‘Heat Wave’ Did It First

I could not help but laugh at all the hoopla surrounding “Ready for L.A. Riot, the Movie?” (Calendar, Feb. 20). Everyone from the film’s producers to the executives at Showtime are speaking as though they are tackling incendiary issues that have never been tackled on film before.

I would like to invite all of them to watch “Heat Wave,” TNT’s searing, insightful, award-winning and definitive film about Los Angeles’ 1965 Watts riots.

It is astonishing how the present-day questions, statements and prognostications about our beleaguered city are almost verbatim of those said by the writer, director and cast of the Turner piece, and this was two years before the 1992 riot.

Showtime and the producers of the latest film deserve kudos for their efforts, but if they and the rest of us were listening to the messages of the earlier film, perhaps there wouldn’t be a need to make a second.

CARLO ROMAR

Woodland Hills