Hey -- let's smear those anti-Semites, Adolf Zukor & Louis B.

Holy hell! How could these men be so damned insensitive?! How dare they! (The ADLs Abe Foxman would undoubtedly call Adolf Zukor & Louis B. Mayer, "self-hating", anti-Semitic Jews for doing this awful thing! (He probably already has.))
Yeah that's right we're talking about the "Passion Play". The same "Passion Play" Mel Gibson produced years later.

It was the first feature film shown in America. And it was first brought to the people in 1910, by Adolf Zukor, the Jewish founder of Paramount Pictures.
Oh, geeze, the scandal!!! Can Adolf Zukor ever, EVER be forgiven for this blatant, anti-Semitic act?! I shouldn't think so! (In fact let's start rumors and spread innuendo. Let's do a good real good smear job on him I know, we could somehow link him with NAZIS you think?)

(Or is it only anti-Semitic if a Catholic named Mel Gibson does it?)

http://daily.greencine.com/archives/000130.html
August 04, 2003
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To make matters murkier, here's another odd twist. In the widely praised "An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood" (two of the laudatory blurbs on the back cover come from the NYT and another is clipped from Frank Rich's review in The New Republic), Neal Gabler informs us that Adolf Zukor, still just setting out in 1910 on the long and bumpy road that would eventually lead to Paramount Pictures, clung to the unheard of idea that features, rather than shorts, were the future of movies. To prove it, he shocked friends and family by snapping up the rights - for $40,000 - to a film that lasted a full hour and a half. Few believed anyone would sit still that long, staring at the flickering screen.
And the film? It was shot in Oberammergau, Germany. That's right; it was the Passion play that had been performed there every decade since
1634 and which, interestingly enough, went through an "overhaul," asGoodstein puts it, by both Catholic and Jewish scholars aiming to rid it of anti-Semitism. Goodstein doesn't date that overhaul, but it's hard to imagine it occurred before 1910. Zukor's greatest fear, however, was not a backlash from Jews, but rather...

" ...that the Catholic church might organize opposition to a film depicting Christ. According to one version, he booked the film into Newark first to test reaction, and when a priest strenuously objected that Zukor was usurping the role of the Church, Zukor begged for mercy, claiming that he would be broke if the film failed. The ploy, if it was a ploy, worked. When the film opened in New York, it did very well, justifying Zukor's faith that audiences would sit through movies just as they sat through stage plays."
60 pages later, we learn that none other than Louis B. Mayer, in aneffort to lift the reputation of movies from the arcades and to bring in middle class audiences, showcased another film of the Passion play. In neither case does Gabler register any Jewish protest. What's different this time around?
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Paulo Joe Jingy