Church Leaders Upset at Delay in Film Screening

Full-scale religious protests against the controversial movie “The Last Temptation of Christ,” scheduled for fall release, are likely to begin soon because of a delay in a promised screening of the film for evangelical leaders.

Tim Penland, a born-again Christian marketing consultant hired to calm evangelical leaders until they saw the Universal Pictures film, said Friday that he quit his post early this week because he was informed that the movie was not ready to be shown in June as originally expected.

Penland said that the Rev. Donald Wildmon of Tupelo, Miss., who has led widely publicized boycotts against television networks, told him early this month that Universal had broken faith with him.

‘Not Waiting Any Longer’

“I’ve waited six months and I am not waiting any longer,” Penland quoted Wildmon as saying. Wildmon was on vacation and unavailable for comment, said a spokesman for Wildmon’s American Family Assn.

Copies of an early script of the movie, produced and directed by Martin Scorsese, were circulated by Wildmon last week.

In that script, written by Paul Schrader, Jesus was depicted as “a bumbling fool” who says at one point, “I must be as stupid as everyone says,” according to Don Beehler, a spokesman for Campus Crusade for Christ, based in San Bernardino.

The script, according to two people who had it, depicts Jesus dreaming that he is making love to a follower, Mary Magdalene, and exults, “I was so stupid; I tried to find a way outside my flesh . . . now I know a woman is God’s greatest work and I worship you. . . .” Jesus also agrees to let a guardian angel watch them make love.

Campus Crusade is urging Christians to write or call Universal to protest the film, he said. “We’d like to make this the last temptation of Universal to make a film that is going to defame the name of Jesus Christ,” said Beehler.

Universal Pictures said it wrote Wildmon on June 7 to say that Scorsese “believes these scripts differ from the film in a great many key and important ways” and that the motion picture “will serve as a reaffirmation of faith to members of the Christian community.”

Sources who have seen scripts of the movie believe that the film will be similar to the novel of the same name by Nikos Kazantzakis, which portrays Jesus as an often despised man torn with misgivings and anguished thoughts. It was denounced as heresy by the Greek Orthodox Church. The English translation was removed from some public library shelves in this country in the early 1960s because of religious objections.

Filmed in Morocco

The picture was filmed last fall in Morocco with Willem Dafoe as Jesus, Harvey Keitel as Judas and Barbara Hershey as Mary Magdalene.

To act as a liaison to evangelical leaders, Tom Pollock, chairman of MCA Motion Pictures, last January hired Penland, a marketing consultant who had helped to promote “Chariots of Fire” and “The Mission” for Warner Bros.

Pollock promised in a letter read at a National Religious Broadcasters seminar last February that the film would not show Jesus sinning, that it would show Jesus as fully God and fully man, and that he redeemed mankind on the cross.

“It might have been a foolish thing to hope for, but we were hoping to have some influence,” said Ted Baehr of Atlanta, who has a radio program broadcasting a “biblical guide to movies and entertainment.”

Universal said Friday that Scorsese has agreed to show the uncompleted film at a special screening for evangelical leaders July 12 in New York City since the director recently told them the finished product would not be delivered until the first week of August.

But Penland, who felt the promise to make the first screenings “far in advance” of the public release was broken, said that Wildmon and several other key evangelicals will not attend.

Delays Cited as Common

The Universal statement Friday said that it had not reneged on a promise made Feb. 29 that a special advance screening would be scheduled within seven days of the studio’s receipt of the film, then projected to be in late June. Universal said it learned on June 13 that the delivery would be in early August.

“Such delays in the post-production phase are not uncommon in the motion picture industry,” the statement said, adding that the studio had “gone out of its way” to accommodate the religious concerns.

Evangelical protests over the movie previously were limited to statements earlier this spring by smaller groups, such as Media Focus, headed by John Probst. He said he objected to the “wimpy” portrayal of Jesus in one of the scripts for the film.