6/1/2018 After Sony | The New Yorker

N s Desk

After Sony

By Evan Osnos December 18, 2014

With hackers threatening violence at movie theatres, Sony Pictures

Entertainment this week cancelled the release of “The Interview,” a buddy
comedy about journalists who assassinate the North Korean leader Kim Jong-
un. The news inspired an eclectic coalition of the offended. Newt Gingrich
declared, “With the Sony collapse, America has lost its rst cyberwar.” Rob
Lowe compared the moment to the appeasement of Hitler. “Hollywood has
done Neville Chamberlain proud today,” Lowe wrote. The Post, ever alert to
instances of Left Coast turpitude, mourned the movie: “KIM JONG WON: Sony
Kills Movie.”

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Until the lm was cancelled, however, members of the industry had been
largely content to watch their peers at Sony suffer. In late November, hackers
calling themselves the Guardians of Peace, whom the U.S. government says are
linked to North Korea’s government, stole, by their count, a hundred terabytes
of Sony’s data and crippled its network. They posted un nished movies, erased
hard drives, and exposed Social Security numbers and details about salaries and
contracts. Many of the headlines focussed on a string of e-mails between the
Sony Pictures Entertainment co-chairman Amy Pascal and the producer Scott
Rudin, which contained the shocking revelation that Hollywood may be a
place of casual cruelty and epic pettiness. There was little evidence of industry
solidarity, despite the fact that few studios, one can assume, would have looked
much better if their private e-mails had been arrayed across front pages.

On Tuesday, the hackers raised the stakes, promising a “bitter fate” to those
who see “The Interview.” “Remember the 11th of September 2001,” the group
wrote. “We recommend you to keep yourself distant” from theatres. Almost
immediately, America’s ve largest theatre chains dropped the lm. Some
people urged Sony to ght back by releasing the movie out for free online—
one group promised to drop DVDs over North Korea by balloon—but, by the
end of the day, the studio announced that it had “no further release plans for
the lm.” Unless something changes, nobody will see “The Interview” beyond
some snippets on the Web.

So many actors and directors tweeted their umbrage that it was easy to forget
their industry’s intermittent regard for free expression. The “Hollywood” sign
had been up for barely ve years when makers of “The Woman Disputed”
(1928) sought to assuage Germany’s concerns by changing the nationality of a
villain from German to Russian. (The Russians had a tiny import market.)
When the French complained about an un attering portrayal of the Foreign
Legion, the industry chief William Hays visited Paris to offer what the author
Ruth Vasey calls assurances that American studios “would make no lms
derogatory to the French.” The studios’ accommodation of the Nazis has
inspired a number of books, though, as David Denby wrote in the magazine
last year, people sometimes go overboard in describing Hollywood’s behavior.
“The studios didn’t advance Nazism; they failed to oppose it,” he wrote.
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Foreign governments have attempted to suppress lms before, and they have
been at least partly successful. In 1980, the Saudi government objected to
“Death of a Princess,” a television docudrama about the public execution of a
Saudi princess and her lover, for adultery. Before “Death of a Princess” aired in
Britain, the Saudis hinted that they might break off diplomatic relations or cut
off oil exports to England. In the U.S., the acting Secretary of State Warren
Christopher wrote to the PBS president Lawrence Grossman, conveying Saudi
concerns and asking him to be sure “viewers are given a full and balanced
presentation.” Christopher was criticized for sending the letter, and later said
he regretted using the word “balanced.” Some PBS stations refused to air the
show, though, including ve in South Carolina, “where Saudi investors have
large holdings in real estate in Hilton Head and other coastal resorts, and
where the U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, John West, once served as
governor,” according to a Harvard study.

More recently, Hollywood has proved to be abundantly exible when money is

on the line. China is now the second-largest international market for
Hollywood, and studios pursue Chinese nancing for such joint productions as
“Kung Fu Panda 3” and “Iron Man 3.” To avoid offending Chinese censors,
lmmakers have cut scenes from “Cloud Atlas, “Skyfall,” and other movies, and
altered a remake of “Red Dawn,” making the villains North Korean instead of
Chinese. When James Cameron released “Titanic” in 3-D, in China, in 2012,
he agreed to censor Kate Winslet’s breasts, telling the Times, “This is an
important market for me. And so I’m going to do what’s necessary to continue
having this be an important market for my lms.”

The obvious danger in withdrawing “The Interview” is that it will embolden

others to try to squelch movies before they appear, not just, Moscow or Riyadh,
but also terrorist groups, oligarchs, and any deep-pocketed entity that is willing
to hire a hacker. To this day, Hollywood has never composed a code of conduct
on censorship because many would prefer to leave the subject unexamined.
Within hours of Sony’s decision, news broke that New Regency had decided
to cancel a North Korea thriller set to star Steve Carell. Before we declare this
a moment of unprecedented concession, we should acknowledge not only the
history of self-censorship but also ongoing censorship in Hollywood. If North
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Korea wanted to make studios bend, it didn’t need to hack them. It just needed
to fund them.

Evan Osnos joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2008, and
covers politics and foreign affairs. He is the author of  “Age of
Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New
China.” Read more »

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