Mel Gibson’s most vicious Hollywood feud: “What the fuck have you been doing?”
Controversy has a habit of following Mel Gibson around, but, and this isn’t a good thing, he has at least managed to keep his personal and professional lives apart when hitting the self-destruct button.
The arrest that cast him into Hollywood exile two decades ago was because the two-time Academy Award winner revealed himself to be a terrible person, just like the unsavoury incidents, which were caught on tape, that saw him plead no-contest to a misdemeanour battery charge in 2011.
Of course, the two sides of Gibson have been known to meet in the middle, with Winona Ryder revealing that he’d made antisemitic remarks at an event they were both attending, while he’d also gone on the record in the 1980s and 1990s, making various sexist and homophobic remarks, and threatened to “tear the fucking face right off” someone who’d written an unauthorised biography about him.
Despite retaining the backing of several friends, colleagues, and former collaborators, it’s unlikely that mainstream cinema will ever welcome Gibson back with open arms. His best shot at doing it came from behind the camera, but following up Hacksaw Ridge with the awful Flight Risk negated that possibility, even if his Passion of the Christ sequels are sure to do a decent turn at the box office.
However, the Lethal Weapon star did become embroiled in one notably vicious Hollywood feud, with screenwriter Joe Eszterhas. Formerly the highest-paid writer in the business, the Basic Instinct and Showgirls scribe partnered up with Gibson to crack The Maccabees, a historical epic that the latter was set to direct. Unfortunately, when things didn’t go smoothly, he lost his rag.
He was caught on tape, again, and didn’t come across as the best creative partner. “Why don’t I have a first draft of The Maccabees?” he asked. “What the fuck have you been doing? I go to work, you’re getting paid, I’m not! Shit! I am earning money for a filthy little cocksucker who takes advantage of me! Just like every other motherfucker! So hurry the fuck up!”
That didn’t create an ideal working environment, and when the project was officially cancelled, Eszterhas speculated on why: “I’ve come to the conclusion that the reason you won’t make The Maccabees is the ugliest one possible,” he wrote in a nine-page letter. “You hate Jews.”
Summing up his feelings towards the Braveheart filmmaker, he was labelled as “a man who’s been battling his demons and the demons have won.” Needless to say, Gibson wasn’t thrilled at Eszterhas airing alleged dirty laundry in public, forcing him to release a statement of his own where he denounced everything that had been claimed.
Informing Deadline that “the great majority of the facts as well as the statements and actions attributed to me in your letter are utter fabrications,” he suggested that Eszterhas was taking it out on him because Warner Bros pulled the plug on The Maccabees, and that he hadn’t produced a single word of a script after 15 months of pre-production and development, and when he finally got one, he said he’d “never seen a more substandard first draft or a more significant waste of time.”
Signing off by saying the back-and-forth slander “should be our last communication,” Gibson drew a line under his most public Hollywood blowout, but not before his reputation had been sullied even further.
