A film is condemned, sight unseen, yet again

In America, people are innocent until proven guilty -- unless they’ve made a movie that might offend a religious group, ethnic minority or worst of all, well-connected media insiders. Then the rules get reversed. I’ve never met Mel Gibson, I doubt that we agree on anything politically and God knows what would happen if the talk turned to religion. But if he’s looking for a Jew who’s willing to stick up for “The Passion,” he should give me a call.

If you’ve been otherwise occupied, perhaps distracted by the thousands of sports-talk radio hosts offering their valued opinion of whether Kobe Bryant is guilty of sexual assault a year before he goes to trial, the 47-year-old movie star has been caught in a firestorm of outraged speculation over his unfinished $25-million historical drama about the death of Jesus Christ.

The film won’t be in release for another seven months. But that hasn’t stopped a flood of reporters, columnists and academics -- few, of course, who’ve actually seen the movie -- from debating its merits, Gibson’s motives and whether the film’s alleged anti-Semitism could provoke, in the words of a Biblical scholar who read an early version of the script, “one of the great crises in Christian-Jewish relations.” The furor began this March when the New York Times magazine revealed that the Academy Award-winning director has bankrolled a Malibu church devoted to Catholic traditionalism, which conducts Mass in Latin and views the popes who’ve served since the Second Vatican Council as illegitimate. It interviewed his father, Hutton Gibson, a Holocaust denier who said that the Second Vatican Council was “a Masonic plot backed by the Jews.”

Since then, all hell -- cinematic, religious and otherwise -- has broken loose. Late last month, a story ran in the New Republic with a damning account of the film’s script from one of the scholars who had reviewed it for historical accuracy. The Wall Street Journal rushed in with an editorial defending Gibson’s integrity. The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times ran front-page stories detailing the growing debate.

A raft of stories have appeared in the world press, most focusing on the film’s alleged historical inaccuracies and portrayal of “bloodthirsty” Jews. New York Times columnist Frank Rich weighed in, saying the film’s “real tinder-box effect could be abroad, where anti-Semitism has metastasized since 9/11,” adding that “Jews have already been libeled by Mr. Gibson’s politicized roll-out of his film.” In a column last week, our Tim Rutten wrote that watching Gibson build interest in his film “is like watching an unwholesomely willful child playing with matches.”

Reading all this, I thought: Why does this sound so familiar? Because it happens all the time.

People have a nasty habit of tarring a movie long before they actually see it, often led by the same conservative pundits and religious figures who are now Gibson’s most ardent supporters. In 1988, 25,000 demonstrators converged on Universal Pictures to protest the studio’s impending release of Martin Scorsese’s “Last Temptation of Christ,” vilifying the film’s portrayal of Jesus, despite not having seen the film. Scorsese and studio executives, from Lew Wasserman on down, received hundreds of death threats. One enraged fundamentalist Christian, the Rev. H.L. Hymers, staged a demonstration at Wasserman’s home where an actor portraying Wasserman pretended to drive nails through Jesus’ hands on a wood cross.

Although he acknowledged not having seen the film, New York Cardinal John O’Connor attacked “Priest,” the 1995 movie about two priests having affairs, comparing it to “scrawling on the walls of men’s rooms.” In 1998, before seeing the film, the Council on American-Islamic Relations condemned “The Siege” as an attack on the Islamic religion, even though the film itself argued that terrorism has little to do with any specific religion or nationality.

In 1999, “Dogma” director Kevin Smith was deluged with hate mail and bomb threats for his satiric film about Jesus and Christianity, long before anyone had seen the movie. “I got a note from Scorsese saying, ‘Get ready to spend a lot of time indoors,’ ” Smith recalls. Last year, without having seen the film, the Rev. Jesse Jackson denounced the comedy “Barbershop” for deriding Jackson and civil-rights icons Rosa Parks and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

It’s worth noting that most of the movies, once seen, emerged as harmless satire or even worthy objects of critical regard, leaving egg on the faces of their detractors. “The minute ‘Dogma’ came out, the uproar stopped. It wasn’t at all what people had imagined,” Smith says. “In fact, the dude who did the protests [Catholic League leader William Donahue] actually invited me out to have a beer after making my life hell for six months.” After all the sordid revelations involving priests’ sexual behavior in recent years, says Miramax co-chairman Harvey Weinstein, “ ‘Priest’ looks prophetic today. If I opened that movie Friday, there wouldn’t be a single protest. When Catholics saw it, they weren’t offended at all. If anything, it reaffirmed their faith.”

Early versions of script

Many protesters and critics legitimize their complaints by saying they’ve read an early script, as is the case with “The Passion.” But as Lenny Bruce often complained when he was on trial for obscenity -- how can you base your case on a cop reading a transcript of my act? Most of the charges against “Last Temptation” were inspired by excerpts from a years-old Paul Schrader script.

“It’s completely unfair to base accusations on a script,” says producer Tom Pollock, who made “Temptation” when running Universal Pictures. “You have to see what’s in the faces of the actors when Jesus is condemned and crucified, are they happy or sad or shocked? How does the director portray the context of the situation? That isn’t in the script. That’s filmmaking.”

All too often in these debates, the real issue isn’t the movie but whose ox is being gored. One of the first things you notice is how a contentious film functions as a gigantic Rorschach test reflecting the political or religious bias of its defenders and attackers. Most of “The Passion’s” harshest critics are the same liberal free-speech advocates who led the charge to defend Scorsese’s “Last Temptation of Christ.” The difference, of course, is that they see Scorsese as one of their own -- a gifted artist who’s always questioned authority -- but view Gibson as a political conservative tarred with the brush of his father’s anti-Semitism.

The New York Times’ Rich was quick to raise questions about “The Passion’s” “tinder-box effect.” Yet in 1998, when Catholic groups were outraged by Terrence McNally’s gay-Jesus play, “Corpus Christi,” it was Rich who was airily dismissive of the noisy protests and media hoopla, comparing it to what he viewed as equally frivolous protests by African Americans critics of the TV sitcom, “The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer.” That goes double for Michael Medved on the right side of the spectrum, who defended Gibson’s film after seeing it, but railed against “The Last Temptation of Christ,” whose portrayal of Jesus as a vulnerable man, tormented by human desires, didn’t conform to Medved’s rigidly moralistic view of the world.

As is often the case with celebrities, Gibson’s biggest miscalculation has been over the issue of control. So far he’s largely screened the film to conservative religious figures and reliable right-wing mouthpieces like Rush Limbaugh and Matt Drudge, freezing out most Jewish leaders, reformist Catholics or liberal Hollywood types. Gibson hasn’t talked to the press, except to Bill O’Reilly, who wasn’t exactly a tough interview, having published a mystery novel that’s been optioned by Gibson.

(Gibson finally showed the film to a representative of the Anti-Defamation League following which ADL National Director Abraham Foxman issued a statement Monday saying the league was “deeply concerned that the film, if released in its present form, will fuel the hatred, bigotry and anti-Semitism that many responsible churches have worked hard to repudiate.” The ADL called on Gibson to modify the film so that it will be “free of any anti-Semitic messages.”)

Certainly there’s cause for Jews to be concerned based on previous incidents. During the uproar over “The Last Temptation of Christ,” protesters focused not on Scorsese, but Universal’s Jewish executives. When picketers went to Wasserman’s home, they brought caricatures of him with a crooked nose. A devout Catholic, Smith says protests against “Dogma” took a similar tack. “I got a lot of ‘Shame on you -- Mary weeps’ stuff. But Harvey and Bob got death threats saying, ‘You Jews better take that money you stole from us and start investing in flak jackets.’ ”

If people are offended after seeing “The Passion” they should raise a righteous stink. If anyone had bothered to protest the nauseating violence in “Bad Boys II,” I’d be the first to join them on the picket line. But for anyone who values art, it is intellectually dishonest to criticize something without seeing it, no matter how suspicious you may be of its motives or aesthetic value. When I look for moral high ground, I defer to Pollock, who traveled with a bodyguard for years after making “Last Temptation.” “Mel Gibson’s dad may be a right-wing Catholic, but that doesn’t mean that Mel is, or his movie,” Pollock says.

“It’s not fair to judge the filmmaker’s intent, or raise the specter of anti-Semitism, if you haven’t seen the film. I’ll pay my money to see it and then make my own judgment.”

(Times staff researcher John Jackson assisted on this story).

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