Wednesday,
July 02, 2008
Muslims Teach Italian Americans How To
Fight Sterotypes in Film
The
ANNOTICO Report
For
at least 8 years now I have been telling Italian American Groups that one of
the principle ways to combat Italian Negative Stereotyping in Film and TV would be to insist on talking to, or promoting
activism in
Others
insisted on fighting the battle Long Distance from
How
successful have they been ???
If
you want to influence Legislation,
On
the other hand, CAIR
(The Council on American
Islamic Relations), the most
vocal of any US lobby group representing either Middle Easterners or Muslims
convinced The Writers Guild
in Hollywood with
backing from the prominent Washington think tank the Brookings Institution , recently hosted a Panel of Writers,
Producers and Filmmakers IN
HOLLYWOOD to discuss ways of breaking the stereotypical
portrayal of Muslims.
The consensus was
clear: Hollywood has dealt in stereotypes for far too long, just as previous generations of filmmakers
stereotyped Italians as gangsters Howard Gordon, the
creator and executive producer of the television terrorist drama 24,
preached with the ardour of someone recently
converted about the responsibilities he now feels. Fear sells. It
does, he acknowledged. We need to be mindful of it.
To
the credit of many Mid Easterners, they refused parts that negatively portrayed
Muslims, or persuaded the producer to make the part more human, and well
rounded. Only were our Italian American writers, actors, directors,
producers more activist!!!
Operation Stereotype
TheNational,AE
Andrew
Gumbel
July
01. 2008
Omar
Berdouni plays a hijacker in Paul Greengrass's
United 93, which chronicles events from September 11. Siemoneit Ronald / Corbis Sygma
A few years ago,
when Ahmed Ahmed was a young Egyptian-American actor
struggling to make a name for himself in
She told him that if he didn't change his name, he didn?t stand a chance. "If you don't call yourself
Ricky, or Matt, or Dave," she said, "you're never going to get work
except as a terrorist."
Ahmed chose not
to listen even though, in his words, he was so short of work he felt he
"couldn't even get himself arrested" as an actor. "I'm never
going to change my name. It's my birth name, my given name," he said.
"I thought, if I have to wait until the world is ready to have a performer
called Ahmed Ahmed, then so be it. I'll wait."
It is no secret that
That, though, may
be changing. Growing numbers of performers such as Ahmed are refusing to take
parts that demean them and, instead, are launching themselves with their own
material and promoting a more nuanced, more positive public image of Middle
Easterners and Middle Eastern-Americans.
After years of setbacks and frustration, the gamble appears to be paying off.
Ahmed has a thriving career as an actor (he appeared in Iron Man, and in the
Adam Sandler vehicle You Don't Mess With the Zohan),
and as a stand-up comedian. He is part of the Axis of Evil comedy troupe that
recently toured the Gulf and has earned enough positive attention in the United
States to earn him a slot on Jay Leno's Tonight Show on CBS television, a
featured slot on Vince Vaughn's Wild West Comedy Show and a regular headline
gig at the Comedy Store, one of Los Angeles' premier stand-up venues.
It's a similar
story with Ahmed's fellow Axis of Evil comedian Maz Jobrani, an Iranian-American who grew up wanting to be
Tony, John Travolta's character from Saturday Night
Fever, but found, in the early going of his career, that the casting directors
were only interested in casting him as "Mohammed or Abdul".
Jobrani's moment of truth came when he was cast in a
Chuck Norris movie of the week as an Afghan-American who plans to blow up a
building but is thwarted by the steely resolve of Norris's law enforcement
hero. The film was shot before September 11 but aired shortly afterwards " causing Jobrani to
fear what might happen if someone recognised him on
the street and confused him with his on-screen character. "I was freaked
out," he said. "I mean, people were shooting Sikhs because they were
wearing turbans."
So he told his agent:
no more terrorists. "I don't need to play these parts," he said.
"You want to see that, just turn on CNN and you'll see it- It just feels
icky. It does. You feel like you are selling out."
Since then, Jobrani has developed something of a
reputation for the parts he has turned down. He didn't want to be in United 93,
Paul Greengrass's reconstruction of the final moments
aboard the hijacked plane that ended up crashing in a field in
And he has done
just fine for himself. He played a secret service agent in The Interpreter, the
United Nations thriller starring Sean Penn and Nicole Kidman, whose ethnicity
is only incidental to his character. His comedy career, like Ahmed's, is
soaring. And he is developing a lot of his own material.
He has just sold a television series to CBS that he describes as a sort of
Iranian Everybody Loves Raymond, centring on a man in his thirties who can't get away from
his crazy family. And he has written a comic film script called Johnny Vestvood, American Hero, about a modest Iranian American
rug salesman who lives with his mother (Westwood " with w's instead of v's "
being an Iranian-intensive neighbourhood in Los
Angeles) but dreams of becoming a superman like the lead characters in American
films and television series.
It's not just the
Middle Eastern-American performers who are sensing it is time for a change in
The Writers Guild in Hollywood - with backing from the prominent
Washington think tank the Brookings Institution, and from the television
producer and political fund-raiser extraordinaire Haim
Saban - recently hosted a panel of writers,
producers and filmmakers to discuss ways of breaking the stereotypical
portrayal of Muslims.
The consensus was
clear:
Nobody epitomised the realisation more
than Howard Gordon, the creator and executive producer of the nail-biting
television terrorist drama 24, who preached with the ardour
of someone recently converted about the responsibilities he now feels.
"Fear sells. It does," he acknowledged. "We need to be mindful
of it."
The moment he became mindful himself was during the second season of 24, in
2002. The plot line of the series focused on a suspect Middle Eastern family,
and Fox's marketing department arranged for a giant billboard to be erected
above
The Council on
American Islamic Relations, perhaps the most vocal of any
That same season,
Maz Jobrani was hired to
play a character called Marko " the last
terrorist part he has played " and it was obvious to him the
producers were getting more nuanced in their thinking. Marko was part of a crew
delivering a truck bomb, only to have a change of heart when they see children
playing at the site where they intend to detonate their load. "They decide
they don't want to do it, which is kind of cool," Jobrani
said. "That was OK."
Gordon's change
of heart was, in part, a business decision. He too had noticed that
Arab-American performers were turning down parts in his and other shows, and he
knew that the pool of Middle Eastern actors was not so huge in Los Angeles that
he could afford to ignore the ones who didn't want to stand up and utter the
ultimate clichid line: "In the name of Allah, I
will kill you all."
He made sure he listened to the performers he did hire, so at least some of
their suggestions for making their characters better-rounded would make it into
the completed show. And he realised it was also
important to cast Middle Eastern-Americans in parts where their ethnicity is
not necessarily a determining factor - as doctors, or telephone
operators, or teachers.
By now, Gordon is
front and centre - along with the politically conscious film production
company Participant Media, which made Syriana and The
Kite Runner - in an effort to wake up
The idea is to promote a series of dialogues with writers at which experts
on various aspects of Middle Eastern culture could explain how the practice of
Islam works, or how day-to-day life operates in
Not everyone at
the forum " which was called Rewriting the Divide:
Many in the
audience also felt that a writer serious about depicting Middle Eastern
characters would know how to do his or her own research and wouldn't need a
helpline. The problem, rather, was that the writers peddling in stereotypes
just didn,t care about
getting it right.
Everyone at the forum agreed, however, that the ignorance of American audiences
about Middle Eastern culture was both breathtaking and disturbing. Dalia Mogahed, a researcher with the Gallup polling organisation who wrote a recent book titled Who Speaks
for Islam?, said that when she asked Muslims around the world what they most
admired about the United States, they generally pointed to the country's
political freedoms and its technological savvy - two things they would
like more of for themselves. When she asked Americans what they most admired
about the Muslim world, their two most common answers were "nothing"
and "I don't know".
That's not all
Take a film such as American Dreamz (2006) which recently
aired in heavy rotation on the cable station HBO. The plot centres
on a television talent show very much like American Idol, and on two members of
the same Arab family who end up competing to participate. One of them "
naturally " turns out to be a terrorist who only wants to get on the
show so he can blow it up and kill an eccentric US president who has decided
the best way to shore up his failing popularity ratings is to appear as a guest
judge.
According to Jack
Shaheen, a Lebanese-American university professor who
has made a career of cataloguing Middle Eastern stereotypes in books like Reel
Bad Arabs and his latest, Guilty, told me American Dreamz
was actually pretty tame compared with some of the insidious nonsense out
there. One thing, though, was particularly striking about the film: of the
numerous members of the Arab family at the heart of the plot, only one was
played by an actual Arab, the Lebanese American actor Tony Yalda. The rest were mostly Iranians, with one Indian
actress, Noureen DeWolf, playing
Yalda's sister.
Shaheen saw several possible
reasons for this sort of casting choice. Either Arab-Americans
didn't want to play these parts, or the producers weren't interested in casting
Arabs - someone with brown skin was good enough. Or something sneakier
might be at work. "Producers and directors may want to avoid Arab-American
actors," he said, "to avoid alerting the community that the film
contains damaging stereotypes."
Those stereotypes
have now become so pronounced that some Arab-American performers are now
being told they don't look Arab enough. "They want ugly," said Nicole
Pano, the Palestinian-American actress who happens to
be good-looking. "They want us to play terrorists, and terrorists are
ugly." (She has had more luck playing Italians, happily going along with
the fiction that because her last name ends in "o", she must be
Italian herself.)
One casting
director who specialises in casting Middle
Easterners, Jane Sobo, said she had an Algerian
client who had great difficulty getting work because of his "almost
feminine- facial features. "He is not booking
roles because his face is not swarthy enough to intimidate lily white
audiences," she said.
This is the atmosphere that has prompted Ahmed, Jobrani
and others to strike out on their own. Ahmed sees a dual opportunity for a new
kind of film and television in the
Others seem to be
moving in the same direction. Jonathan Friedlander, a Middle East expert at the
"We want to
pioneer a new outlook on
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