China even has Hollywood spooked; MGM playing footsy with the Communists.

Feature referred by Pantano for Congress

Without Beijing even uttering a critical word, MGM is changing the villains in its 'Red Dawn' remake from Chinese to North Korean. It's all about maintaining access to the Asian superpower's lucrative box office.

By Ben Fritz and John Horn, Los Angeles Times

March 16, 2011

China has become such an important market for U.S. entertainment companies that one studio has taken the extraordinary step of digitally altering a film to excise bad guys from the Communist nation lest the leadership in Beijing be offended.
When MGM decided a few years ago to remake "Red Dawn," a 1984 Cold War drama about a bunch of American farm kids repelling a Soviet invasion, the studio needed new villains, since the U.S.S.R. had collapsed in 1991. The producers substituted Chinese aggressors for the Soviets and filmed the movie in Michigan in 2009.

   About this series: Reel China 

But potential distributors are nervous about becoming associated with the finished film, concerned that doing so would harm their ability to do business with the rising Asian superpower, one of the fastest-growing and potentially most lucrative markets for American movies, not to mention other U.S. products.

As a result, the filmmakers now are digitally erasing Chinese flags and military symbols from "Red Dawn," substituting dialogue and altering the film to depict much of the invading force as being from North Korea, an isolated country where American media companies have no dollars at stake.

The changes illustrate just how much sway China's government has in the global entertainment industry, even without uttering a word of official protest. Although it's unclear if anyone in China has seen "Red Dawn," a leaked version of the script last year resulted in critical editorials in the Global Times, a communist party-controlled paper.

That followed postings of pictures on China's popular Web portals Sina and Tiexue in late 2009 of the "Red Dawn" set showing actors posing as Chinese troops and mock propaganda posters of the U.S. Capitol building smashed by a hammer. The posts received tens of the thousands of views. "When does it come out?" read one Chinese comment. "There is no hope for theatrical screening [censorship], wait for pirated version."

An MGM spokesman said that no one at the studio has had discussions with Chinese government officials about "Red Dawn."

Hollywood has learned the hard way that besmirching China's image on-screen can have long-running implications for the many arms of a modern media conglomerate. In the late 1990s, Walt Disney Studios, Sony Pictures and MGM all faced a temporary halt in their business dealings in the country after releasing the movies "Kundun," "Seven Years in Tibet" and "Red Corner," respectively, which were critical of the communist government.

Today, China is far more important to the Hollywood studios, despite the government's policy of allowing only about 20 non-Chinese films into theaters each year. In 2010, China was the fifth-biggest box office market outside of the United States, with $1.5 billion in revenue.

A number of Hollywood studios are deepening their business ties to the world's most populous nation. Disney is building a theme park outside Shanghai, Sony Pictures co-produced the recent "Karate Kid" remake with the government-affiliated China Film Group, and News Corp.'s Fox International Productions recently made the Chinese-language hit "Hot Summer Days" there. Even independent studios like Lionsgate and Summit Entertainment will release their films "Killers" and "Red" in China in coming months.

 Dan Mintz, whose DMG Entertainment is a leading producer and distributor of movies in China, said the "Red Dawn" story dramatizes how Western companies can fundamentally misunderstand how the nation works. If the picture had gone out without redacting the Chinese invaders, he said, "there would have been a real backlash. It's like being invited to a dinner party and insulting the host all night long. There's no way to look good.... The film itself was not a smart move."

Mintz, who met with the producers of "Red Dawn" to offer some suggestions on how they could proceed, said that doing business in China requires a partnership approach. "The more you reach out, the better your relationships will be," Mintz said. "This is bigger than a single film."

The "Red Dawn" remake follows several teenagers in Spokane, Wash., who fight invading Chinese forces allied with Russia in the near future (in the original film, the Soviets partnered with Cubans). The roughly $60-million production stars Chris Hemsworth, who will become much better known to moviegoers this May when he plays the title role in the superhero event picture "Thor."

MGM had been set to release "Red Dawn" in November, but the debt-laden studio filed for bankruptcy the month before and emerged under new leadership at the end of the year. New chief executives Gary Barber and Roger Birnbaum are seeking to sell both "Red Dawn" and the horror film "The Cabin in the Woods," the last two pictures produced under a previous regime, as they try to reshape the 87-year-old company.

China will be an important market for the studio as it goes ahead with plans to produce two movies based on "The Hobbit" and James Bond sequels. The last Bond movie, 2008's "Quantum of Solace," grossed $21 million in China.

In the last few weeks, MGM has begun showing "Red Dawn" to potential buyers at other studios. Several people who have seen the movie but requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the record said they couldn't risk distributing it given the potential blowback in China.

The feedback led to MGM's decision to make the highly unusual changes. Although it's common to reshape movies in the editing room, there's no known precedent for changing the nationality of an entire group of characters.

People close to the picture said the changes will cost less than $1 million and involve changing an opening sequence summarizing the story's fictional backdrop, re-editing two scenes and using digital technology to transform many Chinese symbols to Korean. It's impossible to eliminate all references to China, the people said, though the changes will give North Korea a much larger role in the coalition that invades the U.S.

"We were initially very reluctant to make any changes," said Tripp Vinson, one of the movie's producers. "But after careful consideration we constructed a way to make a scarier, smarter and more dangerous 'Red Dawn' that we believe improves the movie."

Representatives for director Dan Bradley did not respond to requests for comment.

If MGM is unable to find a distributor for the movie, it could end up going direct-to-DVD or could even be shelved, never to be seen by the public.

"Red Dawn" is not the only piece of entertainment to swap out Chinese villains for North Koreans recently. The video game "Homefront," which was released this week and features a script by John Milius, writer of the original "Red Dawn," was also originally intended to feature a Chinese invasion. For business reasons, publisher THQ changed the occupying forces to North Korea.

A representative for MGM said it's hopeful the unusual changes will have a simple result: turning "Red Dawn" from a complete write-off into a movie that can find an audience and make money.

"MGM has been working with the film 'Red Dawn's' director and producers to make the most commercially viable version of the film for audiences worldwide," said Mike Vollman, executive vice president of worldwide marketing. "We want to ensure the most people possible are able to experience it."

Times staff writer David Pierson in Beijing contributed to this report.

ben.fritz@latimes.com
john.horn@latimes.com

The Civil War according to Hollywood -- shot through with myths, omissions, and outright lies.

Verne Strickland Blogmaster     April 30, 2011
 

WE ARE OBSERVING THE 150th ANNIVERSARY OF THE U.S. CIVIL WAR. FEW MAJOR EVENTS IN OUR HISTORY HAVE BEEN MORE MISUNDERSTOOD, OBSCURED, OR WILFULLY WARPED BY REVISIONIST WRITERS AND FILMMAKERS. THIS IS A STORY YOU MUST READ.

By Dan Gifford 
 

“Film strongly influences perceptions of historical events.” Gary W. Gallagher: History Professor, University of Virginia.

If there is a film genre that has been the source of more fiction and mythology than the western, that category would have to be the American Civil War. The difference seems to be that while some of the most persistent myths about the frontier West like the quick draw shoot-out are Hollywood fabrications that keep getting put into new movies, many of the contemporary beliefs about the Civil War are perpetuated because contrary facts get omitted from scripts.

So whereas the reputation of Tombstone’s Johnny Ringo as a gunfighter is maintained on the screen even though he was never in a gunfight (nor was he killed by Doc Holliday as the movies have it) according to those who knew him like my grandfather and great uncle, a US Deputy Marshal and business partner of Wyatt Earp’s, we never see that Union general Ulysses S. Grant, the man supposedly fighting a war to end slavery, used his wife’s slave during that entire war or that Confederate general Robert E. Lee, the man supposedly fighting to protect slavery, considered it an evil and didn’t own any slaves. That’s just one of the numerous contradictions of this conflict that we have not seen on the screen that have created so many false perceptions of it.

We never see that many blacks in the South were free men, that the Confederate government was not ant-Semitic (its Attorney General and acting Secretary of War was Jewish and many Jews fought for the South), that 3,000 blacks owned 20,000 slaves according to the 1860 census, that northerners (some abolitionists excepted) did not go to war to end slavery, that armed pro Union resistance to the Confederate government by southern whites was rampant in portions of the South, and we certainly never see Union General William Sherman emphatically state that “Slavery is not the Cause but the pretext” for the  war before listing what he believed was in his letters.

How do we reconcile that with all the southern state secession declarations that name the retention of slavery as their reason for leaving the United States?  Beats me. But if anyone at that time understood southern motivations, it was Sherman.

For years Sherman was superintendent of the school that became Louisiana State University and he understood the South and its people in a way virtually nobody in the the North did.  Grant did say slavery was the cause of the war, but that was after years of Union floundering around for a cause to rally around. Before the war, Grant said “If I thought this war was to abolish slavery, I would resign my commission and offer my sword to the other side.” That quote is disputed, but having seen it in several books over the years, I believe it’s accurate and suspect it has been attacked because it does not fit the the currently favored political narrative.

The net result of those and many other omissions like the extreme importance of the Irish immigrant soldiers to both sides is that most Americans are largely ignorant of the complexities and contradictions and outright hypocrisies that school boys of my background generally knew about their ancestors, their war and its issues that still underlie much of our contemporary political contention. The reason we knew was that we got to talk to people who were raised by those who actually fought in the Civil War or lived through it. That was the case in my family.

My father’s parents were on opposite sides of the Civil War and they would re-fight it over dinner every day. My grandfather had several brothers who fought for the North, one of whom was a telegrapher in Sherman’s army and was privy to many candid staff conversations he passed along that have not made it into any history book I’ve seen.

Grandad was a strong Union Republican and to him, secession was treason. That was Sherman’s view and motivation for his vicious campaign against the Confederacy and its people as well.  My grandmother didn’t agree. Her father, older brothers and cousins had fought with Texas and North Carolina cavalry units. 

What I learned from them and others was that slavery was basically a non issue for most people then and that the likes of Sherman, Grant and even Abraham Lincoln felt that way too no matter what they said late in the war or after it that contradicted their earlier or privately expressed opinions. That “nuance” never makes it onto the screen just as other relevant facts have not in the most recent Civil War films.

The Conspirator shows the tooth and nail legal defense by Union Army hero Frederick Aiken of accused Lincoln assassination conspirator Mary Surratt before a US Army kangaroo court. So we have the drama of Surratt, a backer of the Confederacy, being defended by a former Yankee soldier of principle who’s upset that Surratt’s constitutional rights are being violated.

What’s missing? Setting Surratt’s obvious guilt aside, the fact that Lincoln had rescinded the very constitutional rights Aiken complains are being trashed by the military court, for one, and the fact that before joining the Union army, Aiken had written to Confederate president Jefferson Davis offering to serve with the South, for another.

Glory shows us the first all black regiment formed by the Union — the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry — and seems to imply that only the North was evolved enough to allow blacks into its army. In reality, they were cannon fodder for suicidal attacks like the 54th’s on Confederate Fort Wagner ,  key parts of which the film got wrong.

But have you ever seen a film portraying this eyewitness account of the Confederate army as it marched through Frederick, Maryland  (the town where 96 year old  Barbara Fritchie taunted the southerners with her American flag)  on its way to Gettysburg? “Over 3,000 Negroes must be included in the number … They had arms, rifles, muskets, sabers, bowie-knives, dirks, etc. They were supplied, in many instances, with knapsacks, haversacks, canteens, etc., and they were manifestly an integral portion of the Southern Confederacy army.”

CBS 60 Minutes curmudgeon Andy Rooney fumed that textbooks saying blacks fought for the South were a spreading a lie during a recent rant. Sorry Andy. Era newspapers contain accounts of captured fully armed black soldiers, black snipers and a History Channel piece correctly recounts how soldiers at Camp Douglas, the Union’s hellish POW prison near Chicago  — immediately killed black confederate soldiers.

Cold Mountain shows us a sadistic western North Carolina Confederate home guard that murders a harmless retarded boy and a musician in addition to terrorizing the civilians it’s supposed to be protecting. This story I know well. I heard it along with most everyone else while a child living in the mountains and have been to the grave that holds both victims several times. The film has the reason for the killings wrong (the two were Union sympathizers not Confederate army deserters), but maybe that’s because Cold Mountain is really an anti-war, women’s empowerment film. Far as it went,  the film still does not show what a bunch of murdering bastards this home guard actually was in addition to the other murdering bastard raider gangs that robbed, raped and pillaged area towns in North Carolina’s “valley of  humility between two mountains of conceit.”

Those mountains were the plantation aristocrats of Virginia and South Carolina, a class the average man tended to dislike for its arrogance. That’s why the Appalachians on through northern South Carolina, Alabama and Georgia were part of that other South that was ambivalent or outright hostile to the Confederacy and the war years there were not unlike the Missouri border war Bushwaker –  Jayhawker bloodlettings shown in The Outlaw Jose Wales and Ride with the Devil.

Gods and Generals presents another issue of authenticity that I have not seen on the screen. Take a look at this movie scene photo of actors portraying Confederate soldiers and compare it with the eye witness description of southern troops below it.

“I have never seen a mass of such filthy strong-smelling men. Three in a room would make it unbearable, and when marching in column along the street the smell from them was most offensive… The filth that pervades them is most remarkable… They have no uniforms, but are all well armed and equipped … They are the roughest looking set of creatures I ever saw.” Another observer described the Confederates as “a lean and hungry set of wolves.”

Do you see “lean and hungry wolves” in that scene? Neither do I.  But maybe I expect too much.
The Civil War or any other historical period can be interpreted any way a director wants, but that interpretation tends to reflect current sensibilities.Past interpretations like those in Gone With The Wind presented a ridiculous southern fiction of chivalry,  whimsical lost cause  and the off-putting sight of “darkies” singin’ ‘n dancin’ in da cotton fields.

We’re now at the opposite end of that spectrum within a framework of what Indiana University history professor David Thelen defined as a “story of bitter irreconcilable conflict between two societies and between two sets of values” — some of which we are still arguing about with no resolution in sight.

http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/dgifford/2011/04/30/the-civil-war-according-to-hollywood/#more-466276