No thanks, Mel, we'll pass:
Mel Gibson, whose The Passion of the Christ drew charges of anti-semitism, is reportedly developing a TV miniseries set against the backdrop of the Holocaust.
The Daily Variety reported yesterday that Gibson's production company is involved in a project to get on screen the real-life love story of Flory A Van Beek, a Dutch Jew whose non-Jewish boyfriend sheltered her from the Nazis.
The report hastened to add that the project was still in its very early stages, and that it was not even certain if Gibson's name would be publicly attached to the finished product. Furthermore, a formal go-ahead was still months away and the series would not be broadcast on the US ABC network until the 2006-07 season at the earliest.
Critics will be sure to point out that Gibson's father, Hutton, has been quoted questioning whether the Holocaust actually happened and asserting that there were more Jews in Europe after the second world war than ever before.
Even though Mel himself told an interviewer in 2004 that some of his best friends "have numbers on their arms" and that the "second world war killed tens of millions of people; some of them were Jews in concentration camps", Holocaust scholars have criticised him for failing to disassociate himself clearly from his father's views.
ABC's senior vice-president for movies for television, Quinn Taylor, has already fired a pre-emptive strike against critics, saying, "I would tell them to shut up and wait to see the movie, and then judge," Taylor told Variety. "I'm not about to rewrite history (with the movie). I'm going to explore an amazing love story that we can all learn from and, hopefully, be inspired by."
Especially the part where the protagonists convert to Catholicism at the end.
(hat tip for the title: Esquire magazine's annual Dubious Achievement Awards.)
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