It can be a little hard to remember, twelve years later, but there’s really never been anything in Hollywood quite like the 2014 Sony hack: A deliberate and targeted campaign exposing every single skeleton lurking in the closet of a major film producer, (allegedly) organized by a hacker group working at the behest of a foreign government. Personal information, embarrassing private emails, a whole fresh James Bond movie script: The information released in the hack was massive, and insanely damaging, to the point that Sony Pictures Entertainment is still recovering from it more than a decade later. And it was all, allegedly, caused by certain film executives’ inability to tell that dastardly charmer Seth Rogen “No.”
That, at least, is the narrative being put forward (per Variety) in new book excerpts from the tone-obvious-from-title From Mistakes To Meaning, a new book by then-Sony Pictures CEO Michael Lynton. Lynton, at least, is convinced that the hack was provoked entirely by his studio’s decision to make Rogen and James Franco’s The Interview, a film that probably would have gone down in history as a pretty minor offering in both men’s filmographies if not for the massive international incident of it all. Among other things, Lynton notes that, several months after the fact, Barack Obama himself asked him “What were you thinking when you made killing the leader of a hostile foreign nation a plot point?” Which, Lynton concedes, was a pretty good point.
Somewhat hilariously, Lynton essentially says he was peer-pressured into greenlighting the movie, in which Rogen and Franco play journalists who are recruited to assassinate North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. “Just for a moment,” Lynton writes, “I wanted to join the badass gang that made subversive movies. For a moment, I wanted to hang—as an equal—with the actors. I had grown tired of playing the responsible adult, of watching the party from the outside while I played Risk….The party got out of hand, and the company, its employees, my family and I all paid dearly.” (Truly, a cautionary tale about the dangers of being cool.)
The thing is, in Lynton’s telling, that no one who has not been subject to his affable stoner potency can truly understand how powerful Seth Rogen apparently is. (On the basis of This Is The End making $127 million at the box office the previous year, we guess?) Lynton writes that Rogen successfully played on a rivalry between his own co-chair Amy Pascal (who would wind up resigning over leaked emails in the Sony hack) and Universal’s Stacey Snider, writing that, “When either Stacey or Amy refused to greenlight a film because it was too offensive, the other agreed to make it… Sony found itself in the difficult position of not being able to say no, and Rogen found himself in the enviable position of getting approval for almost anything that he chose to present.” Thus are studio heads brought down and international tensions brought to a head, apparently: Truly, it is Seth Rogen’s world, and we (including the heads of major motion picture studios) are simply living in it.
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