Former Sony Pictures CEO Michael Lynton broke down his role in the studio’s infamous hacked email scandal on “Obsessed: The Podcast.”
Former Sony Pictures CEO Michael Lynton broke down his role in the studio’s infamous hacked email scandal on “Obsessed: The Podcast.”The one time former Sony Pictures CEO Michael Lynton changed up his routine, he made the biggest mistake of his career.
“I normally didn’t attend read-throughs because I was always the suit. I was the guy who was sitting in the background trying to make sure that nobody went off the rails,” Lynton, 66, toldguest host—and fellow Snap Inc. board member—Joanna Coles. “But in this case, I had to be in the room because we had to make the choice.”, an outrageous 2014 comedy film from Seth Rogen and James Franco that ended with the graphic assassination of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. In response to the movie, a state-sponsored hacking group executed a devastating cyber attack on Sony Pictures.From Mistakes to Meaning , written with former Treasury Department Chief of Staff Joshua Steiner, Lynton described how he learned of the hack on his morning drive to work. “They wiped out 70 percent of our computers, so everything was brought to a standstill,” Lynton said, not to mention leaked scripts, full film cuts, and celebrity emails.and studio executive Clint Culpepper insulting comedian Kevin Hart with, “I’m not saying he’s a whore, but he’s a whore.”“To do this would be a violation of PBS rules, actually, even for Batman,” the show’s host, Henry Louis Gates, wrote in response—though the revelations were ultimately left on the cutting room floor. In retaliation for the Sony Pictures film"The Interview," a state-sponsored North Korean hacking group carried out the biggest hack in Hollywood history.“They put out all of these salacious emails from all over the studio, which had a lot of correspondence with movie stars and agents,” Lynton said, “which the press picked up on, and that made it a big media event, and it went on for months.”Lynton said Sony had been in a “competitive situation” with Universal Studios over the film’s acquisition. “I didn’t want to be the parent. I didn’t want to be the cop. I didn’t want to be the person who said, ‘No,’” Lynton said. “In fact, what I wanted to do was be with the cool kids—meaning Seth Rogen and James Franco—and all those people around having a great time reading the script.” “So I said, ‘Yes, let’s do it,’ when the reading was over, and everybody was cheering and saying how funny it was,” Lynton added. “And nothing good came of that.”Lynton attributes the mistake to his lonely childhood. During his upbringing, Lynton’s family moved to the Netherlands, where he didn’t know anyone or speak the language. “And what I developed as a result of that is a deep desire to belong. I really wanted to be with a cool group of kids,” Lynton said. President Barack Obama called Lynton on the phone to question his decision. “What were you thinking when you made killing the leader of a hostile foreign nation a plot point? Of course, that was a mistake," Obama said.impulse that caused me to do this," Lynton said. “And I had not really understood that until we went through the process of this book.”
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