MOROCCO, FALL, 1987: I arrived on the set of Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ a week into the filming. Andre Gregory, stripped to the waist, is standing knee-deep in water and ranting at the extras, who are writhing and wailing and flagellating themselves. I'm still adjusting to the heat and dust that the filmmaking team has already had a chance to acclimate itself to. The sun is doing strange things to my eyes. I thought I saw a goat with the head of Wallace Shawn run to the edge of the river to drink, but shrugged it off. A member of the crew picked up the goat, tucked it under his arm, and carried it back to the catering tent. The goat kept talking about how much it enjoyed sipping cold coffee in the morning and reading Charlton Heston's diaries until the sound of its voice was cut short by the sound of an axe connecting with its neck.

Scorsese himself wanders back from the line of portable toilets and looks at the screaming, bloody mess going on in the river. "Wow," he says to no one in particular, then flags down his cinematographer, Michael Ballhaus. "Listen," he says, "I don't want to get you in dutch with the union, but maybe you should cut your break short and film some of this, y'know? Maybe we could use it." Ballhaus nods and turns his camera toward the scene as Scorsese heads for the catering area.

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One movie about the life of Christ that didn't make it into Turner Classic Movies' Easter weekend schedule is Him, a 1974 pornographic film, said to have been directed by "Ed D. Louie." The film is said to intercut scenes depicting Jesus' homoerotic sex life with the apostles and modern-day scenes about a young gay man who comes to a better understanding of himself sexually and spiritually by using the picture's vision of Big Gay Jesus as a role model. The movie is also infamous for a scene in which the hero describes his desires in confession to a priest, who is on the other side of the booth listening and masturbating. Most discussions of Him have to rely on a certain amount of trust and guesswork, because scarcely anyone is known to have seen it, and it's not clear that any prints of it still exist. For a while, there was serious reason to doubt that it ever existed at all.

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It’s Good Friday, so somebody out there must be writing about Jesus movies. Ah, here we go – it’s Joshua Land at Moving Image Source comparing The Passion of the Christ and The Last Temptation of Christ. “The single most hollow claim of those who picketed Last Temptation was the notion that Universal was exploiting Christianity in pursuit of the almighty dollar; like The Passion of the Christ, Scorsese’s film was an obviously uncommercial proposition from the get-go, and it remains remarkable that the studio ever pursued it at all, let alone held firm in the face of protests—particularly after Paramount had already dropped the project before it even went into production.”

David Lynch won’t do commentary tracks, so the folks at Shooting Down Pictures have taken it upon themselves to live-blog Inland Empire.

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Tom Hanks once confided that, while watching the big musical production numbers is often the lamest part of the Academy Awards telecast, "when you see them live, they look kind of cool." As with so much else in life, we'll have to take Tom Hanks's word for it. Unfortunately for those in the audience at this year's Oscars show, the musical component of this year's event started out downsized and is getting smaller by the minute. In previous years, the people in charge of picking out five "original songs" to nominate for that treasured category have rolled up their sleeves and worked with what God gave them, forcing the people onstage to read out words that were never meant to fgo together, such as "Love Theme from The Towering Inferno." (It's also because of the Best Original Song category that such movies as The Karate Kid, Part II, Yes, Giorgio, Mannequin, and Whiffs can truthfully claim to have been Oscar nominees and so may well turn up on Turner Classic Movies during their annual "Thirty Days of Oscar" celebration, while Robert Osborne smiles into the camera and wishes he were dead.) This year, though, the category consists only of three nominees. There's a precedent for this: it happened in 1988 (when Carly Simon's theme song for Working Girls beat out a Phil Collins tune from the Phil Collins movie--you see what I mean about words that were never meant to go together?--Buster and something from Bagdad Cafe), and again in 2005, when the relative lack of competition turned out to be windfall for those musical craftsmen Three 6 Mafia. (They won for their contribution to the soundtrack of Hustle & Flow, "It's Hard Out There for a Pimp", a sentiment calculated to get Hollywood agents and studio chiefs standing on their chairs screaming, "Can I get an amen?") But this year, the three songs were selected from a grand total of two movies: Slumdog Millionaire and WALL-E. This in spite of the fact that anyone who's been to the movies more than a couple of times in the past few months has had Bruce Springsteen's song from The Wrestler imprinted permanently in their brains, even if they haven't seen the movie. Now comes word that Peter Gabriel, whose WALL-E theme "Down to Earth" has already won a Grammy for Best Song from a Motion Picture, has pulled out of the ceremony to protest the decision that he would only be allowed to perform a brief snippet of the song as part of a medley. Gabriel will be in the audience in case he wins; "I’m an old fart," he says, "and it’s not going to do me any harm to make a little protest. But the ceremony will be fun and I’m looking forward to it." So anyone who volunteers to take his place and perform part of the song on stage will do so knowing that the composer is staring at him trying to kill him with hate rays.

Gabriel, who discusses his gripes with the Academy in a video posted at his website, co-wrote "Down to Earth" with Thomas Newman, the son of the legendary film composer Alfred Newman. (He and Randy Newman are cousins.) It's the first Oscar nomination of Gabriel's career, though he has composed three well-regarded original film scores, for Birdy, The Last Temptation of Christ, and Rabbit-Proof Fence. And he has a special place in Oscar history for his appearance at the 1998 awards, where he sang Randy Newman's theme song for Babe: Pig in the City.

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The Cloon is getting political again. According to Variety, George Clooney “has bought the rights to Jonathan Mahler's legal thriller The Challenge, about the long campaign waged by U.S. Navy lawyer Charles Swift and Georgetown law professor Neal Katyal to ensure a fair trial for Salim Hamdan, the bodyguard and driver of Osama bin Laden.” Presumably Clooney will play the lawyer and not the driver.

Conan (the Barbarian, not the O’Brien) dons his loincloth again for Lionsgate. Dirk Blackman and Howard McCain, who have written an Amazon warrior vehicle for Scarlett Johansson, will pen the return of Robert E. Howard’s creation. (Presumably the governor of California is unavailable to reprise his role.)

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Andrew Hearst at the invaluable Panopticist recalls one of the lesser-known Hollywood scandals of the 1980s, the aspiring screenwriter Joseph Minion mining Joe Frank's radio monologue Lies for a script that would become the 1985 Martin Scorsese movie After Hours. Frank, a God in the highly specialized field of contemporary radio drama and performance art, wrote Lies back in 1982, one of eighteen original works he created for NPR Playhouse in the early 1990s. In the opening section of the monologue, which you can listen to at Hearst's site, the hero describes visiting a diner and meeting a woman who seems to flirt with him and mentions that her roommate is a sculptor who's looking to sell some of her work as paperweights. The hero goes home, starts thinking about the woman, calls her and receives an invitation to come over, and takes a cab to her building. In the course of the cab ride, he loses the only money he has on him when the bill goes flying out the window. When he finally arrives, he discovers that the woman's roommate is a sultry type who "sleeps around" and that the two of them live in a space filled with "leaden art droppings." Alone in the bedroom, the hero observes that the woman seems unstable and possibly nuts, and that "she seemed interested and indifferent at the same time;" eventually she tells him that she's still trying to come to term with having been raped. All these details turn up transposed in the first half hour of After Hours, along with other small, strange bits that may have been indirectly influenced by Lies.

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