‘The Last Temptation:’ Tempest in a News Box?

The other day, in the midst of a conversation about the hubbub over “The Last Temptation of Christ,” Chet, my barber, said it. He didn’t blink or growl. He didn’t glare into my eyes, as so many people had done before. He just blurted it out, as reflexively as a store clerk wishing me a nice day.

“Well, it sells newspapers,” he said.

There are two people whom I attempt to never offend. One is my dentist, the other my barber. Yet, there I was, in mid-cut, handing Chet a $5 bill and telling him that it was his prize for being the one millionth person to assault me with that phrase in the last 20 years.

Sure, I’ve sold newspapers. When I was 9 or 10 years old, I hauled a wagon loaded with Sunday papers down the side streets of Huntington Park singing at the top of my lungs, “TIMES-EXAAAAAMINERRRR (down an octave) paaaaaaaay-(back up)-PERS!!”

Perhaps if I’d spent those Sunday mornings in church instead of on the streets, I would have a better understanding today of why so many Christians are outraged by a movie that ultimately affirms their faith. But I don’t regret that sales experience. It enabled me to eliminate one entire occupational field from those confusing Career Day lineups I would soon face.

So, it is with plenty of irony that I find myself in a profession where I am constantly accused by lay folks of being a salesman. And not just a salesman, but one who would sell his soul, sleep with Satan, and let his nose grow long with lies just to squeeze another quarter out of some innocent victim wandering by a news stand.

Sometimes, the accusations have involved me directly. On my first newspaper job, I was asked to call the survivors of a fellow who had passed away and write an obituary on him. When I identified myself to the person who answered, he said, “I’m not going to help you sell newspapers” and slammed the phone down.

More often, it has been salesman by association. I was a sports writer through most of Watergate, but that didn’t stop a very conservative friend of mine from snarling at me after each new front-page revelation and saying, “I see you sold a few newspapers today!”

I have nothing against salespeople. Some of my best friends, as they say. And in some corners of journalism--the supermarket tabloids, the celebrity magazines, most local TV news shows--the editorial content and display are designed “to sell.”

When I was a film critic and reporter for USA Today, a newspaper defined by its own founder as the “journalism of joy,” the example from above was to think of sales. Certainly, the paper’s front page is designed to loosen you from your change. This is not important if your customers are Stepford yuppies shuttling to work, but it’s not recommended for people who actually want to know something.

About three out of every five celebrities I interviewed for USA Today started the conversation by telling me how much they liked the paper. Then they sat back, waiting (I always imagined) for me to ask them for their favorite flavor of tofu.

Of course, they liked the newspaper. It aims to please. It’s filled with joy. It’s like the perfect dog. No barking, no odor, no unsightly attempts to expunge fleas from those hard-to-reach areas. It’s just there to haul in your slippers and stand by for a pat on the head, if you feel like it.

The truth for me, and for most journalists I’ve worked with, is that we couldn’t sell a newspaper if it had a six-column nude on Page 3, as some do in London. We may have outsized egos--we love prizes, laudatory letters and relatives who fall at our feet and weep with pride--but the process of reporting and writing requires vastly different skills from sales.

We are often dismayed at the labels placed on what we turn out (I will soon be handing over a $5 bill to the one thousandth person who comments on the headline he or she assumes I wrote to go with my own story), or the placement of our products on the shelves. If reporters were able to determine where their stories were played, there would be but one page, and there would be nothing below the fold.

There is a direct correlation, by the way, between those stories that journalists are accused of writing in order to sell newspapers and the negative perception the accusers have of those stories. Tax rebates, for instance, qualify as man-bites-dog stories and they inevitably end up on Page 1 where a passer-by might spot it in the window of a news box.

But when was the last time a reporter who covered a tax rebate story had to sit and take it in a barber’s chair?

“The Last Temptation of Christ” is a great news story, an unavoidable news story, on several levels. Before it was released, it figured to command a lot of media attention. It was made in secrecy, after years of aborted efforts, by the director whom many people regard as the best of his generation. It is adapted from a book that prompted its own furor three decades ago. It is in a genre--the Biblical Epic, Non-Spoof Division--that is currently held to be about as commercial as underwater musicals. And it was underwritten by Universal Pictures, a studio hardly known as a risk-taker.

Some opposition to the film was inevitable, but few people in or out of the media anticipated the intensity, and at times, ugliness of the debate. The pickets, the inflamed rhetoric, the anti-Semitic attacks on Universal executives. In San Diego the other day, protesters lobbed water balloons at people standing in line for “Last Temptation,” giving them a baptism in intolerance.

Chet, my ex -barber, suggested that the protesters have been roused to passion by all that they have read and heard in the media. Asked by a reporter why he was at the theater in San Diego on the night that balloons were cast, one protester quoted a line from the “Last Temptation” script that had actually been cut before the film was finished. He got the material, he said, from his church.

So, churches sell newspapers?

Judging by the box office receipts for “Last Temptation,” it appears that churches--at least some members and some leaders of churches--have been selling newspapers and a movie, too. And I have a $5 bill for the 500th person who tells me we were all in it together.