4/13/2024 0 Comments Chinese movie production companiesActors who filmed scenes as Chinese invaders were turned into North Korean soldiers. The movie had already been shot, but MGM methodically scrubbed every scene in the film, at a cost of more than $1 million. ![]() MGM executives decided that North Korea, rather than China, would invade the United States. Chinese censors demanded that the producers of Red Dawn change the enemy in the film. In the original plot of the 2012 remake of Red Dawn, Chinese paratroopers land on suburban American lawns and Chinese generals take over city squares. At China’s request, Paramount Pictures cut from the movie scenes that depicted Shanghai’s ubiquitous clotheslines. In the original cut of 2006’s Mission Impossible III, Tom Cruise chases villains through the streets of Shanghai. (The Taj Mahal is blown up instead.) The Chinese version of Top Gun removed the Japanese and Taiwanese flags from Tom Cruise’s jacket. The 2015 movie Pixels deleted a scene in which the Great Wall gets destroyed. Some of these changes were minor others required the rewriting of whole scripts. ![]() ![]() Schwartzel recounts dozens of stories of how American films have been edited by Chinese censors. American studios have to satisfy layers of Chinese bureaucrats before a movie hits the market. Early in the movie’s life cycle, international distributors meet with Chinese film bureau officials. They had also standardized a lobbying process to get China’s approval for its films. On an elaborate apology tour, Disney officials boasted to Chinese officials that very few people had seen Kundun.īy the turn of the century, Hollywood directors and producers had learned not to broach subjects (Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tiananmen) that offend the Communist Chinese. After poor marketing led to poor returns, Disney had a plausible reason not to release the film to theaters nationwide. To appease China, Disney quietly strangled the film by minimizing its marketing budget. When Disney made a movie about the Dalai Lama, Kundun, Chinese authorities threatened to cancel Disney’s TV channel and theme park. For Sony’s sympathetic portrayal of the Dalai Lama in Seven Years in Tibet, China threatened to disrupt the company’s electronics supply chain-which would cost billions to rebuild. In the 1990s, American filmmakers learned that China would punish political missteps with economic sanctions. Producers and directors must showcase “a China of sparkling new cities, where young and old live together in harmony and prosperity,” Schwartzel observes. China’s de facto veto power over Hollywood’s films means that most portrayals of China are, in effect, state-sanctioned propaganda. Chinese censors routinely ask studios in Hollywood to scrub scripts and finished movies of scenes that might somehow damage China’s Communist system. Over the past twenty years, China has translated its economic leverage into political leverage. This huge market share means that Hollywood has begun tailoring its casting, story lines, and dialogue to fit Chinese-not American-audiences. In 2020, Chinese ticket sales exceeded ticket sales in the United States, making China the number one box-office market in the world. In 2017, the number of movie screens in China (50,766) surpassed that of the U.S. In the 2010s, the Chinese company Wanda bought AMC for $2.6 billion and Legendary Entertainment for $3.5 billion. Today, China exerts similar power in Hollywood. ![]() It wasn’t until the start of World War II that Hollywood stopped doing Germany’s bidding. Georg Gyssling, “Hitler’s ambassador to Hollywood,” exerted pressure on studios to cancel screenings of anti-Nazi films like Are We Civilized and Mad Dog. German censors further demanded that the edited version of the film be the version shown not only in Germany, but in cinemas around the world. Hollywood obliged and deleted unflattering depictions of German soldiers. For years, this system forced Hollywood to suppress stories that offended Nazi sensibilities in exchange for access to German markets.įor example, German censors demanded that Universal Studios scrub its 1930 film A ll Quiet on the Western Front of any scene that might demean Germans. Throughout the 1930s, German officials presided over a system of censorship and coercion. As a film industry reporter for the Wall Street Journal, Schwartzel is perfectly positioned to write this sweeping story of Hollywood’s perverse relationship with China. In his 2022 book Red Carpet : Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy, Erich Schwartzel makes a case that China’s current system of censoring American films bears a striking resemblance to the Nazi playbook.
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