I grew up not even knowing who the wealthy kids were at Punahou, (which was) very diverse in both race and especially economics.'

Everyone sort of mashes up against everybody else, and you don't limit your social life to just other kama'aina. 'It's very accessible and very warm - it's not exclusive. 'It's a different sort of wealth from anywhere in the world,' noted Hemmings, whose stepfather (and later adoptive father) is renowned surfer and former state senator Fred Hemmings Jr. But King still has Honolulu traffic jams to contend with - not to mention more pressing personal issues - and is far from socially isolated, equally at home in the working-class neighborhood of Kaimuki as in tony Kahala or his downtown law office. On Oahu, that meant the privileged world of attorney Matt King, played by Clooney, who may wear Reyn Spooner aloha shirts and 'slippahs' (flip-flops) but comes from the island's landed gentry, with a house in upscale Nuuanu, a membership to an exclusive country club, a vacation home on Kauai and other perks of the kama'aina lifestyle. 'I love place and setting, and I chose not Hawaii in general, but a specific place in Hawaii, and a specific people and a slice in Hawaii … I definitely wanted to capture a specific experience on Oahu in particular, and a little bit of the Big Island, and Kauai.' 'The beauty of cinema is that it can do some things that novels just can't,' said Hemmings, in a phone interview from Los Angeles, where she was attending the movie's premiere on Wednesday. While she may understandably still be reluctant to be pigeonholed as an island writer, I found her more than willing to play tour guide to that somewhat less-exotic sphere of everyday Hawaii, at least as seen in the movie. With George Clooney starring in the movie version of 'The Descendants,' opening Friday in San Francisco and already widely acclaimed, even more viewers will see Hemmings' vision of contemporary Hawaii. When Kaui Hart Hemmings' brilliant 'The Descendants' was published in 2007, the young author was still living in San Francisco, a Mainland-born president was in the White House and the only time downtown Honolulu appeared on screen it was subbing for Sydney, London or some other city on 'Lost.' Although Hemmings had grown up on Oahu in a prominent family similar to her protagonist's - descended from both Hawaiian royalty and American missionaries - the former Wallace Stegner Fellow rejected the label of 'Hawaiian writer,' or the suggestion that her debut novel was meant to illustrate more than one man's psychological journey through a family crisis.įour years later, Hemmings has returned to Hawaii, she shares her elite alma mater of Punahou with President Barack Obama, and the hit TV remake of 'Hawaii Five-O' has created a high-definition showcase for the workaday world outside of Waikiki.

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