An Asian-American group is up in arms over plans to screen “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” in Brooklyn Bridge Park, alleging that Mickey Rooney’s portrayal of a buck-toothed, bumbling Japanese man in the flick is offensive and racist.
The 1961 Audrey Hepburn classic is being shown as part of the Park Conservancy’s free outdoor “Movies With a View” series, which receives some city funding but is primarily sponsored by the SyFy network. Films are shown on the park’s lawns by Pier 1 in Brooklyn Heights.
“By screening this film, the organizers are sanctioning the racism it contains, and subjecting new audiences (including children and Asian-Americans) to a minstrel show of racist ideology,” wrote Ursula Liang, a Bronx woman who organized an online petition last week that has gathered more than 200 signatures.
“It’s 2011. It’s New York. Do we still have to fight the hostile, hurtful world of 1961 Hollywood?” she added.
In the adaptation of the Truman Capote novel, Rooney sports “yellowface” in heavy makeup to play bumbling, buck-toothed neighbor Mr. Yunioshi, who speaks in an exaggerated Japanese accent.
Liang noted on the petition’s website that she had reached out to both Borough President Marty Markowitz and Assemblywoman Joan Millman (D-Brooklyn), whose staff said they’ve passed on the petitioners’ concerns to the Conservancy.
Nancy Webster, executive director of the conservancy, said the show would go on, adding “we recognize” Rooney’s character is inappropriate but it was “a product of the times.”
Regina Myer, who heads the city’s Brooklyn Bridge Park Corp., said her agency “recognizes that one character in the ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ movie is an offensive stereotype, but this does not negate the value of the film as an American classic.”
In audio commentary for the movie’s 45th anniversary DVD released five years ago, producer Richard Shepherd and director Blake Edwards both confided that they wished Mr. Yunioshi would’ve been played by an authentic Japanese actor.
After the film was pulled from the “Ratatouille” film festival in California in 2008 following complaints that it was racist, a saddened Rooney told the Sacramento Bee the criticism “breaks my heart.”
“They hired me to do this overboard, and we had fun doing it,” he said. “Never in all the more than 40 years after we made it — not one complaint. Every place I’ve gone in the world people say, ‘God, you were so funny.’ Asians and Chinese come up to me and say, ‘Mickey you were out of this world.’”