New Book on Last Temptation

Hollywood Under Siege: Martin Scorsese, the Religious Right, and the Culture Wars
Thomas R. Lindlof
University Press of Kentucky (July 1, 2008)
Hardcover, 408 pages
English
ISBN: (978)0813125170
9.2 x 6.4 x 1.4 inches

Martin Scorsese's Last Temptation of Christ was 20 years old last month and to mark the occasion Thomas R. Lindlof has published a book looking at the controversy that surrounded the release of the film. Hollywood Under Siege: Martin Scorsese, the Religious Right, and the Culture Wars looks to be a dense inspection of many aspects of the movie from filming in Morocco to the clashes with the religious right.

Here's an extract from the publisher's blurb:

Thomas R. Lindlof offers a comprehensive account of how this provocative film came to be made and how Universal Pictures and its parent company MCA became targets of the most intense, unremitting attacks ever mounted against a media company...The making of The Last Temptation of Christ caught evangelical Christians at a moment when they were suffering a crisis of confidence in their leadership. The religious right seized on the film as a way to rehabilitate its image and to mobilize ordinary citizens to attack liberalism in art and culture...Hollywood Under Siege draws upon interviews with many of the key figures—Martin Scorsese, Paul Schrader, Michael Ovitz, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Jack Valenti, Thomas P. Pollock, and Willem Dafoe—to explore the trajectory of the film from its conception to the subsequent epic controversy and beyond. Lindlof offers a fascinating dissection of a critical episode in the embryonic culture wars, illuminating the explosive effects of the clash between the interests of the media industry and the forces of social conservatism.

It's certainly an interesting premise and it sounds like it will be quite a different prospect to the other recent book on Last Temptation - Scandalizing Jesus? Kazantzakis's The Last Temptation of Christ Fifty Years On. I'll be reviewing this latest book shortly.