TV Walks Religion High-Wire

When ABC televised the classic Old Testament movie “The Ten Commandments” on Easter Sunday 1998, some irate viewers complained about the network airing a so-called “Jewish” movie on the holiest of Christian days.

Clearly, religion is not a subject that fosters consensus.

Yet, network television--a medium that thrives only by building a consensus of the largest number of viewers possible--is set to broadcast two movies this season that take on perhaps the most sensitive of all religious topics, the life of Jesus, and a third on the life of Jesus’ mother, the Virgin Mary.

On the most basic level, the movies are an attempt by the major networks to capitalize on an increased interest in all things religious as the new millennium approaches. Strong response to last season’s miniseries “Joan of Arc” and “Noah’s Ark” also told broadcasters that religious themes would be embraced by large audiences. And then there were the competitive factors. Once word surfaced that one network had a “Jesus” project in the works, no one wanted to be left behind.

That does not mean it has been an easy process. TV executives struggled with everything from theological nuances to such questions as whether Jesus should have blue eyes.

“Will the fundamentalists be happy, will the Jews be miserable, will the atheists be appalled, will the Protestants be upset?” asks Sunta Izzicupo, CBS’ senior vice president overseeing miniseries. The network’s four-hour, $24-million movie “Jesus,” which will air in May, “is sensitive material. This is someone’s God,” she says.

And still left to be answered is whether the networks have correctly judged the appetite for Jesus as prime-time entertainment--will viewers really care enough to sit through not one, but three versions of a story that is well-known even to many nonbelievers?

The networks are betting yes, based on recent experience. After years in which the topic was taboo, religion quietly has become an increasing presence on television. ABC’s controversial “Nothing Sacred” followed a Catholic priest through his internal theological struggles, while CBS’ “Touched by an Angel” deals with spirituality through an undefined god and angels as healing assistants. Cable has been somewhat bolder, telling Old Testament stories for children on HBO and for adults on Turner Network Television.

But it’s one thing to have a family drama revolving around a minister’s family as in the WB’s popular “7th Heaven,” and quite another to take on issues of temptation and miracles and resurrection. Indeed, navigating the minefield of religion in a way that is respectful to believers of all stripes of Christianity and not offensive to nonbelievers, all the while reflecting the recent leaps in historical research about Jesus and his milieu, has proved to be extremely difficult.

“We want believers to watch because it’s a smart interpretation and respectful of what the Bible says,” says CBS miniseries executive Bela Bajaria. Nonbelievers, she says, should watch “Jesus,” for its “production values.”

But when Christianity meets Hollywood “production values,” bizarre combinations can result. Until recently, the Jim Henson Co., best known for its Muppets characters, had in development an offbeat film about the birth of Jesus, seen through the eyes of wisecracking animatronic animals. In a draft of the script, two Roman dogs working for King Herod complain “Mamma mia, we’re stuck in Judea!” and a donkey named Samson acts as the Virgin Mary’s labor coach while she is delivering Jesus (“Push, big push!” he says).

In what could have been a flash point for Bible literalists, one early script of NBC’s “Mary, Mother of Jesus,” which is airing Sunday, had Jesus administering the first Eucharist not to his disciples at the Last Supper, as the Bible has it, but to his mother. The scene, which was an attempt to squeeze the concept of Communion into the movie, was later cut.

Ultimately, the CBS and NBC movies, as well as ABC’s animated “The Miracle Maker,” airing on Easter Sunday 2000, take reverent approaches to the story, but they require viewers to take leaps of faith--at least for those who take the Bible literally. All three movies have invented scenes that aren’t in the Bible; NBC and CBS imagined scenes of Jesus at the deathbed of Mary’s husband, Joseph. The CBS producers even flirted with having Jesus try to resurrect him.

Jesus’ little-described 40 days in the desert have become opportunities for the ABC and CBS producers to bring to life elaborate fantasies on the temptations the devil laid before him; CBS also has Jesus struggling with a black-suited devil in Gethsemane (where he spent the night before his arrest), and seeing the misuse to which Christianity will be put in the world. The ABC movie, which is done in three-dimensional and conventional animation, is seen through the eyes of a child mentioned only briefly in one Gospel.

Peter Gilmour, associate professor at Loyola University Chicago’s Institute of Pastoral Studies, says that although many people rely on the Gospels as history, in fact, “every articulation of Jesus, whether a Gospel or the latest TV film, is basically an artistic expression that relies heavily on the imagination.”

He compares Jesus films to the Jewish “Midrash” scholarship that studies biblical texts for what they leave out as much as what they include and encourages imaginative exploration. But “for fundamentalists who believe that the word of God is unalterable and complete and total, clearly building on that imaginatively is going to be anathema.”

New Research Fuels Projects

Why remake at all a story told so thoroughly by Franco Zeffirelli in his lengthy 1977 “Jesus of Nazareth,” which had several successful runs on NBC? The topic also has been well-covered in film by both Pier Paolo Pasolini (“Gospel According to St. Matthew,” 1964) and Martin Scorsese (“The Last Temptation of Christ,” 1988), and musicals “Jesus Christ Superstar” and “Godspell.”

“The story is a great story, and a lot of new historical research came up,” says Lorenzo Minoli, executive producer of CBS’ “Jesus.” For example, the movie emphasizes that Roman ruler Pontius Pilate took an active role in the Crucifixion, a shift from the traditional portrayal that he merely washed his hands of the affair.

“The Miracle Maker” producers actually took their crew on a tour of the Holy Land to understand the new advances in thinking, including research on the role of political squabbling within the ancient Jewish community.

Meanwhile, CBS’ own written “mandate” for remaking the film says: “We should have a clear message that is relevant to a contemporary audience” that will come away “thinking about the universal ideas of forgiveness, redemption and inner peace. In a time where many are picking up self-help books, let’s highlight the idea of looking inward for your answers, not in money, fame or material possessions.”

But TV adaptations of biblical tales have tended to draw fire. In the case of “Noah,” some conservative Christians reacted strongly to a topsy-turvy chronology that placed the flood after the fall of Sodom and Gomorrah (the Bible has the two reversed, but many historians don’t take the chronology literally).

The conservative Christian Web site The Revolution Against Evolution devoted 27 pages to refutation of “Noah” using Biblical citations; it already has a similar page up and running for “Jesus.”

The networks are “trying to draw in an audience that has turned away from television because of the content. But then by twisting and turning these stories to meet Hollywood standards, they are alienating them again,” says Mark Honig, executive director of the conservative Parents TV Council.

CBS’ Minoli, a non-practicing Catholic married to a Unitarian, says, “You can’t avoid reaction when you do a Jesus movie.”

“I don’t expect [Sunday’s ‘Mary’] to appeal to everyone,” says Lindy DeKoven, NBC’s executive vice president overseeing TV movies. “But I think it’s an important project to do.”

The movie’s executive producer, Eunice Shriver, thought so too. Shriver, a Catholic, and sister of assassinated president John F. Kennedy, has been trying to get a movie about Mary on the air since 1993, but found no takers for the four-hour project she suggested. Even her son Robert Jr., also executive producer, had to be convinced. “He didn’t jump right up and say, ‘Oh, what a great idea,’ ” Shriver says. Eventually, he took the project to his friend DeKoven.

“She must be delighted,” Shriver says, referring to the Virgin Mary’s reaction to the two-hour movie NBC bought. “At least some people will know who she is.”

NBC “wasn’t sure [the Shriver project] was going to go,” DeKoven says, until the May “Noah’s Ark” drew viewers in droves. Further impetus, says one person familiar with the scenario, was the fact that CBS had taken on “Jesus,” which had had its own rocky beginning: It had been initiated at cable’s TNT, but that network wanted more special effects than the producers did.

With the two projects in the works, the race was on. CBS went to Morocco for shooting despite the 120-degree summer weather. NBC wanted to get its film on first and hired producer Howard Ellis, a nonobservant Jew, who decided to avoid the heat and headed instead to Budapest, where he used a combination of sets and computer-generated imaging to simulate the Middle Eastern landscape.

Meanwhile, ABC entered the game late: It bought “The Miracle Maker” after it was finished. The two-hour film, a Welsh-Russian collaboration four years in the making, is being released as a theatrical feature elsewhere in the world.

Theologians Were Consulted

Each movie impaneled Christian and Jewish theologians (and Muslims for “Jesus”) to vet the scripts, with a good amount of give and take. In a series of lengthy meetings, “we pushed the story within the limits of acceptance of historical and theological interpretation,” says Minoli.

As for NBC’s “Mary,” it went through several screenwriters; many members of the Shriver clan had a hand in it, as well. One ending, Shriver says, was hammered out with daughter Maria Shriver’s help while Eunice Shriver and family members were on an island cruise, talking to a writer back on shore. Producer Ellis says he got notes on each day’s filming from Maria, an NBC News correspondent, her husband actor Arnold Schwarzenegger, and other family members, via Eunice. “The family really bound together to participate in this movie,” he says.

Casting Jesus in the CBS movie proved tricky in part because of the cultural expectations of how Jesus should look. CBS settled on actor Jeremy Sisto, who, while traditional-looking, doesn’t have the blue eyes Jesus is often portrayed with, Minoli says proudly.

At ABC’s “The Miracle Maker,” the Russian model makers focused on replicating the Jesus seen in Orthodox icons. “We said, ‘No, no, no, we have to find our own imprint,’ ” says executive producer Christopher Grace of Welsh TV station S4C. Jesus ended up with a more Semitic look than the fairer man portrayed in icons. “The fact is, Jesus was Jewish,” says the movie’s writer Murray Watts, who was raised Scottish Presbyterian and practices a mix of Christian traditions.

There was a similar creative tension over how much holiness with which to invest the characters. “They were real people, ordinary fishermen following a charismatic man,” says Grace of the debate he had with the Russian animators, adding that, “we had to make sure Jesus didn’t roller-skate everywhere 12 inches off the ground.”

In the end, “Mary, Mother of Jesus” takes a fairly Catholic view of the Jesus story, ascribing actions and traits to Mary that other Christians might not necessarily embrace, such as crediting her with flawlessness. At the same time, the original overtly religious ending--where Mary turns to the camera and addresses viewers directly, followed by pictures of modern-day situations where the producers feel Mary is present in the world--was partly eliminated by NBC, because the network felt it didn’t flow with the rest of the movie.

Eunice Shriver says her goal with the movie was to portray Mary as a woman with an “enormous faith. She had a lot of struggles and yet she never failed in her faith.”

Both NBC and CBS show a strong Mary, one who “pressured and pushed” Jesus into starting his mission, says Roger Young, director of CBS’ movie, who was raised Southern Baptist but doesn’t practice. CBS, like ABC, ultimately portrays Jesus “the man,” he adds. “Of course he is God, but we wanted to show the man side of him, the person you would meet, the guy who sweats and gets angry.”

Of all the films, “The Miracle Maker” draws most heavily on Jesus’ resurrection, “the explosive force that starts the Christian church,” Watts says. He is confident that the animated form and its child’s perspective will let viewers come to the story in an unexpected way. As Watts puts it: “It’s essential not to be cautious in making a dramatization of the life of Jesus, who’s anything but cautious.”

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THE LEGEND OF JOAN

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