Mel Gibson might be to phone pranks what rickets is to tap-dancing, but did you know he's an accomplished prankster? That's pretty dangerous: when someone shoots to stardom for pretending to chain a man to a burning car and make him hack his own foot off, he can develop some strange ideas about what people like.
Hilarity!
Let's look over Mr. Gibson's pre-police-with-sucrose-mammaries career and pick out the pranking highlights. (WARNING: In the previous sentence, the part of "highlights" was played by the phrase "examples of near-criminal lunacy.")
1. Serial Killer On Set
If you're involved in a movie with 1992-era Jamie Lee Curtis, you might be tempted to try to get close to her*. If you're a lunatic, you might be tempted to get close to her with a hockey mask and a knife.
* After all, it had been 9 years since you fell in love with her amazingly-gratuitous-and-wonderful cleavage in Trading Places
Comedy!
Mel's prank was laughed off as a stab at her horror movie career. Later, we'd learn that Mel probably wasn't aware of her horror movie career, and probably would have played the same prank on a visiting nun with a heart condition.
2. The Amazing Sexual Misconduct/Death Threat/Invasion of Privacy Prank
Sorry, we know these things are meant to slowly escalate into madness instead of leaping off the top insane diving board into a pool of craziness. While filming Ransom, Mel found a photographer who'd taken naked pictures of co-star Rene Russo. Which he then blew up, chopped into pieces, and distributed around the set with notes like "If you want to see her in one piece again..."
You have nude pictures of this woman. You decide to chop up magnified pictures of her knees and breasts and surround her with them. Oh, we forgot to mention, YOU'RE INSANE.
There is no sane way to interpret that prank, other than the fact that Mr. Gibson:
a) thought it was funny
b) was far too damn rich for anyone to tell him it wasn't
3. Dead Rat Deliveries
We'll let Mel explain his prank on Julia Roberts because even describing it feels like we're letting spiders into our minds.
"I found a place where they sold freeze-dried rats," he told the Herald Sun, "I wrapped it up and left it for her in her dressing room. I knew she had opened it because you could hear her screams for miles.''
Think about that. This man has millions upon millions of dollars, an army of staff, almost total freedom, and Julia Roberts, and he uses it to find a dead rat shop.
If you're thinking, "I'd love to give her a dead rat," you either use the worst slang ever, or need psychological help.
He didn't do this once, he did it repeatedly, replacing thrown out carcasses with fresh (well, frozen, so probably not as nutritious) rats each time. At no point was this man arrested. You try this on a celebrity. See how long that lasts.
4. What Woman Don't Want
In 2000, Mel Gibson made What Women Want, proving beyond all possible doubt that he doesn't know what's funny. Or What Women Want. Or "How to behave in a way that wouldn't get anyone else on the planet arrested as a goddamn sociopath."
Most movies are fiction, but this one is actual lies.
This time he targeted the director, Nancy Meyers, and we do mean "targeted" as in "that's an awfully dangerous and criminal-sounding verb." He had the security office circulate a memo describing a dangerous stalker, then made himself up as that stalker and sprang out at her. Hoho! She was so terrified, she attacked him with a pencil in self-defence! Haha!
Understand: this man's entire, in fact only, job is to pretend to be other people. And given the chance to write his own part, he chose "A dangerous lunatic who attacks women when they're vulnerable, and hey guys, for fun let's do this role somewhere there aren't any cameras! Just me and my victim! I mean slu-, er, sugar-tits, no, wait, frieeeeeend, yes, frieeeeend who I won't desecrate!"
5. Personality Breakdown
In 2002, Mel would sneak up behind the director of We Were Soldiers and shout insults through a megaphone, already an amazing million on the one-to-ten scale of being a dick, but that wasn't Mel any more. In the voice of his hu-man shell, Mr. Gibson told the Daily Record.
"I became this German character Klaus, who was a man who only lived at night. He was pale, and probably some kind of sexual deviant, and he probably liked being whipped and stuff. So he'd say stuff like 'Vy are you even bothering to attempt zis?' He was the harbinger of doom, the voice of negativity, your inner voice of your inner doubt. Everyone has that inner voice of doubt -- and Klaus is mine."
Looking back on a saner time.
He put more thought into his lunatic German alter-ego than he put into "Is it okay to jump at women with a knife?"
Someone has to stop this guy, preferably someone with a strong grip, expertise in administering strait jackets, and just for fun let's make it someone wearing a skullcap.
Mel loves those.
Otherwise we've got an insane celebrity with near-infinite funding, no grip on reality, who's been trained to fight midgets strapped to the back of a giant.
Hang on, that actually would be funny. Let's give him a while.
And now the link:
http://tinyurl.com/gibsonprankhistory
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