Opinion: Ted Levine <i>is</i> Reginald Denny

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Happy hunting to Spike Lee and recent Times OpEd star John Ridley on L.A. Riots, the only movie idea I’ve heard in six months that I’m actually looking forward to.

Read all about the picture, which Ridley describes as a ‘mosaic’ following ordinary Angelenos.

Jay A. Fernandez notes that Anna Deavere Smith’s Twilight was brought to the small screen in 2001, so by my count this is only the third time the 1992 riots will be depicted in a dramatic movie. Ron Shelton’s Dark Blue, with Kurt Russell and Ving Rhames, closed with the riots.

And their ghosts haunt movies made both before and after: Crash, Short Cuts, Boyz n the Hood, Grand Canyon, and for that matter Day of the Locust. Spike’s own Do the Right Thing prefigured the events, on the other coast.

But I’ve got to be massively undercounting. Haven’t there been other movies that did the riots up in full movie fakery?

In any event, I’d happily close any two major freeways for Lee and Ridley before I’d close so much as an alley for Live Free or Die Hard director Len Wiseman.

Update: Patt Morrison hips us to The L.A. Riot Spectacular, Marc Klasfeld’s 2005 parody. I don’t know how a cast this celestial could have escaped lighting up the sky all over America. Check it out—more half-stars than there are in half-heaven: Ronnie Cox, Charles Durning, Snoop Dogg, Emilio Estevez, George Hamilton, T.K. Carter, Charles S. Dutton, Christopher McDonald, Ron Jeremy, Tabitha Stevens, William Forsythe... and Ted Levine as Tom Saltine.