Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - Hollywood, China & Cold War 2, with The Wall Street Journal’s Erich Scwartzel

Episode Date: February 4, 2022

On this podcast, we spend a lot of time discussing the rising threat from China and Cold War 2. We’ve hosted Matt Pottinger (episode #28), Josh Rogin (episode #17), and Admiral Stravidis (episode #44). We’ve also done an episode on the future of the movie industry, with John Podhoretz (episode #16). But what do China – and specifically Cold War II – and Hollywood have to do with one another? You may not have realized it, but when you watch movies like Skyfall, Mission Impossible III and World War Z, to name a few, you are watching a strange relationship at work between the Chinese Communist Party and one of America’s most influential exporters. It’s the fascinating and richly reported story told by Erich Schwartzel in his new book, Red Carpet: Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy. Erich has reported on the film industry for the past decade for The Wall Street Journal. He’s based in the Journal’s LA bureau. Previously, he reported for The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette where he wrote extensively on the environment and the burgeoning energy industry there. To order Erich’s book: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/red-carpet-erich-schwartzel/1139401471

That collision of the short-term gains and the long-term planning is ultimately the humbling of Hollywood here. I have yet to find any executive who has said to me, I'm really disturbed by what's happening and I want to do something about it. Whether it's try to move more of my business away from there, I want to make a movie about it, something that kind of proactive, I have yet to see. On this podcast, we spend a lot of time discussing the rising threat from China in Cold War II. We've done episodes with Matt Pottinger and Admiral Stravides.

We've also had an episode on the future of the movie industry with John Podhoretz. But what do China, and specifically Cold War II, and Hollywood have to do with one another? You may not have realized it, but when you watch movies like Skyfall or Mission Impossible 3 or almost a decade ago, World War Z, to name a few, you're watching a strange relationship at work between the Chinese Communist Party and one of America's most influential exporters. It's the fascinating and richly reported story told by Eric Schwartzel in his new book, Red Carpet, Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy. Eric has reported on the film industry for the past decade for the Wall Street Journal. He's based in the journal's LA

Bureau. Previously, he worked for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, where he wrote extensively on the environment and the burgeoning energy industry there. To set this up, the dynamic we have today is that Hollywood often depends on two important inputs for their business model in making blockbuster films. Capital from China to finance production of the films and access to audiences in China. Basically, they want to be in Chinese movie theaters. And the Chinese Communist Party has, shall we say, strong views on the content of these films coming out of Hollywood and they've been also trying to develop their own domestic movie making market. As Eric writes in his book China is now home to the number one box office in the world home to grosses that routinely near

one billion dollars a market that's become too big to ignore and too lucrative to anger. That's Eric Schwartzel. This is Call Me Back. And I'm pleased to welcome Eric Schwartzel of the Wall Street Journal and author of the just released Red Carpet, Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy to the podcast. Eric, thanks for joining us. Hi, Supremacy to the podcast. Eric, thanks for joining us. Hi, I'm thrilled to be here. Thank you.

So I want just for our listeners to just set up the saga you write about. And I want to do that using these two bookends of your story, uh, which you describe in the book. The first is the release of top gun in 1986 by Paramount, which was peak Reagan era America. I, I loved it. I loved, I like probably watched it hundreds of times, uh,

during the pandemic, I made my kids watch it. Uh, like I, I, I was a top guy. I can quote from it extensively and was so anticipating with such excitement. Top Gun 2, the sequel that's supposed to be released in May of this year, Maverick.

And after reading your book, I'm kind of heartbroken about my sort of pathetic anticipation for the sequel to top gun oh yikes i've ruined top gun for you ruined that and many movies for me but but i don't want to digress i don't want to hold it against you so can you explain what happened as it relates to hollywood and china between the release of the first Top Gun and the second Top Gun, or the upcoming release of the second Top Gun? Just explain the paramount experience with that movie and dealing with China. Well, yeah, and I think the first thing to understand it, as you said, is the first Top Gun comes out in 1986. It is the ultimate emblem of Reaganism on screen. The script is made with the collaboration of the U.S. Navy.

And not only that, but it also is such a symbol of the power of cinema. I mean, Ray-Ban sales shoot up after that movie comes out. More men and women enlist in the armed forces after that movie comes out. It really... I think you wrote that there were recruiters for the Navy hanging out at movie theaters. Yeah, recruiters would wait outside the theater. So the movie actually was a more successful enlistment campaign than traditional enlistment campaigns were at that time.

And this is also an era, I call it the rah-rah era of American movies because they were the most powerful medium in the world. They were making hundreds of millions of dollars for these studios. And they were also presenting a very specific image of America to audiences around the world. And Tom Cruise in Top Gun is the pinnacle of that. Now, cut to 2017, 2018, when Paramount announces that they, like every studio in town, are dusting off the library, seeing what they can do to reboot some of these beloved franchises. And they announce a sequel that's also going to star a much older Tom Cruise to Top Gun. And when promotional material for this new movie came out, people noticed a difference in the jacket that Tom Cruise's character Maverick,

the perfectly named Maverick, wears in this movie. Because in the original film, the jacket has patches on the back that allude to the tour of the USS Galveston. Now, explain what the USS Galveston, the significance of that particular, the Galveston as it relates to Pacific countries in the Pacific. Right. So it sort of has these patches that represent its tour, including its presence in Japan and Taiwan. And whenever Tom Cruise suited up in the original Top Gun, that was not a problem. However, a very big change had come to Hollywood between that Top Gun and the original Top Gun, that was not a problem. However, a very big change had come to Hollywood between that Top Gun and the new Top Gun. And that is the fact that China's box office was growing to become the largest in the world. And in those 20, 25 years, 30 years,

China had made it clear that crossing it politically was going to result in economic ramifications. And so when Tom Cruise suited up a second time in the economic reality of 2018, those patches were removed because there's, as you know, better than pretty much anyone, there are a lot of territorial issues with Taiwan and Japan and China have always had tensions over the past several decades. And so the Chinese audience might not show up if those patches were there. The Chinese censors might not let the movie into the country. And the Chinese financing that was funding the new Top Gun could also be jeopardized. And so the solution was a bit of an economic no-brainer. They took the patches off. And so suddenly you had this movie that, as you said, is this emblem

of Americana on screen, instead bowing to the one China policy. So you write in the book, and I quote here, the arc of China's influence is evident in made it clear through, I think, intermediaries that they had a problem with Taiwan, which, you know, being represented as an independent sovereign nation rather than reflected of the one China policy. And then while they were at it, they're like, you know, from time to time there's tensions between China and Japan, so it was conveyed i think through again through

intermediaries that you know it's probably not good to include japan on there and they just it was like it was like bit by bit they just the paramount was being dictated to what could and couldn't be in top gun the sequel right i mean it's like i guess like yeah while you have the sewing machine out let's just take care of anything. And I think it speaks to a reality of working in Hollywood, or really, frankly, working in any business today that does work with China, which is the risk assessment, right? There's no edict coming from Beijing to take these patches off of Tom Cruise's jacket. But by now, Hollywood has absorbed so many cautionary tales from other studios that have run into trouble with similar political issues,

that a self-censorship has taken root. And I also think that the risk assessment with a movie as big as Top Gun and one as expensive as Top Gun... Which will cost about $150 million to produce? I'd say probably more than $200. And then when you add in marketing and advertising, it gets probably close to $300 in total expenses. And a movie that big in today's Hollywood isn't greenlit without an expectation that it will make some money in China. And so you have to protect that access. Okay. So I want to then move back. First of all, you and I talked previously about,

I just want to spend a minute on the role that American film has played in projecting America's story globally. It's a big topic, but I just want to just do a minute or two because I think it's important for some of these films we're going to talk about and then what China tried to replicate. So can you just describe, and this will be familiar to a lot of our listeners, but can you just describe the role that Hollywood plays in the global perception of America? You write, you write about Joe Nye, Joseph Nye talking about American

soft power. Yes. One of my favorite experiences of reporting this book was asking Joe Nye if he has seen a Transformers film. So yeah, not a question I think he's ever gotten before, but you're absolutely right. And it starts in World War I, when European film capitals that until then had been more sophisticated than America's entertainment industry, really had to hit pause because of the fighting that broke out across the continent. And so during World War I, we saw America really quickly catch up in terms of the kinds of movies it was able to make. And then around World War II, you had this shift toward the movie being some kind of, really, frankly, being a soft power tool. Because after World War II, with the start of the Marshall Plan, movies were shipped to Europe to either convey the argument for a unified Europe

or to celebrate the glories of capitalism or democracy. There was this idea that movies could serve a function beyond entertainment. And I think also that is where we really started to imagine Hollywood as a de facto arm of America. And certainly, of course, through the 70s with the rise of the American blockbuster, you have an economic domination along with that cultural domination where no movies globally are making as much money. No movies are selling as many tickets as something like jaws or star wars is and then the 80s is a fascinating time too because that is the movies are being shipped around the world they're selling more tickets than anyone but they're also being kind of conscripted into

broader ideological battles right like remember all of the movies around that time, around the Top Gun time, where the Soviet villains were portrayed on screen. And I think Hollywood today is a little out of step with the expectations that were set over the last century. Because when you talk to executives here in Los Angeles today, they see themselves as, running global companies, not necessarily running companies that should be doing America's bidding or really that worried about making sure they're presenting America in the best light because the products they're putting out in the global marketplace are selling tickets to people around the world. But because we have this history, especially during wartime, of seeing the movies as these soft power vehicles, I think there's still an expectation. And that's why so often news of like a Top Gun censorship rubs so many

people the wrong way, because it's not what we've expected the movies to do. Yeah, my friend Roger Bennett, who's a sports journalist from England, from Liverpool, who now lives here in New York. And he became obsessed. He recently came out with a book called Reborn in the USA, which came out around July 4th. And he talks about growing up in Liverpool and falling in love with America through like Miami Vice and through, you know, different movies. And that became America to him. And that, that was part of not, you know, one of the reasons, one of his big motivations for wanting to come here that so many people around the world understood America through this content. Oh, exactly. It was, uh, I think it,

I think it's Joseph Nye who coined the phrase an empire by invitation. Right, right. So now take us to China during the second half of the 20th century, and particularly Mao. So Mao Zedong's rise and the way he viewed the role of creative arts in Chinese society? So we see a template set by Mao that is still followed today. And this is clearest in a series of lectures that he gave in 1942, where he, in describing his ideal communist state, talked about art's role in it. And he said, there is no such thing as art for art's sake. It is art will serve the state. And so there's even these stories of during the cultural revolution, if there was a painting of let's say, like a like a pastoral scene, like a rural farm or something, they would take that off the wall and then paint power lines atop the scene so that it

looked like it was reflecting the the boom times that they were living through and there's this museum i'm not sure if you've been there it's quite popular among among visitors but there's a museum in shanghai of propaganda art throughout throughout the decades yeah And it is just fascinating because it shows you just how closely state-sanctioned art has mirrored government priorities in China. You know, you can walk through it and it's all laid out chronologically. So, you know, during the civil rights unrest of the 60s, all of this Chinese art is produced, highlighting the inequities in America for African Americans as a way as a sort of veiled commentary on how messy that system is compared to the egalitarian communist system. You know, in the in the 80s and 90s, when China wants to

bolster its space program, there are suddenly posters everywhere of people zipping through the stars. I mean, there really has always been like two sides of the same coin. I remember and so this was very helpful for me because I started to see it in the movies that China was making as well. I have a story in the book about going to Shanghai in the summer of 2019 and staying in a hotel that would get copies of People's Daily, the state media outlet. And I was reading it over breakfast one morning, and there was a little feature about Xi Jinping, about Vladimir Putin sending Xi Jinping ice cream for his birthday. And later that night, I went to a party for a movie that was coming out.

It was going to be the first ever Russia-China co-production. And it was about how the two countries work together on screen. So we started to see on screen a reflection of the kind of the bilateral agreements or the government priorities that China was curating off screen as well. And so after the Cultural Revolution, we start to see an intrusion because in the 90s as china's economy starts to open up more generally and you have um you have sort of the post mao era the deng xiaoping era of like opening up to the world hollywood starts to come in and suddenly this there is no such thing as-art-sake model has to contend with the appeal and competition of this American medium that over 100 years has become so culturally dominant.

And I think you say that up until 1994, Chinese movie theaters were largely closed off to American films. Right, and there were very few. I mean, it's hard to imagine given the population, but it was dramatically underscreened market too. And today, China is the largest box office in the world for US films, right? It is. Well, I don't know. I guess it would be for US films in COVID times. They sell more tickets and make more money on ticket sales than any country in the world. And they have more screens now as well. Okay. So now I want to fast forward to 2008, which seems like a key moment. It's weeks after the 2008 summer Olympics,

which is timely because here we are now back in the Olympics in China while we're recording this. So it's 2008. It's just after the 2008 Summer Olympics. Chinese officials visit Hollywood. And this is, as I said, it's a pivotal moment in your book. Tell us why they came to Hollywood and what they were trying to accomplish. I couldn't believe this when I found it. So in 2008, I'd say the Chinese box office has shown some real promise. We've seen movies like Titanic come out and do really well there. And it doesn't take a Harvard MBA to see that there's a lot of growth there. And China's obviously pounding its chest with the Summer Olympics. And they're just sort of meeting a moment in history there. And sort of happening out of sight in a classroom at UCLA, a group of Chinese officials and entertainment executives travel to Los Angeles and literally sit in a classroom as studio executives, agents, and producers come through to tell them how the Hollywood system is set up and how it works. And one element that you hear

a lot whenever you're talking about US-China economic ties is this concept of technology transfer. And the requirement that access to the Chinese market or financing from Chinese firms is going to require kind of handing over of technology and know-how. And it's very easy to understand when you're talking about Boeing, how that works. But a question I've always had is, well, how do you transfer the technology of storytelling and the appeal of hearts and minds campaigns? How does that work? And here you had Chinese officials sitting in a classroom taking notes on how movies are put together and how studio systems work, how they release the films into theaters, how they market the films. And it's really the start of a

decade of technology transfer that we start to see where in exchange for access to the Chinese market or the Chinese financing, or frankly, just like a real, a giant payday in China, Hollywood screenwriters, directors, producers, fight fight choreographers special effects folks they're going and working in china and helping china build a competitor to america right i mean it's like they're hollywood was giving china like a master class on on how to eat our lunch right this right uh with this amazing American export. Okay, so now let's go back farther to the mid-90s and the significance of the Disney movie Kundan.

Is that how you pronounce it? Kundan? Kundan, yes. So the release of the Disney movie Kundan. So this film caused huge heartache between China, between the Chinese Communist Party, Chinese government and Hollywood and specifically Disney. was going on. This is while China was, you know, in its campaign to join the WTO. China was trying to modernize, to integrate into the world. And there's this huge confrontation, this huge blow up between China and Disney. That's right. And so this is 1997. So Hollywood films have been exported to China at this point for three years. They send about 10 titles a year, and $3 million is like a record-setting gross.

I mean, this is not a market that any studio chief is paying attention to, really. And Disney, through some machinations, inherits this movie that Martin Scorsese is making about a young Dalai Lama in Tibet. And it is shooting for one day when an official from the Chinese embassy calls Disney's general line and is directed to the C-suite. And this official informs the Disney executive on the line that this is going to be a major

problem because China does not want to see an American movie valorize the Dalai Lama. They do not want to see a movie that explores that chapter in Chinese history or portrays it in a way that they wouldn't approve of. And this catches the executives off guard because this is not, first of all, this is not a market they think about when they're greenlighting movies. And this is, even if it was on their mind, this is not a movie they would think would go to China anyway. And so they think they're in the clear, but there are larger issues. So you might think like, well, what, why can't they just make say you know buzz off and and make the movie well there are larger issues at play because disney at this time is trying to

get a tv channel into china they they know that it is that there's as one person put it there's a lot of money under the mattress over there. And they're also already in talks about a potential theme park on the mainland. And so this is... And Disney, according to your reporting, Disney at the time had viewed China's one-child policy actually as a big economic, a big market opportunity for Disney because people had more money because they weren't having a lot of kids and kids were at home alone needing to be entertained right and they had you know to every child had two sets of grandparents there was all this focus that people could put on on one child and also i

mean there was a middle class that there that didn't exist you years prior. But what was so fascinating is it was very clear from that phone call that the making of this movie, Kundan, jeopardized all of it. So here you have this conglomerate worth billions of dollars and nestled deep, deep, deep inside it is this contaminant

that is just going to grow like a crack on a windshield and potentially threaten all of that promise. And Disney's in a tough spot because it's Martin Scorsese. If they just cancel the film, they'll be tarred as, you know, squelching free speech and free expression in Hollywood. But they also know they have to maintain warm relations with this country that they know in 10 or 20 years is going to be this massive opportunity for them. And so this executive I spoke to calls the man they happen to have on retainer for such issues, which who is Henry Kissinger. And he and Henry Kissinger fly to DC to meet with embassy officials and explain to them why it would be bad for this movie to just be canceled or to be

buried. And also that there would be a bit of a Streisand effect, right? Like you would just end up and more people would be talking about it than would otherwise. And so the movie comes out disney intentionally buries it they release it on very few screens and then use that low that low performance to justify not expanding it further and still nonetheless disney is banned in the country for making it at all now now yeah go ahead and so and so um it's not until more than a year later that the ceo michael eisner has that's what i want to get to has to fly over 98 goes yes china and he thinks he's going to clean the whole thing up right and he thinks the fact that they that they that they released this film without a lot of fanfare which meant that in eisner's view no one really saw it so

like hey we're all good now right right he says there's a transcript of it that is really eye opening and he says um you know the bad news is we made this movie the good news is nobody saw it i mean it's really the quote in the book it's incredible. He really just throws the company's entire creative ethos under the bus. And at the same time, the Chinese official he's meeting with, Xu Rongji, he is also trying to use the situation... And he's the mayor of... He's the mayor of Shenzhen or Shanghai? He was the mayor of Shanghai.

He had been elevated to a higher role by the time Eisner went to meet with him. And he himself was using that meeting for his own leverage because China at this time, if you can believe it, was desperate to get a Disney theme park. They thought the Disney theme park would be the ultimate emblem of their economic miracle. And so he in this meeting is advocating for a Disney theme park while Eisner is trying to get back into the country at all. And eventually, Disney obviously is allowed back into the country. And lo and behold, some 15, 16 years later, Shanghai Disneyland opens. So you I speaking of this transcript of this meeting, so there's this amazing quote you have in the book where Zhu, the Chinese official, says to Eisner, quote, I very much admire your courage in correcting mistakes and the efforts you've made to promote the Chinese-American friendship. This also proves that you're a very farsighted businessman, and it's also an important factor in ensuring the success of the Disney company. And then you put in your own words, effectively, what Zhu was saying to Eisner is, nice company you've got there. Shame if something happened to it. Yeah, we see even back then, I mean, and this would have been pre-WTO, we see China understanding the economic leverage it has over all of these companies.

That's what I'm struck by is how self-confident the Chinese official is in his conversation with an extremely influential senior American slash global media executive. Right. Oh, absolutely. I mean, I think at some point, Eisner is trying to explain why a theme park doesn't make sense at the moment, because a Disney theme park only works if you've introduced children to the characters, and you've kind of seeded affection for them over time. And and the Chinese official says,

oh, we've got like a billion people, like someone will show up, you know. I mean, there's just this consumer force behind all of these decisions that even today, and this is, I mean, I think this is why in many ways, Hollywood is an early student to what the NBA, Tesla, H&M, Intel, Nike, all these companies and sectors have had to learn, which is there's a consumer base there too lucrative to give up. So, and then you also write about two other films that were released right around there, Seven Years in Tibet, and the other one was Red Corner, Richard Gere's Red Corner. So can you just briefly just describe the significance of those two films and the role they played while this was happening during this period? Right. I mean, it's insane that these three movies were all coming out the same year. But Seven Years in Tibet was being released by Sony, which ran into very similar issues,

where it was not a matter of this movie not getting into China or showing in China, but it was about China's potential at disrupting its larger electronics business and its supply chain issues. I mean, this is something that I think today like Apple would have to think quite a bit about, right? Those companies that not only have a consumer base to worry about but just a supply chain manufacturing uh arm to worry about and and um and so that sony also had to do its part to try and get back into the chinese good graces um interestingly enough it required buying a lot of gifts at Tiffany's in Beverly Hills and presenting them to the local consulate. And then Red Corner, which was a movie released by MGM, was not about the

Dalai Lama, but it starred Richard Gere, who even then was probably Hollywood's most famous and vocal critic of the Chinese regime because he was such a proponent of Buddhism and a close friend to the Dalai Lama. And so whenever he was on his publicity campaign for this movie, which is about an American executive who goes to China and kind of gets wrapped up in this awful legal horror, he was very vocal about the regime and what he considered the horrendous human rights abuses. And he was, just to be clear, he was doing this while, again, there was the 90s. I mean, people forget now because the relationship between China and the US has gotten so tense. But at the period, at this point, there's a lot of excitement about China joining the WTO. You know, President Zheng Zemin, you know, visited Washington, Clinton hosted him,

Bill, President Clinton host him, first time a Chinese leader had visited the US since Deng Xiaoping, Xi Jinping had come in 1979. I was working in Washington at the time on Capitol Hill. In the 90s, there was a lot of excitement about, I think misplaced, but there was a lot of excitement about China's integration into the world global economy and locking arms with Washington. Oh, yeah. And Richard Gere was like the skunk at the garden party. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. He kept bursting the bubble. I mean, I think at the state dinner from the visit you referenced, he held a, quote, stateless dinner across the street where he was trying to bring attention.

You're right. That was one thing. And this is why in some circles, it's considered like one of the biggest foreign policy blunders in recent history was there was this incredible sense of optimism and this hope among, you know, from everyone, everyone from Bill Clinton to Rupert Murdoch, that this kind of entry into the WTO would usher in a more democratic regime. And certainly, the movies were seen as a potential tool in that campaign, that getting Hollywood films into China would sell America or sell democracy or sell the west as well as anything could and at the same or in the last couple of decades we've also seen these these chinese films so like you talk about how the business model was such that you know initially that that these u.s films didn't depend on the

chinese audience the chinese market and then and then you write about how these tentpole films became so expensive to produce that they needed other sources of capital so they needed capital from china and they needed access to this growing chinese market but at the same time as you talk about that meeting you know the the crash course after the 2008 olympics where the chinese are learning how to do hollywood suddenly there's this flourishing chinese movie scene in chinese movie theaters to the point that they don't need American films anymore. The Wolf Warrior film, there's all these films being made. So that's its own thing going on.

It just becomes this flourishing over the last couple of decades Chinese movie making scene. Yeah, exactly. I mean, whenever Hollywood films were first coming into China, they were considered so much better than Chinese movies, that the government had to put all these controls on their distribution to make sure that at the end of the year, Chinese movies always made more than American movies. So so one of the like, one of the big priorities of the Communist Party was always making it seem like, given the choice, Chinese audiences would flock to Chinese movies sooner than they would American movies. So they would have blackout dates.

They still do. They have blackout dates where if there's a popular week of movie going, there's no imported film. So only Chinese markets get the run of the multiplex. They also will sometimes stack movie releases. So if there are two or three major Hollywood films coming out, they'll release them on the same day. So they cannibalize one another's grosses. And so at the end of the year, lo and behold, oh, look, you know, Chinese movies accounted for 51% of grosses this year. China remains the dominant film industry in its home country. But over time, the Chinese movies

got better and better, and more and more commercial. And you still had the medicinal propaganda films, but you also had movies that I think of as kind of like our Amblin films, like the films of the 80s, you know, lighter comedies or domestic dramas or coming of age stories. These movies started to get more and more sophisticated in China. And understandably, Chinese audiences started to prefer them. I mean, I always ask people, you know, like, how often, I mean, do we expect American moviegoers to go see a Chinese version of Davy Crockett? You know, 600, 700 million dollars in their home market alone. And Hollywood movies, when they are allowed in by the officials,

still prove popular. But there's no question that at the end of every year, the top 10 highest grossing films are mostly Chinese titles at this point. China, but also global reach films like the success that Korea has had, for instance, with Parasite and Squid Game, that actually China becomes associated with these brand names, these brand titles globally, not just servicing the massive audience inside China. Oh, yeah. And I think, I mean, the example of Korea right now is particularly relevant. I think Korea has at this moment what China wants. And it's the final leg of the campaign, which is making movies that it can export around the world. And frankly, just sort of fulfilling that last element of Hollywood's soft power playbook, which is selling China

to the world through movies and TV shows. And so I think sometimes in Hollywood, I run into executives who are very complacent, because they say, probably accurately, Chinese movies are never going to catch on in America. And partially that's true, because American audiences have traditionally been resistant to foreign entertainment. I mean, Parasite only happens once every decade or so, right? But there are other parts of the world, particularly where China's influence and presence has accelerated in recent years through the Belt and Road Initiative, where that's not the case. And so I spent some time in Kenya, where there's, I mean, obviously, wellocumented Chinese train stations going up and new roads. And, you know, you drive around Nairobi and suddenly you end up at the Great Wall Apartments and you can stay at a hotel that prints receipts in Mandarin.

I mean, the Chinese presence is just everywhere. But there is a soft power complement to that campaign that is, I think, underappreciated. And it mostly, I'll keep this to Africa. It's happening elsewhere. But in Africa, there's an initiative known as the 10,000 Villages Project, which is operated through a Chinese satellite dish company called Star Times. And it is setting out to wire 10,000 African villages with low-cost satellite dishes that pipe in Chinese movies and TV shows. So I have to say, the most memorable moment of this entire reporting process was walking in to an apartment in Suswa, Kenya, which is two hours northwest of Nairobi, rural inner Kenya, and seeing a family pass the afternoon by watching a

Chinese soap opera. And I would say there wasn't necessarily a wholesale replacement of American entertainment with Chinese entertainment. I think it was best characterized by this young four or five-year-old boy I met whose hero was the Monkey King. But his other hero was the Rock. So there's a bit of a coexistence right now. But then when you talk to Kenyan officials, it becomes about a much broader conversation about what superpower are we going to align with. And this was in 2000. This was in early, early 2020. I was there, I think this first time Trump was being impeached. And when you talk to the officials, there was the sort of like the the conversations we have in

foreign policy circles about democracy versus authoritarianism were happening in a very literal way and in a very kind of grounded way in these offices because they had CNN on TV and they were watching Trump be impeached and looking to me, the American reporter, and asking if that looked like the best system. Wow. Okay. I want to go to the story of Chloe Zhao, who is an American. I think she immigrated to the U.S. from China when she was very young as a kid, and she ultimately was nominated for Best Director for Nomadland last year. Can you tell us her story and where it fits into your story sure so she she's this the daughter of a um of a chinese industrialist who was educated largely in the west um and and as you said really found quick critical acclaim in hollywood and yeah it was uh last year she was nominated and the clear front runner for best director at the oscars for for nomadland fascinatingly a movie about how america doesn't take care of its you know yeah

i mean it's the most vulnerable people financial crisis story i mean according to these screenwriters uh of of america of the part of amer part of America left behind after the 2008 crisis. I mean, I think they even leave a town called Empire. There's something like that. Something like that. And so Chloe Zhao, at one point, this was China's ultimate entertainment goal was getting an Oscar

and getting a Chinese presence at the Academy Awards. And whenever her nominations were first announced, the state media took her up as a cause and said, you know, she is the pride of China. And then comments that Chloe Zhao made in 2012, so almost a decade earlier, unsurfaced. And they were comments she made in a Q&A with a frankly, relatively obscure industry publication about how growing up in China, I believe the quote was that it was it was a place with lies everywhere. And she was critical of China. And these comments spread through Chinese social media. I think there's one thing that explains a lot of these sort of company, the furious backpedaling you see a lot of companies do right now are the nationalist mobs on Chinese

social media that can be activated by these kinds of things. And Chloe Zhao became a target of these online mobs, some of whom seem to be supported by or amplified by the government, some of whom seem to be, you know, just general nationalists. And the entire presence of Chloe Zhao was essentially scrubbed from the Chinese internet. And when she did eventually win the Oscar. No one in China. Looking through official channels. Even knew about it. And it's this fascinating example.

Of a Chinese woman. Leaving China. Coming to Los Angeles. Reaching the pinnacle of her field. And yet still having to answer to Beijing rules. So Chloe Zhao. My understanding. So the quote or the the article that had this quote was you said it's an obscure um industry rag called i think it's called filmmaker

yes and it doesn't have a big online presence really i mean this this article you couldn't find online and there were these stories about um like the remaining hard copies of the of the of the issue that had the article that had her quote critical of china were being like people are scouring to get them and there is there is reporting that it was disney that was trying to do it because disney had signed chloe zhao to work on the eternals right so what like and so and do you think disney again come back to your earlier story about disney i mean do you think disney was was hiring her as a director in part because they thought oh my gosh we're gonna i mean before that these this quote surfaced they they hired they hired her for to direct uh the eternals because they thought oh well this will

help us in china oh absolutely i'm sorry I'm sorry. Yeah, but absolutely. I mean, and I think and same goes for the Marvel movie that preceded that, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. That movie was certainly greenlit with an expectation that it would do well in China, that it would help its play in China. Ironically, Shang-Chi did not get into China, and The Eternals never played in China either. So we're at a moment right now, especially as tensions are so high between the two countries, where it just feels like any effort to appeal to the market ends up backfiring. And it's so interesting because I remember whenever the Chloe Zhao Oscar controversy was happening, really the stakes were much higher

because she had this Marvel movie coming. It was another case of, you know, it would be one thing if Chloe Zhao wanted to stay an independent director making movies like Nomadland, she might be able to speak out a little bit more. But she wouldn't be able to work with major studios because those comments would essentially turn her radioactive. So just closing things out here in the last several years, the plight of the Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang province and the labor camps, concentration camps that exist to brutally repress this Muslim minority in China have become a front and center story which really whatever was going on was not a front and center story when during the episodes that you're you know that you're reporting on obviously there was tibet i mean tibet as a as a crisis goes back

you know all the way to you know what 19 1949 right but but uh and and you had the chinese army going into tibet and you know at that time and and rounding up uh what rounding up people putting them in tibetans putting them in um re-education camps but but for that and then you know which which has been well studied and then obviously tiananmen square 89 well studied until you had the uigh Square, 89, well studied. Until you had the Uyghur Muslims, you didn't have enormous focus as much as it warranted on human rights issues in China at the same time as you write about that Hollywood becomes so dependent on China. So when you talk now to Hollywood executives, both for your reporting and then for the book and for reporting generally? Does this make them uncomfortable?

Like, do they realize now like they just can't kind of look the other way? I don't think so. I think that the answer remains, you know, it's a global market. It's not my job to police human rights abuses in foreign countries. And if I started to have moral qualms about where we release movies, I'd have a very, very small footprint. I will say I do notice a difference. I wouldn't say it's quite Jekyll and Hyde but I do notice a difference with those who have been out of the studio system for a while I have talked to several former high-ranking executives who I think have a combination of sort of moral weariness and also just a sense that they got played and that what

had worked in the short term and what had maybe helped them win the quarter is ultimately planted a bit of a poison pill in the industry at large and um and so so i think that i think there's a frustration there too um that they were put in a position to think on a quarter by quarter basis while working with a country that very casually talks about 5,000 years of history. And that collision of the short term gains and the long term planning is ultimately been the downfall, really the humbling of Hollywood here. And so, but to be honest,

I have yet to find any executive who has said to me, I'm really disturbed by what's happening and I wanna do something about it, whether it's I wanna try to move more of my business away from there, I wanna make a movie about it, something that kind of proactive, I have yet to see. And lastly, you talk about what a number of these executives say now that they're learning what it means to really do business with China. Even though they, you know, Hollywood tends to be a pretty partisan town whose politics are pretty liberal, they will quietly or anonymously say that they thought that Trump, for all his flaws,

was onto something in terms of heightening, sharpening the differences with China. Oh, that's right. Yeah, that is, I would say, that is the one thing most people in Hollywood give President Trump credit on, is a lot of them, just because they, by the time Trump took office, had been for more than a decade dealing with the lopsided deals, the requirements, the provisions to have state-backed partners, to never allow majority ownership, all of those issues that the broader business community has complained about recently, Hollywood has had to deal with as well. And I do think that is one thing that folks out here in liberal Hollywood would concede they think Trump was right about. And what's been interesting is that since Biden took office, Biden, who played a significant

role in expanding Hollywood's access to China. Right. Wasn't he, when he was vice president, he was responsible for negotiating the quota? He did. He did. So he and Xi Jinping, who was then his counterpart, who is not yet president, got together in 2012 and personally negotiated an expansion to the number of movies that China would allow into the country. And that is essentially what allowed every studio to

guarantee that all of their major releases would get into the country. And so Biden has a history with this topic. But since he's taken office, I think in part because the studios during the Trump years just tried to duck and cover. They did not want to be swept up in the broader trade issue. But since Biden has taken office, it has been very quiet. And what's and but it'll be interesting, because it's not really tenable, because for the past year or so, Dan, one major movie after another has been rejected by Chinese officials. And the studios right now are looking at some really glaring gaps in their balance

sheets about what they expected to get out of the Chinese box office and what they're actually getting. And if that doesn't change, it's going to force a real reckoning on how exactly their business plans are drawn up, and whether they continue to keep trying to get these movies into China. spider-man movie that's made a gazillion dollars this year was absolutely greenlit with the intention of playing in china and it's never screened there and they and it it's gross something like you know one and a half billion dollars or something so it's done just fine but you're you write that they had they had penciled in generating a few hundred million dollars in china and they still can't

figure out Marvel, whomever, like the studio, they can't figure out why they don't have access on Spider-Man, right? Right. And they don't really have recourse either. And because when a decision is made, you know, not to allow a movie in, it's not like a memo goes out saying, and here's why. You know, for years now, Hollywood has kind of had to cobble together its own rule book just by looking at decisions that are made and trying to divine and back channeling to officials who they know on the ground, but really just trying to divine what the officials are thinking in that moment. And right now, there's nothing they can really do.

And if you're a studio that eventually wants to get a movie into China, you're not going to be the one that says, Hey, what's going on here. Right. Eric, we will leave it at that, but we're going to have to have you on.

Cause as I've mentioned to you, the story of your book is interesting. It's very, it's very interesting, but we'll, we'll only be more interesting is the reaction to the story of your book is interesting. It's very interesting, but what will only be more interesting is the reaction to the story of your book, which I think will be its own story because I think it will hopefully be a catalyst

for a lot of important conversations. So we're going to need you back on this podcast. Anytime. Once you're out there with the book for a while. Anytime. We can have a group viewing of Top Gun or something like that. Yes.

Sounds great. All right. The book is Red Carpet, Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy. Eric, thank you so much for joining the podcast. We'll post a link to the book in the show notes. Great having you. My pleasure. That's our show for today. My pleasure. S-C-H-W-A-R-T-Z-E-L. And of course, you can purchase Red Carpet,

which I strongly encourage you to do, at your favorite independent bookseller or at barnesandnoble.com or that e-commerce site that I think they are calling these days Amazon. Call Me Back is produced by Ilan Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor. you