One of the biggest stories in Hollywood over the past week has been the falling-out between Mel Gibson and screenwriter Joe Eszterhas. Gibson, in a move that that garnered justifiable skepticism from those of us offended by his repeated expressions of anti-Semitism, planned to make a movie about the Maccabees, an army of Jewish rebels who reconquered Judea and expelled its Greek occupiers, reestablishing the Temple and experiencing the miracle of lights that’s the basis for Hanukkah. Eszterhas was supposed to be writing the script. Warner Brothers rejected the script. Eszterhas released an exceedingly lengthy letter full of allegations that Gibson had behaved bizarrely, frighteningly, and in a way that indicated he continues to despise Jews. Gibson said that Eszterhas was covering up for the fact that the script was a disaster. Whatever the truth is, two things remain. First, it would be nice to mine Jewish history and scripture for awesome movies. Second, these two should probably stay far away from these stories. But here are five ideas that someone else should take up!

1. Deborah and Yael: Jewish men aren’t the only potential badasses who would make for great movie heroes. Deborah’s the wife of a commander who made her husband promise at the beginning of a war that a woman would have the honor of killing the enemy commander. Said enemy commander wanders into Yael’s tent, upon which she takes care of him, lulls him to sleep, and hammers a peg through his temple, killing him. Quentin Tarantino would approve.

2. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising: It doesn’t have a happy ending. But trying something incredibly brave and humanity-restoring in the face of certain defeat isn’t any less brave. And the decision by Warsaw’s Jews to resist transportation to the Treblinka concentration camp is tremendously moving.

3. Esther and Mordecai: This is a great story about the reembrace of identity even under incredible odds. Esther, the secretly Jewish wife of a Persian emperor decides to break the rules that govern her contact with her husband when she learns that one of his advisors plans to manipulate him into a pogrom against the Jews in his kingdom. That defiance of convention at great personal risk to Esther makes for great drama. And Esther’s relationship with her cousin Mordecai, who raised her after she was left an orphan, is also a wonderful story of a friendship between a man and a woman without the slightest hint of sex in it. There’s a relatively recent, but decidedly indie movie on the subject.

4. The Book of Joshua: If you want a pioneer story, Joshua, which documents the settlement of the land and the clashes with the people who already live in the areas the descents of the Twelve Tribes want to settle. This is as close to a Jewish Western as we’re going to get. It could be a story that touches a lot of nerves. But it’s go an epic sweep, and contemporary relevance.

5. People of the Book: Text is important in Judaism, so why not tell an awesome story about the survival of a Torah? Geraldine Brooks’ novel People of the Book imagines the survival of the Sarajevo Haggadah through occupation, Inquisition, pogrom and war. It would make a terrific series of short films, and it’s a great testament to the almost religious power of art, even to people who don’t share the religion that art is created in service of.

The first half of Atlas Shrugged did not exactly demonstrate that there is a giant untapped pool of Objectivists, or at least, people who are so bought into the dream of business success that they’re valorizing withdrawal from society, who are not being served by the entertainment industry. And the ads for the second half of the movie, due to come out around Election Day this year, don’t seem to be doing much new to turn on that audience, if it in fact exists, or failing that, preaching to the unconverted to make a buck:

Ultimately, there’s just a limit to the extent to which you can get people to consume entertainment by telling them that it’s good for them. It was true for Red Tails, which did only okay box office—it hasn’t paid off its production costs, much less started eating into its advertising budget. And I think it’s true here, too. I will probably go see Act of Valor, that movie starring a bunch of Navy SEALs that’s being hyped by conservatives as the second coming because the action sequences look reasonably cool, I’m curious about how the non-actors will turn out, and it’s February, people—it’s this or The Vow. But it would be very, very heavy lifting to get me to see Atlas Shrugged were it not for my professional interest in it, and telling me that it supports things that are an anathama to me are not a way to get me into the theater and maybe have my mind changed.

This goes back again to that eternal question of whether you trust your values to be compelling. Conservatives, I think, tend not to trust that their values are going to win out in the wider market. There’s a reason you see niche releases of heavily Christian movies while a company like Walden Media focuses on something like the Narnia adaptations, which clothe Christian values in a heavy coat of familiar fantasy storytelling, a tactic that lets the faithful tune in for a reaffirmation of their faith while letting everyone else get excited about Tilda Swinton dressed up in a variety of special effects. It’s a bait and switch that lets some audiences ignore the message rather than making it go down easier.

Something like Avatar, by contrast, is much more confident. All of the special effects in the movie are aimed at making the Na’vi look cool—gorgeous trees! flying dinosaurs!—and amping up the danger posed by the RDA Corporation, whether by giving them bigger, badder earth-moving equipment or fighting exoskeletons. Now, James Cameron is not exactly a retiring or insecure filmmaker, but I appreciated that the movie didn’t really give viewers an out. Even if you didn’t walk out of the movie a committed environmentalist, for the couple of hours you spent in the theater, it was totally clear who the villains were and why they were so destructive.

And I think that contrast is why you often see a conservative response to media that’s oriented towards shutting things down. What happens if straight folks play as gay characters in video games and then, in evidence that gayness isn’t catching or corrosive, return happily to their real-life relationships? What happens if kids hear a single brief obscenity on a television broadcast, or see a human nipple, and return to their lives unscarred? Conservatives don’t want these test cases because they don’t want to see the results, which would suggest that the narratives they’re selling aren’t compelling or coherent. Similarly, sticking with a niche market isn’t proof that you’re oppressed—if Mel Gibson can turn torture porn like The Passion of the Christ into a hit, it ought to be easier to sell things that aren’t so much with the anti-Semitism and the public beatings—it’s a sign you’re not confident enough to venture out and sell people on the quality of your narrative.

Now that Mitt Romney’s finally given us his tax returns, we’re all out of luck on Republican document dumps for a while, right? Wrong! I was Nexising around yesterday, and found out this delightful tidbit. In 2007, the Pittsburgh Tribune Review reported that Rick Santorum, adjusting to his role as a former Senator, was in talks with Braveheart and The Passion of the Christ movie producer Stephen McEveety about working together on a movie project. And not just any movie project, but a look at three Iranian brothers, one of whom eventually becomes a terrorist.

This was, of course, just a couple of month after Santorum, who landed at the Ethics and Public Policy Center after he lost his Senate seat, gave a speech where he started spinning a theory about an alliance between “Islamacists,” lefitsts regimes in Latin and South America, and American liberals that makes for better paranoid action movie fodder than foreign policy. He told attendees at the Second National Academic Freedom Conference:

It was in a growing alliance between this radical group of Islamacists, particularly Iran, and people in Central and South America, Venezuela, Nicaragua now, Ecuador, Bolivia, and North Korea and other places—that these alliances were forming. And no one was talking about it. In fact, we were ignoring it. You saw the United Nations, when Hugo Chavez got up and called the President a devil. And the American left and the college campuses—they just loved that…They fight us on college campuses, and they fight us in the streets of Central and South American countries, in North Korea, in other places. You’re seeing an alliance grow. There was just an announcement this past week — there is now nonstop service, airplane service, between Karakus and Tehran. Interesting destination. You’re seeing Venezuela, under Hugo Chavez, sign a defense pact with Iran, start a $2 billion anti-American fund for Central and South America, spend more money on arms than any other country—foreign arms sales—than any other country in the world, create a million-person army, spending $30 billion to build forts, and [has] aligned country with Evo Morales in Bolivia to build forts—where? On the border of Chile, on the border of Peru, on the border of Brazil and Argentina and Colombia; facing toward those countries. And who is going to be in those forts? Yes, there’ll be Bolivian troops. But the officers in charge will be Cuban and Venezuelan.

Santorum’s movie doesn’t ever appear to have gotten off the ground, which is too bad—McEveety’s got a movie about the Virgin of Guadalupe, which seems to have less potential to be ridiculous and awesome, coming out. But clearly, Santorum should release the script or script treatment of the movie. How else will we get the critically important look we need at his evolving thinking on our foreign policy with Iran and how best to prevent young men from turning to terrorism?