Casting fail incident in The Hobbit.

[mijan]

This is relevant to our interests:

(Taken directly from THIS article in Entertainment Weekly)
"A casting agent working on director Peter Jackson’s adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit was fired from the production after placing ads in a regional New Zealand newspaper seeking extras with “light skin tones,” according to Agence France-Presse."

The issue was brought to light when a woman of Pakistani heritage wanted to become a background extra as a Hobbit, and was told succinctly that they were only looking for (quote) "light-skinned people."

"...video footage shows the casting agent telling people at an audition, 'We are looking for light-skinned people. I’m not trying to be … whatever. It’s just the brief. You’ve got to look like a Hobbit.'"  (So, the casting guy was caught directly on tape saying this.  His words.)

And a more detailed article on Google news.

And on the Atlantic Wire.

This... shall be interesting.  They're saying the casting agent was NOT told to discriminate by race, and he's been fired.  I wonder - was he really acting on his own?  Was he sacrificed for the PR?  What were his instructions for casting?  What does a Hobbit look like anyway?  (Yes, we have the description from the books, which describes short folks with big feet and curly brown hair, but no specific racial indicators beyond that.)  I wonder how fandom will react.  Thoughts, anyone?

(Edited title to avoid misinterpretation.)

Comments

[furiosity.livejournal.com]

What do you mean by curious? A racist asshat was fired for being a racist asshat. What's curious about that?

[mijan.livejournal.com]

Curious as to how fandom will perceive the overall situation - was this a solitary racist asshat, or was he instructed to find light-skinned people and now the producers/directors are scrambling to cover their PR-tarnished asses? There's the obvious bullshittery and racism, but I wonder what happened behind the scenes. How much of this is backpedaling. Or was it really just one asswipe being an asswipe? I'm also curious about how the fans will react to the incident alone and to the franchise as a whole. Perhaps curious is the wrong word for a header.

Lemme rephrase the header.

[furiosity.livejournal.com]

Wait, what does it matter? Even if he was instructed to find light-skinned people, that the higher-ups still immediately realised that they've fucked up -- that's a good thing, considering what Racebending.com had to go through to even be noticed by the asshole casting director for the TLA movie.

It really doesn't matter to me if some dude is fired because he did a racist thing at his own discretion or because he's having to take the fall for a production company's fail. If he was personally anti-racist and ~forced into being racist by his bosses, bawwww~, what the fuck stopped him from going to Wingnut Prod and saying "dudes and dudettes, this is racist and wrong, so can I please do it another way?". If one complaint from a woman of colour was all it took for Wingnut to fire his ass, clearly it's the sort of company that is willing to consider these issues quickly -- whether sincerely or out of a desire to appear PC, it doesn't matter in this context.

Why is anyone supposed to give a shit about this guy's personal virtue? No matter what the background, what he did was racist. He could have chosen not to do it even if he'd been ~told by his superiors~; he didn't choose that.

[mijan.livejournal.com]

There was definitely a very improved reaction time from the higher ups. And it's definitely being handled better than the Airbender racefail. I'm impressed that they responded to the incident this quickly. I also hope they end up casting the woman as a Hobbit extra, especially after she went through that.

I do think there's a difference of whether he was fired because he was following someone else's instructions, or if he was acting on his own judgment of what a Hobbit "should" look like. In casting, the agents ARE told what to look for, and their only job is to fill the request. Sometimes, ethnicity is part of what they're looking for in a casting call, so there's a chance he didn't even think it was odd because it's so common to head-hunt based on appearance. (It's Hollywood, after all - EVERYTHING is about appearance.) It's the nature of the job. He may have thought he had firmly in his mind what the directors were looking for, and was trying to fill it. I can honestly see why, IF he was following instructions, he might not have seen the inherent racism in the situation.

Ideally, instead of just turning the woman away, if he wasn't sure, he should have contacted the director/producer folks and asked for clarification, then challenged them if they told him "light-skinned only." Sadly, more people are inclined to just plow through and not think.

So if someone else told him what to look for, but then they pulled a PR stunt when someone took them to task on it... it's a different sort of problem in my eyes. And, of course, if he was acting completely on his own and adding his own racial restrictions to the casting instructions, THEN he got exactly what he deserved.

But with casting... it's really common to be hunting for a certain look, and race can be part of it. It's not lack of virtue - it's the nature of the job to find exactly what the directors/producers want.

tl:dr:
It was a definite fail, but I'm glad they resolved it quickly. It's being handled much better than the Airbender fail. I hope the woman gets the job if she still wants it. I still wonder where the blame lies, and wonder how fandom will react. And I'm sad that this will taint the movie in my mind when I go to watch it.

I hope that made some sense.

[furiosity.livejournal.com]

Dude. He is not in the army. He does not have to follow the orders of his superiors no matter what he thinks. There is no excuse for what he did. If the production company wonks are a bunch of lying sacks of shit and are throwing him under the bus, that's unfortunate for everyone involved.

But I really, really do not see why it's relevant who REALLY is to blame. We could argue back and forth and arrive at the conclusion that no one really is to blame, all these poor little white people involved are just victims of being raised in a society that makes it impossible not to be racist, but that would just be bullshit and I'm pretty sure you know it.

Why is blame so important to you in this situation? I really don't get it. What matters to me here is that this person said and did really offensive racist shit; whether he ~really meant it or not~, I really don't give a fuck; he's not my friend.

[midnight-birth.livejournal.com]

Not to drive by your conversation, but I think it's important to know whether he was told this or did this of his own accord because he should have gotten fired either way, but the people who told him to do this (which, in my opinion, is very likely in the industry) should get fired too. It's common in the face of scandal to make someone the big sacrificial goat, but that's how a lot of people get away with things like this, since once the person directly responsible is dealt with, people stop asking further.

[furiosity.livejournal.com]

This is a good point, except a production company can't really fire itself from a film project, I don't think. *headscratch*