Cowardice Is Hollywood Tradition
By Bob Small
Hollywood has a sordid history of refusing to have a moral backbone, from racist films such as Birth of a Nation (1915) to the failure to oppose the 1934 Hays Production Code to acceptance of a blacklist to numerous other other things.
Now, this same Hollywood, has created “new inclusion rules” for Oscar consideration.
The standards are requirements for on screen representations 30 percent of smaller roles are played by women, LGBTQ, disabled people, or ethnic minorities.
Also, creative leadership with similar quotas.
Also, industry access. Again these are quotas for “under-represented groups”.
But whose definitions are we using?
There is also an audience development standard.
The late Kirstie Alley responded by saying “Can you imagine telling Picasso what had to be in his paintings.?”
Richard Dreyfuss has also spoken in opposition to these new rules extensively
“It’s an art. No one should be telling me as an artist that I have to give in to the latest, most current idea of what morality is,” he said.
Let me just add that the 2004 version of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, with Al Pacino is tremendous. Pacino, it should be noted, is not Jewish.
Guess this should be remade with Woody Allen, Larry David, or Paul Rudd or…….
Cowardice Is Hollywood Tradition