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Stonewall director: ‘Straight-acting’ white hero appeals to wider audience
Roland Emmerich has said he made the Stonewall film about a fictional straight-acting white man, Danny, to appeal to a wider audience.
Since the trailer was released last month, the the openly gay director has been criticized for whitewashing and erasing the drag queens and transgender women of color who started the 1969 riots.
The film premiered at the Toronto Film Festival last week and had a 3.6/10 rating on IMDB and 11% rating on Rotten Tomatoes at the time of writing.
One particularly scathing review in Vanity Fair said ‘Stonewall is terribly offensive, and offensively terrible.’
‘Turns out, Stonewall is perhaps even worse than some feared it would be – more offensive, more white-washed, even more hackishly made,’ reviewer Richard Lawson wrote.
‘What this really is, I think, is the filmmakers tending to their personal preferences and prejudices, and then blaming the system. Darn it, this is how it has to be, because that’s how the world is,’ he continued.
‘We simply must redirect as much history as possible through a white, bizarrely heteronormative lens, or else, the thinking goes, no one will care. People like Emmerich throw up their hands at this supposed inevitability and say, “That’s just the way it is.”‘
And that’s exactly how he did respond in an interview with Buzzfeed.
‘Some people warned me,’ Emmerich said. ‘But I said, “Well, you know, so be it.”‘
‘You have to understand one thing: I didn’t make this movie only for gay people, I made it also for straight people,’ he continued.
‘I kind of found out, in the testing process, that actually, for straight people, [Danny] is a very easy in. Danny’s very straight-acting. He gets mistreated because of that. [Straight audiences] can feel for him.’
He added: ‘As a director you have to put yourself in your movies, and I’m white and gay.’
Stonewall hits US theaters on Friday (25 September).
Watch the trailer below:
The post Stonewall director: ‘Straight-acting’ white hero appeals to wider audience appeared first on Gay Star News.
Darren Wee
www.gaystarnews.com/article/stonewall-director-straight-acting-white-hero-appeals-to-wider-audience/
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