Oscars blogging, sort of
And here's the ever-insightful Cathy Seipp on Crash:
Because I also live in Silver Lake, and grew up in the same dumpy Long Beach-adjacent area that Matt did, I share his impatience with rich Hollywood screenwriters who live in isolated enclaves but feel sure they somehow see the racist truth of life here that eludes the rest of us. Haggis, who got the idea for Crash after his Porsche was carjacked, explains in the current Written By (a magazine for Writers Guild of America members):
"It's an odd life we live here in Los Angeles, a city that uses freeways and wide boulevards to divide people by race and class. We spend most of our time encased in metal and glass while in our homes, our cars, at work. Unlike any real city, we only walk were 'it's safe' — those outdoor malls and ersatz city blocks we've created to feel like we're still part of humanity, if only humanity could afford to shop where we do."
In the same issue, an interviewer asks TV writer Jenji Kohan, a Los Angeles-raised daughter of a TV writer, about her Showtime series Weeds — the story of a white suburban mom and widower who begins selling marijuana to pay bills after her husband dies. Kohan explains why the show's cast has to remain all white:
"L.A. is an incredibly segregated city. There are certain places where they cross, like Venice or downtown, but, really, there are separate worlds. Inevitably, we got [from the network] the 'Can't you give them a black neighbor? Can't you give them a Chinese friend?' kind of notes. The answer was absolutely not — we're trying to reflect her reality. It's a segregated place. I spent my whole life here, and there isn't a whole lot of interaction with the black community, or the Hispanic, or the Korean, or the Japanese, or the Salvadoran."
Besides serving as a useful reminder that liberal Hollywood writers aren't always the nonwhite working actor's best friend, these kind of cocksure pronouncements make me scratch my head and wonder: Who is this privileged, rarefied, and all-encompassing "we" these people are always talking about?
I know one thing for sure. "We" ain't us. Anyway, read the whole thing.
posted by Kate Marie | 9:22 PM | Permalink
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5 comments
5 Comments:
The politics of it aside, I thought Crash was one of the best movies that I have seen in years. It was an impressive bit of ensemble acting. The highest compliment I can give it is that it made actors out of stars. Matt Dillon was flat out brilliant, as always.
I actually haven't seen Crash, but I thought Seipp's observations about the provincialism of L.A. screenwriters was great.
I always like Matt Dillon. I think he's actually underrated, but I like to see him in comedies (like In and Out).
I was very curious to see what you guys thought of the Seipp article. Except for one childhood visit to Los Angeles, I don't know much about the city, but I sympathized with Seipp's overall point, because I react the same way to movies and TV shows that depict the typical American suburb as racially and socioeconomically homogenous. Some suburbs may be, but that certainly hasn't been my experience.
Jeff, my experience growing up in in the suburbs of Los Angeles was very much like Seipp's -- my school and my neighborhood were very multi-racial and culturally diverse, though there were fewer African-Americans in my school and neighborhood than Asians and Latinos. I didn't experience Los Angeles as a place where racial animosity seethed constantly below the surface. People of different races and ethnicities are/were my friends, classmates, neighbors, co-workers, students, and extended family members. My hunch is that lots of these screenwriters aren't actually from Los Angeles, and they end up extrapolating -- just as Seipp suggests -- from their experience in the rarefied environs of West L.A., though even there you have to be pretty blinkered -- which is exactly what I thought writers pride themselves on *not* being -- to experience L.A. as "segregated."
The Stew Dog House is near Van Nuys. This general area of the San Fernando valley is remarkably diverse. I think there were about 25 ethnicities at my daughters' high schools. And we have a lot of people "in the business" in the area, but I think they are the cameramen and scene movers, rather than the writers.
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