The Scotsman Article

Henry Bean was a nervous man when he took his directorial debut, The Believer, to this year's Sundance Film Festival. How would people react to a provocative psychological drama inspired by the true story of a young Jew who joined a neo-Nazi group in New York? It was clear, long before the collapse of the World Trade Centre, that here was a film likely to fascinate and appal people in equal measure. After 11 September, The Believer has proved too controversial even for a US cable network, Showtime, that prides itself on showing difficult material.

Bean's year had started well. Against expectations, The Believer carried off the Sundance Grand Jury Prize, the festival's top honour, while Miramax, Paramount Classics and USA Films all seemed poised to make offers to buy the film for distribution. Despite these positive signals, however, a meeting with an interested party from Paramount Classics suggested things were not necessarily going to go Bean's way - people high up in the company were worried. According to Bean, they thought they could make money with the film, but felt that the "downside was worse than the upside was good." That is, they feared, not unrealistically, a backlash from Jewish groups. The deal was not dead in the water just yet. But, recalls Bean, who is Jewish and married to a rabbi's daughter: "The fact that they were worried made me worried. I thought, 'Are these guys really going to back it? What happens if the film goes out and gets attacked? Will they back off from it?'"

Bean got his answer after what turned out to be an ill-judged decision to screen the film at the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles. Buoyed up by his Sundance triumph, Bean says he arrived there thinking, "It's not going to be a problem, they're going to be patting me on the back for being one of the better Jews of the year." He quickly realised he was being naive, however.

"The minute I walked into the room and saw Rabbi Abraham Cooper (associate dean of the Wiesenthal Centre), I knew it was a mistake. He just looked at me like (he was thinking) 'I've seen kids like this before, I never liked one of them, and I'm not going to like this one either.' If I had had my wits about me, I would have taken my tape and walked out." Cooper watched the film with an audience of Jews and non-Jews, then denounced it as a "primer for anti -Semitism".

Bean believes Cooper took exception to the idea of a Jewish Nazi. Cooper, though, insists that was fine: he had heard of such people when he was growing up in New York in the 1960s and considers the phenomenon worthy of investigation. What actually bothered him, he says, was Bean's failure, in his view, to explain the character's motivation, and thus to teach us anything about the extremist psyche. He also took offence at an "incredibly vile scene of a desecration of a synagogue", including "what would constitute a hate crime in the United States": the ripping up of a Torah Scroll (that the scroll was a prop appears to have been irrelevant).

The Paramount deal collapsed, and The Believer moved to the more daring Showtime cable channel, only to have its transmission date postponed following the events of 11 September. Whether or not Cooper's comments influenced Paramount's decision is a moot point that not even Bean can answer. But what it does illustrate is the risky game American film-makers and artists engage in when they court the praise and support of an organisation such as the Wiesenthal Centre, especially if their project is as taboo-breaking as The Believer.

The film's problem - if it can be said to be such - is that Bean uses irony and ambiguity to express the tension between Judaism and Nazism within his central character. The film also ends ambiguously, raising more questions than it answers. Tellingly, while The Believer did not work for Cooper, American History X did - doubtless because it showed a neo-Nazi returning from the darkness following a Malcolm X-like transformation in prison. The film's simplistic morality made it safe and unthreatening.

It is clearly the moral grey zone which bothers Cooper and, no doubt, others like him. As we talk, he also attacks Errol Morris's documentary, Mr Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A Leuchter Jr, for allegedly making a Holocaust -denier look like "average Mr American", adding that, on this occasion, the respected documentary-maker "did not do his homework".

Morris, who was unavailable for comment, has claimed that a representative of the Wiesenthal Centre actually tried to pressurise the LA County Museum of Art into cancelling a screening of the film. Being Jewish himself, he was stung by the suggestion that his documentary was unduly sympathetic towards its subject.

"It would be very, very difficult to see how anyone could ever imagine that this movie provided aid and comfort to Holocaust-deniers," Morris said. "There's an argument that's advanced all the time that this sort of thing should be ignored ... I call it the 'water under the door point of view'. This stuff leaks into our consciousness and, left unanswered, it becomes a stain on the world, and the important thing is to bring this stuff into relief and answer it and address it. Was the way to deal with Hitler to ignore him or to address the problem?"

Although the Wiesenthal Centre was unsuccessful in its attempt to prevent the screening, comments by it and other pressure groups can have a damaging effect on a film's future, even when they are not backed up with actions. It used to be that controversy was good for a film, but not anymore. These days a mere whiff of it can dissuade a studio from green-lighting a project, or a distributor from picking it up. For example, Miramax dropped Tim Blake Nelson's film O, which relocates Othello to an American high school and, like the play, ends in a bloodbath, because Bob and Harvey Weinstein feared they would look hypocritical in the wake of the Columbine massacre.

"If you deal with the studios, anything you do that might offend anybody is filtered out," says Bean, decrying the dearth of politics in American cinema. "I once had some cops in a script who were making totally non-derogatory comments about gay people, and the producer said, 'You can't put that in there. I came out with a movie and I got all this trouble from the Gay Alliance, so I just don't want to bring it up.' The same fear about Jews - whether it was a justified fear or not - sabotaged The Believer."

Nelson is now bracing himself for criticism from certain sectors of the Jewish community over his unconventional Holocaust film, The Grey Zone. Inspired by an essay by Primo Levi, it takes a hard, unsentimental look at the troubling role of the Sonderkommandos of Auschwitz - prisoners (usually, although not exclusively, Jews) who helped run the Lager's crematoria.

Joel Coen advised Nelson not to make the film, and a respected Holocaust film scholar criticised him for showing Jews killing other Jews. Like Bean, though, Nelson believes that Jews are a self-questioning group, and he is confident that most will embrace The Grey Zone. He predicts that the dissenters will fall into two camps, "people who depend on a binary view of the Holocaust, in which there is no one in between victim and perpetrator, and those who feel they're the guardians of how the Holocaust must be depicted aesthetically".

When The Grey Zone was screened in Haifa recently, opinion ranged from a prominent radio broadcaster recommending that the film be shown to every Israeli high-school student, to a newspaper claiming that Nelson had crossed the line and the film was unacceptable. If things get rough for Nelson when the film is released in America, there is at least one heavyweight voice he will be able call on for support - Steven Spielberg. According to Nelson, the Schindler's List director is an "enthusiastic proponent" of the film.

The Grey Zone has an American distributor, and The Believer has just been picked up for a limited theatrical run following its premiere on Showtime (whenever that is), but the odds are increasingly stacked against directors even having challenging films of this nature made, let alone shown. Studios want their product to appeal to the broadest demographic possible in order to maximise their box-office potential, and that usually means avoiding controversy. This is why, says Nelson, American films "were being homogenised and dumbed down in an effort to offend as few people as possible" long before the terrorist attacks on America panicked Hollywood into cancelling the release dates of some films, and expensively re-shooting parts of others.

"We have a free speech amendment in America," says Bean, "but it's an amendment that only protects us against laws made against free speech; it doesn't protect us against the marketplace that is designed to limit speech. People complain they don't distribute better films, but what are they going to do? They're in the business of making money.

"The truth about Hollywood is they're scared to death now. People are frightened there. They don't have the freedom to be courageous. People have power and they have luxury, but they don't have freedom."

- Stephen Applebaum