China's Influence Over Hollywood

It's Been a Minute

NPR

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4.6 • 8.8K Ratings

🗓️ 8 February 2022

⏱️ 30 minutes

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Summary

China has held a soft power over Hollywood for the last few decades. Examples range from the cosmetic, like the way Chinese police heroically restore order in films like The 355. It can also be more overt, like China blocking the release of Chloé Zhao's film Eternals in the country. Sam and Erich Schwartzel talk about how and why China has influenced the American film industry and more reporting in his new book Red Carpet: Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	I bet most of you have never heard of this movie called Kundan.
0:04.6	It came out in 1997 and it's a biopic about the 14th Dalai Lama.
0:10.0	You must be a very high Lama, a great Tibetan monk.
0:13.6	So this is a good thing. Don't be scared.
0:16.4	You're not the first boy to be discovered like this and certainly not us.
0:21.4	You know by many metrics, this film should have been a big success.
0:25.2	The Dalai Lama was a celebrity in the 90s, at least to other celebrities.
0:30.4	This film was directed by Martin Scorsese and it was produced by Disney.
0:35.0	You put all those ingredients together and you expect to hit.
0:38.8	But not so with Kundan.
0:41.4	This movie made just under $6 million at the American box office.
0:46.8	It was a flap, a major flap.
0:50.4	Why? China.
0:52.2	Executives at Disney were already looking at China as a growth market.
0:57.0	That is longtime friend of the show, Eric Schwarzel.
1:00.0	He covers the film industry for the Wall Street Journal.
1:02.6	They were saying to themselves, you know, eventually we might want to build a theme park over there.
1:07.0	We might want to release our big movies over there.
1:10.0	We might want to sell toys over there.
1:12.0	And they had all these grand plans that were completely waylaid by a phone call
1:18.0	that one executive in Burbank got one afternoon from the Chinese embassy saying that they were very offended.
1:25.2	Eric says this Disney executive had no idea what was going on.
	...

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