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. Thomas R. Lindlof is
professor in the School of Journalism and Telecommunications at the
University of Kentucky.
