Book description
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.
""His book gives one of the best available accounts of
how Hollywood works."Mark Kamine,Times Literary Supplement"
-- Mark Kamine, Times Literary Supplement
Thomas R. Lindlof is professor in the School of Journalism and
Telecommunications at the University of Kentucky.
