From Hollywood With Love by Scott Meslow

Author:Scott Meslow [Meslow, Scott]
Language: eng
Format: epub

Jennifer Lopez

The Triple Threat

Hollywood didn’t know what to do with Jennifer Lopez. Though she had pursued an acting career since she was a teenager, she shot to fame at a time when Hollywood’s default “color-blind” approach to casting meant, in practice, that lead roles went to white actresses. It’s no accident that her breakout role came in 1997’s Selena, a biopic of the Latin music icon Selena Quintanilla-Pérez—a role in which Lopez’s ethnicity was treated as a necessity and not something that a screenwriter felt the need to justify.

But despite Hollywood’s total lack of vision, Jennifer Lopez also had her own plan: starring in a rom-com. “When I first started, one of the things that I wanted to do—because I was Puerto Rican, Latina—was that I wanted to be in romantic comedies,” says Lopez. “I felt like all the women in romantic comedies always looked the same way, they were always white. And I was like, if I can do it and just show that I’m every girl—because I am the hopeless romantic, I am that—I am the single working woman, I was those things. And I remember thinking, I need to be the lead in a romantic comedy.”

When she finally got the chance, in 2001’s The Wedding Planner, she first had to overcome the biases of both the studio and the director, who tried and failed to develop versions of The Wedding Planner that would have starred Minnie Driver, Jennifer Love Hewitt, and Sarah Michelle Gellar. It was only when none of that panned out that Lopez was finally given a shot (noticing a pattern yet?). “I was honestly resistant to the idea. I didn’t perceive her as a romantic comedy person; she seemed too tough to me, frankly,” says The Wedding Planner director Adam Shankman. (Lopez happened to be coming off a string of thrillers at the time, but it is still difficult not to read this reluctance as coded, unexamined racism.)

The resulting movie is a perfect example of Hollywood’s sheer, muddled ham-handedness when it comes to race. In The Wedding Planner, Lopez—who is of Puerto Rican descent—was cast as Mary Fiore, an Italian-American woman. Though the movie is packed with Italian caricatures, including Mary’s incredibly zealous suitor Massimo, there is no reason the movie couldn’t have been rewritten to incorporate Lopez’s actual ethnicity. Adam Shankman says he and Lopez mutually agreed not to. “It was a very quick conversation,” he says. “We were both like, ‘Why can’t you be Italian?’ There seemed to be no reason; people play different faiths all the time, you know? The thinking is different now. Today, I would say, ‘No, we’re changing it, and we’ll make you what you are.’ ”

But if The Wedding Planner was fuzzy on exactly what Lopez was bringing to the table, Lopez—with characteristic confidence—knew exactly what she was doing. Part of what’s fascinating about The Wedding Planner is that it catches Lopez just on the peak of superstardom, before even her nickname had become entrenched in popular culture. “I mean, she wasn’t J.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.