Wednesday, December 07, 2005
GIBSON DEVELOPING HOLOCAUST MINI-SERIES
LOS ANGELES, Dec. 6 - Mel Gibson, whose "Passion of the Christ" was criticized by some as anti-Semitic - and whose father has said that the Holocaust did not happen - is developing a nonfiction mini-series about the Holocaust.
Mr. Gibson's television production company will base the four-hour miniseries for ABC on the self-published memoir of Flory A. Van Beek, a Dutch Jew whose gentile neighbors hid her from the Nazis but who lost several relatives in concentration camps.
The project is in its early stages, so there is no guarantee that it will be completed. Mr. Gibson is not expected to act in the mini-series, nor is it certain that his name, rather than his company's, will be publicly attached to the final product, according to several people involved in developing it.
But Quinn Taylor, ABC's senior vice president for movies for television, acknowledged that the attention-getting value of having Mr. Gibson attached to a Holocaust project was a factor.
"Controversy's publicity, and vice versa," Mr. Taylor said.
Mr. Gibson's father, Hutton Gibson, has repeatedly denied that the Holocaust happened. Before the release of "The Passion of the Christ," Hutton Gibson said that accounts of the Holocaust were mostly "fiction" and asserted that there were more Jews in Europe after World War II than before.
Mel Gibson, for his part, when asked by an interviewer in early 2004 whether the Holocaust happened, responded that some of his best friends "have numbers on their arms," then added: "Yes, of course. Atrocities happened. War is horrible. The Second World War killed tens of millions of people. Some of them were Jews in concentration camps."
Continue reading...
