‘Judas’ has the passion, minus the star power

Father Frank Desiderio is no fan of “The Passion of the Christ,” and he makes no bones about it. “It didn’t change my faith or give me a lift into the transcendent,” he says. “It’s superb from a technical point of view, but I walked out feeling sad and sick to my stomach because the violence made it too painful to stay involved in the story.”

But Desiderio admits to feeling a pang of envy for Mel Gibson’s star power. As head of Paulist Productions, Desiderio is a man of the cloth who lives in the relentlessly material world of show business, making TV movies and documentaries that focus on spiritual values. And while the media have endlessly covered Gibson’s controversial film of Christ’s last hours that grossed $125.2 million in its five-day opening, Desiderio has struggled to get the word out about “Judas,” a new movie that views Jesus’ last days through his relationship with his betrayer. Starring Johnathon Schaech as Judas, Jonathan Scarfe as Jesus and Tim Matheson as Pontius Pilate, the film airs Monday night at 9 on ABC.

To say that the “Judas” creative team has mixed emotions about “The Passion” would be an understatement. Gibson spent about $30 million on his film; “Judas” had a bare-bones $5-million budget, shooting in Morocco on sets left over from a TV movie. On the other hand, the “Judas” filmmakers apparently got a much-needed boost from “The Passion.”

“It’s probably only because of Mel’s film that our movie is being seen at all,” says “Judas” writer-producer Tom Fontana, best known as a creator of such critically lauded shows as “Homicide: Life on the Street” and “Oz.” “It took ABC two years to put us on the schedule. I have to think they were afraid of the movie.”

Founded in 1960 by the late Father Ellwood “Bud” Kieser, Paulist Productions has won eight Emmys and various film festival awards. Its productions have attracted such acting talent as Walter Matthau, Martin Sheen, Ed Asner and Carol Burnett, and writers including John Wells, Michael Crichton and Rod Serling, as well as Fontana, who also wrote a 1985 TV movie called “The Fourth Wise Man.” But today’s Hollywood is allergic to films with specifically religious themes, a stance that is unlikely to change even with the commercial triumph of “The Passion.”

Paulist Productions has largely lived off the money it made from “Romero,” a 1989 film that starred Raul Julia as El Salvador’s martyred archbishop Oscar Romero. But after taking a big loss on another feature film, 1995’s “Entertaining Angels,” it has shied away from theatrical productions, preferring the relative financial safety of television. Not that mainstream TV is much more hospitable to spiritual issues. In recent years, most Paulist productions have aired on distant outposts like the History Channel.

“With the networks today, almost all the material has to be baby-boomer-driven celebrity stories,” explains Desiderio, sitting in his Paulist headquarters, a Spanish-style building on Pacific Coast Highway that in the 1930s served as a private club for movie starlet Thelma Todd. Desiderio rattles off a list of recent TV movies based on the lives of such celebrities as Natalie Wood, the Three Stooges, Lucille Ball, the Reagans and Martin & Lewis. “The logline in TV Guide has to have a celebrity name in the title. At least with ‘Judas,’ we might have a name people can recognize.”

Unlike many conservatives and evangelicals, Desiderio doesn’t believe Hollywood is hostile to Christian values. “It’s not so much hostility as disconnectedness,” he says. “I find that a lot of people in Hollywood and the media are religiously illiterate. They just don’t know the Christian story.”

Desiderio is a fan of both “Touched by an Angel” (now in syndicated reruns) and “Joan of Arcadia,” two TV shows that deal with spiritual issues. He only wishes they were less risk-averse. “They’re both smart, sensitive shows, but they only seem to offer a very generic form of spirituality. They never mention Jesus. TV tries to stay away from anything that seems too ideological. Everything has to be as universal as possible.”

There is one time when TV seems receptive to specifically faith-based material -- holidays. As a result, most Paulist productions have aired around Christmas or Easter, or on Halloween, as was the case with “Saints Preserved,” a documentary that aired Oct. 30 on the History Channel. That’s just before All Saints Day, Desiderio dryly notes. “So there’s a religious connection if you go back far enough.”

The idea for “Judas” began with Kieser, who wanted to do a Rashomon-style depiction of the life of Christ. In early 2000, Kieser got Fontana on board. “Even for a wayward Catholic like myself, there’s no underestimating the power of a Catholic priest,” Fontana recalls. “I told Bud I was too busy and the next thing I knew I was in pitching three Jesus movies to [then ABC movie chief] Susan Lyne.”

Lyne said she’d make one of the movies, so Kieser and Fontana picked “Judas.” “Bad guys are always the most interesting characters,” Fontana explains. “It was a challenge to take the most reviled character in the history of mankind and try to figure out why he did this betrayal without portraying him as a one-dimensional bad guy.”

Fontana wrote a first draft of the script for Kieser just before he died. “He gave me notes on a Friday, went into a coma on Monday and died later that week,” Fontana recalls. “I always thought that was his ultimate revenge, because I couldn’t argue -- you have to do the notes of a dead priest.”

It was especially intriguing for me to see “Judas” in such close proximity to “The Passion.” Although they both feature essentially the same characters and story, they deliver a very different perspective. “The Passion” is a director’s movie, relying on the visceral power of its horror-film-like bloodletting for its emotional impact. “Judas” is a writer’s movie, using character development to create a complex psychological portrait of the relationship between Judas and Jesus.

“Judas” also has a more complex view of the Jewish elders’ role in Christ’s death. Whereas Gibson refused to show his film to most Jewish leaders until it opened last week, Desiderio had a rabbi involved early on as a technical consultant on his film. Unlike “The Passion,” which puts most of the onus for Jesus’ death on the Jewish elders, “Judas” points the finger equally at Pontius Pilate, who is portrayed as a despotic ruler. The film also opens with a scene of a mass crucifixion, reminding viewers that Jews were persistently persecuted by the Romans.

Since there is very little biblical text devoted to Judas, the film uses imagined scenes to develop Jesus’ relationship with his betrayer. “Christian art has been filling in the blanks of the Scriptures for ages,” explains Desiderio. “The apocryphal Gospels are folk tales -- they’re the pulp fiction of Christian literature. Where does it say in the Gospels that after Jesus was taken down from the cross that he lay in the arms of his mother? That image comes from Michelangelo’s ‘Pieta’ more than from anywhere else.”

Fontana also uses invented scenes to give the story a more socially conscious spin. When the Jewish high priest confronts Jesus, he says he will be destroyed if he continues to attack “traditional values.” “I figured the term is in play, so if the fundamentalists can use it, so can I,” Fontana says. “To me, Jesus was a good Jew who believed in the law of Moses, but he was persecuted because he believed in the spirit of the law, not the letter. And whether it’s fundamentalist Christians or Muslims, they only seem interested in the letter. What Jesus says to me is: Believe in the spirit -- justice, compassion, family -- not just the narrow interpretation of the Bible.”

“Judas” may not have the box-office clout of controversy, but it does benefit from Fontana’s humanism, a quality evident in all Paulist productions. “Bud and Frank gave me the power to take the words of the Bible and create my own translation,” says Fontana. “I don’t have the assurance of saying, ‘This is as it was.’

“I haven’t seen Mel’s movie, but anytime you view the world in black and white, you make it devoid of love, which is Jesus’ message. I mean, if you make a movie about Jesus, and you create anger and division, aren’t you missing the point of the message?”

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