GOP Kills The Interview, by Mike Gold – Brainiac On Banjo #386 | @MDWorld
December 22, 2014 Mike Gold 3 Comments
We all know the story: a group calling itself “Guardians Of Peace” – GOP, no kidding – declared the Christmas movie The Interview to be a blood libel. The Korean Central News Agency – that’s North Korea – quoted a government spokesman as saying “Making and releasing a film on a plot to hurt our top-level leadership is the most blatant act of terrorism and war and will absolutely not be tolerated.”
If you look at the Korean posters advertising The Interview, you’re likely to see the phrases “Please do not believe these ignorant dishonorable Americans,” “Do not believe the ignorant cowboy,” and “War will begin.” Wait… what?
Sony pulled the movie from release four days ago. An un-American act of cowardice, shouted both Hollywood liberals and eagle-addled Republican reactionaries. We should thank North Korean Supreme Leader (that’s what it’s called in the job description) Kim Jong-un for bringing these two disparate groups together in a genuine Kumbayah moment.
How dare Sony cave in to the demands of a mad dictator? What sort of precedent does this establish? Those are valid questions, but in order to understand the situation we must also look to the concerns of the movie theater owners, operators, and customers.
In what is called “first North American release,” virtually all movies are shown in mega-plex bunker-clusters. So if you go to Bow-Tie’s Cinema 24 to see The Interview on Christmas weekend – a major moneymaking period that can actually make or break a theater location – and some pro-Kim nut job decides to vest-bomb himself into the next iteration of string-theory, he’s going to take several thousand people with him. Not just those seeing this latest Seth Rogan masterpiece, but people who were warming the seats of Annie, The Hobbit 4, Night At The Museum 3, Exodus, Hunger Games whatever, Top Five, and Into The Woods as well. I will assume the bomber would, at best, consider this to be collateral damage and would be comfortable with those extra dead bodies, as if he was going to be in a position to appreciate anything.
Michael Moore and many, many others said “hire security.” That’s simply not practical. How many security guards will it take to screen everybody going into the theater for a few weeks, and keep each theater safe once everybody walks through the metal detectors, have their purses and packages and briefcases checked, put their shoes back on, put their belts back on, and have their cellphones and electronics placed in temporary custody? If you think waiting in line at the airport is frustrating, just imagine how happy people will be waiting two hours in line with their kids to see Annie.
But – and this is important – Sony did not make the decision to pull the movie. They’ve got $44,000,000 tied up in the print, and at least as much on their massive advertising and marketing campaign, and they want to make that back. However, the biggest theater chains, including AMC, Bow-Tie, Cineplex Entertainment and Regal, pulled the film. Sony didn’t decide to kill the release until the next day, effectively closing the barn door after the horses left town.
It’s possible that The Interview would have bombed at the box office. Now, it’s the Citizen Kane of unreleased movies. Maybe Rogan can hire Terry Gilliam to do a “Sony, when are you going to release my movie?” campaign.
Sony says they have no plans to release the film on home video or video on demand. Maybe they think this whole thing will calm down and they can put the flick back in the theaters. Of course, by then The Interview may very well be the most bootlegged movie in history. As Chris Rock told Jon Stewart last Thursday night, you already can buy the bootleg on 125th Street, the main street of Manhattan’s Harlem district well-known for its street vendors. Chris, who has his own movie to worry about, was kidding… but I doubt he’d be surprised to discover he was right. Right now, most reports of the movie’s online availability are bull, but evidently the movie was online 22 days ago. Maybe yes, maybe no.
Pulling The Interview is un-American. It does set a dangerous precedent. Bowing to terrorists is ugly. But it is quite easy to understand the concerns of the theater owners: this could have made the 9-11 bombings look like a cherry bomb in a high school locker.
As for Sony… they had no place to show the movie, so they killed it. All dressed up and no place to go.
Mike Gold performs the weekly two-hour Weird Sounds Inside The Gold Mind ass-kicking rock, blues and blather radio show on The Point, www.getthepointradio.com and on iNetRadio, www.iNetRadio.com as part of “Hit Oldies” every Sunday at 7:00 PM Eastern, rebroadcast three times during the week – check www.getthepointradio.com above for times and on-demand streaming information. Gold also joins MDW’s Michael Davis and Martha Thomases as a weekly columnist at www.comicmix.com where he pontificates on matters of four-color.
R. Maheras
December 22, 2014 - 8:48 am
This is not the first major studio film whose release involved threats of violence from the lunatic fringe, but I think it is the first where the distributors very visibly caved to the threat.
This sets a horrible precedent — not just regarding Bizarro worlds like North Korea, but ANY group with an axe to grind involving some soon-to-be-released film, book, graphic novel, comic book, or whatever.
This distributor cave-in, no doubt due to advice from ever-cautious lawyers, tells any fringe group, OR NOISY AND AGRESSIVE LONE NUT-CASE, that a threat of violence, bombings and other mayhem can stop ANY “offensive” mass-media product.
For purveyors of mass media, this is a particularly sad day indeed.
Rene
December 22, 2014 - 12:54 pm
A sad day, yes.
But one thing I disagree with the Conservative point of view, when they say “such-and-such group proved that terrorism works!” or “those countries only understand strength and you can’t appear weak to them, or you’re doomed” is that (call me overly-optmistical if you like) in the long-term, that sort of display only hurts their cause. They become more of a rogue state than ever.
Mike Gold
December 22, 2014 - 1:02 pm
It’s not a popularity contest for these people, Rene. No Sally Field “You really like me” reaction when they get handed the terrorist of the year award. All they’re trying to do is return some land to their god and live the lifestyle it dictated. And if they get killed before that happens, well, then they’ve got those 72 virgins waiting for them.
72 virgins. And they thought drone bombs are a problem…
Rene
December 22, 2014 - 2:47 pm
Mike –
The competition and survival of cultures has a lot to do with winning hearts and minds. But terrorists are, by definition, short-term thinkers, and some people who fight terrorists become stuck in that sort of thinking too.
To use as an example a case that had a “happy” ending, the IRA. They could pull off a lot of terrifying strikes and celebrate every last one of them as a sign of their strength, but does that really worked for them in the long term? They could either kill every single person that disagrees with them or keep every single one of them scared for the rest of their lives… or they can depose their weapons and win hearts and minds, and, you know, REALLY win.
Mike Gold
December 22, 2014 - 3:06 pm
I appreciate your point, but there’s a lot of Brits who still don’t trust the IRA and a lot of Irish who still believe in separation by any means necessary. Their roots go back about 100 years, so everybody in the UK has grown up with the IRA specter over their shoulder and Michael Collins continues to be a personality revered by many.
What constitutes a real win is in the mind behind the hand of the molotov. Will he light it? Will he toss it? Will it blow up in his hand? The latter is likely, but I meant that metaphorically.
Revolutionary action plus history equals romance. Take the Tea Party of today. They totally got the Boston tea party wrong. A complete misunderstanding of what the fight was all about two and a half centuries ago. But the romance works, the romance “sells.”
Steve Chaput
December 22, 2014 - 7:21 pm
I’ve heard some rumors on the ‘net (big surprise) that there were Sony execs that felt the movie was so bad that they didn’t want to release it even before the hacking was revealed.
Sad, that things came to this, but I don’t blame anyone for being “cowards”, since as you say it would have only taken a single nutjob with a gun or bomb to really turned this into a tragedy. It would certainly have opened everyone from Sony execs down to the guy in the ticketbooth open to lawsuits. Plus the same folks at Fox who are yelling that Sony did the wrong thing would be joining the chorus screaming for the heads of the execs at the studio for not doing enough to protect ticket buyers.
This will be an issue for the next week or until something else captures the short attention span of the Mainstream Media and their viewers.
Mike Gold
December 22, 2014 - 7:37 pm
Serious, informed doubts have been raised about North Korea’s culpability – if a hacker routed the “attack” thru China’s proxy servers, it would look like North Korea because they use the same servers. Indeed, those were the servers that cut off North Korea today. Payback? China covering its tracks? North Korea casting false doubt? A horny 14 year old who’s bored out of his skull?
So was it North Korea (with whom, by the way, we remain in a state of war), and/or China and/or some brat or some Sony executive or the ghost of Steve Jobs or what?
Now Sony can consider releasing the movie in some form, over a distribution system to be determined. Everybody will see it, most will hate it, even if it’s any good, which seems unlikely.