CULTURE WATCH : Miscast Protest

Luis Valdez has been getting it from both sides. He set out to make a film, “Frida and Diego,” about Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, the wife of the better-known Diego Rivera. Backers were nervous: an ethnic film that wasn’t about gang wars, a political film about a strong woman, an art film about a semi-obscure painter. Big dollars they didn’t see. And then, when a protest broke out, some of the backers took a walk.

The protest, led by Latina actress Dyana Ortelli, attacked Valdez angrily for not giving the role of Kahlo to a Latina but instead to Laura San Giacomo, an Italian-American actress.

Now it appears that the role may go to no one: The frustrated Valdez has put the project on hold.

We appreciate his feelings but hope he will persevere with this potentially important film. Kahlo, as the distinguished Chicano director has so well put it, “was a child of America, born of a complicated system of races and beliefs.” Her mother was Mexican, her father a German Jew. Her Mexico was a nation that, no less than the United States, was of mixed European and non-European descent.

In an earlier, happier moment, there was talk that Edward James Olmos would play Leon Trotsky, the Russian (Jewish) revolutionary who fled to Mexico and had an affair with Kahlo. Olmos a Russian? It could have been a brilliant move. He has the right intensity, he even looks the part. In any event, a director ought to be free to cast a Latino as a Russian Jew--or an Italian-American as a German-Mexican--if he wants to.