Script Synopsis:Two Americans (Shirley MacLaine, Richard Crenna), stranded in the mideastern country of Fawzia, help an Arab leader (Peter Ustinov) build a football team so it can play and hopefully beat Notre Dame. Director J. Lee Thompson’s once-highly-controversial 1965 comedy also features Scott Brady, Jim Backus, Charles Lane, Jerome Cowan, Fred Clark, Wilfred Hyde-White, Harry Morgan, Telly Savalas, Richard Deacon, Jackie Coogan, Jerry Orbach, Barbara Bouchet, Patrick Adiarte, Irene Tsu and Angela Douglas.
John Goldfarb, Please Come Home! Script Resources:
Mainstream success is often thwarted when a director decides to make a religious film. For the most part, these films are focused at ‘specialty audiences’ that choose their films out of a sense of pious duty instead of interest. However, there are a small amount of directors who are able to bring religion into a cinematic perspective and create a film that funnels crowds of religious and non-religious people alike. Some examples include Mel Gibson with his highly successful Passion of the Christ (2004) and Cecil B. DeMille’s groundbreaking epic The Ten Commandments (1956). These films attempted to show the beauty and power of God in all its cinematic artistry.
On the flip side of the coin are directors like William Peter Blatty who have taken ideas from religion to show a much darker vision to audiences. With his first novel, Blatty was able to take one of the scariest characters from biblical text and turn it into a terrifyingly cinematic monster. The result was the notoriously frightening film entitled The Exorcist (1973). The film launched Blatty into success not only because the film was frightening but also because it was based on an actual occurrence.
When Blatty was in college, he read in a newspaper about a young boy who was demon possessed in the local area. The story intrigued him for years and inspired the film that is now considered a masterpiece. After this film came many other films including The Exorcist 3: Legion (1990) which Blatty directed, and the most recent exorcism film Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist (2005). While Blatty has written, starred in and directed many films to date, these are the films that he will most likely be remembered for in the future and will be a great influence to film makers yet to come.
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