No one saw it coming.
Not his agent or his bosses -- the shoot he had just wrapped had been long, strange and physically difficult but not out of control. Not the Malibu restaurant owner who served him appetizers early that fateful evening, or the two young women with whom he later posed for pictures. Certainly the friends with whom he spent his last scandal-free afternoon had no idea that Mel Gibson was about to go on a life-changing bender.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Wednesday August 09, 2006 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 62 words Type of Material: Correction
Roman Polanski: A graphic about the travails of other celebrities that accompanied an article about Mel Gibson in the Aug. 4 Section A said that director Roman Polanski was charged with raping a teenager in 1977 and fled the country to avoid prosecution. Polanski pleaded guilty to a charge of unlawful intercourse with a minor and fled the country to avoid sentencing.
If they had, they would have done everything to stop it -- because though conventional wisdom says that Gibson has been sober since the early '90s, some of those close to him acknowledge that he has been on and off the wagon for years.
"I have been with Mel when he has fallen off," says producer Dean Devlin, who had spent the afternoon before the arrest with Gibson, "and he becomes a completely different person. It is pretty horrifying."
And horrified is exactly how Devlin and many of Gibson's friends felt when they heard that the actor-director, in the course of his arrest for drunk driving, made sexist and anti-Semitic remarks, including one that quickly became infamous: "Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world." Gibson has since been charged with two misdemeanor counts of driving under the influence of alcohol.
Devlin and Tom Sherak, a partner at Revolution Studios who once headed distribution at 20th Century Fox, had spent last Thursday afternoon screening Devlin's upcoming film "Flyboys" for Gibson, and Gibson seemed very much himself.
"We were kidding around, talking about our kids, he was very friendly," said Sherak, who met Gibson while working on "Braveheart." Gibson, he added, had a trailer of his new film, "Apocalypto," that he was very excited about. "We talked about the shoot and he was just very upbeat, not stressed out at all."
Said Devlin: "I consider Mel one of my best friends in Hollywood." Devlin met Gibson while co-producing "The Patriot," in which Gibson starred.
"The day this happened, my wife had gotten this long letter from Mel full of congratulations [for the birth of the Devlins' first child] and talking about the joys of being a parent," Devlin said. "She's Jewish. I'm Jewish. If Mel is an anti-Semite, then he spends a lot of time with us, which makes no sense. But he is an alcoholic, and while that makes no excuse for what he said, because there is no excuse, I believe it was the disease speaking, not the man."
