Ted Baehr Is Still Talking
Published March 18, 2005
I was quite surprised to suddenly get comments on a story I posted a year ago, but not surprised at the passion of the commenter. People like to get worked up over pet projects, allowing their passion to blind themselves to any data that don't fit their preconception. Ted Baehr is no exception.
For years, Ted Baehr has been telling anyone who will listen that R-rated movies are nearly doomed to failure simply by virtue of their R rating, and that movies with a Christian worldview (as defined by Ted Baehr, of course) make more money on average than otherwise. The trick is that Mr. Baehr never actually releases the lists of movies on which he is basing these summaries, which makes his claims impossible to examine.
And in fact, R-rated movies continue to make a lot of money, which is why they continue to be made. In fact, as I thought about 2004, I realized that one R-rated movie that made a lot of money last year was Mel Gibson's The Passion Of The Christ. How would Mr. Baehr respond to this outrage? An R-rated movie broke into the top ten of all time! I visited his site and quickly found my answer as the most recent news link: The new standard isn't the R rating, it's "explicit lewd content".
And here Mr. Baehr slipped up, because he mentioned a few movie titles for a change, provided just enough to get a grip on his argument. Troy, for example, is cited as a movie with no sexual nudity whatsoever, which startled me somewhat, because I distinctly remember nudity and sexual situations in that film, both when I saw it in the theater and on subsequent viewing via DVD. I'm not sure how Mr. Baehr missed the sexual nudity in Troy, but he's simply wrong on that score.
Here's how I think it works: To begin with, the case against R-rated movies could be made more or less from U.S. theater grosses alone. Then, the tide began to shift. More R-rated movies did well, and more lower-rated movies tanked. And so the focus shifted to overseas grosses. In the last few years, Mr. Baehr has been able to make his points about films by contrasting worldwide grosses or simply overseas grosses, while analysis of the same films based solely on their U.S. grosses would have gone the other way.
But now you've got Troy, a film which did the lion's share of it's business overseas, despite the R rating. And there's The Passion Of The Christ, an admittedly confusing film to analyze. What to do when the 7th and 9th worldwide highest-grossing films of 2004 are rated R? You change the rules again, and now the standard is lewdness. That lets The Passion off the hook, and apparently Troy too, if you close your eyes for a few seconds here and there, but to be fair, I suppose Meet The Fockers should suddenly switch sides, despite the PG-13 rating.
- Ted Baehr Is Still Talking
- Published: March 18, 2005
- Type: Opinion
- Section: Video
- Filed Under: Video: Film and TV Business
- Writer: Phillip Winn
- Phillip Winn's BC Writer page
- Phillip Winn's personal site
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Stopped watching R rated movies back in college, only because most of the oens shown were junk. Still don't watch, because the previews tell me the movie is going to suck.
Aaman, I agree with you, but I've occasionally taken on the issue of so-called "the Christian worldview" on my blog, and I'll continue to do so, because that view does hold sway with a lot of people near and dear to me.
I know a family of otherwise-reasonable people who made a rule against watching R-rated films years ago. They almost broke it for Saving Private Ryan, and were actually driving to the theater when they changed their minds and turned around and went home. Then, in 2004, came The Passion. Their church is buying out entire showings. So what do they do? Chuck the rule out the window. Which makes me want to ask, "What was the point of the rule then?"
If someone wants to avoid most of the dreck involved with movies that advocate or aren't negative enough about immorality, I hardly think that the entirely-secular MPAA is the best source of info, you know?
At that same church, a popular visiting preacher (Bishop Joseph Garlington) used an illustration from The Matrix (rated R) and interrupted himself in shock when he realized that the pastor of the church hadn't seen the film. "Oh brother, you've got to go see that one!" he said.
Amen.
Also, I think The Passion illustrates one of my often-repeated statements, that the Bible is R-rated at least, just read from beginning to end, with no effort made to spice it up.
Anyone dumb enough to refuse to watch R-rated films is robbing themselves of the greatest films ever made (Schindler's List). On the flip side, anyone dumb enough to refuse to watch G-rated films is also missing some of the great films ever made (Wizard of Oz).
We Were Soldiers had strong family values and was one of the best films of the year it was released. I tend to not like war films as a whole (hated Saving Private Ryan, loved Apocalypse Now), though enjoyed Gibson's work. I have yet to see The Passion because I don't play into that trip. Violence disturbs me, whether performed on a bikini-clad babe in Friday the 13th or upon some actor playing someone's interpretation of this cat called Jesus.
No one is forced to watch a fucking movie a la Alex in A Clockwork Orange. It's called choice. It's called keeping an eye on the kids while they're growing up and make sure they don't check out some Italian zombie film. As long as there has been films, there has been controverisal films (remember Birth of a Nation?).
It's art baby, and you can't mix it with fabricated morality, family values or Aryan beliefs.
I should point out that it is presumably possible to perform real statistical analysis on the movies released in a given year, taking into account not just the average gross by rating, but also the number of films in each rating, the budgets, etc. That might actually yield some interesting info, unlike Baehr's screeds.
I was turned on to this article by a colleague, and am pleased I can post a response.
It bears mentioning that MOVIEGUIDE is a business, at its heart. Certainly we strive to enlighten and inform parents about making wise an discerning choices for their children's viewing habits, and adults' choices as well. But at the end of the day it is all about the bottom line, and in this case it is revenues generated by donations, and by financial incentives provided by production houses.
You will notice that everything, articles and reviews both, that appears on www.movieguide.org solicits for donations. This is an integral part of our income. More so is the money paid to the Kairos Marketing Group, a sister company of MOVIEGUIDE and the Christian Film & Television Commission.
Production houses submits a monetary fee to Kairos, which in turn rolls the money over to me at movieguide.org, and I then lean the subsequent review of that producer's movie to be much more favourable in terms of rating for Content and Acceptability.
Therefore, in the case of a Christian-friendly movie such as THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST, we will bend out reviewing standards to extoll the wholesome Biblical worldview while largely ignoring the "torture porn" aspect of that film. By the same token we will take a clean and interesting film like THE DA VINCI CODE and attack it endlessly, because it posits subject material antithetical to our Christian ethos.
It is a money game we play here, gentlemen. MOVIEGUIDE must play to its conservative Christian base, and to do so we must re-interpret our own rules in order to keep up the bottom line.
Yours in Christ,
Dr. Ted Baehr
Founder, Christian Film & Television Commission
Of course, I'm reasonably certain that the previous comment is *not* posted by Ted Baehr, for what are probably obvious reasons. I actually don't question the real Ted Baehr's sincerity; I just suspect that he is blind to his own inconsistency.
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Well-reasoned post, Philip, but, and if you'll pardon the opinion, not intended personally, it deals with an absolutely irrelevant, culturally insipid, intellectually weak position.
Pigeonholing films into a particular worldview lessens the worth one derives from them - culturally, visually and morally. Any film, or human effort, is multi-faceted, contradictory, rich.
The identification of certain films with this world-view are specious, as is the term 'Christian', used in this sense. The tent is large, but not that large.