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Viggo Mortensen Apologizes for Using N-Word During ‘Green Book’ Panel'Green Book’ Is A Poorly Titled White Savior Film
When will Hollywood stop centering white people in Black stories? If the much-lauded Peter Farrelly film Green Book is any indication, no time soon.
The film supposedly gets its title from The Negro Motorist Green Book, an iconic Black travel guide published from 1936-1966 by Victor Hugo Green and his wife Alma Green. Green was a well-connected Black mailman whose Green Book documented restaurants, hotels, gas stations and more that Black travelers and vacationers could safely use while traveling throughout the country – from the segregated Jim Crow South to his hometown in New York City. The north was no safe space for Black people and Green and his book show that.
“Carry your Green Book with you—You may need it,” the cover of the book urged its readers. And carry it they did.
Just not in this ahistorical film. Green Books deserved Better.
In Farrelly’s Green Book, Black people don’t even touch the Green Book, let alone talk about its vital importance to their lives. Instead, the film centers the story of a racist white man who makes an unlikely Black friend on a journey through the American south and becomes slightly less racist.
In this reverse-Driving Miss Daisy film, Viggo Mortensen stars as Tony Lip, an Italian American bouncer hired to drive and protect Mahershala Ali’s queer, Jamaican-American classical pianist Dr. Don Shirley on a concert tour from Manhattan down to the deep south.
The first mention of the Negro Motorist Green Book in the film is when a white representative from Dr. Shirley’s record company pulls Lip aside to hand him a copy and explain that Lip will need it to know where he can safely take Dr. Shirley on this trip down south.
“Three years ago when we started writing this thing, no one knew about it –not no one, obviously, but nobody I knew,” Farrelly told Shadow and Act about why he chose to title his movie Green Book. “White people didn’t know about it, I didn’t know about it, and most of the Black people that I spoke with didn’t know about,” he said.
And you still won’t know about it after watching this movie, because the Green Book, much like the film, only exists as a prop to enhance white understanding of white racism and white privilege in this country.
But that understanding is limited because this story is told from Tony Lip’s perspective. And, again, Tony Lip is a racist.
We see how racist Lip is as he lets anti-Black pejoratives like “eggplant” hang from his lips as easily as the cigarettes he chainsmokes. When two Black service workers enter his home and drink beverages from glasses Lip’s wife offered to them, Lip promptly takes their empty glasses out of the sink and throws them in the garbage can so no one in his home will have to use the same glass Black people used once. Because the bar for a racist’s growth is beneath the floor, the audience is meant to use this scene as a benchmark to tell how far he’s come by the end of the film when he and Dr. Shirley become lifelong friends. But a racist’s relationship with individual Black people is not the same as being anti-racist. Ask Sally Hemmings.
So, Lip’s racism must also be the lens through which we view the details of this story, as well. Though the Green Book he shuffles through for Dr. Shirley promises comfortable hotels, through Lip’s eyes, the motels he finds are not cozy homes away from home but rundown slums crawling with stray cats and dice-shooting Black people. Lip even remarks to himself that the Green Book is essentially offering false advertising to its desperate consumers.
On a press call about the Negro Motorist Green Book with Maira Liriano, Associate Chief Librarian of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture–which holds the largest collection of Green Books in the country–Liriano strongly disputed this characterization to Shadow and Act:
“I’ve never heard that, in the years that I’ve been working with researchers and scholars studying the Green Books, I’ve not encountered ‘false advertising’ within the Green Books. So I don’t think that was very accurate,” Liriano says.
“I’m not saying every single place was wonderful and fabulous that was listed in the Green Books, but I feel like they don’t do it justice (in the film).“
Mahershala Ali deserved better.
But while the real Green Books don’t match their depiction in this film and the title doesn’t match the premise of the film, the movie poster most certainly is accurate. Mortensen is front and center on the poster and Green Book is his star vehicle. The brilliant Ali (and, therefore, Dr. Shirley) literally and figuratively takes a back seat.
The Green Book: The Black Travelers’ Guide to Jim Crow America
“There will be a day sometime in the near future when this guide will not have to be published. That is when we as a race will have equal opportunities and privileges in the United States. It will be a great day for us to suspend this publication for then we can go wherever we please, and without embarrassment.”
That was how the authors of the “Negro Motorist Green Book” ended the introduction to their 1948 edition. In the pages that followed, they provided a rundown of hotels, guest houses, service stations, drug stores, taverns, barber shops and restaurants that were known to be safe ports of call for African American travelers. The “Green Book” listed establishments in segregationist strongholds such as Alabama and Mississippi, but its reach also extended from Connecticut to California—any place where its readers might face prejudice or danger because of their skin color. With Jim Crow still looming over much of the country, a motto on the guide’s cover also doubled as a warning: “Carry your Green Book with you—You may need it.”
First published in 1936, the Green Book was the brainchild of a Harlem-based postal carrier named Victor Hugo Green. Like most Africans Americans in the mid-20th century, Green had grown weary of the discrimination blacks faced whenever they ventured outside their neighborhoods. Rates of car ownership had exploded in the years before and after World War II, but the lure of the interstate was also fraught with risk for African Americans. “Whites Only” policies meant that black travelers often couldn’t find safe places to eat and sleep, and so-called “Sundown Towns”—municipalities that banned blacks after dark—were scattered across the country. As the foreword of the 1956 edition of the Green Book noted, “the White traveler has had no difficulty in getting accommodations, but with the Negro it has been different.”
The Green Book’s listings were organized by state and city, with the vast majority located in major metropolises such as Chicago and Detroit. More remote places had fewer options—Alaska only had a lone entry in the 1960 guide—but even in cities with no black-friendly hotels, the book often listed the addresses of home owners who were willing to rent rooms. In 1954, it suggested that visitors to tiny Roswell, New Mexico, should stay at the home of a Mrs. Mary Collins.
‘Green Book’ Star Viggo Mortensen Apologizes For Using N-Word During Panel On Film: ‘I Will Not Utter It Again’
Mahershala Ali’s co-star in the racial dramedy Green Book, Viggo Mortensen, has issued an apology after it was revealed on Twitter that he used the N-word on a panel about the film Wednesday. The Q&A panel took place after the Film Independent Presents screening of the film at Arclight Hollywood.
Mortensen was with Ali and director Peter Farrelly for the panel when he began to speak about racial progress in the country.
“For instance, no one says n**ger anymore,” Mortensen said, per Film Independent member Dick Schulz. He spoke with The Hollywood Reporter on Thursday after his tweet began to gain traction.
Schulz told The Hollywood Reporter, “It was all anyone was talking about when we left the theater. I was hearing everybody passing by me going up the stairs going, ‘That was crazy! Why did he say that? You cannot say that!’ And it’s sad because the movie is great. The irony is confounding, to be honest — it’s really shocking, and it was really shocking in the moment.”
He explained that it happened during Mortensen using an example during a response to a question toward another panelist. “Viggo just started talking, and it got away from him quickly. He started talking about how, in this climate, the world today, progress isn’t going to happen quickly, it’s going to happen slowly, but the movie is going to mean a lot for a long time because we’re constantly coming up against racism and how racism is almost human nature and these things come in waves. And that’s when he went, ‘I’m gonna go off on a tangent here, but it’s important, and I don’t like saying the word, but, for instance, people don’t say’ — and then he said the N-word in its entirety — ‘anymore,’ and you could just feel the room immediately tense up. And the craziest thing was they had just talked about body language, so I felt like everyone was really attuned to body language, and everyone’s body language on the panel immediately tensed up.”
“I think that he immediately regretted it,” Schulz added. “He went on for I don’t know how long it was — it felt like an eternity after that, because everyone was waiting for the answer to end, but he was trying to steer the ship back to where he was trying to go.” According to Schulz, “A woman shouted back at him, ‘Don’t say that,’ immediately after he said it.”
*sighs* I actually wanted to go see this movie. Now it’s definitely not happening. What a disappointment.
Unnecessary racist white characters are always seen as more human than us. The story’s already rich with the black main character. If you can’t make the original story stand on its own then you’re terrible at your job and need to leave the work to black creatives.
“Unnecessary racist white characters are always seen as more human than us.“
Which is why Viggo is already being talked about for giving an “Oscar-worthy performance”…🙄
Oh, there’s more…
How ‘Green Book’ and the Hollywood Machine Swallowed Donald Shirley
In August 2018, Edwin Shirley III sat in disbelief as he watched a screening of Peter Farrelly’s new movie Green Book, a simplistic racial harmony story set in the Jim Crow south. Viggo Mortenson stars as Tony “Lip” Vallelonga, a racist Italian American New Yorker. Mahershala Ali is the supporting actor who is tapped to play Dr. Donald Waldridge Shirley, a Black, queer, musical genius, and Edwin’s uncle, who died at 86 in 2013.
As is typical of a Hollywood White Savior Film, Green Book places Dr. Shirley in several dangerous circumstances with racist white men so that Vallelonga can swoop in and save the day. In the process, Vallelonga teaches the world-renowned Black pianist about Black music and how to eat fried chicken.
Though Dr. Shirley did hire Vallelonga as a driver and bodyguard during one of Dr. Shirley’s concert tours in the south, much of the rest of the movie’s plot (co-written by Vallelonga’s son Nick Vallelonga) is disputed by more family members of Dr. Shirley than just Edwin—none of whom say were consulted or even contacted at any point during the writing or production of this film.
A “symphony of lies.”
“It was rather jarring,” Edwin shared with Shadow and Act of his first experience seeing this on-screen portrayal of his uncle as a Black man who is estranged from his family, estranged from the Black community and seemingly embarrassed by Blackness.
Never mind that Dr. Shirley was active in the civil rights movement, friends with Dr. King, present for the march in Selma, and close friends with Black musicians — from Nina Simone to Duke Ellington and Sarah Vaughn — Dr. Shirley was also very much a part of his family’s lives.
(Don Shirley pictured with Jinx Falkenburg, Duke Ellington, Lena Horne and her husband, Lennie Hayton, backstage after a 1955 concert)
To see him portrayed otherwise, “That was very hurtful,” Edwin said. “That’s just 100% wrong.”
Dr. Shirley’s last living brother, Dr. Maurice Shirley, 82, was “furious” when he heard of the depiction of his brother in this film and had much harsher criticism of it, calling it “a symphony of lies.” As one example, Maurice mentions the moment in the film where Ali’s character says he has a brother but didn’t know his whereabouts, as they hadn’t been in contact for some time.
“At that point [in 1962 when the events of the film supposedly take place], he had three living brothers with whom he was always in contact,” Maurice said, speaking of himself, and his and Dr. Shirley’s two older brothers, Dr. Edwin Shirley Jr. and Dr. Calvin Hilton Shirley.
“One of the things Donald used to remind me in his later years was he literally raised me,” Maurice said. Their mother died when Donald was 9 years old and Maurice was just two days old, so Donald, as the closest brother in age to Maurice, took care of him growing up and remained close with him until Dr. Shirley’s death five years ago.
“There wasn’t a month where I didn’t have a phone call conversation with Donald,” Maurice said.
The Uncle Donald that Edwin knew comforted him in his grief in 1964 when Edwin was just 15 years old and Edwin’s little brother had been struck and killed by a car. Dr. Shirley was on tour at the time and stopped everything to come down to Miami to be with the family at the funeral. It was there that Edwin became enthralled with what his Uncle Donald did for a living and Dr. Shirley took a special interest in him too.
“He asked my mother if she would allow me to ride with him on tour for a week, and much to my amazement, she allowed me to skip school for that week and a couple of days to ride with him,” he said. Thus began Edwin’s first adventure with his uncle as they embarked on Dr. Shirley’s nine-day concert tour from Cincinnati to Chicago.
“He was always instructing,” Edwin remembered from that trip. When Edwin shared with Dr. Shirley that he wanted to be a writer, Dr. Shirley said, “'If you want to be a writer, you need to read Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust.’ I will never forget that. He said, ‘This will make you focus on attention to detail. It’ll make you neurotic but it will make you a better writer,‘” Edwin said.
Dr. Shirley’s inclination to teach is one part of the film that Edwin doesn’t find “highly doubtful.”
“There was a scene in which he was correcting Tony and Tony asks, ‘Why are you busting my [balls]?’ And he said, ‘Because you can do better.’ That, to me, sounded just like him.”
Unfortunately, for the family, there is more wrong than there is right, including the crux of the film—that Green Book, as Universal’s marketing materials advertise, is “inspired by a true friendship.”
“No,” Maurice and his wife Patricia Shirley said in a uniformed scoff when asked if Dr. Shirley and Vallelonga were ever close friends. “Not at all,” Patricia said.
SoGreen Book won Best Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy at the Golden Globes… How white of them.
What Viggo Mortensen Got Wrong In His Recent ‘Green Book’ Response to the Shirley Family
As a refresher, Dr. Shirley’s family had several issues with the film, particularly with the film’s premise and marketing as “inspired by a true friendship,“ when Dr. Shirley and Vallelonga only had “an employer-employee relationship.” The family also took issue with Dr. Shirley being portrayed as a man divorced from both his family and the Black community as a whole in the film when he was very close to both in real life, and active in the civil rights movement. Dr. Shirley’s nephew Edwin Shirley III told Shadow And Act that his uncle had “flatly refused” Nick Vallelonga’s request to make a movie about Dr. Shirley back in the 1980s.
“I met Nick for the first time at the premiere and I told him, ‘I have to give you credit for tenacity because you have been trying to get this thing done for 30 years.’ And that’s when he told me, ‘Oh, yeah, well my father and I went to see him and he gave us his blessing,’ and I told him that was hard to believe,” Edwin told Shadow And Act.
“He just flatly said, ‘No, absolutely not. I don’t want to have any part of that,’” Edwin recalled his uncle saying. “God knows, this is the reason that he never wanted to have his life portrayed on screen,” Edwin told Shadow And Act. “I now understand why, and I feel terrible that I was actually trying to urge him to do this in the 1980s, because everything that he objected to back then has come true now.”
After being asked about Dr. Shirley’s family’s complaints with the film, Mortensen said this with his whole chest:
“[Writer] Nick Vallelonga has shown admirable restraint in the face of some accusations and some claims—including from a couple of family members—that have been unjustified, uncorroborated and basically unfair, that have been countered by other people who knew Doc Shirley well,“ he said.“There is evidence that there was not the connection that [the family members] claimed there was with him, and perhaps there’s some resentment.”
The caucasity.
First of all, it seems like Mortensen has gotten entirely too close to the subject material at hand, so much so that he refuses to acknowledge what Dr. Shirley’s family has called a fabrication. Second, Mortensen is ignoring the fact that the family members that are enraged about the film aren’t distant relatives. They aren’t suddenly upset that they weren’t close to Shirley in light of his recent resurgence, which Mortensen hints at with the word “resentment.“ Instead, they are relatives who grew up with Shirley and were influenced heavily by him and definitely knew him better than Mortensen in 1962, when the film supposedly takes place.
“Normally, I don’t read reviews,” said Farrelly, sitting on a worn leather couch in the office space he shares with comedian and writer Larry David. “Because if I get 10 good reviews and one bad one, I remember the bad one and I don’t remember the good ones. So I don’t read any of them. To wake up every day and have stories [about Green Book] on the Internet about this, that, and the other, I don’t read them, but other people do and they are saying, ‘Oh shit, we have this article and they are saying this, or someone is accusing you of that.’ It’s disturbing, I don’t like it. By the end of this thing, I’m afraid I’m going to have P.T.S.D.”
(Fuck his white, self-serving feelings. Anyway back to the article.)
Farrelly has repeatedly countered the white-savior criticism of the film by saying there is no savior in this movie. “These guys help each other,” he said. “Tony Lip gets Don Shirley out of some earthly problems, but Don Shirley saves Tony Lip’s soul.” He also objects to the suggestion that he’s hiding behind Ali and executive producer Octavia Spencer, the two African-Americans he says he actively recruited to be part of the filmmaking process to help keep his white privilege in check.
“The worst accusation I got was that I was a white guy taking advantage of a black man, and making money off of it,” Farrelly said. “I didn’t do this for money. I don’t care if I make a dime… . I’m doing it to make a difference. I believe in this movie. I think it can change people’s hearts and minds, incrementally. I’m not saying it’s going to change the world. But it can make a change in the right direction at a time when we need it. And that’s the god’s honest truth why I did it. That’s why it pains me to get criticized.”
She is singing an ancient herding song from mid-north Sweden and Norway. I sense very old vibrations in the calling tones. See what happens to the cows as the singing calls.
