Red Carpet

Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy

By: Erich Schwartzel

Narrated by: Sean Patrick Hopkins

"This is a fascinating book. It will educate you. Schwartzel has done some extraordinary reporting." (The New York Times Book Review)

“In this highly entertaining but deeply disturbing book, Erich Schwartzel demonstrates the extent of our cultural thrall to China. His depiction of the craven characters, American and Chinese, who have enabled this situation represents a significant feat of investigative journalism. His narrative is about not merely the movie business, but the new world order.” *(Andrew Solomon, author of Far from the Tree and The Noonday Demon)

An eye-opening and deeply reported narrative that details the surprising role of the movie business in the high-stakes contest between the US and China

From trade to technology to military might, competition between the United States and China dominates the foreign policy landscape. But this battle for global influence is also playing out in a strange and unexpected arena: the movies.

The film industry, Wall Street Journal reporter Erich Schwartzel explains, is the latest battleground in the tense and complex rivalry between these two world powers. In recent decades, as China has grown into a giant of the international economy, it has become a crucial source of revenue for the American film industry. Hollywood studios are now bending over backward to make movies that will appeal to China’s citizens - and gain approval from severe Communist Party censors. At the same time, and with America’s unwitting help, China has built its own film industry into an essential arm of its plan to export its national agenda to the rest of the world. The competition between these two movie businesses is a Cold War for this century, a clash that determines whether democratic or authoritarian values will be broadcast most powerfully around the world.

Red Carpet is packed with memorable characters who have - knowingly or otherwise - played key roles in this tangled industry web: not only A-list stars like Matt Damon, Angelina Jolie, and Richard Gere but also eccentric Chinese billionaires, zany expatriate filmmakers, and starlets who disappear from public life without explanation or trace. Schwartzel combines original reporting, political history, and show-biz intrigue in an exhilarating tour of global entertainment, from propaganda film sets in Beijing to the boardrooms of Hollywood studios to the living rooms in Kenya where families decide whether to watch an American or Chinese movie. Alarming, occasionally absurd, and wildly entertaining, Red Carpet will not only alter the way we watch movies but also offer essential new perspective on the power struggle of this century.

©2022 Erich Schwartzel (P)2022 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

“Red Carpet sketches out a frightening pattern in US-China trade relations . . . A fine book.” —Orville Schell, The New York Review of Books

"Schwartzel tells the story of how Chinese investments in Hollywood and the Communist Party’s role in deciding what Chinese audiences could see swiftly inverted the power relationship between China and the United States in this immensely influential industry. . . . Schwartzel makes this story of big stars and big money a page-turner, but its implications are much larger.”—Foreign Affairs

“Red Carpet is the story of the nexus that formed when Hollywood realized it needed China’s cash, and China realized it could first manipulate—and then appropriate—Hollywood’s special gifts for enchantment, coercion, lifestyle control, and inducing audiences to tear up by means of orchestral swells and Tom Hanks talking earnestly to small children. . . . The two stories, the humbling of Hollywood and the swelling of Chinese soft power, twist and combine across Schwartzel’s masterfully organized book. . . . This is a fascinating book. It will educate you. Schwartzel has done some extraordinary reporting, and a lot of legwork.”—The New York Times Book Review

Scary but excellent

Outstanding book on the impact China is having on the worldwide entertainment business. A must read for anyone in the business.

The Chinese name pronunciations bother me a lot

The overall narration is great. Just when the narrator says Chinese names I have a hard time understanding who that is. I am a Mandarin speaker, can't relate to those names really bothers me.

A timely piece

A comprehensive, entertaining, and fairly alarming piece at a time of increasingly fraught global relations.

The ingenui grasps for the Star

What America (gangsters controlling govt) said thru the Dallas (Dulles) Bros. "We bring modernization!" Chinese are bringing the real thing to those cheated by Dalles Bros. of America.

This explains so much!

This is a very informative book that reads as if tons of research went into it.

It also opened my eyes to the workings and real desires of Hollywood, and has forever changed the way I will view movies in the future. Great listen!

Excellent, complete, timely

An outstanding review of the history of Chinese cinema, the influences on it and motivations of Hollywood, and the recent schism steeped in nationalism and party orthodoxy that’s set up the rejection of Disney’s ‘Eternals’ and Sony’s otherwise smash hit, ‘Spider-Man: Never Going Home’ (which due to publication date are not discussed explicitly, which is unfortunate due to how relevant the incidents are). I believe that much of Disney’s rationale for buying 20th Century Fox was likely presupposed on future access to China for films like ‘Avatar 2 (3, 4, 5 etc), and now, all of that isn’t just at risk, but likely preordained at this point to not be something that can be counted upon. Meanwhile, attendance at Shanghai Disneyland apparently has never come close to 17-18 million annual guests, and guests have complained that the experience is far too expensive. There’s a great discussion about how Disney over 25 years had to alter its playbook of “Disney Channel”, then “plus toys”, then “movies”, and only then “theme park”, which it ultimately gladly embraced to get into the market (and for Iger and his senior executives to hit their multimillion dollar bonuses), but longer term seems foolhardy and predictably defective, as Chinese consumers appear to have little connection to any of the characters. It seems hard to see a bright future for big US studios in this market, particularly Warner Bros.

I do wish that the author had perhaps provided more data on China vs non-China box office, and perhaps gotten more off the record sourcing from ex-Disney execs who could have shared more of the concessions and mechanizations from behind the scenes.

if you love movies

I thought this was fascinating. love reading about movies, this tells a very scary tale of how much China has come to influence the world. really by copying the Hollywood/USA playbook

Why modern cinema is a comic experience.

Seen one too many Marvel Comic movies? Do you recall seeing films by directors Hitchcock, Fellini, Kubrick, Coppola, Satyajit Ray in a movie theater? Are you beginning to wonder if this sort of filmic storytelling is a thing of the past? Wonder why Scorsese believes the movie biz is killing cinema? Then listen to this we’ll-read and deeply informative audiobook.

Enlightening

Great perspective/ take on the fight for cultural supremacy between US and China (worlds 1 & 2 GDP).

Money, the root of all evils…

Nothing in this book is or should be a surprise. Unless you’re born after 200 and or have not paid attention to world events over the last few decades. Bottom line: short term profits at the expense of the soul of America.