Video footage has surfaced of the moment Native American actors walked off the set of Adam Sandler's movie Ridiculous Six, as has a page of the screenplay in which characters discuss using a dead squirrel as toilet paper.
The footage, shot on a phone camera and obtained by Native American news agency Indian Country, shows a producer and another crew member – both Caucasian – attempting to persuade the actors that the movie is not demeaning to Native Americans, despite clothing them in what has been dubbed "stereotypical" clothing and giving them names such as "Beaver Breath".
About a dozen actors walked off the set of the movie – one of four Sandler is making for Netflix under a package deal announced last October – in protest. Some of the actors later spoke of their frustrations with the continuing typecasting they suffer at the hands of Hollywood.
In the page of the screenplay, also obtained by Indian Country after apparently being photographed on a phone by one of the actors, Beaver Breath, described as a "30-ish chubby woman", tells her friend Smoking Fox (no description, but we're willing to guess she is an attractive woman in her 20s) that she has come up with a great idea for decorations for her forthcoming wedding.
"We decorate tree with toilet paper," she says.
"What is this toilet paper?"
"Paper used to clean your chi-wat after taking a chungo."
A third character, Never-Wears-Bra, then chimes in: "That's what dead squirrel for!"
Meanwhile, white rapper Vanilla Ice, who plays Mark Twain in the movie, has told TMZ that "it's a comedy, I don't think anybody had any ill feelings or intent or anything".
"This movie isn't Dancing With Wolves, it's comedy," said the former motocross champion, who had a massive hit in 1990 with Ice Ice Baby before falling into drug abuse and occasional skirmishes with the law (the most recent coming in February when he was charged with burgling a Florida home next door to one he was renovating).
Ice said that he is "Part Choctaw Indian, so I see both sides".
But, he insisted, "It's not like [the filmmakers] are there to showcase anything about anybody".
