Hollywood screenwriter Joe Eszterhas was diagnosed with throat cancer in 2001. Forced to give up drinking and smoking, he found himself reaching out to God for help. Amazingly, God answered and gave Joe the strength to not only beat his cancer, but to become a practising Catholic and write a book about his conversion. The book was called Crossbearer: A Memoir of Faith and, unlike Hollywood Animal and The Devil's Guide to Hollywood, it was a worthy if plodding account of how he turned his life around.
On page 200 of the hardback edition of the book, Joe writes about how a certain director of one of his favourite films, The Passion of the Christ, royally screwed up by getting arrested and spewing out a barrage of anti-Semitic vitriol:
"So that was it. Ball game. Open and shut. No doubt now. Mel was a raving anti-Semite. The man who had composed his prayer of a movie about Christ shared the mind-set of Adolf Hitler.
It made me want to retch. Mel had assassinated his own film. Now the movie would be known for all time as a big-screen anti-Semitic billboard. It was said that in the course of making the film, Mel's own hands were used to drive the nails into Jesus's. And now, I thought, Mel had done it again - publically and in full view of the world. He had driven his nail into his own movie."
Eszterhas concludes:
"He didn't even deny what he had said - at least not for long. It turned out there was a police videotape of the filth he had spewed. He went quickly away to some ideological rehab facility in rehab-rich Malibu Man plans, God laughs.
I still maintained that The Passion of the Christ was a prayer and not anti-Semitic filth, but then I was stubborn and I had been wrong about a great many things in my life."
The Gibson incident occurred in 2006. The book Crossbearer was published in 2008. Joe Eszterhas must have changed his mind about Gibson as he sat down to write the first draft of The Maccabees. A draft Gibson and Warner Brothers branded 'substandard' and a waste of time. Eszterhas hit back, accusing Mel of a series of anti-Semitic comments the screenwriter allegedly witnessed and also accused Gibson of cynically using The Maccabees as a way of restoring his now damaged reputation after the 2006 fracas.
In truth, Gibson had been involved on The Maccabees for a good eight years, as pointed out in his carefully drafted reply to Eszterhas. A reply that contains the following important statement:
"I have your letter. I am not going to respond to it line by line, but I will say that the great majority of the facts as well as the statements and actions attributed to me in your letter are utter fabrications. I would have thought that a man of principle, as you purport to be, would have withdrawn from the project regardless of the money if you truly believed me to be the person you describe in your letter. I guess you only had a problem with me after Warner Brothers rejected your script."
Mel Gibson makes a sage point. Eszterhas did indeed know (according to Crossbearer) that Gibson was 'a raving anti-Semite' who had sabotaged his own movie and ruined Joe's profoundly religious feelings towards the film. So, why did Joe Eszterhas take the plunge to work with Gibson? Why dance to the devil's drum?
As the bickering between Gibson and Eszterhas continues, it seems that Joe and Mel are probably cut from the same cloth. Both are Hollywood bad boys, both are very religious, both are extremely passionate about filmmaking, both were once hugely successful and now both have a tarnished reputation to restore to former glory. Eszterhas peaked (if that is the word) with Basic Instinct and then eventually fell out of Hollywood as he battled cancer and then found God. Gibson never recovered from the 2006 incident and is still dogged by myriad accusations of spousal abuse, anti-Semitism and drunken and aggressive behaviour.
It makes you wonder what sort of conclusion to draw from this escapade. It's hardly a moral maze and the protagonists little more than two Catholic school boys bickering in the playground. And yet I can't see what Eszterhas hopes to achieve by attempting to destroy Gibson's weak hold on Hollywood when his own is well and truly broken.
(Extracts from Crossbearer: A Memoir of Faith by Joe Eszterhas, published by St Martin's Press)