Movies on Bible…Amen!!!
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| Source: en.wikipedia.org |
The American film industry aka Hollywood has time and again turned to the Holy Bible stories for film making. Ditto with the Italian film makers. It has long been more popular to make films about the Old Testament than the New Testament. Many of the tales in the Old Testament are well suited for epic films. They contain sweeping, but relatively straightforward, narratives of good versus evil. They also feature crowd-pleasing massive battles, sword fights, natural disasters, and spectacular miracles. The stories had few enough details in the Bible that they could easily be embellished and modified without any great outcry over Biblical inaccuracy. The peak era of the Old Testament epic was the 1950s and early 1960s when lavish films with "casts of thousands" were regularly made.[citation needed] In the era of the production code, basing a film on the Bible allowed it to be more risqué than would normally have been accepted. Sex and violence are common in the Old Testament. Figures like Eve, Delilah, Jezebel and Judith could all be portrayed as seductive temptresses. In tales like that of Sodom and Gomorrah the sinfulness of those to be punished could be lavishly portrayed on screen.
These films were some of the highest grossing during this period with the best known and most successful being Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments. These movies were made in great numbers both by Hollywood and by the Italian film industry, and many of the biggest films were joint American/Italian productions. During this period most of the major stories in the Old Testament were put on film, some multiple times. As well as The Ten Commandments epics like Sodom and Gomorrah, The Story of Ruth, David and Goliath, David and Bathsheba, Solomon and Sheba, and Esther and the King dominated the box office.
News from Hollywood Reporter:
Good Lord! Hollywood Suddenly Hot for the Bible (Analysis)
With half a dozen film projects derived from classic Bible stories in development, it would seem that Hollywood has (amen!) found God. Not since the 1950s, when Paramount and Cecil B. de Mille trotted out a handful of Old Testament tales, has there been so much Good Book on the books. Paramount and New Regency are building the big-budget Noah with Black Swan director Darren Aronofsky; Relativity has Goliath in the works with director Scott Derrickson; Warner Bros. has its controversial Judah Maccabee/Hannukkah movie with Mel Gibson producing (that film is competing with another Maccabee project); Steven Spielberg is considering directing Gods and Kings, a Moses story; and an adaptation of John Milton’s Paradise Lost starring Bradley Cooper as Lucifer is aiming for a January shoot. It’s a veritable flood.
“’What are those things that have huge pre-awareness that are huge spectacles that you can exploit our contemporary filmmaking abilities to do even bigger?’" says Goliath producer Wyck Godfrey, who saw comic-book, video-game and fairy-tale cycles running their course. "We’ve spent our entire lives hearing sports analogies of David versus Goliath. Well, before every David and Goliath story there was David and Goliath. That’s how I sold it.”
Acknowledgement:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bible_in_film
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/good-lord-hollywood-suddenly-hot-251536
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