Where Is Barret Oliver Now? Bastian's Second Life in 19th-Century Photography

By CelebPaid Research · Updated October 7, 2026 · 8 min read

A 19th-century Woodburytype portrait — the antique photographic printing process Barret Oliver specializes in. (Illustrative example; not Oliver himself.)Image via Wikimedia Commons

He was the boy who read himself into Fantasia — the lonely kid whose shouted name gave the Childlike Empress new life. Barret Oliver, who played Bastian Balthazar Bux in The NeverEnding Story (1984), spent the 1980s as one of Hollywood's most sought-after child actors. Then, at fifteen, he walked away — and found a craft even older than the stories Bastian loved: the lost photographic arts of the 1800s.

Few career pivots are this poetic. The boy obsessed with books on screen became a man who literally writes the history of how pictures were printed before movies existed — trading the fantasy of Fantasia for the chemistry of the darkroom, and finding in both the same thing: images that stubbornly refuse to ever die.

The Peak: Bastian and the Book That Swallowed Him

Born in Los Angeles in 1973, Oliver started with minor television and film roles before landing Bastian in Wolfgang Petersen's adaptation of Michael Ende's novel The NeverEnding Story (1984). As Bastian — the bullied boy who steals a mysterious book from an old bookshop and is pulled into the dying fantasy world of Fantasia — Oliver carried the emotional weight of one of the decade's defining family films.

Hollywood came calling immediately. The same year, he played the lead in Tim Burton's short film Frankenweenie (1984), as young Victor Frankenstein — a black-and-white homage to the old monster movies that Burton would remake as a feature decades later. In 1985 he starred as the android "Daryl" in D.A.R.Y.L., carrying an entire science-fiction film as a boy who discovers he is a military experiment; the performance won him a Saturn Award for Best Performance by a Younger Actor. He also appeared in Ron Howard's Cocoon (1985) as part of its ensemble, with guest TV spots and Cocoon: The Return to follow. The NeverEnding Story itself was filmed largely in Munich, Germany, under director Wolfgang Petersen — a massive, effects-heavy production for its time, with Oliver at its center as the bullied, bookish boy who learns that stories need believers. His final feature-film role came in 1989, at age fifteen: Willie Saravian in Paul Bartel's ensemble comedy Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills.

Why He Stepped Away

Oliver's exit from acting was quiet and complete. Rather than chasing adult roles, he focused on his education and never tried to return to the screen. What he found instead was photography — not the digital kind, but the painstaking, chemical, hands-on processes of the 19th century: wet-plate collodion, albumen prints, and above all the Woodburytype.

He learned the old arts seriously, studying with respected photographers and printers including Stephen Berkman, and learning from the traditions of artists such as Cole Weston and George Tice. What began as a passion became a profession: Oliver is now a working photographer, printer, teacher, and historian of photographic technology.

His path also says something about how child stardom ends well. Oliver didn't crash, didn't sue, didn't write a memoir about the industry's sins — he simply redirected the same intensity that made him a compelling child actor into mastering something difficult and obscure. Teenage fame gave him resources and freedom; the darkroom gave him purpose. By most accounts he has guarded his privacy as carefully as Danny Lloyd has, letting the work speak and the past stay past.

The Second Act: A Historian of Light and Chemistry

Oliver specializes in nineteenth-century photographic processes — the techniques photographers used before film, before enlargers, before electricity was assumed. His expertise centers on the Woodburytype, a photomechanical printing process invented in the 1860s that produced images of extraordinary tonal richness, widely used for book illustration in the Victorian era.

In 2007, he published the definitive English-language work on the subject: A History of the Woodburytype (Carl Mautz Publishing), covering both the history and the hands-on implementation of the process, as well as the early photographic printing industry at large. It is the kind of book that sits in the libraries of museums and specialist printers — written by someone who actually practices what he describes.

His work has been displayed in museum and gallery exhibitions and commissioned for use in commercials and films, and he has worked with the Getty Conservation Institute in his role as a photographic historian, helping catalogue the history of printing processes. He also teaches photography in Los Angeles, passing the old chemistry on to new hands. In a neat symmetry, the boy who once starred in a story about the power of books now literally preserves the craft of making images with ink, gelatin, and light.

The Lost Arts He Keeps Alive

To understand what Oliver actually does, it helps to know what he revived. The wet-plate collodion process — one of his specialties — dates to the 1850s: a glass plate is coated with collodion, sensitized in silver nitrate, exposed, and developed while still wet, all within about fifteen minutes, usually in a portable darkroom tent. It is slow, toxic, and unforgiving — and it produces negatives of startling detail.

The Woodburytype, invented by Walter Bentley Woodbury in the 1860s, went further. It translated a photograph's tones into varying depths of pigmented gelatin, pressed into lead to make a printing mold. The result was a continuous-tone print with a richness that halftone dots could never match — which is why Victorian publishers used Woodburytypes for their finest book illustrations. The process died out around 1900, done in by cheaper methods.

Oliver is one of a tiny handful of practitioners worldwide who can both do these processes and write their history — a combination of craftsman and scholar. He learned 19th-century photography from artists such as Stephen Berkman and absorbed the traditions of masters like Cole Weston and George Tice. He has applied wet-plate work to modern commercial commissions, including a Guinness advertisement, proving that 1850s chemistry can still earn a living in the 21st century. His museum and gallery exhibitions, and his collaboration with the Getty Conservation Institute on cataloguing historical printing processes, put him at the center of a small but serious movement to keep photographic history from becoming mere theory.

For a former child actor, it is an almost defiant career choice: slow, manual, anonymous work, judged by craftspeople rather than critics. No red carpets — just darkrooms.

Then vs Now

Barret Oliver didn't just leave acting — he time-traveled. While the film industry moved toward digital, he moved backward, into a world of darkrooms and glass plates, and became one of the few people keeping a 150-year-old art alive.

There is a final irony worth savoring. The NeverEnding Story is about a boy who discovers that the world of Fantasia is dying because people have stopped believing in stories — and that it can only be saved by giving it a new name. Oliver gave his own second act a new name too: not actor, but printer, photographer, historian, teacher. The book Bastian stole from the bookshop changed his life on screen. The book Oliver wrote about the Woodburytype preserves a dying art in real life. Fantasia, it turns out, was just practice.

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