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Philip Anschutz may be the biggest Hollywood mover and shaker you've never heard of. The two adjectives that typically precede his name in news stories—"Christian" and "billionaire"—are the very reasons he can do all that moving and shaking.

Almost a decade ago, the Christian part motivated Anschutz to quit cursing the darkness of mainstream movies and do something about it instead. And the billionaire part, of course, prompted Tinseltown's execs to sit up and listen.

His efforts seem to be working. Anschutz, 69, now owns two production companies—the family-friendly Walden Media and the more broadly focused Bristol Bay Productions. The companies' creative teams have brought us such films as Amazing Grace, Charlotte's Web, Bridge to Terabithia, Ray, and, most prominently, The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, the first of seven planned movies based on C. S. Lewis's beloved Chronicles of Narnia. The second Narnia film, Prince Caspian, is due this month. Bristol Bay is also adapting The Screwtape Letters for the big screen, likely due in 2009.

Such cinematic bounty is a result not just of Anschutz's deep pockets: he's also a lifelong film buff committed to bringing more wholesome options to the local multiplex.

Anschutz's first brush with Hollywood was a literal trial by fire. It was 1967. Anschutz, then in his mid-20s, had recently taken over the family's once-lucrative oil-drilling business after his father had fallen ill.

After coming up empty for a while, Anschutz finally struck black gold in Wyoming and immediately bought the surrounding oil leases on credit. Things looked good. For one day.

The next day, a spark started a fire, and the entire oil field went up in flames. Facing bankruptcy, Anschutz had to do something in a hurry. While he watched the blazing fields, an outside-the-box idea—one of many he's had in his career—came to him: Call Universal Studios and get a film crew out here.

Anschutz had heard that Universal was filming Hellfighters, a John Wayne movie about Paul "Red" Adair, the famed American oil-field firefighter. Computerized special effects were still a thing of the distant future, so the studio needed some footage of a real oil field ablaze.

Anschutz cut a deal, and Universal cut him a check—for $100,000—to film his burning fields. With that money, Anschutz then hired the real Adair to extinguish the flames. Anschutz ended up making a huge profit off of those fields, and went on to make a fortune in oil.

He sold most of his oil fields in 1982 to Mobil for $500 million and started buying railroad companies, including the Denver and Rio Grande Western in 1984 and Southern Pacific four years later. In the 1990s, he capitalized on his railroad holdings by laying fiber-optic cables along all of those rail lines—a brilliant and forward-thinking move, long before the Internet swept the globe. He bought Qwest Communications at about the same time, and when he took the company public in 1997, he turned his original $55 million investment into a staggering $4.9 billion.

Today, according to Forbes, Anschutz is America's 41st richest man, with a net worth of $7.6 billion.

Fortune noted admiringly that Anschutz struck it rich in a "fundamentally different way … [operating] across an astounding array of industries, mastering and reshaping entire economic landscapes."

With that kind of money, Anschutz is now doing some serious drilling into what he has long seen as the decadence of Hollywood.

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May 2008, Vol. 52, No. 5