“Small films see the big, wide world”
Our friend Lewis Beale offers up this really interesting LA Times article about movies and multiculturalism:
In the new indie film “Goodbye Solo,” a Senegalese cab driver in love with a Hispanic woman befriends a suicidal, middle-aged white man. The characters all interact in an urban, working-class atmosphere in which their racial, sexual and ethnic diversity is not only accepted, it isn’t even a plot point. Yet the picture, which opens Friday and was directed by Iranian American Ramin Bahrani, does not take place in New York, Los Angeles. The setting is Winston-Salem, N.C., a tobacco town with a population of 225,000.
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Bahrani’s is just one of the recent movies in which multicultural and multiracial interaction are presented as the American norm. Last year’s “The Visitor” features a depressed university professor (Oscar-nominated Richard Jenkins) who finds that his New York apartment is being illegally occupied by an African woman and a Syrian man, but rather than kicking them out, he allows them to stay and eventually becomes part of their lives. “Rachel Getting Married” is centered around a multiracial wedding with multiethnic guests and world music entertainment where no one comments about, or even notices, their differences.
Last fall, several students from my UNC screenwriting class and I attended a screening of Rachel Getting Married. They all loved the movie and in fact, they thought it was “cool” how the movie was populated by such a polyglot of ethnically diverse characters. That was a plus to these young people. But do Hwood movie studios embrace multiculturalism? As Beale notes in his article:
Everywhere, it seems, but in big-budget Hollywood movies. Although studio pictures have certainly made breakthroughs in terms of minority images — particularly those of African Americans — the kind of multiculturalism seen in indies is missing in many of the films that hit multiplexes. Several studios contacted for this story had no comment, but, says a former executive at a major studio’s boutique division, “I don’t think mainstream films will truly reflect an unself-conscious multiculturalism until the lives and associations of the creators of the big movies reflect this.”
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Same as it ever was, really. Studios are in the global marketing game and the one color that is most important is green. “You have to look at studio financial interests as a global issue,” Koltai says. “I don’t think race or nationality really matters; what matters is if it’s box-office worthy.”
Which means, according to Bahrani, “In those films that have a 2,000-print release, do you see films with a diversity of ideas? The people making those decisions are afraid. They are afraid if they put something that’s actually happening on the streets onscreen, that it wouldn’t be accepted. But that’s not the case.”
So as is often the case, we are left with independent filmmakers to push the envelope re multicultures — or perhaps just show the way things actually are evolving in America:
Which, of course, leaves the whole field of depicting Obama’s America — as some might refer to it — to filmmakers with small budgets and big visions. “Independent films are where you always saw the most complete portrayals of minorities, immigrant or ethnic Americans, gays and lesbians,” says the former executive. “It is why independent films came to be — to tell different stories from different points of view, often outsider or alternative stories that were not being told in the mainstream.”
Still, there is hope for the future of storytelling. “Slumdog Millionaire,” for example, won the best picture Oscar and has pulled in nearly $140 million domestically. This British-made movie set in India has become a sort of introductory-level cultural course — Bollywood Meets Hollywood 101 — for millions of filmgoers. There is always the hope a movie like this will spin off in interesting ways and encourage other filmmakers to take chances with bigger budgets. “It is evolutionary,” says Koltai, who believes “you have a lot more diversity in film now than 10 years ago.”
How about you? If you were brainstorming a story you wanted to write as a spec screenplay, would your thinking be affected by an oppenness to varying ethnic and gender identities? Would you find that a more compelling area to explore for unique stories or would you be concerned that it might impact the marketability of your script?
Here is the trailer for the movie Goodbye Solo (2008), written by Bahareh Azimi & Ramin Bahrani, who also directed the film: