If this ends up in GD, that’s fine. I thought this was the best place to start.
It seems the initial hubbub of his voice mail debut has calmed a bit. He’s (apparently) in Australia, and as time passes, the story will continue to get lost in time.
True, his tirades will be on the web forever, but they will pass from shock and anger, to noise, humor and parody.
I believe he will have a successful comeback if he wants one, and here’s why.
Woody Allen.
I can remember the stink raised when Woody Allen decided to marry his daughter. Not a blood relative, but so what? That’s about the most disgusting thing anyone could do… marry an adopted child. How strange that was at the time! And I remember everyone predicting the end of Allen’s career. As it should have been.
But it wasn’t. He’s still writing and directing movies, and people are still paying to see them. The old pervert is still making money in the business. Why?
Mel may have demonstrated himself to be a total tool, but what Allen did is disgusting, continues to be disgusting, and there’s no way to change it. Mel can put the whole debacle behind him when he gets the custody of his child worked out with the woman currently living in his house (Oksana something or other).
I predict a successful comeback for Mel, especially as a director. If he wants to act, he’ll be able to act, but he may not want to. Time will tell on his choice, but he’ll come back to Hollywood and make money.
Soon-Yi Previn is not Woody’s daughter. She is the adopted daughter of Mia Farrow and André Previn.
Which means she is not only not his biological daughter, she is also not his adopted daughter or his step-child.
What happened is that he exchanged his girlfriend for his girlfriend’s daughter. Tasteless? Very. Incestuous? No. There was never any legal connection between Woody and Soon-Yi, and nobody ever considered Woody to be the father, legal guardian, or anything else to Soon-Yi other than her mother’s boyfriend.
I stand corrected. I thought he was her step father at the time :smack:
Still, it just smacked of skeevy behavior. No, he’s not going to jail, but it was as close to incest without being incest for my comfort. No legal connection, but having sex with your girlfriend’s daughter, and then marrying her? That’s too strange for me, and put Woody on my creep-o-meter forever.
Thanks for clearing up the relationship connection. I was wrong.
Imho, Woody’s saving grace was that he only did it once. If he kept exchanging wives for young girls, nobody would give him the benefit of a doubt. For now, I think people could say he found his soulmate under imperfect conditions.
The thing about Woody Allen is that everybody has always known he’s an extreme oddball with highly distorted ideas about sex and relationships.
This is plainly obvious from the films that he makes, virtually all of which revolve around his weird hang-ups about sex and dating (and death).
So, when the details of his relationships with Mia Farrow and Soon-Yi came out, it was, of course, quite freaky, but not particularly out of character for what we might expect from Woody Allen. The Soon-Yi episode (still in progress) certainly didn’t help his career, but it didn’t shatter his image.
Mel Gibson, on the other hand, and particularly the fundamentalist Catholic Mel Gibson of late, was not supposed to be a raging asshole and domestic abuser, much less repeatedly shown to be one of the basest sort.
I don’t necessarily see Woody Allen as being similar, but eventually Gibson will be back.
Ingrid Bergman created similar levels of moral outrage when the left her husband for Roberto Rosselini. Six years later, she had won an Oscar.
There’s also Roman Polanski, who worked in Europe and won a Best Director Oscar after his rape conviction. Until he was arrested last year, most people had completely forgotten about it (the level of indignation is high right now, but until he was arrested last year, few cared about it; no one took seriously any cries to boycott The Pianist).
In any case, in five years (assuming there aren’t any additional incidents), Gibson will be making movies again.
The difference being that I don’t see Polanski’s face on the big screen. If Polanski as an actor, I’d be too distracted by the urge to punch him in the face whenever he was onscreen to be able to sit through his movie.
Gibson as a director will fare better than Gibson as an actor, if and only if, he is sane enough to work productively.
The part you’re forgetting is that Soon Yi was underaged at the time he began taking nude pictures of her. And he was still banging her Mother, so that adds to the ick.
Polanski, Allen, Gibson, Jane Fonda. . . I won’t support their work, and have no interest in viewing it. I recognize I’m one of a very small minority who will not forget and soften their attitudes over time.
It’s not that I think they care whether one overwight exhausted single Mom in the Mid-Atlantic region will watch their work; I just don’t want a dollar of mine to be shared by a person like that, or to encourage the studios to do business with them.
But what about the other people who make the movie? It’s a collaborative art and if the other actors or directors are involved in a flop, that will negatively affect their careers. Should they be punished for what Mel Gibson did?
But it doesn’t matter. This will be forgotten in five years. It always is.
Consider the case of Alec Baldwin. He verbally threatened and was abusive to his daughter; the tapes were all over the Internet. It was pretty nasty stuff – similar in many ways to Gibson – but Alec is now out there winning Emmies.
Woody Allen has been, is, and always will be a screwed up little walking wrinkled penis. He’s half laughable and half contemptible, but he is what he is. Mel Gibson has revealed himself to be a raging, possibly dangerous, raving lunatic, which came out of nowhere (in spite of signs of it for the last few years). You can’t laugh at rage and madness, you can only back away in fear.
I won’t support either of them by putting down my hard earned money, either. (I’ve never watched the Godfather, or Pretty Woman. Two movies that celebrate the mafia and prostitution.)
Of course Woody Allen and Mel Gibson will continue to work. They have fervent fans. They will, somehow, continue to make money after the fervor dies down, and that’s all that’s important in this life, that you make someone somewhere wealthy.
Not me either, TruCelt, I’m with you. One tiny gesture in the universe, making no difference, but it does to the one who is standing up for a belief.
Also, Woody and Soon-Yi never lived together. He and Mia kept totally separate households so he didn’t even know her as a child. It’s obviously weird but they’ve been together for nearly 20 years now so it was hardly a fling. Additionally, Woody and Mia were in a long term relationship but never married.
Soon-Yi and Woody’s age difference and their respective ages when they got together is nearly identical to that of Mia Farrow when she was with Sinatra. Soon-Yi was 22 when their relationship was discovered. She was not underage.
Woody Allen’s career has never really been the same, but once all the smoke cleared, he hadn’t done anything criminal. He began a relationship with his girlfriend’s daughter. Sleazy, yes, but he was never married to Farrow, or ever even lived with her and Soon-Yi never had any kind of father-daughter relationship with him. I think that fact that he is still with Soon-Yi took some sting out of it too. He did a caddish thing to Mia Farrow, but he wasn’t predatory or abusive to anybody,a nd hasn’t had a pattern of doing things like that. Even so, his reputation is still tarnished. He still works, but he’s never been seen in the same light or with the same respect as he was before.
Gibson’s got a harder row to hoe. He’s got the double whammy of actual, physical violence against a woman and now what has become a pattern of over-the-top racist remarks.
In addition, Mel Gibson was already on his second chance. He was on his way to rebuilding his career and putting the drunken, antisemitic incident behind him, now there’s this. That’s going to make it very difficult for the public to swallow another apology and show of contrition, especially since the tapes clearly reveal some unhinged personality problems that lie deeper than any credible ability to explain away as a bad day or drunken mistake.
Well, maybe his next movie can portray him as a normal, sane person and tamp down his growing image as a loony toon. Apparently it’s called The Beaver. Let’s see what it’s about:
The other thing, of course, is that Mel Gibson was a superstar. His movies, unlike Woody, made boatloads of money. Woody may have been well-known and a household name, but the people who were most bent-out-of-shape by what he did with Soon-Yi are also the people who generally didn’t pay to go see his movies anyway. Yes, his career has been different since, but largely because his movies have not been nearly as good (although he’s still incredibly productive). Gibson will have a better chance of continuing a career by directing movies, but they are really niche movies anyway (even Passion, which was a niche movie whose incredible success was a freak outside of any typical Hollywood playbook).
As an actor (and a hero character; he always has played the good guy), he’s going to have a very very difficult time getting work. Small character stuff in indie films will still emerge (similar to what he did in The Singing Detective or Million Dollar Hotel), but headlining a major tentpole pic or high-level Oscar-bait drama? I really don’t see it happening in the next decade, at least.
It wasn’t very nice, but I have a hard time viewing Alec Baldwin’s voicemail as threatening, abusive or even all that out of line (if the accusations he made are true).
There is something that has been bothering me about this whole thing with Mel. Now… before I begin, you need to understand 2 things: I have always been a huge fan, and I am in NO WAY excusing what he’s done.
With that out of the way, let me say that Mel Gibson is a human being. He is not perfect. He has a temper and reacted poorly. VERY poorly.
But… how many homes around the world have the same type of thing going on behind closed doors every day? How many of us have said something in the heat of an argument that we immediately regreted, wished that we could swallow those words back? How many of us have had someone in our life that knew how to push all the right (wrong?) buttons to make us madder than a wet hen? I know I have.
This does not make it right. The big difference here is that when the average person does something like this, it’s private. It doesn’t make the news. It happens, it’s over, the participants get on with their lives. The average person does not have someone recording you in the heat of an argument and releasing the tapes to the world.
Yeah, he was wrong. Yeah, he need anger management. Does this make him any less of a talent? No.
I will continue to go see any of his movies that pique my interest. I will continue to respect him as an actor/director.
Except the rest of your post does exactly that. To whit:
Almost everybody, I reckon, but that doesn’t begin to capture the sort of verbal abuse that’s on these tapes, which go on far too long be something that slipped out and was immediately regretted. In any case, the allegations of physical violence.
Sorry, if pushing my buttons includes prompting me take a swing at a woman who’s holding our child, I’m getting help or getting out. It’s stupid, dangerous, criminal, and flat-out wrong, no matter who does it and how much he was provoked.
There are many, many advantages that come with being famous. This is one of the disadvantages. Of course, one way to mitigate this disadvantage is to refrain from domestic abuse.