I think that Mel Gibson is a great actor. He manages to get pulled over in his own neighborhood for drunk driving and then starts on a some sort of anti-Jewish tirade in 2006. Great script!
I have always discounted his behavior that night as someone with a past drinking problem and then going off the wagon and then blacking out. I know people like that, like Mel drinking beer since age thirteen and after two beers in a bar, the next day, they don’t what they said or did the night before and then they ask you.
Mel, admit that he blacks out? Or has a dysfunctional family situation with Dad? Hell no. His Father is quoted by Mel in many places as “never having lied to him about anything” – like the Holocaust. Of course if Hutton Gibson has never lied about anything, doesn’t that make him perfect? And doesn’t that make Mel the son of God so to speak.
This narcissistic behavior out of the show biz types started or at least I labeled it as such when Michael Jackson was on top twenty five years ago. When you are that rich you can do or believe anything you want to. Until you get caught.
The whole anti-Semitic incident may have been a cowardly way for Mel to start the divorce process. Put a dozen projects on hold, hide the assets offshore and separate long enough for half your actual estate to disappear temporarily. Mel missed his true calling in life. He should have been a RC bishop.
Community property or not his spouse of twenty eight years will get about $120 million. It is a lot less than the 50% - 50% California community property split might promise. But she will get ten percent at least of book value of his properties. Ten percent cash is hard to come up with especially if you are land poor and movie project poor like old dear Mel.
I remember some years ago when they, the press, were talking about his cult church there in Malibu. Must be fifteen, twenty or more years ago. The news said he paid something like $500,000 to fund the construction of his designer religion traditionalist catholic church. Now that all the Hollywood news sites are getting their teeth into Mel – pay back time – I see that his Church is part of a foundation and he has supposedly spent $45 million dollars ??? on it as an ongoing building of a monument to himself and his exclusive religion. His own construction company too – talk about cooking the books. Like I said, he should have been a bishop to put such a low accounting tax book value on an adobe structure with how many acres of sub dividable Malibu real estate, ten, twenty, thirty? Whatever.
Reading all the petty Hollywood stuff, I went onto the Internet and went with the flow to see a few interesting things directly or indirectly related to Mad Max. This here is petty too I admit. Mea Culpa. Mea Culpa. But when I read that he thinks that his Episcopalian wife is an automatic send to “hell” – Christ what a medieval jerk she was married to and mothered seven of his known children with!
His church – his cult following – subscribes to the third century concept “extra Ecclesiam nulla salus” (“outside The Church there is no salvation”). This is the backbone of the Traditionalist Catholic movement – that and the Latin Mass. The old Church condemned all the non-Catholics, mostly Jews and Protestants back then to hell.
There is a hero, a saint, a martyr, of that fanatical Traditionalist anti-semitic branch of Catholicism. Have you ever heard of Leonard Feeney SJ, a Jesuit in Boston that got quite popular in his writings in the late 1940s into the early 1950s. Even the Vatican was embarrassed by his success. He managed to get excommunicated for not submitting to proper Vatican management of his activities. He would not tone down his rigid non-conforming exclusive interpretation of salvation within the Church only and never outside the Roman Catholic church.
Back in grade school, I heard the Leonard Feeney story from the nuns every year because he had some poetry in our outdated poetry books. His poems were about St. Mary and the nuns’ dedicated to St. Mary gave a kind rendition to us of why the pope f-----d Leonard Feeney for his views about the damnation of anybody outside the RC church. There was dissention in the ranks before Vatican II and even from nuns.
So when Vatican II defined, redefined who or who was not inside the Church, who would, could be saved from hell etc, the Tradionalists like Hutton Gibson went ape shit. Poor man could not get a decent night’s sleep with the noisy six million Jews (recently arrived immigrants) living in the apartment house next door to him in Queens NY. Had to move to Australia for breathing space so to speak. I think all this made an impression on young Mel. Whatever.
Like I said before Mel is a good actor. I wish him well on the building of his mini-Vatican in fashionable, expensive and exclusive Malibu. I also hope Robyn screws the pants off him in divorce court. Cheers mate.
