The Screengrab : the last temptation of christ

22 Years Ago in the Screengrab: Nailing "The Last Temptation of Christ"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 22 May 2009 18:00:00 GMT

MOROCCO, FALL, 1987: I arrived on the set of Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ a week into the filming. Andre Gregory, stripped to the waist, is standing knee-deep in water and ranting at the extras, who are writhing and wailing and flagellating themselves. I'm still adjusting to the heat and dust that the filmmaking team has already had a chance to acclimate itself to. The sun is doing strange things to my eyes. I thought I saw a goat with the head of Wallace Shawn run to the edge of the river to drink, but shrugged it off. A member of the crew picked up the goat, tucked it under his arm, and carried it back to the catering tent. The goat kept talking about how much it enjoyed sipping cold coffee in the morning and reading Charlton Heston's diaries until the sound of its voice was cut short by the sound of an axe connecting with its neck.

Scorsese himself wanders back from the line of portable toilets and looks at the screaming, bloody mess going on in the river. "Wow," he says to no one in particular, then flags down his cinematographer, Michael Ballhaus. "Listen," he says, "I don't want to get you in dutch with the union, but maybe you should cut your break short and film some of this, y'know? Maybe we could use it." Ballhaus nods and turns his camera toward the scene as Scorsese heads for the catering area.

The prospect of Scorsese telling a Biblical story is an exciting one. His Catholic background is felt in every frame of Mean Streets and Raging Bull. If one knows the devotion and passion that the director is likely to bring to religious themes, it makes it all the more frustrating to listen to the ridiculous complaints that have been coming from conservative religious groups who expect the movie to be an exercise in blasphemy. This is Scorsese's second try at getting this movie made. He was all set to go in 1983 with a cast that included Aidan Quinn in the title role, but Paramount got cold feet and pulled the plug at the last minute. This time, Scorsese is determined to get the movie finished no matter what. Word has it that he sought out a secret line of support as a safety net, just in case Universal tried to withdraw funding. If the stories are true, then he was right to hedge his bets. Sidney Sheinberg, the head of Universal, was reportedly on the verge of canceling the production shortly before he was hospitalized with mysterious stomach pains. (Doctors subsequently removed a nest of locusts that had somehow managed to make their home in his abdomen.)

I find Scorsese in the catering tent. A true hands-on director, he is helping prepare lunch, personally slaughtering the animals that have been smeared with lambs' blood and trussed up beneath a giant pentagram, a symbol the matches the crimson tattoo on Scorsese's bare chest. "O dark prince, accept my offering!" he screams as the knife in his hand comes down for the last time, opening the throat of a deer. The spray of blood hits Scorsese right in the face, but with the reflexes of a trained butcher, he barely winces. He wipes his hands and face with a wet toilet offered to him by his assistant, then whips off the antlers and animal skin that he has been using to protect his head and back from the ferocious sun. "Hi," he says as he shakes my hand, "I'm Marty, pleased ta meet'cha!" You can still see the shy, asthmatic little boy from Queens inside the powerful Hollywood player.

"I'm, I'm, I'm a, I'm like very excited about having the chance, having the chance to make this picture," he says, looking down at the mob at the river. "It's, it's a, it's just a very personal thing to me, and after awhile, you're prepared to do anything to get made. Anything." He turns to look at his crew sorting the carcasses to go on the grill, then grabs my face with both hands and looks deep into my eyes. "Aaaaanything!!" he stresses.

"You know, some people have been trying to depict this production as some kind of sacrilege, and that's kind of funny for those of us who do understand the project and what your intentions are. I know some people who think you must be angry about that, but I imagine that you must see it as sort of amusing."

"Yes, yes, sacrilege, blasphemy, that is, that is very funny, it amuses me, it makes me laugh, mwahh-hahh!! It hits me in the whadadya whadadya whadaya call it the funny bone, that it where it hits me. Where it makes me laugh. Hey, Randy, how's that venison coming?"

"This is some hard terrain you're shooting in," I say, watching as the chaos at the river accelerates and a man dressed incongruously, in a long black cloak and black hat, strolls along the bank, taking notes. "Have any of the actors had trouble working under these conditons?"

"It's been, it's, it's been, what you say, a very lively, most unconventional shooting environment. For sure, it has. And people have reacted to in any number of surprising ways. Willem Dafoe, when he's not working, he mostly hides in his trailer, weeping and curled in the fetal position. David Bowie spent his first half hour on the set wandering around muttering something about Berlin, then joined Dafoe in his trailer. Harry Dean Stanton is talking about buying a house here."

The man in the long black cloak turns to face the tent. "Oh, no," mutters Scorsese. "Please don't look at me. You can be here, you can leave notes, you can watch the dailies, but please, please don't ever look at me, not like that..."

Sensing that this might be a representative of Scorsese's secret investor, I ask, "Who is that guy. Would it be all right if I talked to him?"

"Nggggggghhhhh!!, replies Scorsese, "I, I do not think, I would not suggest that you, I think that would be a very bad idea, am unfortunate idea, one that I would in fact urge you not to pursue. Please don't. I urge you, don't. And whatever you do, don't sign anything he gives you. " He turns and holds me by both my arms and, looking me in the eyes again, silently mouths the word, "Don't." Then he turns and looks again at the man in black, and murmurs, "I passed him yesterday when he was talking to Barbara Hershey. Something about Botox..." He seemes to shudder.

The sky, which was clear and bright, suddenly turns black and the sound of distant thunder is heard. "Good set of ears on him, that's for sure," says Scorsese.

"You've worked as an independent filmmaker and from deep inside the industry," I say. "Even this far into your career, you've sort of gone back and forth. Do you think you'll ever work this way again?"

"No. No no no no no no no no no, I do not forsee that happening," says Scorsese. "I cannot anticipate the project on which I would want to repeat this particular experience, so no. It's just that this one means a lot to me, you know? I am...provisionally obligated to do another picture with my financer, a picture of his choosing, but based on the suggestions that he's got up his sleeve, I am fairly comfortable in my hopes that the actuality will not materialize. I'm pretty sure. I think. I hope." For the third time, Martin Scorsese looks me in the face, but now his expression is different, beseeching, hopeful yet frightened. "You don't happen to know," he asks, "if it's true that the remake rights to Cape Fear are up for grabs?"

The Legend of "Him", the Lost Dirty Jesus Movie

Phil Nugent — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 17:00:00 GMT

One movie about the life of Christ that didn't make it into Turner Classic Movies' Easter weekend schedule is Him, a 1974 pornographic film, said to have been directed by "Ed D. Louie." The film is said to intercut scenes depicting Jesus' homoerotic sex life with the apostles and modern-day scenes about a young gay man who comes to a better understanding of himself sexually and spiritually by using the picture's vision of Big Gay Jesus as a role model. The movie is also infamous for a scene in which the hero describes his desires in confession to a priest, who is on the other side of the booth listening and masturbating. Most discussions of Him have to rely on a certain amount of trust and guesswork, because scarcely anyone is known to have seen it, and it's not clear that any prints of it still exist. For a while, there was serious reason to doubt that it ever existed at all.

For many of us, the first time we ever came across a mention of Him was in the 1980 humorous non-book The Golden Turkey Awards by Michael and Harry Medved. That book, which served its purpose in the universe by getting the Ed Wood cult rolling, dates from a time when Michael Medved was best known as a genial exploiter of other people's bad filmmaking--it was a sequel to the 1978 The Fifty Worst Films of All Time, which Michael published (with Harry) under the pseudonym "Randy Dreyfuss", lest fallout from the book damage what he then imagined to be his burgeoning scriptwriting career. He had not yet turned into a professional right-wing "values" scold, though there are traces of that later personality detectable in Golden Turkey's "comic" description of the black patrons attending a late-night screening of Scream, Blacula, Scream. Him is cited in the book as one of the contenders in the awards category "Most Unerotic Concept in Pornography", and in fact it took the top prize in that category. The book also includes the revelation towards the end that one of the "turkeys" cited in its pages is a hoax created by the Medveds, and the reader was invited to send in their best guess as to which film was their invention. The scarcity of Him, and the fact that it becomes harder with each passing year to imagine Michael Medved trudging off to gay porn theaters to properly research his life's work, eventually led many to speculate that the Medveds had made the whole thing up.

However, at some point the Medveds revealed that the hoax title in their book was actually Dog of Norway, a "Lassie"/"Rin Tin Tin" knockoff they'd conjured up as an excuse to make cruel sport of their own pet's weight problem. And over the years, a few surprising traces of Him's actual, if not ongoing, existence have come to light. These include the newspaper ad art seen above, online recollections by one or two lucky patrons who saw the film in the mid-1970s, and Al Goldstein's review from the April 29, 1974 issue of Screw, in which Big Al declared that it had "more to recommend it than some of its mismatched shots, mishmash editing and cheap budget would have allowed." Goldstein went on to write that "The plot might have worked, had it been explained to the viewer, but the movie begins inexorably slowly and, for its first 40 minutes, it consists of some solid hard-core in the gay vein and the meaning of the title HIM eludes the spectator. Only deeply into the film does one get the necessary material to permit the audience to comprehend the meaning of the plot. By then it's too late and you really don't give a shit, which is a shame, since so much of this film transcends most of the porno pap that permeates our perimiters." Ah, our critical forbears.

If Him did once exist only to vanish from the face of the Earth--and it wouldn't be the only independently produced hardcore gay porn film to slip into neglect over the course of more than thirty years--most of us will probably be able to live with the knowledge that we may never get to see for ourselves just how mismatched those shots really were. But the movie has its place in history and its lingering effect on the culture. I can remember as a kid growing up in the Bible Belt hearing rumors--spread, not by the local freaks and weirdos (even at nine or ten, I was the local freak and weirdo--but by the church deacons and the most rabidly disgruntled members of their flock, about how commie perverts in Hollywood were, even as we spoke, laboring away at a dirty movie about Jesus. Such rumors were, and are, useful to church groups for fund-raising purposes, and Snopes, the website devoted to the study of urban legends and other assorted horseshit, has a page that covers the evolution of the fund-raising letters specifically claiming to be targeted at combating this piece of filth. Did Him get the ball rolling on this?

Probably not. Most of the letters, which have kept being generated years and decades after Him was made and seen and forgotten and lost, are about raising funds to stop the movie from being made, and most of them seem to assume that the movie itself is a mainstream, big-budget Hollywood production. Also, as Snopes points out, the film "is so impossibly obscure...that it's hard to imagine it could have triggered a massive outpouring of petitions to stop its production." Most likely, the idea of a dirty movie about Jesus's sex life was just the sort of great-minds-thinking-alike notion that a lot of people scooped out of the ether at some point in time. But many of the great Jesus-movie controversies of the last several years, especially the one surrounding Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ, have been fueled in part by the fact that many of the kind of people whose idea of a day well spent is marching in front of a movie theater with a handmade sign in their mitts and red food dye on their shirt have been primed for a Biblical porno movie and react to reports of a "daring" new film on religious themes with the mistaken assumption that it is finally here. This element of the controversies may be lost on someone like Scorsese, who just doesn't spend enough time showing up with a plate of pecan logs at Southern Baptist church picnics to know what the hot rumors about sinful Hollywood are these days. In fact, it seems likely that, in the years since Last Temptation came out, at least a few people who thought that the movie was the legendary dirty-Jesus movie and who lost their faith and went through their own fallen angel phase must have rented it and set it aside for an especially depraved weekend's entertainment. Boy, must they have been disappointed.

In Other Blogs: Jesus Wept

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 14:00:00 GMT

It’s Good Friday, so somebody out there must be writing about Jesus movies. Ah, here we go – it’s Joshua Land at Moving Image Source comparing The Passion of the Christ and The Last Temptation of Christ. “The single most hollow claim of those who picketed Last Temptation was the notion that Universal was exploiting Christianity in pursuit of the almighty dollar; like The Passion of the Christ, Scorsese’s film was an obviously uncommercial proposition from the get-go, and it remains remarkable that the studio ever pursued it at all, let alone held firm in the face of protests—particularly after Paramount had already dropped the project before it even went into production.”

David Lynch won’t do commentary tracks, so the folks at Shooting Down Pictures have taken it upon themselves to live-blog Inland Empire. “I don’t think it’s an informational kind of film. I don’t think it’s part of his vocabulary. That might be the trouble behind understanding the ‘genre’ of this film. Simply avant-garde play of light, affectations and moods. I think the first time I saw this, by this point I was thinking that it was explicitly about interpretation. And it’s setting up all these signs for you to interpret in any number of ways. But it is going to provide a network of significance, and there are several things that will keep popping up for you to pay attention to how and when. There’s an intuitive kind of architecture to the film. A lot of it is just the face - dreams, and faces. It’s all about cinema as a dream, dreams as cinema. It’s not even a syllogism, it’s all a bunch of links.”

Director Richard Kelly (Southland Tales) blogs on his MySpace page about his new movie The Box. “The film was digitally photographed using the Panavision Genesis camera. In my audio commentary on Tony Scott's Domino, I mentioned that I would never shoot a 1970s period piece using a digital camera. My position on this changed when I saw David Fincher's extraordinary Zodiac. It can be done.”

This open letter to Bill O’Reilly has nothing to do with movies, but Roger Ebert wrote it and it’s too good to pass up: “I understand you believe one of the Sun-Times misdemeanors was dropping your syndicated column. My editor informs me that ‘very few’ readers complained about the disappearance of your column, adding, ‘many more complained about Nancy.’ I know I did. That was the famous Ernie Bushmiller comic strip in which Sluggo explained that ‘wow’ was ‘mom’ spelled upside-down.”

And in List-o-Mania this week…what the hell, let’s go with the 10 Greatest Mall-Set Action Scenes from Spoutblog, including Commando. “There’s nothing like seeing Arnold Schwarzenegger throw off about eight mall cops attempting a circular apprehension. There’s also nothing like seeing Arnold Schwarzenegger swing across the atrium of the Sherman Oaks Galleria using a plastic balloon-like decoration that couldn’t possibly have held him. Yes, there are a lot of over-the-top moments in this action scene, but there’s no denying it’s entertaining, at least to those of us who aren’t employed as mall security.”

Academy Awards Show Cuts Best Song Nominee "Down to Earth" Down to 65 Seconds; Peter Gabriel Vows Silent Protest

Phil Nugent — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 16:00:00 GMT

Tom Hanks once confided that, while watching the big musical production numbers is often the lamest part of the Academy Awards telecast, "when you see them live, they look kind of cool." As with so much else in life, we'll have to take Tom Hanks's word for it. Unfortunately for those in the audience at this year's Oscars show, the musical component of this year's event started out downsized and is getting smaller by the minute. In previous years, the people in charge of picking out five "original songs" to nominate for that treasured category have rolled up their sleeves and worked with what God gave them, forcing the people onstage to read out words that were never meant to fgo together, such as "Love Theme from The Towering Inferno." (It's also because of the Best Original Song category that such movies as The Karate Kid, Part II, Yes, Giorgio, Mannequin, and Whiffs can truthfully claim to have been Oscar nominees and so may well turn up on Turner Classic Movies during their annual "Thirty Days of Oscar" celebration, while Robert Osborne smiles into the camera and wishes he were dead.) This year, though, the category consists only of three nominees. There's a precedent for this: it happened in 1988 (when Carly Simon's theme song for Working Girls beat out a Phil Collins tune from the Phil Collins movie--you see what I mean about words that were never meant to go together?--Buster and something from Bagdad Cafe), and again in 2005, when the relative lack of competition turned out to be windfall for those musical craftsmen Three 6 Mafia. (They won for their contribution to the soundtrack of Hustle & Flow, "It's Hard Out There for a Pimp", a sentiment calculated to get Hollywood agents and studio chiefs standing on their chairs screaming, "Can I get an amen?") But this year, the three songs were selected from a grand total of two movies: Slumdog Millionaire and WALL-E. This in spite of the fact that anyone who's been to the movies more than a couple of times in the past few months has had Bruce Springsteen's song from The Wrestler imprinted permanently in their brains, even if they haven't seen the movie. Now comes word that Peter Gabriel, whose WALL-E theme "Down to Earth" has already won a Grammy for Best Song from a Motion Picture, has pulled out of the ceremony to protest the decision that he would only be allowed to perform a brief snippet of the song as part of a medley. Gabriel will be in the audience in case he wins; "I’m an old fart," he says, "and it’s not going to do me any harm to make a little protest. But the ceremony will be fun and I’m looking forward to it." So anyone who volunteers to take his place and perform part of the song on stage will do so knowing that the composer is staring at him trying to kill him with hate rays.

Gabriel, who discusses his gripes with the Academy in a video posted at his website, co-wrote "Down to Earth" with Thomas Newman, the son of the legendary film composer Alfred Newman. (He and Randy Newman are cousins.) It's the first Oscar nomination of Gabriel's career, though he has composed three well-regarded original film scores, for Birdy, The Last Temptation of Christ, and Rabbit-Proof Fence. And he has a special place in Oscar history for his appearance at the 1998 awards, where he sang Randy Newman's theme song for Babe: Pig in the City. Some of us have never fully recovered from seeing the smartly dressed and coiffed Gabriel, his eyes damp with emotion, pour all his soulful reverence into a love song to a pig that featured the refrain, "That'll do, babe, that'll do." (It crowded out the space in my head that I'd been using to store Bonnie Raitt's bluesy cover of the mama elephant's song from Dumbo.) There is speculation that this move will leave the evening bereft of music-scene stars, especially since the big draw related to the Slumdog numbers is M.I.A., may still be recovering from the rigors of giving birth when Oscar night rolls around. On the other hand, anyone who saw the very pregnant young thing a-wigglin' and a-jigglin' at the Grammys show a week ago knows that she is a trouper. But does she do inspirational barnyard love ballads?

Morning Deal Report: George Clooney’s Challenge

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 14:30:00 GMT

The Cloon is getting political again. According to Variety, George Clooney “has bought the rights to Jonathan Mahler's legal thriller The Challenge, about the long campaign waged by U.S. Navy lawyer Charles Swift and Georgetown law professor Neal Katyal to ensure a fair trial for Salim Hamdan, the bodyguard and driver of Osama bin Laden.” Presumably Clooney will play the lawyer and not the driver.

Conan (the Barbarian, not the O’Brien) dons his loincloth again for Lionsgate. Dirk Blackman and Howard McCain, who have written an Amazon warrior vehicle for Scarlett Johansson, will pen the return of Robert E. Howard’s creation. (Presumably the governor of California is unavailable to reprise his role.) The Hollywood Reporter quotes producer Fredrik Malmberg as saying “We all want this movie to go into production as soon as possible,” so you know quality is priority number one.

Willem Dafoe is a versatile fellow, isn’t he? He played Jesus in Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, and now he’s set to star in Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist. It doesn’t sound like he’s necessarily taking on the title role, however. Variety describes it as a “psychological thriller that evolves into a horror film,” in which “Dafoe and [Charlotte] Gainsbourg will play a couple who retreat to an isolated cabin in the woods following the death of their child.” That Von Trier, he’s a million laughs.

Related:
George Clooney Leans In and Other Insights
Face/Off: "Breaking the Waves"

Separated at Birth: "After Hours" and Joe Frank's "Lies"

Phil Nugent — Thu, 29 May 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Andrew Hearst at the invaluable Panopticist recalls one of the lesser-known Hollywood scandals of the 1980s, the aspiring screenwriter Joseph Minion mining Joe Frank's radio monologue Lies for a script that would become the 1985 Martin Scorsese movie After Hours. Frank, a God in the highly specialized field of contemporary radio drama and performance art, wrote Lies back in 1982, one of eighteen original works he created for NPR Playhouse in the early 1990s. In the opening section of the monologue, which you can listen to at Hearst's site, the hero describes visiting a diner and meeting a woman who seems to flirt with him and mentions that her roommate is a sculptor who's looking to sell some of her work as paperweights. The hero goes home, starts thinking about the woman, calls her and receives an invitation to come over, and takes a cab to her building. In the course of the cab ride, he loses the only money he has on him when the bill goes flying out the window. When he finally arrives, he discovers that the woman's roommate is a sultry type who "sleeps around" and that the two of them live in a space filled with "leaden art droppings." Alone in the bedroom, the hero observes that the woman seems unstable and possibly nuts, and that "she seemed interested and indifferent at the same time;" eventually she tells him that she's still trying to come to term with having been raped. All these details turn up transposed in the first half hour of After Hours, along with other small, strange bits that may have been indirectly influenced by Lies. (In the movie, the woman, played by Rosanna Arquette, introduces herself to the hero--Griffin Dunne--by reciting a passage from the Henry Miller paperback he's reading; in Lies, the woman tells the hero that he "sounds like someone in a paperback book.") There's also a brief appearance by Larry Block, an actor known for his association with Joe Frank, as the cab driver. This is such a weird coincidence that Andrew Hearst is moved to speculate that it might have been part of a payoff to Frank, but in his own comments on the affair, Frank says that he didn't know Block at the time and was unaware that he'd been ripped off until someone told him that he ought to see the movie. It was just one of those fluky things.

The After Hours screenplay, which also includes a scene built around dialogue lifted from Kafka's "Before the Law"--a steal obvious enough that anyone who noticed it probably assumed it was a deliberate homage--was written by Minion when he was a kid in Columbia's Graduate Film Writing Program. (He was twenty-eight when the movie got made.) Whatever he was thinking when he wrote it, he probably didn't guess that a production team that included Dunne and Amy Robinson (who played Harvey Keitel's girlfriend in Mean Streets would get the script to Scorsese, and that Scorsese would latch onto it when he was looking for a small project he could make fast and on the cheap after his plans to film The Last Temptation of Christ with Robert De Niro collapsed. In a 2000 profile in Salon, Frank declined to name the "Hollywood film" whose producers had "paid him handsomely" for the theft of his material. In discussing the matter in the relative safety of his own web site, Frank took a pretty conciliatory tone towards Minion, pointing out that he took the story in a different direction after using Frank's monologue to achieve liftoff. The film industry may be less forgiving about the whole thing; Minion hasn't been drummed out of the business, but after achieving some whiz-kid renown on the basis of After Hours, his career failed to catch fire. His best-known screenplay credit since then was for the Nicolas Cage picture Vampire's Kiss; he also wrote the Scorses-directed episode of the TV series Amazing Stories and directed a couple of pictures, Daddy's Boys and Trafficking, neither of which got a theatrical release. Maybe he should spend a few weekends taking notes while listening to Car Talk.