(no subject)

[benlehman]

From Chris.

HBO is doing an adaption of "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee." But they've decided, apparently, that the book needs some changes. Namely

But the fact that Mr. Brown’s work has been translated into 17 languages and has sold five million copies around the world was not enough to convince HBO that a film version would draw a sizable mainstream audience. When the channel broadcasts its two-hour adaptation of the book, beginning Memorial Day weekend, at its center will be a new character: a man who was part Sioux, was educated at an Ivy League college and married a white woman.

“Everyone felt very strongly that we needed a white character or a part-white, part-Indian character to carry a contemporary white audience through this project,” Daniel Giat, the writer who adapted the book for HBO Films, told a group of television writers earlier this year.


I'm livid. Please, let's kick some shit about this.

Comments

[kynn.livejournal.com]

Ben, do you have a link to the source of the quote? I'd like to link to this but I want to include the original.

[benlehman.livejournal.com]

http://andweshallmarch.typepad.com/and_we_shall_march/2007/05/this_reminds_me.html Blog post
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/09/arts/television/09knee.html NYtimes article

[kynn.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

[icecreamemperor.livejournal.com]

That's just lame.

[bigbluebackpack.livejournal.com]

Indeed. I was most displeased that The Last King of Scotland's main character (at least in the trailer) was not Idi Amin nor anyone else from Uganda or anywhere else in Africa but a goddamned Scot. Who may or may not have existed (not that I have checked) and who was having sex with a hot local (black African) woman.

[xorphus.livejournal.com]

Mmm, that's a bit unfair; the character is based on a number of real white advisors to Amin (particularly Bob Astles), and two of the big points of the movie are to show the consequences of people like Garrigan treating Africa like an amusement park, and how the world at large won't believe what Amin is doing until they hear it from a white man.

This "contemporary white audience" shit, though: absurd.

[evilmagnus]

That's almost as retarded as doing a Wizard of Earthsea adaption and not casting a black man in the lead role ... oh, wait.

[yeloson.livejournal.com]

Ben, a friend of mine gave me a link to give HBO some feedback (http://www.hbo.com/apps/submitinfo/contactus/submit.do?title=Films&questiontype=films).

I asked them if they felt they would have to add a German POV character if they were doing Anne Frank.

Just an idea but what if...

[amberley.livejournal.com]

I asked them if they felt they would have to add a German POV character if they were doing Anne Frank.

Or maybe a happy ending based on focus group feedback.

Cue the Doomed Planet skit about Hollywood-style "fix up" of Diary of Anne Frank (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8R7dVcawdQ0).

Stephen Dedman wrote in Never Seen by Waking Eyes about how he changed one of his stories to leave out a bit of Australian Aboriginal myth when readers objected that after the Europeans had stolen everything else, did they have to take the myths and use them for their own purposes too? He thought that was a fair criticism and made his story work without it.

[denyse.livejournal.com]

That's disturbing. But I'm not surprised that the industry thinks everything needs to be done from the POV of someone at least partly white.