Leonard Bernstein had a wildly successful career as a conductor and composer who made it his mission to make classical music accessible to a wide range of people, especially young people. He was also, by all accounts, a flamboyant and charismatic figure and so it was inevitable that there would be a biopic of him some day and that day has arrived with the release of the new film Maestro starring Bradley Cooper as Bernstein. Cooper also co-wrote the screenplay and produced and directed it so it was clearly a project that meant a lot to him personally.
This review praises the film and I will likely watch it when it appears on a streaming service.
There have been a few controversies about the film, once again dealing with the issue of representation. Some have criticized the fact that while Bernstein was Jewish, Cooper is not and that while Bernstein was bisexual, Cooper is straight. But the most difficult controversy to deal with was that Cooper had a prosthetic larger nose put on as make up to make him look more like Bernstein, resulting in Cooper even being accused of being anti-Semitic.
These are really tricky issues to navigate.
As to the first two issues of Jewishness and sexuality, I have written before that big-name actors playing characters that are different from them in various categories is problematic if by doing so they are depriving lesser-known actors who belong to those categories of the few roles that are available to them. So able-bodied actors playing disabled characters is problematic. White actors playing people of color is problematic. So are Jewish and bisexual/gay actors being deprived of rare acting opportunities by Cooper?
Leonard Bernstein in rehearsal, c. 1958. Library Tag 08212005 City Weekly
Actors portraying real-life people often go to extreme lengths to try and make themselves look physically like the character they are playing. Cooper was trying to look like Bernstein. If Bernstein had not been Jewish then Cooper using a nose prosthetic to look like him would have not been at all controversial, any more than wearing a wig or glasses or putting on or losing weight or all the other things actors do to increase verisimilitude. In fact, Bernstein’s children have said that they had no problems with how Cooper was made up to look like their father.
Bernstein’s three children – Jamie, Alexander and Nina Bernstein – on Wednesday issued a statement supporting Cooper, saying they were “touched to the core to witness the depth of (Cooper’s) commitment, his loving embrace of our father’s music and the sheer open-hearted joy he brought to his exploration.”
“It breaks our hearts to see any misrepresentations or misunderstandings of his efforts,” the statement said. “It happens to be true that Leonard Bernstein had a nice, big nose. Bradley chose to use makeup to amplify his resemblance, and we’re perfectly fine with that. We’re also certain that our dad would have been fine with it as well.”
The Bernstein children added that “strident complaints about this issue strike us above all as disingenuous attempts to bring a successful person down a notch – a practice we observed perpetrated all too often on our father.”
Although I have seen many photographs and videos of Bernstein, enough to make him instantly recognizable, until this controversy arose, it had not struck me that he had a particularly large nose.
There are those who will object to your characterization of Bernstein as bisexual. People close to him considered him a gay man who married a woman. Funny old world.
I’ve seen a couple of stills from the movie, and I thought Cooper looked ridiculous with that obviously fake nose stuck to his face. Is it insensitive? I don’t know. Maybe. What I do know is that I could not watch that film without being distracted throughout by that exaggerated proboscis. The nose jokes would never stop.
The Onion has already run an article about this, with Bernstein’s children confirming that their father did, in fact, wear a giant prosthetic nose.
This is the funniest thing I’ve read this year. So few opportunities in showbusiness for Jewish people and gay people, how ever will they survive?
It’s also an excellent example of one of the most pernicious forms of policing, the weaponised accusation of anti-semitism. There are few things more toxic to a career than an accusation of anti-semitism (see: the career of Mel Gibson), apart perhaps from an accusation of paedophilia.
I am, however, happily put in mind of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyQvjKqXA0Y
@ Rob Grigjanis, 1:
Yeah, but then there are “those who will object” to fucking anything. Best just ignore them.
Surely acting is about pretending to be someone else, unless the actor is portraying themself. That’s the whole point!
Hm.
Is disabled actors playing able-bodied characters similarly problematic?
Is people of color playing white actors similarly problematic?
What?
John @#4,
Right before the sentences you quote, I wrote that “I have written before that big-name actors playing characters that are different from them in various categories is problematic if by doing so they are depriving lesser-known actors who belong to those categories of the few roles that are available to them.”
So the two cases you cite are not problematic, since there is no shortage of roles for able-bodied white actors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Converse_(logic)
Mano, I confess I had not realised that was the explicit justification, I thought it was the first part of a listing. I get it now. Maybe yes, maybe no. Depends on the relative degree of fame given both actors could play the role.
Jewish actors are hardly “deprived” of roles, and it’s simply a fact that the dude had a large-ish nose. Rarely have I seen a group so bent on being the victim…
#9 WMDKitty
But jews aren’t the ones doing the complaining here. It is that most tedious creature, the performative ally, doing all the complaining that I have seen. It’s how they both display and prove their allyship credentials.
>
You know, I did wonder if you were like a stopped clock, whether at some point you’d accidentally post something actually interesting by accident. And here we are.
You probably considered that first example as something that’s obviously not possible, something borderline ridiculous. Maybe not, doesn’t matter. Point being, there’s an excellent example of such a thing in a series my wife and I enjoyed last year -- Netflix series “Locke and Key”. The main characters in the show have a good friend called Logan Calloway, portrayed by actor Eric Graise. He’s a double amputee, wearing a pair of what look like carbon-fibre leg prosthetics. And this never comes up. It’s not a part of the plot at any stage, he doesn’t turn out to have a gun built into one or both of them, he never gets in jeopardy because of his disability requiring someone to help him OR for him to turn out to be a badass. Not a single one of the other characters ever mentions it. He’s just another character, and could perfectly well have been played by an able bodied actor with absolutely no changes to the script at all. Is it “problematic”? Be honest -- do you think it is? And if so, can you articulate why?
Similarly, the 2019 movie “The Personal History of David Copperfield” cast Dev Patel in the title role. Again -- do YOU think that was “problematic”? If so, can you articulate why? Bear in mind that a huge part of the point of that 957th adaptation of an extremely popular book was the diverse casting before you bemoan that only 956 white British actors had had a go at playing it and surely it was the turn of another one.
What the Bernstein complainants sound like to me are people who are annoyed that “Jewface” hasn’t (yet) been deemed as instantly and obviously wrong as blackface. They made the same bleating noises when Helen Mirren played Golda Meir recently. I’m honestly curious to see how successful this turns out. I can’t imagine any white actor taking on Othello. I wonder if, fifty years from now, any non-Jewish actor will ever be allowed to or want to try to play Shylock… or is that already a thing? (Note: I’m obviously ignoring the cinema of other nations that don’t give two shits about this sort of thing here -- I doubt Devan searched his conscience before taking on the lead in “Shylock” in 2020… )
Did I say “Devan”? I think I meant “Mammootty”. Possibly.
sonofrojblake, you’re a bit slow. :
Huh. I tried to watch that, didn’t get far. Tried reading the comic books, too… better than the usual Netflix pabulum, but still not worth it.
Better example would be someone like Peter Falk’s Columbo, about whom Mano has written.
That’s a digression, anyway. I was seeking to determine the basis for the claim that it’s problematic, which was sorted out @6,7,8.
Anyway, since you wonder and speculate, I confirm that for me it’s similarly problematic — that is, not at all. As I wrote, acting usually means pretending to be other than what the actor is. I don’t expect someone who plays a murderer to be a murderer, for example, or someone who plays a drug addict to actually be a drug addict any more than I expect some bloke to be Jewish because they play a Jew — though were their penis to be visible, I would expect it to look like it were circumcised, even if a prosthetic were required.
(Nose, dick… both body parts)
—
Kinda amusing how people keep imputing views to me that I neither hold nor have claimed to hold.
@9, WMDKitty:
Careful now.
If they made a biopic of Barack Obama starring Bradley Cooper in skin-darkening makeup as Obama, would you say that? Don’t think so… but then, maybe you would, because…
Holy shit, are you serious? Anti-semitic much? Did you not get the memo?
Carrying this argument to the extreme: A decade ago, the actor Tony Shaloub played a police detective, called Monk, with severe OCD and possibly other mental illnesses in addition great detective skills. When the show starts, he’s grieving the murder of his wife, which has left him so incapable of caring for himself that he has a nurse caring for him--and even at his best, he needs a keeper because his disabilities keep him from driving or doing some of the mundane basics of life. The show won several awards during its run.
Should Tony Shaloub been forbidden from playing the role because he, himself, does not have OCD or other mental illnesses? Of course not.
@SailorStar, 15 -- your problem with employing that argument is that I can, just as validly, ask whether e.g. Bradley Cooper should be forbidden from playing Barack Obama. “Of course not” doesn’t leap quite so easily to the lips in such a case, or at least not to mine. I’d guess that among racists like WMDKitty there’d be indignant insistence that there’s nothing wrong with blacking up, but progressives at least have moved on from the simplistic “they’re acting” argument.
I once went to a play of Huckleberry Finn where the races of Huck and Jim were swapped because the best ones to audition were of a different race than the character. Afterward there was a Q&A and a discussion of the play. Nobody died.
Barack Obama is white on his mother’s side and black on his father’s side. Depending on the story being told, I think an actor of any race could portray him.
How about the countless superhero movies? Should the actor playing the Hulk be limited to someone who’s naturally green? How about The Thing? Limited to Rock-Americans?
In the play Peter Pan, the role of Peter has often been played by a woman. Should they now get death threats and/or shunnings?
“These are really tricky issues to navigate”
Then what about a jew from Brooklyn playing the role of a Mexican bandit? Of course I’m talking about Eli Wallach and Tuco Benedicto Pacífico Juan María Ramírez.
@SailorStar, 17:
You trivialise something much, much worse. Yes, nobody died, but far more serious -- someone, somewhere might have been offended. Imagine.
I think the same. Whether they WOULD is a different question, and whether any white actor who tried would have any career or friends afterwards is quite another.
@roj — LOL pay attention to the Israel situation and you’ll see what I mean. Invade, steal land, and whine about being the victim when the native population rightly fights back…
A casting choice is, more than anything else, an artistic choice.
I think of three categories:
1. Characters that flat out can be portrayed by anyone. Most fictional characters fall under here, really.
The terminator could look like anyone, it’s actually kinda weird that it mostly looks like Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Even if we granted that the Little Mermaid was set off the coast of the Netherlands, that would only inform us of the ethnicity of the humans, the mer-people can look white, black, asian, blue, translucent. There’s no real life demographic analysis of Atlantis we can compare to.
The Major from Ghost in the Shell is a robot, she looks however the factory made her look.
2. Characters that are fictional, but, being part of a group in particular informs a lot about them and it would feel weird if they didn’t look the part.
If you got an entire cast of pacific islanders, or inuit actors to play the wakandans in Black Panther. Technically you’d still be doing something positive in terms of giving jobs to usually overlooked actors, and you can’t really say it´s inaccurate because Wakanda isn’t a real place. But it would be weird, and most people would wonder what was the point of saying the setting is in Africa if you’re going with a cast that won’t really sell the african setting, just say it’s in the pacific instead.
If you did a remake of Zorro and got a korean dude to play him. Nothing wrong with that, objectively speaking, but it would be very distracting. Thinking about the comment by sonofrojblake about nobody commenting on the character. If you make a Zorro movie set in Mexico and Zorro is korean and no one mentioned anything about it, that would take me completely out of the story. The lack of comment would actually make it worse in that case.
If you got a black Batman, nothing inaccurate about it, there isn’t a real guy to compare to. But the character is this trust fund baby billionaire goth who was raised by the family’s butler, it would be weird if he wasn’t white.
3. Non-fictional characters. For the most part you’d expect the actor to at least look like the real person, and having an actor from the same ethnic group is a good start, but it’s complicated.
I think of the movie Invictus, where they got Morgan Freeman playing Nelson Mandela. I grant you that they are both old black men with warm, welcoming voices and a lot of gravitas. But Morgan Freeman looks nothing like Mandela other than that. I bought the acting, but I can see how one might be taken out of the movie if one is familiar with how Mandela looks.
On the other hand you got Hamilton, where the real life person was white and the actor playing him was puerto rican in it’s first productions. I understand that there is a deliberate casting choice there because Alexander Hamilton was a migrant in his time, and casting him to look like what the audience thinks of when they imagine a migrant in our time helps draw parallels that are relevant to the themes of the musical. So you sacrifice a little bit of accuracy for the sake of the themes.
I think Hamilton is especially relevant on this. Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote the damn thing, he gets to cast himself as the lead, with or without a thematic justification. Same as Bradley Cooper for Maestro. It’s not uncommon for writers and directors to do this. I’d say that anyone complaining about that is welcome to make their own movie and cast whoever they want as the lead.
At the end of the day, casting choices are artistic choices, sometimes they are financial choices, but they are not moral choices.
An artistic choice can enhance your enjoyment of a movie and its themes. It can also distract you from the story, making you wonder “why did they do it like that?” instead of keeping you engaged. I’ll grant that some of them can annoy you to the point that you may walk out of the movie.
What they can’t do is hurt you. And I think a lot of the discourse around casting choices in movies has completely lost sight of that fact nowadays.
Well I didn’t see the movie and for my 2 cents I’ll accept the makeup if Cooper acted it well . A white person playing a black person ? It’s been done already .
Imitation Of Life and Pinky both had white actresses playing Black women
@ 11 sonofrojblake
Hahahaha. Remind us what planet you come from again? Because it sure as fuck ain’t Earth.
https://www.google.com/search?q=list+of+actors+who+have+played+othello
Selected highlights:
Laurence Olivier
Orson Welles
Patrick Stewart
Richard Burton
Anthony Hopkins
John Gielgud
Etc., etc….
Commenting on this thread more generally, I’m astonished at the number of white guys who have absolutely no conception of systemic prejudice! It’s like you show them a scenario of a fat rich man sitting at a table groaning with food -- more than he could possibly eat. And a poor starving man with a single morsel to eat. And the idiots in this thread are like, “well how could the rich man snatching the poor man’s morsel and gobbling it down be any different to the poor man having a small portion of the rich man’s bounty. They look exactly the same to me”.
Just such stupendous ignorance of systemic inequality.
@ 5 weeabooboi (違う)
He’s asking is a Japanese person pretending to be you would be as offensive as you pretending to be Japanese.
(The answer is no.)
#20 WMDKitty
Israel? The earlier exchange was about jewish actors being deprived of roles. Do you judge them based on the actions of the government of Israel? Best not to. Jewish people are not necessarily Israeli, and Israelis are not necessarily jewish. The government of Israel would like you to think the two are synonymous, but that is reductive and propagandistic.
[OT + meta]
“weeabooboi” is such a very, very, very stupid attempted epithet.
If you truly imagine she’s pretending to be on the basis of the kanji, you’d test her somehow. As with me, you accuse, then you run, run away.
(Brave, brave Sir SillyBob bravely runs away!)
For those who are still claiming to be unaware of why a white person pretending to be a person of colour is offensive, I give you “chigau”s 1961 inspiration -- Mickey Rooney as “Mr Yunioshi”.
^ Because every white person playing a canonically non-white character is the same as this? You are not good at thinking.
Um, I thought about pointing out BabblyBog’s well-poisoning (didn’t really work with me, won’t work with chigau), but hey. Topicality, not personality.
So. Tropic Thunder
Turns out, they got that bit right. Bit they got wrong, well…
https://proxy.freethought.online/singham/2023/09/03/the-controversy-over-bradley-cooper-playing-leonard-bernstein/#comment-5234370
[bah, preview is a thing, slack am I. But then, it was only a comment about the trollish BubblingSewer]
Intended link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropic_Thunder#Controversy
@WMDKitty, 20:
Ah, I see. Any Jews anywhere = the Israeli government. Gotcha. Nice to have your anti-semitism confirmed unarguably. Excellent. I mean, unashamed and blatant to an astonishing degree, but good for you for putting it out there so clearly so everyone knows the sort of person you are.
@Silentbob 24:
Remind us what year you come from again? Because it sure as fuck ain’t 2023.
I appreciate that English is not your first language, so some nuances may escape you. I can see I’m going to have to spell it out for you. Here it is in short words.
Blackface used to be a thing. White actors used to play Othello, a black character. They would black up to play him. Today, in 2023, and for some time now, blackface is seen as BAD. So NOW, TODAY, even though white actors used to play that role, I can’t imagine a white actor who valued their job trying it.
D’you see dear?
And now a separate post to address a non-moron:
@A Lurker From Mexico, 21:
>A casting choice is, more than anything else, an artistic choice.
Ah, no. As you observe yourself, later:
>casting choices are artistic choices, sometimes they are financial choices, but they are not moral choices.
They are always financial choices. My ur-example of this is Jack Nicholson as the Joker. To a fan of the comics, he’s wrong on so many levels… but to the person in the street who knows almost nothing about Batman, he’s a face you want to see. And it did work. For a quarter of a century, he was what most people pictured when they thought of the Joker.
>The terminator could look like anyone, it’s actually kinda weird that it mostly looks like Arnold Schwarzenegger.
“It” mostly doesn’t. How many Terminators have you seen? MOST of them don’t look like Arnie (Robert Patrick, Kristanna Loken, Summer Glau, Garret Dillahunt, Sam Worthington, Matt Smith (kinda), Byung-Hun Lee, Gabriel Luna -- none of those people look like Arnie but they all played Terminators). Also, in universe, it’s not weird that all the T-800s look like Arnie -- they’re a mass produced product. It’s not weird that all iPhone 14s look the same.
>The Major from Ghost in the Shell is a robot, she looks however the factory made her look.
She’s… not a robot exactly. Her name’s Motoko Kusanagi. There was a degree of controversy over the casting of the very-not-Japanese Scarlet Johansen in the part in the live action movie. Personally I thought that was actually a great piece of casting and people complaining about it were the usual pack of safely-ignorable knee-jerk bleating idiots who hadn’t seen the film, didn’t understand it and had no concept of what the source material was about. The erasure of her identity as a Japanese person and her rebirth in the shape of a stereotypically perfect idea of a Western woman was a huge part of the point. The tragedy of it was addressed in the film, but the bleaters either didn’t get it, or never saw it. /shrug/
>If you did a remake of Zorro and got a korean dude to play him. Nothing wrong with that, objectively speaking, but it would be very distracting.
It would be. If there was a point to it (as in the Ghost in the Shell example) then it could be great -- Asian swordfighting techniques against European? I’d watch that.
>black Batman…it would be weird if he wasn’t white.
I’m in two minds about this. It’s similar to the idea of a Black person playing James Bond. If either character is presented in anything close to their original milieu, then yes, absolutely, they have to be massively entitled white guys. But in 2023, is the idea of a massively entitled Black guy still unbelievable? (I’m sure a remember a documentary about a black kid who went to live with his incredibly rich uncle and massively entitled cousins in Bel Air…)
(Idris Elba would be my pick for Bond, FWIW. Bit old, though, but that needn’t be insurmountable for a one-off…)
>I’d say that anyone complaining about that is welcome to make their own movie and cast whoever they want as the lead.
I get that…. but part of the complaint normally is that the people doing this are already massively rich and entitled people (Bradley Cooper’s doing OK…) and the folks being harmed by it (if you accept that there is harm being done -- and in this case I absolutely do not) are people without that power, money and influence. Of course, suggesting that Jewish people are being harmed by the casting of Bradley Cooper here because there’s not enough Jewish power, money and influence in the movie industry is gut-bustingly hilarious.
>What they can’t do is hurt you.
I sarcastically made a point earlier that they CAN hurt someone’s precious feelings.
#33 sonof
Your example of Jack Nicholson as the Joker does not support this claim. If we take it as an example of your point, it is still only one example of it. It seems to me the decision is still often artistic, even if there are also financial considerations.
To this point, I quote from later in that same comment: “There was a degree of controversy over the casting of the very-not-Japanese Scarlet Johansen [as Motoko Kusanagi in Ghost in the Shell]. […] The erasure of her identity as a Japanese person and her rebirth in the shape of a stereotypically perfect idea of a Western woman was a huge part of the point.” That is, casting a non-Japanese person was in fact an artistic decision. It may also have been a financial one -- let’s get Famous Hot Woman to generate more ticket sales -- but the artistic basis was “a huge part of the point”.
silentbob @25
Ta mère était un hamster et ton père sentait le sureau.
@Holms, 34:
Eh? Chunky 5’9″ Nicholson was an enormous bankable star with an incredible track record of serious acting and very little physical resembance to the wiry, towering Joker portrayed in the comics or for that matter the slim, 6’3″ Cesar Romero. His CV just from the 80s includes The Shining, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Reds (for which he was nominated for an Oscar), Terms of Endearment (for which he was also nominated for an Oscar in the same year), Prizzi’s Honor (for which he was nominated for an Oscar), Ironweed (for which he was also nominated for an Oscar in the same year), Heartburn, The Witches of Eastwick and Broadcast News. Getting him on board for a piece of intellectual property which in the minds of most of the public was associated with Adam West and Cesar Romero BIFF/POWing their way across TV screens in the sixties was a huge deal. It’s also notable that while Michael Keaton actually played Batman in the movie called Batman, it was Nicholson that got top billing. Casting Nicholson was clearly ALL about the money.
Re: GitS -- I feel like we’re nitpicking. Casting a non-Japanese was barely a “decision” really, it was practically dictated by the source material (an “artistic choice” by the original artist? I guess.) Casting one of the hottest (in two senses of that word) actresses in the world, on the other hand, is likely what made the difference between it getting made and not… for purely financial reasons. Getting a movie made is HARD. (Douglas Adams once opined that it’s like trying to cook a steak by putting it on a table getting a succession of people to walk up and breath on it -- he never lived to see his life’s work make it to the big screen). Getting a big name on board gets you the funding. Is GitS with Scarlet Johansen better than GitS with, e.g. some actor from a daytime soap would have been? In one sense, yes -- because that film would never have got off the ground, no matter how good she was or how committed to the project. Not for artistic reasons. And indeed much the same with Batman. It’s fair to say that Warner Brothers did not greenlight that $30m production because they got the guy from Beetlejuice on board.
@35 -- “les baies de sureau”, surement?
sentait les sureaux, sûrement.
#36 son
Did you stop reading after that one quoted sentence? If Jack Nicholson’s casting was for financial rather than artistic reasons, he is still only one example and hence not much use to your claim that all casting decisions are financial.
Huh.
I had to look it up. It *is* plural.
@Holms, 39:
What?
Me, #33: casting decisions are never purely artistic, they always involve financial considerations, and Jack Nicholson as the Joker is the best example.
You, #34: Jack Nicholson as the Joker is NOT an example. Or if it is (?), it’s only one example.
Me, #36: here’s why it IS and example, and a good one.
You, #39: *If* it is (?), it’s only one example.
At this point it would appear that I cannot persuade you that casting decisions are always financial by appealilng to your common sense (hah!) knowledge that films cost money and practically every decision ever made at every stage of making a movie is filtered through the “what will it cost?” filter. Rather it would appear that before you would concede the point I would have to give an example from every film ever made, or even possibly every person ever cast, and show why and how what they cost vs. what they could bring to the project was considered. I don’t really have time to do that, and since I imagine most of the people reading this can make the common sense observation I mentioned above, I’m not going to waste any more time trying to convince the tiny minority who don’t get it.
An aside: you posit a utopia where casting decisions don’t involve considering cost, but instead are purely artistic decisions. For what it’s worth -- I’d actually like to live in your fantasy world. It’d be great.
Sigh. Sonof, I think this comes down to the wording choices you made.
You responded to A Lurker From Mexico’s #21 in which he said “A casting choice is, more than anything else, an artistic choice” and “casting choices are artistic choices, sometimes they are financial choices” with “Ah, no” and “They are always financial choices.” This is called disagreement. You disagreed with ‘mostly artistic’. You could have replaced this with ‘mostly financial’, but your wording was instead ‘always financial’, emphasis yours. An absolute claim that admits no artistic element at all.
And now you are backing away from this, or at least clarifying that your first statement meant something other than what it appears to state. Casting (and other) choices are artistic but have budgetary constraints, a far cry from your initial wording. This is a position I can agree with, and I would note the disagreement arose from your first (poor) wording.
Lastly, “you posit a utopia where casting decisions don’t involve considering cost” is a load of bull. At no point did I posit this, you inferred it.
@41
Most times, the choice of actor is very relevant to the aesthetic of a movie, and there is a deliberate choice made by directors to get the person whose face, voice, demeanor, acting style, and even reputation with the audience will bring something to the movie.
Every once in a while, mostly in smaller budget stuff, a director may just grab whoever was around the set that day, or their wife, or their go-to stuntman, not having much regard for the artistic implications of that choice.
I suppose that there is always a financial impact to every casting choice, whether to get a complete unkown, a famous actor, a B-Lister, a musician, a guy who’s known for playing the opposite of the role he’s being cast as. Whatever one chooses will probably have a financial impact on the movie, either to secure the budget to get it made, to get asses in seats, or to ruin the movie because the actor was not a good fit, or to keep people out of the theater because they didn’t trust the name in the poster to entertain them.
If the argument is that any choice that has a financial impact is necessarily a financial choice… I don’t think that I can argue with that. I suppose it’s true. I just think that definition is so broad that it becomes useless.