Conspiracy Theory (film)

From The Black Vault Encyclopedia Project

Conspiracy Theory is a 1997 thriller directed by Richard Donner. It stars Mel Gibson as Jerry Fletcher, an eccentric taxi driver who believes that many world events are actually government conspiracies. Jerry is infatuated with an assistant district attorney named Alice Sutton (Julia Roberts), whom Jerry once saved. Alice believes Jerry is a harmless, good-natured goofball — until one of his theories turns out to be true. Furthermore, and it's tied in to the murder of her father and a mysterious scientist named Dr. Jonas (Patrick Stewart.)

But even Alice can't fathom the depth of this conspiracy.

In the film, some of the other conspiracy theories believed by Jerry turn out to be true, such as NASA trying to kill the President with a shuttle-mounted seismic weapon.

Controversy over opening

Mel Gibson is rumored to be a bit of a conspiracy buff. In 1981, he starred in The Road Warrior, which made him a star in the United States. In this film, there is a reference to the Seven Sisters conspiracy that states that before OPEC gained control of oil production and pricing, that the world's seven largest oil companies were actually in cahoots to monopolize the industry.

At the beginning of Conspiracy Theory, Jerry Fletcher is espousing a number of his theories to a succession of passengers. On the DVD's audio commentary track, director Richard Donner revealed that these scenes were ad-libbed by Gibson to extras acting as passengers because they wanted realistic reactions from the clearly startled extras. It was widely speculated that these, in fact, were Gibson's personal views.

Arguably, the most controversial of these sequences was when Fletcher tells two Catholic nuns that the modern Roman Catholic Church is a gangrenous limb that needs to be cut off. In reality, Mel Gibson is a devout traditionalist Catholic who, like his father, Hutton Gibson, denounces many of the new rules implemented during the Second Vatican Council.

Trivia

• The role of Alice Sutton was initially offered to Jodie Foster.
• Jerry runs into a theatre showing Ladyhawke (1985), also directed by Richard Donner.

Copyright

"Original data received from Wikipedia on April 22, 2006. Credit given to original authors can be seen Here."