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

by Thomas R. Lindlof

A behind-the-scenes look at the making of The Last Temptation of Christ and the controversy following its release. In 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. Praise for Hollywood Under Siege “No other book has traced the development of a major motion picture from conception through production to reception with the kind of care and detail that Lindlof does here. Hollywood Under Siege provides valuable insight into the machinery of the film industry, and into the machinations of American culture on a broader front as well.” —Thomas Schatz, author of The Genius of the Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era and Executive Director of the University of Texas Film Institute “Riveting and accurate. Even though I thought I knew the events, I found myself captured anew.” —Paul Schrader, screenwriter and director “As a study of a landmark moment in American cinema, Lindlof’s book is both profound and extremely entertaining.

Genres: Film, Religion, Nonfiction

410 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 1, 2008

Reviews

[Adrian Hart · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book primarily chronicles the saga surrounding Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ, from the many problems that plagued the film's production to the headaches that Universal Pictures, its parent company MCA, and theatre owners and law enforcement around the globe had to deal with in the wake of the controversy related to the film. The epilogue touches on similar controversies that have occurred in the two decades that have passed since the film's release (including the Rushdie Affair and the Da Vinci Code), underlining The Last Temptation's lasting legacy.

I personally found this book a fascinating read. Despite the fact that it's over 300 pages, I burned through it in three days. It was one of those books that I couldn't put down. I enjoyed the movie before, but now I appreciate it an a whole new level.

[Sean · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very in depth recounting of the making and massive protests surrounding The Last Temptation of Christ. I recall a few protesters outside the theater when I saw it way back when, but didn't realize the extent of the fundamentalist religious insanity that surrounded the movie (particularly in France, the one country where theaters that dared to show the film were actually bombed and burned to the ground). So, an interesting read. Though written in pretty dull fashion at a length I grew tired of.

[Gregory Freeman · Rating 3 out of 5]

The madness of faith

I attended the opening day screening of The Last Temptation of Christ in 1988 but was disappointed that there were no protesters at the theatre to greet me or harass me. After reading this book perhaps that is a good thing. I had watched the episode of Nightline which featured a story on the controversy surrounding the film but I had no idea how fanatical and crazed this protest got, both in America and in Europe.

I went into the film as a fan of Martin Scorsese and not as a person of any religious beliefs. To me it was just going to be a film and I was not burdened with the baggage others had when the film opened. I loved it. Even as a person who does not share the same views as the film it won me over. It was an interesting and new take on a very old and often told story, especially the relationship between Jesus and Judas.

The book does not dwell too much on the actual making of the film. The section about the controversy surrounding the novel was very interesting. The bulk of the book focuses on the protest and outrage over the film, starting even before it was released and scripts were being leaked and used as fuel to condemn the film as being blasphemous. None of these individuals had seen even a frame of film and they were ready to go to war for what they saw as a degrading treatment of their deity. I doubt that many who raged against it ever bothered to watch the film. As someone who has seen the Mel Gibson film The Passion of the Christ I can say that the Scorcese film is the better of the two.

[Jack Herbert Christal Gattanella · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this quite a while ago, maybe almost like 13 or 14 years back, but it is an all-encompassing, harrowing, inspiring, and just unbelievable story about how Scorsese got this movie made, which was a massive struggle (it was ready to go and cast and scouted and then canceled due to studio pressure, then revived four years later following the success of the Color of Money), followed by the ridiculous backlash to the film that came from the Evangelical right - as always happens largely from people who either hadn't seen the film or were going off of an earlier draft of the script by Schrader that wasn't the same as the one used for the film or both. Through it all Scorsese comes away as a consummate artist and professional who wanted to bring something to say with the book to screen, and the hard-core Christians just make clear how ANYTHING that somehow goes against or just questions even in some philosophical sense what has been in place for centuries come away as even worse than you might think going in. I liked how detailed the writer got into how the media ran with the religious right's nonsense at a pivotal moment and in a sense we're complicit in trumpeting their ignorant messaging and boytcotting (ultimately more people saw the coverage than the film, which wasn't the case with the Gibson Passion movie) It's a triumph of art over adversity.