Red Carpet, page 14
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When asked about acceding to Chinese censors, Hollywood executives will often say they change movies for many foreign countries—and that’s true. Yet none come with the economic leverage China does, or its ability to change not only the movies shown within its borders, but the ones made outside them. In fact, China’s system of censorship follows a playbook established by another totalitarian regime that once mandated what audiences around the world saw and what Hollywood producers created, and continues a lineage of Hollywood acquiescence to the almighty market.
The troubling precedent to consider begins on a winter evening in December 1930, when a crowd gathered at a Berlin movie theater for an opening-night screening of All Quiet on the Western Front. In the U.S., the adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s novel was a breakthrough in Hollywood sophistication and storytelling. In Germany, it was an indictment of the country’s part in the Great War. No audience member watching this movie was unsure of its jaundiced view of recent history—with its cynical soldiers, lying lieutenants, and unvarnished acknowledgment that war is hell. But to the moviegoers assembled in Berlin that Friday night, the movie also dared to rebuke the central historical animus of their new leader, Adolf Hitler.
Brownshirts in the audience yelled as the film appeared on-screen. Pro-Hitler moviegoers assaulted Jews in the crowd. The projectionist soon gave up and the movie was stopped. Joseph Goebbels, a failed novelist a few years away from becoming the most famous propagandist of the twentieth century, addressed the crowd. Hollywood had come to Germany to sully its reputation, Goebbels told the faithful. This movie was an opening blow in a coming clash of ideals, and they would not stand for it. Then some Nazis in the crowd released stink bombs and mice into the auditorium.
By the time the crowd had dispersed from the aborted movie screening that December night, German officials had set into motion a system of censorship and coercion that for years would force Hollywood to trade moral qualms for market access, keeping the stories of vulnerable Jews and Europeans off-screen at the Nazis’ request. It is an uneasy parallel to draw, but the Nazis’ approach to regulating film following that 1930 screening bears alarming resemblance to the one China would adopt a half century later.
In the eyes of Germany’s censorship board, All Quiet on the Western Front showed the world an unflattering portrayal of Germans, and allowing it to screen with no repercussions would convey a weak Germany. The choice was clear: the movie was banned. “Victory is ours!” shouted a Nazi-run newspaper.
Universal, the studio behind All Quiet, began scrubbing the film of any scene that might offend Germans. Eight months later, they resubmitted it. German censors approved this version, but only if Universal agreed to an extraordinary demand: the edited cut must be the version shown not only in Germany but in cinemas around the world. The Germans did not simply want their own people to think that their country had an unblemished war record; it wanted the rest of the world to believe it, too. Moviegoers everywhere would see a sanitized version of All Quiet on the Western Front—one in which the German soldiers weren’t dunked in mud so often and one missing the dialogue about the kaiser causing the war. German consuls stationed in overseas offices went to the theater to confirm Universal had kept its word.
In 1932 the German government, riding a wave of nationalist sentiment, introduced Article 15, a provision that gave Germany the right to cancel distribution agreements with any studio that produced a film it found offensive. It didn’t matter if the offending film had shown in Germany—if Nazis or German honor were disparaged on-screen anywhere, the studio behind that movie could have its future releases banned from Germany and German-occupied territories. The outsize reach of an Article 15 infraction gave the Nazis disproportionate power—power that meant the party would rise without significant cinematic pushback from the most powerful cultural force on earth.
Hitler had watched in frustration as Hollywood won the war for hearts and minds. After assuming the chancellorship of Germany in 1933, Hitler ordered his Supreme Command to create Universum-Film AG, a film company that produced propaganda movies that reflected the values of the regime. The Reich’s ownership stake in Universum-Film AG was kept secret so audiences wouldn’t receive its movies suspiciously. Hundreds of actors, directors, and producers joined its ranks.
Controlling imported films was just as crucial. German authorities oversaw a quota system limiting the number of foreign releases allowed into the country. German censors approved films only after screening for “moral, political, and eugenic” infractions and kept a blacklist of Hollywood offenders whose projects would not be imported. Soon Hollywood was making changes at the root level of production. After the German backlash to All Quiet on the Western Front, Universal delayed production on a sequel and Paramount scrapped a project about the sinking of the Lusitania, an ocean liner taken down by a German U-boat in 1915.
Germany was also unique in the degree of its on-the-ground pressure campaigns. Georg Gyssling, by then a member of the Nazi Party for two years, moved to Los Angeles and became Hitler’s ambassador to Hollywood, overseeing a currency system that rewarded good behavior and punished bad. He urged Warner Bros. to remove moments of German indignity from a POW film called Captured!, like when a German prisoner complained of thirst. Warner Bros. complied with the requested cuts, but Germany rejected subsequent movies for release anyway, including the musical 42nd Street, which was expected to be a box-office smash in musical-loving Germany. The official reason, the censors said, was that the movie was “too leggy.” (There are a lot of kick lines.) Yet when MGM canceled a screening of an anti-Nazi movie called Are We Civilized?, a dozen of its movies were approved for release in Germany a week later.
Gyssling looked for public examples, specifically protesting portrayals of World War I where Germans looked weak. Loud public protests taught everyone a lesson and convinced others to avoid anything incendiary. Eventually, studio executives took it upon themselves to volunteer changes to the censorship board. Could they substitute a different score for Give Us This Night, since the original was composed by a Jew? The director of All Quiet on the Western Front later directed The General Died at Dawn. When the latter film was rejected, Paramount offered to cut his name from the credits. On a 1938 adaptation of another Remarque book, Three Comrades, Louis B. Mayer himself looked at a political speech delivered in the script: “There’s more to fight for—better than food—better than peace. Democracy—freedom—a new Germany! Isn’t that worth fighting for?”
The studio chief’s notes: “Delete references to ‘democracy.’”
Such rules and accommodations did not register as bizarre—the German rigmarole for screening a movie was “no more or less onerous than the edicts handed down by the Chicago Board of Censors,” as scholar Thomas Doherty writes. Countries were known for idiosyncratic demands. The British didn’t like to see married couples sleeping in the same bed or to see the mistreatment of horses. The Chinese were sensitive to portrayals of the racial stereotypes common at that time. France had warned Warner Bros. against making a movie about a French penal colony. Making a movie that kept all of those customers happy wasn’t kowtowing. It was business.
But no one in Chicago or France was screening films for reasons the Nazis were. Shirley Temple was beloved the world over, but one movie that showed her befriending a Native American boy demonstrated too much comingling of the races for German eyes. Chicago did not reject Tarzan, but German censors did, because its romance between Tarzan and Jane ran afoul of the Nazis’ thoughts on racial purity and “the highest sense of responsibility in the selection of a husband,” as the Propaganda Ministry ruled.
Even more crucially, no foreign market was exerting as much pressure on studio chiefs to avoid scripts altogether that would anger a foreign power, and the Hollywood aversion to ruffling feathers created a marketplace in which the only way to see a story about Nazis on-screen was through obscure documentaries or independent films. Much like China today, Germany had built a system of economic punishment for political crimes, one that combined vocal outcry, retaliatory tactics, and the preemptive obedience of Hollywood executives to keep certain stories off-screen. That is, any narrative that challenged their version of history, their national sovereignty, or their strength.
When The Mad Dog of Europe, among the first major attempts to dramatize Hitler’s rise, was submitted for review at the U.S. Production Code Administration, the group advised against making the movie. The PCA explained its rationale, which ran counter to Goebbels’s idea of cinema’s role: “While it might serve a good purpose from a propaganda angle, it might likewise establish a bad precedent. The purpose of the screen, primarily, is to entertain and not to propagandize.” Whereas Goebbels was trying to conscript his nation’s film industry into making entertaining pro-Nazi propaganda, the American officials had prioritized keeping the movies a conflict-free zone. More 42nd Street, less Mad Dog. Behind the scenes, Gyssling appears to have threatened studio executives and government officials, saying the release of Mad Dog—written by Citizen Kane screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz—could lead to a ban in Germany of all American films. Studio executives and Will Hays leaned on the film’s producers to abandon the project for the good of the industry, and the movie, which would have been the first to tell the story of Hitler’s persecution of the Jews, was never made. The cancellation “occurred in the first year of Hitler’s rise to power,” writes scholar Ben Urwand, “and it defined the limits of American movies for the remainder of the decade.”
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Stateside criticism of doing business in Germany intensified as the Nazis rose in power. Some studios had left Germany, but others fell back on familiar defenses: Paramount claimed, “It is only logical for us to do business wherever profitable as an obligation to our shareholders.” MGM pled ignorance, too, saying it “will make pictures without regard to politics and with only box office and entertainment in mind.” Those studios that continued working in Germany were subject to new rules requiring overseas businesses to reinvest their profits locally. MGM set up a loan business, lending money to companies in the German armament industry.
Gyssling, the Nazi ambassador to Hollywood, appeared to overplay his hand, though, when he tried to stop an All Quiet on the Western Front sequel called The Road Back. When Universal began preparing production of the film in 1936, Gyssling sent a letter to the sixty actors who were to appear in the film, warning that their careers in Germany would be over. It was a classic scare-the-monkeys ploy, and the entertainment press, the anti-Nazi groups forming in Hollywood, and the State Department all protested the letter. The Road Back went into production soon afterward, but with twenty-one cuts made in anticipation of any German objection, including the sanitizing of an ending that went from being about militarism in Germany to militarism around the world. Germany still kicked Universal out of the country as punishment.
After Kristallnacht in November 1938, Hollywood faced more stringent criticism for doing Germany’s bidding. Hollywood’s presence in Germany shrank but remained until mid-1940, when the studios still working there began a wholesale retreat. Geopolitics was only one reason for the departure. German box-office receipts were falling, and Hitler’s war across the continent had taken several European markets out of distribution. “With all hope of profit gone, we can, at last, become properly indignant and raise our voices in shocked protest without any pecuniary regrets,” said screenwriter and director William C. de Mille. And with much of Europe off the table, anti-Nazi movies that tapped into growing anti-Nazi sentiment in the U.S. seemed the better box-office bet. Newly unbound executives embraced a patriotic role, making movies that “sold the American way of life, not only to America but to the entire world,” as Fox executive Darryl Zanuck said when he testified before Congress in 1941. People in the chamber applauded at the speech.
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For China, censorship was a prerequisite to doing business, and the foundation upon which its larger soft-power ambitions were built. But it would need to grow in stature before it could grow in influence. In 2011 only three years removed from the Beijing Olympics, which had served as a coming-out party on the global stage, Chinese leaders signaled just how seriously they would take their entertainment ambitions by placing cultural industries in their twelfth five-year plan.
No document provided the blueprint for China’s economic priorities like the five-year plan. The first Five-Year Plan of the Chinese Communist Party, introduced in 1953 as the initial outline of the country’s economic and political priorities, signaled the incredible might of a Chinese government with a mission. China’s industrial businesses were essentially nonexistent, but then seemingly overnight production in China grew about 10 percent a year as investors and authorities focused on certain sectors in lockstep. Under five-year-plan outlines, China made textiles, radios, coal, steel and oil, nuclear missiles, and jet fighters. The twelfth five-year plan was the first of the government agendas to mention entertainment. China wanted to produce something else.
A goal was set: culture would be a “pillar industry” of China by 2015, meaning it would account for at least 5 percent of China’s annual gross domestic product. To hit its mark, China’s culture and entertainment industries would need to grow more than 15 percent per year through 2015. Contrasted with the anything-goes alchemy that had characterized the storytelling of Kung Fu Panda and other Hollywood imports, it was an explicitly straightforward strategy that treated a highly subjective industry with the metrics and calculation once afforded textiles and coal.
One year later, China’s five-year plan coincided perfectly with a Hollywood desire to milk the market for all it was worth. Greg Frazier, an MPAA official, had been working for years on a case before the WTO that accused China of breaking trade rules by restricting foreign media. Negotiations to settle the case had dragged on, slowing Hollywood’s effort to expand access to the market. Studios were hoping to boost the number of movies allowed into China beyond twenty a year but also, more important, get a larger share of ticket sales than the measly 13 percent negotiated in the Fugitive days. The terms that had been grudgingly accepted in the mid-1990s, when the focus was also on combating piracy, were woefully out of date now that the market was among the top five in the world.
In February 2012, Frazier had his shot when Xi Jinping, then his nation’s vice president and heir apparent, arrived in the U.S. Prior to his arrival, President Barack Obama sent Chinese premier Hu Jintao a letter outlining “deliverables” the two men should work on during the trip. Settling the film-agreement dispute was among them, and Obama’s letter reignited settlement talks.
The ultimate breakthrough came at a hotel in downtown Los Angeles, where Xi met with Vice President Joseph Biden during an afternoon of deal signing and photo ops. At one point, Xi and Biden found a quiet moment with Jeffrey Katzenberg, who was by now a Zelig in anything related to China and Hollywood.
“You know, Mr. Vice President,” Biden said to Xi, “I’m sure it’s not lost on you: you’re here in the home of Hollywood. I know this negotiation has been going on for a long time, about this movie quota, and we’re coming to a deadline. It would be a matter of face for me if you and I did not resolve this while you’re here.”
Telling Xi it would be a matter of face-saving was a savvy tactic: now Xi would lose face if he couldn’t deliver for Biden. The three men outlined the terms they wanted, Katzenberg serving as a de facto representative for Hollywood—or at least knowing to say, “Absolutely, Mr. Vice President” when Biden asked if the agreement sounded fair. Xi said he would call Beijing and get back to them. That evening, Biden and Katzenberg took Xi to a Los Angeles Lakers game at the Staples Center. Frazier had advised Katzenberg to press Xi to accept the improved conditions outlined in the negotiations: thirty-four movies a year, with 25 percent of sales flowing back to studios. While the three men watched the tipoff, Frazier joined a conference call with U.S. officials to go over an agreement that was reached that evening with those very terms.
In the eleven months between the twelfth five-year plan and the quota negotiations during Xi’s visit, the chief motivations of China and Hollywood had merged with perfect timing. China’s leaders wanted an entertainment industry that would support their new political rise, and Hollywood’s executives wanted greater access to a market that would save their business and please their shareholders. Biden and Katzenberg were responding to the call of the markets, not realizing they were slotting into Xi’s governmental mandate. Over the next decade, China’s plans for its own cultural industry would fall into place as planned, with the help of an American entertainment business that could not believe its luck.
PART II
seven
Fakeistan
Hollywood loves recycling. In the ruthless assessment of whether a movie will be a good investment, nothing comforts a studio executive more than something that’s worked before. Whether it’s an old TV show, an old movie, or even a historical figure like Abraham Lincoln, “preexisting IP,” or intellectual property, is the industry’s favorite crutch.
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc. desperately needed to retreat to the familiar in 2008. The studio was fending off bankruptcy, and this was not the time to try something risky. It was time to look through the studio’s most prized asset—a library of decades of cinema classics—and see what could be remade. Eighties nostalgia was hot, with versions of Clash of the Titans and The A-Team being resurrected, so MGM found two of its own. The musical Fame was one. Red Dawn was the other.
