Seems a dumb premise for the question. e.g in the UK from 1957 to 1978 there was a show on primetime broadcast TV called 'the black and white minstrel show' and it had performers in black face singing and doing jazz hands and all that 1880s minstrel vibe. It enjoyed audiences of 20 million plus at its peak. Now to say "could you do that today?" as though in the past no one said anything is just disingenuous. The show had complaints and was being criticised for the blackface being racist within 5 years of it being on TV, i.e in 1963 – a time when, perhaps halfwits are going to suggest to you that everyone was ok with it and it was all different back then. By 1967 the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination delivered a petition to the BBC – signed by both black and white people – which requested that the programme be taken off air. Still the show existed until 1978 before being removed – albeit the last series did remove the blackface element to a large degree. So if there's any suggestion that performers in the 70s, 80s or 90s didn't know – this simply is not the truth. Nothing is new. No one has any new insights in the modern day. A better truth is that they didn't listen to the criticism. Are you asking today whether TV and film producers would either listen to or, perhaps more key, act on any criticism?
Thankfully here RDJ isn't being as disingenuous as the host and is honest that he knew when taking on the part that it was a potentially bad idea back when they made the film – there isn't any reason to suggest it was less controversial when the film was made than it would be today to entertain the premise "you couldn't make it today"
@8:25 I think thats really interesting what he’s saying about memorizing lines. That was my cheat sheet through all of law school that I had developed since highschool. By law school they were sentences and paragraphs of acronyms but it really really worked and made it so I could just lay there and coalesce what I knew. That was just as important as studying the thousands of pages you needed to regurgitate.
Seems a dumb premise for the question. e.g in the UK from 1957 to 1978 there was a show on primetime broadcast TV called 'the black and white minstrel show' and it had performers in black face singing and doing jazz hands and all that 1880s minstrel vibe. It enjoyed audiences of 20 million plus at its peak. Now to say "could you do that today?" as though in the past no one said anything is just disingenuous. The show had complaints and was being criticised for the blackface being racist within 5 years of it being on TV, i.e in 1963 – a time when, perhaps halfwits are going to suggest to you that everyone was ok with it and it was all different back then. By 1967 the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination delivered a petition to the BBC – signed by both black and white people – which requested that the programme be taken off air. Still the show existed until 1978 before being removed – albeit the last series did remove the blackface element to a large degree. So if there's any suggestion that performers in the 70s, 80s or 90s didn't know – this simply is not the truth. Nothing is new. No one has any new insights in the modern day. A better truth is that they didn't listen to the criticism. Are you asking today whether TV and film producers would either listen to or, perhaps more key, act on any criticism?
Thankfully here RDJ isn't being as disingenuous as the host and is honest that he knew when taking on the part that it was a potentially bad idea back when they made the film – there isn't any reason to suggest it was less controversial when the film was made than it would be today to entertain the premise "you couldn't make it today"
@8:25 I think thats really interesting what he’s saying about memorizing lines. That was my cheat sheet through all of law school that I had developed since highschool. By law school they were sentences and paragraphs of acronyms but it really really worked and made it so I could just lay there and coalesce what I knew. That was just as important as studying the thousands of pages you needed to regurgitate.