Why Do We Keep Whitewashing?

So, the other day I wrote about how we might just be living in a post-movie star age, and how it might not matter anymore who is in the movies, but rather what the movies are about. That is, in this day and age, it’s the concept that’s the star, rather than the performer.

With that in mind, it’s also time to recognize that we should also be living in a post-whitewashing world. I mean, if ever there was a moment in time when the casting of caucasian actors to play people of color has become obsolete, it would be hard to argue that we’re not living in it, right now.

I love Ridley Scott. I do. I think he’s a brilliant and visionary filmmaker who has made some of my very favorite movies. Hell, I’m on record as to how much I love The Martian, and I think it’s criminal that he wasn’t nominated for a Best Director Oscar last year. Having said that, though, I’ll also point out that he said something about the casting of his Ten Commandments remake, Exodus: Gods and Kings — a movie that starred Christian Bale as Moses, Joel Edgerton as Ramses and Aaron Paul as Joshua — that I think is monumentally dumb.

“I can’t mount a film of this budget, where I have to rely on tax rebates in Spain, and say that my lead actor is Mohammad so-and-so from such-and-such,” Scott told Variety in 2014. “I’m just not going to get it financed. So the question doesn’t even come up.”

Come on. That’s patently absurd. Aside from the fact that the name “Ridley Scott” is probably worth a rather large amount of money from any film financier, there are a host of actors who could have been cast who, you know, actually look like Egyptians. Don’t want to cast Mohammad so-and-so? Fine. Don’t bother. But don’t try to tell the rest of us that there aren’t plenty of actors of color who could just as easily have filled those roles and the movie would have fared just as well.

At least, it almost certainly wouldn’t have fared worse, as the $140 million flick (not including P&A, of course), did just $65 million domestically and only $268 worldwide, nowhere close to breaking even.

Yes, Charlton Heston, Yul Brynner and John Derek played those parts in the original, but that was 1956, when casual and institutional racism was the norm. Nowadays, as we like to think we’re living in a more evolved society, there are certainly films that get financed on the strength of attached actors, but as that list of actors shrinks with each passing year (and I’m pretty sure that, talented as they are, Edgerton and Paul are not on such a list), so do we put more emphasis on the concept behind the film, as well as where that film is going to play.

It’s not like the only money filling studio coffers is coming from North America. On the contrary, the global buck is what drives the movie business now, which also, it should be noted, has contributed to the downfall of the whole idea of the movie star. To say that foreign audiences actually might want to see a movie featuring actors who look something like them is not so outlandish a concept.

Take a movie like Furious 7 which, among its fast cars and explosions, also happens to feature an impressively multi-racial cast that, it could be argued, is as responsible for the film’s phenomenal box office success as the effects. Well, that and maybe a small amount of fascination with how the death of star Paul Walker would be handled, but that morbid fact certainly didn’t carry it to over $1.5 billion worldwide — over a billion of that, by the way, coming from abroad — and a current spot as the sixth-highest grossing movie of all time, third when it comes solely to foreign box office.

And yet, here we sit, with Emma Stone playing a half-Asian woman in Cameron Crowe’s Aloha, Gerard Butler and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau playing a set of Egyptian gods in, well, Gods of Egypt, Scarlett Johansson cast in the live action adaptation of the decidedly Japanese Ghost in the Shell, and Jack Huston playing the title role in this summer’s remake of Ben-Hur, a role originated by, yes, Charlton Heston, who is probably the all-time world heavyweight champion of whitewashing, especially when you consider that he also played a Mexican policeman in Touch of Evil.

A couple of addenda to that last paragraph. First of all, while one could defend the casting of ScarJo and her attendant star power, the film is based on a very famous comic book about a cyborg policewoman attempting to bring down a nefarious computer hacker. In this modern era of intellectual properties, you throw enough effects and action set pieces into that sucker and you could cast my sister in the main role and people will go see it. Basically, make the same movie without the $15-20 million (plus back end) you’re paying your star, and you’ll probably still come out ahead.

Meanwhile, as much as I like Jack Huston as an actor — he did revelatory work on Boardwalk Empire — there’s just no defending his casting as Ben-Hur. We are apparently to understand that, in putting together a tentpole with a nine-figure budget set in ancient Israel during the time of Jesus, the decision was made to give the starring role to a talented but little-known actor. That’s fine. I support that decision wholeheartedly. The question is, did he really have to be white?

Of course not, but the powers that be remain beholden to antiquated notions of how to sell movies. As much as Donald Trump tries to tell us otherwise, we’re living in a multi-racial, multi-national culture with an audience that seems to care less and less about who is in a movie and more and more about what is — be it spaceships, superheroes, fast cars, dinosaurs, or some combination thereof (which, let’s face it, sounds pretty awesome).

With that in mind, it’s time to start casting movies to better reflect the reality of the stories being told, rather than the outdated one held by those making the decisions.

Neil Turitz is a filmmaker and journalist who has spent close to two decades in the independent film world and writing about Hollywood. Aside from being a screenwriter/director and Tracking Board columnist, he is also a senior editor at SSN Insider.