Mel Gibson knows no shame.
Ten years after his anti-Semitism was revealed in a DUI arrest, he’s still trying to figure out how to undo the massive damage he did to his career.
Let’s not forget that the DUI came AFTER we learned that his father was a Holocaust denier, that he wouldn’t dispute his father’s writings, that Mel funded a church that now has a $70 million value for parishioners who still blame Jews for Jesus’s death. The church more than anything is a reality.
Yet, Mel knows that he must do something to spin his past messages. So now he’s something gotten involved with a group called the Survivor Mitzvah Project. They’re a fine little organization in Los Angeles with a smallish budget run by a woman named Zane Buzby. They give away a little less than $500,000 a year to help Holocaust survivors. On their website, they feature celebrities who’ve helped them or lent their names. Gibson’s is not one of them.
But in the last two days, Gibson’s name has turned up on “Extra” and in People magazine as one of their secret benefactors. It’s a bit of remarkable public relations item planting that should fool no one. But it helped get Buzby’s name in the press– she’s being honored by the Anti Defamation League on March 30th so this has been the hook of her interviews. Buzby worked in TV from the mid 80s to the mid 90s as a sitcom director and writer.
In the decade or more since the reveal of Gibson’s anti-Semitism he’s never once had any association with a Holocaust group. Suddenly he’s “supporting eight Holocaust survivors” around the world. Has he mentioned to them his connection to the denial of the death of 6 million Jews? Has he mentioned his statement to Peggy Noonan that “the Holocaust is a numbers game”? Somehow I doubt it.
Remember: In that decade, as he built up a $70 million in his church’s war chest, he hasn’t given a penny to any Holocaust museum, to the Shoah Project, or to any number of groups associated with Holocaust education.
I’ve emailed Buzby and will report faithfully what she has to say.
Key to Nixon’s success was her launch of “One of Life to Live” in 1968. The show addressed social and racial issues that had never been dealt with on soaps and rarely on nighttime TV. She created a character called Carla Gray, played by Ellen Holly, who was black but passed for white. That much the book gets right. But from there, the story is lost and there is a huge mistake. The book says Carla fell for a “white police lieutenant” named Ed Hall. But as everyone knows, Ed Hall was black, and he was played by the great Al Freeman, Jr. This was a hot story at the time. Maybe Nixon was unaware that Laurence Fishburne, who played Ed and Carla’s son, became a big star.
I’ve never heard Sting say this before, but last night when the audience finished singing “Message in a Bottle” and ‘sending out an SOS’ for the millionth time, he said, “I wrote that song almost 40 years ago in a little flat in London, with no one there but a cat who wasn’t interested in what I was doing. And to think 40 years later I’m here, with you, and you seem to know all the words—it means a lot to me.” He was genuinely moved, maybe because it was the end of tour leg, but really because it’s sort of amazing for an artist on stage to hear their material sung back to them with so much heart.