Passion trumps predictability

They are true believers who wear the thorned crown of victimhood, lashing out at anyone critical of their deeply held beliefs.

They have been the targets of a skeptical press that has questioned their films’ accuracy and often painted them as wild-eyed extremists.

Their movies go after convenient scapegoats, using guilt by association to portray the Jews or the Bin Ladens as an evil cabal.

When the big media conglomerates kept their distance or refused to distribute their films, they went outside the system to get their message out.

They are, of course, Michael Moore and Mel Gibson, the filmmakers who will be remembered for making the two most impassioned, most hotly debated, most profitable and most influential movies of the year: “Fahrenheit 9/11” and “The Passion of the Christ.”

In many ways, they are as different as Al Jazeera and Fox News. One is movie-star handsome, the other jowly and built like a UPS truck. One is the darling of the religious right, the other a hero of the secular left. One relies on the visceral punch of blood-drenched action epics, the other uses the sly editing of reality TV and the satirical humor of “The Daily Show.”

Despite all these differences, Hollywood reacted to their movies as if they both came with a Tom Ridge “orange alert” warning sticker. Everyone Gibson showed “The Passion” to shuddered and took a pass, even 20th Century Fox, the studio where he has a production deal. Hollywood insiders were so appalled by the film and Gibson’s remarks in support of it that two studio chiefs told the New York Times -- hiding behind the convenient cloak of anonymity -- that they’d never work with Gibson. Moore got a similar cold shoulder on “Fahrenheit.” Disney refused to distribute the film, which ended up being released by Lions Gate and IFC Films, two indie distributors. The film was viewed as so inflammatory that even desperate-for-a-hit Paramount Pictures took a pass, with its vice chairman, Rob Friedman, offering the lame excuse that the studio’s summer schedule was too busy for the $5-million movie, which is now on its way to grossing $100 million. “The Passion,” which cost roughly $30 million, has grossed $609 million worldwide.

The year’s two most provocative filmmakers also got a decidedly chilly reception from the same American media that so frequently bemoan the absence of thought-provoking Hollywood pictures. Gibson’s film was pilloried in many quarters, led by influential New York Times columnist Frank Rich. “Fahrenheit” has been skewered across the political spectrum, from Fox’s Bill O’Reilly and essayist Andrew Sullivan to Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff and Slate’s Christopher Hitchens. Even PBS’ Gwen Ifill questioned the film’s accuracy on “Meet the Press,” saying, “Michael Moore is guilty of the same thing that he and a lot of Democrats say the Republicans are guilty of, especially on the Iraq-9/11 connection -- I call it guilt by juxtaposition. You put several facts out there and say to the viewer, ‘How could this not be true?’ ... It makes it a movie, but it doesn’t make it fact.”

Ah, but it makes it controversial, which in today’s meta-media landscape can make a movie not merely a hit but an event. In our noisy, nonstop news universe, the right controversy equation (Mel Gibson + Jesus x anti-Semitism = standing room only) can ignite a media firestorm that gives a Jesus movie the same drawing power as “Spider-Man.” Resistance is futile. The more criticism “The Passion” received from Jewish leaders, the more it assumed the aura of a must-see movie. For Purim, L.A.’s Jewish Journal printed a gag cover with Gibson holding two Oscar statuettes, saying, “I’d like to thank the Academy and Abe Foxman” (national director of the Anti-Defamation League) with a headline that read: “Passion Sweeps Oscars, Gibson Hires ADL to Promote Sequel.”

Gibson and Moore became front-page news not because of their films’ artistic heft but because of the media’s fascination with the incendiary nature of their movies. Both films became part of a national conversation: “The Passion” as a hot-button illustration of a growing religious revival in America, “Fahrenheit” as a referendum on Bush Inc.’s selling of the invasion of Iraq and politicization of the war on terror.

For an indie film, a mega-media uproar is like manna from heaven -- it levels the playing field, giving a film about Jesus or a Bush-bashing documentary the chance to compete with a $100-million studio movie without having to spend $30 million in TV ads. “The success of both films shows the power of free publicity,” explains Tom Ortenberg, president of Lions Gate Releasing. “The biggest edge a studio has is that they have deeper pockets. But if we can make up in free publicity what the studio has to spend on marketing, we can compete with anyone.”

With rare exceptions, there is a depressing absence of bold ideas at big studios, largely because the spiraling cost of selling films has choked most of the risk-taking creativity out of the business. The studios are addicted to lowbrow comedies and comic-book adventures because they can be sold in 15- and 30-second TV spots. It’s one key reason no studio chief could imagine rolling the dice on “Fahrenheit” or “The Passion.” As one executive put it, “Even if you loved it, how would you sell a Bible story in Aramaic in a 15-second TV spot?”

Filmmakers instinctively sense that the higher the stakes, the less stomach people have for risk. “Nowadays, no matter what your job is, everybody’s career seems to be at stake, picture by picture,” says Jonathan Demme, director of the upcoming “The Manchurian Candidate.” “The studios have this ‘it’s got to be a record opening weekend’ philosophy. So when Mel Gibson comes in with a film in Aramaic about Jesus or Michael Moore has a documentary blasting George Bush, what does that promise a studio in terms of an opening weekend?”

It promises more tsoris than most studios are willing to bear. In fact, calling these entities studios has become a misnomer. What were once filmmaking factories are now tiny cogs of global media conglomerates whose reach includes TV networks, cable and satellite companies, theme parks, video libraries, record companies, technology divisions and publishing companies. If you’re Viacom or News Corp., think of the risk-to-reward ratio: Is the potential payoff for a hit film (or even worse, the fallout from a controversial flop) worth antagonizing a key member of Congress who might be voting on a bill allowing you to own more TV stations or get tougher anti-piracy laws (or, while they’re handing out favors, merge with an even bigger media behemoth)? It’s increasingly rare to see a conglomerate that will endorse a movie that might provoke the ire of Congress or attract a swarm of chanting pickets outside their stockholder meeting.

It’s probably foolish to predict that “The Passion” and “Fahrenheit” will change the movie business. But they have shaken a few bricks. When I was in San Luis Obispo last weekend, I visited the Palm Theater, the art house there. Owner Jim Dee has been playing “Fahrenheit” for three weeks, selling out every show, even the ones at 11 a.m. I talked with some of the moviegoers leaving the theater and, trust me, they weren’t pointy-headed Bush haters. In fact, they were no different from the people who went to see “The Passion.” They were there because they wanted to see a movie they could talk about afterward.

More important, they were people who rarely go to the movies, because the studios rarely make movies that they have the slightest interest in seeing. Some cynics dismiss “Fahrenheit” and “The Passion” as flukes. But they are not sleeper hits like “The Blair Witch Project” or “My Big Fat Greek Wedding.” These films are personal statements, films that have more in common with such ‘70s hits as “MASH,” “A Clockwork Orange” and “Taxi Driver,” movies whose irreverence, angst and rage captured the spirit of their time.

In Time magazine, Andrew Sullivan dismissed “The Passion” and “Fahrenheit” as two sides of the same coin, films “designed to rally the faithful, to use the power of imagery ... to rouse the already committed to various forms of hatred or adoration.” But it is selling those films short to view them simply as the cinematic equivalent of the “Lying Liars” genre of bestsellers or the latest embodiment of the country’s Republican-Democratic divide.

My guess is that Sullivan doesn’t see many Hollywood movies. If he thinks these films are crude or strident, what would he call “Van Helsing” or “White Chicks”? Because of Mel and Michael’s huge success -- success being something that gets Hollywood’s attention -- their films could open the door for personal films that do what cinema does best: arouse emotion, question beliefs and provoke debate.

Imagine the possibilities. What if filmmakers stopped having to dream up remakes of “Starsky & Hutch”? What if we found ourselves with an audience that demanded something provocative before shelling out $10 a ticket? If I were running a studio, nothing would unnerve me more than the nagging suspicion that the movies I was the most afraid to make were the ones moviegoers wanted to see the most.

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“The Big Picture” runs every Tuesday in Calendar. If you have questions, ideas or criticism, e-mail them to patrick.goldstein@latimes.com.