|
?:reviewBody
|
-
An item that began circulating online in the latter half of the year 2000 was neither an accurate description of actor/director Mel Gibson's early life nor a transcription of a radio piece by commentator Paul Harvey. Suffice it to say that someone took the framework of Mel Gibson's biography and built upon it a touching but completely fictitious house of glurge: Mel Gibson's father did move his family from New York to Sydney, Australia, when Mel was 12, but the similarities between this piece and Mel's real life end there. Young Mel wasn't dreaming of joining the circus as a trapeze artist; he was a Catholic high school student mulling over the possibilities of becoming a chef or a journalist and ended up enrolling in the University of New South Wales' National Institute of Dramatic Art. Young Mel had a role in the low-budget film Summer City while still a student and then appeared in a number of productions with the State Theatre Company of South Australia before the lucky break that catapulted him to stardom: being chosen for the lead role in George Miller's action film Mad Max. A little bit of truth may have sneaked into the story quoted above at this point. The night before his Mad Max audition, Gibson reportedly came in a poor second in a barroom brawl, ending up with a face like a busted grapefruit. He then had to audition for the Mad Max role with a bruised, swollen, discolored, and freshly stitched face — an appearance that, legend has it, helped win over producers who wanted someone weathered and rough-looking to take the part. The beating Gibson received did not, however, leave him with smashed eye sockets, fracture his skull, legs, and arms, result in the loss of all his teeth or a nose that was hanging from his face or a jaw almost completely torn from his skull. He didn't spend over a year in the hospital, nor did five years pass with Mel in agony before plastic surgery restored his looks. His face got smashed up a bit, he required a few stitches to close some open cuts, and a few weeks later he was good as new. (However, some Hollywood pundits maintain that even the milder barroom brawl version was a bit of fiction invented by a publicist.) Mel Gibson did direct and star in The Man Without a Face, a 1993 film about a man who became a recluse after his features were disfigured in an automobile accident, but the movie was based upon a novel by Isabelle Holland, not Mel Gibson's life. Many of our readers have sworn to us they heard Paul Harvey recite this piece, exactly as reproduced above, on one of his broadcasts. Paul Harvey did offer a Rest of the Story segment about Mel Gibson on 24 June 2000, and it was a typically (for Paul Harvey) exaggerated version of the truth, but it didn't come close to the glurge reproduced here. What Harvey reported, verbatim, was this: And now you know ... the real story. The February 2004 release of the film The Passion of the Christ, financed and directed by Mel Gibson, started this legend circulating anew, often with tacked-on codas such as the following:
(en)
|
![[This page as RDF]](http://data.gesis.org/claimskg/static/rdf-icon.gif){kind=icon}