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..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..R.J. Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington



The release of The Passion of the Christ is a week away, and, based solely on the media hysteria already surrounding Mel Gibson’s accounting of the Greatest Story Ever Told, I’m ready to throw up my hands and demand, "Give me Barabbus,” instead … the Anthony Quinn version, that is.

It wasn’t bad enough to wake up on Sunday, and be confronted with three separate, lengthy pieces related to the Feb. 25 launch of TPOTC -- on Page 1, inside Calendar and on the cover of the magazine -- or stumble over the Newsweek with Jim Caviezel’s thorned and bloodied visage on the cover. No, what sealed it for me was turning on coverage of the Daytona 500 and finding Bobby Labonte’s car, plastered not only with the usual array of corporate logos, but a plug for The Passion of the Christ on its hood.

Not only was I stunned into disbelief by the sheer chutzpah of Gibson’s marketing team, in their decision to win the hearts and minds of the NASCAR crowd at 200 miles per hour, but I also was prompted to wonder, for the first time, "What would Jesus drive?”

(I don’t know about my Lord and Savior, but I probably would have opted for Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s No. 8 Chevrolet Budweiser winning racer, over Labonte’s No. 18 The Passion of the Christ Interstate Chevrolet, which finished 11th. My Jesus is no also-ran.)

That was it. By the time the NBA All-Star Game rolled around, later that afternoon, I half expected to see Caviezel struggle to center court, bearing a cross, to sing the National Anthem. Instead, Nelly Furtado constructed a bilingual version of “Oh, Canada,” and Christina Aguilera performed a beatnik take on America’s theme song, complete with electronic bongos. Thank God for small favors.

I wonder what Labonte thought when his team’s sponsor, Norm Miller, told him that the ad for TPOTC would replace the hood-size logo for Interstate Batteries. Not only would it be unwieldy to repeat “The No. 18 Passion of the Christ Interstate Chevrolet” a hundred times, during interviews, but how would he explain coming in behind the No. 666 Acapulco Gold Pontiac? (I made that one up.) Or, how track announcers would react if the No. 18 Chevrolet were involved in a catastrophic accident? If he won, would anyone complain if Labonte forgot to thank Jesus and/or Gibson for his success?

The mind boggles.

In her Page One interview Sunday with Gibson, Rachel Abramowitz was careful to point out that the Los Angeles Times was one of the few media outlets “handpicked” by Gibson’s handlers to help spread the film’s message, and convince doubters that he’s no closet anti-Semite, which, apparently, can’t be said of his dad. A member of a fundamentalist Roman Catholic sect – whose beliefs and practices are described in the magazine feature – Hutton Gibson reportedly has denied the existence of the Holocaust, offered a kooky alternative explanation for the events of 9/11, and isn’t fond of the reforms instituted by Pope John XXIII and the Second Vatican Council. His son, Mel, a devout Catholic himself, hasn’t revealed any similarly alarming opinions, at least not to his Hollywood pals.

The close father-son relationship, as well as Gibson’s devotion to his strong religious beliefs, is what launched most of the early fears about the motivations behind spending $25 million in cold, hard-earned cash to produce TPOTC. Fact is, though, in Los Angeles, almost anyone who attends religious ceremonies on a weekly basis is considered a fanatic of some sort.

Last year at this time, the 48-year-old multi-hyphenate was pitching his The Passion – since renamed, due to a prior claim by Miramax -- as an action picture. According the occasionably-reliable World Entertainment News Network, Gibson told reporters, "There is no greater hero story than this one. The Passion is the biggest adventure story of all time. God becoming man and men killing God -- if that's not action, nothing is."

He also was seriously toying with the idea of presenting the film in Aramaic and Latin, sans subtitles. Sounds crazy now, but it might have solved all of Gibson’s problems, if no one except scholars understood what the characters were saying.

With the publicity campaign now fully engaged, Gibson is presenting himself as yet another misunderstood artist, whose true intentions have been twisted and ignored. Oh, and by the way, he once had substance-abuse problems, and considered suicide … just like everyone else in Hollywood.

"I'm subjected to religious persecution, persecution as an artist, persecution as an American, persecution as a man," he told the Times. "These things have happened in the last year. I forgive them all. But enough is enough.

“They're trying to make me some cult wacko. All I do is go and pray. For myself. For my family. For the whole world. That's what I do."

Having not been among the anointed few to see “TPOTC ahead of time, I have no reason to doubt his sincerity. On the other hand, hiding a movie from public view – especially from the lapdog junket press -- rarely serves the purposes of its author.

"I've taken every opportunity to say this out there and publicly: This is not the blame game.... I understand that some may have fears ... because they maybe look at one aspect of it; it emotionally sort of causes a knee-jerk reaction,” Gibson continued. “I'm sorry for that. I'm stunned by that. I don't understand.

"I do understand it now, because I've had to think about it and look at it for a while. It wasn't something that I was completely aware of."

That sentence, right there, says a mouthful. How could anyone who’s been on this Earth 48 years not be aware of the ravages of anti-Semitism and other corrosive philosophies, whether they pertain to Jews, Moslems, Hindus or Christians. Certainly, as a Catholic, he must be aware of the prejudices his co-religionists continue to battle in big and small ways, and on a daily business, around the world.

Indeed, one of the most fascinating aspects of the marketing campaign behind “TPOTC is how successful it’s been in getting the film embraced by Evangelicals and other Protestant groups. Most fire-breathing, Bible-banging preachers would rather eat worms than accept a papist’s view of the world.

If Gibson’s film does well from Ash Wednesday to the close of its opening weekend, it will because of people like Arch Bonnema, a financial planner in Plano, Texas, who reportedly bought 6,000 advance tickets and gave them to fellow members of Prestonwood Baptist Church. He also rented the local theater to make sure the film plays on all 20 screens on opening day.

"It's important for everyone in America to see this movie and know this story," Bonnema told USA Today.

Group sales appear to be booming in our markets, as well.

Instead of offering long-lead screenings to critics and other entertainment writers, Team Gibson gave sneak previews to religious groups it felt would be pre-disposed to enjoy a torturous re-enactment of the last 12 hours of Christ’s life. Pope John Paul II was given a private screening (over two days, on a video monitor), as well, and columnists from here to Rome are still arguing over what he allegedly said after seeing the film.

The one thing widely known and freely acknowledged about “TPOTC is that it’s gut-wrenchingly violent. Caviezel still carries some of the welts he received in the process of being flogged for the camera.

As Gibson told Diane Sawyer Monday night, on a separate front in the publicity campaign, "I think it pushes one over the edge, so that they see the enormity, the enormity of that sacrifice.

"It's very violent, and if you don't like it, don't go, you know?"

The clips shown on ABC’s Primetime Special Edition left no doubts about how painful the experience could be for some viewers.

More to the point, Gibson insisted his story was about "faith, hope, love and forgiveness. To be anti-Semitic is a sin. It's been condemned by one papal council after another.

“To be anti-Semitic is to be un-Christian, and I'm not."

In a separate interview with Sawyer, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League said he did not believe Gibson or the film were anti-Semitic. Nonetheless, it "has the potential to fuel anti-Semitism, to reinforce it."

Abraham Foxman, who snuck into a screening before 5,000 evangelicals, described the anxiety he felt after seeing how TPOTC left the audience in “stunned silence … or wailing, sobbing.”

Gibson said that he didn’t think that his critics had a problem with him personally, but with the Gospels that put most of the blame on the Jewish mob, and not Pontius Pilate. When pressed by Sawyer, he said he took the Gospels literally.

Throughout the 100-plus-year history of the cinema, filmmakers have been praised and lambasted in equal measure for their attempts to dramatize the life and death of Christ. The genre officially began in 1906, with The Birth, the Life and the Death of Jesus Christ, and continued on through From the Manger to the Cross (1912), Cecil B. DeMille's The King of Kings (1927), several versions of Ben-Hur, Nicholas Ray's King of Kings (1961), The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), Jesus Christ Superstar (1973), Franco Zeffirelli’s mini-series Jesus of Nazareth (1977) Life of Brian (1979), The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) and, last year, Philip Saville’s critically acclaimed and little-seen The Gospel of John.

Dozens of movies have depicted the crucifixion in one way or another, and almost all of them have offended someone. (During one break in the conversation, ABC even managed to get in a plug for its own passion play, Judus, which airs a week after TPOTC opens in 2,000 theaters nationwide.) Somehow we survived them all.

Only a handful of the pictures based on the Gospels, though, have benefited from the kind of highly sophisticated, cruelly cynical and absurdly manipulative marketing campaign now powering The Passion of the Christ. Even fewer have had to face the kind of scrutiny Gibson and TPOTC are undergoing in thousands of tangentially related websites on the Internet. (Don’t believe me, try Googling “Hutton Gibson.”)

In two weeks we’ll know exactly the kind of impact Gibson has had on American audiences. If, as I suspect, the controversy has blown over by then, all we’ll be left with is another over-hyped, over-analyzed movie, soon to arrive at a video store near you; if, as is entirely possible, TPOTC inspires ecumenical discussion and rational debate, terrific; if it, instead, inspires a wave of rabid anti-Semitism and social discord, then, shame on everyone who underestimated the power of the moving image.


- by Gary Dretzka

February 18, 2004


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