![]() ![]() Act II follows what happened once a post-Maoist China began letting American-made movies into its theatres, detailing the myriad miscommunications that ensue when a liberal democracy suddenly begins doing business with a Communist country that’s home to more than a billion potential new customers. The first opens with the founding of Hollywood itself-an American Dream factory that manufactured one of the nation’s biggest exports. The book unfolds “the story of this unexpected relationship,” as Schwartzel puts it, in three acts. In Schwartzel’s telling, billion-dollar business decisions take on the erotic charge of romantic courtship, and turn on the thrill of a cat-and-mouse chase. Much of “Red Carpet” reads like a cautionary tale for American corporations seduced by the lure of the Chinese market. If anything, China had been putting its moves on Hollywood since at least the nineteen-nineties, just a few years after the first “Top Gun” was released. But, upon joining the Los Angeles bureau of the Wall Street Journal in 2013, Schwartzel “soon started seeing China everywhere looked.” Whether in the form of Chinese stars in American movies, or American movie theatres backed by Chinese investors, China’s encroachment on the American film industry was no passing fling. For Schwartzel, a reporter who began his career covering the fracking boom for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, publishing a book on China’s creeping influence over Hollywood came as an unexpected development. “This book is the story of what happened between the two ‘Top Guns,’ ” he writes in his introduction. The journalist Erich Schwartzel’s new book “ Red Carpet: Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy” lays out, among other things, the history surrounding the disappearing badges. Paramount executives removed the offending flags for the preview without Chinese officials even needing to say a word. Japan and Taiwan might have been American allies in real life, but any positive acknowledgment of them in the world of “Top Gun: Maverick” would run the risk of Chinese state censorship, potentially costing the film hundreds of millions. In 2019, China not only had access to Hollywood’s biggest blockbusters but often contributed to the largest portion of its ticket sales. ![]() While Chinese audiences had missed the first “Top Gun”-in 1986, their options were mostly limited to propaganda films and the odd Hollywood import-“Top Gun: Maverick” was entering a radically different media landscape. The motivating factor for the swap? China. Galveston tour, previously featuring the flags of Japan and Taiwan, had been replaced with two different symbols of similar colors. The patch on Cruise’s bomber highlighting the U.S.S. Yet the film’s most essential icon was perhaps Cruise’s bomber jacket, decorated with emblems celebrating America’s military campaigns in the Pacific.īut, when the trailer for the sequel, “Top Gun: Maverick,” was released, in the summer of 2019, something looked a little different. The film earned a hundred and eighty million dollars domestically, and managed to do what years of state-produced recruitment videos could not: upon its release, Navy and Air Force enrollments surged. Recall the glossy-haired, twenty-three-year-old Tom Cruise, effortlessly speeding on his motorcycle, or flying an F-14A Tomcat and donning his iconic aviators. When “Top Gun” came out, in 1986, every detail of its release seemed carefully orchestrated to prop up an image of American power.
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