cinematic marketplace, dominated by
China. In “The Big Picture: The Fight
for the Future of the Movies” (Hough-
ton Milin Harcourt), the Wall Street
Journal reporter Ben Fritz shares a star-
tling fact: in 2005, the highest-grossing
film in China was “Harry Potter and
the Goblet of Fire,” which took in just
under twelve million dollars. In 2017, a
“Fast and the Furious” sequel made al-
most four hundred million there.
To write “The Big Picture,” Fritz
sifted through all the Sony e-mails
made public by the hack. “This was, I
realized, a way to embed myself inside
a studio,” he writes. The surprising un-
dersong to the story he tells is one of
pathos—the pathos of an old-school
studio head becoming an anomaly in
a Hollywood increasingly overseen by
brand managers. Fritz quotes at length
from an extraordinary St. Crispin’s Day-
like pep talk that Rudin delivered to
Pascal, via e-mail, in 2014. Rudin had
been trying to get Sony to back the
movie “Steve Jobs,” with a screenplay
by Aaron Sorkin, based on Walter Isaac-
son’s 2011 biography. David Fincher
was going to direct, but then he dropped
out and Danny Boyle took over; Chris-
tian Bale was going to star, then maybe
Leonardo DiCaprio, or perhaps Brad-
ley Cooper or Matt Damon or Ben
Aleck. Now it was Michael Fass-
bender. Pascal had wavered, and let
Rudin take the movie to Universal.
When Rudin e-mailed her, she was
trying to get it back.
“Why have the job if you can’t do
this movie?” he asked her. “So you’re
feeling wobbly in the job right now.
Here’s the fact: nothing conventionalyou could do is going to change that,
and there is no life-changing hit that
is going to fall into your lap that is NOT
a nervous decision, because the big ob-
vious movies are going to go elsewhere
and you don’t have the IP right now to
create them from standard material.
Force yourself to muster some confi-
dence about it and do the exact thing
right now for which your career will be
known in movie history: be the person
who makes the tough decisions and
sticks with them and makes the un-
likely things succeed.”
Universal kept the movie, and re-
leased it in October, 2015. It was the
kind of nervy, mid-budget drama that
Pascal lived to make. It was also the
kind of movie that does not play in
Sioux City, Bayonne, or Chongqing.
“Steve Jobs” lost about fifty million dol-
lars at the box oice, according to Fritz.
By then, Pascal had been eased out of
her position at Sony in classic Holly-
wood style. When her contract expired,
in February, 2015, she was given a “first-
look” producing deal.A
side from one person’s job, what
was lost? Fritz sees a bleak future
for the big studios, but is surprisingly
upbeat about what’s in store for the rest
of us. The decline of wide-release mov-
ies for grownups has coincided with
the rise of ambitious, big-budget story-
telling on television, a trade-of Fritz
is fine with. “For those of us who sim-
ply want to sit down, turn of the lights,
and be immersed in the magic of sto-
ries told in images on a screen,” he
writes, “the future has never looked
brighter.” True. But for a book that care-
fully delineates the causes and efects
that have shaped the recent Hollywood
past, the reduction of movies to “sto-
ries told in images on a screen” is sur-
prisingly ahistorical. How and where
the movies reach us has always con-
tributed to the particular power they
have to rearrange our moral furniture.
The story of Amy Pascal’s downfall
at Sony is unsettling, but the period
that preceded her tenure is not widely
regarded as a golden age of American
cinema. It was, instead, the age of the
traditional blockbuster, when a “high
concept” and a single A-list star could
drive a project from pitch meeting into
production and, finally, out to theatres.