Caffeinated Clint
Here’s the latest on North Korea now calling the shots in Hollywood (did you hear Kim Jong-Un is the new head of the Motion Picture, Arts & Sciences?). “The Interview” can now be released, the hackers tell Sony, but with one major change : no death scene for the Supreme leader. If they do as they say, and also polish the knobs of every North Korean embassy employee before breakfast each morning, they’ll let the film run. But that statement conflicts with another that apparently came in around the same time stating that the studio isn’t allowed to release the film.. ever – not even on DVD or VOD, or the blanket dancing from a clothesline screening I had proposed to them. So, for all we know, one of those hacker messages was fake. Or, the hackers are simply getting a kick out of this now. I picture the kids from ‘Superbad’ sitting behind a computer, taking turns of making shit up and consequently emailing Sony their ridiculous demands. Fuckin’ McLovin’.
President Obama has come out saying Sony sent us back about 500 years by agreeing with North Korea not to release the movie.
“We cannot have a society in which some dictator someplace can start imposing censorship here in the United States” he said on Friday. “Because if somebody is able to intimidate folks out of releasing a satirical movie, imagine what they start doing when they see a documentary that they don’t like, or a news report that they don’t like — or even worse, imagine if producers and distributors and others start engaging in self-censorship because they don’t want to offend the sensibilities of somebody whose sensibilities probably need to be offended. That’s not who we are. That’s not what America is about.
“Sony is a corporation. It suffered significant damage, threats against some employees. I am sympathetic to the concerns they faced. Having said that, yes I think they made a mistake,” Obama said this morning when asked just that. That’s not what America is about…I wish they’d spoken to me first. I would have told them, ‘Do not get into a pattern in which you’re intimidated by these kinds of criminal attacks’. They caused a lot of damage and we will respond. We will respond proportionally, and we’ll respond in a place and time and manner that we choose. It’s not something that I will announce here today at a press conference. It says something interesting about North Korea that they decided to have the state launch an all-out assault on a movie studio because of a satirical movie starring Seth Rogen and James Franco. I love Seth and I love James, but the notion that that was a threat to them, I think, gives you some sense of the kind of regime we’re talking about here.”
In response, Sony CEO Michael Lynton said : “Sony Pictures Entertainment is and always has been strongly committed to the First Amendment. For more than three weeks, despite brutal intrusions into our company and our employees’ personal lives, we maintained our focus on one goal: getting the film The Interview released. Free expression should never be suppressed by threats and extortion. The decision not to move forward with the December 25 theatrical release of The Interview was made as a result of the majority of the nation’s theater owners choosing not to screen the film. This was their decision. Let us be clear – the only decision that we have made with respect to release of the film was not to release it on Christmas Day in theaters, after the theater owners declined to show it. Without theaters, we could not release it in the theaters on Christmas Day. We had no choice. After that decision, we immediately began actively surveying alternatives to enable us to release the movie on a different platform. It is still our hope that anyone who wants to see this movie will get the opportunity to do so.”
So, it does sound like it’ll come – but it sure as shit won’t be out anytime soon. If Sony wanted to release the movie, they might have to beam it from Shopping Mall food court tables – because there’s not one VOD distributor willing to touch that piping hot potato right now.
“There has not been one major VOD distributor, one major e-commerce site that has stepped forward and said they are willing to distribute this movie for us,” he said.
Not surprisingly, Sony aren’t considering BitTorrent – although they’ve offered to run it. Again, not surprisingly.
CEO Matt Mason said they’ve offered to run a Torrent of “The Interview” online. “We have reached out (to Sony) on a number of fronts,” he said. “It seems like no one else wants to touch this, but for us this about the two things we care about most: an open Internet and a sustainable future for creativity. This is bigger than this film at this point. As a company, we feel we have no choice but to help Sony Pictures and defend these principles.”
BitTorrent propose that the studio use BitTorrent Bundle, “a safe and legal way for Sony to release this film and they would join the nearly 20,000 creators and rights holders now using the Bundle publishing platform.”
Through all this kerfuffle, I see only one winner at the end of the day :
DVD stores carrying the title “The Interview” starring Hugo Weaving and Tony Martin.
