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

By Thomas R. Lindlof. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, July 2008. Cloth: ISBN 978-0-8131-2517-6, $32.50. 408 pages.

Review by Laurence Raw, Baskent University, Ankara, Turkey

This book recounts the stormy passage from page to screen of Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of Nikos Kazantakis’s The Passion of the Christ. Originally published in America in 1960, the book attracted a hail of criticism, as city councils and other pressure groups tried to ban it from local libraries on account of its allegedly blasphemous content. Nonetheless, the novel was optioned by the director Sidney Lumet; when he failed to obtain studio backing, Martin Scorsese took up the idea. He acquired the rights to the book in 1977 and commissioned a screenplay from Paul Schrader. Originally, the film was to be made by Paramount, but following objections from a variety of Christian groups, the project was shelved indefinitely in 1983, despite the fact that Scorsese had begun filming in Israel. Four years later, Universal agreed to produce the film; this was partly due to Scorsese’s box-office potential, which had rapidly increased following the success of The Color of Money (1986), and partly due to some astute wheeling and dealing by Universal’s chairman Tom Pollock. Filming recommenced in Morocco with a cast including Willem Dafoe and Barbara Hershey. However, the reaction to the project from the Christian Right was much the same as before: even before filming had been completed, Universal executives were asked to abandon the project, while talk-radio stations denounced the studio for daring to green-light a film that might (note the word “might”) “have a deleterious effect on the millions of movie-goers looking for the truth about Christ” (166). Lindlof chronicles in exhaustive detail the ways in which Universal circumvented such criticism by engaging a Christian executive to put a positive slant on the film, and when this strategy failed, to devise an astute marketing campaign for the film’s American release. It was premiered in safe venues in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, and subsequently distributed to nine more markets with only two – Houston and Austin – in the South. The film broke box-office records in some theatres, even though many of them were picketed by protesters. Last Temptation encountered even more extreme responses elsewhere: in October 1988, the Cinéma Saint-Michel in Paris, where the film played on two screens, was burned to the ground. In Greece the film was banned altogether. As time passed, however, so reactions to Last Temptation became less and less extreme. In 2000 the American cable network Bravo announced four showings during the Easter season; no protests or telephone calls were registered. Lindlof’s book concludes with an analysis of other religious films released after Last Temptation, and concludes that The Passion of the Christ (2004) and The Da Vinci Code (2006) both “appealed to a vast audience of believers” (313). Last Temptation is a seminal film, as it helped reshape attitudes towards religion in Hollywood: filmmakers took more note of the feelings of Christians of all denominations, while faith-based groups adopted a more conciliatory tone towards the studios. At a deeper level, however, Hollywood Under Siege tells us a lot about the conflicts dominating American society in the late 1980s. Although the protests centered on the film’s allegedly blasphemous content, they also served as a pretext for anti-Semitism. Lew Wasserman, then the president of MCA (Universal’s parent company) became the subject of a series of violent demonstrations accusing him of endangering Israel and ridiculing a religion in which he did not grow up (188). Although many Christian leaders protested, the playing of the Jewish card evoked feelings in the media community ranging from “shock to anger to embarrassment, regret and sadness” (192). The violence of the protests also demonstrated the climate of fear still dominating American society at that time: people believed that Last Temptation was a potentially subversive text. One Presbyterian pastor observed that “all fictional treatments of Jesus are pale imitations of the Sacred Word.” They could be dangerous, especially for “all the millions of impressionable young people who . . . may have inadequate Christian education to be able to divide truth from fantasy” (195). Last Temptation provided a battleground for the so-called “culture wars” that emerged during the Reagan presidency. People were either for or against the film; sitting on the fence was considered moral weakness. Lindlof has marshaled a variety of evidence from books and newspapers, as well as extensive interviews with over eighty executives, directors, critics, journalists, and others intimately involved with the film and its release. Sometimes the book reads more like a novel than a work of film history, particularly when the author quotes verbatim an interviewee’s reconstruction of important conversations that took place thirty years ago. Nonetheless, Hollywood Under Siege is valuable as a record of a specific yet seminal event in American film history, showing just how difficult the process of bringing a controversial text to the screen can be.