oped: Indeed I totally agree...No one does it better than Mel...from his start in Mad Max...all the way through the Passion.and beyond..Mel captivated his audience with believable characters and great story lines!
Passion of the Christ:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htNO2k3I9TE
And my Fav Mel Movie...being a Vn era Vet he captured this story right on the money:
We Were Soldiers:
Addendum: Before the Hollywood Elite,the Jewish Community and the LGBT community attacks a person they really should learn from history the true story: Take a step back in time History 101 WWII era:
So how about it, Hollywood?
By ALLISON HOPE WEINER
How ironic is it that Hollywood studios walk on eggshells with faith-based groups hoping their religious epics like Noah
do a fraction of the business Mel Gibson did with The Passion Of The Christ
, while those studios continue to shun Gibson like a leper? What better way to commemorate Passion
‘s 10th anniversary than journalist Allison Hope Weiner‘s
examination of her relationship with Gibson and how it evolved from
harsh coverage to the point where she feels strongly enough about his
good qualities and recovery to urge Hollywood to consider giving him
another chance. Weiner has written about Gibson for Deadline before, as
well as The New York Times
and other national magazines. – MF
It has been a decade since
Mel Gibson made
The Passion Of The Christ
and watched it become the biggest-grossing independent film with $612
million in worldwide ticket sales. In the years that followed, Gibson
made several comments that went public, made him seem anti-Semitic and
racist. They made him persona non grata at major studios and agencies,
the same ones that work with others who’ve committed felonies and done
things far more serious than Gibson, who essentially used his tongue as a
lethal weapon. As a journalist who vilified Gibson in
The New York Times and
Entertainment Weekly
until my coverage allowed me to get to know him, I want to make the
case here that it is time for those Hollywood agencies and studios to
end their quiet blacklisting of Mel Gibson. Once Hollywood’s biggest
movie star whose film
Braveheart won five Oscars and whose collective box office totals $3.6 billion, Gibson hasn’t been directly employed by a studio since
Passion Of The Christ was released in 2004.
The Gibson I’ve come to know
isn’t a man who’ll shout from the rooftops that he’s not anti-Semitic,
or hold a press conference to tell media those audiotapes were released
as part of a shakedown, and that he never assaulted the mother of his
infant daughter. He won’t explain to people that he first got himself
into a career spiral because he’s a long struggling alcoholic who fell
off the wagon and spewed hateful anti-Semitic remarks to an arresting
officer who was Jewish. He won’t tell you that he’s still got a lot to
offer Hollywood as a filmmaker.
The fact that he won’t jump to
his own defense is part of his problem, but also part of why I have
grown to respect him. That is why on the occasion of this 10th
anniversary of
Passion, a
film about an innocent man’s willingness to forgive the greatest
injustice, I propose to Hollywood that it’s time to forgive Mel Gibson.
He has been in the doghouse long enough. It’s time to give the guy
another chance.
For those who are skeptical, I
understand. For the longest time, I disliked Gibson and thought he was a
Holocaust-denier, homophobic, misogynistic, racist drunk. I wrote as
much in articles for EW and the NY Times. And whenever I wrote about him, I would get irate calls from his representatives saying I didn’t know him.
Then something happened that I
never expected. I came to rethink my harsh assessment after I got to
know the man. It started when I interviewed him in 2006 for an EW
cover. I could see that he was smart, expressing sincere empathy for
the people he’d hurt. I had to admit to myself that I was impressed that
he hadn’t shied away from answering my tough questions.
We next spoke when he was working on a script about Vikings with his Braveheart
writer Randall Wallace. After that, we spoke occasionally on the phone
and met for lunch at his Icon Production offices to discuss Get The Gringo.
Our conversations were mostly about business, but would carry over to
movies or books we liked, trips we’d taken. I liked how his mind worked.
Like the movies he directs, the stories he told were incredibly visual.
He never asked me for anything or tried to play me, and I’ve
interviewed enough movie stars to know when they are working you. Gibson
was unafraid to disagree with and challenge me. Our conversations
broadened to family, our relationships, religion.
It developed into something that
felt like friendship, which doesn’t often happen with investigative
journalists and the subjects they cover. Odder still was that it
happened with a man disdained by my colleagues, friends and my family,
who, like me, are observant Jews. At this point, Gibson’s career had
gone all kinds of wrong, starting with that 2006 DUI arrest, when he
told that cop that “the Jews are responsible for all the wars in the
world.” Four years later, he sounded positively unhinged and racist in
surreptitious recordings of an angry phone exchange between Gibson and
ex-girlfriend Oksana Grigorieva — the mother of his infant daughter. The
whole world heard him shout abusively at her and make racist remarks.
It was after the latter episode
that my relationship with Gibson truly changed. It’s very difficult to
get to know anyone in a journalistic context — one rarely gets any real
insight into the person you’re interviewing. In Gibson’s case, this was
particularly true. He wasn’t the kind of person to open up a vein and
publicly plead for forgiveness as some do. But a conversation that came
months after that changed our relationship.
I was on vacation with my family
when Gibson called me. During his breakup with Grigorieva, he’d gone
through a terrible emotional breakdown and struggled to get healthy,
gain joint custody of his infant daughter and deal with the fallout from
the publication of those awful tapes. He was in a very bad place and we
talked for some time about how difficult it was for him to deal with
the pain he’d inflicted on his family — his ex-wife Robyn and his seven
children, his infant daughter. He got so upset talking about that period
in his life that he ended our call abruptly. He’d shared some very
deep, personal feelings with me and was in so much pain, that I was
honestly worried about him. It wasn’t the type of conversation that one
has with an interview subjects. I decided we were friends now and that I
could no longer write objectively about him.
Since then, I’ve gotten to know
Gibson extremely well. I thought it would be difficult for him to have a
friend in the media, but he has been surprisingly honest and trusting.
As a lawyer-turned-reporter, I have no problem asking tough questions,
even of friends. Gibson never wavered or equivocated when I confronted
him, whether the subject was his drinking, his politics, his religion or
his relationships with women. It soon became clear that my early
journalistic assessment of him wasn’t right.
This crystallized when we met
each other’s families. It was hard to blame his family for being
skeptical of a journalist, but the issues with my own family were more
challenging. Gibson asked to meet them at my son’s bar mitzvah
celebration. Imagine the scene: A room filled with Jews. In walks the
person who, in their minds, might be the most notorious anti-Semite in
America. Gibson attended alone and I can only imagine what was going
through his head when he walked into the party.
Before the evening was over, he
was chatting with many of my relatives, who saw a funny, kind, charming
guy and not the demon they’d read about. Gutsier still, he attended our
Yom Kippur break fast dinner. Anyone who has attended such a gathering
knows there is nothing more imposing than making friends in a room full
of Jews who haven’t eaten in 24 hours.
It might sound naïve after 20
years writing about celebrities, but my friendship with Gibson made me
reconsider other celebrities whose public images became tarnished by the
media’s rush to judge and marginalize the rich and famous. Whether it’s
Gibson, Tom Cruise or Alec Baldwin, the descent from media darling to
pariah can happen quickly after they do something dumb. I was part of
that pack of journalists paid to pounce, so I know. I consider myself
intelligent, someone who makes up her own mind, but just like readers
do, I have accepted some reports at face value. The press said that
based on Gibson’s statements, he was a homophobe, a misogynist, a bully,
an ant-Semite, so he must be. What he was, I discovered, was an
alcoholic whose first outburst was captured after he fell off the wagon.
What the later release of audiotapes showed was a man with a
frightening temper, capable of saying whatever will most offend the
target of his anger.
I’ve discussed the Holocaust with Gibson and whether his views differed
from those of his father. Just as he refused to condemn his father in
that TV interview with Diane Sawyer, Gibson refused to discuss his dad
with me. Similar to what he told Sawyer, Gibson told me that he believed
that 6 million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. “Do I believe that
there were concentration camps where defenseless and innocent Jews died
cruelly under the Nazi regime? Of course I do; absolutely,” he told
Sawyer. “It was an atrocity of monumental proportion.” In our
conversations, I took that a step further. Why, I asked him “did you say
those things about the Jews starting all the wars? Where did those
unkind things come from?” Gibson thought for a moment, then answered
that he’d been terribly hurt by the very personal criticism of him from
the Jewish community over The Passion Of The Christ.
He said that while he’d been criticized for films before, this was
personal and cruel. He said that when he drinks, he can be a mean drunk
and “Stuff comes out in a distorted manner…” His own faith led him to
make his version of Christ’s story, and he found himself being attacked
for making a film that might get Jews killed, and that he was
insensitive that his depiction of Jews as Christ’s killer could inflame
religious tensions. He was called names by numerous Jewish leaders and a
few people literally spat on him. “The criticism was still eating at
me,” he told me. “This was a different kind of hammering. A very
personal attack.”
Based on my exchanges with Gibson
and my own reporting on his transgressions, I’ve stopped doubting him.
He worked in Hollywood for 30 years without a single report he was
anti-Semitic. Before that drunken evening in July 2006, he worked all
the time with producers, directors, actors and crew who happened to be
Jewish, without incident. But, even if I accept the comments from those
who believe his drunken remarks tapped into some deep-seated
anti-Semitism back then, the Gibson I know now is clearly a different
man, one who has worked on his sobriety since that awful night in
Malibu.
Gibson would later tell me that
he was grateful the officer pulled him off the road that night because
he might have killed someone else or himself. He felt so badly for
verbally attacking LA County Sheriff’s Deputy James Mee that night that
he later asked him out for coffee to personally apologize. Like many
things he does, Gibson never publicized that.
I am not nominating Gibson as an altar boy. It takes a certain kind of person to make movies with the intensity of Braveheart, The Passion Of The Christ, and Apocalypto.
As I’ve seen with other temperamental stars, there is a wildness in his
blue eyes, an electricity that is part of what has made him a big movie
star and a great director. One has only to interview the man to see
that there’s something a little different in how he sees the world. He’s
intense and rash, and he struggles with alcoholism. Despite the
Australian bravado, and the crude humor, he is actually quite sensitive
to criticism, even if he doesn’t publicly challenge or deflect it.
In his second apology on the
anti-Semitic statements, Gibson promised to reach out to Jewish leaders.
Gibson followed up by meeting with a wide variety of them. He gave me
their names when I asked, but Gibson asked me not to publish them
because he didn’t want them dragged into public controversy or worse,
think he was using them. The meetings were not some photo op to him, he
told me, but rather his desire to understand Judaism and personally
apologize for the unkind things he said. He has learned much about the
Jewish religion, befriending a number of Rabbis and attending his share
of Shabbat dinners, Passover Seders and Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur
dinners. I believe that effort, along with our conversations, helped him
understand why Jewish people reacted as they did to The Passion Of The Christ
and why there was Jewish support for the Second Vatican Council. Gibson
has quietly donated millions to charitable Jewish causes, in keeping
with one of the highest forms of Tzedakah in the Jewish faith, giving
when the recipient doesn’t know your identity.
Gibson went well beyond a mea culpa tour. He came out of that experience determined to film the Jewish version of Braveheart.
He set at Warner Bros a film about Judah Maccabee, who with his father
and four brothers led the Jewish revolt against the Greek-Syrian armies
that had conquered Judea in the second century B.C. That seminal story
is celebrated by Jews all over the world through Hanukkah, the Festival
of Lights. Gibson planned to direct, but the effort was undermined by
the decision to hire Joe Eszterhas to write it. The screenwriter’s
penchant for making public spectacles of private matters (he famously
leaked a conversation when he said ex-agent Mike Ovitz threatened him),
and Gibson’s unwillingness to publicly defend himself, doomed the film.
After Eszterhas traveled to
Gibson’s Costa Rica estate to discuss a draft he’d written, things got
ugly. I’ve heard from sources at Warner Bros that Eszterhas turned in a
shoddy script that was rejected. Gibson was upset, the writer’s son
taped the outburst and Eszterhas leaked a nine-page memo to a website
happy to take his side. Eszterhas said he did all this for reasons that
ranged from persuading Gibson to get help to protecting the Jews and
Gibson’s estranged girlfriend from his violent rage. Was it possibly a
convenient smokescreen to obscure taking a studio paycheck and not
putting in the work, or maybe something more, since the writer turned
the episode into a windfall when he used the controversy to get an
e-book deal?
Gibson will never win in some
quarters, but his penchant for not hitting back makes him the dictionary
definition of a good punching bag. I’ve observed hypocrisy in several
examples where Gibson was vilified. For instance, when agent Ari Emanuel
wrote a column for the Huffington Post urging Hollywood to shun Gibson,
the actor’s longtime agent, Ed Limato, told me that Emanuel tried to
poach Gibson as a client as recently as when The Passion Of The Christ
was released. “For some people in my business to publicly try to
destroy Mel Gibson because of this incident the other night I find very
hypocritical,” Limato told me, “since I know Ari and a few others, who
even after The Passion Of The Christ have been calling Mr. Gibson and trying to entice him to their agency as a client weekly.”
While talent including director
Roman Polanski (drugged and sodomized a minor, and fled), Mike Tyson
(rape conviction), Chris Brown (beat up ex-girlfriend Rihanna), T.I.
(weapons charge), and many others are repped by major agencies, no
agency has touched Gibson since Emanuel discharged him as a WME client
after those tapes surfaced and he used the “N” word. Gibson has been
shunned not for doing anything criminal; his greatest offenses amount to
use of harsh language.
I’ve spoken to numerous
colleagues who forgave Gibson for his anti-Semitic remarks (that list
includes Dean Devlin, Mike Medavoy and Richard Donner) and they are
quick to remind you who Gibson helped along the way. Start with Robert
Downey Jr, who at one point was broke and an insurance risk on films.
Gibson put up the insurance bond himself to secure Downey to star in The Singing Detective,
which Gibson’s Icon produced. It was a performance that ignited the
actor’s resurgence. I know that he also helped Britney Spears when she
hit bottom, and that he tried to save Whitney Houston from the drug
abuse that ultimately killed her. Not everybody is that generous: when
Gibson himself needed a break that came when Warner Bros hired him for a
showy role in The Hangover Part II, he was abruptly dropped
when cast complained to director Todd Phillips. Mind you, these same
actors happily worked with Tyson despite his felony conviction for rape.
I don’t bring all this up to
excuse anything Gibson has done wrong, but sometimes it’s worth a closer
look. Take the notorious audiotapes released during his row with
ex-girlfriend Grigorieva. From my own investigation of the incident, I
am persuaded Gibson did not beat her or give her a black eye. I base
this on interviews with her lawyer and the deputy district attorney who
handled the case. Gibson admitted to “tapping” Grigorieva on the head
during an argument in which she shook their infant daughter. This was at
a time when Gibson was going through an emotional breakdown, and
Grigorieva capitalized on that by secretly taping their calls in an
effort to shake money out of him.
On March 11, 2011, Gibson was
charged with misdemeanor battery and pleaded no contest, without
admitting guilt. I covered the case for Newsweek (before Gibson
and I crossed the friendship line). The L.A. District Attorney’s office
determined that Gibson was responsible for misdemeanor assault but that
there was also evidence of extortion by Grigorieva. “There is no
question there was admissible evidence of extortion,” former Deputy
District Attorney John Lynch said at the time. “The problem, however,
was whether the D.A. could get a jury to convict.” Lynch added, “As a
practical matter, you have to choose between the two cases. In the one
case of domestic abuse, the victim could potentially be a defendant in
the other case of extortion. If we’d filed an extortion charge against
Ms. Grigorieva and tried to call her as a witness in the domestic abuse
case, no defense attorney on the planet would allow her to answer
questions.”
Although the police initially
contemplated charging Gibson with a felony, they declined. As one
investigator with knowledge of the case told me at the time, “they had
enormous problems with the credibility of the complaining witness
[Grigorieva].” This statement was also confirmed by sources within the
District Attorney’s office.
I’ve since learned from Gibson
about his personal spiral that occurred between his 2006 DUI arrest and
the breakup with Grigorieva. The day after the DUI, Gibson’s wife asked
him to leave the family home. Gibson was suddenly single and alone for
the first time in 30 years, cut off from his seven children and wife as
he struggled to stop drinking. He was depressed and lonely, his career
in shambles as he apologized to anyone who’d listen. Alone in a new
house, he tried to stay off the sauce. It was then that he met
Grigorieva, a Russian pianist who’d dated composer David Foster after
being married to actor Timothy Dalton.
The relationship got rocky when
Gibson asked her to sign a co-habitation agreement. Shortly after,
according to published emails, Grigorieva began arguing with Gibson
about whether he would provide for her if they split. This intensified
after the birth of their daughter in October 2009, when she began taping
the recordings that she allegedly leaked to the press despite a judge’s
order. Those recordings revealed a man in personal turmoil. While they
contain racist and misogynistic statements, there is also evidence that
the comments she made to provoke those statements were conveniently
edited out. No matter. You can’t make any of what he said OK, and Gibson
paid a price much higher than whatever monies Grigorieva walked away
with. Whatever good will Gibson had in Hollywood evaporated.
I’ve asked him why he didn’t
defend himself when the tapes surfaced. Why didn’t he challenge the
assertion he was crazy? He shrugged his shoulders and said his comments
just seem to make things worse. So he continues to say nothing.
Hollywood has long been a town
famous for loving a good comeback story. In Gibson’s case, I believe
that a few powerful people have gone out of their way to prevent that.
I’m telling you, my friend Mel
Gibson has pulled himself together. He is sober seven years, hitting the
gym for a role in an independent film, and thinking positively about
the future. It has been 11 years since he was paid by a major studio to
star in a film, and he hasn’t directed a studio film since Braveheart
won five Oscars including Best Picture and Best Director. He wasn’t the
bad person I thought he was back when I first wrote about him, and I’m
telling you, he is now not the person you think he is. As one A-list
star told me recently, “Mel has spent enough time in the penalty box.”
So how about it, Hollywood?
