Or, ya know, cast the right person for the role, regardless of who they like to fuck, or what type of hardware they have between their legs. I know ... crazy idea. But I just spent the weekend with a theater director in San Diego, and the problems she has with casting are comically sad. Talent just doesn't show up when you need it, isn't available, or .... gasp! ... may be unreliable! (I know, ARTISTS, right?) It's easy, once a production is complete, to pick someone who would have been better / more appropriate for a role. But that's the finished product, which is about a billion miles away from the thing you started making 18 months, and 26 script drafts ago...
The problem with this is you end up with John Wayne playing Ghengis Khan, Joel Grey playing Chiun and Mickey Rooney as Mr. Yunioshi. Or Emma Stone playing Hawaiian Chinese. There's a middle ground but it will never be happy because nothing in Hollywood ever is. He effortlessly slides into perfect Spanish for a few seconds, then returns to being Anthony. "Why am I not being hired for Mexican or Latino roles?" he says. "You play my roles, but I can't play yours, and I speak Spanish just as well? Go fuck yourself." Anthony picks up my recorder. "Go fuck yourself, Jon Stewart!" he yells. "Have me on your show if you have the balls! You don't have the balls!" Jon Ronson, "You May Know Me From Such Roles as Terrorist #4"Or, ya know, cast the right person for the role, regardless of who they like to fuck, or what type of hardware they have between their legs.
Anthony carries on, turning his anger toward Jon Stewart's Rosewater, in which the Mexican actor Gael García Bernal plays the Iranian-Canadian reporter Maziar Bahari. "Man, if I saw Jon Stewart, you'd have to hold me back. How dare you hire a Mexican-American to play an Iranian-American, with all these amazing Iranian-American artists. I can't stand it. I'm sick of it. I speak Spanish fluently.…"
Well, I did say cast the right person for the role. At the time, of John Wayne playing Genghis Khan, it didn't matter what the movie was about... it was a John Wayne movie. They just grabbed the next script off the pile, and put Marion in the starring role. In that case, if you wanted a John Wayne movie, then he was the "right person for the role". If you wanted a Genghis Khan movie, then he was the wrong person. Again, Linda Hunt.
Aloha is an unmitigated disaster. Stone shouldn't have accepted the role. No one should have considered her. There are more layers of failure in this than one can count. And it bombed so hard the public forgot it so it doesn't even hold the level of shame it deserves in the minds of people who watch movies