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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   32785 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 12, 2023

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John Grisham, the author of the book, is from Arkansas and Mississippi. He's not a Hollywood liberal.

That said, the description of the movie does sound like a Hollywood liberal adapted the book.

He's not a Hollywood liberal.

Not geographically, but his politics seem to be roughly standard Hollywood liberalism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Grisham#Political_activism

Opposing the death penalty, while also writing a sympathetic novel about black-on-white vigilante murder (race-swapping a real case) is also an amusing position.

His current political activism isn't super relevant to a book he wrote in 1989. Other plot points in the book that I think got removed from the Hollywood version:

  • This town elected a black sheriff who was respected by everyone.

  • The part of jury selection that was harmful wasn't that they were all white, but that they were white women.

At least based on my recollection of Grisham books from the 90's, I doubt he'd be taking the modern liberal position of "Fry Jose Alba".

https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/new-video-shows-girlfriend-stab-nyc-bodega-worker-after-confrontation-turned-deadly/3769959/

I doubt he'd be taking the modern liberal position of "Fry Jose Alba".

Who is saying that?

Left wing Soros prosecutors. Presumably the left wing voters who put them in office.

Screenplay by Akiva Goldsman from New York.

an infamous hack, even among hack Hollywood writers

A Beautiful Mind was okay, I guess.

I don't know anything about the production of the movie, but remember reading the book some time back in the late 90s / early 2000s because it was in a pile of cheap paper-backs and I was looking for something to read on a cross-country flight. I'm pretty sure I've caught bits of the movie on cable over the years but have never sat down and watched it start to finish. It would not surprise me at all to find out that Grisham wrote a story that was intended to harken back to the bad old days of "strange fruit" and the producers simply set it in [current year] out of laziness and because Hollywood.

I can say that FWIW Southern Alabama actually struck me as substantially less racist than California or anywhere in the northeast both when I was stationed there in the early 00s and when I went back there for work in the mid 10s.

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