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Spinning Mel Gibson

Mel_duithumb_1 Mel Gibson's reps earned their pay for this LAT story. Don't get me wrong. It's their job to get his friends to stand up for him, and some of them did. I'm conflicted about Gibson, whom I've talked to many times over the years. When my husband and I had a few beers with him at the Beverly Wilshire bar during the Mad Max era, I was struck by how much he enjoyed being shocking. (I cannot recount the astonishing story he told us in a public forum.) Years later, during my stint at Premiere Magazine, we did a fun cover shoot with Gibson, Jodie Foster and Kevin Costner on the Warner Bros. lot. Gibson has always been charming, a little guarded about keeping himself private, but always sharp and helpful about sharing info on his movies. On some level, he's eager to please. He is not one of the entitled Hollywood royalty who takes his stardom for granted. With Gibson, you get the sense that he knows it could be taken away at any moment. He's still proving himself, in other words. In that way, I've always associated him with Foster, who speaks up for him in the LAT story today. As she says, they both earned respect from film crews because they work hard at their craft. I suspect that I share with a lot of the people who've written in about Gibson a sense of disappointment and anger at someone I really like—even if I do not share his religious and political views. (I did admire, with some reservations, The Passion of the Christ.) For me, that mug shot says it all. I look at his face and see how drunk he is. I really hope that Gibson digs into deconstructing that old tape recording that his father put into his head.

ADD: Gavin DeBecker's letter to Ari Emanuel. And a young actor attends Mel's All Latin Mass in the Agoura Hills. And, driving back from Malibu Beach on the PCH Saturday, we couldn't help but note that Moonshadows, the scene of last week's Gibson drinking spree, was doing landslide business.

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