LOL.. where PC is taking us.

[Dill]

(07-10-2017, 09:31 AM)ABmorePat87 Wrote: This doesn't seem to be an attack on Baldwin as much as it is an attack on the industry. I get it, the portrayals would be more authentic. Obviously we see an issue with someone pulling a Mickey Rooney a la Breakfast at Tiffany's, but as a society, we don't see disability the same way we see skin color. In special education, one of the repeating themes is that disability is one of the final civil rights battles, one we constantly advocate for in the profession.

That said, this is silly. Going back to SSF's post early in this thread, the way the fight has turned for many progressive groups is focused on attack rather than understanding. Don't immediately compare this to black face and attack everyone, encourage casting directors to look at actors with disabilities. I can't name a big name blind actor, can you?

I agree the critique is directed towards the industry. Baldwin did not cast himself and was never the issue.

But I don't think the issue is aesthetic, relating to dramatic integrity or some such. Screen portrayals are not more authentic because a "real" X is playing the role of an X. (Hollywood knows this. Think of Audie Murphy playing a "real" soldier. Not so good.)

Rather, the issue is about raising awareness of the competency and humanity of the disabled, first in Hollywood, but also in the public. An advocacy group is asking the industry to give competent disabled actors a chance--hence the white paper and list of actors who could be considered for roles. Their case is partly that people in the industry have preconceptions about people with disabilities that prevent them from considering disabled people for roles. They also want to see the industry move away from stereotypical portrayals and to show people with disabilities in roles where disability is actually not the point. So Ruderman is actually doing what you suggest they do above. If this group is right about the "invisibility" of competent disabled actors, as well as disability issues, then they can expect some push back from people who "don't see a problem," and some of it will be cruel (see the readers comments on the RS OP link).

So I don't see much of an "attack" here, other than in the article title and in Leonard's riff on how "PC are eating their own" and a list of imagined rules now to be imposed on Hollywood. What caught my interest in this thread was not the issue itself, but how immediately it became a kind of Rorschach blot upon which pent up fears of PC were projected, "confirmed," and expanded. I wonder how many people who "already know" what this issue is about actually checked out the Ruderman White Paper or the link to the round table on actors with disabilities?
http://www.rudermanfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/TV-White-Paper_final.final_.pdf
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-disabled-actors-hollywood-diversity-20161101-story.html