Change over time takes initiative from the bottom up. The studios will support it if they see it's already there, but they're not going to build it themselves. Racism isn't the factor so much as knowing what *sells*.
Up until very recently, studio execs saw a pie chart with three slices. "What'll sell to Blacks", "What'll sell to Latinos", and "What'll sell to Whites". Nothing personal, they say, just business. If you put out 'Sideways', you're selling to one demographic, if you put out 'Soul Plane', you're selling to another. Those demographics track strongly enough on racial lines that from a pure moneybag perspective, it makes sense they do it that way.
What about Asian Americans? The studio response was "they spend and consume like white people, so there's no need to represent them on this, there's no money in trying to particularize beyond that."
When Justin Lin was selling Better Luck Tomorrow to the studios, he got a lot of execs (Including, he said, Asian American execs) saying to him, "We'd be glad to make your movie -- if you change all the characters to caucasian."
When he refused, and when BLT got some serious buzz at Sundance due to a question-time dustup involving Roger Ebert, the film went on to do respectable business, and it was a major critical success.
The result?
According to one studio exec, the success of BLT was why Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle was green-lighted.
...And after Harold and Kumar's success at the box office and in DVD sales/rentals, a sequel's coming down the pipe...
...and it goes from there.
It's still a small trend toward representation, but it's growing. It worked because studio execs saw, at every step of the way, that they'd be rewarded financially if they invested in this.
Same thing with Tyler Perry's movies, which (while not always great pieces of film in their own right) portray a more positive slice of African American life than you normally see in Hollywood. Perry was tested at the box-office with the first Madea movie, he passed the test, he put together an unbelievably strong cross-platform content distribution system, and the movies keep coming.
Initiative from the ground up is what makes it happen.
This week the screen adaptation of Pulitzer Prize winning author Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake is released on DVD. The novel and film follow Gogol Ganguli, the American born son of Indian immigrants as he struggles with and rejects his Indian culture.
The film starring Kal Penn made just a little over $2 million playing in 2,000 theatres in its opening week. With little knowledge of the film's contents I decided to avoid it rather than taking the risk of supporting a film that could do nothing but perpetuate pre-existing stereotypes. After seeing the final box office results, I was left to wonder if others in the Asian American and South Asian communities avoided the film due to similar trepidation?
As we all know it is extremely difficult for a minority actor to get a starring role in Hollywood, and even when they get a part in a major motion picture they become shadows who either remain silent, perform racial stereotypes, or both (Penn himself in Superman Returns and Kelly Hu in X2: X-Men United serve as clear examples of this trend).
Yet despite this fact, I could not shake my reservations about the film. How could I support a sequel to a film about a white frat boy that turns its focus on a sidekick who was created as nothing more than a tool to gain cheap laughs at the expense of an entire community of people? Is this the kind of star vehicle that we really want for our up and coming actors and actresses?
Sure, Kal Penn lead an entire film by himself, but the trailer only refers to him as the caricature he is playing, never does the name Kal Penn appear on screen the way the star of any other film would.
Though it could be argued that the film does make some progress by showing Taj as a sexual character, he is still just another horny minority character who was taught about sex and wooing women by a white character in the previous film.
As a friend of mine pointed out this stereotypical role of a South Asian male is seemingly nothing new to Kal Penn who has appeared in 2003's "Where's the Party Yaar?" and 2001's "American Desi". However unlike Taj, these films were either directed or written by South Asians and made for predominantly South Asian audiences. In both films the main characters end up embracing their people and their culture.
Anyone who has googled Penn knows that he is a very bright, educated, articulate young man who wants to see a change in the representation of Asian Americans in film. It was this very intelligence that lead him to seek out the role of Gogol in Mira Nair's adaptation of the Namesake.But unfortunately, he is repeatedly typecast as an amorous but sexually inexperienced ethnic sidekick or a terrorist.
The development of such a pattern often leads to questions of what is more harmful, the complete absence of major characters portrayed by minority actors or said actor making a name for himself in a string of roles that bring to life unimaginative, one dimensional, and ultimately tired stereotypes?
Final Question:
Are these sorts of films truly detrimental to the societies they portray or am I just reading too much into a man's attempts at making his name known in Hollywood?
Discuss.
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Up until very recently, studio execs saw a pie chart with three slices. "What'll sell to Blacks", "What'll sell to Latinos", and "What'll sell to Whites". Nothing personal, they say, just business. If you put out 'Sideways', you're selling to one demographic, if you put out 'Soul Plane', you're selling to another. Those demographics track strongly enough on racial lines that from a pure moneybag perspective, it makes sense they do it that way.
What about Asian Americans? The studio response was "they spend and consume like white people, so there's no need to represent them on this, there's no money in trying to particularize beyond that."
When Justin Lin was selling Better Luck Tomorrow to the studios, he got a lot of execs (Including, he said, Asian American execs) saying to him, "We'd be glad to make your movie -- if you change all the characters to caucasian."
When he refused, and when BLT got some serious buzz at Sundance due to a question-time dustup involving Roger Ebert, the film went on to do respectable business, and it was a major critical success.
The result?
According to one studio exec, the success of BLT was why Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle was green-lighted.
...And after Harold and Kumar's success at the box office and in DVD sales/rentals, a sequel's coming down the pipe...
...and it goes from there.
It's still a small trend toward representation, but it's growing. It worked because studio execs saw, at every step of the way, that they'd be rewarded financially if they invested in this.
Same thing with Tyler Perry's movies, which (while not always great pieces of film in their own right) portray a more positive slice of African American life than you normally see in Hollywood. Perry was tested at the box-office with the first Madea movie, he passed the test, he put together an unbelievably strong cross-platform content distribution system, and the movies keep coming.
Initiative from the ground up is what makes it happen.