Gibson taking Oscar high road for 'The Passion'

LOS ANGELES, Nov 19 (Reuters) - Mel Gibson has sworn off using paid advertisements to seek Oscars for his blockbuster, "The Passion of the Christ," and instead is putting his faith in the merits of the work as it vies for the film industry's top honors.

Breaking with a growing Hollywood practice of heavy-handed pre-Oscar marketing, Gibson and his Icon Productions partner Bruce Davey have vowed not to spend a cent on television, radio or print ads hawking "Passion" for Academy Award consideration, a spokesman said on Friday.

However, Icon is presenting promotional screenings of "The Passion" and plans to send out thousands of DVD copies to members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (news - web sites) and other industry groups that present year-end film awards.

"This film should be judged on its artistic merit, not on who spends more money for advertising. That's really what the academy was meant to be and to celebrate," Davey said in a statement issued through Icon's publicist, Alan Nierob.

Gibson, who wrote, directed and produced the blood-drenched film about the last hours in the life of Jesus, likewise spent relatively little on commercial advertising to promote "The Passion" before its theatrical release.

Instead, Icon relied on a marketing campaign centered on special screenings for Christian churches. The R-rated film also benefited from media scrutiny after some Jewish leaders expressed concern that the movie could incite anti-Semitism.

"The Passion" went on to gross well over $600 million in worldwide ticket sales.

Nominations for the 2004 Academy Awards (news - web sites) are two months away, and with no clear favorites having yet emerged the Oscar contest is expected to be especially heated this year.

"The studios that have films in the race are going to be out there doing everything they can to get attention for their films," said Gregg Kilday, film editor for The Hollywood Reporter.

Oscar marketing has grown into a multimillion-dollar exercise for major studios and production companies, which spend lavishly on advertising, parties and publicity campaigns to raise the profile of their movies during the run-up to the Academy Awards and other year-end film prizes.

In recent years, promotional blitzes have taken on a nasty edge, with rival movie executives accusing each other of trying to buy academy votes or fomenting whisper campaigns.

Academy officials thought the situation had gotten so out of hand that last year they formed a committee to tighten guidelines governing the promotion of Oscar-eligible films.

Academy President Frank Pierson praised Gibson for working to restore the Oscars as a "celebration and appreciation of excellence" and resisting the "crass commercialism that was threatening the integrity of the award."

The stakes are high. An Oscar nomination or award carries tremendous prestige for a film's producers and talent while often translating into a commercial windfall for those movies that are still in theaters or in DVD release.

"The Passion" has little to gain commercially from Oscar recognition at this point, having already completed its global theatrical run and DVD release.

There will always be those -- around here, even -- who think it matters what transpires at or what the Talent wears to the Oscars.

I find it all about as meaningful as our political campaigns anymore ... where that same Talent is trotted out either to Opinionate as necessary to cause a firestorm or, even worse, glorify or desecrate as required the very real lives and issues allegedly the purview of politics such as Cider House Rules ... or WORST OF ALL, used to play a "conservative" used to capture the governorship of Hollywood's own home state.

It's rather sad to live in the Age of the Fueilleton and just one more reason I truly admire Gibson's erring on the side of privacy where his personal opinions of politics and such are concerned.

… since the end of the Middle Ages, intellectual life in Europe seems to have evolved alone two major lines. The first of these was the liberation of thought and belief from the sway of all authority. In practice this meant the struggle of Reason, which at last felt it had come of age and won its independence, against the domination of the Roman Church.

The second trend, on the other hand, was the covert but passionate search for a means to confer legitimacy on this freedom, for a new and sufficient authority arising out of Reason itself. We can probably generalize and say that Mind has by and large won this often strangely contradictory battle for two aims basically at odds with each other.

Has the gain been worth the countless victims? Has our present structure of the life of the mind been sufficiently developed, and is it likely to endure long enough, to justify as worthwhile sacrifices all the sufferings, convulsions, and abnormalities: the trials of heretics, the burnings at stake, the many "geniuses" who ended in madness or suicide? For us, it is not permissible to ask these questions. History is as it has happened. Whether it was good, whether it would have been better not to have happened, whether we will or will not acknowledge that it has had "meaning"--all this is irrelevant.

Thus those struggles for the "freedom" of the human intellect likewise "happened," and subsequently, in the course of the aforementioned Age of the Feuilleton, men came to enjoy an incredible degree of intellectual freedom, more than they could stand.

For while they had overthrown the tutelage of the Church completely, and that of the State partially, they had not succeeded in formulating an authentic law they could respect, a genuinely new authority and legitimacy. Ziegenhalss recounts some truly astonishing examples of the intellect's debasement, venality, and self-betrayal during that period.

We must confess that we cannot provide an unequivocal definition of those products from which the age takes its name, the feuilletons. They seem to have formed an uncommonly popular section of the daily newspapers, were produced by the millions, and were a major source of mental pabulum for the reader in want of culture.

They reported on, or rather "chatted' about, a thousand-and-one items of knowledge. It would seem, moreover, that the cleverer among the writers of them poked fun at their own work. Ziegenhalss, at any rate, contends that many such pieces are so incomprehensible that they can only be viewed as self-persiflage on the part of the authors. Quite possibly these manufactured articles do indeed contain a quantity of irony and self-mockery which cannot be understood until the key is found again.

The producers of these trivia were in some cases attached to the staffs of the newspapers; in other cases they were free-lance scriveners. Frequently they enjoyed the high-sounding title of "writer," but a great many of them seem to have belonged to the scholar class. Quite a few were celebrated university professors.

Among the favorite subjects of such essays were anecdotes taken from the lives or correspondence of famous men and women. They bore such titles as "Friedrich Nietzsche and Women's Fashions of 1870," or "The Composer Rossini's Favorite Dishes," or "The Role of the Lapdog in the Lives of Great Courtesans," and so on. Another popular type of article was the historical background piece on what was currently being talked about among the well-to-do, such as "The Dream of Creating Gold Through the Centuries," or "Physico-chemical Experiments in Influencing the Weather," and hundreds of similar subjects.

When we look at the titles that Ziegenhalss cites, we feel surprise that there should have been people who devoured such chitchat for their daily reading; but what astonishes us far more is that authors of repute and of decent education should have helped to "service" this gigantic consumption of empty whimsies.

Significantly, "service" was the expression used; it was also the word denoting the relationship of man to the machine at that time.

In some periods interviews with well-known personalities on current problems were particularly popular. Ziegenhalss devotes a separate chapter to these. Noted chemists or piano virtuosos would be queried about politics, for example, or popular actors, dancers, gymnasts, aviators, or even poets would be drawn out on the benefits and drawbacks of being a bachelor, or on the presumptive causes of financial crises, and so on. All that mattered in these pieces was to link a well-known name with a subject of current topical interest. The reader may consult Ziegenhalss for some truly startling examples; he gives hundreds.

As we have said, no doubt a goodly dash of irony was mixed in with all this busy productivity; it may even have been a demonic irony, the irony of desperation--it is very hard indeed for us to put ourselves in the place of those people so that we can truly understand them. But the great majority, who seem to have been strikingly fond of reading, must have accepted all these grotesque things with credulous earnestness.

If a famous painting changed owners, if a precious manuscript was sold at auction, if an old palace burned down, if the bearer of an aristocratic name was involved in a scandal, the readers of many thousands of feature articles at once learned the facts. What is more, on that same day or by the next day at the latest they received an additional dose of anecdotal, historical, psychological, erotic, and other stuff on the catchword of the moment. A torrent of zealous scribbling poured out over every ephemeral incident, and in quality, assortment, and phraseology all this material bore the mark of mass goods rapidly and irresponsibly turned out.

Herman Hesse (from introduction to "The Glass Bead Game")
as posted within Will Hollywood Actors Become Extinct in our Life time?

A torrent of zealous scribbling poured out over every ephemeral incident, and in quality, assortment, and phraseology all this material bore the mark of mass goods rapidly and irresponsibly turned out.

Just another reason Gibson's film doesn't belong among the Rove-ish propaganda or casually immoral and often wholly gratuitously "bloodsoaked" images and stories used to shock, amuse and sex the masses.

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