Hollywood Under Siege: Martin Scorsese, The Religious Right, and the Culture Wars
by Pamela Grace
Cineaste
For those of us who thought we were relatively familiar with the brouhaha over the production and 1988 release of The Last Temptation of Christ, Thomas R. Lindlof’s Hollywood Under Siege: Martin Scorsese, the Religious Right, and the Culture Wars is a revelation. Lindlof’s meticulously researched page-turner, which draws from interviews with nearly eighty significant figures involved in the controversy, provides a wealth of detail about Universal’s massive effort to bring the film to the screen without bloodshed and the Christian right’s highly organized attempts to suppress, or even burn, the picture.
Lindlof takes us all the way from the conception of Nikos Kazantzakis’s 1951 eponymous novel written as a devotional exploration of Christ’s possible hesitation on his way to the cross and then placed on the Vatican’s Index of Forbidden Books to the film’s domestic and international release. Although Sidney Lumet (The Pawnbroker, 12 Angry Men) attempted to adapt the novel for the screen in 1971, this accomplished director could not pull together a screenplay or find a studio willing to take on the project. Later the same year, actress Barbara Hershey gave the novel to Martin Scorsese, who had once planned to become a priest and still had a strong interest in religious themes. The young director was interested in pursuing more straightforwardly the religious ideas that pervaded his other films sin, forgiveness, and redemption and was eager to make Jesus accessible to modern film viewers. Scorsese’s collaboration with Paramount in the early 1980s was famously disastrous. The project quickly ran into budgetary problems, but it was the protests of the recently organized religious right that ultimately killed the film before it was even made.
Donald Wildmon, founder of the National Federation of Decency (NFD), which had formed alliances with several large conservative religious groups, launched his campaign against Last Temptation in 1983 with an article in his journal the NFD Informer: “Film to Have Jesus Fighting against Being Accepted as the Messiah.” The article ended with a list of the products made by Paramount’s parent company, Gulf & Western, and provided the address of the company’s president, for those who “care to write.” At about the same time, independent of Wildmon, several evangelical nuns with large mailing lists also began organizing protests. Soon churches were circulating petitions, and the mail reached over five thousand pieces a day. The highly publicized protests led United Artists, which owned 3,200 screens, to reject the film and raised the possibility that the studio could be left with an expensive picture that virtually no one would screen. Concerned and conflicted, Paramount’s Barry Diller, Michael Eisner, and Jeffrey Katzenberg soldiered on until Gulf & Western chairman Martin Davis abruptly cancelled the project just as principal photography was about to begin. Scorsese was devastated; Diller, Eisner and Katzenberg left Paramount a few months later; and Wildmon boasted that the NFD had brought down the film. The Paramount-Last Temptation ordeal ended with a newly confident, highly activist Christian right, a more cautious Hollywood, and a culture war that had become more structured, focused, and intense.
Scorsese never gave up on the idea of making Last Temptation, even when his future as a filmmaker was in question. Finally, in 1987, in his words, “everything changed.” This time a confluence of events worked in Scorsese’s favor. The innovative agent Michael Ovitz, founder of Creative Artists Agency (CAA) and a specialist in “packaging” deals for leading authors and actors, had become one of the most powerful people in Hollywood. In October 1986, Ovitz’s long-time colleague, Tom Pollock, a leading Hollywood lawyer, who had developed new financing strategies for the film industry, became the chair of MCA Motion Picture Group, whose flagship label was Universal. (The parent company was MCA, chaired by Lew Wasserman.) Ovitz won Scorsese as a client and then went to Pollock and worked out a contract for Last Temptation. A fortunate coincidence made it possible for Universal to take on a project that exhibitors had once shunned. The previous year, taking advantage of the Reagan Justice Department’s loosening of the laws against vertical integration of movie producers and exhibitors, MCA had bought close to fifty percent of Cineplex Odeon Corporation, a theater chain that owned forty to sixty percent of the exhibition space in several major cities. Pollock pushed this advantage even further. He convinced Cineplex Odeon to become a fifty percent equity partner in Last Temptation.
Scorsese went through a grueling shoot in Morocco, and then came back to face an even greater challenge. By the late 1980s, the Christian right had developed a huge constituency and over a thousand radio stations. It had also been burned by recent sex scandals and was eager to take on a unifying cause. Last Temptation seemed to invite opposition from evangelicals; and their massive campaign required an unprecedented studio response. Lindlof’s description of Universal’s “dual-track public relations strategy” is one of the most interesting elements of the book.
To Read the Rest of the Book Review
Criterion Collection: The Last Temptation of Christ
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