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  • Introduction: Studio Systems
  • Richard Koszarski

In Hollywood Under Siege: Martin Scorsese, the Religious Right, and the Culture Wars (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008), Thomas Lindlof revisits the uneasy history of The Last Temptation of Christ.

The scandalous Nikos Kazantzakis novel on which the film was based had reached America in 1960, where it quickly became the focal point of a series of rancorous public library disputes. Despite the level of controversy (or maybe because of it?), Sidney Lumet optioned the book in 1971 but eventually dropped out when he found it impossible to ‘lick’ the script. Hotly debated both within and without the Christian community, Kazantzakis’ speculative novel was never a very likely candidate for the Hollywood production line. But The Last Temptation did have its share of supporters – among them Barbara Hershey, who introduced it to Martin Scorsese while they were on location in Arkansas shooting Boxcar Bertha.

Unlike most production histories, Hollywood Under Siege doesn’t spend much time detailing the film’s hectic shooting schedule. Instead, it investigates the various cultural and economic systems that affected its production, distribution and reception over the next two decades. Many of these systems were peculiarities of Hollywood in the 1980s: the creation of the negative pickup, it would appear, was crucial to Universal’s agreement to take on a project that Paramount had already abandoned. But some involved much larger forces – hence the ‘culture wars’ of the book’s title, in which The Last Temptation of Christ would play so significant a role. According to this account, the growing Christian evangelical movement seized on Scorsese’s film as a way of revitalizing its constituency, dispirited and disillusioned after a series of notorious tele-evangelist scandals. What the media had taken away, through the antics of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, it would give back courtesy of Martin Scorsese and MCA. But while the American Family Association and other conservative groups mobilized thousands for a series of noisy protests, it is good to be reminded that only in France were theaters actually fire-bombed.

Lindlof makes excellent use of personal contacts within MCA/Universal, who appear to have given him privileged access to the sort of internal documentation rarely available on so recent a project. And unlike most previous writers on this film, he tries his best to avoid demonizing either side. The Last Temptation proves to be a useful teaching tool, a project with an unusually colorful narrative line –creative types work diligently with studio suits to put their picture into theaters, after which much of the potential audience organizes itself to push back just as hard. And as in all good histories, the light it shines on the topic at hand also illuminates a great deal of significant background.

We didn’t plan it this way, but many of these background structures are also under examination in this issue of Film History. The tricky relationship between talent and management has been a sore point since the days of D.W. Griffith. So this issue begins with the star system, and Martin Shingler’s account of how Warner Bros. undertook a surprising make-over of their most valuable female ‘property’, Bette Davis. Wartime considerations may have been behind it, but the forces affecting this new star persona were more complicated than often imagined. Writers could also be stars, as it turned out, and were sometimes capable of exercising a considerable degree of control themselves – at least so long as they had something special to offer. The best-selling British novelist Elinor Glyn, as Vincent Barnett demonstrates, was one of the first to work the Hollywood system as author, screenwriter, producer and celebrity simultaneously.

If MCA had not acquired half interest in the Cineplex-Odeon chain, it would have been a lot less [End Page 267] comfortable handling Martin Scorsese’s controversial religious project (even so, by the end of its run the film had appeared on only 130 screens). Exhibition is the subject of the next four essays here. Although much recent work on early film exhibition has centered on the American market, Patricia Cook sketches the history of Albany Ward, an itinerant British exhibitor who started with Birt...

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