TLS: on Scorsese and Hollywood

Martin Scorsese' s movie The Last Temptation of Christ incurred the wrath of the Christian Right in the United States at a time - 1988 - when that loose affiliation of local and national organizations was beginning to flex its muscles. As a test case for the censoring voice offundamentalism, the Temptation controversy lacked the chilling effect and staying power of the nearly contemporaneous fatwa issued by Iran' s Ayatollah Khomeini in response to Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses. It has also been overshadowed by recent events to which the Rushdie affair seems more akin. Still, as Thomas R. Lindlof convincingly argues in Hollywood Under Siege, the controversy over Scorsese's movie marked the beginning of the war between "religious conservatives" and "cultural modernists" (as Lindlof terms them). The American "Culture Wars", as they soon came to be called, between Christian family values and the rights to privacy and free expression had commenced.
Oddly, though the religious flare-up is the linchpin of Lindlof's study, in its execution he articulates the movie-making process - the slow gestation from idea to funded project to completed and distributed film - with such clarity and detail that his book ends up working as that rarest of things, a Hollywood how-to manual. read more

Lindlof's roughly chronological account of the pressures brought to bear on the studios through which the project passed and the protests during its early release also illuminates the procedures by which film projects get green lit and marketed. Everything that went on as the project gained steam - Paramount Pictures convened a theological seminar to decide if the script was blasphemous - can be seen as a kind of preliminary test screening. The political advance team that an outside PR firm brought in as the movie was about to open, young men and women fresh off the campaign trail, operated as savvy press manipulators, keeping things from getting out of hand while encouraging the free publicity. "You know, it's staging protesters with signs in proximity to, let's say, the marquee or the moviegoers or the fa~ade of the theater", as one of the advance people put it. "And then, just in case the photographer's blind, you casually mention that, Gee, you know, it looks like from over there, it all kind of' lines up"'.
Lindlof starts by going back to the novel by Nikos Kazantzakis from which the film derived, summarizing its impact and the early interest of filmmakers (Sidney Lumet tried his hand at a script). He provides curious facts about Scorsese's involvement: that Barbara Hershey, eventually to play Mary Magdalene, recommended the book to him in 1971 during the shooting of Boxcar Bertha; that Robert De Niro didn't want anything to do with it; that Christopher Walken was an early favourite to play Jesus; and that Aidan Quinn got the role in 1984 and was on his way to Tel Aviv when Paramount backed out. When the film finally got shot, in Morocco in the autumn of 1987, the new studio was Universal and Willem Dafoe was the star. (Regarding Dafoe, Sergio Leone is quoted as having remarked, "This is the face of a psychopathic killer, not the face of our Lord".) The chapter devoted to the film's production is a model of economy, presenting a crosssection of inevitable production problems. Cast and crew are shown struggling with human, financial, geographical and meteorological constraints. Scorsese gives up viewing dailies after a projectionist threads the film backwards in the projector. Dafoe breaks toes and loses toenails during filming of the crucifixion scene. Film of the best of Dafoe' s takes is mishandled, leading to partial exposure. "Leakage spilled ribbons of color onto the final frames of the scene and the rest was consumed by edge fog. Nevertheless, when he saw the take later in the editing room, Scorsese decided it was the one he wanted." The high drama of the book turns out to be the game of cat and mouse played by the studio and the religious Right. While Scorsese edited, Universal brought in a born-again Christian producer named Tim Penland to distract the other faith-based groups who monitored Hollywood. Penland, Lindlof reports, was there "to build a bridge between the studio and the Christian community". Penland was given neither script nor access to footage. He was told the film would be finished in late June 1988, at which time Universal would screen it for an approved list of Christian leaders. In the months leading up to this screening, pressure built. In early June, the studio postponed the screening without changing the early autumn release date. Penland quit, and the protest movement began. Universal pulled up the release date to give the protesters less time to mobilize their campaign. Penland and his cohorts ended up feeling deceived. Surprisingly, given the threatening language of religious leaders, protests in the US were relatively peaceful. France suffered the worst of it: theatres were vandalized, and two were destroyed by fire. The film was banned in Greece and some South American countries. It did, in the end, make a small profit. Thomas R. Lindlof isn' t persuasive in establishing the film or the events surrounding its release as culturally or politically central. Yet his book gives one of the best available accounts of how Hollywood works.