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 first 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.”
Until the film 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 unfinished 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 five largest theatre chains dropped the film. Some people urged Sony to fight 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 film.” 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 five 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 unflattering 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 films 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.
Foreign governments have attempted to suppress films 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 five 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 flexible when money is on the line. China is now the second-largest international market for Hollywood, and studios pursue Chinese financing for such joint productions as “Kung Fu Panda 3” and “Iron Man 3.” To avoid offending Chinese censors, filmmakers 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 films.”
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 Korea wanted to make studios bend, it didn’t need to hack them. It just needed to fund them.
