Word: mel
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...book called Thank You for Smoking, a satire about a Washington tobacco lobbyist and his somehow weirdly valiant efforts to convince the world that smoking isn't conclusively unhealthy. Mel Gibson, or more accurately, "Mel's people" (as we movie folks say), optioned the rights to it in 1994, even before it was published. Mel's people couldn't have been nicer. They announced with conviction, "This will be Mel's next movie." That was extremely pleasing to hear. And, indeed, I would hear it many, many times over the ensuing decade...
...watched, from very distant sidelines, as Mel and his people dithered with inconsequential projects. Two of these, a movie called Braveheart andwhat was the name of the other one?The Passion of the Christ, bombed miserably at the box office. While I felt sorry for him, I thought, Well, Old Shoe, you really have only yourself to blame. You could have been a star. You could have been a player...
...little saga might have gone the way of most of those little sagas. But then one day, as Smoking continued to languish in the ninth circle of Hollywood-development hell as Mel and his people occupied themselves with an obscure fracas set in Jerusalem 2,000 years ago, I received a call from a 24-year-old named Jason Reitman...
...close-ups too. Says Richard Hansen, a Maya scholar at Idaho State University, head of the Mirador Basin Project and a consultant for Apocalypto: "This is by far the best treatment--the first treatment really--of the Maya any film has ever done. I'm amazed at the detail Mel's shooting...
Gibson nonetheless is a lightning rod--pro-Mel and anti-Mel blogs abound on the Internet--and he knows that even non-Mexican detractors will ask why, if he's so morbidly fascinated with the bloody deeds of Jewish Pharisees and Maya priests, he doesn't hold a mirror to his own church and film the Spanish Inquisition. Gibson won't say that's a future plan, but he nods and agrees that "there are monsters in every culture...