Newsbites: Scorsese! Clarence! and more!
Newsbites: Scorsese! Clarence! and more!
Scorsese's Jesus script is already online, The Book of Clarence just had a test screening, and a key figure behind The Jesus Film passes away.
Martin Scorsese’s Jesus script is already online
True fact: when news broke last Monday that Martin Scorsese was thinking of making another Jesus movie, one of my very first questions was, “Is this a dramatic film or a documentary?” Something about his statement that he had “imagined and written” a “screenplay” for the film didn’t seem to fit with either genre: Scorsese has almost never written his own dramatic films, and documentaries tend not to have pre-written scripts. Well, it turns out he’s doing neither: we now have video footage of Scorsese’s remarks, and through that footage, we learn that Scorsese’s script was posted to the La Civiltà Cattolica website several months ago, and through that website, we learn that Scorsese seems to be planning a highly personal essay film, and an apparently short one at that. Among other things, the film will combine new footage set in the modern world with clips from older movies, and—in a very on-brand move for Scorsese, given how violent his films can be—it will meditate on the spiritual significance of Jesus’ statement that he came “not to bring peace but a sword” (Matthew 10:34).
The Book of Clarence gets a test screening
Remember The Book of Clarence? It’s a movie with a mostly black cast, set during the time of Jesus, that was filmed in Italy several months ago. The studio has yet to release any images from the film, but Jordan Ruimy reports that the studio has started test-screening it, and someone who caught one of those screenings sent him a short description of the film, comparing the first part to a cross between Sorry to Bother You and the films of Taika Waititi (Jojo Rabbit, etc.), and saying it has many modern elements like the “smoking of weed” and “a scene where they dance to synth music like in a club”. Also, “one of the most amusing moments in the movie” features Benedict Cumberbatch “almost in borderline blackface” as “a dirty filthy street beggar who receives a makeover to look just like Jesus is pictured today”. Directed by Jeymes Samuel and starring LaKeith Stanfield, who previously collaborated on the Netflix western The Harder They Fall, the film is coming to theatres September 22.
Jesus Film Project director passes away
Christianity Today reports that Paul Eshleman, who played a key role in producing and distributing Campus Crusade’s “Jesus film”, passed away last month at the age of 80. Eshleman is described in the article as an “evangelism strategist” who had never worked on a film before but served as a “fixer, gofer, and all around problem solver” on the Jesus film when it was made in 1979. The film was initially released in North America by Warner Brothers,1 and then Eshleman, as director of The Jesus Film Project, oversaw the film’s translation into hundreds of languages and its distribution to millions, if not billions, of people around the world; the Guinness Book of World Records says it’s the most-translated film of all time, and it is arguably the most widely seen, too. Eshleman also oversaw the making of new films that used footage from the Jesus film; his one and only producer credit at the IMDb is for The Story of Jesus for Children, a hybrid of new and old footage that came out in 2000.
Warner distributed the Jesus film at the very same time that it distributed the Bible-movie parody Monty Python’s Life of Brian—a fact that greatly annoyed Jesus producer John Heyman (who, incidentally, was the father of Harry Potter producer David Heyman).