Entertainment

Gibson scandal could doom his movie career

interns Contributor
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As Mel Gibson’s legal and publicity problems mount, his prospects for a future in mainstream Hollywood grow dimmer.

Eight minutes of new audio surfaced on Monday capturing Gibson’s angry and expletive-laden rant to ex-girlfriend Oksana Grigorieva. The recording, which appeared on the website Radar Online, follows an earlier release on the site of a tape in which Gibson uses foul and threatening language toward Grigorieva as well as the N-word. Monday’s audio features an increasingly apoplectic Gibson threatening Grigorieva, with whom he’s locked in a child custody battle, yelling at her that she needs a “bat to the side of the head” and that he could put her “in a … rose garden” if he wanted to. (Although the audio has not been independently verified by The Times, no one involved in the incident, including representatives from Gibson’s camp, has called its authenticity into question.)

Interviews with a number of Hollywood talent agents and studio executives on Monday suggest that as a result of these recordings, Gibson has become anathema in the entertainment business; the insiders see little way Gibson would be hired as either an actor or director on any mainstream film.

On Friday, the news broke that Gibson had been dropped by his agency, William Morris Endeavor, around the time that the first reports of a diatribe against Grigorieva surfaced and as his longtime agent and supporter, Ed Limato, lay on his deathbed, both of which may have been factors in the decision.

Full story: Gibson scandal could doom his movie career – latimes.com