Meet the Rev. James K. Friedrich
Cathedral Films was established by the Reverend James K. Friedrich, an Episcopal pastor and visionary who was obsessed with movies and advocated film as a medium of Christian ministry. In 1936, Friedrich moved his family from Minnesota to Hollywood, determined to learn the craft of making movies. Soon he began working with a handful of professional filmmakers, casts and crews and became known as the “Evangelist of Hollywood.”
The first major Cathedral Films production, released in 1939, was The Great Commandment, which was shot on the old Selznick-International lot in Culver City, California, at the very same time as Gone with the Wind. The story concerns the conversion to Christianity of a young Zealot by the teachings of Jesus in the parable of the Good Samaritan. In 1941 the film received a national theatrical release from 20th Century Fox.
Over the next three decades Friedrich produced short and feature length religious films in a variety of genres using professional Hollywood casts and crews. His television productions set a high artistic standard for other Christian film producers. This was by no means an easy task, and despite the good reviews for his work, Friedrich struggled to fund his high quality (and expensive) productions in Hollywood and then exhibit them to the largest number of viewers. In the late1960s Cathedral stopped regular film production. While it occasionally produced films and videos of its own after that, it concentrated its mission on distribution for some of the younger independent religious filmmakers who were following in Friedrich’s wake.
The importance of James Friedrich to independent religious film history cannot be overstated. By the time of his death in 1966 Friedrich had produced or distributed over 150 films that were of a professional and theological quality that impressed contemporary audiences, anticipated and influenced the mid-century Hollywood Biblical blockbusters, inspired two generations of religious filmmakers, and demonstrated that there is a market for theatrical films about religious subjects. The preponderance of Friedrich's Cathedral Films remains highly relevant and timely today.
