Are we learning anything new from Sony e-mail hacks re Hollywood?

I'm not linking to them here, but there have been plenty of lip-licking posts from various gossip and news sites about the private e-mails of Sony executives being recently hacked and revealed to the public.

Here's a few things I processed from what little I've read:
1. Studio execs still love to bad-mouth actors.
2. Women still aren't being paid as much as men.
3. It's more likely that disgruntled employees are behind this--not North Korea.
4. THE INTERVIEW had its climax toned down for the US version--and it will be removed for overseas viewing.
5. For an exec and a producer, it's not yet a post-racial society (regarding certain comments about President Obama and what movies/actors he may/may not like).

In conclusion, today's Hollywood isn't much different than, say, four decades ago.

[UPDATED 4/16/15: Wikileaks has re-released files; Sony has objected on privacy grounds.  At this point, the only thing I found worthy of public notice is current Sony exec Michael Lynton is on the board of famous think tank The Rand Corporation.]

Kyle Buchanan on the continuing under-representation of women in big Hollywood movies.

From Kyle Buchanan's article for NEW YORK magazine's VULTURE subsite:
. ..More often than not, women are an afterthought in our wannabe blockbusters, an endemic problem that Hollywood still doesn’t know how to handle.

Look, for example, at Sony, which is headed by the very savvy Amy Pascal. Last May, Pascal gave a revealing interview to Forbes about how poorly Hollywood treats its top actresses. Stars like Angelina Jolie and Sandra Bullock “probably get paid the same as their male counterparts,” Pascal acknowledged, but “the problem is the averages, because there are not enough parts for women to star in and get paid. So when you look at the total amount women make as compared to men, it's paltry … it’s sort of a wholesale change that needs to happen.” Pascal vowed to lead that change, and promised to hire more female directors, too. “I think it is my responsibility, because I love movies about women,” she said.

How has she done since? Well, just look at Sony’s upcoming slate: Of the 21 movies that Sony has dated over the next two years, not one has a female director, and only one of them gives an actress top billing. (That would be this weekend's Cameron Diaz comedy Sex Tape; even Annie, out this Christmas, bills Jamie Foxx before the Oscar-nominated young actress who plays the film's title character, Quvenzhané Wallis.) If that’s what it looks like when a female studio head leads a charge for diversity, it says a whole lot about how entrenched Hollywood’s attitudes toward women really are.

The complete article is here: http://www.vulture.com/2014/07/summer-blockbusters-female-problem-planet-apes.html

More discussion of ZERO DARK THIRTY as Oscar campaigning reaches climax.

Entirety of Tom Shone's recent THESE VIOLENT DELIGHTS blog post:

"While I found the depiction of torture to be upsetting–it seemed to me that Bigelow and Mark Boal presented it in a way that leaves it up to the viewer to decide whether or not it was worthwhile or reprehensible..." — Mike Fleming, Deadline Hollywood

Notice the baseline assumption behind Flemings comment: the torture worked. Whether it was worthwhile or reprehensible is for us to decide. This is why Boal has done such damage. Because millions now believe that torture produces good information. The baselines of public debate have, for many people, been permanently altered. 

 

Entirety of Jeffrey Wells' recent HOLLYWOOD ELSEWHERE blog post--titled "It Can't Happen Here...Or Can It?":

It's absurd, I realize, to speculate or fantasize about the absolute finest film of 2012 actually winning the Best Picture Oscar...ridiculous! The best films don't win the Oscar, dummy -- the most popular ones do. And yet Zero Dark Thirty is turning into a highly popular film with $75 million tallied + 9/11 families expressing their support + Leon Panetta giving it a thumbs-up + Martin Sheen going "homina-homina-homina...I've changed my mind!" + the Stalinist haters having been marginalized by common sense and routed by public scorn. Tables turnin', cut down to size, how ya like me now?

 

My take: I'm going with Tom Shones.  The Mike Fleming quote is inadvertently spot-on regarding ZERO DARK THIRTY's explicit desire to put torture/rendition into an apolitical vacuum.

 

I wonder if Mr. Boal/Ms. Bigelow were influenced not only by their CIA sources but also Sony exec Amy Pascal in proceeding with this "for us to decide" approach--to make it "acceptable" for a mainstream audience.

[Remembering the sexual politics of Sony's remake of THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, where Rooney Mara was on top of Daniel Craig until Craig flipped Mara over to assert the dominant male/female sex position--a marked difference from the original Swedish film version.]

 

And, though I read Wells' blog, it's rather silly/unbecoming of him to persist in the claim that people unswayed by ZERO DARK THIRTY's filmmaking/screenwriting are merely "Stalinist haters."

 

I don't know Steven Soderbergh personally, but I can feel his pain.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/jul/14/steven-soderbergh

Key passage for me from the article:
"I'm looking at the landscape and I'm thinking, 'Hmmm, I don't know. A few more years maybe,'" says Soderbergh. "And then the stuff that I'm interested in is only going to be of interest to me."
It would all sound depressing if Soderbergh didn't pepper his speech with fits of incredulous laughter. Perhaps the last few years – capped by his recent run-in with Sony over his revised script for Moneyball, a baseball movie starring Brad Pitt, that saw him elbowed off the project – have left him punch-drunk.
"In terms of my career, I can see the end of it," he says. "I've had that sensation for a few years now. And so I've got a list of stuff that I want to do – that I hope I can do – and once that's all finished I may just disappear."

I feel the same way. The kind of poetry I write isn't what the literary world wants. And the LA/OC scenes tend to want to play a Rotisserie Baseball version of Great Literature--where they think they're part of something like the Algonquin Roundtable, but it's actually another chapter of Rotarians or Toastmasters.