Q: How did Billy Graham feel about his film company’s first movie premiere?
A: At first, embarrassed. Then amazed.
Billy Graham started World Wide Pictures in 1951 with the intention of producing full-length films with a spiritual message. The first film produced was Mr. Texas, a low-budget Western featuring singers Redd Harper and Cindy Walker. It premiered at the Hollywood Bowl, an outdoor arena seating 25,000, with 5,000 more finding a seat on the hillside. Some of Hollywood’s top film executives attended.
Billy Graham writes about it in his autobiography, Just As I Am:
“We hired twenty-five searchlights to crisscross the sky for the Mr. Texas premiere, outdoing anything the film capital had seen before. As I look back, I blush at our brazenness—not just in that lighting effort but in the whole project—and at the extent to which our youthful zeal sometimes outraced our knowledge. As soon as the showing started, we realized that the loudspeakers were too far away from some of the audience; and the sound was not synchronized exactly between the forty-foot screen and the top tier of seats a thousand feet away. Then the projector broke down.
“I wanted the earth to open up and swallow me, I was so embarrassed!”
After gathering some of the team together to pray for the technicians to get the projector started, the film came on again and finished without incident.
“To my utter amazement,” Billy Graham writes, “when I gave the Invitation at the end of the film, 500 people responded.”
World Wide Pictures went on to produce more than 200 dramatic and documentary films, and BGEA still hears about people accepting Christ into their lives as a result of Mr. Texas.
