Apple Falls Close to Tree Dept.: You have no doubt heard that we had a seismic incident here in Hollywood Land. The temblor occured about 2:30 Friday morning on the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu when a major movie star was busted for drunk driving — and its aftershocks are only now beginning to reverberate through the movie industry.

As he was being arrested for drunk driving on the PCH Friday night, Mel Gibson — a self-proclaimed Christian and family man — reportedly said to LA County deputies:

“Fucking Jews… The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world.” Gibson then asked the deputy, “Are you a Jew?”

That statement was a lie, and a dangerously delusional one at that. But here’s the truth: Jews occupy top offices at every movie studio in this town. It is as true today as it was a century ago when the Hollywood branch of the Industry was founded.

What will be interesting to watch is how they — the suits who run this town — deal with this outburst from one of their major stars.

If OJ Simpson murdering his wife — I mean “allegedly murdering” — was a “10″ on the gossip seismometer, this is at least a “5.”

From a political perspective, now that President Reagan has passed away, Charlton Heston has succumbed to Alzheimer’s and Arnold Schwarzenegger is up in Sacramento playing governor, Mel Gibson is the de facto top conservative in the movie business. After him, there is Bruce Willis and Bo Derek — and that’s about it.

Gibson’s arrest won’t have any direct effect on, say, Republican fortunes in the mid-term elections, of course, but it does provide one more example of a top conservative who preaches family values but who is revealed to be a drunken, racist lout in real life.

It doesn’t help that Mel’s father is a reknown Holocaust denier. In Februray 2004, at the time his son was publicizing “The Passion of the Christ,” Hutton Gibson
unleashed an anti-semitic screed during radio interview that caused much agita for the film’s publicists.

[Hutton Gibson] argued that many European Jews counted as death camp victims of the Nazi regime had in fact fled to countries like Australia and the United States.

“It’s all — maybe not all fiction — but most of it is,” he said, adding that the gas chambers and crematoria at camps like Auschwitz would not have been capable of exterminating so many people.

“Do you know what it takes to get rid of a dead body? To cremate it?” he said. “It takes a litre of petrol and 20 minutes. Now, six million of them? They (the Germans) did not have the gas to do it. That’s why they lost the war.”