The Color Bind: Casting Big-Budget Hollywood in Black and White

October 22, 2012

By Tony Phillips

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Jim Sturgess as Hae-Joo Chang in ‘Cloud Atlas’/Photo © Warner Bros.

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In David Thomson’s indispensable Biographical Dictionary of Film, the critic claims Morgan Freeman “could play Iago as easily as Othello,” before trenchantly asking if the Academy Award winner should sit around waiting for a producer to offer him the part of one of Shakespeare’s most sinister villains. When looking at the upcoming crop of big-screen studio adaptations – from the Nina Simone biopic that recently traded in Mary J. Blige for Zoe Saldana so that the dark-skinned jazz legend could now pass the notorious brown paper bag test to the eagerly awaited collaboration between Tom Tykwer and the Wachowski siblings whose rendering of “Cloud Atlas” features Jim Sturgess and Hugo Weaving in pulled-eye yellowface – it’s hard not to wonder just what the hell is going on in Hollywood.

Tom Donahue, whose latest documentary, “Casting By,” was picked up by HBO last month at the Toronto International Film Festival, lays the blame squarely at the feet of what he calls “these $200 million comic book productions.” Donahue traces the weirdly Amazonian world of the casting director from its roots in the 1950s Golden Age of Television to its apex with the maverick American film directors of the 1970s.

Donahue says the current cookie-cutter approach to casting is “happening because of the corporate mentality that exists with studios. They need to feed all of their different arms: from amusement parks to clothing lines created to coincide off of these movie properties. They can no longer make ‘The Graduate’ or ‘Deliverance’ – two movies my documentary focuses on – because that whole part of the industry has bottomed out.”

And what’s left is shoring up to larger corporate entities. Tyler Perry’s 2009 film “Madea Goes to Jail” made close to $100 million in its domestic release and Perry has since branched out to work with white actresses like Rebecca Romijn and Doris Roberts, but things turned ugly after he cast Kim Kardashian in his latest film, “The Marriage Counselor,” and fans threatened a boycott on his website. The mogul has since inked a multiyear exclusive deal with his “Precious” producing partner Oprah Winfrey.

Idris Elba, who starred in Perry’s 2007 film “Daddy’s Little Girls” before Perry replaced him as the police psychologist lead in this month’s adaptation of James Patterson’s nourish procedural “Alex Cross,” addressed students last year at Rutgers University’s Newark campus: “I don’t like all of Tyler Perry’s films,” Elba explained in a thick, East London accent, “but I am happy for Tyler’s success. We need Tyler Perry. By going to support his movies, we show economic strength, but we are also responsible for elevating film. I’m not with buffoonish characters like Madea or Big Momma.”

Things are no less farcical for Asian actors of color. Tony-winning playwright Henry David Hwang’s 2007 play “Yellowface” chronicles the controversy surrounding a white British actor being cast as a Eurasian pimp in the hit musical “Miss Saigon.” When that show transferred from the West End to Broadway in 1991, Actor’s Equity initially blocked Jonathan Pryce from re-creating his role as The Engineer. “The casting of a Caucasian actor made up to appear Asian is an affront to the Asian community,” Equity’s Alan Eisenberg explained. “The casting choice is especially disturbing when the casting of an Asian actor, in the role, would be an important and significant opportunity to break the usual pattern of casting Asians in minor roles.”

Despite this kerfuffle, Hwang cites recent Broadway turns by Denzel Washington as Julius Caesar and James Earl Jones heading up an all-black cast of “On Golden Pond” as putting the theater light years ahead of Hollywood. “We are still miles away from this happening in the movies,” Hwang says, “where verisimilitude is taken much more literally.” Witness Tom Cruise’s former producing partner, Paula Wagner, who has been trying to get the film version of “Miss Saigon” off the ground for almost five years.

“Casting By” director Donahue suggests the disparity could be the byproduct of a war of the sexes. If the female-dominated field of film editing came about due to a shortage of manpower during the war and the feminized notion of “sewing” a film together, Donahue suggests the female-driven world of the casting director has its roots in the 1950s paradigm of boss and secretary with the task-oriented woman subservient to the all-powerful male director. And this sexism could even beget the racism inherent in the heavily coded breakdowns a casting director generates.

And while color-blind casting in Hollywood, or filling a role irrespective of an actor’s ethnicity as in David Thomson’s example of Morgan Freeman as the white Iago or the dark-skinned Othello might have some catching up to do with Broadway, this year is one of strides from Idris Elba playing a Norse God in Thor to Andrea Arnold casting an unknown, twenty-year-old black actor as the “dark-skinned gypsy” Heathcliff in her adaptation of “Wuthering Heights.”

But in the end, 2012 is first and foremost an election year and perhaps the city Hollywood really needs to catch up to is Washington. Morgan Freeman took a turn as a black president in 1988′s 1998′s “Deep Impact” while Obama was entering his first year at Harvard Law, but Obama’s 2008 “casting” left Hollywood in the dust. Freeman’s gone on to become a million-dollar high roller for the campaign, albeit one not above carping that Obama is “not America’s first black president.”

Thomson, a critic who has already demonstrated himself prone to hyperbole when it comes to Morgan Freeman, once suggested that the actor “could play Lincoln.” The 1996 comment has haunted Freeman ever since, popping up as a question whenever he does press on his latest film, but the idea gained some traction when Harvard-affiliated historians suggested Abraham Lincoln himself was of mixed race. And while Steven Spielberg stopped short of casting Freeman in the lead of his big-budget Lincoln biopic due this Christmas, he has re-cut his trailer to resemble a current-day campaign spot.

Tags: Cloud Atlas, David Thomson, Lincoln, Morgan Freeman, Steven Spielberg, Tyler Perry