Joe Esterhas says he has film of Mel Gibson saying he wanted to stab his girlfriend while in an act of sex, if I’ve got that right, called the head of William Morris a ‘cunt Jewboy’, said John Lennon ‘deserved to die’ and hoped his Maccabees film would ‘convert the Jews to Christianity.’
It seems remarkable that after all this he continued to work with Mel, took a million dollars from him, or was it two, and did not give it back.
Elsewhere it is reported that Mel is carrying on without him, will make the film without him — the Maccabees film, that is, without him — and it will not be, amazingly, an anti-Jewish film, in the manner of Dr Goebbels’ Jew Suss, but more like Braveheart.
This emphasises what I said yesterday, that Joe Esterhas is as mad as a cut snake, an unreliable witness, a character assassin, a mean drunk, and, by the look of his many, many Golden Rasberry nominations and prizes, a rotten screenwriter.
He will not release the film of the stab-my-girlfriend rant, if I’ve got that right, because … it’s hard to say. Maybe he’ll release it, and maybe he won’t.
Let’s look at what’s being alleged here. That Mel, who made another film about a heroic Jew, Jesus of Nazareth, in the language he spoke and preached in, Aramaic, with his own money and made half a billion dollars out of it, proposed to make another film, about another Jewish insurgent hero Judas Maccabeus and his fighting brothers Jonathan, Simon, Eleazar and Yohanan, who cast out the Seleucids in BC 164 and were the last Jews to hold and rule Jerusalem till the war of 1967 took back the Wailing Wall two thousand and eleven years later, did so because he HATED JEWS, apparently, and hoped by spending a lot of money on a film about their most heroic struggle and victory to do them harm. During the writing of the film he cursed them bag and baggage, claimed the Holocaust did not happen, and used the word ‘hebe’, short for ‘Hebrew’, a lot, AND JOE DID NOT WALK OUT ON HIM BECAUSE HE LIKED THE MILLION DOLLARS OR WAS IT TWO.
Then Joe wrote a script which Warner Brothers didn’t think was any good, nor did Mel, and he was fired from it by the agreement of both parties, and he now says he was fired from it because Mel hates Jews, though he, Joe, is not a Jew, he is a Hungarian.
Are there any flaws in this narrative so far? Anything that supports my thesis that Esterhas is a mad bastard who ran off at the mouth in a bar somewhere then noticed there were cameras on him and had to stick with his libels and hour by hour is making a bigger and bigger fool of himself?
Because, if the reports are true, Mel is going on with the film. And we will see the film eventually. And how anti-Semitic it is.
I had a public stoush with Mel once over the Fabians and he may not like me any more but I ask him to send me Joe’s script so I can take a look at it. If it is as bad as he says it may explain a good deal of what has happened.
And necessitate apologies from a lot of people including Terrance who has defiled these columns with his unremitting libels of an Oscar-winning hero of Scotland, Christendom and the AIF.
Name:
You may well be right about the script, but when Mel says it was the worst he’d seen in 25 years, I wonder where that leaves the screenplay for The Beaver - one of the most cringeful and embarassing movies ever made.
Here mel, who not make a movie about a man who communicates through a hand puppet?
Me thinks you defend this Jew hater, wife beater and drunkard too much.
Fine actor, great director but flawed as a character and his views, and those of his father, are repulsive.
You can admire someone’s work Bob but still accept they are an anti-Semite. Gunter Grass for example, or T.S Eliot.
Did you admire his Estragon, his Biff, his Romeo, his Hamlet, his Titania, his Mad Max, his Maverick, his Harry Porter in No Names No Packdrill, his Man With No Face, his William Wallace? His direction of Braveheart, Apocalypto, The Passion of the Christ? His voice work in Chicken Run and the Simpsons episode about him? His singing in On Our Selection and What Women Want? His tap-dancing, crooning and Jack Nicolson imitation in Shorts?
No?
Whyever not?
A hundred million Protestant Americans believe Jews will burn forever in Hell. Is this anti-Semitism? Sure looks like it.
Why not pick on them?
Any reason?
becuase your article was about MEL GIBSON, not a hundred million Protestant Americans.
Stick to the narrative.
Stay on the path please, your article was about Gibson, was it not?
Why punish one American in a hundred million?
How is that just? How is that fair?
Like being unfair, do you?
Here’s what I wrote:
“Fine actor, great director ”
Maybe Walter’s meth lab got to you, but where did I say I didn’t admire his work?
As a human being he is dogshit, however.
So Michelangelo, the pederast, was dogshit as a human being was he?
Please say so.
And Socrates, the pederast.
And Charlie Chaplin.
Please say so.
I urge Bob before writing to actually read Joe Eszterhas’ letter to Mel Gibson. It’s available on line in all it’s glory. From Mel’s colorful description of Jews as “oven dodgers” to the circumstances behind Mel confiding to their teenage son how he planned to stab his Russian girlfriend whilst sodomizing her. Mel Gibson is in need of medical treatment.
http://www.thewrap.com/movies/article/joe-eszterhas-letter-mel-gibson-36949
I tried to punch it up and it’s been withdrawn. Thousands of my relatives died in ovens and I’m not too worried about the joke-phrase, as I wasn’t by the jokes in The Great Dictator, To Be Or Not To Be, and Life Is Beautiful. Or Bugs Bunny, which is all about oven dodging.
Can you not see freedom of speech is what it is, and privacy of conversation a chapter of that freedom?
Can’t see, can you. I and my wife say things in bed that we don’t want published, any more than you and your wife want your pet-names in the headlines. Each relationship is in some sense a private language, not for publication.
Untie that string, that bond of love, that vow of male friendship, and hark what discord follows.
And hark what discord follows : pity then Prince Charles with his private words to Camilla, and James Gilbey calling Princess Diana as “squidgy”, hacked by the feral British press.
And on it goes.
The letter is still there now.
http://www.thewrap.com/movies/article/joe-eszterhas-letter-mel-gibson-36949
No, it won’t come up. It’s there in miniature, but my machine won’t let me enlarge it.
Ah, now I’ve got it.
I’ll do a separate piece in reply to it.
“Your relatives”???
Are you Jewish now too. Did you have a Bar Mitzvah or are you just ‘nearly’ a Jew, like you were ‘nearly’ a paid Beazley staffer.
How can you look yourself in the mirror? You milk your own circumstance to elicit sympathy and patronage. How many times have you mentioned the tragic circumstances of your sister? With genuine respect, you cite this when you attack others, as if you alone have suffered or been bound down by the tragedy of loss.
And now, you fraudster, you claim “your” relatives died in the concentration camps as a means of defending Mel Gibson’s humour. And liken your circumstance to The Great Dictator, made 18 months before the first acknowledged media reports of gas ovens as means of mass extermination.
Or liken yourself to Mel Brooks, a child of anti-Semitism in rough NYC, who has earned the right to use humour – you are a charlatan Ellis.
If you want Esterhas to release his script then you print your family tree so we can see the great Yid lineage you claim died in Europe.
Ah dear. One quarter of my ancestors were Jewish which gives me about fifty million of them since Abraham’s time. Rachel Larkman’s people were from Poland, which gives me about a hundred third cousins likely to have died in gas chambers there, and a thousand or so fourth and fifth cousins. Rachel converted to Seventh Day Adventism, a Sabbath-believing religion with the same diet strictures that I grew up in. Okay so far?
And believe me, I did feel persecuted, not being able to play cricket or go to the pictures on Saturday, not being able to drink tea or coffee or eat lollies, and being obliged as a little boy to knock on strangers’ doors and say the end of the world is nigh.
You have called me a fraudster, and are showing signs of ill-temper, and I think it’s because you haven’t thought things through.
I ask you this: how should Mel Gibson be punished, punished for his Thoughtcrimes, if he is guilty of them? Should he go to gaol, like David Irving? Should he be fined five hundred million dollars? Five million? Five hundred? What?
If you do not think he should be punished at all, why are you making all this fuss?
I have never, never, cited my dead sister as if no-one else had suffered a loss. I did it always, always, in fellow-feeling with other people who had.
Be careful how you go. You are showing signs of nastiness.
As you do when talking of Mel.
Sorry, yes, I see that and a genuine apology Mr Ellis.
Seriously, a heartfelt apology is due.
But they were not your relatives, your kin folk who you went to Synagogue with and shared a Bar Mitzvah with, was my point. I married into Irish Catholic, but that doesn’t make the bastardary of England to the Irish my loss, or the IRA my spiritual companions.
But not to Gibson, he like Irving should have hot mushrooms placed up their clackers and made to listen to the records of boy bands for eternity!
No, they were not. And neither were they yours, I think.
Answer my question on the punishment of Mel.
Redeem yourself, as we Semites like to say.
Mel and Hollywood is there for all to see. He’s a genius at his art and craft even just with natural attributes.
Theology, fame,business, his art, the worries and politics of the world and confliction’s all go into his factory for processing with passion. Dissecting,throwing it all against the wall in science of study, reassembling.
Thank the stars he expels than holds. Not always pleasant to those who judge surface deep or couldn’t walk 5 feet in his quest for answers with his life, burdens and healths accroutrements and passions. The cycle of stormy rains always gets a garden growing after as long as the cycles don’t embed. Sometimes when finding peace in life, it doesn’t rain , it pours.
I see in that letter besides truths and context that the pen underlines sympathy and wounding for the writers script and riles and angles a fury using Mel’s turmoil’s they were unfortunately caught in. Why did he hang in there? Or put his family through Mel’s pain’s, expelling and burdens at “threat of death.” No locks on the door to bar saving and doing the right thing by his family.
Personally I would trust Mel’s pain’s, passion and judgement for visualising and stylising for delivering a story I would want to chew on and view. Esterhas’s writings may carry the stink of guilt. Politics, the correct of it and cliche’d line not in line with the flaw or healing of genius art that paces a house painting canvas in a storm.
I feel for Esterhas and his family and wish peace for Mel finding his way through what would kill lessor.
Mel,in interview, seems to have trouble expressing sometimes and that can be deadly in media world. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Questions sometimes have a lot of answers and angles but that is where genius lives.
Jesus, Jim, you’re worse than ever.
Enrol in kindergarten for Christ’s sake.
I can’t stand this.
Like Bob Brown, I may have to give it up.
I struggle through it Bob, because there are sometimes gems hidden in the long grass.
We cannot all, or always, be as erudite and articulate as we would like. I think Jim is working on his syntax and that he should be allowed to continue to do so. Prove me right, Jim!
Is it a time to welcome you back, jim?
Years ago when street parties were all the go, we had one in our street in Balmain NSW. Mel Gibson was a friend of our actor neighbour and joined in; I remember him as a shortish bloke with very blue eyes, and that most of the ladies at preasent were flocking to him…
Depends on the boss’s tolerance of my attempting English:)
I have a soft spot for Mel. My daughter is named after my best friend who was Mel’s twin.
He became a statistic traversing the outback at high speed on a motorcycle at night. You could see his blue eyes from 20 feet away. He had good looks burdens. I love Mel’s work.
No one denies Mel Gibson’s creative talent and artistic judgement. I greatly admire his film “Braveheart” a film you can watch again and again and continue to enjoy it. Not many films you want to see twice. But Mel for whatever reason, is consumed with great anger and terrible rage. Perhaps its his Catholic guilt but whatever the reason all his wealth and talent cannot keep his mind steady and heart pure without apparently if the reports are true - his brain snapping whether at Jews or Priests. I do hope he gets to make that Jewish Braveheart film and he continues to shine. But Gee, I wouldn’t want to live with him…
Your point being?
I mean, has he asked you to?
He may be better off Frank, avoiding the matter of Jewish history for his health and find other subjects not so part of ping pong American favourite frustrations and argument conflict pastimes.
There is not enough of the story of why his frustrations and scorn have come out and been directed here and there for me to bother condemning or understanding one way or another. I’m happy not to be engrossed in the matter or overcast my life with it. It only feeds the media beast of contextual swordplay.
I picture someone in Mel’s position having to fend off many approaches and friends to enemies are only a script or idea rejection away.
If you could pick your friends at all with fame.
Better off avoiding Jewish history? Quite so, Jim; but who ever said he had sense?
A quiet life is not for someone like Gibson; the urge is there to create, and what he is urged to create is always controversial.
Some fires smoulder, some rage like an inferno.
I’m very happy Doug that I was never schooled heavily in religion and theology. Hurts my head and confuses situations. I’ve got no time or room for it. Not my hobby.
Mel would be a walk in the park to what I grew up with. Shearer’s and bushmen’s tantrums accented with 303′s. Three M1 carbines getting fired wildly around a room. Passenger in 100 mph suicide tantrums in cars on gravel roads. More than a dozen times with a damaged friend.
Mel seems to get frustrated and intense. He shouldn’t drink. Leave some for everyone else, he’s had his share. Get into cruising gear, sort out his health and happiness.
I was a reformed alco once. Swore I’d never give up drinking again:) The couple I’ll have now every 2nd or 3rd weekend with some music does nothing for me. I’m moving on from that.
“More than a dozen times with a damaged friend”? Once should have been enough, twice for the benefit of the doubt . . . but a dozen? Drive anyone to drink!