'Hollywood Under Siege' by Thomas R. Lindlof
BOOK REVIEW
The controversy surrounding the making and release of Martin Scorsese's 'Last Temptation of Christ' in 1998.
THERE are moments in cultural history, notes Thomas Lindlof in a phrase typical of his fluent but never fussy prose, "of gathered tension." Such a moment came with the 1988 release of Martin Scorsese's "The Last Temptation of Christ," an adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis' classic novel of the same name.
In our present era, when fundamentalists can seek violent solutions, there's a certain harmlessness to the controversy Lindlof so painstakingly details. The most noisome moment in this country, from the announcement of the production through its roll-out, came when a driver rammed a converted school bus into an empty theater lobby in Ithaca, N.Y., injuring only himself.
You could say the film's release amid vigorous protest from fundamentalist (and some mainstream) Christians did another kind of damage, not just to Scorsese's career but, as Lindlof concludes, to adventurous films in general. For studios that were already migrating toward a popcorn-driven consciousness, "Last Temptation" took on, Lindlof concludes, "an almost totemic status as the type of project that should not be pursued, except with the greatest caution."
For a project that cost less than $8 million to shoot and grossed about the same in its domestic run, this effort to show that Jesus was a compound of both divine and earthly elements caused a brouhaha of historic proportions for Universal Pictures honcho Tom Pollock and his legendary boss, Lew Wasserman, who had the most at stake in this PR drama.
But traditional balance sheets are not what Lindlof seeks to explicate. As he puts it, "The 'Last Temptation' crisis -- like most controversies -- occurred at a seam in the transition from one ideological regime to another. . . . [which] made the struggle over the film as much a political battle as a religious one." Through their battle against the studio and Scorsese, he quotes journalist Gustav Niebuhr as saying, "evangelical Christians, who see themselves as a distinct minority group" found "a unity of voice and vision that other minority groups have had."
The author's immediate comparison is to the reaction, in 1989, of Islamic fundamentalists against Salman Rushdie's "The Satanic Verses." No less a figure in the "Last Temptation" controversy than the Rev. Donald Wildmon saw "very definite similarities on the front end," saying that both Scorsese and Rushdie "failed to take into consideration the deeply felt religious convictions of the people offended."
