It sounded like a good idea at the time: a Hollywood spy thriller, starring, for the first time in history, an Asian male lead. With an estimated $350 million production budget, and up-and-coming Hong Kong actor, JK Jr, who, let's be honest, is not the sharpest tool in the shed, but probably the hottest, Brood Empire was basically a sure thing. Until it wasn't.

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So how did it all fall apart? There were smart guys involved. So smart, so woke. So woke it hurts. There was top-notch talent across the board and the financial backing of a heavyweight Chinese studio. And yet, Brood Empire is remembered now not as a historical landmark that smashed the bamboo ceiling in Hollywood, but rather as a fiasco of seismic proportions.

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The Whitewash is the definitive oral history of the whole sordid mess. Unofficial. Unasked for. Only intermittently fact-checked, and featuring a fool's gallery of actors, producers, directors, film historians and scummy clickbait journalists to answer the question of how it all went so horribly, horribly wrong.