Newsbites: House of David! Carpenter's Son! Judas' Gospel! Noah's Ark 2!
The upcoming Amazon series about Saul and David may be pumping up the action; Nicolas Cage is attacked by bees; a revisionist Judas film gets a distributor; and a Noah's Ark cartoon gets a sequel.
The Wall Street Journal visits the set of House of David
The Wall Street Journal ran an article last week on the current surge of interest in “faith-based” movies and TV shows, and the hook for the story was the upcoming Amazon Prime series House of David, which was recently filmed in Greece under the direction of Jon Erwin, co-director of Jesus Revolution and I Can Only Imagine.
The article had a lot to say about the broader business context in which shows like this are being made—we learn, among other things, that Erwin tried to broker a new deal between Angel Studios and the makers of The Chosen before the two sides parted ways completely earlier this year—but, me being a Bible-movie buff, what piqued my interest was the new things we learn about House of David itself.
And, well, a few of the reported details struck me as… odd.
Take, for example, the article’s first paragraph:
IN A ROCK QUARRY south of Athens, more than 100 actors dressed as soldiers in an ancient army are waiting for the order to charge. Blowing dust mixes with white plumes from artificial smoke machines. Thirty horses shift under their riders armed with prop swords and shields. Facing them is another small army: the production crew transforming one of the most famous tales in human history—David versus Goliath—into a television spectacle.
Were there really horses primed and ready to go when David fought Goliath, which happened in a valley between two hills, with the Philistines on one hill and the Israelites on the other (I Samuel 17:3)? Was either side (or both) planning a cavalry charge at the time? It’s not impossible, I guess, but I’ve always imagined that there were foot soldiers, primarily, standing behind each side’s champion.
Then there are these paragraphs:
Sundown is glowing pink behind the surrounding hills and the light is perfect, but it’s dwindling. An assistant director with a bullhorn is about to send the actors sprinting and screaming across the gravel flats when the show’s co-creator, Jon Erwin, calls for an additional camera setup—he wants to capture the perspective of David as a stampede of Philistine soldiers bears down on him.
“It’s the Jon Snow shot,” the director explains to his crew, invoking an iconic battle moment for a hero in Game of Thrones.
Two points here:
First, Bible-series makers have been pitching their shows as Game of Thrones wannabes ever since Mark Burnett produced A.D. The Bible Continues and Chris Brancato produced Of Kings & Prophets—another series about King Saul and David—back in the mid-2010s. So this has been something of a cliché for a while now.
And second, why are the Philistine soldiers bearing down on David? I thought the biblical Philistines were supposed to be standing somewhere behind Goliath, waiting to see how the fight turned out, and then they “turned and ran” (I Samuel 17:51) the moment they saw that their hero, Goliath, was dead. Maybe the Philistines rushed David in other battles, but not in this one, if the text is anything to go by.
And then there’s this paragraph:
The VIPs toured faux palace interiors studded with pillars carved from foam. They did meet-and-greets with cast members, including Martyn Ford, the jovial, tattooed bodybuilder who plays 14-foot Goliath (and a supernatural fighter in the upcoming Mortal Kombat 2).
A 14-foot Goliath?? I can only assume there’s been a miscommunication somewhere. The earliest sources (the Dead Sea Scrolls, Josephus, some versions of the Septuagint) say Goliath was about 6’9”. The later Hebrew manuscripts that most modern Bibles are based on say he was about 9’9”. But no one says he was 14’.
(Side note: Martyn Ford is 6’8”, or almost exactly the height that is given for Goliath in the earliest available manuscripts. Ford previously played Goliath in the never-released original pilot episode for Of Kings & Prophets, as I get into here.)
The article also states that House of David’s first season will consist of eight episodes, which is pretty standard these days, and it says the series will premiere “in early 2025”, which I believe is also roughly when the next season of The Chosen will come out. (Amazon has been all over the place with its release strategies—sometimes dropping entire shows all at once, and sometimes releasing one or two episodes per week—so it will be interesting to see which approach they take for this series.)
The article and its interviewees make a number of comments about the state of “faith-based” films as a whole that I’d love to get into, but there isn’t really space for that here. (Maybe in a later post.) However, one comment is worth quoting here, because it ties into one of my concerns about the House of David series:
Then there’s John Coleman, marveling at the House of David logistics with his wife and one of his four children. He’s a leader of Sovereign’s Capital, a Christian investment firm and the Wonder Project’s biggest source of financing. . . .
Sovereign’s created a special purpose vehicle to let individuals and institutions invest in the Wonder Project. They get a voice in the studio’s business via Coleman, who sits on the board. With stakes ranging from $25,000 to $5 million, the SPV investors put $23 million into the startup. Coleman says they want both a profit payoff and an influence on culture: “So many of these folks say, ‘Gosh, I want some stuff I can watch with my kids or grandkids.’ ”
When I hear that House of David is being financed by people who want to see stuff that they can watch with their “kids or grandkids”, I worry that the series is going to deliberately obscure some of the story’s rougher, more adult edges.
The biblical David was a man of faith, but he also had some very dark impulses, even in the young “heroic” part of his career when he was on the run from King Saul; witness how he threatened to murder Abigail’s first husband and all their male servants over a single insult (I Samuel 25, especially verses 22 and 34), or how he slaughtered entire non-Israelite communities, including the women (I Samuel 27:8-11).
There have been shows that explored David’s darker side. If anything, Of Kings and Prophets went a little far in that direction—the David of that series actually does murder Abigail’s first husband, and the series never explored David’s faith as a counter-balance to his violence the way it arguably should have—but it did at least get into the parts of his story that the Sunday school teachers tend to ignore.
(Although, even there, the series pulled its punches sometimes; when Saul asks David to kill a hundred Philistines for their foreskins à la I Samuel 18:25-27, David has the good fortune to come across a bunch of Philistines who are already dead—so he doesn’t have to commit unprovoked mass murder to get those foreskins.)
Alas, I don’t think House of David is going to give us the kind of fully biblical treatment of David that the character deserves. Instead, I suspect it will sanitize his story, the same way Jesus Revolution sanitized the story of Chuck Smith and Lonnie Frisbee (no crazy Rapture obsession, no homosexuality, etc., etc.).
I could be wrong, though. We’ll find out soon enough, sometime next year.
Bees swarm the set of The Carpenter’s Son
Speaking of biblical (or at least apocryphal) films being made in Greece, it turns out that is where The Carpenter’s Son, the horror movie based on the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, is currently being filmed.
The film stars Nicolas Cage as the Carpenter (i.e. Joseph), FKA twigs as the Mother (i.e. Mary), and Noah Jupe as the Boy who discovers his “powers” (i.e. Jesus)—and the filmmakers were reportedly “forced to find a new filming location” at one point “after Nicolas Cage was attacked by a swarm of wild bees in a cave.”
Insert your own Wicker Man remake comment here.
Judas’ Gospel gets a distributor in Latin America
Variety reports that Judas’ Gospel, a revisionist take on the life of Judas Iscariot, has been picked up for Latin American distribution by Plus Films KFT.
The film, which is now in post-production, stars Rupert Everett as Caiaphas, Paz Vega as Mary, and Abel Ferrara as one of the Herods.
Variety doesn’t say much about the film itself, but according to a report I covered two months ago, the film will depict Judas as someone who was running a brothel before he became an apostle, and his sister will be Mary Magdalene.
There is no word yet about who might distribute the film in North America.
Brazilian Noah’s Ark cartoon gets a sequel
The other day, I wrote about an animated Noah’s Ark film that has been stuck in development hell for at least seventeen years (but is apparently, as of a few weeks ago, still enough of a going concern to generate new news stories).
Now, there’s news about a completely different animated Noah’s Ark film that I’ve been following for years—but in this case, the film has actually been finished and released to the public (ten years after I first blogged it), and now it’s getting a sequel.
The film in question is Noah’s Ark: A Musical Adventure, a Brazilian film inspired by the poems of Vinicius de Moraes and produced by Walter Salles (director of the Oscar-nominated and -winning films Central Station and The Motorcycle Diaries).1
The film premiered in South Africa last January, and it has played in a number of countries since then, though I haven’t heard much about it in the way of reviews and whatnot. (The Guardian gave it two stars out of five last month.)
Now Variety reports that a sequel is in the works:
The sequel will pick up the story of Vini and Tito and female mouse Nina, plus the other ark animals, once they land on dry land. Sergio Machado, co-director of the original with Alois Di Leo, is currently writing a screenplay for the sequel. Gullane is also planning a TV series based on the same characters “but slightly simplified and maybe in 2D,” said Fabiano Gullane.
I have one question: If the Flood is over and the animals have disembarked, what will the film be called? Could it be called Noah’s Ark 2 or some such thing if there aren’t any scenes set on the ark itself? Or will a lot of the action still take place there?
You can watch a trailer for the first film here:
Central Station was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film and Best Actress in 1999 (it lost to Life Is Beautiful and Shakespeare in Love, respectively), while The Motorcycle Diaries won for Best Original Song and was also nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay in 2005 (it lost the latter award to Sideways).