Director Luis Valdez says he's shelving his latest project because of criticism surrounding the casting of a non-Hispanic - Laura San Giacomo - in the role of the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo.
Valdez, whose other films include "La Bamba," said that "to suggest that I have been somehow selling Latinos short . . . is to completely distort the situation."Raul Julia, who is Hispanic, had been cast to play the artist Diego Rivera, Kahlo's husband. San Giacomo appeared in "sex, lies and videotape."
If he made the movie now, Valdez told the Los Angeles Times, audiences would "see the casting rather than the story."