Tropic Thunder’ Director/Star Ben Stiller Says Disability Advocates’ Planned Boycott Is Unwarranted
“It’s sort of edgy territory, but we felt that as long as the focus was on the actors who were trying to do something to be taken seriously that’s going too far or wrong, that was where the humor would come from,” Stiller insisted. “[The joke is on] actors reaching for roles in terms of hopefully winning awards.”
“Some people have taken this as making fun of handicapped people, but we’re really trying to make fun of the actors who use this material as fodder for acclaim,” co-writer Etan Cohen echoed to MTV. “The last thing you want is for people to think you’re making fun of the victims in this who are having their lives turned into fodder for people to win Oscars.”
The joke, then, is really on people like Dustin Hoffman (“Rain Man”), Sean Penn, (“I Am Sam”) and Tom Hanks (“Forrest Gump”), actors who do more harm than good by denying the painful realities of the illness and instead paint their characters as too sunny or bright, Cohen said.
Uhm, bad job dude.
Links to read:
What ‘Tropic Thunder’ Thinks Is Funny: Tim Shriver’s Op-ed in the Washington Post
Tim Shriver is chairman of Special Olympics and a columnist for washingtonpost.com’s On Faith discussion site.
