Summary of Erich Schwartzel's Red Carpet

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 The Chinese government had plans to build a Disney park, and they would start by broadcasting the Disney Channel on local airwaves. Families would become attached to the characters, and then the company would build a park.
#2 In 1996, Murphy received a phone call from the Chinese embassy in Washington. They had heard about a film being shot in Morocco about the Dalai Lama, and they were not happy. The making of this movie endangered Disney’s entire future in China.
#3 In the spring of 1997, a politically sensitive movie called Seven Years in Tibet was shown to some Chinese officials, and they became so offended that they might expel all Sony business from the country.
#4 The Dalai Lama was so popular in Hollywood that there were two movies about him under way by 1997. The history that both films explored was nearly fifty years old, but it was fresh in the minds of Chinese officials.

Sujets

• Entertainment
• Industrie

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 20 mars 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781669355199
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Erich Schwartzel's Red Carpet
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

The Chinese government had plans to build a Disney park, and they would start by broadcasting the Disney Channel on local airwaves. Families would become attached to the characters, and then the company would build a park.

#2

In 1996, Murphy received a phone call from the Chinese embassy in Washington. They had heard about a film being shot in Morocco about the Dalai Lama, and they were not happy. The making of this movie endangered Disney’s entire future in China.

#3

In the spring of 1997, a politically sensitive movie called Seven Years in Tibet was shown to some Chinese officials, and they became so offended that they might expel all Sony business from the country.

#4

The Dalai Lama was so popular in Hollywood that there were two movies about him under way by 1997. The history that both films explored was nearly fifty years old, but it was fresh in the minds of Chinese officials.

#5

China’s film bureau, Kong Min, said that The Prince of Tides was intended to glorify the Dalai Lama, so it was an interference in China’s internal affairs. The movie industry's involvement with China grew as political clashes became more common.

#6

China was not pleased with the film, and did not allow the production to open a bank account in Ladakh, a border region between India and China. The production had to move to the Andes Mountains in Chile, halfway around the world.

#7

Boonshaft went to great lengths to try and build up guanxi with the Chinese, from buying offertory gifts to screening Chinese movies on the Sony lot. She sensed tension between China and Japan, and wanted to make sure that Sony was not seen as taking sides.

#8

The Disney team huddled to figure out what to do with their inherited mess. Like Seven Years in Tibet, Scorsese’s Kundun depicted the Dalai Lama as a rambunctious toddler and typical teenager caught in a war with an imperialist China.

#9

The release of the film in China posed many challenges for Disney, but the company decided to release it quietly, spending as little money as possible on marketing it. Once the film failed to attract large audiences, Disney had a valid excuse to dismiss Scorsese.

#10

In 1997, Hollywood producer Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer released a movie starring Richard Gere that depicted the Chinese judicial system in a negative light. The movie was released around the time of a state visit from Chinese president Jiang Zemin, and Chinese officials were not pleased.

#11

The visit allowed Americans to see that Chinese citizens wear business suits instead of Mao jackets. Four years earlier, President Clinton had gathered forty Chinese dissidents and Tibetan activists to sign an order calling on China to improve its human-rights record before it could enjoy freer trade with the US. But during this visit, Jiang and Clinton signed trade deals.

#12

In China, officials prepared their own cinematic counterattack to Sony’s movie: Red Corner, a government-sanctioned retelling of the 1904 British invasion of the region that would serve as the country’s own Tibet-focused feature. It was released two days after Jiang Zemin’s state dinner.

#13

The release of Kundun, a Disney movie, triggered a widespread ban on all Disney products in China. The three movies grossed $66 million collectively, or about one tenth the haul made by Titanic.

#14

The Chinese government asked Sony to send Boonshaft back to China to apologize for the film, but she instead brought in the company’s chief operating officer, Bob Wynne, to meet with the Chinese ambassador. The ambassador turned to Wynne and told him he was once again free to do business in China.

#15

After the crisis, Sony’s executives were able to smooth things over with the Chinese authorities by organizing an apology tour across China, bringing Twelve executives and their wives. They brought The Mask of Zorro with them to screen as a sneak preview for officials.

#16

The men sitting across from one another in Beijing’s Hall of Purple Light had more in common than they might have thought. Zhu Rongji, a descendant of a Ming dynasty emperor who ruled from 1368 to 1398, joined the Communist Party as a young electrical engineering student in 1949. His life was interrupted when he gave a speech criticizing Mao’s economic policies.

#17

Hollywood became the center of entertainment, and the first moviegoers were primarily European. American cinema got its chance to catch up to European filmmakers in World War I, when production and distribution houses shifted their focus to war supplies.

#18

The U. S. Committee on Public Information, headed by George Creel, made sure that American movies were shown abroad, and they made sure that they portrayed America in the best light possible.

#19

The American cinema industry was booming in the 1920s, and foreign audiences were a large part of that. Studios began to rely on overseas crowds, and movie theaters sprang up near American cities to meet the demand.

#20

The same phenomenon occurred in China, where filmmakers tapped into a new kind of national self-conception that was forming, especially after Japanese aggression on the continent offered an enemy against which the country could define itself.

#21

The first recorded movie screening in China was on August 11, 1896, when audiences in Shanghai watched a film by early cinema pioneers the Lumière brothers. Mao Zedong, who saw art as a reflection of and produced for the masses, defined China’s output for decades to come.

#22

When it came to economic leverage, China had it. China was entering an era in which it would always have the upper hand. Zhu reminded Eisner that a Disney Channel would be useless if it couldn’t draw between 12 million and 15 million guests each year.

#23

During World War II, Hollywood became a subsidiary of the Defense Department. The rising number of soldiers deployed overseas meant more black Americans would be filling jobs that hadn’t previously been available to them, and so studios were encouraged to place black actors in the background of scenes.

#24

Until quite recently, white actors have typically played Asian roles in Hollywood movies. The Chinese government used this to their advantage, by having movies that extolled the Communist revolution and its leader.

#25

The only American movie believed to have breached Chinese borders between 1951 and 1981 was a little-known 1954 drama about a workers’ strike at the Empire Zinc mine in New Mexico called Salt of the Earth.

#26

Following the war, Hollywood began producing films to help rebuild Europe’s mood and economy. These films, which were sent across Europe, aimed to convince the European viewers of the importance of European interdependence.

#27

The Marshall Plan movies were extremely careful to not mention the plan itself more than twice in a one-reeler and three times in a two-reeler, as Europeans were still reeling from the aggressive efforts of the Nazis.

#28

China, with the help of Hollywood, learned this lesson in the 1980s. Strict artistic control defined the years following the end of World War II. Mao’s wife, a former actress, mandated that only eight types of model dramas be performed on Chinese stages.

#29

In China, certain kinds of expression were considered treasonous, and those who were guilty were publicly castigated and sometimes killed.

#30

In postwar America, suburbanization emptied cities of young moviegoers, and television kept them at home. The competition from the smaller screen was so threatening that MGM banned reference to TV sets in all scripts.

#31

American movies were popular around the world in the 1980s and 1990s, and Chinese audiences were largely missing out on this era. When Top Gun premiered in 1986, Chinese citizens were still watching propaganda movies and only the occasional Hollywood import.

#32

America’s soft power has been a major part of its diplomatic strategy since the 1940s.