When the Religious Right Came for Martin Scorsese

In Mary Pratt Kelly’s “Martin Scorsese: A Journey,” the film’s director of photography likens the production to being in a war. Scorsese and his crew had fifty-eight days to shoot a hundred-and-twenty-page screenplay that mostly takes place outdoors. The compressed timetable left him with very few takes, and the remote location meant that he couldn’t get rushes in time to review what he had shot. At one point, a flood swept in and cut off the roads back to Marrakesh. Depending on whom you ask, the low budget gives the film either an immediacy lacking in most Hollywood epics or, as Schrader put it to me, “a lot of just walking around ruins when Paul was preaching and stuff.”

I belong to the former camp. “The Last Temptation of Christ” is one of Martin Scorsese’s greatest films. It is also one of his strangest. The screenplay, which Schrader described as “a plexiglass layer cake,” built out of Kazantzakis’s Greek Orthodoxy, Schrader’s Calvinism, and Scorsese’s Catholicism, shifts beguilingly among the mystical, the mundane, and the surprisingly funny. All dramatizations of Jesus’ life struggle to make his story coherent: we have four contradictory accounts of what he said and did in the Gospels, and his teachings do not always line up. “Last Temptation” channels these inconsistencies into a story of Jesus’ evolving understanding of his mission. Surely, being a prophet destined to die on the cross would be a painful vocation, and the film refuses to look away from this pain. By focussing on Jesus’ humanity and putting it in difficult conversation with his divinity, “Last Temptation” gives us a life of Christ that is both more relatable and more moving than other Biblical films.

Scorsese frequently discussed the film as “faith-affirming” in the press, but his arguments did little to persuade evangelical leaders. Before it was finished—before anyone had even read the script, which Universal had locked down like the nuclear codes—the religious right had decried his depiction of Jesus as blasphemous. If the book was any indication, they said, it was libelous of someone with whom they had a personal relationship.

Universal knew the movie would be a tough sell to the public, and they wanted help building inroads to the camp most likely to speak out against it, so they reached out to a man named Tim Penland, a marketing consultant with deep ties to the Christian community. In the eighties, Hollywood had begun dipping its toes into the evangelical-Christian marketplace, looking to tap into a demographic that numbered roughly eighty million people. Penland had made “Chariots of Fire” a hit in 1981; five years later, he brought out an audience for “The Mission,” a superior, if less successful, film.

“You only have your credibility in this business,” Penland later told the historian Thomas Lindlof. “Once you lose your credibility, you’ve lost everything.” Worried that “Last Temptation” would erode that cred, Penland reached out to his friend Larry Poland, the head of Mastermedia International, a prominent Christian media-advocacy group. Together, the two men attempted to help a blasphemous film find a faithful audience.

In their initial meetings, Universal’s Tom Pollock pitched Penland on Scorsese’s sincere, if idiosyncratic, Catholicism, and the ways that showing Jesus’ human side could open people’s hearts to his message. Penland offered a deal: he could get Jerry Falwell, Donald Wildmon, Focus on the Family’s James Dobson, and their allies to hold their fire on the film if he could also promise that they could see a cut before it came out. Once that happened, they could proceed as their consciences dictated. Pollock agreed to the terms, and Penland left the meeting excited by the possibility of forging greater links between Hollywood and the evangelical community.