Alisa Valdes-Rodríguez takes to social media to Fight Dirty adaptation of her work
By Arturo R. García
Since we noted it in the links last month, the controversy surrounding a TV adaptation of Alisa Valdes-Rodríguez’s book The Dirty Girls Social Club book series went from escalation to cease-and-desist orders to, now, an apparent cease-fire.
The novel, the first of two books dealing with a sextet of Latinas (the “Dirty Girls” nickname stems from one of the girls being referred to as “Sucia” by her family; a third book will be released this fall) who become friends while attending Boston University and stay in touch as their lives take them in different directions. In a series of blog posts, Rodríguez accused the parties to whom she optioned the television rights – producer Ann Serrano López and screenwriter Luisa Lechin – of distorting her characters’ ethnicities and transforming them from sex-positive characters into sexually-irresponsible caricatures.
Neither López (reportedly getting a divorce from comedian George López) nor Lechin have publicly responded to Rodríguez’s series of posts and tweets over Christmas weekend, which have since been taken down. In one, Rodríguez said López and Lechin told her nine months ago that their prospective script included a lesbian character, Elizabeth, being re-written to be bisexual. Rodríguez said producer Lynette Ramírez told her at the time, “No one trusts a bisexual.” From the post:
I took that moment to tell the ladies at the table that I was, in fact, bisexual, and very trustworthy. Bisexuality, I informed them, did not mean a person had a compelling need to screw everything in sight. It means only that we are attracted to SOME men and SOME women and, just like straight or homosexual people, monogamous and normal when we commit to a person we love.
The women around the table seemed very uncomfortable with me after that. I’m not sure if it was because I’d objected to the change in my character, or because I was bisexual, a condition they clearly saw as pathological and depraved.
Rodríguez later posted what she called a portion of the script for a Dirty Girls pilot. Emphasis below is hers:
INT. COLLEGE DORM HALLWAY – NIGHT
The camera follows a young GIRL’S tight ass down the hallway to a closed door. The hand-written sign on the door reads: The Dirty Girl’s Social Club – Don’t enter unless you want to get dirty! Grooving to the music, she opens the door and enters…
INT. DORM ROOM – CONTINUOUS
The smoky, four-bed dorm room is jammed with a dozen of so co-eds, partying hard.
Let me take a break from the script here for a moment to point out that none of my characters are “partiers.” They don’t smoke. Further, the idea that the very first we would see of them is a “girl’s tight ass” is so overwhelmingly stupid and offensive it gives me heart palpitations and keeps me up at night. Anyway, let’s see the rest of the opening sequence, shall we?
On one of the beds, a pretty Cuban girl, carrying the ‘freshman twenty’ in hotpants and a camisole, slurps a jello shot off her supine boyfriend’s six-pack abs. As she reaches for another jello shot, FREEZE-FRAME: the name LAUREN (19), is written in cursive.
Let me intercede again for a moment. Lauren is the main character in my novel. She is half-Cuban and “half white trash,” from Louisiana. She is white. (Hispanics can be of any “race,” according to the census bureau, and ARE of all races, according to REALITY.) To simply call her a “pretty Cuban girl” leaves this wide open for her to be played by a stereotypical actress. But that is the least of my concerns.
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