Hollywood Under Siege: Martin Scorsese, the Religious Right, and the Culture Wars Review

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Hollywood Under Siege: Martin Scorsese, the Religious Right, and the Culture Wars ReviewIt is strange to read of the ancient Christological heresies like Arianism which held that somehow Jesus was more than mortal, but less than God; or Docetism, which held that Jesus's humanity was a mere illusion. They were not just controversies, they were often bloody, and we are lucky to be beyond such hairsplitting now. Except that we are not beyond them, really. There is a good deal of writing about how Jesus was tempted, and of course the Gospels describe that he indeed was. Naturally, there had to be some risk that he might give in, or it wasn't really a temptation. There are passages that show that he was tempted in every way, which includes being sexually tempted; but it was too much for many Christians that his sexual temptation was described in the 1951 novel _The Last Temptation of Christ_ by Nikos Kazantzakis, and it was worse when it was depicted in Martin Scorsese's movie in 1988. In _Hollywood Under Siege: Martin Scorsese, the Religious Right, and the Culture Wars_ (The University Press of Kentucky), Thomas R. Lindlof, a professor in the School of Journalism and Telecommunications at the University of Kentucky, has given a detailed history of an important event in popular culture, religious thinking, and First Amendment philosophy. It was a real firestorm at the time, and it is surprising how naïve the filmmakers were about how much trouble the film might cause. The week the movie opened, Paul Schrader who wrote the initial screenplay found the director Martin Scorsese fretting over the protests and controversy. Schrader pointed out that Scorsese had intended to make a controversial film and had succeeded. "I know, I know," came the reply, "but I didn't think it would be _this_ controversial."
Scorsese had wanted to do a Jesus picture for years, and when he read Kazantzakis's novel, he knew he wanted to make a film of it. The Hollywood brass sitting around the table at a planning session probably could not have understood his answer when they asked why he wanted to make this particular picture: "Because I want to get to know Christ better," came the utterly serious answer. It proved to be a difficult way to attain such knowledge. Lindlof details the problems in gaining rights to the novel, in coming up with draft scripts, and in dealing with the reactions of those who wanted Jesus shown straight from the Gospels only. Scorsese always said he was filming a novel, not the Bible, but even the idea of doing so stirred protest long before filming began. The movie was eventually taken up by Universal Studios, and Lindlof describes the filming in Morocco, including how Scorsese would provide the cast with articles from theology journals to have them consider their roles in depth. The biggest problem the protesters had was that they made the movie more popular. There were serious and dangerous physical assaults, with a gasoline bomb found on one theater's roof or an evangelical Christian ramming a bus through another theater's lobby. More often there were letters of death threats against members of the studio. In one town after another, though, the most visible manifestation of the protests were the pickets outside theaters, and the advanced teams sent from the studios were able to manipulate them so that they would make good photos for the newspapers. Lindlof doesn't mention it, but in Dayton, theater manager Larry Smith kept the protesters outside the Neon Movies warm and well fed with coffee and doughnuts, a small investment to keep up the free publicity.
The film did fairly well financially, and Scorsese went on to direct movies like _Goodfellas_ and _Casino_, which for all their violence, repeated his themes of individuals forced to make moral choices. Lindlof has given us a parable of a simpler time, when the phrase "culture war" was just beginning to be used. Scorsese took into the battle sincerity and intelligence, and made a thoughtful and meaningful film (and, one assumes, one that let him know Christ better). Lindlof's account is detailed and even exciting. Different aspects of the battle between the religious right and Hollywood are still in play, but this episode from twenty years ago marked an important beginning.
Hollywood Under Siege: Martin Scorsese, the Religious Right, and the Culture Wars OverviewIn 1988, director Martin Scorsese fulfilled his lifelong dream of making a film about Jesus Christ. Rather than celebrating the film as a statement of faith, churches and religious leaders immediately went on the attack, alleging blasphemy. At the height of the controversy, thousands of phone calls a day flooded the Universal switchboard, and before the year was out, more than three million mailings protesting the film fanned out across the country. For the first time in history, a studio took responsibility for protecting theaters and scrambled to recruit a "field crisis team" to guide The Last Temptation of Christ through its contentious American openings. Overseas, the film faced widespread censorship actions, with thirteen countries eventually banning the film. The response in Europe turned violent when opposition groups sacked theaters in France and Greece and caused injuries to dozens of moviegoers. Twenty years later, author Thomas R. Lindlof offers a comprehensive account of how this provocative film came to be made and how Universal Pictures and its parent company MCA became targets of the most intense, unremitting attacks ever mounted against a media company. The film faced early and determined opposition from elements of the religious Right when it was being developed at Paramount during the last year the studio was run by the celebrated troika of Barry Diller, Michael Eisner, and Jeffrey Katzenberg. By the mid-1980s, Scorsese's film was widely regarded as unmakeable -- a political stick of dynamite that no one dared touch. Through the joint efforts of two of the era's most influential executives, CAA president Michael Ovitz and Universal Pictures chairman Thomas P. Pollock, this improbable project found its way into production. The making of The Last Temptation of Christ caught evangelical Christians at a moment when they were suffering a crisis of confidence in their leadership. The religious right seized on the film as a way to rehabilitate its image and to mobilize ordinary citizens to attack liberalism in art and culture. The ensuing controversy over the film's alleged blasphemy escalated into a full-scale war fought out very openly in the media. Universal/MCA faced unprecedented calls for boycotts of its business interests, anti-Semitic rhetoric and death threats were directed at MCA chairman Lew Wasserman and other MCA executives, and the industry faced the specter of violence at theaters. Hollywood Under Siege draws upon interviews with many of the key figures -- Martin Scorsese, Paul Schrader, Michael Ovitz, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Jack Valenti, Thomas P. Pollock, and Willem Dafoe -- to explore the trajectory of the film from its conception to the subsequent epic controversy and beyond. Lindlof offers a fascinating dissection of a critical episode in the embryonic culture wars, illuminating the explosive effects of the clash between the interests of the media industry and the forces of social conservatism.

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