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To: Poet who wrote (5386)	3/29/2002 1:08:36 PM
From: jlallen	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 21057

Hey! I was reasonable.... So was Bill for that matter...

To: Poet who wrote (5386)	3/29/2002 1:42:06 PM
From: Lazarus_Long	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 21057

Oh, come now, Poet. A woman gets up on one of the most watched programs on national TV and bitches, moans, and whines about discrimination as she receives one of the most valuable honors in the world. A columnist writes a column criticizing her statements that is published in newspapers that 2% of the people who saw that TV program will read. And he's being a boor. Gimme a break. These days, racism is so much more subtle. Yes, any, even the slightest, disagreement with the politically correct viewpoint that blacks are always victims and whites are always brutal exploiters brands you as one of the brutal exploiters.

To: Poet who wrote (5386)	3/29/2002 5:33:28 PM
From: E	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 21057

<Plenty of black filmmakers with money? I can think of only a handful, Spike Lee leading the pack.> You don't have to be a black filmmaker, ie director, such as Spike Lee, to make a film starring a black actress in a serious, Academy Award-type role. You just have to have the script and the financial backing. The financial backing is the problem. I'm saying that there is a lot of money in Hollywood for films, and millions of dollars of it is in the hands of black people whose capital does the same as does the capital of white people: it looks for places to go to make the most money out of money that it can. If either whites or blacks with money in America believed that there was a good risk/reward gamble to be taken on any particular film starring a black actress or a giraffe or a Martian, they'd put their money there. And that if neither multimillionaire black investors nor multimillionaire white investors have put their capital to work funding films offering good roles for black actresses, it's for the same reason: they think they'd be likelier to lose their money than to make more of it. I agree -- before the 1960's the calculations might not have occurred to anyone to make. But I do not believe, personally, that any consideration other than profitability (or ability to detect potential profitability that was in fact there) has barred black actresses from great roles in recent times. And again: Black capital as well as white has not sought out films it believed would be unprofitable. It's not irrelevant to the kinds of calculations made by capitalists looking to invest in a film, that "serious" films, even those starring black actors, attract only a small percentage of black moviegoers. Spike Lee's audiences, for example, are predominantly white. A Jewish friend told me that Poitier had thanked many of the backers of his early films, and that many of those had been Jewish. This reminds me that there has always been a liberal Hollywood contingent that I believe would have been willing to star anyone regardless of race if, like Sidney Poitier's, their movies could have been expected to make money. So basically, I'm happy if the best actress won, and don't buy that, recently, racism on the part of Hollywood producers, as opposed to the logic of capital and markets, has determined who starred in what roles. Between the lines here is that it may well be that racism on the part of audiences figures in the casting choices and the prospects for black-themed movies, in that if audiences won't go (black or white), the movies won't be made.