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1921
2022
The Whitewash
By Siang Lu (2022, UQP)
From the less-talented co-creator of The Beige Index (ed note. Hey, fuck you!): The Whitewash.
Siang Lu's searing debut is a black comedy about the whitewashing of the Asian film industry, told in the form of an oral documentary
It sounded like a good idea at the time- 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, who, let's be honest, is not the sharpest tool in the shed, but probably the hottest, Brood Empire was basically a sure thing. Until it wasn't.
So how did it all fall apart? There were smart guys involved. So smart, so woke. So woke it hurts. There was topnotch talent across the board and the financial backing of a heavyweight Chinese studio. And yet, Brood Empire is remembered now not as a historical landmark of Asian representation that smashed the bamboo ceiling in Hollywood, but rather as a fiasco of seismic proportions.
The Whitewash is the definitive oral history of the whole sordid mess. Unofficial. Unasked for. Only intermittently fact-checked, and featuring a fool's gallery of actors, producers, directors, film historians and scummy click-bait journalists, to answer the question of how it all went so horribly, horribly wrong.
The Whitewash, written by Siang Lu (2022) is not ranked on the IMDb Top 250. Trust us. We checked.
SCORE: BEIGE FEVER
Cast
of the Top 250's credited cast lands in the palest band of the beige scale.
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The beige-o-meter
Each credited cast member is coded 1–5. Averaged across the cast, a film lands somewhere on this scale.
The Oscars, but beige
How diverse were the 2023 Best Picture nominees?
The Whitewash
The award-winning novel by co-creator Siang Lu.
