We all know that Mel is sometime an angry guy. It seems to surface around the most thin-skinned and sensitive people like that WGN-TV reporter Dean Richards who asked Mel about the fallout from his 2006 drunk driving arrest and Mel called him a “baaad” name that we can’t repeat here. It think it was “fuckface.” Anyway, after that incident, Mel acknowledged that “I have a short fuse. I’m trying to work on it.”
So then a tape surfaces during a traumatic custody hearing in which Mel is heard commenting to Oksana Grigorieva , his ex-girlfriend and mother of his baby daughter, Lucia. The remarks include, yes, okay.. a term known as the “N-Word,” as in it starts with “N” and ends with “R” and that stands for “Boy.” So, is this a shock?” He said he was “trying to work on it.” Savvy? The tape was made by Grigorieva. Why? So she can tell the rest of us what we already knew about Mel long before she did..that he’s a potty mouth, a rough boy, a redneck racist, simple and plain? He is still one of the greatest film directors of the age. A great man, looking for artistic perfection, for that single shot blessed by God which becomes an oil painting, a masterpiece, I think can be forgiven if someone in craft services screws up his omelette and he calls them a “simple-minded spook-adelia” or a “spic gone wrong.”
In an e-mail to The Times, Mel’s representative Alan Nierob said that he had not yet confirmed the report’s accuracy “due to legal matters.” That means, he’s got other things to do than verify the ravings of a thrown over slav.
According to people who say they’ve heard the tape (and here is where we have to get into discussions of who are the born liars in Hollywood and who went to school for it), Mel reportedly remarked, “You look like a … pig in heat, and if you get raped by a pack of (stove lids) it will be your fault.” Isn’t that the Mel we know? In fact I heard those exact words uttered by a director to an actress once when she had made a wrong wardrobe change. Big wow.
Mel is also alleged to have said to her, very candidly, “I am going to come and burn the … house down,” adding, “but you will [blow me] me first.”
For those not familiar with the pressures of Hollywood and the demands made on a wildly successful director like Mel Gibson, this all sounds so ugly and shocking and nasty. Flush out your head gear, girlfriend. Around Hollywood a famous saying goes “If I’m gonna die for a word, my word is poon-tang.”
There’s much, much more, but I’ll spare you the boring details. You’ll undoubtedly hear all about them in the media uproar that is sure to follow. Snore. Mel, I have no doubt, will explain his comments, which of course echo the so-called anti-Semitic remarks he made at a formal dinner for the then California Governor, Gray Davis and that he repeated after his DUI arrest. Of course Mel has not denied having a confrontation with Grigorieva but has simply described it, through his lawyer, as a series of remarks he delivered upon seeing her squeezed into a pair of jeans.
The sorry excuses for writers that hide bottles currently at the LA Times are already panting about “career fallout.” If Mel needs to make an apology, he’ll make it and he’ll let them know when and where. It’s a sad thing to realize that so-called critics who know Mel is so gifted at playing bitter, violent men on screen don’t know that this reality comes from a store of bitterness and anger deep inside his own psyche that has been inflamed by proximity to drooling, mouth-breathing scum like the Hollywood press. It sounds to me as if it’s time for these same “people” to get some psychiatric help fast before their neurotic nit-picking forces Mel to eviscerate each and every one of them in front of some patients from a rest home being given a studio tour
By Margaret Grey
