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Actresses Laverne Cox, Evan Rachel Wood, and Sarah Hyland speak at the 2019 Women’s March in Los Angeles, California.
Gale Sondergaard was the first. In accepting the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her 1936 film debut in Anthony Adverse, she spoke out on live radio for those fighting Franco’s fascists in the Spanish Civil War.
Thus began a tradition that many others would follow. From Sacheen Littlefeather, a Native American activist, declining Marlon Brando’s 1973 Godfather Oscar on live TV because of demeaning celluloid stereotypes of indigenous people, to Meryl Streep and Robert De Niro’s recent denunciations of President Donald Trump at the annual Golden Globe and Tony rituals, prize presenters and winners have used their platforms and celebrity to speak out on political issues and attract attention to movements.
At January’s Women’s March in Los Angeles, stars Laverne Cox (trans actress of Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black), Evan Rachel Wood (HBO’s Westworld), talk show host Ricki Lake (Hairspray), Sarah Hyland (ABC’s Modern Family), and attorney Gloria Allred (subject of the documentary Seeing Allred) joined political leaders, including L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti, at City Hall to denounce child and domestic abuse. Actress Rosanna Arquette (Pulp Fiction) condemned sexual misconduct in the film and television industry, while Lisa Ann Walter (The Parent Trap) declared: “During the Kavanaugh hearings, it felt like we were being revictimized by our government.”
Denizens of Hollywood prominently take part in cultural events, such as Black Lives Matter L.A.’s fundraising screening at 2019’s Pan African Film Festival, and use their star power to lure crowds, cameras, and donations for causes. Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver famously proclaimed, “You’re either part of the problem or part of the solution.” Here are seven Tinseltown talents who use their art and celebrity to be part of the solution.
Brooklyn-born Italian American Marisa Tomei scored the Best Supporting Actress Academy Award as Joe Pesci’s ballsy girlfriend in 1992’s My Cousin Vinny. Tomei’s eighty screen credits include numerous socially conscious movies, including 2001’s anti-domestic abuse drama In the Bedroom. She also supports causes offscreen, including a 2014 L.A. event celebrating the publication of the tenth anniversary edition of Voices of a People’s History of the United States, co-edited by Howard Zinn. Tomei joined rocker Tom Morello, Kerry Washington (ABC’s Scandal, Django Unchained), and Benjamin Bratt (Traffic) in reading Voices quotations at the live show.
Tomei has participated in the Women’s March LA since 2017. At this year’s event, on January 19, she introduced Angelica Salas, executive director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of L.A., who blasted Trump’s policy of separating migrant children from their parents.
I caught up with Tomei backstage, where she was wearing a T-shirt with blacklisted quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s image (shirt sales benefit the ACLU). She said she supported the Women’s March “because I want to put my body with the other bodies and not allow division. Bots electronically planted stories so people wouldn’t want to march and go on being in the streets here and in Washington. But the wave is here—we flooded the streets and are standing together.”
Tomei has two new films coming out in 2019: Frankie, a generational drama set in Portugal, and Human Capital, an adaptation of Stephen Amidon’s 2004 novel about two families who collide as they pursue the American Dream.
As Hollywood’s home, Los Angeles is best known for the movie and television industries, but also features a thriving theater scene. On January 28, during L.A.’s annual Ovation Awards ceremony recognizing excellence on SoCal boards, performance artist Kristina Wong stole the show with her acceptance speech for the prestigious Sherwood Award, which supports “innovative and adventurous” Los Angeles stage artists.
Kristing Wong. Performance artist. Credits include the one-woman shows "The Wong Street Journal" and "Kristina Wong for Public Office."
“We live in times where politicians and artists have switched jobs,” Wong said. “They create the spectacle that has us questioning reality and we reclaim the quiet space for . . . truth.” Turning the tables on politicians who have turned election campaigns into live theater, the third-generation Chinese American announced that she’d use the $10,000 prize to fund her latest performance project: running for a nonpartisan seat on the Wilshire Center Koreatown Neighborhood Council. The election is April 4.
“I’m still a theater artist and the crazy theatrical person I am, but I’m legitimately running for office at the same time,” insists Wong, who belongs to the Democratic Socialists of America. She pledges to “impeach fascists from the White House” and “work for affordable housing and supporting undocumented immigrants and immigrant businesses.” She says Koreatown “is an immigrant neighborhood and it should be a sanctuary neighborhood.”
The San Francisco-born actress, who minored in Asian American studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, is eager to continue speaking out about issues. “For me, they’re inseparable,” she tells me. “Politics and theater have become the same thing.”
The London-born son of Italian and Spanish working class immigrants, Alfred Molina has been nominated for BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) and Independent Spirit Awards, as well as Golden Globe and Primetime Emmy Awards for his TV work. Molina has performed on stages from Broadway to London’s West End to Los Angeles, receiving three Tony nominations.
In January, Molina recorded A Walk in the Woods at the University of California, Los Angeles, for broadcast on L.A. Theatre Works’ syndicated radio theater series. Inspired by actual events, Lee Blessing’s 1988 play about nuclear disarmament depicts a meeting between two diplomats, one from the United States and one from the Soviet Union, during the height of the Cold War.
“They start off very relaxed, as if they’re just two friends, just chatting in a place where there’s a little bit of scenery,” Molina says. “But then the play turns into a much more serious conflict between them.” He sees Walk as being “about what happens when you take irrevocable sides, when you draw a line in the sand, a kind of wall between two ideologies.” For that reason, “the play is very relevant because the world hasn’t changed much. In fact, it’s gotten worse.”
As we talked, Molina mused on the role of art in public affairs: “I’m not sure if theater, film, television by themselves can change the world,” he said. “It’s an accumulation of ideas and movements.” Yet art “generally does have an important role in how the world progresses and looks at itself. The role of people who work in the creative field is very much to hold that mirror up and say, ‘This is what we are. Are we happy with it? Or do we want to do something else?’ We become part of a bigger conversation.”
Molina co-stars with Edward James Olmos in the film The Devil Has a Name, a dark comedy on the oil industry due out later this year. He calls it “a great example of a movie with a crucial, social component. It’s about the way we’re screwing up the environment, couched in a thriller.”
Best known for the antiwar sitcom M*A*S*H, for which he earned two Primetime Emmy nominations, Mike Farrell is the Hollywood Progressives’ elder statesman. Before the Iraq invasion, Farrell and director Robert Greenwald worked with Artists United to Win Without War to resist the rabid Bush-Cheney drive to attack Baghdad in 2002 and 2003. They used their fame to break through the weapons of mass destruction disinformation campaign by appearing at press conferences and on TV and radio programs, signing a full-page ad in The New York Times, and marching in and speaking at peace demonstrations.
An ex-Marine, Farrell has championed abolishing the death penalty as president of the board of Death Penalty Focus. In 2018, he did a public service announcement urging people to ask then-California Governor Jerry Brown to declare a moratorium on state killing and commute the sentences of those on death row. He also wrote an op-ed on the topic in the San Francisco Chronicle and helped orchestrate a New York Times op-ed signed by six former governors.
Farrell, in an email to me, added that he is co-chair emeritus of Human Rights Watch in Southern California and continues to work on prison reform. “And I serve on the advisory board of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation and the advisory committee for the Muslim Public Affairs Council’s Hollywood Bureau.”
Farrell continues to act, including a recent performance of his one-man show about global warming, Dr. Keeling’s Curve, as a fundraiser for the Sierra Club at the Broad Theater in Santa Monica, California. In the show, he depicts scientist Charles David Keeling, a pioneer in studying how carbon emissions contribute to the greenhouse effect.
Two decades before Spike Lee, director Melvin Van Peebles began shooting features, including the 1971 black consciousness film Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, in which his son Mario appeared. Their collaboration continued throughout the years. Melvin scripted 1995’s Black Panther Party-themed Panther, with Mario directing and playing Stokely Carmichael. Mario depicted Melvin in 2003’s biopic Baadasssss!
Mario’s latest cinematic venture is 2018’s Armed, which he directed, wrote, co-produced, and starred in. Inspired by actual events, Armed tackles gun violence, rightwing militias, post-traumatic stress disorder, and more. Scripted before some of the worst mass shootings, including those in Las Vegas and Parkland, Mario’s screenplay is prophetic. Like Lee’s 2018 BlacKkKlansman, it ends with a montage of contemporary news clips, including Donald Trump opposing gun control.
When I asked him about the President, Van Peebles analogized: “As a filmmaker, when I’m on the set, I set the tone [on] how to handle things. The producer perpetuates the tone—of kindness, of an inclusive film universe. Whether one agrees with Trump—and many don’t—what do you think of the tone? Hate speech has real consequences.”
In Armed, a hillbilly in a mountain militia group that shackles and tortures Mario Van Peebles’s character, Chief, wears a red cap bearing the words: “Make America Late Again.” Van Peebles said: “I wanted to flip it: make it different and have some fun” with Trump’s familiar slogan.
At a February screening of the film at the Pan African Film Festival in Los Angeles, Van Peebles said the film, which deals with mental health issues, “got a good review from the military, because so many soldiers come back home from combat fighting demons, inside and out. At the end of the movie, Chief [interviewed on live TV by Van Jones] is not cured, just functional.”
Van Peebles stressed that he doesn’t want to “do revenge films that take gratuitous shots at whites.” He notes that besides casting himself, Ice-T, Wesley Snipes, and other black actors, he also cast “an Asian guy, Russell Wong, and a Jewish guy, Judd Nelson, in New Jack City. I believe in inclusive filmmaking. Don’t leave love off the table.”
An Oscar-winning actor and nominated director, Tim Robbins is committed to both his art and his ideals. As he told me in a recent interview, “It’s the responsibility of art and artists to reflect public discourse and current events and to question what might be socially, politically, or morally abhorrent.”
In 1981, Robbins co-founded the Actors’ Gang, a Los Angeles theater where he still serves as artistic director. During the Iraq War, Robbins and his partner at the time, Susan Sarandon, emerged as prominent opponents of the war; he created the anti-war satire Embedded for the troupe, which often mounts anti-militarism shows.
This year the Gang produced Italian playwright Dario Fo’s Accidental Death of an Anarchist, based on an Italian rail worker, Giuseppe Pinelli, who died in police custody under suspicious circumstances in 1969. “Pinelli was accused of the notorious Piazza Fontana bombing, and was cleared of the charges after his death,” Robbins said. “The events that led to Pinelli’s death have never been revealed. I’m sure this isn’t the only instance where a suspicious death of an anarchist has occurred.”
Last October, as the Gang rehearsed Death, Saudi journalist and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered at the Istanbul consulate of Saudi Arabia. “What happened to Khashoggi is enraging, not only for its cold-blooded brutality but because it has revealed how craven we are to Saudi money and influence,” Robbins stated. “This journalist isn’t the first to die at the hands of despots the U.S. supports and probably won’t be the last.”
Robbins sees this as part of the “devil’s bargain we’ve been making in U.S. foreign policy for decades. We openly support dictators that commit human rights abuses throughout the world and have done so since the early twentieth century. One would hope Khashoggi’s murder would lead to a discussion of our historical support of brutal dictators, but it doesn’t seem to be.”
He added, “This play encourages the press to be uncompromising in its pursuit of the truth, however uncomfortable that truth may be.”
Legendary actor Ed Asner has won five Golden Globes and more Primetime Emmy Awards than any other male actor. Nevertheless, despite 390 screen credits, Asner arguably played his greatest role offscreen: As Screen Actors Guild president during the 1980s, he clashed with President Ronald Reagan (himself a former S.A.G. prez) over his Central American policy, the fallout from which precipitated Lou Grant’s cancellation by CBS.
Asner has expressed his radical sensibility onscreen too, co-starring in movies such as 1983’s Daniel (E.L. Doctorow’s fictionalization of the Rosenberg “atomic spies” case), Oliver Stone’s controversial 1991 JFK, and Sean Garrett’s 2016 Citizens United, about an activist group that seeks corporate accountability and more.
Interestingly, the actor who portrayed TV’s best-known male journalist is now touring America in a satirical play about news media. Asner plays the title role in God Help Us! as a deity moderating a debate between lefty and righty television pundits.
Asner, who depicted Lou Grant as a TV news director on The Mary Tyler Moore Show and later as a big city newspaper editor on the eponymous series, discussed his views about journalism: “Donald Trump, as big a putz as he is, is correct in saying that the news in many ways has been manufactured in the past and will continue to be. It’s always the 1 percenters who create the agitation, the angst, to go to war.”
However, he continued, “there’s always a core to attach to, there is a bottom line to the truth. Only research and endeavor on our part will make that truth surface.”
Asner believes God Help Us! offers a solution to Trump-era polarization: “God’s offer of a compromise is certainly helpful. If Americans are willing to compromise with one another, they’d eventually find there’s no barrier to reach peace on Earth.”