How about Uma Thurman?
This could be an apocryphal or exaggerated story, but if not…
A Hollywood executive wanted Julia Roberts to portray Harriet Tubman in the leading abolitionist’s biopic, the screenwriter of the new film “Harriet” said.
After studying Tubman’s life in college, about how she helped lead enslaved people to freedom on the Underground Railroad, screenwriter Gregory Allen Howard was determined to adapt her story into a feature film, he said in an interview with Focus Features, the distributor of “Harriet.”
When he met with a studio president about the idea in 1994, his script garnered praise, Howard wrote in an essay in the Los Angeles Times. It also received a casting suggestion.
“Let’s get Julia Roberts to play Harriet Tubman,” the executive told Howard.
Howard said the one other black person in the meeting said that would be impossible, as Julia Roberts is white.
The president replied, “That was so long ago. No one will know that,” Howard wrote.
But…what would the plot be then? Harriet Tubman spends a weekend with Richard Gere in an expensive hotel? Harriet Tubman meets scruffy bookseller Hugh Grant and his eccentric Welsh flatmate? Harriet Tubman dies young leaving her mother Sally Fields bereft but plucky?
Julia Roberts? Please. Charlize Theron or Meryl Streep could play the hell out of that role.
/s
If they just never heard of Harriet Tubman and didn’t realize she was black, that would be one thing. But how can you read the script, and not realize that she’s black and that that’s crucial to her life story since she was a slave and all?
I think the guy just said “great script” since everybody else was without having read it.
All I can come up with is he was thinking “This Tubman character helped slaves escape, a very nice big-hearted white person could do that.”
I say “he” but perhaps the studio president was a woman –
Hahahaha just kidding.
It strikes me as bloody typical of Hollywood, and the ignorance and cynicism of a certain kind of film-maker. I recommend the British playwright Martin Crimp’s play ‘The Treatment’, which addresses this sort of thing. Crimp, by the way, is a wonderful playwright, and wrote the libretto for the superb opera (music by George Benjamin) ‘Written on Skin’. I helped to coach the very good Japanese soloists in a semi-staged production in Tokyo last summer. There was a wonderful American baritone flown in, along with a good Danish soprano, as well.