World Wide Pictures (WWP) is a film distributor and production company established as a subsidiary of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA) in 1951. It is involved in the production and distribution of evangelistic films, the production of Graham crusade films, and publicity for Graham crusades.
WWP got its start after Graham met Dick Ross, who had produced a documentary film of Graham's 1950 crusade in Portland, Oregon. That film's success led the BGEA to buy Ross's production company, and hire him as the president of a new BGEA subsidiary incorporated as the Billy Graham Evangelistic Film Ministry (which was to be WWP's official name until 1980).
WWP's first feature film was Mr. Texas, produced during Graham's 1951 Fort Worth, Texas Crusade. It was also during the 1950s that WWP established production facilities in Burbank, California.
Perhaps WWP's best-known production was the 1965 film The Restless Ones, featuring Kim Darby. According to an October 14, 1966 issue of Christianity Today more than 120,000 professions of faith were recorded after more than two million people viewed the film. Other major feature films included Two a Penny (1965), which starred Cliff Richard. Both The Hiding Place (1975) (with Julie Harris) and Time to Run (1973) received Golden Globe nominations for Most Promising Newcomer.
WWP stopped national releases of its films in the late 1980s. The company sold its Burbank studio, moved its headquarters to Minneapolis, and switched to working with independent producers and distributing films to churches, on home video, and as made-for-TV movies.
They cautiously returned to feature films in 2001, with the limited national release of Road to Redemption, WWP's first comedy after over 125 films (including nine major motion pictures). The film starred Pat Hingle. It was followed by The Climb, which starred Jason Winston George, Ned Vaughn, and Dabney Coleman, and featured Todd Bridges. In 2003, the company released its latest film Last Flight Out.
Famous quotes containing the words world, wide and/or pictures:
“Learning has been as great a Loser by being shut up in Colleges and Cells, and secluded from the World and good Company. By that Means, every Thing of what we call Belles Lettres became totally barbarous, being cultivated by Men without any Taste of Life or Manners, and without that Liberty and Facility of Thought and Expression, which can only be acquir’d by Conversation.”
—David Hume (1711–1776)
“But the way is wide over stubble and sands,
Wider and not too wide, as a dish in space
Is excellent, conforming to demands
Not yet formulated.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“There is no one kind of thing that we ‘perceive’ but many different kinds, the number being reducible if at all by scientific investigation and not by philosophy: pens are in many ways though not in all ways unlike rainbows, which are in many ways though not in all ways unlike after-images, which in turn are in many ways but not in all ways unlike pictures on the cinema-screen—and so on.”
—J.L. (John Langshaw)