Mel Gibson's Apocalypto conspiracy exposed!

'Mad Max' uses wads of cash to dodge anti-Semitic fallout

Herschel Goldbaumsteinsilverberg

Crazy actor/director Mel Gibson is the author of a massive conspiracy orchestrated to prevent his recent anti-Semitic remarks from marring the release of his new film Apocalypto. The cleverly designed scheme, put into motion just after his July 28 DUI arrest during which he made his infamous derogatory remarks about Jews, was designed to take the heat off Gibson by diverting media attention to a string of fabricated high-profile scandals
Using the media's own fascination with dirty politics to shield himself, Gibson and the film's distributor Disney (neither of them strangers to racial controversy) brilliantly bribed Republican Congressman Mark Foley and evangelical preacher Ted Haggard to willfully expose themselves to sex scandals.

Foley, the former representative of Florida's 16th district who is now better known for exchanging sexy text messages with an underage male who had worked as a Congressional aide, stepped down from Congress on Sept. 29. While the incriminating allegations were true, they had long been covered up by Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert. It took Gibson's network of character assassins to find out about the cover up, offer Foley a huge sum to play along, and then leak evidence of it to draw the media firestorm. Well played, Mel, well played.

While the Foley imbroglio was intense and sustained, Disney still felt uncomfortable releasing Apocalypto. Mel just needed more disaster to distract the public long enough to land a Christmas release and Oscar nod for his film.



Luckily, Gibson and his shadowy cabal were also keeping tabs on bad-boy evangelical preacher Ted Haggard. While publicly condemning gay marriage, Haggard privately liked to smoke crystal meth and have anal sex with male prostitutes. The Mel Gibson-Disney-Sino-Illuminati conspiracy offered him a deal: take $20 million from Mel's own pocket and face the scandal willingly, or take no payout and receive the same fate. With little room to maneuver, Haggard took the cash and played along. Barely a month after the Foley scandal, Haggard jumped into the media's hot seat at the centre of a national debate. Advantage: Mel Gibson-Disney-Sino-Illuminati conspiracy. Still, one final push was needed to heave the memory of Gibson's drunken slip-up into the national memory-hole.

Now came the conspiracy's cruelest twist. Gibson and Disney had been closely watching actor Michael Richards' downward career arc since Seinfeld went off the air. They decided he would be their final patsy. On Nov. 19, Richards accepted $10 million from Gibson and Disney, along with a script he was to act out at his standup gig at LA's Laugh Factory the next night. By Nov. 21, all anyone could talk about was the actor's racist tirade, conveniently was caught on an audience member's videophone. Richards appeared on David Letterman, hired a high-profile spin doctor and made headlines by meeting with civil rights leaders Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, all to keep the story in the headlines. With that final blow Gibson's anti-Semitic remarks were relegated to yesterday's news. Game, set, match.

After the three sex and race scandals played out without a hitch, Disney gave Gibson the green light to run ads for Apocalypto, which is now being released Dec. 8, much sooner than anyone thought possible in the days after Gibson's midsummer meltdown.

So how was evidence of this masterful conspiracy uncovered? Last week The Varsity Arts correspondent Herschel Goldbaumsteinsilverberg, working out of L.A., spotted an ad for Apocalypto and became suspicious.

"I knew something was up last week when I saw ads for the upcoming Mesoamerican thriller proudly announcing that the film was by 'director Mel Gibson.' Wasn't it just this summer that 'Braveheart' was hanging his head in shame for calling Jews the cause of every world war when he was booked for drunk driving?"

Acting on instinct, Goldbaumsteinsilverberg trolled seedy Hollywood bars looking for Gibson. As luck would have it, he ran into Gibson at The Crooked Crocodile, and proceeded to buy the acclaimed director 15 shots of Kosher whiskey to loosen his tongue. Gibson, it seems, likes to open up when drunk, and proceeded to slur the entire plot from beginning to end into our reporter's tape recorder. Gibson ended his story by warning: "You tell anyone about this, I'll fucking slit your throat, you hear me? You're not a cop or Jew are you? I ask everyone that now."

Goldbaumsteinsilverberg quickly replied that he was neither cop nor Jew.

Afterward, the still chatty Gibson then spilled the beans on his next film. Pre-production for Passion of the Führer will begin this January, on location in historic Germany, starring Ashton Kutcher as Adolf Hitler.
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