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A star-studded cast has been assembled to bring the Bible's stories to a digital listening audience
The history of casting Hollywood stars in epic stories from the biblical world has been chequered.
There have been some successes, such as Charlton Heston's towering 1956 portrayal of Moses in The Ten Commandments, but many more performances have had an appeal that is chiefly kitsch - from Liz Hurley's recent Delilah to Dennis Hopper's Samson in Turner Home Entertainment's The Bible Collection.
Now Terence Stamp is to take on the challenging role of God in an epic 20-CD verbatim version of the New Testament being put together in Chicago.
Luke Perry and Marisa Tomei will also be joining a 100-member cast, playing Judas and Mary Magdalene respectively. Former adolescent heart-throb Lou Diamond Phillips will be Mark, and John Heard is cast as Matthew.
Such is the optimism about the vast recording project, which began in July and takes the New King James version as its text, that a reading of the whole of the Old Testament is planned too, with actor Richard Dreyfuss as Moses.
The complete production will fill 70 CDs.
The producer behind The Word of Promise is Carl Amari, 43, a Chicago entrepreneur who made his fortune by restoring and repackaging old hit radio shows.
He was a millionaire at 30 after starting a company called Radio Spirits that licensed more than 60,000 shows featuring the likes of George Burns, Milton Berle and Orson Welles.
Following the huge critical and commercial success of Mel Gibson's film The Passion of the Christ, which cost US$30 million to make and has grossed roughly US$610 million in cinemas around the world, Amari has embarked on a plan to offer a digitally up-to-date retelling of the Bible.
His choice of actor to play Jesus was a shoo-in - Jim Caviezel, who took the central role in The Passion of the Christ and is a co-producer of the audio project.
Amari is still negotiating over the part of Satan, a character he concedes has "some of the best lines".
The idea came to him as he read the Bible to his children one night and realised he could not communicate the drama and sweep of its stories.
"There's a hunger for things that speak to a spiritual life, and I think now, with what's going on in the world, people are thinking about religion and their faith quite a bit," he said.
British journalist and broadcaster Rod Liddle, who presented a Channel 4 documentary on the King James Bible at Easter, believes the poetry of the text comes from its clarity. "It is so absolutely direct and unambiguous," he said.
Michael York is the narrator, providing a crisply English voice.
"This beautiful story was meant to be read aloud," he said, "but so often when it is read aloud it's not done with the drama that is there within the story."
Americans often cast British actors as authority figures and deities ... and as devils and villains. Says York: "I think it has to do with diction."
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