Retired Lt. Col. Goes Off, Explains How to Win a War: ‘Leave Behind Smoking Ruins and Crying Widows’January 10, 2015 By Greg Campbell
In what is, perhaps, one of the greatest, most clear-cut and brutally-honest assessments about the U.S.’s “War on Terror,” retired Lt. Col. and current Fox News military analyst Ralph Peters highlighted what needs to be done to win this war.
Spoiler Alert: coddling and reasoning with those who want us dead does not make it onto Peters’ list.
On Friday’s “The O’Reilly Factor,” Peters remarked that the way to win a war is not to coddle, but to engage in Sherman-esque total war and “leave behind smoking ruins and crying widows.”
Peters outlined his plan for winning a war:
“One, you accept that you are in a war. Two, you name the enemy: Islamist terrorists. Three, you get the lawyers off the battlefield and out of the targeting cell. You accept there will be collateral damage, and do you not apologize for it, you do not nation build. You don’t hold — try to hold ground. You go wherever in the world the terrorists are and you kill them. You do your best to exterminate them, and then you leave, and you leave behind smoking ruins and crying widows. If in five or ten years they reconstitute and you have got to go back, you go back and you do the same thing and you never never never send American troops into a war you don’t mean to win.” And “be as merciless as the enemy, if you’re not willing to do that, they will win.”
When discussing how to deal with state sponsors of terrorism, Peters explained:
“We have 2,000 years of recorded history of religious insurgencies, the only thing that has worked in 2,000 years is killing them. Now, as far as countries that don’t want to play ball, very simple. Pakistan doesn’t want to crack down on the Haqqani Network, we tell them ‘we are going to go in and take them out, and if you get in our way, we are going to smack your military down’…in a war you fight to win, you don’t worry about political correctness. The jihadis will do anything to win, and we’re worried about our table manners.”
Peters’ assessment is absolutely correct. While leaders should think long and hard about engaging in a war and should only put our service members in harm’s way only when every other option has failed, the true goal of the conflict should be to win as quickly as possible and get home as quickly as possible.
All other distractions and political considerations should be a distant thought compared to the mindset of winning the war, protecting as many of our lives as possible and ending the war with the complete and utter defeat of the enemy.
While naïve hippies might balk at such a brutal notion, the fact is that a prolonged war littered with casualties is a far crueler notion than an awe-inspiring devastation of the enemy that shortens combat significantly
Spoiler Alert: coddling and reasoning with those who want us dead does not make it onto Peters’ list.
On Friday’s “The O’Reilly Factor,” Peters remarked that the way to win a war is not to coddle, but to engage in Sherman-esque total war and “leave behind smoking ruins and crying widows.”
Peters outlined his plan for winning a war:
“One, you accept that you are in a war. Two, you name the enemy: Islamist terrorists. Three, you get the lawyers off the battlefield and out of the targeting cell. You accept there will be collateral damage, and do you not apologize for it, you do not nation build. You don’t hold — try to hold ground. You go wherever in the world the terrorists are and you kill them. You do your best to exterminate them, and then you leave, and you leave behind smoking ruins and crying widows. If in five or ten years they reconstitute and you have got to go back, you go back and you do the same thing and you never never never send American troops into a war you don’t mean to win.” And “be as merciless as the enemy, if you’re not willing to do that, they will win.”
When discussing how to deal with state sponsors of terrorism, Peters explained:
“We have 2,000 years of recorded history of religious insurgencies, the only thing that has worked in 2,000 years is killing them. Now, as far as countries that don’t want to play ball, very simple. Pakistan doesn’t want to crack down on the Haqqani Network, we tell them ‘we are going to go in and take them out, and if you get in our way, we are going to smack your military down’…in a war you fight to win, you don’t worry about political correctness. The jihadis will do anything to win, and we’re worried about our table manners.”
Peters’ assessment is absolutely correct. While leaders should think long and hard about engaging in a war and should only put our service members in harm’s way only when every other option has failed, the true goal of the conflict should be to win as quickly as possible and get home as quickly as possible.
All other distractions and political considerations should be a distant thought compared to the mindset of winning the war, protecting as many of our lives as possible and ending the war with the complete and utter defeat of the enemy.
While naïve hippies might balk at such a brutal notion, the fact is that a prolonged war littered with casualties is a far crueler notion than an awe-inspiring devastation of the enemy that shortens combat significantly
Retired Lt. Col. Goes Off, Explains How to Win a War: ‘Leave Behind Smoking Ruins and Crying Widows’January 10, 2015 By Greg Campbell
Nothing new. WT Sherman's blueprint on modern warfare that he coined and used in his March to the Sea........Sherman made Georgia HOWL....our government should make the bad guys in Syria, Iraq, Yeman and anywhere else these GOD DAMN Fuckers are by slaughtering them without mercy. We can if we had the fucking balls to to do so. But our government is no so inclined.
http://launch.newsinc.com/share.html?trackingGroup=69016&siteSection=breitbartprivate&videoId=28334900
Republican Robert Duvall Bolts GOP
By Marlow Stern
The Daily Beast
Thu, Mar 13, 2014
http://news.yahoo.com/republican-robert-duvall-bolts-gop-094500581--politics.html
A century from now, when Venice is underwater, reality TV has gone the way of The Hunger Games, and Russia’s president is a dead ringer for Johnny Weir, a budding cinephile will enroll in an American Studies course entitled, “Legends of Cinema.” And an entire section of that class will be dedicated to the work of Robert Duvall.
The 83-year-old icon has won an Academy Award, four Golden Globes, and an Emmy. He’s appeared in six films on the American Film Institute’s list of the Top 100 Films, more than any other actor. The Godfather. The Godfather Part II. Apocalypse Now. To Kill A Mockingbird. M*A*S*H. Network. Many view the Duvall-starring miniseries, Lonesome Dove, as one of the greatest westerns ever.
A quarter century later, Duvall has reteamed with Lonesome Dove screenwriter William D. Witliff for A Night in Old Mexico. The film, directed by Emilio Aragón, tells the tale of Red Bovie (Duvall), a curmudgeonly Texas rancher who will not go gently into that good night (in his case, a trailer park-retirement home), and whisks his grandson, Gally (Jeremy Irvine), off to Mexico for one final adventure. It boasts an excellent late-career performance from Duvall, who hasn’t lost a beat as he’s aged.
Duvall is seated across from me in the bowels of the Four Seasons Hotel in Austin, Texas, where the film is premiering as part of SXSW. He’s sipping on a coffee and clenching a script for his upcoming film, The Judge, a comedy he’s starring in opposite Robert Downey Jr. that (allegedly) hits theaters on Oct. 10.
“These are additional lines—we have to do additional shooting,” says Duvall. “With the money they have for these four days of re-shoots I could finance a movie I’m trying to raise money for! It’s a script I want to direct here in Texas about Texas Rangers.”
After exchanging some more pleasantries, Duvall opened up about his storied career, from his early days in New York City palling around with Dustin Hoffman and Gene Hackman to A Night in Old Mexico, and why he, as a longtime Republican—he even reportedly narrated a video for the 2008 Republican National Convention—is voting Independent.
I really enjoyed A Night in Old Mexico, and your performance.
I love the movie too because it’s storytelling—it’s not gratuitous sex, fights, and all that crap. Whitliff started working on the screenplay 25 years ago, right after we finished Lonesome Dove, and I was walking around with my ex-wife and he said, “Now that we’ve done Lonesome Dove, let’s do A Night in Old Mexico.” I said, “It’s too soon! I gotta get a little older.” Dennis Hopper was going to direct it at one time, then some crazy French guy who disappeared. So it was now or never with this Spanish guy who brought the money to the table.
Have you ever had a wild time in Mexico?
I got a little sick on the food! But not too much. On this movie, the crew—including this girl in a bikini—got bored and stole a patrol car from the props people and drove down the highway and started arresting people! So they put them all in shackles and orange jumpsuits, but they judge let them off. If they had gone into Mexico, it would have been tough.
A Night in Old Mexico opens with your character at a very low point, ready to commit suicide after losing his family land. Have you ever, in your career, reached a low point?
Oh, yeah. Around the time of M*A*S*H, I was always looking for the next job. I thought, “When’s the next one coming?” I did TV and then I wanted to get into movies, but it was TV, TV, TV. Come on! Some of the old episodic shows were good to do, but it got to be repetitious.
But these days, you’re still performing at such a high level while many of your old pals, like Gene Hackman, have since retired.
Oh, I know! I hadn’t seen him. I went to New Mexico and was producing Crazy Heart and emailed him but he didn’t respond. I haven’t seen him for years. But I’m married to a younger woman and hang around young people. That helps.
One of my all-time favorite SNL sketches is the “Who’s More Grizzled?” showdown between you and Garth Brooks. But I’ve got to ask: who’s more grizzled than Robert Duvall?
Oh, I’m not so macho. Jimmy Caan tries being macho with the shoulders and ass so tiny. I never felt comfortable doing Saturday Night Live. Never did. Who was the funny guy that died? John Belushi. I called him and said, “We’ve got to do a Brando-off. I know someone who can do a better Brando than you!” In the Philippines, when I was doing my last rehearsals on Apocalypse, Jimmy Keane did an amazing Brando, and then we all started doing Brando impressions all over the Philippines.
Republicans in Hollywood seem to get a lot of flack and be a bit marginalized. Has it ever been tough, for you, to be a Republican in Hollywood?
Let me say it this way: my wife’s from Argentina, she’s been here for a while, and he’s very smart. She calls herself a “tree-hugging Republican,” but she might even vote Democrat next time because the Republican Party is a mess. I’ll probably vote Independent next time. I think it was Jack Kerouac who said something like, “Don’t run down my country. My people are immigrants, so I believe in this country with all its faults. To me, it’s a big country that’s made mistakes.” Some of the bleeding-heart left-wing, extreme left-wing, are actually different from liberals. That movie The Butler? It’s very inaccurate. JFK had one of the worst Civil Right’s voting records. And the Rockefeller’s were much more liberal with the blacks. All the atrocities in the South were committed by the Democratic Party, but now, everything’s been turned around in a strange way. Some of these very conservative Republicans… I don’t know, man. I believe in a woman’s choice. I believe in certain things. I hear they booed Rick Perry last night on the Jimmy Kimmel show. But it’s a great country. We’ve done bad things. Slavery was terrible. One-third of all Freedmen in New Orleans fought for the South. I can’t figure that out. Those things aren’t told in the history books. There’ve been lots of contradictions and this and that. But I think the country’s okay, and hopefully it will survive.
I’d like to backtrack a bit since I’ve been a fan of yours for quite some time. You and James Caan came up in the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York, while your pals Gene Hackman and Dustin Hoffman were over at Pasadena Playhouse.
I met Gene in New York and he said, “Dustin’s coming,” and Dustin, my brother, me, and a few other guys all had an apartment on the Upper West Side. It was a lot of fun. Dustin was a lot of laughs. We’d go into a bar trying to pick up girls and he had the worst pickup lines. He’d say, “We just put up some new linoleum in our apartment, do you want to check it out?” He was always talking about “new linoleum.” Gene was married at the time to an Italian woman and we’d come over and she’d cook us dinner, and then we’d all sleep on the floor, wake up when it’s sunny and have dessert. Hackman, when he stood guard duty in the Marines—and it was cold over there—it’d be two in the morning and he’d have his coat zipped up, and he’d unzip it and have a woman in there. But it’s such a big country you hardly see those guys. Jimmy Caan I see sometimes—and Wilford Brimley.
Your first film role was To Kill A Mockingbird, which was a very important film in 1962 during the Civil Rights Movement.
It was a wonderful statement. Gregory Peck was a gentleman and Horton Foote, the great Texas playwright, was always on the set. He and Coppola gave me great roles early on that really helped my career. I like doing character parts. I told someone recently that if I lived in England I could fit because I feel I’m a character actor. I played Stalin, a Cuban barber. Terry Gilliam saw it and wanted me to play Don Quixote, but it’ll never happen now. Johnny Depp wouldn’t do it with [Gilliam]. My friend, Scott Cooper, cast Johnny Depp as Whitey Bulger [in Black Mass], but the guy who should play Whitey Bulger is Mark Wahlberg, because he knows Boston. I told Scott, “Johnny’s gotta get rid of his old bag of tricks and find a new bag of tricks to play that guy.” People love those gangster movies.
The Godfather and The Godfather Part II are two of the better films ever made. There’s a fantastic image on the set of the first Godfather where you literally have Brando’s lines written on a placard over your chest.
Duvall doesn’t recall, so I whip out my phone and show him the following picture:
[Laughs] I forgot about that! Sometimes we’d put up Brando’s lines but then remove them right before and put in a little wedding invite with really small letters and Coppola would say, “ACTION!” and he couldn’t see it! Or Pacino during a scene outside would have his lines up on a billboard and he’d look up at them. I don’t know how you could do it that way, but he did. In the Philippines, during Apocalypse, Brando had an earphone thing where they fed him lines. I think Downey does that, too. I don’t know how you do it. I like to learn them, and if called for, I love to improvise.
Any fun stories from filming The Godfather movies? I imagine with James Caan around there were plenty of shenanigans on set.
Oh, yeah. I remember during The Godfather Part II, it wasn’t as much fun so he jacked it up and Jimmy was only there for a day. We went and had Hungarian food near the studio and the AD says, “Come on guys, you’ve got to hurry up.” So Jimmy takes the hottest pepper and puts it inside a pita bread, and Jimmy walks by with his shoulders just sort of looking away, and Coppola comes up, takes it, and bites into it, and yells, “YOU COCKSUCKER!” We knew he loved to eat.
Brando was so great in those films.
He had so much talent. I remember I told Brando once that he should do Othello and he said, “Bo-ring!” For the first time in fifty years, about a month ago, I saw A Streetcar Named Desire and thought, “Look at how unique this guy is.” At one point in the film, some particles go up in the arm and you just see him take them in his hand. What a force of nature.
Coppola famously had problems with Brando though during the filming of Apocalypse Now.
y
Yeah. It was better the second time around. Coppola listened to so many editors, but the second time, Brando created this language with the kid, and my thing was better because they put back in a scene where I save a baby’s life. I like Redux much better.
I read that Harvey Keitel was cast in the lead in Apocalypse but Coppola fired him after a week of filming.
Yes, he was. Just a week. Harvey had been a Marine but I don’t know what happened. He wanted to go back to Manila on a plane every day, but we all stayed out there. I told Coppola, “Why don’t you try Jeff Bridges, or Steve McQueen. Jimmy Caan turned it down. Nobody wanted to go out to the Philippines. We stayed in these homes with no hot water, but it was fun. They got Marty Sheen. Nice guy, Marty.
Did you actually surf out there, like Col. Kilgore?
I just body-surf, but don’t surf. Shooting Apocalypse was okay for me, but it was tough. All those typhoons destroying sets. It was crazy.
You were in Network, too, which in hindsight was such a prescient film.
Not one of my favorites. I liked working with William Holden. Great guy. When a girl came on set he’d light up.
Well, he did date Audrey Hepburn at one point. Not too shabby.
Did he? Well, he loved women. But there are weaknesses in that movie. The casting in The Godfather was pretty impeccable. But Lonesome Dove is maybe my favorite part. I came in the mess hall one morning and said, “Boys, we’re making The Godfather of Westerns.” Down here, it’s an icon. I ran into a woman who was a Texas Ranger and she said, “I wouldn’t let my daughter marry her fiancé until he saw Lonesome Dove.”
And miniseries’ are really starting to come back in a big way on HBO, with shows like True Detective, Top of the Lake, etc.
Have you seen this show called Red Road? [Shakes head] James Gray did it. He’s got a big opinion of himself. When I did Stalin it was very difficult to work with HBO, and with Broken Trail, we put AMC on the map, but they were very difficult to work with. On TV, it’s more compartmental.
Are there any young actors out there that you’re a big fan of?
Oh! Ok. The kid this year, if you and I live to be 100, nobody’s going to do it better than McConaughey did this year.
Have you seen True Detective? Eh, it’s ok. But I’m friends with his brother, Rooster McConaughey. What a crazy family. He’s going to come visit soon. Last year, I thought Joaquin Phoenix was terrific in The Master. I voted for him over [Daniel Day-Lewis in] Lincoln. Did you see Snatch a few years ago? Brad Pitt was terrific. Eric Bana in Chopper? So great. Ben Kingsley in Sexy Beast? I don’t know if these guys will ever do that again. These guys aren’t so young, but Sean Penn, Denzel Washington, and Laurence Fishburne—he can be terrific. I loved his Othello. But with young actors, there’s room for all now.
What’s your take on the film industry today?
Well, my favorite movie from last year was The Invisible Woman. I would’ve voted for the girl [Felicity Jones] for the Oscar. Beautiful movie. Oh, but I wouldn’t know how to do it today. In the ‘70s, the independent filmmaking was in the system, but now it’s on the outside. I heard someone say there’ve been no good movies since the ‘70s, but there have been tons. Come on! Every bit as good as the ‘70s, some of them.
Mel Gibson
http://movies.yahoo.com/news/journalist-plea-10th-anniversary-passion-christ-hollywood-mel-214854535.html
A Journalist’s Plea On 10th Anniversary Of ‘The Passion Of The Christ’: Hollywood, Take Mel Gibson Off Your Blacklist
Mel Gibson by Amir Taqi-Iraq
By ALLISON HOPE WEINER, Special To Deadline | Deadline.com
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.
[Related: 8 Things You Didn't Know About 'The Passion of the Christ']
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.
[Related: Burning Question: Is a Big-Screen Jesus Wave on the Way?]
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?
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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.
[Related: 8 Things You Didn't Know About 'The Passion of the Christ']
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.
[Related: Burning Question: Is a Big-Screen Jesus Wave on the Way?]
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?
Related stories
Oscars: Parties, Q&As, Campaigning More Rampant Than Ever As Voting Continues
Paul Verhoeven Finds Backing And A Writer For Controversial Jesus Christ Movie
Mel Gibson To Join 'Machete Kills' Mayhem
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