GREEN BOOK is not a Dr. Don Shirley Biopic
The critically acclaimed film GREEN BOOK is being promoted as a performing artist’s biographic film. It may be a biopic of the music virtuoso’s one time driver/bodyguard, but many details are very far removed from documented reality of Dr. Don Shirley.
GREEN BOOK is a decent dramedy. The acting is solid. The characterizations and set-up, however, are very simplistic. Basically, a street smart white ethnic gesticulates when he speaks and a highly educated black aesthete condescends. The storyline stoops to a maudlin scene worthy of a 1950s film portrayal of pathetic/self-loathing homosexual men. It commodifies anecdotal depictions of 1960s police profiling — meanwhile reinforcing the myth that racism only existed in its worst form in the Deep South. Hah! Laws of every colony, and later, U.S. state permitted human enslavement and indentured servitude.
Other than Dr. Shirley’s NY address, his pianistic virtuosity, his race/age, his hiring of driver Tony “Lip” Vallelonga and his record label’s packaging of his career the GREEN BOOK script does not present one actual bit of biographic information. Don Shirley has been WHITEWASHED in death as he was in life, when reportedly his record label convinced him to modify his resumé and repertoire, “White people won’t feel comfortable watching a historically black college/university educated black man play classical music, so please play popular music, with a little race flare, you know.”
It has been reported that no one involved with this production RESEARCHED Don Shirley’s life. How is it possible for a team of writers, producers, director, executives and actors AVOID researching the celebrity whom it promotes as the subject of the biopic? It can’t. In fact, creator and co-writer Nick Vallelonga, son of Tony “Lip” Vallelonga, identified the story’s commercial potential and contacted Don Shirley about a project about the 1962 trip. One would think that creating a character based on Dr. Shirley would include researching family and confirming the details of the record label hype and mystique surrounding Dr. Shirley especially since Nick Vallelonga had met the virtuoso personally. Dr. Shirley chose against working with Nick Vallelonga on a film. After the deaths of Dr. Shirley’s and Mr. Vallelonga, Nick Vallelonga proceeded with the project and, despite Dr. Shirley’s well-documented Internet presence, Google search and numerous web-based name/family search engines, the project didn’t learn of any surviving relatives whom they might contact to flush out Dr. Shirley’s character. Interest in Dr. Shirley’s family ties is expressed in some of the film’s dialogue. However , the facts about Dr. Shirley’s family were presumably JETTISONED for dramatic effect. It’s a travesty. It’s a conscious commercial conspiracy. It uses the power of cinema to defraud the viewing public. As a result of watching this fallacious waste of celluloid, thousands or millions of people will now more firmly etch into their minds this urban/suburban/plantation myth that white salvation and black passivity as the fundamentals of U.S. race relations.