby, and A Clockwork Orange "promoting sex outside of marriage, satanism, violence, and perverse anti-religious bigotry", stating:
"From 1933 to 1966, Christians were one of the predominant forces in Hollywood. During that period, the Roman Catholic Legion of Decency and the Protestant Film Commission (which started several years after the Legion of Decency) read every script to ensure that movies represented the largest possible audience by adhering to high standards of decency. As a result, it was a wonderful life in America because Mr. Smith went to Washington, Ricky still loved Lucy, and the Bells of St. Mary’s rang across the land!
It took 10 years and God’s Grace acting through three dedicated Christian men to position God’s people to be such a powerful moral influence on Hollywood. As the videotape Hollywood Censored all too clearly demonstrates, prior to the involvement of these Christian men in 1933, American movies were morally bankrupt – full of nudity, perversity and violence. From 1922 to 1933, church-going men and women tried everything, including censorship boards, to influence Hollywood to make wholesome entertainment. Nothing succeeded until Christians volunteered to work alongside the Hollywood studios to help them reach the largest possible audience.
When the Protestant Film Office closed its advocacy offices in Hollywood in 1966 (in spite of many pleas to stay by the top Hollywood filmmakers), not only did it open the floodgates to violence (The Wild Bunch), sex and Satanism (Rosemary’s Baby), and perverse anti-religious bigotry (Midnight Cowboy), it also caused a severe drop in movie attendance from 44 million tickets sold per week to about 20 million.
Now is the time, therefore, to help Hollywood regain the wholesome quality and financial success of its Golden Age. The exciting thing is that the major movie studios and TV networks have good economic reasons to abide by a revived motion picture code. The world actually wants cleaner movies. Vulgarity, sex and nudity hurt box office results!!!
Also, a standards-based Motion Picture Code of Decency is not censorship. It is a business operation standard saying, “We choose not to produce movies with certain objectionable content that isn’t profitable, economically, morally or spiritually.”"
However, something Baehr has failed to realize is it was not because of the abandonment and removal of the Hays Code that caused movie attendance to drop down but rather the rise of broadcast television (To put this into perspective, when broadcast television was introduced and became commonplace, the amount of movie tickets sold per week went down by a whopping 50 percent from 90 million tickets to about 48 million between 1948 and 1953. Also, when the Big Three channels started broadcasting in color in the second half of the 60s, ticket sales were brought down even further. In fact, the 50 highest grossing films came from after the Code had stopped being used all together in 1965. Read more information about it in The Hays Code and Fall of the Studio System).
Finally, a March 2004 article by Marshall Allen in Christianity Today claimed that Baehr's public relations company "Kairos Marketing" accepted payment for consulting and promotional activities on behalf of six movies that were positively reviewed in Movieguide. Though Kairos is not part of Good News Communications, the non-profit that supports the CFTVC and publishes Movieguide, Kairos does donate to Good News Communications. The article quotes David P. Gushee, an ethicist then at Union University in Tennessee as saying that accepting money to promote movies and publishing reviews of those movies in a magazine that "presents itself as a Hollywood watchdog," is a conflict of interest.
Baehr contends otherwise. He states that the CFTVC primarily functions as an advocacy group, with the end goal of "redeeming the values of the mass-media." Reviewing films in order to advise filmmakers and educate the public is only one aspect of the ministry's overall goal to promote a "redeemed Hollywood." Supporting moral movies through advertising is another, further stating "We've lent our expertise to many movies – gratis, for the sake of helping God's kingdom advance in this industry. In a few cases, after we approve of and review the movie according to our stringent criteria, we have been remunerated for our services through a sister organization set up for this purpose to help underwrite the extra time these promotional efforts required."
Further rebuttal from CFTVC advisory board member Jane Chastain in World Net Daily countered that the Christianity Today article was a slanderous "hatchet job", noting that the Protestant Film Office, the ideological predecessor to Baehr's organizations, was routinely paid for consultations by Hollywood Studios that needed its stamp of approval. Other rebuttals followed, including one from musician Pat Boone, published in Christianity Today, lamenting that publication's decision to attack rather than aid a fellow Christian organization in light of a perceived problem. Christianity Today did not officially retract its criticisms, but it removed the allegedly biased article from its website and published a reply by Baehr about his organization and the allegations against it.
