''Are you anti-Semitic?'' she asked her guest, which is about as useful an interview technique as asking about wife-beating. Gibson on ABC's ''Primetime'' last Monday, Diane Sawyer stuck to the obvious. Those touchier subjects are taboo on network television, where the debate has mostly stayed frozen on the topic of Jewish responsibility for Jesus's execution 2,000 years ago. Gibson's message long before they had a chance to see his film. Reagan, some Jewish groups and liberal organizations complained about Mr. In the same way that right-wing groups rose up to protest what they predicted would be an unfair portrait of Mr.
Under pressure from right-wing groups that threatened a boycott of advertisers, CBS last November was driven to cancel ''The Reagans,'' a biographical mini-series about President Ronald Reagan and his first lady, Nancy. Gibson is viewed not as an artist flouting convention and mainstream Hollywood orthodoxies, but as a lobbyist for the fundamentalist religious movement in the United States at a time when its clout is unmistakably on the rise. (Offensive films are not exactly unusual: dozens of movies are released each month that are deeply denigrating to women, and nobody seems to object very strenuously.) Gibson has argued that he is just an artist expressing his personal vision, and certainly he is entitled to make any kind of film he likes, even if it offends some Jewish groups. But his film has been embraced by Christian leaders not just as a faith-affirming experience, but also as a backlash against a permissive, godless world of media and entertainment.
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(The subtitles alone would be viewed as box-office poison.) He has said repeatedly that the movie represents his own artistic vision and religious sensibility, which includes a firm belief in the literal truth of the Gospel. Gibson says he spent about $30 million of his own money to make ''The Passion,'' a film that no studio would contemplate. But the treatment of ''The Passion'' underscores the timidity with which television handles tricky subjects. Network and cable television usually come under fire for going too far, like showing Janet Jackson's bare breast during the Super Bowl. (In last weekend's Daytona 500, Bobby Labonte drove a car painted with a ''The Passion of the Christ'' logo.) Yet television discussion about the ''The Passion'' has remained oddly muted.įor those who want an investigative take on the events surrounding the Crucifixion, tonight NBC plans to devote an entire edition of ''Dateline'' to the debate over ''The Passion'' by sending the show's anchor, Stone Phillips, to Jerusalem to uncover what really happened in the last days of Jesus's life.
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No other recently released movie has received as much attention - and free publicity - on television news programs, on talk shows, in newspapers and even at sports events. And in that sense, ''The Making'' fits in with the elliptical approach the rest of television has taken to l'Affaire Gibson. This is not surprising - promotional behind-the-scenes documentaries rarely look too closely behind the scenes.
The one thing missing from the documentary about the making of the film are the passions that ''The Passion of the Christ'' has aroused. The film's R-rated violence is shown only fleetingly on PAX, a network devoted to religious and family programming that was founded by Lowell (Bud) Paxson, the creator of the Home Shopping Network and Christian Network Inc. ''The Passion of the Christ'' is scheduled to open next week - on Ash Wednesday. Gibson does not allude to the fierce debate over his depiction of Jews that engulfed his film long before its release date. Gibson's film company, Icon Distribution Inc. The word ''Jews,'' on the other hand, is not uttered in this documentary, which was made for Mr. Gibson clowning with extras on location in Italy. There are interviews with the director and crew members as well as scenes of Mr. On Sunday on PAX TV, viewers can see snippets of dialogue in Aramaic and Latin, with subtitles. Anyone who cannot bear to wait one more day to hear Aramaic in a movie theater should be assuaged by ''The Making of 'The Passion of the Christ,' '' a behind-the-scenes look at Mel Gibson's much-discussed film.
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