Publisher Description

"This is a fascinating book. It will educate you. Schwartzel has done some extraordinary reporting." - The New York Times Book Review"In this highly entertaining but deeply disturbing book, Erich Schwartzel demonstrates the extent of our cultural thrall to China. His depiction of the craven characters, American and Chinese, who have enabled this situation represents a significant feat of investigative journalism. His narrative is about not merely the movie business, but the new world order." -Andrew Solomon, author of Far from the Tree and The Noonday DemonAn eye-opening and deeply reported narrative that details the surprising role of the movie business in the high-stakes contest between the U.S. and ChinaFrom trade to technology to military might, competition between the United States and China dominates the foreign policy landscape. But this battle for global influence is also playing out in a strange and unexpected arena- the movies.The film industry, Wall Street Journal reporter Erich Schwartzel explains, is the latest battleground in the tense and complex rivalry between these two world powers. In recent decades, as China has grown into a giant of the international economy, it has become a crucial source of revenue for the American film industry. Hollywood studios are now bending over backward to make movies that will appeal to China's citizens-and gain approval from severe Communist Party censors. At the same time, and with America's unwitting help, China has built its own film industry into an essential arm of its plan to export its national agenda to the rest of the world. The competition between these two movie businesses is a Cold War for this century, a clash that determines whether democratic or authoritarian values will be broadcast most powerfully around the world.Red Carpet is packed with memorable characters who have-knowingly or otherwise-played key roles in this tangled industry web- not only A-list stars like Matt Damon, Angelina Jolie, and Richard Gere but also eccentric Chinese billionaires, zany expatriate filmmakers, and starlets who disappear from public life without explanation or trace. Schwartzel combines original reporting, political history, and show-biz intrigue in an exhilarating tour of global entertainment, from propaganda film sets in Beijing to the boardrooms of Hollywood studios to the living rooms in Kenya where families decide whether to watch an American or Chinese movie. Alarming, occasionally absurd, and wildly entertaining, Red Carpet will not only alter the way we watch movies but also offer essential new perspective on the power struggle of this century.

Author Biography

Erich Schwartzel has reported on the film industry for The Wall Street Journal since 2013. Previously, he covered energy and the environment for The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, where his work won the Scripps Howard Award for Environmental Reporting. He lives in Los Angeles.

Review

"Red Carpet sketches out a frightening pattern in US-China trade relations . . . A fine book." —Orville Schell, The New York Review of Books

"Schwartzel tells the story of how Chinese investments in Hollywood and the Communist Party's role in deciding what Chinese audiences could see swiftly inverted the power relationship between China and the United States in this immensely influential industry. . . . Schwartzel makes this story of big stars and big money a page-turner, but its implications are much larger." —Foreign Affairs

"Red Carpet is the story of the nexus that formed when Hollywood realized it needed China's cash, and China realized it could first manipulate—and then appropriate—Hollywood's special gifts for enchantment, coercion, lifestyle control, and inducing audiences to tear up by means of orchestral swells and Tom Hanks talking earnestly to small children. . . . The two stories, the humbling of Hollywood and the swelling of Chinese soft power, twist and combine across Schwartzel's masterfully organized book. . . . This is a fascinating book. It will educate you. Schwartzel has done some extraordinary reporting, and a lot of legwork." —The New York Times Book Review

"Gripping. . . . Scrupulously reported. . . . Scary and true." —Esquire

"An extraordinary narrative. . . . A fascinating and timely account of how Hollywood's once-promising relationship with its most important market has gone horribly wrong. . . . Schwartzel's trove of colorful and at-times-ludicrous anecdotes are invaluable." —Reuters

"Red Carpet will change the way you watch movies. . . . A fascinating exploration of the Chinese entertainment apparatus and how seemingly innocuous American films can become international flashpoints. . . . Red Carpet is both a movie nerd's dream and nightmare in the sense that it contains fascinating information that may make readers more wary of the entertainment they consume. If you love movies and are willing to take that risk, you won't be disappointed by following Schwartzel down this particular rabbit hole." —The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

"Fascinating and disturbing. . . . Avid viewers will be surprised by this exposé of the seedy partnership between Hollywood and the Chinese government." —Kirkus (starred review)

"Schwartzel makes an eye-opening debut with this accomplished account of how soft power—namely, entertainment—helped China become one of the most influential players on the global stage. . . . An illuminating look at what China learned from Hollywood, and why Hollywood needs China to survive. It's a fascinating take on the crossroads of film and global politics." —Publishers Weekly

"Schwartzel's narrative emphasizes the trajectories of specific films and is leavened by interviews with directors and studio executives as well as a sophisticated understanding of internal Chinese political dynamics." —Booklist

"China's growing influence on Hollywood has been one of the biggest, and least understood, stories in the world. Erich Schwartzel brilliantly blends groundbreaking reporting, riveting stories, and brave analysis to reveal the enormous stakes involved for American popular culture and democracy itself. Like a great movie, this book is hugely entertaining and changes the way you look at the world." —Ben Rhodes, author of After the Fall
 
"Wow. It's no secret that, for years, Hollywood moviemaking has been in a substantive free-fall. But saying so would get you called a Cassandra because you're ruining so-and-so's dinner party with your slanderous conjecture. Well, now Erich Schwartzel's written a whole book—a lucid, engrossing, rigorously, adventurously reported book; a shocking book, honestly—about one industry's acquiescent collapse in the face of another's ascent. For money. The studios might now be flush with cash. But this book reveals the ways in which the American end of the business is near its end. It illustrates how there is no American movie industry if in greedily seeking to conquer China it just wound up conceding to it. Here's the rare feat of investigative culture journalism that doesn't aim for gossip yet, somehow, is all the juicer for it. Every couple of pages holds another jaw-dropper. It's made me smarter about both Hollywood and China. No more conjecture from me. Next dinner party, I'm making the skeptics eat Schwartzel's receipts." —Wesley Morris, two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism
 
"What's the Hollywood version of the U.S.-China relationship? A story in which John Wayne plays Genghis Khan, and Kung Fu Panda inspires great angst among Communist Party officials, and Avatar, the highest-grossing movie of all time, gets pulled from Chinese theaters and is replaced by a biopic about Confucius. The fact that all of these things really happened is what makes Erich Schwartzel's Red Carpet so vivid and entertaining. By examining the history of Hollywood and China in unprecedented detail, Schwartzel illuminates the larger geopolitical culture clash that is likely to shape the world for years to come." —Peter Hessler, author of Oracle Bones and The Buried
 
"In the ongoing ideological struggle between democracy and authoritarianism, popular entertainment has emerged as an unlikely but critical battleground. Epic in scope and meticulously researched, Red Carpet reads like dispatches from the front lines of this war, whose outcome will help to determine our future. Always compelling and often chilling, Erich Schwartzel's invaluable work shows how the power of narrative continues to change the world." —David Henry Hwang, Tony Award winner for M. Butterfly and Pulitzer Prize finalist for Soft Power

"It's often presumed that American companies have to toe the Communist Party's line to access China's markets. Erich Schwartzel's new book offers us a commanding and fly-on-the-wall account of how Beijing has come to own Hollywood and change a hallmark of the American culture." —Lingling Wei, co-author of Superpower Showdown

"Erich Schwartzel sheds fresh light and understanding on the evolution of Hollywood's fraught relationship with the Chinese Communist Party as well as the nature of this century's high stakes competition between totalitarianism and democracy. The story in Red Carpet demonstrates how, in art and in life, the Party coopts and coerces leaders across the free world to support its violent self-conception as a one-party nation with no room for plurality except on its own rigid terms. Please read this book and demand that those who sit in Hollywood's board rooms stop sacrificing principle on the altar of profit." —Lt. General H.R. McMaster (Ret.), former National Security Advisor and author of Battlegrounds and Dereliction of Duty

"In this highly entertaining but deeply disturbing book, Erich Schwartzel demonstrates the extent of our cultural thrall to China. His depiction of the craven characters, American and Chinese, who have enabled this situation represents a significant feat of investigative journalism. His narrative is about not merely the movie business, but the new world order." —Andrew Solomon, author of Far from the Tree and The Noonday Demon

"In the ongoing ideological struggle between democracy and authoritarianism, popular entertainment has emerged as an unlikely but critical battleground. Epic in scope and meticulously researched, Red Carpet reads like dispatches from the front lines of this war, whose outcome will help to determine our future. Always compelling and often chilling, Erich Schwartzel's invaluable work shows how the power of narrative continues to change the world." —David Henry Hwang, Tony Award winner for M. Butterfly and Pulitzer Prize finalist for Soft Power

"Erich Schwartzel has told a hugely entertaining and deeply revealing story about China's disturbing aspirations. Red Carpet is juicy and quietly damning, a brilliant anthropology of both Hollywood and Beijing. It's one of the most fun books about global politics I've ever read." —Franklin Foer, author of World Without Mind and How Soccer Explains the World

Review Quote

"Schwartzel tells the story of how Chinese investments in Hollywood and the Communist Party''s role in deciding what Chinese audiences could see swiftly inverted the power relationship between China and the United States in this immensely influential industry. . . . Schwartzel makes this story of big stars and big money a page-turner, but its implications are much larger." -- Foreign Affairs " Red Carpet is the story of the nexus that formed when Hollywood realized it needed China''s cash, and China realized it could first manipulate--and then appropriate--Hollywood''s special gifts for enchantment, coercion, lifestyle control, and inducing audiences to tear up by means of orchestral swells and Tom Hanks talking earnestly to small children. . . . The two stories, the humbling of Hollywood and the swelling of Chinese soft power, twist and combine across Schwartzel''s masterfully organized book. . . . This is a fascinating book. It will educate you. Schwartzel has done some extraordinary reporting, and a lot of legwork." -- The New York Times Book Review "Gripping. . . . Scrupulously reported. . . . Scary and true." -- Esquire "An extraordinary narrative. . . . A fascinating and timely account of how Hollywood''s once-promising relationship with its most important market has gone horribly wrong. . . . Schwartzel''s trove of colorful and at-times-ludicrous anecdotes are invaluable." -- Reuters " Red Carpet will change the way you watch movies. . . . A fascinating exploration of the Chinese entertainment apparatus and how seemingly innocuous American films can become international flashpoints. . . . Red Carpet is both a movie nerd''s dream and nightmare in the sense that it contains fascinating information that may make readers more wary of the entertainment they consume. If you love movies and are willing to take that risk, you won''t be disappointed by following Schwartzel down this particular rabbit hole." -- The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette "Fascinating and disturbing. . . . Avid viewers will be surprised by this expos

Excerpt from Book

one Banning Brad Pitt The dead would be moved for Disneyland. Generations of villagers lay buried under the acreage outside Shanghai that officials had allocated for China''s first Disney theme park, but the ancestors would not get in their way. Homes could be razed, remains excavated, and families relocated. Even in the early 1990s, when Peter Murphy, the head of strategic planning for the Walt Disney Company, traveled to Shanghai, it was clear the country held larger ambitions for the miles of rice fields and shanties that the city''s construction cranes hadn''t reached. To Murphy, the acres of low-ceilinged homes and bicycle riders hardly looked like the setting for a polished, perfect Magic Kingdom where Snow White and Goofy might stroll. But when his host, Shanghai mayor Zhu Rongji, took in the expanse, he saw something different. "This," Zhu said, "is where Disneyland will be." When executives suggested it wasn''t the right time to open a park, Zhu didn''t understand what the holdup was. Chinese construction crews could clear the land the next day, he told Murphy. They could pour foundation on a Saturday and start building that Monday. The Shanghai government had already allocated the land for the future park in 1990, shortly after Zhu visited Disneyland in Southern California. In the minds of Chinese officials some twenty years after the Cultural Revolution, there could be no greater validation for their nation''s economic miracle than the erection of their own Disney park in Shanghai. Murphy suspected that Zhu was right. There would be a Disney theme park in China-someday. But there was a reason that the company operated only four Disney parks around the world at that point. A company built on precision and customers'' expectations of perfection didn''t simply start building a park when someone suggested it. There was a playbook Disney deployed when introducing its brand to a new country. First, it would broadcast on local airwaves the Disney Channel, a twenty-four-hour network that introduced shows like Darkwing Duck and characters like Pluto in short order. Once families grew attached to the characters, Disney would open toy stores where they could express that love by buying stuffed animals and action figures. Only then would the company consider spending billions of dollars to build a theme park, which families wouldn''t visit if they hadn''t been seeded with affection for the characters in the years-long campaign. China would get its park, but on Disney''s time line. Like China''s ruling party, Disney operated in five-year plans, and in the mid-1990s, a crucial part of that plan was generating more business overseas. Fortune 500 companies like Coca-Cola and Ford were selling soda and cars to the Chinese, while Disney remained heavily weighted in the domestic sphere-about 80 percent of its revenue came from American consumers during this time. The Chinese, though, "had a lot of money under their mattress," as Lawrence Murphy, then Disney''s chief strategic officer, told his colleagues. The one-child policy, enacted in 1980, had spawned a generation of only children in Chinese homes; for the first time in recent history, Chinese parents had money to spend on their children. Just a few decades earlier, Western entertainment had been banned in China, and only top officials had TV sets. The 1990s would be a decade in which China, in the eyes of American business, turned from a country into a market. All of that promise and ambition were suddenly endangered in 1996, when Murphy received a phone call to his Los Angeles office. It was the Chinese embassy in Washington. An official there had called Disney''s general line and been directed to Murphy. "You started, in the last forty-eight hours, shooting a film in Morocco about the Dalai Lama called Kundun," the embassy official said. Murphy was dumbstruck. He had never heard of a movie called Kundun. He barely paid attention to most movies Disney made. A thirty-four-year-old Wharton MBA and strategic planner known as "the Enforcer" within Disney''s notoriously political C-suite, Murphy kept the longest hours among executives and made sure the divisions making movies stayed within their financial parameters. He had little interest in the creative side of moviemaking. Disney''s business was one of imagination, filling children with inspiration and aspiration on its best days and cementing gender roles and black-and-white morality on its worst. Murphy might as well have worked as an executive at a car company, taking carburetors instead of fantasy abroad. He called himself a "suit," proudly. He had to ask around about Kundun. His colleagues told him that it was, as the embassy official had said, a drama being directed by Martin Scorsese about the Dalai Lama. It had taken only two days after cameras started rolling for word of the production to travel from its set in Morocco to Beijing, where officials were not happy. After learning about the film and the story it told, Murphy realized that the making of this movie endangered Disney''s entire future in China. He didn''t know it at the time, but that phone call to his Burbank office was the start of a cautionary tale for all of Hollywood-in fact, it was a sign that the capital offered in China was inextricably tied to politics. On the afternoon of the call from the Chinese embassy, a future in which China would exercise remarkable power in Hollywood-the ability to green-light projects and change scripts like an invisible studio chief-began to take shape. In the meantime, though, Murphy needed to put out this fire. He called the person who was already on retainer to help Disney navigate the Chinese power structure. Henry Kissinger listened to Murphy as he laid out the Kundun issue. Murphy''s mind was racing with the implications it might spell for Disney''s plans in China, but the former secretary of state remained unfazed by the whole thing. Granted, Kissinger had negotiated Nixon''s meeting with Mao Zedong in 1972, a dZtente that reorganized the world order. Given China''s economic growth and the political power it had accrued since Nixon and Mao shook hands in Beijing, it was fitting that, twenty-four years later, he would be called in to save Mickey Mouse. Across town at Sony Pictures Entertainment, a government relations executive named Hope Boonshaft received a perplexing phone call of her own only a few months later, in the spring of 1997. Of all things, it also concerned a politically sensitive movie about the Dalai Lama, this one called Seven Years in Tibet. Howard Stringer, Sony Corporation of America''s top executive, explained that the film had been shown to some Chinese officials, and it had so offended them that there was now concern that they might expel all Sony business from the country. The film wasn''t just putting Sony movies at risk; in the mid-1990s, the Chinese box office could have hardly covered a few executive salaries anyway. It was threatening "big Sony," as employees put it-the manufacturer of computers and televisions that had led Japan''s electronics boom since its founding just after the end of World War II. The prospect of losing access to China''s factories and customers meant billions of dollars were on the line. "Howard," Boonshaft said to her boss, "that''s a bit above my pay grade." Stringer told her to figure it out. Work on Seven Years in Tibet had begun innocently enough. In the early 1990s, Jean-Jacques Annaud, a French director known for little-seen but well-respected art house movies like The Bear and The Lover, was drawn to Asia after filming a movie in Vietnam. He had a strong desire to return and explore the continent''s spirituality and asked his assistant for books he could adapt into movies on the theme. She brought him Heinrich Harrer''s memoir. Harrer was a mountaineer who''d left Nazi Europe to summit Nanga Parbat in British India, only to be taken prisoner and eventually find himself tutoring a teenage Dalai Lama as war broke out between Tibet and China. "Fabulous," thought Annaud as he read the book and assessed its cinematic potential. "Here''s a blond Aryan Nazi who becomes the teacher of the Dalai Lama." Brad Pitt, Hollywood''s most famous blond, got the part. The movie was perfectly timed for the Dalai Lama''s own star-making moment in Hollywood. He was born in a shed and identified as the fourteenth incarnation of the Dalai Lama at four years old, and now the docile monk lived in Dharamsala, where a government-in-exile of about 113,000 Tibetans sandwiched between China and India is based. As repression of Tibet grew, the Dalai Lama''s public persona rose. In 1989 he won the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1992 he guest-edited the December issue of French Vogue. The next year, Richard Gere, star of An Officer and a Gentleman and Pretty Woman, went off script before announcing the winner for Best Art Direction at the Academy Awards to decry the "horrendous, horrendous human rights situation" in Tibet. Sharon Stone called herself a disciple. In a 1997 ceremony in India attended by 1,500 monks and nuns, Steven Seagal, the star of ultraviolent revenge fantasies like Hard to Kill, was anointed a tulku, a "reincarnated lama and radiant emanation of the Buddha." Disney''s ABC put Dharma and Greg, about a young American woman embracing Buddhism, on its prime-time lineup. A charming monk who encouraged others to shun all earthly possessions had become the patron saint of Beverly Hills. His Holiness was so popular, in fact, that soon there were not one but two movies about him under way. Also, among those taken in were E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial screenwriter Melissa Mathison and her husband, Harrison Ford, already a fixture in the Hollywood firmament as th

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