"The notion that any Hollywood executive of any religion would cast aside one of the most successful movie stars of the modern era (in box office terms, at least) over a theological dispute is a novel one. It was certainly far from believable for at least one contributor to the Times 's story. 'If the movie works, I don't think it will hurt him [Gibson],' argued prominent Hollywood agent John Lesher. 'People here will work with the anti-Christ if he'll put butts on seats.'"
In which case, the scripts will be piling up behind Mel Gibson's door this coming week.
<snip>
"Any discussion on the controversy surrounding The Passion of the Christ must start with Hutton Gibson, biblical scholar, father of Mel and, these days, America's most prominent holocaust denier. Now 85 years old, Hutton Gibson is the son of an Australian opera singer who moved to the US. He worked as a railway brakeman until early retirement following an industrial injury. In 1968, when Mel was 12, he moved his family to Australia.
Having returned to the US and living in Summerville, South Carolina, with his second wife Joye, Gibson Snr first came to prominence with the publication of two books attacking the reformist movement in the Roman Catholic church. Rather than stick with the Second Vatican Council of 1962-5, which nudged the church into the twentieth century, Hutton Gibson decided to stay in the sixteenth century, setting up his own reactionary Catholic group which continued to observe the Latin mass and other ancient Catholic traditions.
One of these ancient traditions, at least in more extremist circles, was the vilification of Jews, whose alleged sins began with hastening the death of Christ and continued down through the centuries. In modern times, this obnoxious strand of Catholicism has had few advocates more vocal or more persistent than Hutton Gibson. According to his world view, the Second Vatican Council was a Jewish plot to destroy the Catholic church, the United Nations was a Jewish plot to take over the world and the Holocaust was a Jewish fiction aimed at winning sympathy.
As recently as last month, at precisely the moment his son was most under attack from his critics for his cinematic interpretation of the gospels, Gibson Snr gave a radio interview during which he described Holocaust museums as a 'gimmick to collect money' and suggested that Alan Greenspan, the head of the Federal Reserve and who happens to be Jewish, should be hanged."
continued.........
film.guardian.co.uk
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