To contemporize Tonto for a broad audience required discarding a century of cultural tropes about Native Americans - the blatantly racist ones and the more subtly so, according to “Lone Ranger” screenwriter Justin Haythe, who shares credit with Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio. “This pushes us further back into exotica, into otherness, strangeness, a kind of a mystical, spooky past.” “This represents a major setback in our efforts to combat stereotyping of our image,” said Hanay Geiogamah, a Native American playwright and professor at UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television. The director points out that the film incorporates the perspective of the original North Americans, but as is clear from some of the commentary since the film opened, not all are impressed. As a submissive sidekick, his very name came to stand for a pathetic, backward stereotype, even though some Native Americans decades ago were pleased to at least see him portrayed by one of their own.įor the new movie, the studio went to great lengths to hire a cast that included Native Americans and to consult them while the film was being made. Tonto has been a complex lightning rod for shifting sympathies over four generations. Though this revisionist western has Tonto holding the reins, some prominent Native Americans aren’t smiling at Depp’s flamboyant portrayal of the most famous and divisive character in their pop culture history. More than 40 years later, Tonto’s side of the story is being told in a longer and more ambitious form - a saucy, big-budget Disney movie starring Johnny Depp, which opened last week to cool reviews and poor box office.

The lone ranger kemosabe