Reader to Reader

Thanks, Dick Van Dyke, for defending with typical wit not only your own professional image, but that of others against “geezerizers” (Saturday Letters, Dec. 11)! To have maintained your activity, agility and vigor so agelessly--and I’ve witnessed all of it--easily earns you my lifetime achievement award!

Eventually “they” will come to realize that although their external bodies have changed, inside they are the same kids.

Incidentally, in Monday’s article about Michael Caine, there appears a definition of “geezer” as a real man. Go figure.

PATRICIA R. JONES

Claremont

So cool that you printed Dick Van Dyke’s letter. I think he has more class in his ass than the two reporters combined. (I am not a senior citizen but a 49-year-old kid.)

MARY DICKINSON

Alta Loma

Matthew Okada writes that the reason “The Insider” hasn’t done much business is because “it’s just a labored retelling of events that everybody already knows happened.”

Gee, that’s exactly how I felt about “Titanic”!

MICHAEL SCHLESINGER

Sherman Oaks

Due to a production error, the following two letters were garbled last Saturday.

Roger E. Goulet’s Nov. 27 response to Dana Calvo’s article (“Applying the First Light Coat,” Nov. 20) is remarkable in that it illuminates the depth of his ignorance regarding the subject of Latino underemployment by the “Hollywood” industry.

The Spanish-language television stations he refers to mainly target viewers in Mexico, Central and South America and, to a lesser degree, immigrants from those countries living in the U.S. Americans of Latino heritage by and large do not regularly watch this programming.

Latino Americans have contributed greatly in making America what it is today. Americans of Latino heritage are part of the American fabric, and their concerns about the lack of diversity in Hollywood are very much legitimate. The basic problem with Goulet’s rationale is also reflected by the Hollywood powers that be in that they don’t consider Latino Americans as real Americans; rather, Latinos are just another bunch of foreigners.

It is that malignant mind-set that has to be abolished if there is to be equal employment opportunities by Hollywood’s present-day employers.

DAVE SILVA

Tarzana

Just to set the record straight: 65-year-old King Leopold met his mistress--16-year-old Caroline Delacroix, already mistress of a former French army officer--in 1900, not “the 1850s.” She later became Baroness de Vaughan, proving yet again that sex is the express lane of upward mobility. Neither she nor King Leopold ever visited Africa.

This story is marvelously recounted in Adam Hochschild’s book “King Leopold’s Ghost,” along with other incidentals of King Leopold’s career--the plunder of the Belgian Congo, the related deaths of 10 million Africans in the ivory and rubber trade. Obviously, the Hollywood producer casting a “very young, very hot” babe as Leopold’s mistress decided to laser in on the really important stuff.

ROBERT W. SAWYER

Long Beach