A comedy of errors
- By Brad Franklin
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E-mail China.org.cn, December 29, 2014
North Korean computer hackers worked their way into the computers at Sony and compromised the personal information of the people who work there. The hackers then threatened to bring Sony and its employees to their knees and unleash cyber-attacks on theaters if the film, "The Interview," was ever released to the public. Mistake number three. Some theaters said they wouldn't show the film, scheduled to be released on Christmas Day, and Sony promptly caved in and said they would not release it. Mistake number four. North Korea, for the record, has denied it had anything to do with the hacking. No one believes them.
All of this might have happened without anyone outside of the film industry noticing except for the fact that Sony publically complained about the hacking of its computer systems. Although this is normal practice in the U.S., in this case it has to be recorded here as mistake number five. The bottle was opened, the genie was out, and the world was now watching. If the situation was precarious before, it was now rapidly moving toward the ridiculous.
Portions of the film were already in the public domain as part of the advertising push surrounding the planned and now aborted release, and the critics who had seen it were calling it lame. In spite of the fact that it had cost several million dollars to make, "The Interview" was considered to be a fairly low-budget production and apparently hewed to the adage that you get what you pay for. The buzz was that it was a turkey (why not, it was to be released on Christmas, after all) and would be lucky to recover its investment. Not anymore.
Sony, under fire from actors, the public and no less than President Obama himself for having yielded to North Korea's threats and agreeing to bury the film, reversed its decision and said it would release the film not only in theaters but also over the Internet. By then, any possible lapses in judgement on Sony's part in making the film in the first place had been overshadowed by public clamour to see the picture just to find out what all the fuss was about. The turkey had become an eagle.
"The Interview," probably the product of a bad idea to start with, is now in American theaters and will spread to those offshore within days. I predict that what was probably going to be a financial failure for Sony is on its way to becoming a smashing success simply because those who didn't like the idea tried to stop it and the story got out to the public. I expect Americans are already filling the theatre seats, those in other countries will also go to watch "The Interview," and the people of North Korea will get to see it and will laugh themselves silly over the very idea that a film such as this could even be made. I'm sure that someone, somewhere, thought this film idea was good, and it may turn out that, in terms of making lots of money for Sony, they were right. They could not have foreseen the twisted path "The Interview" would take to success - the litany of bad ideas, ridiculous responses, reversed decisions and a high public profile that would led to the eventual outcome. If "The Interview" becomes a box-office success because of a path strewn with mistakes, compounded mistakes and outright bad planning, even the reporters who have been covering the story and scribblers like me will benefit from the bizarre story surrounding it.
Brad Franklin is a former political reporter, newscaster and federal government employee in Canada. He is a regular columnist for China's English Salon magazine and lives on Vancouver Island.
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