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 Post Posted: Wed Jul 31, 2013 8:23 pm 
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ImageThe Saphires, based on a true story about four Aboriginal Female Singers. Their manager is part of their story but the focus of the tale is the girls. You'd hardly know that by the American DVD cover (left) as compared to the original (right)

Sorry about the image size. I can't figure out how to shrink it on my phone.

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 Post Posted: Fri Aug 02, 2013 9:38 am 
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As much as it sounds like you want this to be about race, gender, or American imbecility; I am fairly certain it's about marketability. Only one of the four women has a filmography anywhere near Chris O'Dowd's, and she's more well known in Australia than the US. O'Dowd is emphasized on the US cover because he's the one that has the greatest chance of being recognized.

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 Post Posted: Sat Aug 03, 2013 1:08 am 
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I understand the marketing decision to spotlight Chris O'Dowd but they really overdid it. It definitely looks like he's the protagonist and the four girls are just background characters. I suppose nobody ever lost money by assuming their audience were idiots, though...

For the Asian movie posters for the Green Hornet, Jay Chou's character was emphasized more than Seth Rogen's but at least Rogen wasn't just a faded image in the background.

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 Post Posted: Sat Aug 03, 2013 7:23 am 
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Just because it is about one thing does not mean it cannot be about more things as well. The irony is that The Saphires story is about their struggle to be recognised while being aboriginal women to then be pushed into the background of their own DVD cover.

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 Post Posted: Mon Aug 05, 2013 9:48 am 
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This kind of thing is endemic in the movie business. It's all about what they perceive as marketable. The movie "Twenty-One" was based on the true story of a group of Asian MIT students who took casinos for millions through card-counting. In the movie version, almost everyone was white. Ursula LeGuin's "Wizard of Earthsea" is notable for reversing the standard "light-skinned = good and civilized, dark-skinned = bad and primitive" color-coding of most fantasy novels. Guess what didn't make it into the movie version. And of course, the movie "The Last Airbender" was notorious for "white-washing" its characters.

At least all they did with this movie was whitewash the DVD cover --not recast the characters.

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 Post Posted: Mon Aug 05, 2013 5:09 pm 
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I remember, LeGuin was really upset about that.

You know, this is a problem that Samuel Delaney never had. Mainly because no one makes movies out of his books. :(

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 Post Posted: Tue Aug 06, 2013 7:45 am 
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They whitewashed The Hunger Games movie too. The books described the main character and the inhabitants of her mining town as olive skinned and dark haired.

(Ngau just added that he thinks the decision to emphasize Chris O'Dowd was pretty stupid purely from a marketing point of view. Because since when has a movie with four beautiful women on the cover not sold? He says he'd buy that movie over one about Chris @%*ing O'Dowd.)

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 Post Posted: Tue Aug 06, 2013 10:09 am 
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drachefly wrote:
I remember, LeGuin was really upset about that.

You know, this is a problem that Samuel Delaney never had. Mainly because no one makes movies out of his books. :(


I'd love to see "Dhalgren" as a movie --although it would really have to be at least a miniseries to do it justice. I can imagine one of the cable stations really sinking their teeth into it.

Kea wrote:
They whitewashed The Hunger Games movie too. The books described the main character and the inhabitants of her mining town as olive skinned and dark haired.


Interestingly enough there was a significant racist outcry (by people who didn't, of course, consider themselves racists) over the fact that they DIDN'T whitewash the race of the little girl with whom the main character forms an alliance, despite the fact that a) that same character is clearly described as black in the book and b) she dies sacrificially to help save the main character, just like hundreds of other black movie characters.

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 Post Posted: Tue Aug 06, 2013 12:28 pm 
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I heard about that happening, but I still can't make any sense of it. Were they careless readers who claimed that they imagined her white, despite the book's description?

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 Post Posted: Tue Aug 06, 2013 2:09 pm 
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It takes real effort to get people to notice basic facts, if they go against preconceptions. Protagonists start out white, straight, and male. Extensive use of pronouns is usually sufficient to convince a reader that the protagonist is actually female. Outright declaration that a character is black, unless reinforced by using those same preconceptions, usually doesn't. Sometimes it doesn't stick even under repetition.

I had a story that was all about a character's journey to Africa to find her grandfather. One reader didn't figure out that she wasn't exactly white.

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 Post Posted: Tue Aug 06, 2013 3:59 pm 
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Kea wrote:
I heard about that happening, but I still can't make any sense of it. Were they careless readers who claimed that they imagined her white, despite the book's description?


The book's description is subtle, although clear enough if you're looking for it. But I think the big thing was that the little girl in the arena strongly reminds the main character of her own little sister. Apparently some readers just couldn't imagine that happening across race.

I'm reminded of a letter I once saw to a syndicated columnist. To paraphase it, "I'm not racist, but it ruined my enjoyment to see a recent production of the Nutcracker in which one of the little snowflakes was not white. Casting like this makes no sense to me!"

I think the columnist replied something along the lines of "did you also notice she wasn't a little frozen crystal of water"?

EDIT: Here's the original column: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/17/magaz ... .html?_r=0

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 Post Posted: Tue Aug 06, 2013 4:02 pm 
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Odd, I've never had any problem whatsoever when it comes to imagining non-white characters when reading books. That I'm aware of, anyway.

And I agree with Ngau. Would be more likely to buy a DVD with four pretty ladies than some ugly guy on the cover.

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 Post Posted: Tue Aug 06, 2013 8:50 pm 
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Kea wrote:
I heard about that happening, but I still can't make any sense of it. Were they careless readers who claimed that they imagined her white, despite the book's description?

Pretty much. Many posts needed the description straight from the book to prove that they were wrong. Even then some people wouldn't accept that Rue was always black.

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 Post Posted: Wed Aug 07, 2013 3:32 am 
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I did....but then I always imagine characters with skin the color of paper and hair/eyes the color of ink....

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 Post Posted: Wed Aug 07, 2013 4:46 am 
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People get remarkably irate about skin colour in casting things. The way I see it, there, are only two things to consider:

1. Is is relevant to the story? If you're making something like American History X, a film about racial tensions, then certain characters need to look white and certain characters need to look black. That's part of the story. If their skin colour has no relevance to the story, then it matters little what colour the actor you choose is. I couldn't understand people's annoyance about Ford Prefect being black in the last Hitchhiker's Guide film - he's an alien, after all (I was, however, a bit dubious about the casting of an American - if the alien in question was trying to fit in to an English town, wouldn't an English accent be more appropriate?). Similarly, the casting of Twenty-One doesn't seem so important. The fact that the students were Asian isn't really relevant to their story (though I understand commentary about this as part of a wider point about Asian men in films).

2. Does it clash with the setting? I find it inteferes a bit with the suspension of disbelief when film makers go for, say, black Vikings. In criticising these, though, you do have to be careful that your criticism isn't simply a result of your own historical ignorance - as when people complain about casting black men as cowboys.

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