The recent news that Mel Gibson is no longer a client of William Morris Endeavor should come as no surprise. Many news and entertainment programs, including NBC's "Today Show," pegged the delisting to Gibson's recent domestic assault allegations and tabloid leak of surreptitious tapes of racist rants he allegedly made, all arising from his custody dispute with his baby-mama Oksana Grigorieva.
But Gibson was already on borrowed time at the agency. In 2006, following his Malibu arrest and anti-Semitic rant, Ari Emanuel, then at Endeavor, writing in the Huffington Post, called on all Hollywood to shun Gibson. Gibson's great defender was his longtime agent Ed Limato, then at ICM, who famously threw a drink in the face of Page Six's Richard Johnson for comments about Gibson at a Vanity Fair Oscar party.
Subsequently, Limato moved his operations from ICM to William Morris, and when William Morris and Endeavor merged last year, Emanuel and Limato found themselves having to make a cold peace.
A few weeks ago, Limato died. Then the other shoe dropped. Regarding Gibson, no one could call Emanuel a hypocrite. For his part, Gibson's self-destructive self-immolation has cost him his marriage, much of his fortune, his standing in Hollywood and -- depending on what happens next -- could lead to criminal prosecution for domestic violence.
Which begs the question: Are the travails of Mel Gibson a fitting comeuppance, a vindication of those who saw something noxious in Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ," a Shakespearean tragedy where character is destiny, or, perhaps in and of itself, proof that God exists? Or some combination of the above?
Rewinding through Gibson's oeuvre and focusing on "Braveheart," "The Man Without a Face" and then "The Passion," the consistent theme appears to be that violence and harsh confrontation beget redemption.
Gibson entered the fray with his "The Passion of the Christ." I would argue that each generation gets the version of Christ it deserves. So, if "The Greatest Story Ever Told" was made for the post-World War II "Greatest Generation," "Godspell" for the '60s flower children, and "Jesus Christ Superstar" for the "me" decade 1970s, then "The Passion of the Christ" embodies a rift in American culture, a moment when war and existential threats seemed everyday experiences.
When Gibson told us he was being true to the Gospels in making his movie, he was not wrong. But it was his specific choices from among the versions that reflected Gibson's own soul and character.
The enormous success of the film is history now, but it's almost hard to remember the time when Jews questioning Gibson's "Passion" were made to seem as if they were asking for a revisionist Jewish version of the New Testament. Indeed, even Gibson's Jewish publicist, Alan Nierob, defended him.
At one point, Gibson claimed he was going to make a film about the Maccabees, which some took as a form of atonement, but which, to me, carried an implied threat -- of exposing an ugly side to Jewish heroism.
