RS: Well you’re raising another issue there too, which springs more to the forefront, which is: is the Church too weak in its condemnation of popular culture? In the desire not to appear repressive and medieval, does it bend over backwards trying to find the pearl in the dung, and really lead people astray in so doing? And I think that’s a real danger. I haven’t seen the L’Osservatore Romano article, but if anyone is saying anything good about Harry Potter and its influence on children and its advisability, then I think they’re doing that. In other words the Church is in the business of saving souls, and its not a matter of an aesthetic or analytical judgement, it’s a matter of, you know, will it lead souls towards heaven, or will it lead souls towards hell? And when you glamorise witchcraft, or occultism, or sorcery or disobedience, which Harry Potter definitely does, I mean it’s designed to be a bad influence, so it’s just irrelevant to find Christian allegory in it because there are souls at stake.
SFC: I agree, and I’m not sure all people get that. You talk in your book of the battle that we are in, the spiritual battle, and I really don’t think that people appreciate that the movies are used as a weapon in that battle, and there’s not - certainly not in this country anyway - that awareness of how movies are used for that purpose. And something like the Lord of the Rings films as well, they were immensely popular, and if you were to look at the fruits that they should have produced if there were real Christian messages that they were communicating, you’d be expecting mass conversions, but it just hasn’t happened.
RS: By the way I haven’t seen the Lord of the Rings films, well, I walked out of the first one, just out of boredom frankly, and I haven’t seen the others, but I read the trilogy in high school, even maybe junior-high school, long before my conversion, and it did have a profoundly Christianising effect on me. And of course J.R.R Tolkien was profoundly Christian, so I guess what I’m saying is that the book shouldn’t be tarred with the same brush as the films.
SFC: No, I agree with that. Switching tracks now, in 1998 the American Film Institute compiled a list of their 100 Greatest American movies of the past 100 years. Of these 100 movies, 371 were directed by men that were Jewish, or half Jewish. When the Jewish community make up less than 2% of the overall population of the USA, how do you explain that? Is it purely a cultural thing? Or is it the inheritance of a blessing from God? – “See the Lord… has filled him with the divine spirit, with skill, intelligence, and knowledge in every kind of craft…” (Exodus 35:30-32).
RS: I’m not sure I can explain that, but I’ll throw a possibly irrelevant ingredient into the stew, which is the numbers associated with Jewish winners of the Nobel Prize is incredible… Jews are something like 0.2% of the world’s population, and my memory is vague, but something like 35/40% of the winners of the Nobel Prize in the sciences are Jewish. So there is a possibility that one aspect has to do with gifts given to certain people, and in the case of the Jews we know why they are given. But it is also true that the film industry, from its origins in the United States, was dominated by Jewish people, quite possibly for the wrong moral reasons. Vaudeville (a genre of variety entertainment prevalent on the stage in the United States from the early 1880s until the early 1930s) had been Jewish dominated. And in part that could have been related to it’s being immoral, offensive to Christian sensibilities, even though most of the customers were Christian! so it would have been much more unseemly for a Christian to be involved in it. And the film industry when it began was morally questionable, which might have made it tend towards being a Jewish industry, in part because they didn’t have the kind of culture, the kind of society, that resulted in the same reservations about doing in those days. So there’s an unattractive aspect to that too.
RS: I don’t know if you know in America there was the League of Decency, and in the first three or four decades of film the Catholic Church had a strong influence on what was made. And they really cared about what the moral effect of the movies would be, and that’s got to be what you’re addressing. My understanding of the League of Decency is that everything in that was a judgement call, and they would negotiate with the film maker and say okay I’ll let you show that much flesh, if you take out this vulgarity, so it was actually quite intelligently applied rather than absolute rules, which I think in the end is the way you have to do it.
SFC: In your book you mention the conversion of Rabbi Eugene Zolli (the Chief Rabbi of Rome at the time of World War II, who was baptized into the Catholic Church in 1945). I thought some time ago that his story could potentially make a good film, how do you think a film of his life might be received by the public?
RS: I don’t think it’s a commercially viable proposition. First of all it’s extremely antagonistic to Jews; if you look it up in the Jewish encyclopaedia you’ll find it’s complete calumny, that he stole the money from the Jewish community, that he became Catholic to flee the rightful wrath… you know you’re not going to get many investments there! But besides, I’m not sure it has enough twists and turns in order to make a good movie.
SFC: Okay so if you were the guy in charge, which stories would you like to see made into films?
RS: Well when I saw Mel Gibson, one of the projects he had going (he always has about 50 he’s thinking about), but he was very interested in a film on the Maccabees, now that I think is a good story. Not only do you have blood and guts and gore, but you have the institutional corrupt religious authorities, and you have the kind of maverick, impassioned servant of God winning against all odds, you know there’s much more colour in the story there.
SFC: Any other ideas that may be suitable for the big screen?
RS: I think Herman Cohen’s story (as mentioned in my second book Honey from the Rock: Sixteen Jews Find the Sweetness of Christ) has some potential in it, especially the way he died. The story is basically that there was war between France and Germany, and the French prisoners were all Catholics being held in German prisoners of war camps in Germany, and the Germans wouldn’t let in any French priests to minister to them, even though they were dying by the droves, because they were afraid of traitors. But they allowed permission for Hermann Cohen to minister to the prisoners because he was a German national. And he was ministering to them, and he was clearly dying, working 18 to 20 hours a day, and he was called to give last rights to a dying prisoner, and he couldn’t find even a little spoon, so he used his finger knowing he was going to get the infection, and he died a few days later. So you know it has the beginning, which could be very picturesque, and then you have his hardcore conversion, and then this tear-jerking death. So that might work.
SFC: And a film on Pope Pius XII? How would that be received?
RS: Oh I’m sure that would be a sell out in the Jewish community! Cont'd... |
