Religious See a New Spirit in Hollywood

Hollywood and organized religion have regarded each other with deep suspicion, and sometimes open hostility, since the days of the flickering silents.

“Perverts” in the movie business had a hidden agenda to “paganize the nation,” railed Joe Breen, the Catholic layman who headed the Production Code Office that held censorship power over virtually all American films from the early 1930s to the 1960s. Churches routinely condemned movies and the people who made them as being sinful and devoid of morality.

But since the tempest nine years ago over Martin Scorsese’s “The Last Temptation of Christ,” which many called blasphemous for its portrayal of a sexual Jesus, the relationship has warmed.

Many religious leaders, thinking the furor over “Last Temptation” only publicized some tasteless protests over a disappointing movie, now prefer to work along with producers and artists to influence the themes of films and television shows. Religious groups are more likely to congratulate than condemn, saying Hollywood is producing more movies that reflect public desire for more morally uplifting themes.

Also, a nationwide upsurge of interest in spiritual pursuits has permeated even Hollywood, where being a religious person is gaining new social and professional acceptance.

And believers within the entertainment industry, from writers and actors to studio executives, are banding together to encourage one another to reflect religious values in their work.

“Until very recently, pathetically few people of either Jewish or Christian background have taken their faith seriously in Hollywood,” said movie reviewer Michael Medved, whose 1992 book “Hollywood vs. America” harshly criticized the industry for having an aggressively secular tilt.

“There is now more of a constructive religious presence in Hollywood than at any time in the last 10 years,” said Medved, co-founder of the Pacific Jewish Center, an Orthodox synagogue in Venice.

At the Oscar ceremony March 24, Cuba Gooding Jr. thanked “Father God” and yelled “Hallelujah!” in accepting his best supporting actor award for “Jerry Maguire.”

“In the last five years, it’s become acceptable to thank God in speeches at the Academy Awards and Golden Globe Awards,” said Howard Suber, co-chairman of the Producers Program at the UCLA film school.

Some winners “really mean it and others do it to be fashionable,” he said, but “if anyone did that in the 1970s and 1980s, it would have suggested that you were aligned with the religious right. It would not have been taken as a genuine expression of faith.”

Still open to question, however, is whether religious voices sympathetic to the industry will be drowned out by critics who hold to the traditional church view of Hollywood as a sinkhole of depravity that should be attacked, not coddled.

Religious groups “which make very strong, negative statements about Hollywood are given far more attention by the media,” said Walt Disney Co. spokesman John Dreyer. He cited the boycott urged against Disney last year by the Southern Baptist Convention for alleged “anti-Christian and anti-family trends” in films and for extending benefits to partners of gay employees.

“Sometimes if you wait for change to come from within, the whole of society could be warped and destroyed,” said the Rev. Donald Wildmon, whose Mississippi-based American Family Assn. also called for a Disney boycott.

Story Lines Reflect Changes

But the climate in Hollywood is warming for entertainment professionals who want to talk about moral and religious matters and to represent those ideas in story lines.

John Furia Jr. of USC’s School of Cinema-Television said he believes the positive approach of religious envoys to Hollywood “seems to be working” and encouraging greater appreciation for human and spiritual values. Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Assn. of America, said the growing nationwide interest in religious and moral subjects “seems to have shown itself among people in the industry to a greater degree.”

Christian activist Ted Baehr, who publishes Movieguide for Christian readers, said that when he began the magazine 12 years ago “the number of movies aimed at family audiences was at a low point of 6%. And in 1995, 40% of the movies were aimed at families.”

During Movieguide’s fifth annual awards show at the Beverly Hills Hotel this month, Baehr said that 60% of the most profitable movies in 1996 were rated “acceptable” by his magazine--reflecting a change in the themes chosen by Hollywood.

Without necessarily claiming credit for all or even much of the shift--money is still the ultimate god in Hollywood--religious leaders say many current movies reflect the moral values they preach. They cite family movies about forgiveness, hope and other uplifting themes such as “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” “The Preacher’s Wife,” “Toy Story,” “Babe” and “The Lion King” and the treatment of repentance in “Dead Man Walking,” an Oscar-winning film that portrayed a contemporary Catholic nun.

Baehr suggests that value-laden movies can make money and receive critical acclaim. Two examples he cites are “Mr. Holland’s Opus,” which showed that the true worth of a man depends on caring for others, and “Forrest Gump,” which contrasted a simple but good soul with the slick, worldly--but empty--people he encountered.

Even last year’s winner of the Oscar for best picture, “Braveheart,” a violent battlefield epic written by a divinity school dropout, impressed some evangelicals as a sermon extolling liberty over injustice.

Except for CBS’ unexpected success “Touched by an Angel,” Hollywood insiders say moral themes often need the clout of a star with creative control, such as Carroll O’Connor. As the executive producer, star and sometime writer for the Emmy-winning dramatic TV series “In the Heat of the Night,” O’Connor was able to shape episodes that dealt with religious values.

“We used religious scenes and stories as much as we could,” said O’Connor, who was honored last year with a lifetime achievement award by Catholics in Media. “Churches and religious belief, if used properly, are wonderful sources of drama and dealing with what is right and wrong.”

Perhaps the ultimate coup by a religious enterprise was the long-shot success last year of “The Spitfire Grill,” produced for a comparatively cheap $6 million by a Catholic charitable group in Mississippi looking for a way to bring religious values to film audiences.

“Spitfire,” the tale of how a young woman, just out of prison, rejuvenates the spiritual outlook of a small town in Maine, was a hit at Robert Redford’s Sundance Film Festival and took off from there. In giving “Spitfire” its inaugural Spiritual Quest Award in Film in November, the Los Angeles First Congregational Church called it a “startling story about healing and the renewal of a community.”

Baehr, an evangelical conservative who now rarely mentions his attempt a few years ago to resurrect a stern moral code for movies, notes that 1995’s hit ‘Batman Forever,’ was “a strong morality tale written by two Christians who are actively involved in Christian ministry in Hollywood.”

He was referring to writers Lee and Janet Scott Batchler, who advise religious young people with Hollywood ambitions to seek positions of influence with powerful people rather than power itself.

“There are Christians in these positions all over Hollywood,” Janet Batchlers said. She cautions against an “attitude of moral superiority . . . to convert all those perverts. No one is going to listen to you. . . . You’re going to make it even more difficult to be a Christian in Hollywood.”

Former Adversaries Join Hands

Producer-priest Ellwood “Bud” Kieser exemplifies that positive approach.

“You can spend your life cursing the darkness, and I will defend [others’] right to curse Hollywood, but I have chosen to work within the industry to help it to humanize the viewing public,” said Kieser, who produced “Romero” and last year’s “Entertaining Angels.” He originated the annual Humanitas Awards to honor scripts he considers laden with good values.

Los Angeles Cardinal Roger M. Mahony in 1993 backed the formation of Catholics in Media, which presents an annual awards program. And in a major statement the next year, Mahony rejected proposals to revive anything like the old Legion of Decency, a powerful and rigidly moralistic film rating agency that was under the aegis of the Los Angeles archbishop from the 1930s to the 1950s.

Those steps gave a boost to Catholics “who had felt alone” in the industry, said Jack Shea, a founder of Catholics in Media who has directed such TV sitcoms as “The Jeffersons” and organized the group’s awards show.

Christian fellowship groups for Hollywood professionals also have proliferated. One of the most active is Intermission, an outgrowth of the Actors Co-Op at Hollywood Presbyterian Church, which has doubled to more than 2,000 members in the last five years.

“The need is huge,” said actor Robert Hanley, guiding force of the Catholic-oriented Entertainment Fellowship, which holds discussions in five parishes.

The shift in Hollywood’s attitude amounts to “a quiet spiritual awakening,” said Larry Poland, who runs an evangelical ministry to studio executives called Mastermedia. “We are working with very conservative Christian executives--vice president or higher--in seven major film studios and at the four major television networks.”

The Synagogue for Performing Arts, growing fast under the leadership of a writer-rabbi of traditional bent, last year moved its monthly Sabbath services on the Westside from the Writers Guild building to Temple Beth Am on La Cienega Boulevard to accommodate an average turnout of 800.

“People that talk with me--often in high positions--are looking for a spiritual, moral content,” said the rabbi, Joseph Telushkin. “I think people want a higher code than, ‘How do I feel about it?’ ”

Tim Robbins, who wrote and directed “Dead Man Walking,” explained his movie-making philosophy earlier his year while accepting one of Father Kieser’s Humanitas awards.

Film heroes of recent years eventually corner their victim, say something clever, then blow them away, Robbins said. But when he was young, “I remember the hero saying to the villain, ‘No, I’m not going to shoot you,’ and thinking, ‘Why doesn’t he shoot him?’

“As I got older, I realized it was because to shoot him was immoral, because it was illegal, and because the hero was able to reach a level of humanity far beyond what I could, a superhuman level of compassion and righteousness.

“I believe strongly that what you see on the screen as a child helps provide a moral path for later years,” Robbins said. “You really can effect change through television and movies.”

But actors below the star level say that even today they have to be careful about suggesting story changes on the set or identifying themselves as believers.

“I stand up for what I believe, but I always do it tactfully,” said Terri Ivens, who has appeared on “Melrose Place” and “Doogie Howser, M.D.” “I play a lot of bad girls, but I never choose to glorify them or make them appealing.”

On Warner Bros.’ short-lived “Medicine Ball,” Ivens said she convinced the director that instead of her devout character showing fear when facing imminent death in a hospital, as the script dictated, she should portray the calm of a believer confident she was about to meet her savior.

“I showed peace with the expression on my face, and that moment, maybe 20 seconds long, was well-received by the network and the producers,” she said.

Though active in the evangelical group Media Fellowship International, Ivens doesn’t trumpet her religion around Hollywood. “When people know you’re a Christian, they start looking at you through a microscope,” Ivens said.

It was after the increasingly lusty films of the 1920s, which generated a backlash from moral crusaders, that the major studios set up the Production Code Office. Its censoring efforts were entwined with the clout of the Legion of Decency, which could slash a scene or raise a neckline by threatening to condemn a film as immoral, driving away millions of Catholic customers.

As those restraints faded with the old studio system amid the social revolutions of the 1960s, filmmakers felt freer to portray life realistically and explore mature subjects without worrying about religious concerns. They often challenged long-observed taboos and sometimes offended believers by depicting, among other things, gay priests and a lustful Jesus.

It was the furor over the latter--in “The Last Temptation of Christ”--that many say gave rise to the new rapprochement.

Conservative evangelicals and Catholics spent months urging Universal Pictures not to release “Last Temptation,” calling it blasphemous and anti-Christian, particularly a dream sequence in which the film’s Jesus succumbs to sexual desires.

The studio and its allies denounced the effort as censorship. And although some theater chains refused to carry the movie, many leaders in organized religion came away feeling that their protests had done more to publicize the film than alter its content.

Widening the Debate

The old confrontational approach lives on in the form of the American Family Assn.’s Wildmon, who cheerfully describes himself as “the devil incarnate to Hollywood” for wielding a mailing list of 500,000 to organize boycotts.

Another Hollywood gadfly is William A. Donohue, who heads the independent Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights in New York. Using news releases and angry letters--rather than boycotts--Donohue protests perceived anti-Catholicism.

“We’re not asking for a return to ‘The Bells of St. Mary’s’ movies, which tended to give a glamorized portrayal of the Catholic Church, but we object to movies like ‘Primal Fear’ and ‘Priest’ in which the only Catholics introduced are those who are despicable,” Donohue said.

Religious liberals and moderates, writing in magazines and books, complain less about how religion is portrayed and more about whether broader human issues are raised.

On that point, Margaret R. Miles of Harvard Divinity School says Hollywood now appears to be doing religion’s traditional job.

Believers and nonbelievers alike, she wrote in her 1996 book “Seeing and Believing: Religion and Values in the Movies,” “now gather about cinema and television screens rather than in churches to ponder the moral quandaries of American life.”

That’s not lost on those with a foot in both worlds.

Randall Wallace, who dropped out of Duke University Divinity School to write films, won the Writers Guild Award and an Oscar nomination last year for “Braveheart.”

“The well-intentioned efforts of many groups to eliminate violence, racism, profanity, immorality or sexism from television can result in anti-artistic impulses to force artists to portray characters without flaw and without opinion,” he said in an interview.

“I fear that efforts to restrict the profane can all too easily become efforts to restrict the holy.”

“Braveheart,” Wallace said, was simply the “best sermon I could have ever preached.”