Mel Gibson Claims Joe Eszterhas’ ‘Maccabees’ Script Sucked
Mel Gibson is never one to mince words. When he has something to say, for better or worse, he’s going to say it regardless of how it makes him look in the process. The Wrap reports that Gibson, who was slated to work on a project with Basic Instinct screenwriter Joe Eszterhas, is none too pleased about the fallout surrounding the motion picture The Maccabees. As such, he’s decided to let everyone know just how he feels about the writer and his work.
“Okay, so a guy gets paid to write a screenplay and doesn’t turn anything in for 14 months,” Gibson explained to Coming Soon. “That’s a serious problem. Not even an outline so I lost my nutter with him. I developed a Viking script [for the project ‘Berserker’] almost a year after he started, and I already had a second draft and he hadn’t even given me an outline. And he was at my home on a working holiday and he didn’t even bring one word.”
Gibson also claims that Eszterhas took some of his best story ideas and essentially tossed them by the wayside, a fact which clearly didn’t settle too well with the Lethal Weapon star. He added:
“It’s really bad with heinous, bad, shonky [sic], D-grade dialog. And after 18 months of waiting, from when we started talking, that’s what came in. And of course the studio also recognized it as not very good.”
The actor’s ranting doesn’t stop there. In addition to penning a really bad script, Gibson believes the screenwriter intentionally tried to set him up and sabotage his career.
Eszterhas, who claims Gibson once referred to Jews as “oven-dodgers” and “Jewboys,” doesn’t have very many nice things to say about the actor either. The war between the two men reached a fever pitch back in April when Eszterhas wrote a lengthy letter to Gibson detailing why the project fell apart. In the eyes of the Showgirls scribe, it’s basically Gibson’s fault.
According to The Wrap, Eszterhas could not be reached for comment. Are you still a Mel Gibson fan despite everything that’s happened over the past few years?
