Two made-for-TV movies about JPII will air shortly. NYT Link. Excerpts:
As it happens, two American television networks - ABC and CBS - had the same idea about the same time. Both movies are planned for this season, although no broadcast dates have yet been announced. ABC's "Have No Fear: The Life of John Paul II" will run two hours; CBS's mini-series version, with Mr. [Jon]Voight, has the working title of "Pope John Paul II" and will run four hours over two evenings.
Inevitably, the road for both productions led to Rome, where ABC recently completed shooting, and CBS is working through mid-October. And before Rome, while ABC did much of its filming in Vilnius, Lithuania, CBS covered a good part of John Paul's pre-Vatican life in Krakow, Poland, the city where he was archbishop before becoming pope in 1978. . .
Still, while both movies appear to approach John Paul with due reverence, there is one fundamental difference.
"Ours does not avoid controversy," said Lorenzo Minoli, one of the executive producers of ABC's "Have No Fear." "We show the pope's confrontation with Romero over liberation theology. We deal with the sex scandals in the American church. We depict his youthful friendship with several young women and even show an innocent kiss while he is acting in a play. We show 'the human man' behind the pope."
And he added: "We are not making an Opus Dei movie. Others are."
Certainly, Opus Dei, the deeply conservative Catholic order, is deeply involved in the CBS film. It is being co-produced by Lux Vide, a company based here and led by Ettore Bernabei and his son Luca, members of Opus Dei who have close ties to the Vatican, which vetted their original script. The movie's consultant, Alberto Michelini, is also an Opus Dei member; his son, Jan, the director of the movie's second unit, was baptized by John Paul.
