Its revulsion may be genuine, but the decision also was based on the bottom line, a calculation that Gibson no longer has real monetary value to the agency.

"There's nothing to do for Mel Gibson at the moment," a William Morris source said. "No one will touch him with a 10-foot pole. He'll make his own movies, but you don't commission those anyway."

Hollywood has routinely overlooked reprehensible, even illegal behavior when there's money to be made. And observers — including a studio chief and an insider at William Morris — said the industry might even have gotten past Gibson's alleged assault on his former girlfriend. But the repeated allegations of bigoted comments have left his relationship with the public in tatters, and that's a deal-breaker.

With tapes surfacing in which Gibson apparently used unforgivable language when referring to African-Americans and Latinos, he has antagonized two groups that are disproportionately represented in movie audiences.