Am I being asked to believe that Training Day was racially progressive
in some way? That a movie ending with gang members saving Ethan Hawk
took moral courage to make? Or just that it was a risky business
decision? Or that studios aren't racist, they just do what is profitable?
Louis Schwartz
> But for all that, both Michael and Clark have a piece of the truth.
> Clark's defense of Hollywood might have been termed a bit better, in
> that
> the studios' decisions are business decisions above all, decisions
> based on
> mostly gut instincts about what the market will bear. The recent
> expansion
> of multi-racial casting, for example, is not really the result of
> political
> pressure from groups and organizations, though the pressure was surely
> felt.
> Rather, the studios saw that audiences were open to multiple colors
> represented on screen, that the hero could be black, and the white
> audience
> wouldn't mind. Even more, the black hero could be a bad-ass, like Denzel
> Washington in ``Training Day,'' and white audiences would actually turn
> up.
>
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