World News Engine: Jodie Foster is bullish on 'The Beaver'

Jodie Foster is bullish on 'The Beaver'

As she has crisscrossed the country tirelessly promoting her latest directorial effort, "The Beaver," Jodie Foster has been keeping in touch via text with Mel Gibson. When the star of your film is also your close friend and Hollywood's leading persona non grata, the messages can get a tad awkward.

"Mel said, 'I will be dragged through gravel for you,'" Foster said in Beverly Hills. "He's been in Costa Rica. I texted him back, 'I don't want you to be dragged through gravel for me. Please do not.'"

Left hanging in the air is what, if anything, Foster does want from Gibson at this point. His personal scandals delayed the film's release for months, prevented him from participating in the movie's publicity and threatened to hijack the message of "The Beaver," a tale of a toy company executive battling
depression. Now a famously private feminist icon is in the strange position of making the rounds to defend a man who has become an industry pariah for his racist, sexist, anti-Semitic meltdowns. Yet if she's angry, sad or disappointed that Gibson's problems have overshadowed her first work as a director in 15 years, Foster hides it well behind a kind of old-fashioned Hollywood omertà. "I grew up with the idea that the movie business is a family," she said. "It's like the mob. You don't rat on your friends. Who you are in a business relationship is a reflection of who you are as an artist."

Whether it's a code of honor or maybe just the latest manifestation of the savvy that has kept Foster, 48, working in entertainment since age 3, it seems to be succeeding. Whatever their distaste for Gibson, moviegoers and critics appear willing to at least give "The Beaver" a chance.

After the film's distributor, Summit Entertainment, delayed the movie's fall 2010 release, Foster began quietly screening it for select press shortly after the new year, showing up in person to introduce it. In March, just five days after Gibson pleaded no contest to charges of domestic battery related to a 2010 altercation with his ex-girlfriend, she took "The Beaver" to Austin's South by Southwest Film Festival, where its first public audience gave it a relatively warm embrace.

Early reviews have been more positive than negative. Next week, "The Beaver" will debut in 10 theatrical markets including New York and Los Angeles before Foster takes the movie to the Cannes International Film Festival and the film expands to more theaters in the U.S. and abroad. It's a gamble but one that the two-time Oscar winner may be uniquely equipped to pull off.

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Jodie Foster is bullish on 'The Beaver'

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