Mel Gibson Plans TV Miniseries on Holocaust

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/06/arts/television/06cnd-gibson.html?hp&ex=1133931600&en=5c7469338f8f51e3&ei=5094&partner=homepage

LOS ANGELES, Dec. 6 - Mel Gibson, whose "The Passion of the Christ" was assailed by critics as an anti-Semitic passion play - and whose father has been on record as a Holocaust denier - has a new project under way: a nonfiction miniseries about the Holocaust.

Mr. Gibson's television production company is developing a four-hour miniseries for ABC based on the self-published memoir of Flory A. Van Beek, a Dutch Jew whose gentile neighbors hid her from the Nazis but who lost several relatives in concentration camps.

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Mr. Gibson, who is currently filming "Apocalypto," an adventure set before the Spanish conquest of Mexico and Central America, could not be reached. His spokesman, Alan Nierob, did not return repeated phone calls today. Ms. Cotton did not return repeated telephone calls to her office over several weeks.

Mr. Gibson's father, Hutton Gibson, has repeatedly denied that the Holocaust happened, saying before the release of "Passion of the Christ," for example, that accounts of the Holocaust were mostly "fiction" and asserting that there were more Jews in Europe after World War II than before. Mel Gibson has declined to disassociate himself clearly from his father's views, according to Rafael Medoff, director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies in Melrose Park, Pa., and the author of an annual study of Holocaust denial.

"For him to be associated with this movie is cause for concern," Mr. Medoff said. "He needs to come clean that he repudiates Holocaust denial, and that he understands the Holocaust was not just another atrocity that occurred in World War II along with other atrocities."