“If Jean Claude Van Damme was a key plank in the lucrative bridge between East and West, then another man, a bearer of similar martial artist as leading man legacy, was building a different bridge… that man was Brandon Lee. The Crow was the shockingly prescient template for everything that was to follow in modern action films. It had a movie star..who not only looked the part but was the part.”
So writes Eric Dutton, Adjunct Professor of Chinese Cultural Studies, one of the many voices heard in THE WHITEWASH, Siang Lu’s astonishing non fiction dissertation on the whitewashing of Asian roles in Hollywood.
Erasing the Asian and replacing with Caucasian seems to be the sad and sorry history of Western cinema and the East are still waiting for the apology.
While they’re waiting, it’s time to hook up the woke wagon. Not quite Henry Golding as James Bond, but nonetheless a Hollywood spy thriller, starring, for the first time in history, an Asian male lead. With an estimated $350 million production budget and up-and-coming Hong Kong actor JK Jr, Brood Empire was going to set the box office ablaze. Instead it becomes a bamboozling bomb, as hollow as bamboo.
THE WHITEWASH purports to be the definitive oral history of the whole sordid mess, featuring a Heaven’s Gate cavalcade of entrants including errant actors, inept producers, a film historian, click-bait journalists, and a social media sleeping beauty that dwarfs belief.
Totally bonkers, serious in scholarship and packed with pun in cheek playfulness – “So while I was in panic rooms, Jodie Foster went away, silent as a lamb” – THE WHITEWASH is a book about movies just waiting to be booked for a movie. A mischievous hoot.
THE WHITEWASH by Siang Lu is published by University of Queensland Press
