Red carpet, p.1
Red Carpet, page 1
PENGUIN PRESS
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Copyright © 2022 by Erich Schwartzel
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library of congress cataloging-in-publication data
Names: Schwartzel, Erich, author.
Title: Red carpet : Hollywood, China, and the global battle for cultural supremacy / Erich Schwartzel.
Description: New York : Penguin Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2021027952 (print) | LCCN 2021027953 (ebook) | ISBN 9781984878991 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781984879004 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Motion picture industry—United States. | Motion picture industry—United States—Finance. | Motion picture industry—China. | Motion picture industry—Government policy—China. | United States—Relations—China. | China—Relations—United States.
Classification: LCC PN1993.5.U6 S355 2022 (print) | LCC PN1993.5.U6 (ebook) | DDC 791.430973—dc23/eng/20211027
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021027952
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021027953
Cover design by Christopher Brian King
Cover image by Oleksandr Hurtovyi / Getty Images
Designed by Meighan Cavanaugh, adapted for ebook by Shayan Saalabi
pid_prh_6.0_139121902_c0_r0
For my parents, Paul and Romayne Schwartzel
Every film that goes from America abroad, wherever it shall be sent, shall correctly portray to the world the purposes, the ideals, the accomplishments, the opportunities, and the life of America. We are going to sell America to the world with American motion pictures.
—will hays, president of the motion picture producers and distributors of america, 1923
During its 5,000-year history, the Chinese nation has created a brilliant and profound culture. We should disseminate the most fundamental Chinese culture in a popular way.
—xi jinping, president of china, 2014
CONTENTS
Introduction
PART I
1. Banning Brad Pitt
2. Hearts and Minds
3. Opening
4. Development Hell
5. Spielberg in Beijing
6. Censorship
PART II
7. Fakeistan
8. Transformed
9. The Rise and Fall of China’s Richest Man
10. Magic Kingdom
11. Hollywood’s Translators
12. The Hero’s Journey
PART III
13. Heartland
14. Agents of the State
15. Wolf Warriors
16. Watching Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in Kenya
Epilogue: Sequel
Images
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Image Credits
Index
INTRODUCTION
In the weeks following the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, a group of Chinese executives traveled to Los Angeles for a crash course in influence. Inside the UCLA classroom of film professor Robert Rosen, a parade of Hollywood executives conducted a series of lectures on America’s entertainment industry. The students had been chosen by their country’s State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television, and they were in Los Angeles with a mandate: to learn how the American film industry had achieved its status as the leader in global culture—and how China could re-create that achievement back home.
The head of Universal Pictures, the studio behind Frankenstein, Back to the Future, and The Fast and the Furious, spoke about his film operation, a conglomerate grown out of a collection of nickelodeons founded in 1912. So did the CEO of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, a company that was established before the talkie and eventually produced The Wizard of Oz, West Side Story, and The Silence of the Lambs. An agent at William Morris, the talent agency that counted Matt Damon and Denzel Washington as clients, talked about how he managed America’s biggest movie stars. An independent producer explained the art of putting a movie’s finances together, and the head of the Motion Picture Association of America detailed his organization’s lobbying work on behalf of the nation’s entertainers in Washington. It was hard to imagine a more glamorous set of day jobs, positions that turned the men and women who held them into stewards and emissaries of American culture.
That China would send officials to Los Angeles to learn from America’s most famous capitalist enterprise would have been unthinkable just decades before, when the Cultural Revolution and the massacre of protesters at Tiananmen Square left little doubt about the government’s attitude toward free expression. Yet China in 2008 was ascendant itself, even if that rise occurred out of view of many Americans—including many in Hollywood, where the country’s work was just beginning. At the time, the Chinese visitors’ unassuming exterior masked incredible power. One young executive worked at a movie channel with eight hundred million viewers, a scale beyond what any of his Hollywood instructors could fathom.
It would take only a decade for the positioning of the two parties in that classroom—the Chinese as students and the Hollywood executives as teachers—to seem both prescient and absurd. In the years that followed, the dynamic would reverse, and it would be Hollywood looking to China for help.
Consider the future of the entities represented in that classroom alone. Within a decade of those classes, Universal would complete a $500 million financing deal with a Chinese firm, cast Chinese actresses in its biggest movies, and construct a Universal theme park outside China’s capital city. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer would shop itself for a Chinese takeover and censor James Bond movies to make sure Chinese citizens never looked weak when matched against England’s ageless secret agent. William Morris would open an office in China to help the country’s new class of A-listers win over global audiences. Producers would rewrite scripts, trading New York for Shanghai if it meant getting a movie financed by Chinese billionaires. The MPAA and other officials in Washington would do anything they could to maintain access to the Chinese box office, which grew at a clip as domestic moviegoing flatlined.
Chinese theaters were largely closed off to the world until 1994, when Hollywood studios started exporting ten movies a year to the country. At the time, $3 million was a record-setting gross. By the time those Chinese students arrived at UCLA fourteen years later, the market was growing but still a bundle of optimistic projections. By 2020, China would be the number one box-office market in the world, home to grosses that routinely neared $1 billion—a market that became too big to ignore and too lucrative to anger. Through it all, China would continue to see Hollywood much as those early visitors did: as the ultimate template for building a show business that helped fuel a country’s rise, their goal a twenty-first-century sequel to what America’s entertainers had done for their country over the course of a hundred years. The Chinese were quick studies.
* * *
• • •
I joined the Los Angeles bureau of The Wall Street Journal in the summer of 2013. I had spent the previous four years covering the energy industry for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, reporting on a fracking boom in Appalachia that had transformed the region’s politics, economy, and culture. I was hired to be a fresh set of eyes on the Journal’s Hollywood coverage, and I soon started seeing China everywhere I looked.
One announcement followed another: Chinese star Fan Bingbing was appearing in the new X-Men. An American theater chain headquartered in Leawood, Kansas, was trading on Wall Street thanks to financing from China’s richest man. Paramount Pictures was rushing to edit World War Z to remove a scene that implied a zombie outbreak had originated in China, a plot detail that executives feared would lead to censors denying the movie a Chinese release. Seemingly every producer in town was shopping a script based on the Flying Tigers, the World War II pilots who helped defend China against Japan. Moviegoers in the eastern Chinese city of Qingdao were flocking to see the latest Transformers, sending millions of dollars in unexpected grosses back to its studio on Melrose Avenue.
To many observers, it was another round of “dumb money” flowing into Hollywood, long an industry capable of wooing investors with stardust. When I learned there was actually a government agenda out of Beijing backing the efforts—an agenda visible for anyone to see—I realized this would not be a case of fleeting interest. It was immediately clear that Chinese leaders had a plan larger than just box-office grosses. China’s economic leverage had quickly translated into political sway, most often in the censorship practiced by Beijing bureaucrats who amassed unprecedented power in executive suites. Unbeknownst to most moviegoers, studios were removing scenes and dialogue from scripts and finished movies to appease Chinese censors—scrubbing any production of plot points that brushed up against sensitive Chinese history or made the country look anything less than a modern, sophisticated world power. Even more disturbing than the movies changing were the ones not getting m ade at all, for fear of angering Chinese officials. Hollywood became a commercial arm for China’s new ambition, and piece by piece, China’s interest in the American film industry revealed itself to be a complement to its political ascendance, one that is rewriting the global order of the new century.
The story of this unexpected relationship can be told in three acts. It begins with the founding of Hollywood itself, an industry of workaday seamstresses and actors that in a century transformed into a powerhouse that pulled the world toward the U.S. Hollywood became America’s number one export, shipping the swagger of John Wayne, the resistance heroes of Star Wars, and the romantic sweep of Titanic around the world. For politicians, the movies became a vehicle of influence—especially so in China. Although it had been largely shut off from American culture while it conscripted its own artists and filmmakers into Mao Zedong’s revolution, China began to permit Hollywood movies into its theaters in the 1990s as part of a broader modernizing effort. Economics bested Communist Party instincts to hide dangerous thoughts from their people, generating box-office grosses that would prove indispensable to American studio executives.
The second act is the collision that followed, a decade during which Hollywood vulnerabilities met Chinese ambition. Out of nowhere appeared a market with 1.4 billion potential customers—a population of spenders that one Hollywood executive described to me as “a great national resource.” Accessing that resource would require bowing to censorship demands and navigating political land mines to build a theme park or secure Chinese financing. Throughout this decade, Chinese producers and politicians maintained the student-teacher relationship evident in that UCLA classroom, turning to Hollywood experts for help building a commercial film industry of their own, one that transformed the theatrical propaganda of previous generations into popcorn entertainment.
The third act focuses the spotlight on China, where President Xi Jinping presides over a movie industry that has become an essential arm of a recast Middle Kingdom, a business modeled after America’s but molded to account for the Communist Party’s expectation that art will serve the state. The filmography of China in recent years has given its audiences what Americans have taken for granted: stories about people who look like them, who work and play in a country claiming a moment in history. Now China is trying to complete the hardest piece of the puzzle: shipping those movies overseas—and with them the values and vision that they embody and the alternative mode of governance to Western liberal democracy that they promote. As China redraws the geopolitical alignments of the world, it wants to use its movies to redraw the cultural borders atop them.
* * *
• • •
The arc of China’s influence is evident in a single Hollywood franchise, Top Gun, in which the geopolitical tensions of the next century came to be reflected in a two-inch patch sewn onto a movie star’s costume. The original 1986 film is a hallmark of Ronald Reagan’s America—Tom Cruise as the aviator-wearing daredevil Maverick, Berlin’s “Take My Breath Away,” the hero declaring, “I feel the need . . .” In a sign of how deeply the film saw itself as a celebration of the U.S. Navy, producers asked the military to cooperate on the film and acceded to its wishes to make the movie a robust demonstration of American military might. They scrapped a scene involving a crash and turned Maverick’s love interest, originally a fellow navy member, into a contractor so audiences didn’t see the hero breaking rules about relationships among personnel. Moviegoers didn’t mind the jingoism; they wanted to watch their country’s naval aviators pull off awesome stunts and save the day. Top Gun grossed $177 million in North America. It also did what years of state-produced recruitment videos could not and boosted interest among young men and women in joining the armed forces. Recruiters waited in theater lobbies to catch moviegoers on their way out of the film. (Ray-Ban sales shot up, too.)
In 2017, Paramount Pictures announced it would reboot Top Gun with its original star, turning the thirty-one-year-old movie into another example of Hollywood’s effective strategy of bathing audiences in nostalgia. But much about the global film market had changed in the intervening years. A $150 million production like Top Gun: Maverick, as the sequel would be called, was so expensive that studio chiefs approved the film’s production with accounting projections that assumed its global gross would likely include Chinese ticket sales. What’s more, some of that $150 million budget came courtesy of Skydance Media, a Los Angeles film and TV company partially financed by Tencent, the Shenzhen-based Chinese tech firm behind the country’s most popular messaging app. Chinese money was backing the new Top Gun in two ways: in financing behind the scenes and in expected box-office grosses once it hit theaters there.
This all explains what happened to Tom Cruise’s bomber jacket.
In the original film, Maverick’s bomber featured a patch that highlighted the USS Galveston tour of Japan, Taiwan, and other countries in the Pacific, with flags from those countries below his collar—along with his aviators, as iconic a look as the American movie has created. Chinese investors on the movie pointed out to Skydance executives that those 1986 patches now posed a problem. After moving aggressively into Hong Kong, Xi had taken steps to reinforce the view he and many within China held that Taiwan was a part of China as well, and not its own country. Having a global movie star flaunt Taiwan’s flag on his back undermined Chinese sovereignty. And given China’s decades-long animosity toward Japan, the studio executives reasoned that they should play it safe and erase that patch, too. When Paramount unveiled the poster for Top Gun: Maverick in the summer of 2019, it showed Cruise from the back, his signature brown leather jacket in focus and the flags of Taiwan and Japan—U.S. allies in real life—removed. Chinese officials did not even have to weigh in. By 2019, Hollywood had so fully absorbed Beijing’s political preferences that such decisions were made by teams in Los Angeles without Chinese input. If it could help Paramount executives make their case to Chinese censors that Top Gun should show in Chinese theaters, Maverick’s bomber would adhere to the One China policy.
This book is the story of what happened between the two Top Guns. It is a story with implications that stretch far beyond the entertainment industry. Hollywood’s experience has served as a precursor for numerous American industries trying to balance doing business in China with placating Chinese officials, from Apple to the National Basketball Association. In the months following the COVID-19 outbreak, China’s economic recovery proved a financial salvation for struggling companies across numerous sectors, further boosting the country’s political leverage through its 1.4 billion consumers.
China’s omnipresence on-screen reflects the country’s increasing ubiquity in business and in other parts of the world. That ubiquity has also exported a worldwide fear of crossing China. In the course of researching this book, I learned quickly the set of tools—encrypted messaging apps, coded conversations—that executives insisted upon, knowing their communications were monitored by officials in Beijing.
These concerns only grew as tensions between the U.S. and China escalated during Donald Trump’s administration and Xi’s aggressive crackdown on dissent. As China loomed large in the collective imagination, the lives and experiences of individual Chinese citizens were often lost in sweeping geopolitical analyses. Those deeply involved in Hollywood’s economic relationship with China grew quiet too, worried not only about losing their business but also about graver consequences: being called in for questioning, getting thrown out of the country, disappearing.
In early 2020, I had lunch at a vegan restaurant blocks from Warner Bros. with an executive who worked in China. Before we could begin talking, she turned off her cell phone and put it in her purse underneath the table. When that didn’t assuage her fears, she took her purse to the other side of the restaurant, asking the staff to keep it behind the counter. She then wondered if she should go put it in her car, since she’d heard that the Chinese government could even surveil a conversation from across the room. Chinese paranoia had infiltrated Burbank, and it was entirely justified.
