War Against Artists and Hollywood

Above is a exclusive rights document sent to me to sign by Tom Snyder, the ghost writer hire by Stacey Pierrot to author Christine Rosamond Benton’s biography after she and members of my family disappeared the autobiography.  Christine was writing her view of the truth with the help of Sandra Faulkner. When I pointed out this work belonged to my nieces, Faulkner is off the project. She refused to return my call. When I questioned Mr. Snyder on the phone, and asked him if this contract would prevent me from publishing my biography, he said it would. When I refused to sign it, Snyder told me he had talked with several attorneys my possible unwillingness, and he told me;

“They wanted to play hardball with your, but, I said “Let me try using honey, first.”

This is coersion. Snyder is threatening me with legal action if this artist and writer does not sign his contract that ultimately came from Stacey Pierrot, her father, Vicki, and Mark Presco. These un-gifted people  were irate with Christine because they lent, and invested money, in Rosamond’s  creative career, that was waning. This is why Christine was writing a autobiography, that perhaps would be made into  movie. Rosemary told me there was talk about a movie, and, there was a party planned at Rocky Point the day her daughter drowned. Did the talk about the movie begin the minute the parasites heard a world famous artist – was dead!

On her website, Pierrot says her former employer died on her first sober birthday.  I suspect Christine told Vicki to invite me because I had seven years sobriety. Mark and Vicki did not want me there because they were going to have a showdown. They wanted their money. Pierrot told me she had not been paid in months. Vicki told me they could not find Shannon who was living in Venice California. Shannon told me  Vicki was in touch with her. Why these lies? Why was I kept from the meeting held in Christine’s house they day after Rosamond was “killed” by a rogue wave? The answer is, they were going after the profits from a movie about a world famous artist. None of these people are artists, writers, poets, are the Heirs named in Christine’s Will. What they are are secret Covert Creditors that were hidden from legal view by the Special Executor, Sydney Morris who I suspect was encouraged to step in by Pierrot’s father, a wealthy Tuck and Roll doctor specializing in face-lifts.  I suspect his daughter had come into a legacy, and Christine ended up with it. This is where that team of attorneys came from that Snyder threatened me with.

My grandfather wrote for the movies and used to sail out to the Annacapa Islands with his friend, Dashiell Hammett, who along wiith Lillian Hellman, were attacked by congressman Joe McCarthy, who many see in Ted Cruz. Ted’s father is a evangelical prophet and see his son a Trojan Horse.

Two weeks after my beloved sister was dead, I was put in the dark. I began to understand I was up against rich and powerful people lurking in the background. I left a message for Allan Pierrot informing him I wanted to interview him for my book. He never called.

I then learned Lawrence Chazen, a CEO of Nobel Oil, tried to become executor, but, he was the No.1 creditor, and a J. Paul Getty man. I am sure he was in contact with Mr. Pierrot who may have bought his daughter a Carmel gallery, and made her a player in the Art World. In Snyder’s book that did not sell, Christine is depicted as a insane out of control drunk with bad business practices.  My brother in a millionaire and owns his own computer company. Then there is Allan Fox, the owner of the house at Rocky Point where Christine was going to celebrate her first sober birthday.

I just saw this video. I am in shock. It reminds me of my many posts on the Shembe Zulu Nazarites. I became a Nazarite after I got sober in 1987 – after I was forced from the church, again!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JPnYukhTfs

 

In 1963 Marilyn’s mother forced me to attend four Billy Graham meeting at the LA Colesium. Marie was very unhappy I was brought up a Catholic. She had found a copy of ‘The Last Temptation of Jesus Christ’ under her daughters bed, and disappeared it. When I refused to go down and get saved, Marie forbid Marilyn to see me anymore, or, she would call the cops and have me arrested. I was up against the power Graham Crusade, Jesus, and the American flag.  Marilyn begged me to go down, and pretend I was saved. What a TEMPTATION! I told her I could not betray my principles. I lost the love of my life, who is now my best friend, and the Heir to my intilectual property.  Marilyn is the Alpha and Omega of ‘Capturing Beauty’.

The attack on Hollywood by the dictator of North Korea, is the same kind of attack launched by the Christian-right. Marilyn’s older sister was engaged to the son of a T.V. Evangelist, and co-authored a biography about Fela, an African prophet and musician that would fit well in the John the Baptist scene that looks like Woodstock. Marilyn and my story has a good chance of appearing on the silver screen because it is a archetypal Bohemian Love Story – that has ruled the Art World – and is more powerful then non-creative business people, think! Crazy Dictators and Wild Christian Prophets should stay out of the Art Word. As I type the Crazy Koreans have threatened the White House, and all of Americas infrastructure.  This right out of my novel ‘The Gideon Computer’ that I began in 1986. I got sober when I realized it was coming true.

Jon Presco

Copyright 2014

 

A top North Korean defense committee threatened attacks on “the White House, the Pentagon and the whole U.S. mainland” if President Barack Obama retaliates over last month’s cyberattack on Sony Pictures, according to a statement posted Sunday to the country’s official Korean Central News Agency.

“The army and people of the DPRK [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea] are fully ready to stand in confrontation with the U.S. in all war spaces including cyber warfare space to blow up those citadels,” said the statement, which was attributed to North Korea’s top policymaking institution, the National Defense Commission. The statement did not provide further details of the threatened attacks. Pyongyang has along history of issuing ominous warnings to other nations.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/21/north-korea-threatens-us_n_6362608.html

 

http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2008/0310/086.html

http://www.wysk.com/index/california/fresno/e4rcrtg/alan-h-pierrot-m-d-inc/profile

https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/Secessionist-Movement/conversations/topics/579

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8M9_zPdNhQ

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wzPks3JDYs

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JPnYukhTfs

 

http://www.britishpathe.com/video/south-african-dance-festival-aka-south-african-dan/query/FESTIVALS

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyfHUhvBaGg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cL9RVWK_6Kw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAItYa3Vo60

 

• • https://rosamondpress.com/2012/11/18/my-long-battle-with-billy-graham-son/
  • https://rosamondpress.com/2014/01/02/reading-from-the-gideon-computer/
  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lillian_Hellmanhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?
  • v=nJzV6-wJ3SQhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nuyjghLSS5E

  https://rosamondpress.com/…/my-long-battle-with-billy…/

• 

Chapter 2, “Paramount,” meticulously tracks Temptation‘s initial development and demise in the hands of Paramount Pictures. An adaptation of Kazantzakis’ novel had been attempted by Sidney Lumet in 1971, but had fallen through before even scripting had begun. Almost simultaneously with the collapse of Lumet’s project, a 28-year-old Scorsese came into contact with the novel. The lapsed Roman Catholic was making exploitation features such as Boxcar Bertha (1972), a film for Roger Corman that Scorsese imbued with its own subtextual messianic imagery. The film’s star, Barbara Hershey (whom Scorsese later cast as Mary Magdelene), introduced him to Kazantzakis’s book.

By the early ’80s, when Scorsese finally commanded the industry clout to push for his own adaptation of the novel, Reaganite America was developing its own powerful antibodies against what it perceived as anti-Christian cultural viruses. Lindlof details the rise of Donald Wildmon and his National Federation of Decency. By uniting with “moral majority” watchdogs such as Jerry Falwell and various other mega-churches, Wildmon developed the art of corporate intimidation to an unprecedented degree. Initially Wildmon et al. used church circulars to incite damaging boycotts against corporate sponsors of TV shows, thereby scoring victories over any entertainment vehicles that depict too much sex, violence, profanity, or anti-Christian sentiment. The chapter charts how Wildmon and Falwell’s influence in the arena of corporate sponsorship eventually destroyed Paramount’s backing of Last Temptation.

Subsequent chapters follow the excruciating lengths Scorsese endured to find another champion for the project, the extraordinary series of events required for Universal to finally green-light it, the reluctance on the part of nervous exhibitors to screen the film if it was completed, the ordeal of hasty shooting in Morocco with a radically pared-down budget and skeleton crew, and the ready-made controversy that erupted before post-production was even completed.

As the reader may surmise, this is not a theorist’s book. Lindlof deftly introduces the relevant sociological and historical contexts of the anxieties the film triggers in conservative Christian America, but he doesn’t dwell on them. With the exception of a description of a theological seminar assembled by film executives (pp. 68-74) that asks whether the film project is indeed fundamentally blasphemous or a valid imaginative examination of the nature of Christ’s sacrifice (the four theologians from different backgrounds came to the opinion that it was an acceptable but risky project), Lindlof doesn’t belabour theological matters, either. Rather, the book is at its most compelling in cataloguing the complex media circus constructed by both producers and opponents of the film.

And what an absurd and unpredictable circus it was. Deep-seated fears and prejudices abound. Literally millions of conservatives become enraged by a script — sight unseen — that is rumoured to feature a “limp-wristed Christ.” Curiously, the spectre of homoerotic scenes seemed at times to elicit more vitriol than the putative blasphemy of the film’s central conceit (a Jesus who slinks away from martyrdom on the cross to marry and start a family).

Perhaps most disturbing of all, a substantial contingent of protestors showed they were capable of couching their argument against the film in anti-Semitic terms. Despite the fact that the source material was written by a member of the Greek Orthodox Church, adapted into a screenplay by Paul Schrader (a Dutch Calvinist), and directed by a Roman Catholic, somehow the fact that it was produced by the Hollywood “elite” (read: Jews) turned the film, in the eyes of protestors like Rev. R. L. Hymers Jr., into just another attack on Christ by the Jewish people. In a perverse episode in the run-up to the film’s premiere, Rev. Hymers sets up a passion play protest outside the home of Lew Wasserman, the Jewish “Pope of Hollywood,” and MCA’s CEO (MCA owned Universal Pictures). Playing to the cameras, Rev. Hymers begged Wasserman not to release the film for the good of the Jewish people because, Hymers implied, Jewish blood would be shed if this (now Jewish) attack on Christ enjoyed a wide-scale cinema release.

In a Monty Pythonesque moment, this “Christian kabuki” is interrupted by the arrival of the militant Jewish Defense League, followed by their own set of cameras and microphones. The JDL chairman attacks Hymers for making this “a Jewish thing” and Hymers is thrown off-stride in his pose as a good Christian trying to protect the Jews from themselves. Framing an anti-Semitic argument as a plea to protect Jews is emblematic of many of the ironic turns and political twists that pepper Lindlof’s account. (In Philadelphia, for instance, a group of Baptist protestors came to blows with some Catholic protestors from New Jersey because one group wanted to sing while the other wanted to pray out loud. The praying and singing, falling out of sync, unleashed a brawl between the groups.)

As I’ve noted, theorizing is not the book’s focus, but neither is it all anecdotes and details. Lindlof allows his various subjects to raise philosophical arguments about the limits of free speech. The film, once released, becomes a vast magnet for larger issues (as major media controversies tend to do), in this case ultimately evolving into a showdown between seemingly incompatible worldviews. The liberal, typically secular defenders of the film frame the battle as nothing less than a test of society’s commitment to the primacy of First Amendment rights. The film’s opponents perceive in it such a blasphemous slight against religious sensibility that they deem it hate speech. The latter view sees Last Temptation as the latest instalment in an extensive, concerted, and well-financed conspiracy to eradicate the Christian faith or pervert it with false gospel. The stakes are vertiginous on both sides: Personal liberty is in danger. Souls may be lost to eternal damnation.

The final chapter, “Scorched Earth Blues,” surveys the damage that occurred once the film was exported to Europe and South America. Banned in 13 countries (it is still banned in Greece), Temptation‘s release caused riots among neo-Nazi Catholics in France, where an undetonated bomb was found on the roof of one cinema and the Cinéma Saint-Michel in Paris was firebombed. (Mary Whitehouse launched her own involved attack on the film during its more uneventful British sojourn.) Though Lindlof gives voice to the concerns of the offended, and paints portraits of pious men and women who are more often than not completely sincere in their desire to protect loved ones from what they perceive as an attack on their most cherished beliefs, there is no doubt where his sympathies ultimately lie. In light of the more recent — and more severe — Islamic reactions to Western cartoons featuring the prophet Mohammed, Lindlof’s examination of the tensions and personal sense of injury that followed the release of Scorsese’s 1988 film (the year of Rushdie’s Satanic Verses) seems more timely than ever.Lindlof’s conclusion is that the value of The Last Temptation Of Christ lies not in its theological explorations or artistic merits but in its status as a contentious political artefact, one that scored an important, if costly, victory for artistic free speech in a world of increasing tensions between secular and religious mindsets. Thomas Lindlof has produced a compelling — and often hopeful — chapter in the long, depressing history of censorship.