The journalist Erich Schwartzel’s new book “Red Carpet: Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy” reads like a cautionary tale for American corporations seduced by the lure of the Chinese market.
When “Top Gun” came out, in 1986, every detail of its release seemed carefully orchestrated to prop up an image of American power. Recall the glossy-haired, twenty-three-year-old, effortlessly speeding on his motorcycle, or flying an F-14A Tomcat and donning his iconic aviators. The film earned a hundred and eighty million dollars domestically, and managed to do what years of state-produced recruitment videos could not: upon its release, Navy and Air Force enrollments surged.
” lays out, among other things, the history surrounding the disappearing badges. “This book is the story of what happened between the two ‘Top Guns,’ ” he writes in his introduction. For Schwartzel, a reporter who began his career covering the fracking boom for the Pittsburgh, publishing a book on China’s creeping influence over Hollywood came as an unexpected development. But, upon joining the Los Angeles bureau of thein 2013, Schwartzel “soon started seeing China everywhere [he] looked.
Caught between the threat of losing China’s business if it didn’t pull the film and a Scorsese-led media backlash if it did, Disney settled on a compromise: it would release the film, but as quietly as possible. After financially starving the promotion campaign to insure “Kundun” would bomb on opening week, Disney could then use lousy box-office numbers to tell Scorsese that it wasn’t worth expanding the film nationwide. “The bad news is that the film was made,” as the Disney C.E.O.
Even as American films were progressively allowed into Chinese theatres after Mao’s death, some boundaries remained in place. A deal known as the “master contract,” which would allow ten imported movies a year, was first formalized in 1994.
One of Hollywood’s most expensive disappearing acts involved the reboot of “Red Dawn,” about a group of teen-agers defending the U.S. from foreign invaders. When M-G-M first envisioned the plot, in 2008, China was initially imagined as the antagonist. But, as Schwartzel explains, by the time editing had finished in 2010, “no Hollywood executive would touch a movie that turned their most important new customer into the villain.
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