Grizzlies, Aguirre & Fitzcarraldo: The Genius of Werner Herzog

One of the most interesting and unusual interviews I've read recently was journalist Erik Hedegaard's one-on-one with the enigmatic German director Werner Herzog that appeared in the March 24th issue of Rolling Stone.

While film has been a passion of mine for years, it took me awhile to appreciate the work of this truly unique visionary artist.

My first experience seeing Herzog's work was watching the award-winning 2005 documentary Grizzly Man.

A visually and emotionally stunning film that exponentially expanded my perception and understanding of what the documentary genre could be, Grizzly Man was actually recommended to me as a must-see film by director Bryan Singer back in 2007.

Bryan went to my high school and is one of the few actual geniuses I've known personally, obviously I have enormous respect for his knowledge of film so I immediately ordered the DVD on Netflix.

As an animal lover who grew up watching zoologist Marlin Perkins examine animals and their behavior in their natural habitats on Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom on television each week, as well as National Geographic specials and nature programs on PBS and Discovery Channel, Herzog's Grizzly Man offered a piercing look into both grizzly bears, and the documentary's subject Timothy Treadwell.

If you've never seen it, Grizzly Man is a fascinating examination of the controversial life and gruesome death of Treadwell, an environmentalist, bear-enthusiast, author and documentary filmmaker who spent 13 years of his life in Katami National Park in Alaska during the summer following and photographing grizzly bears.

Timothy Treadwell and Amie Huguenard 

An eclectic and stubborn renegade who was often criticized by animal researchers and park rangers for disregarding the danger that grizzlies represented, Treadwell claimed that observing the bears in their natural habitat had helped him to overcome alcohol and heroin addiction.

Herzog's documentary uses some of the hundreds of hours of video and still photographs that Treadwell captured during his years of bear observation and study.

And it famously examines the horrifying incident on Sunday October 5, 2003 when both Treadwell and his girlfriend Amie Huguenard were attacked, savagely mauled and eventually eaten by a large male grizzly at their remote campsite dangerously close to an area of thick underbrush criss-crossed by bear trails known as the "Grizzly Maze" on Kodiak Island near the shore of Kaflia Bay.

Male bears there can grow up to 11 feet in height and weigh up to 1,500 pounds.

As Ned Zeman wrote in a 2004 article on Treadwell for Vanity Fair, just a few weeks before he and Huguenard were killed, Treadwell wrote a friend:

"My photographs and stories are looking to the deep and secret world of bears that I do not believe any person has ever witnessed. One day I'll show this work to the public. Until then I'll keep living it."

Werner Herzog's documentary wrestles with the terrifying truth that Treadwell endured hardship, ridicule, suffering and an agonizing death for what he felt was his calling in life.

After reading Erik Hedegaard's revealing Rolling Stone interview with Herzog, I think it's that sense of totally devoting one's self, and dying for, one's passion that drew Herzog to Treadwell's story - and compelled him to write and direct a documentary about his life.

It's a theme he's explored in many of his more than 70 documentary and feature films.

Actor Klaus Kinski as conquistador Aguirre 

As Hedegaard notes, while Herzog has been making films since 1962, the two which really established his reputation as one of the most important figures of New German Cinema (and filmmaking in general) are "biopics" loosely based on the lives of real historical figures, Aguirre, The Wrath of God (1972) and Fitzcarraldo (1982).

After ordering both films on DVD via Netflix, Aguirre, The Wrath of God in particular makes it clear why French New Wave director and film critic Francois Truffaut (director of such masterpieces as The 400 Blows) considered Herzog, "the most important director alive".

The film, hastily written by Herzog over a two-day period after he read about the subject in a book lent to him by a friend, is a fictional story loosely based on the exploits of the real-life Spanish conquistador Lope de Aguirre, (pronounced Agear-aay) a greedy, violent, power-hungry figure nicknamed "The Madman" who died in 1561 after a failed attempt to proclaim himself the "Prince of Peru" in defiance of Spanish king Phillip II.

Herzog's film is based on Aguirre's part in a failed 1560 expedition down the Amazon and Maranon Rivers in search of the mythical kingdom of El Dorado by 300 Spanish soldiers and hundreds of native Indians who served as porters and laborers.

The brilliant opening scene of Aguirre, The Wrath of God is like pulling back a curtain on time and looking back into the distant past.

A long single-file line of Spanish conquistadors and natives descend down a steep, treacherous path along a mountain that slopes down into a mist-covered jungle valley that looks as foreboding as it does beautiful.

The conquistadors, attired in heavy, long-sleeved clothes, steel helmets flaked with rust from the humidity and armor, and lugging pikes, swords, arquebus (primitive rifles) and large cannon, look totally out of place in the thick green jungle as they laboriously make their way through the unspoiled wilderness with the help of native Indians (some chained) hacking aside the plants, trees and vines to make a path.

Pizarro orders a detachment to scout ahead

Exhausted, lost in almost impenetrable jungle forest and running low on supplies, the film really starts when the expedition's leader Hernando Pizzaro decides to send a detachment of soldiers and natives ahead to scout along a nearby river and report back on what they find.

The film follows the doomed attempts of the detachment as they construct rafts and set off down river where one disaster after another befalls them and disagreement over how to proceed sparks infighting between the soldiers.


One faction is loyal to the detachment's appointed leader Pedro de Ursua, and the other group is led by Aguirre; who uses his dark charisma to persuade them that they can all get rich by finding the fabled lost city of gold and carving their own kingdom out of the jungle.

With the help of his men, Aguirre eventually plots and overthrows Ursua, once under his leadership, the journey becomes a descent into madness, violence and terror that stands in contrast to the beautiful cinematography captured by Herzog during a grueling five-week shoot in the jungles of Peru.

Like Grizzly Man, the theme that dominates Aguirre is 'Man Versus Nature' and it's easy to see why the 1972 film influenced Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 masterpiece about the Vietnam war, Apocalypse Now.

It's also pretty evident that Herzog, like Coppola, was also influenced by Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad's story about a man's journey up the Congo River deep into the African continent and his growing obsession that was first published in three parts in Blackwood Magazine in 1899 and later published as a novella in 1902.

Herzog would explore that same premise of a man (some might consider mad) obsessed by a singular vision taking a treacherous journey down a river through the heart of the jungle ten years later with the widely-acclaimed film Fitzcarraldo released in 1982.

Werner Herzog on the set of Fitzcarraldo

In some ways, Fitzcarraldo struck me as a more "personal" film for Herzog.

He is a prolific director of opera as well as films and this film opens with his main character Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald arriving in a Peruvian city in the late 19th century after journeying hundreds of miles from the jungle interior to see an opera performance.

Fitzgerald is played by the star of Aguirre, Wrath of God, German actor Klaus Kinski - recognizable as the chained Russian prisoner in the rail journey sequence in David Lean's 1965 epic film Doctor Zhivago.

In Fitzcarraldo, the main character (based on real-life rubber baron Carlos Fitzcarrald) aspires to make a fortune by transporting rubber from large tracts of nearly inaccessible Peruvian jungle using steamships - but he must first find a passable river route to make it possible.

He also dreams of bringing opera to the rough-and-tumble remote jungle town populated by rubber barons, civil servants, workers, sketchy characters, locals and indigenous peoples - it's like an old western boomtown set in the jungle.

With the help of a loan from his girlfriend played by Claudia Cardinale who owns a brothel, Fitzgerald purchases a shallow-bottomed steamship that can traverse rivers and after fixing it up, he hires a crew and sets off down the river deep into largely uncharted jungle territory inhabited by hostile natives.

After most of his crew abandons the steamship before they get too far into hostile territory, Fitzcarraldo is forced to persuade a tribe of indigenous Indians who speak no English or Spanish he encounters to help him.

Klaus Kinski plays opera in Fitzcarraldo

This film is marked by a surreal voyage along a jungle river with Fitzcarraldo occasionally playing opera on a portable record player to try and ward off hostile natives playing drums while concealed behind trees.

While (for me) the story is somewhat less compelling than Aguirre, the intense cinematography is once again simply amazing and Kinski's performance is genuinely compelling.

If you enjoy film, you must see Fitzcarraldo for the sequence in which Fitzgerald persuades the native peoples to lift the steamship out of the water and transport it over a mountain covered with thick jungle in order to launch it into a nearby river that runs roughly parallel to the river on which they set out in order to find the route he is searching for.

Quite simply it has to be seen, as Herzog literally took weeks filming an actual 340-ton steamship being dragged up the side of a mountain and down the other side - in the film they used a complex system of pulleys along with utilizing the ship's engines to power a cable system that helps pull the ship up the mountain-side.

You've really got to see it to believe it.

With August coming up and many people taking some vacation time, if you haven't seen either of these films I highly recommend you rent Aguirre, Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo for a night on the couch, not just for an escapist film experience.

But to to appreciate two of Klaus Kinski's most intense on-screen performances and the monumental filmmaking effort it took for Werner Herzog to bring these visions to the screen shooting in such remote jungle locations.

Herzog has directed over 70 films, so I'm definitely looking forward to making my way through some of his other documentaries and features - it's a privilege and a creative learning experience to have the chance to explore and appreciate the work of one of the most driven and visionary filmmakers of modern cinema.

Need a break from CGI-laden superhero films lavished with explosions, special effects and gratuitous violence? Herzog is your guy.

He doesn't shirk from portraying violence on screen, but it's always in service to the story - and part of his lifelong effort to probe the darker aspects of the human psyche.

Which, I'd venture, is Herzog's own personal grizzly.

The Art of Preparation & Apology

Sen. John McCain savors the sweet taste of revenge

Many people recognize the oft-quoted motto of the Boy Scouts of America, "Be Prepared" - but not everyone.

It's doubtful Donald Trump was prepared to face the repercussions of his having mocked Arizona Senator John McCain (a former U.S. Navy pilot) for being shot down on a mission over Vietnam, captured then tortured and held as a POW for five years.

McCain had the last laugh this morning as he cast the deciding vote that killed the GOP's last-ditch effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

There's little question that McCain has been carefully preparing for just the right moment to publicly back-hand Trump since July 2015 when the liar-in-chief had the gall to publicly low-ball McCain as a "dummy" not long before an appearance in front of the Iowa Family Leadership Summit when the draft-dodging hypocrite dismissed the Vietnam combat vet by saying, "I don't like losers."

To add to Trump's humiliation today, his newly-tapped director of communications Anthony Scaramucci is being eviscerated by the press today for his shocking, expletive-ridden tirade against the as-of today now-former White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus for allegedly leaking The Mooch's financial disclosure statement (and other juicy tidbits) to the media.

Now remember, Scaramucci was hired as the head of communications for what is arguably the most powerful government institution on the planet, right?

So he reads a tweet from Journalist Ryan Lizza that quoted an anonymous senior White House official revealing that The Mooch was having dinner at the White House with Trump, his wife, right-wing nut-job Sean Hannity and Bill Shine - the former co-president of Fox News who was fired earlier this spring for his role in covering up sexual harassment allegations against Bill O'Reilly.

Does The Mooch shrug it off and demonstrate that sometimes silence is the best answer?

The Mooch speaks with the press in stylish shades 

No, he gets pissed and calls up Ryan Lizza Wednesday night, and while being on the record (it's questionable if he really understands what that means), rips into Priebus  - and in the same interview that was published in The New Yorker on Thursday, also suggests that chief strategist and resident white supremacist Steve Bannon is able to sexually self-satisfy himself in a way that suggests the perpetually-unshaven former Brietbart News executive chair has totally mastered yoga in ways I shudder to imagine.

So while it's still unclear to many people why Scaramucci was hired, aside from his near constant fawning over Trump, what is clear is that The Mooch was totally unprepared to take on the role of White House director of communications.

Conservative commentator Ana Navarro was less sparing in her summary of Scaramucci's comments, on Twitter she called him "an unpinned hand-grenade."

Be prepared.

Those two words are much more than a simple slogan.

For the thousands of boys, men (including myself) and women, fortunate enough to have participated in, supported and enjoyed the challenges and experiences of Scouting over the years, those two words encompass an approach to life that spans beyond the BSA experience into how one approaches life from the standpoint of family, work, spirituality and everything in between.

It's too bad Donald Trump used an opportunity to speak in front of thousands of Boy Scouts gathered for the National Jamboree in West Virginia to (yet again) fan the flames of his obsession-hatred of President Obama, denigrate his political opponents as well as Republican members of the Senate, and ramble on incoherently like an obnoxious drunk at a party.

True to his long history as a "Birther", once again, Trump was not truthful in his disparaging comments about President Obama - he told the crowd that Obama had never addressed a Jamboree without apparently realizing that Obama recorded a video message that was played for the assembled attendees of the 2010 National Jamboree.

A speech that was infinitely more substantive, meaningful and inspiring than Trump's was - to say nothing of the fact that, unlike Trump, Obama actually was a Boy Scout.

BSA Chief Scout Executive
Michael Surbaugh 

In response to the anger and outrage over Trump's inappropriate and deplorable comments in front of thousands of Boy Scouts at the National Jamboree in West Virginia on Monday, Chief Scout Executive Michael Surbaugh drafted a well-written but somewhat milquetoast apology on the BSA's Facebook page.

As a former Boy Scout who was one of the 29,765 scouts who attended the National Jamboree held at Fort A.P. Hill in Virginia from July 29th - August 4th 1981, and as a writer, I thought the apology should have spent more time addressing what I and many others consider to be the perversion of everything the Boy Scouts of America stands for that Trump's idiotic comments represented.

The bulk of the apology read like more of a shopping list of all the positive things that had taken place over the course of the Jamboree.

Which is fine, but the problem is that the parents and scouts don't need a rundown of why the Jamboree is a good thing.

Scouters of all generations know the kinds of amazing experiences, activities and personal interactions that take place at the Jamboree - memories that I can tell you from personal experience last a lifetime.

The overall tone of Surbaugh's apology seemed more like he was more concerned with protecting the "brand" of the Jamboree, rather than focusing on more definitively distancing, and distinguishing, the values of the BSA from the repulsive and inappropriate comments Trump gave last Monday.

To be fair, Surbaugh obviously had to walk a fine line in drafting a written apology.

My father was an executive for the Boy Scouts of America for over 25 years, finishing his career as the executive director of the BSA's Northeast Region, which covers 11 states, the northern part of Virginia, Washington D.C., Puerto Rico and the Trans Atlantic Council (Western Europe).

So I know quite a bit about the internal workings and culture of the BSA's professional executive ranks, and I can tell you that it's populated by many politically conservative individuals from what we would call "Red States" - the BSA is headquartered in Irving, Texas.

That doesn't mean everyone who works for the BSA is a Republican, far from it, but the overall culture of the organization tends to lean right, a reflection that many of the values espoused by the BSA could be regarded as "conservative" in the traditional sense.

Don't take my word for it, if you want to get a snapshot of how members of the scouting community reacted to Trump's speech and Surbaugh's subsequent apology, you may find it instructive to read through some of the hundreds of comments posted on the Boy Scouts of America's Facebook page.

It reveals cultural and political divisions within the scouting community that are reflective of the divisions in the broader American populace - (and within the White House if Trump firing chief of staff Reince Priebus this afternoon is any indication).

Divisions exasperated by a man for whom the necessity, and art of preparation, are elusive concepts.

A man who, like his new communications director, is clearly not prepared for the rigors of working in the White House - let's hope General John F. Kelly knows the Boy Scout motto better than his new erratic boss does.

Spicey & The Mooch: Surrealism At 1600

Anthony "The Mooch" Scaramucci & Sean Spicer

Last week as I watched the strange, and lengthy, introductory press conference of newly-tapped White House Director of Communications Anthony Scaramucci, it seemed as if I was watching the presidency slip even further down the rabbit hole live on CNN.

It was during my lunch break at the gym so I was on an exercise bike watching on a screen with closed captions instead of sound.

Even still, Scaramucci's statements came off like a deafening confirmation that Donald Trump is determined to further insulate himself from reality by hiring yet another overbearing sycophant slash-Washington outsider who's willing to pledge loyalty to a widely-despised president saddled with a 35% approval rating - and no major legislative or policy accomplishments.

One whose administration is defined by crisis, incompetence and unprecedented political buffoonery.

Just hours after the embattled press secretary Sean Spicer submitted his resignation, Anthony Scaramucci stepped to the podium of the White House press room before the cameras and gathered press like some contestant plucked from a reality show audition.

Here's a guy who left law school to take a job at Goldman-Sachs before starting two different Wall Street firms (who's known affectionately to his peers as "The Mooch"), waving his hands and gesticulating and literally professing his love for Donald Trump in the press room of the White House.

It was like a Salvador Dali painting (with sound) come to life in a White House that was already considered surreal by many observers.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders glowering as The
Mooch gets chatty at his press conference 

The Mooch's hiring was openly chided by multiple members of the top White House staff because of his lack of communications or political experience and his reputation as a slick salesman.

Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, senior strategist Stephen Bannon and the now ex-press secretary Sean Spicer all opposed Scaramucci's hiring.

As the Daily Beast reported last Friday, "other top aides worried that the Scaramucci hiring would perpetuate the notion of 'Amateur hour' in the West Wing."

But The Mooch seemed genuinely intoxicated by being in front of the cameras, and as he gleefully took question after question and preened, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders actually walked out to the podium and stood a few feet from him with a scowl on her face to politely try and hint that he needed to wrap it up.

Probably because she reportedly wasn't happy that Trump hired him as her new boss, but also
because his press conference was stretching into 30 minutes, and because his slick camera style and easy banter was making her seem like the humorless, overly-confrontational, one-note right-wing partisan hack that she is.

The Mooch isn't stupid, and he's probably aware that Huckabee Sanders considers herself "Republican royalty" and above him because her right-wing talk radio host-Christian minister father Mike Huckabee ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008 and 2016 - and she worked for the campaign.

But Scaramucci made his own bones as they say, and as he made the rounds of the Sunday morning news shows like a glowing 17-year-old at a debutante ball, he seemed to fire off a shot at Huckabee Sanders towards the end of an interview with Jake Tapper on CNN's State of the Union, saying: 

"Sarah, if your watching I love the hair and makeup person we used on Friday, so I'd like to continue to use the hair and makeup person." 

Obviously it's not hard to see why Trump likes The Mooch.

Farewell Spicey

Say what you want about Sean Spicer (and I've said plenty), he's always been a committed conservative Republican who is committed to the party, whereas Scaramucci has basically served Scaramucci, opportunistically allowing the winds of change to take him wherever they lead.

He was a finance guy for President Obama's campaign who openly eviscerated Trump on Fox News back in 2015.

Think all that crap he said about "loving" Donald Trump in his White House press conference was genuine?

Just take a couple minutes and listen to some of the things Scaramucci said about Trump in a Fox News interview - what a difference 24 months makes.

The only unfortunate thing was that this transition happened during the summer when Saturday Night Live is on summer hiatus and can't do a skit about this shakeup at the White House.

If I was an SNL writer, I'd play on the obvious tension between Scaramucci and Spicer by pitching one of those faux-SNL commercials for a fictional TV cop series called "Spicey and The Mooch". 

It would be a send up of one of those old buddy cop TV series like Starsky and Hutch.

Spicey would play the hard-nosed always-plays-it-by-the-book cop, married to his high school sweetheart for 20 years who's forced to partner up with The Mooch - the slick wise-guy cop with perfect teeth who never stops talking, plays by his own rules, has been married three times and now lives with his lovable old Italian mother in Brooklyn.

But alas, as amusing as it would have been to have both Spicey and The Mooch in the same White House communications department trying to unite their talents like the Wonder Twins to spin Trump's constant stream of lies, baseless accusations and incomprehensible nonsense ("Covfefe"?), Spicer decided that was enough.

Trump acting like an ass at the BSA Jamboree

While I thought Spicer did a real disservice to his professional reputation by being willing to stand up and defend what he knew were outrageous lies by Trump, he was loyal to him - and Trump may come to miss Spicey in the dark days ahead.

Since the shakeup on Friday, Trump seems to have gone off his rocker, with his blathering display of partisan idiocy in front of thousands of Boy Scouts gathered at the Jamboree in West Virginia.

Where among other things, he mocked President Obama (who actually was a Boy Scout), babbled incoherently about his healthcare initiative and, remarkably, talked about a cocktail party he attended.

The BSA has, justifiably, found itself facing a huge backlash from current and former Scouters as well as members of the public outraged that Trump would use such an occasion to act like a narcissistic jackass in front of thousands of young men.

Of course, as we all know, Trump intentionally says such asinine things to deflect media attention from his son-in-law Jared Kushner testifying behind close doors in front of Senate staffers, as demonstrated by his latest Tweets attacking his own Attorney General for not investigating Hillary Clinton's emails.

Seriously, did he forget that she lost the election in 2016?

Trump is like an elephant rampaging through a crowded mall, only now the job of defending this kind of quasi-delusional behavior falls on the shoulders of The Mooch.

A controversial figure with no communications or political experience, climbing aboard a sinking ship where he is openly despised by top members of an already-divided White House where chaos is the norm, accomplishments are few and the shadow of investigations related to administration ties to the Russian government loom like one of those erie distorted figures in a Salvador Dali painting.

Can this train-wreck presidency possibly get any more surreal?

Probably.

Oh Florida - Personal Responsibility In the Sunshine State

5 teens laughed as Jamel Dunn, 31, drowned

In many ways the state of Florida is something of a unique entity unto itself.

In the physical sense it's an oddity, connected to the continental U.S. in the north but jutting out on its own like an odd appendage, bordered by the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico.

It's just a stones throw from Cuba and the Bahamas, and is arguably almost a part of the Caribbean.


Upon landing there in the spring of 1513, the Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de Leon promptly christened it "La Florida" (land of flowers), and from its vast swamps and wetlands to its hundreds of miles of beautiful coasts and beaches, it is a place of stunning natural beauty.

It is, as those who've visited there multiple times, or live there can attest, almost like another country.

But after reading the horrific story about the five teenagers aged 14 to 16 from Cocoa, Florida who stood next to the edge of a pond and watched 31-year-old Jamel Dunn struggle for his life before drowning while they mocked him and laughed back on July 9th, I gotta say that right now Florida doesn't feel like a part of the United States that I was born and raised in, and am proud to call home.

Like millions of other people who've expressed outrage over this incident, I feel a sense of sickening anger at those teens, at least one of whom used a cellphone to videotape Dunn drowning and then had the gall to post the video to Youtube.

 How hard would it have been to just dial 911 and call for help?  

Jamel Dunn just before drowning 

As CNN reported yesterday, a spokeswoman for the Cocoa Police Department, Yvonne Martinez, observed:

"I've been doing this a long time, probably 20 years or more... I was horrified. My jaw dropped."

Speaking as a former Boy Scout (and as a human being), it's simply mind-boggling that someone could see a person drowning and not at least attempt to help or call for help.

When I was working to get my Swimming Merit Badge, we learned the term, "Reach, Throw, Row, Go".

Those four words describe the sequence of steps one takes in the event you should come upon someone struggling in the water or starting to drown.

The first step is always Reach.

Use a stick, a branch, a belt, a pole or anything that can be used for the person in the water to grab a hold of so you can pull them to safety.

If they're too far in, grab something that floats (a floatation device, life jacket, anything) and throw it to them so they can grab on and steady themselves.

If nothing is available to throw and there's a row boat, canoe, kayak or motorboat available, then go out and get them - swimming out to get a drowning victim should always be the absolute last resort.

Unless you are a professional swimmer it's risky to swim out and save a drowning victim because once you reach them, the first thing they're going to do is grab you in desperation, and because they're likely going to be in state of panic or hysteria, they could unknowingly risk your life in their attempt to stop themselves from drowning or try and breathe.

Secondly, and I learned this trying to get my Life Saving Merit Badge (which I never got because it's unbelievably difficult), a body in the water is really heavy, especially if they have clothes on.

There are techniques to grab someone in the water and then use a sort of side-crawl motion to swim for safety.

Minneapolis PRI radio exec Vidal Guzman, 60,
drowned in January trying to save his son

But you have to practice them in the water repeatedly with a real body (something most people aren't going to take the time to do) and again, if the person being rescued is in a panic, they could put the rescuer's life in danger.

You know how you hear all those stories about how someone drowned while trying to save someone?

That's why.

Just last month a 57-year-old man drowned in Alabama while trying to save some children who were swimming in the Gulf of Mexico - sadly it happens all the time.

Back in January, Vidal Guzman, a well-respected executive for Minneapolis Public Radio International who was an advocate of diversity in the media industry, died in Puerto Rico over the Christmas holiday while trying to swim out to save his son on a beach 50 miles west of San Juan.

But to get back to those asshole Florida teens, what's also troubling is that the Republican-majority state legislature, notorious for being one of the most conservative in the nation, have never bothered to enact a law that requires that someone attempt to help, or at least call for help in the event that someone's life is in danger.

The same legislature that actively sought and passed Stand Your Ground legislation that makes it legal for someone to shoot and kill another person anywhere based simply on the abstract claim that they felt their life was in danger, have no law that makes it a criminal offense not to help someone whose life is in danger.

Now how does that make any sense?

It would seem that Florida Republican legislator's insistence on "personal responsibility" depends on which private interest group they're shilling for.

Florida District 54 Republican Erin Grall

For example, as reporter Michael Moline observed for Florida Politics.com, back in April, that same Republican-majority state legislature voted to repeal personal-injury protection insurance requirements for all motorists in Florida - proposing instead to make such insurance optional.

Sound familiar?

The sponsor of that bill was self-described "conservative Republican" Erin Grall, who was elected to represent Florida's District 54 in 2016.

"Today, we have the ability to start thinking about personal responsibility in a different way, and shifting that paradigm in the state of Florida and how we do auto insurance." she said of Florida HB 1063, the bill she sponsored.

Which of course benefits both the insurance industry and the litigators who negotiate for and defend them and act on their behalf.

"Individuals will have the ability to decide whether or not they need to purchase medical payments coverage in order to be covered in the event of an accident." she reasoned.

Yes, no doubt a young mother working at Walmart who gets injured by a tractor trailer that slams into her car while she's on the way home will want to "decide whether or not (she) needs to purchase medical payments coverage".

Obviously it's the same kind of asinine logic House Republicans in Washington talk about when they self-righteously pontificate about Americans having the "freedom" to choose whether or not they want to have healthcare coverage.

But it's not surprising given Erin Grall's political policy stances, which include opposing using state funds to expand rail service, blocking Syrian refugees from coming to Florida, "school choice" and of course opposition to women making their own reproductive healthcare decisions.

Oh and Grall is a lawyer and shareholder in her family's law firm who specializes in civil litigation - HB 1063 makes a lot more sense right?

But alas, once again I digress in the political sense.

Florida State Attorney Phil Archer

In the wake of the public outrage over the Florida teen's appalling lack of personal responsibility, last Thursday Florida State Attorney Phil Archer released a statement saying that there was no criminal charge that could be filed against them for refusing to help Jamel Dunn while he was drowning.

While the Cocoa Police have said they want to pursue some kind of charges in this case to hold the teens accountable, as Arriana Brockington reported for NBC News on Saturday, the only thing that it appears that they could conceivably be charged with from a legal standpoint is a violation of Florida Statute 406.

Which makes it a first-degree misdemeanor not to report a death to the local medical examiner.

But that's only a $1,000 fine, and given the depraved indifference the teens demonstrated in mocking and laughing at Dunn then posting a video of his death on Youtube, that hardly seems adequate in holding all Florida citizens accountable to basic standards of personal civic responsibility.

So consider this, racist killer George Zimmerman stalked, confronted, then shot and killed unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin who was walking back to his dad's place with a juice and a bag of Skittles back in February of 2012, but a Florida jury found that he was not personally responsible for the kid's death.

(Members of that jury are now trying to defend their decision by the way.)

But if a person were to walk by a river and see someone drowning, or walk by a house that was on fire and hear kids screaming inside, they are under no obligation by Florida law to, at the least, call 911 and report it.

The same Republican state legislators in Florida who have, in the words of federal judge Mark Walker, passed voter suppression laws on a mass scale that represent an "obscene undeclared war on voting rights", have never bothered to take the time to pass legislation requiring what most people in communities around the U.S. would do without being asked - call for help if they see someone's life is in danger.

Oh Florida.

Sometimes it really does seem that you are like another country, and I ain't talking about the humidity.

Bias and Brutality In Bakersfield

19-year-old Tatyana Hargrove: Misidentified, 
beaten & bitten by Bakersfield PD

The reluctance of the mayor of Minnesota, the Minnesota PD and the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) to release more details about the killing of 40-year-old Justine Damond by MPD officer Mohamed Noor on Saturday night has drawn even more global media scrutiny on the epidemic of American law enforcement killing innocent civilians.

The officer is now claiming he was "startled by a loud sound" before shooting and killing Damond.

While we wait for more concrete details to emerge from the city of Minnesota (including why both officer's body cameras were conveniently turned off at the time of the shooting), let's turn our focus west to the city of Bakersfield, California and the disturbing case of a 19-year-old girl named Tatyana Hargrove.

Another case of egregious and unnecessary police violence committed upon an unarmed woman that happened five weeks ago, but only began receiving national media attention after the Bakersfield chapter of the NAACP posted a video of Hargrove describing the incident (including being punched by at least one cop and bitten by a police K-9 dog), in detail on the group's Facebook page.

This is another case of social media driving a story that flew under the radar of mainstream media.

Granted it happened on a Sunday during a summer Father's Day weekend in which the horrific news about the Grenfell Apartment fire in London, a brutal heat wave in the Southwest U.S. and the latest news about Trump's ties to Russia were dominating the headlines here in America.

As CNN reported last Friday, the story really didn't start gaining serious media traction until early last week as the NAACP's Facebook video started racking up millions of views and people began to learn her horrifying account of the encounter that Bakersfield PD officials initially tried to dismiss.

Bakersfield PD officer Chris Moore and Hamer, the
K-9 police dog he unleashed to bite Hargrove

By the time you're reading this, you've likely heard about, read or seen something about Hargrove's story, and the specifics once again shine a spotlight on the reality of racially-biased policing in America.

Part of what's particularly disturbing in this case is that with 3 police cruisers and multiple officers on the scene, Officer Chris Moore instructed his police K-9 dog to attack and bite a lone, unarmed 19-year-old woman on her bike.

A citizen who was not breaking the law at the time she was stopped.

The use of the dog is reminiscent of police sicking dogs on peaceful African-American civil rights protesters in the 1950's and 60's - images which shocked the nation and the world.

Granted, the Bakersfield PD officers were responding to a report of a 5'10" bald black man with a goatee wearing a white shirt who was between 160 - 170 pounds who'd threatened a store employee with a machete.

According to an article published on Tuesday on Bakersfield.com by Harold Pierce, Moore was the officer who initially questioned and tried to detain Hargrove; who asked him why she was being stopped and justifiably asked if he had a warrant to search her backpack before the situation escalated and got physical - so presumably he was the one pointing a weapon at her.

He later claimed to have mistaken Hargrove for the bald man with the goatee because she was black and wearing a white shirt - but she is 5'2", weighs 120 pounds, has hair, no goatee and, obviously, is not a man.

A photo of the K-9 dog bites on Hargrove's leg 

So why didn't Moore, or Officer G. Vasquez, the man who got into some kind of physical tussle on the ground with Hargrove, bother to ask her name and request some ID?

What confuses me is how this escalated so quickly into this violent physical confrontation.

She'd taken a pause on a really hot day to take a drink from her water bottle when they saw her.

Wasn't it obvious she wasn't wielding a machete?

I mean, not to be flippant, but this was a 19-year-old girl who'd biked to a local store to get a Father's Day present for her dad, found the store was closed, and turned around to bike back home.

On Sunday June 18th the temperature in Bakersfield hit a sizzling 105 degrees, so it was probably at least 100 degrees outside when they stopped her - it's not like she was wearing a bulky overcoat that made it seem like she was hiding a machete.

And it doesn't take extensive police work to see that she could't have grown hair, grown 8 inches, shaved off a goatee, put on 40 to 50 pounds and changed sexes from the time they received the police description of the "transient type" who'd pulled the machete.

Hell, the local store owner who'd reported the apparently elusive, bald, machete-wielding transient ran out and told the cops they had the wrong person, but they told him to go back inside the store and kept right on pummeling Hargrove.

Were the Bakersfield cops just cranky and short-tempered because it was so hot outside?

It just seems like a few questions, a measure of common sense, some patience and a little bit of respect might have solved this in a peaceful manner.

Bakersfield PD Chief Lyle Martin

It was only two weeks before the incident that a Stanford University report published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences offered clinical evidence showing that American police officers (regardless of race) tend to treat people of color with less respect than whites in identical situations.

Hargrove's treatment certainly bears that out.


But there are some positives to come from this still evolving incident.

In an interview with The Californian Bakersfield PD Chief Lyle Martin did acknowledge some wrongdoing on the part of the officers:

"From the policy and technique standpoint, in my opinion, I think we missed on this one in regards to the use of the K-9," 

And to his credit he did calm some community tensions by having the respect to call Hargrove's parents to personally apologize for the incident:

"I told them that I think we as an organization are better than this, and if we're not better than this, then it's my job to make it better."

Time will tell, as a troubling 2015 report from The Guardian reveals, the Bakersfield PD was considered one of the deadliest in the nation per capita in terms of police killings of civilians.

So in light of that history, it's a positive that Hargrove was not killed - and I know it sucks to say that but it's true given what's taken place in this country between some police and people of color.

The Bakersfield PD have also initiated an internal investigation of the incident, but given their violent history as a police department, it's unlikely anything of consequence is going to come of that.

But you never know.

Minneapolis PD officer Mohamed Noor

Pressure from civilians, legal rights groups and outside organizations including the NAACP for  the officers to be reprimanded and disciplined is growing and a GoFundMe page set up to help Hargrove and her family with legal and hospital costs has already raised over $12,000 in just 7 days from people from around the world.

There's also a Change.org petition demanding that the ludicrous charges that the 5'2" Hargrove assaulted the officers be dropped.

Anyway, be sure to keep an eye on this story, particularly in light of developments in the investigation into the shooting death of 40-year-old Justine Damond by Minneapolis PD officer Mohamed Noor on Saturday night.

Based on the many cases of use of deadly force by police that I've read and written about over the years, to me it's a troublesome sign when the very first comment from a police department about a flagrantly unjustified killing by a police officer is something about what the officer's justification was.

In Moore's case, the Minnesota Bureau of Crime Apprehension is now claiming that a loud noise startled him just before Damond, who'd dialed 911 to report a possible assault, approached the police cruiser in her pajamas and was shot and killed;

(The Daily Mail is reporting that Noor is also being sued by a woman named Teresa Graham for false imprisonment, battery and negligence.)

For the sake of justice, many are hoping that such an admission by BCA officials is not the cornerstone of the same kind of "Oops!" defense that allowed former NYPD officer Peter Liang, (who was found guilty of criminally negligent homicide for shooting and killing unarmed Akai Gurley in the stairwell of the Brooklyn housing complex where he lived) to walk away with five year's probation for taking the life of a man who was simply walking with his girlfriend Melissa Butler.

In light of the recent high-profile deadly shootings of innocent people by Minnesota police officers, if Noor is found responsible for wrongfully killing Justine Damond, let's hope the justice system issues more than a dismissed case, hung jury or probation.

The value of a human life merits more than that.

Minneapolis PD - Bullets Over Common Sense?

Justine Damond, 40, shot & killed by a
Minneapolis cop on Saturday - why?

Well it's been all of 25 days since my last post about the alarming rate of unjustified fatal shootings and use of unnecessary physical force by police officers in Minnesota, and once again members of the Minneapolis Police Department are making global headlines for what appears to be yet another killing of an unarmed civilian.

The latest victim is Justine Damond, a 40-year-old woman from Sydney, Australia who was engaged to be married in August to a Minneapolis man named Don Damond.

When I read Gerry Mullany and Isabella Kwai's article in the New York Times this morning it left me feeling sickened and frustrated.

Not at the thousands of members of Minnesota law enforcement who risk their lives to protect the public in accordance with standards of a code of conduct and a sense of professionalism.


What's upsetting is that despite all the media attention and public outrage generated from multiple officers from various police departments in Minnesota choosing to fire their weapons and use deadly force in instances where it was not justified or necessary, innocent people who are unarmed and not threatening the lives of police officers (or anyone else) are still being killed by those sworn to serve and protect.

Remember, in 2015 multiple witnesses claimed that Jamar Clark had both his hands handcuffed behind his back and was lying face down on the ground after a scuffle with paramedics when one of two Minneapolis PD officers, Mark Ringgenberg and Dustin Schwarze, shot him in the head at point blank range.

Just ten days ago it was announced that the city of St. Anthony, Minnesota had agreed to pay former St. Anthony PD officer Jeronimo Yanez a $48,500 severance package as part an agreement for his having been fired for his role in the highly-publicized fatal shooting of school cafeteria manager Philando Castile in 2016 - one of 13 fatal police shootings in Minnesota in 2016.

While Castile did have a handgun on him when he was stopped for a non-working brake light, it was inside the pocket of his shorts and he politely informed Yanez he had the gun on him before Yanez began firing shots directly into the car 74 seconds after pulling Castile over after misidentifying him as a robbery suspect - the permit for the handgun was also found in his pocket after Yanez had fired seven shots.

Despite the video evidence and audio recordings of the shooting, a mostly-white jury found Yanez not guilty and sadly, it looks like race and ethnicity are going to play a role in the death of Justine Damond as well.

Minneapolis PD officer Mohamed Noor

According to an article from local Twin Cities affiliate KSTP, the officer who pulled the trigger and fired the fatal shots has been tentatively identified as Mohamed Noor - a college graduate who joined the force back in 2015.

As many of you know, for years the Minneapolis area has been home to a large population of Somali-born people who've immigrated to the United States.

Noor is reportedly the first police officer of Somali descent to join the Minneapolis PD.


Frankly, having seen so many instances of race playing a factor in the legal outcome of cases of unjustified police shootings when the victim was African-American, it will be interesting to see how the fact that Noor, who is of African descent, and the civilian he shot and killed was a blond-haired white woman, will impact the investigation.

Don't get me wrong, I've made it clear on this blog that I'm of the belief that all police officers should be held legally responsible in cases where a fatal shooting or beating was not justified - particularly in cases where the victim was innocent.

By all accounts, Damond called 911 around 11:27pm Saturday to report a possible assault in an alley near the home she was in - when the squad car arrived, Noor was in the passenger seat when he pointed his weapon and fired across the driver, officer Matthew Harrity, striking and killing Damond.

Did he mistake the cell phone found near her body for a weapon?

Why fire shots at all if he was still sitting in the car?

Minneapolis PD Chief Janee Harteau & Mayor
Betsy Hodges at a press conference

The circumstances of the case are different but it reminds me of 24-year-old college student Jonathan Ferrell being tasered and shot ten times by Charlotte PD officer Randall Kerrick back in 2014 after Ferrell crashed his car.

He saw Kerrick's squad car arrive and walked towards it thinking he was there to help and ended up dead.

Did Damond see the Harrity and Noor's squad car arrive on Saturday night and walk towards it thinking they were there to help her?


Despite calls from outraged neighbors calling for a federal investigation into the shooting, Attorney General Jeff Sessions has made it abundantly clear that the resources of the Justice Department under Trump will not be used to investigate wrongdoing by local police officers.

So this investigation will be conducted by the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and the Minneapolis PD itself.

One question on many people's minds is why officer Noor's police body cam was turned off at the time of the shooting - 600 of the cameras were issued in the wake of the high-profile police shootings that have taken place in Minneapolis since 2012.

What good are those cameras if police officers simply turn them off whenever they want to?

Frankly I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for the Minnesota BCA or the Minneapolis PD to answer that question, their conclusions in cases of unjustified police shootings usually boil down to finding no wrongdoing on the part of officers who choose to use deadly force over common sense.

Whether that trend changes, or a jury feels differently based on the race of both the officer and the victim in this case remains to be seen.

Either outcome could potentially be problematic.

Regardless, Don Damond's son Zach Damond summed up the feelings of millions people about unjustified used of deadly force by police officers both here and around the world when he told reporter's, "This has got to stop. This has got to stop."

Justine Damond, Philando Castile and others deserved better - and members of law enforcement in Minneapolis and around the U.S. need to start holding their professional training and conduct to a higher standard.

The excuse that an officer "feared" for his or her life as a blanket excuse for a bad decision didn't cut it in the case of Philando Castile, and won't cut it in the case of Justine Damond either - yet another death caused by poor decision making and a rush to fire bullets rather than using some common sense.

Aloha Hawaii: Ethnic Diversity & 'Whitewashing' In Hollywood

Korean-American actor Daniel Dae Kim

It wasn't exactly front-page news last week but the recent decision by Korean-American actor Daniel Dae Kim and Canadian-American actress Grace Park to leave the highly-rated CBS reboot of Hawaii Five-O is a stark reminder to the entertainment industry that the issue of pay equity based on ethnicity and gender is not going away anytime soon.

Actress Jennifer Lawrence deserves credit for letting the pay gap-genie out of the bottle with her widely-publicized essay in Lenny Letter in October 2015, but Kim and Park are putting their money where their mouths are.

Since its debut back in 2010, Hawaii Five-O, a smart update of the classic 70's TV series starring Jack Lord that ran from 1968 to 1980, has been a consistent ratings and popular success for CBS - and Daniel Dae Kim and Grace Park have been a big part that.

So their decision to both leave the show after contract negotiations failed to bring their salaries up to parity with the two main stars means they're not only exiting a high-profile show; they're walking away from big salaries as well as lucrative money from residual profits from the show being rebroadcast in syndication.

Granted, after seven years on the show there's little doubt they'll both be getting checks in the mail from Five-O for years, but it says a lot that they're both willing to place the principal of being fairly compensated regardless of their ethnicity, over profits.

As Variety TV critic Sonia Saraiya pointed out in her article last week, for 14 out of the past 15 years more Americans have watched CBS than any other network, and while the two leading (white) actors Alex O'Loughlin and Scott Caan are the highest paid on the show, the storyline of the rebooted Five-O is very much centered on Kim's character Chin Ho Kelly and his fictional cousin Kono played by Grace Park - both characters were in the original series.

Saraiya notes that Kim's character is the only member of the fictional police unit that actually speaks Hawaiian on an Island where almost 60% of the population have some Asian ethnicity.

The Asian characters are central to the show's storyline, and promo and marketing materials often feature Kim and Park alongside O'Loughlin and Caan as a foursome.

CBS marketing campaigns promoted the group as a foursome from the very beginning of the show, as shown by the promo poster (pictured left) from the first season of the show.

It's also important to point out the fact that both Kim and Park were successful actors who'd stood out in ensemble casts on widely-popular television series before being cast in Hawaii Five-O in 2010.

It's fair to say that they both had achieved popularity, and their own fanbases, in front of mainstream American audiences as well.

They weren't just draws for an Asian audience.


Fans of the hugely-popular reboot of the television series Battlestar Galactica will remember Park as Sharon "Boomer" Valerii (and other subsequent "Sharons"...watch the series).

In a large critically-acclaimed cast that included heavyweights like Edward James Olmos and Mary McDonnell, as well as brilliant performances by Katie Sackhoff (who rocks in Longmire), Park definitely stood out in terms of the range of her talent - and obviously her looks, the American-born actress of Korean descent is a former model.

Starting in 1994, Daniel Dae Kim had put together a pretty extensive television resume of his own before he was cast as Jin-Soo Kwon in the ABC hit Lost which aired from 2004 until 2010.

Like Park, he too stood out in a large ensemble cast on a hugely popular show, and he would eventually become one of the more popular and interesting characters on a series with a massive cult following and an enormous cultural footprint.

If you were a fan of Lost you remember his character Jin-Soo Kwon as the lowly fisherman who married way above his station only to become enmeshed in the evil doings of his ruthless corporate crime lord father-in-law.

Kim's character only spoke Korean on the show after being something of a silent enigma initially in a role that had subtlety and depth - it was clear on the show that he was destined for bigger roles.

So CBS deserves credit for casting both him and Park on Hawaii Five-O, but the network has justifiably been on the defensive lately after receiving widespread criticism last week in the wake of Kim's Facebook post in which he essentially announced that he was leaving the show because CBS was paying both him and Park a reported 10 to 15% below what O'Loughlin and Caan were earning.

Lincoln Perry as Steppin Fetchit 

Don't get me wrong I liked Caan in the Ocean's Eleven films, and while CBS had cast the Australian O'Loughlin in a few different series that never quite hit before casting him as the lead in Five-O, outside of his role on The Shield, I'd argue that in terms of overall mainstream popularity, Kim and Park were just as well-known to American audiences as he and Caan.

So it makes CBS's decision not to up their compensation accordingly all the more puzzling - particularly given the network's decision to launch a diversity initiative to nurture and promote more minority talent within its own ranks.

This is not a new battle for the entertainment industry or America for that matter.

And it didn't start with the #OscarsSoWhite social media campaign launched after the 2015 Oscar nominations.

It stretches back to the complex film legacy of African-American actor Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew Perry, better known to audiences by his theatrical stage name "Steppin Fetchit", who became the first person of color to achieve major Hollywood success in the 1930's by playing a character that many considered a degrading racist caricature that promoted negative stereotypes about blacks.

Rex Harrison was cast as the lead in the 1946 film, Anna and the King of Siam, which would famously be rebooted in the film version of Rodger's and Hammerstein's musical The King and I with Yul Brynner playing the lead - as much as I've admired Harrison's performances in films like My Fair Lady and Dr. Doolittle, it's painful to watch him in Anna and the King of Siam because he plays the role as a tired cliche, relying on awkward ethnic stereotypes.

In the 1950's it manifested in Hollywood's decision to cast John Wayne as the 13th century Mongol warlord Genghis Kahn in the 1954 film distributed by RKO, The Conqueror - still widely regarded as one of the film industry's epic casting fails, the big budget Howard Hughes production is ranked as one of the worst films of all time

Remarkably, Wayne actively campaigned hard for that role.

Perhaps he'd been in so many Hollywood westerns where Native Americans had been played by white actors in brown makeup (like John Ford's 1956 masterpiece The Searchers) that he didn't think twice about the broader cultural impact of a white actor donning make up and prosthetics to play an iconic Asian conqueror.

Mickey Rooney as Mr. Yunioshi 

Actor Mickey Rooney was cast as Audrey Hepburn's comically-frustrated (some say racist) Japanese neighbor Mr. Yunioshi in the brilliant 1961 film adaptation of Truman Capote's 1958 novella Breakfast at Tiffany's.

A role that director Blake Edwards obviously intended as over-the-top comedy that's now seen by many as an extension of the kind of degrading "Yellow menace" stereotypes of Japanese people that were so common in print, cartoons and films in America during World War II.

White actors playing Asian characters has come to be known as "Yellowface".

A play on the term "Blackface" used to describe white actors who used to play black people by putting on black makeup.


In various forms, Yellowface continues to be an ongoing issue in major Hollywood productions, spurred not by any lack of qualified and talented Asian or Asian-American actors.

It's largely the result of the mostly white male directors, producers, casting agents, marketing executives and agents responsible for making the decision to cast more well-known white actors in roles written for people of Asian descent on the premise that it will "boost box office draw for mainstream audiences."

You may recall the controversy that surrounded director Cameron Crowe's decision to cast Emma Stone as Allison Ng in the 2015 film Aloha; a character who was Hawaiian and 1/4 Asian with a father who was half Chinese.

Josh Duboff's June 3, 2015 article in Vanity Fair offers an excellent summary of the controversy as well as the text of Cameron Crowe's heartfelt apology and explanation for the casting decision that generated such negative buzz for Aloha and led to it bombing at the box office for Sony.

As much as I admire Emma Stone and Bradley Cooper (who co-starred in Aloha) as actors, the reality is that the both of them are A-Lister's who are going to get the lion's choice of the quality scripts that come down the pipeline in Hollywood; based not only on their talent and looks, but on the fact that the bulk of the roles in those scripts are going to be written for white people.

So given the startling lack of quality roles for Asian-Americans and Asians in mainstream Hollywood films and television, one would think that Sony would have actively looked to cast an actress of Asian descent for the role of Allison Ng - because it would have served the story better in terms of authenticity and because it's good for the industry as a whole.

Tilda Swinton & the Ancient One, the Asian character
she was cast to play in 2016's Dr. Strange  

More recently the issue came up again in 2016 with the release of the box office smash film adaptation of the Marvel comic Dr. Strange.

The powers that be at Walt Disney Studios and Marvel Studios made the decision to cast the enigmatic British actress / performance artist Tilda Swinton as the Ancient One.

An ancient Asian sorcerer who taught Dr. Strange who is central to the story.


For years the character in the Marvel comic book has been an elderly Asian man, and certainly there are scores of Asian male actors who could have owned that role in the film.

But Marvel Studios decided to cast the Nordic-blonde Swinton, and make the Ancient One a somewhat androgynous Celtic character.

Which, in terms of cross-gender casting is fine, but why?

Did making the Ancient One a Celtic woman make Dr. Strange a better story?

It'll be a long time before we see an elderly blond female character be played by a young Asian male actor in a major Hollywood production.

Margaret Cho

Comedian / writer Margaret Cho penned an open letter to Swinton accusing her of being complicit in the 'Whitewashing' of a character who should have been Asian.

The letter was published in the Hollywood Reporter and offers a piercing critique and insightful analysis of how the film and television industry perceives and treats Asians - maybe CBS execs should have read it before letting Daniel Dae Kim and Grace Park go from Hawaii Five-O over a few measly dollars.


Don't get me wrong, I don't think the executives at CBS responsible for this were being intentionally racist or ethnically insensitive.

But I do believe the current state of diversity in mainstream film and TV should have better informed their decision.

Interested in some more perspective on this issue?

Read "What It's Really Like to Work In Hollywood (If You're Not a Straight White Man)", an article in the New York Times by Melena Ryzik from 2016 that offers some unique insights from 27 different men and women who've that found success in the industry is a complex and often rocky road.

Their real-life observations bring home the harsh reality of the specter of ethnically diverse casting decisions that reflect the broader diversity of the American film audience that has loomed over Hollywood for years.

Compensating talent fairly regardless of gender or ethnicity is yet another unpleasant chapter of a long story that has thus far had a decidedly non-Hollywood ending.

Perhaps the courageous decision by Daniel Dae Kim and Grace Park will mark a change in a story arc that needs a major plot change.