Lead Balloon Ep. 68 - Seth Rogen Film, The Interview, Sparks a North Korean Hack Attack and a Hollywood PR Debacle for Sony Pictures' CEO

With Michael Lynton, former CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment

In 2014, Sony Pictures Entertainment sparked an international diplomatic crisis when it announced its latest comedy, which they called “The Interview.”

Starring Seth Rogen, James Franco, and Randall Park as a parodied version of North Korea’s Supreme Leader, Kim Jong-Un, the film features a slapstick plotline where a couple of bumbling journalists are recruited by the CIA to assassinate the reclusive dictator.

But when the teaser for the flick hit the internet, the real life hostile foreign power was not amused.

North Korea spent the ensuing months issuing threats of violence and terrorist attacks.

And then, just a month before the film's scheduled release, the hermit kingdom successfully hacked Sony's computer servers, publishing damaging information for anyone to access on the internet.

So in this episode of Lead Balloon, we speak with Michael Lynton, who was the CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment at the time, and ultimately gave the film the green light for production.

We discuss the public relations fallout from the hack, how he set about rebuilding the company's reputation, and WHY he even chose to launch that project--a mistake he still feels is the biggest he's made in a long entertainment industry career.

Co-authored with Joshua Steiner, Michael's new book "From Mistakes to Meaning: Owning Your Past So It Doesn't Own You" is available now, wherever you get books.

Transcript

Dusty Weis

If you make or promote films for a living, you expect your work to generate criticism… maybe from fans, or film critics or social media… but probably not from a hostile foreign nation.

CBS’s Norah O’Donnell

North Korea’s government is irate this morning over a new Hollywood comedy mocking that country. The North is calling the movie an act of war.

Dusty Weis

But in 2014, Sony Pictures Entertainment sparked an international diplomatic crisis when it announced its latest comedy, which they called “The Interview.” The Interview starred Seth Rogen, James Franco, and a parody version of North Korea’s ascendent dictator.

CBS’s Seth Doane

The film takes aim… literally… at 30-something dictator Kim Jong-Un.

James Franco

You want to go kill Kim Jong-Un?

Seth Rogen

Totally. I’d love to assassinate Kim Jong-Un. It’s a date.

Dusty Weis

And while getting flamed on Rotten Tomatoes is usually the worst thing that can happen if someone doesn’t like your flick… the North Korean regime took film criticism to new extremes, threatening death and destruction if the movie ever screened for audiences.

CBS’s Seth Doane

Actor Seth Rogen, who stars in the film, tweeted, people don’t usually want to kill me for one of my movies until after they’ve paid 12 bucks for it.”

Dusty Weis

But Michael Lynton, who was the CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment at the time, says all the experts said there was no actual threat, and no reason NOT to go forward with the movie launch…

Michael Lynton

On the face of it you wouldn't have thought that this was a threat. Our view of North Korea as the public... We sort of saw the group over there as funny people in funny hats running around, and now we see them as much more dangerous.

Dusty Weis

Yet within months, Sony Pictures Entertainment would be brought to its knees by an international data hack.

President Barack Obama

We can confirm that North Korea engaged in this attack.

Dusty Weis

With widespread public fears of violence on American soil... Becoming the center of a Hollywood PR disaster and an international confrontation.

And Michael Lynton tells us he would come to wish he had never given The Interview a Green Light.

Michael Lynton

The truth of the matter is nothing good came of this. It was a real mistake that had really bad consequences. And I just need to own that. And I do.

Dusty Weis

I’m Dusty Weis. From Podcamp Media, this is Lead Balloon, a podcast about notable tales from the worlds of PR, Marketing and Branding, told by the well-meaning communications professionals who lived them.

Thank you for tuning in.

Our guest today, Michael Lynton, currently serves as the board chairman of Snap, the makers of the Snapchat app, as well as board chairman of the Warner Music Group.

And he’s co-author of the new book, called From Mistakes to Meaning: Owning Your Past So It Doesn't Own You, which explores a theme that we end up talking about a whole lot here on this show.

After Harvard Business School, he started his entertainment career at the Walt Disney Company, got into publishing at the Penguin Group, took a leadership role at Time Warner.

And in 2014, he had already been CEO and co-chair of Sony Pictures Entertainment for a decade. He was in a good place, careerwise, even if he didn’t allow himself to get comfortable.

Michael Lynton

Always you have something to prove, yeah. You know, there's always another year and you have to make more great things and grow profits. And particularly in the entertainment business, I really do subscribe to the notion that only the paranoid survive.

You know, there's always something that's gonna get you, not necessarily the North Koreans, but you know, it's a very competitive landscape, whether it be getting material or putting movies out into the marketplace. You're never resting on your laurels in the entertainment business, ever.

Dusty Weis

During Michael’s tenure, Sony Pictures Entertainment had produced critically-acclaimed films like Captain Phillips,

Barkhad Abdi

I am the captain now.

Dusty Weis

the Social Network,

Jesse Eisenberg

If you guys were the inventors of Facebook, then you’d have invented Facebook!

Dusty Weis

and Moneyball.

Brad Pitt

How can you not be romantic about baseball?

Dusty Weis

Blockbusters like the Amazing Spider-Man and James Bond.

Daniel Craig

Some men are coming to kill us. We’re going to kill them first.

Dusty Weis

Breaking Bad even came out on his watch over on AMC.

Bryan Cranston

I’m not in danger Skyler, I am the danger.

Dusty Weis

But in Hollywood, being the guy who oversaw the production of good work is only half the battle.

It turns out you’re just as concerned with making sure you don’t pass on a project that goes on to be a big hit for your rivals.

Like Universal and Disney both declining to produce Star Wars… Columbia Pictures junking E.T. and turning down Pulp Fiction…

The biggest shortcut to infamy for a studio executive like Michael is to be the guy who says “No Thanks” to a hot project and ultimately gets burned.

And in the late-2000s, you can argue that one of the hottest commodities was Actor, Writer and Producer Seth Rogen.

From his commercial breakthrough in the 40-Year-Old-Virgin,

Seth Rogen

I get with women! Aren’t you curious as to how that’s possible?

Dusty Weis

To his first leading role opposite Katherine Heigl in Knocked Up,

Seth Rogen

I’m Canadian, from Vancouver. I live here, illegally, actually.

Dusty Weis

To his first co-writing credit on Superbad,

Seth Rogen

McLovin! Nice!

Dusty Weis

Look, I’m 41, and while I can’t bring myself to call them cinema, I did see each one of those flicks in theaters.

Rogen’s stoner comedy sensibilities were a hit with Millennial film-goers and racked up box office receipts.

But of his break out hits, Superbad and Pineapple Express were produced by Sony. Knocked Up and 40-Year-Old Virgin came out under the banner of rival Universal Studios.

Michael Lynton

He was in a situation where he had two studios competing for his films.

Dusty Weis

So in 2013, when Seth Rogen brought his pitch to the Sony team, Michael says there was a lot of pressure to snap it up before Rogen could take it across the street.

Michael Lynton

And he presented us with this movie, “The Interview.” The script is about these two hapless journalists, played by James Franco and Seth Rogen, who go off to North Korea under the auspices of the CIA, and their mission is to assassinate Kim Jong-un.

Lizzy Caplan

You two are going to be alone in a room with Kim.

James Franco

We got the interview!

Lizzy Caplan

The CIA would love it if you could take him out.

Seth Rogen

Like for drinks? Take him out on the town?

Lizzy Caplan

No, uh… take him out.

Seth Rogen

You want us to kill the leader of North Korea?

The premise is the most striking thing about the movie The Interview. Throughout the early 2000s, U.S. news outlets regularly devoted airtime to the totalitarian regime’s haphazard pursuit of a nuclear weapon.

And President George W. Bush even included North Korea among his three-nation “Axis of Evil,” supposedly existential threats to the United States along with Iraq and Iran.

But with all their bombastic threats and seeming militaristic impotence, the Kim regime was also a regular target for American comedians, including in the 2004 puppet-centered film by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, “Team America: World Police.”

Kim Jong-Il

“I’m so lonely.”

Though Kim Jong-Un and his father Kim Jong-Il, who preceded him as Supreme Leader, made easy targets for comedy, with their unearned pomposity, their well-documented cruelty and… let’s just say it… their goofy appearance.

The original concept for The Interview centered on the assassination of a fictional dictator in a made-up foreign nation.

But following the death of Kim Jong-Il, Seth Rogen, his co-director Evan Goldberg, and screenwriter Dan Sterling made the fateful decision to focus on North Korea.

Michael Lynton

Seth and his producing partners and his co-writer felt very strongly that to ground this thing as much as you could in reality, that was hugely important to them because, you know, there were times in the process where we thought maybe this isn't the greatest idea and tried to persuade him not to do it. And he really stuck by his guns on that point.

Dusty Weis

And when Seth Rogen, a Hollywood hitmaker with seemingly limitless appeal to the coveted 25-35 demographic, brings you first dibs on a script that you know your competition could hoover up, Michael says there’s a lot of pressure to dive in head first.

Michael Lynton

Under normal circumstances, what would have happened was we would have put together a group of individuals for a meeting. Those people would have included somebody from marketing or finance, public policy, because it involved the subject matter we're describing, creative obviously, and sat around a table and debated the merits of the movie, financial and otherwise, and then come to a point of view.

And that absolutely did not happen this time.

What happened instead was we decided, Amy Pascal, who was running the studio, who was my partner there, she was very enthusiastic about the movie and what we decided to do was do a read through.

And at a read through what you do, and you do these often times with comedies in the movie business because comedy really, jokes present themselves better off the page and spoken than they would do on the page. You try and see whether it's as funny as everybody thinks it is.

All the actors were there. They were dressed very casually, as were the creative staff, including Amy. I walk in and I am not just the suit. I'm in a suit.

And I am the one person actually who on the fence about this. And this was my role, more or less, for those many years at the studio. I was the guy, not who was Mr. No, but was the voice of caution, I would say.

We had the read through. was very, very, very funny.

And everybody jumped up at the end and said, we gotta make this, this is great, including Amy, including the other creative folks working with Amy.

And very much unlike me, I jumped in there and I said, let's do this.

In a moment of enthusiasm and in a moment of desire to be part of that group, I said, yes, let's do it. And that proved to be a big mistake.

Dusty Weis

Production began on the film in Q4 of 2013. And by June of 2014, the movie was the talk of the Internet after the studio dropped a teaser that went Super Viral.

Michael says he knew he should have been feeling good about the film’s prospects, given the amount of buzz it was generating.

Michael Lynton

There was still something in the back of my mind that was sort of uncomfortable with the whole idea. I think part of that was the fact that, on the face of it you wouldn't have thought that this was a threat.

Our view of North Korea as the public is very different today, I would say, than it was 10 years ago. We sort of saw the group over there as funny people in funny hats running around, and now we see them as much more dangerous than that.

We also didn't really know who Kim Jong-Un was. He was new in the role. His father had died recently before that, and we didn't understand that he, in truth, was much more aggressive than his father was, and much more ambitious in terms of what he wanted to do.

Dusty Weis

So when a cryptic and threatening statement appeared online, purporting to be from North Korea’s state news agency, the public’s reaction was more bemusement than concern.

CBS’s Seth Doane

Firing back, the North Koreans promised, “If the U.S. Government permits or protects the film, there will accordingly be firm and merciless response.”

The North Koreans did not clarify exactly what they response would be Gayle, but I wouldn’t expect the red carpet treatment in Pyongyang.

Michael Lynton

The problem is we don't have any official relations or didn't at the time with North Korea. You're sort of hearing what they're saying through sort of murky circumstances.

It showed up on a relatively obscure website. At first you didn't even know that it was the North Koreans. You heard from them so rarely, let alone the envoy.

It did concern me, and I wound up checking with two voices that I respect. One of them, a senior analyst at the Rand Corporation, and the other was a person I was introduced to who was the Undersecretary of State in the State Department.

Dusty Weis

And what was their take? How did that affect your thinking?

Michael Lynton

Well, both of them basically said that North Korea is all bark, no bite, that they threaten frequently, that they have no ability to actually come onto U.S. soil, so we shouldn't be worried about anything physical, and they made no mention of cyber.

They did not talk about the cyber capabilities, despite the fact, oddly, that, and I found this after the fact, that the cyber capabilities of the North Koreans was written up extensively elsewhere, like in The Guardian, I believe.

I think they were slightly biased by the fact that they were judging things from the perspective of Kim Jong-Il as opposed to Kim Jong-Un. You know, I think the father would have behaved differently than the son. And so their advice was, you should proceed, you should not be concerned about this.

Dusty Weis

Shouldn’t be concerned, and, in fact, some commentators suggested the studio ought to welcome the threats, with the Guardian describing the outcry as “Perfect publicity for the movie.”

Accordingly, Michael Lynton says he tried to allow himself to feel cautiously optimistic as the project came together.

Michael Lynton

The movie was, in terms of the assemblages looked very funny.

I don't normally in my job, because I was the CEO and responsible for movie and television and music…

Dusty Weis

You got a lot of balls in the air.

Michael Lynton

Well, it's not my job to look at dailies or assemblages, but in this particular case I did because it was a sensitive piece of material.

We actually embarked on a whole series of edits that were being suggested to minimize the assassination scene in the hopes that it might prove to be less offensive. Ultimately, I think that didn't bear a lot of fruit.

But what we saw looked very funny. Yeah, it looked like an R-rated comedy from Seth Rogen and James Franco that was extremely commercial.

Dusty Weis

And that was the extent of anyone’s expectations for the movie… controversial, goofy, and extremely commercial.

Until November 24th, 2014, the Monday of a short Thanksgiving holiday week, as Michael Lynton was on his way to the studio in Culver City, California

Michael Lynton

Um, so I was driving to work. It's probably 8:30, 8:00 in the morning. And I get a call from our CFO, Dave Hendler. And he said, Michael, we have a problem.

It appears that all of our computer systems are down. A huge number of our laptops are actually no longer functioning. It's not just the internet or something being down. Something happened that fried the computers.

And we don't actually have any understanding of what's going on.

And I get to the studio and you know, a studio is a lot like a college campus. It's about 40 acres. Depending on the day, because you got a lot of day workers coming in onto the sound stages, but you have between five and six thousand people, maybe a few more just mingling around.

And when I got there, there was a large crowd in front of the main office building and they were really perplexed.

The problem was is that nothing worked. We had no email. All the systems were down and the only way we could communicate with each other was through text chains, not just domestically, but with all of our affiliates outside the United States. And that was the first inkling that we had a huge problem.

I called the FBI to come in because we quickly suspected that there had been a cyber attack of some sort. We didn't know that it was North Koreans. The FBI was terrific. They came very quickly and started doing their forensics on the matter. And then things started getting uglier.

Dusty Weis

So, coming up after the break.

How a foreign data intrusion by a reclusive dictatorship caused one of the biggest 21st century PR debacles for a Hollywood studio, with long-reaching consequences that almost kept The Interview from being seen by public audiences.

And made Michael Lynton a target for some high-ranking criticism.

Michael Lynton

I’m in my car and the phone rings and it’s the President of the United States. And he said, “Come on. Killing the leader of a hostile nation in a movie? Don’t you think that’s a mistake?”

Dusty Weis

That’s all coming up in a minute, here on Lead Balloon.

Dusty Weis

This is Lead Balloon and I’m Dusty Weis.

It was three days before Thanksgiving, 2014. And Sony Pictures Entertainment CEO Michael Lynton had just arrived at the office to find everything ground to a halt.

Employees were locked out of their laptops. The company’s computer servers had been hacked. The company’s data, stolen.

And while the culprits had yet to be identified, it quickly became clear that it wasn’t a random attack.

Within weeks, a website appeared where visitors were invited to type “DIE SONY” into a prompt, unlocking access to a data treasure trove—terrabytes of material from the company’s servers that was not supposed to be public.

Michael Lynton

The hackers started releasing these caches of emails and data files, which included unreleased movies like Karate Kid and a new Bond script that had not yet been made public.

And of course, there were a lot of salacious emails. There was a lot of stuff with movie stars in it, a lot of stuff being said that probably shouldn't have been said in those emails. In addition to which there was people's healthcare records and social security numbers. A lot of my personal detail was up there. It was a very, very damaging and awkward period.

Dusty Weis

On the one hand, you have confidential information, draft cuts of movies, top secret scripts going out and that sort of stuff has to be absolutely mortifying to see as an entertainment CEO.

On the other hand, you have confidential information going out about your employees, the people that you're supposed to protect. At that point as a CEO, you have to be just feeling absolutely miserable watching this happen to your company.

Michael Lynton

It was terrible. And to your point, there were a lot of different constituencies to consider. You had our employees who themselves were feeling very vulnerable because of all their information being out in the public.

You had the wider Hollywood community who was upset oftentimes, agents and actors, directors, because their email correspondence with some of the people at the studio was being exposed and a lot of that stuff wasn't there for public consumption.

You had sort of a bigger geopolitical situation, which I was not aware of until this all came about. Sony is obviously a Japanese company. The North Koreans and the Japanese had a very complicated relationship back in the 70s. The North Koreans actually kidnapped a hundred school children out of a Japanese city, and they were, at the time, Abe, who was the Prime Minister then, was trying to negotiate with the North Koreans to get whatever was remaining of those hundred students back to Japan and establish some form of relations.

So this was not helpful to that cause. So it was real three-dimensional chess on many levels.

Dusty Weis

I mean, as CEO at a crisis situation like this, you are making mission critical decisions by the minute, I have to imagine, trying to get back up and running, but also assess the damage, protect against further attack. And of course, looming over all of this is that need to message to stakeholders, your employees, the media and the public.

Did you have a process for handling all that? Is there a crisis binder that can prepare you as CEO for a situation like this?

Michael Lynton

There is no binder that I found. To make matters even worse, we had a director of communications who had left the company about three weeks prior to this all happening, so we were, we didn't even have a head of comms at the time.

I spoke to a couple of people, other CEOs who had been through not a hack like this, but had been through big crises. And they gave me a couple of very good pieces of advice, which I stuck to. One of which was the CEO's job in this instance is to manage the crisis. You are no longer managing a company, you're managing a crisis.

And that means that you basically tell the heads of the divisions, whether it be the person running the television division or the home entertainment division or the movie, whatever it is, you do your job. Call me when you need me. I'm doing this thing. This is my job now for the foreseeable future.

The other piece of advice which proved very useful was make decisions quickly and always with imperfect information. To your point earlier, Dusty, stuff comes at you all the time. You have to make very quick decisions, otherwise events overtake you. Oftentimes you really don't know whether you have the right set of facts, the right information to make the decision. So you're dealing with marginal stuff. And yet if you don't make a choice, you're going to get run over.

So there's a lot of decision making in that vein. And then the comms part… and eventually we hired an outside firm and eventually an internal person because this thing went on for a while, it went on for four or five months. You've got to be constantly communicating.

You know, the press at the time was, they were indeed typing in “Die Sony.” They were dumpster diving and picking up a lot of private email correspondence and republishing it. And if you didn't somehow inject yourself into that process and be speaking either actively with your employees through internal communications or externally dealing with the reporters, then you no longer had control of any part of the narrative, which is also very dangerous.

Dusty Weis

At the time, you expressed frustration not just with the American press, but there was also a character running around at the time named Julian Assange and his WikiLeaks, for essentially giving air to the fire. For covering the story and exposing the leaked information to a wider audience. Looking back at it now, 12 years after the fact, do you still feel the same?

Michael Lynton

Yeah, I don't think it was the finest hour for the press. I mean, I'm a big believer in journalism and the free press. My wife is a journalist. My brother-in-law is a journalist. I've been around it most of my career.

And for the most part, it was not mainstream journalism. It wasn't the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Though I did speak with those folks and others and said, please don't go in there. This is private correspondence. This is not the Pentagon Papers. And they defended their right to go through it and print it if they wanted to. They didn't for the most part.

It was folks like TMZ and Gawker who did that. But then what would wind up happening was they would quote those publications. So ultimately it got out into the public realm.

I'm not sure it served anybody's purpose. Yes, it showed some nasty or funny emails with celebrities and other people and that I guess made for selling newspapers or getting people's eyes on websites. I'm not sure it served the public very well either.

Dusty Weis

In the weeks the followed, Sony’s team set to work trying to bring the studio back online, and enlisted a private security firm to assist employees whose personal data were exposed in the hack.

Fresh press coverage accompanied each new data dump from the hackers.

And on December 16, a hacker group calling itself the Guardians of Peace invoked September 11 in a threatened attack on the upcoming red carpet premiere of The Interview.

If there had been any doubt as to the motive for the hack, that about cleared it up.

But it also raised the stakes and created a whole new crisis for Michael Lynton to manage.

Michael Lynton

At that moment, the theaters really were concerned about physical violence. I was told, going, that they couldn't do anything on US soil. I think they were probably right about that.

But the movie theaters decided to pull the film out of the theaters. And by the way, my colleagues at other studios were not helpful in that respect because I learned after the fact that they were actually actively calling the movie theaters and telling them to do that.

Dusty Weis

Is that a fact?

Michael Lynton

Yeah. Part of the issue here is they wanted the screens, because we were going to take screens.

But the other part of it was they were worried, and to some degree I understand it, I just don't agree with it, that it would keep people away from the movie theaters in what should have been one of the busiest seasons of the year for theater.

Dusty Weis

The Christmas season. was also, it was only two years after the Aurora, Colorado shooting, which I covered as a news anchor at the time. And so there was certainly a lot of caution displayed over that as well. But even for the entertainment industry, that seems a little crass.

Michael Lynton

Well, I'd been before that in the book business and I came to Penguin a few years after they published the Satanic Verses, but the way that the publishing industry treated Penguin in that moment was very different from the way we were treated by the movie biz guys.

But in that moment, we issued a press release and there we made a mistake.

We issued a press release because we couldn't get the movie into the movie theaters, and it's an interesting moment where I can't remember exactly what the line was but how much difference a word makes.

So the release basically said because the movie is now being pulled from theaters, we don't have a plan as to how to release it. And what we should have said was we do not have a plan in this moment or for now.

Entertainment Tonight Clip

The Sony hack attack and the threat of violence against movie theaters. The studio takes action today to avoid a potential Christmas Day catastrophe.

Dusty Weis

Whatever the intent behind Sony’s statement, what news outlets and the public heard was Sony just didn’t plan to release the movie. Period.

Entertainment Tonight Clip

Sony announced it was scrapping The Interview in a statement this afternoon. Quote, “We are deeply saddened at this brazen effort to suppress the distribution of a movie.”

Dusty Weis

And the backlash started almost immediately from politicians and the entertainment industry.

CBC News

Hollywood is in turmoil.

Jimmy Kimmel

What is your take on Sony pulling the movie The Interview?

Megyn Kelly

I think it’s deeply troubling.

Dennis Haysbert

If you start living in fear, then they’ve won already.

Man on Street

It lets the bully win.

Dusty Weis

And, with his co-chair at Sony Amy Pascal embroiled in the controversy over troubling emails released in the hack, Michael Lynton was dispatched on damage control.

Michael Lynton

To take the spotlight off of her, I agreed to go on Fareed Zakaria's show for 10 minutes in New York on CNN and talk briefly about what was going on at Sony.

So I fly overnight to New York, because I really don't want to spend all day in the air while all this stuff is going on back in the studio. I arrive and when I get to CNN, the government had just announced that they had positively identified the cyber attack as coming from the North Koreans, and that President Obama would make a statement.

And Fareed rightly said, before we go on air, why don't we take a pause and see what the president says?

So we're watching the screen together, and a reporter asked him two questions:

What are you going to do about the North Koreans?

And what do you think about Sony's actions up until now?

And I suppose he didn't have an answer to the first question because it was all fresh and new in his head that they had done it in the first place. So he decided to answer the second.

President Barack Obama

Well, let me answer the second question first. Sony is a corporation.

Michael Lynton

“I disagree with Sony's policy on this. I think they're not standing up against censorship.”

President Barack Obama

We cannot have a society in which some dictator someplace can start imposing censorship here in the United States. Because if somebody is able to intimidate folks out of releasing a satirical movie, imagine what they start doing when they see a documentary they don’t like or news reports that they don’t like?

Michael Lynton

Fareed Zakaria he had just got a call from his boss, Jeff Zucker, to say, look, now it's become a much more controversial thing.

Dusty Weis

Right, now it's a free speech thing.

Michael Lynton

We can either cancel the interview or we can devote an entire hour to all of this.

And in that moment, I said, “We should really spend the hour.”

Fareed Zakaria

And we are back with my exclusive interview with the CEO of Sony Pictures, Michael Lynton…

Michael Lynton

And I took Fareed through everything. I explained why, while I have enormous regard and respect for the president, he wasn't that familiar with how movies got into the world. Meaning, you know, if you didn't have theaters to distribute them, there wasn't at that time another avenue. That we were, in fact, trying to explore other avenues through, you know, a digital means.

Michael Lynton Archived CNN Footage

There is a long history of political satire in film. And this clearly falls into that realm.

But I would also say that fundamentally isn’t the issue here. The issue here is that having made the movie, we feel very strongly that it should have been in theaters for the American public to have seen.

Michael Lynton

And in truth, probably the interview served everybody well because it explained to folks what was really going on at time and it also allowed me to explain how brave the folks at Sony were to go through this and how hard they were working to keep the studio up.

Dusty Weis

Mr. Lynton, as a former journalist, I have to say, I've upset some pretty powerful people in my day. I've caught some smoke from some people that outranked me a little bit.

But I have never been put directly in the crosshairs of the President of the United States.

And certainly, walking away from that interview, you have to at least have breathed a sigh of relief but felt pretty good about yourself in that moment.

Michael Lynton

Yes and no. I have a personal relationship with President Obama, so that part didn't feel so great. Neither him saying what he said nor my having to contradict him.

I will say, and it really speaks to the quality of the individual… Ten days later, I'm in my car and the phone rings and it's the President of the United States.

And he calls to apologize for having said what he said and that he misunderstood the situation.

And then he said, because he's both funny and wise, he said, “But Michael, come on. Killing a foreign leader of a hostile nation in a movie, don't you think that's a mistake?”

And I had to acknowledge that I did.

Dusty Weis

Michael ended his appearance on Fareed Zakaria’s show by promising they would find a way to distribute the film. But what Michael couldn’t make public, in that moment, was that behind the scenes he was exploring a previously unheard-of option in the entertainment industry—an opening day digital release.

Michael Lynton

I was making calls all over the place to everybody from Netflix to Facebook to Comcast, asking them if they would carry the movie digitally into homes.

And eventually there were two places that were super helpful to us.

One was Google. Eric Schmidt actually called me, he was running Google at the time, and they had just hardened their systems and he had spent time in North Korea and he was eager to try an e-commerce play up on Google Play and put the movie out that way.

And the second call was from Mike Moritz, a very successful and prominent venture capitalist who had backed a company called Stripe, a guy called Patrick Collison, and they were very generously offering to build us a e-commerce backend so that we could send the movie out digitally ourselves.

Dusty Weis

These days, digital releases are as about common as red carpet premieres.

But in 2014, a straight-to-digital release was fairly unheard of for a high-profile Hollywood debut.

The pioneering nature of that moment, however, was not at the front of Michael’s mind.

Michael Lynton

The real goal in that moment actually weirdly was not to make money. The real goal, because at that time, not just the president, but other people were worried about censorship, me included,

So the real goal was to get the movie out.

We decided to price it, because normally… well nowadays it's $20, but you would have priced it at about $15. We priced it down to about $6 with the idea being we just want to make this available. And I think that was the right strategy. I think it served us from a PR perspective and from a free speech perspective extremely well.

Dusty Weis

Sony also authorized around 300 indie and art house cinemas to host screenings of the film across the country, starting December 23. And the early response was resounding.

News Reporter

They have been inundated with calls and all the tickets are sold out and so they’re thinking about adding more showings of it.

And I think for a lot of people, it’s a way to take a stand for free speech. I think that’s what’s driving a lot of this, and also pure curiosity too after all the hype over this movie.

Dusty Weis

The film grossed $40 million in digital rental revenue, making it Sony's most successful digital release to-date. It earned an additional $12 million worldwide at the box office, all on a budget of $44 million. So it technically turned a profit, though certainly not laughing-all-the-way-to-the-bank kind of money.

And yet, Michael Lynton still calls it the biggest mistake of his career.

In his new book, he revisits that pivotal meeting where he was the only one who showed up in a suit to Seth Rogen’s script read-through.

Michael Lynton

“Just for a moment, I wanted to join the bad-ass gang that made subversive movies. For a moment, I wanted to hang as an equal with the actors. I had grown tired of playing the responsible adult, of watching the party from the outside while I played Risk. My middle school self took over and my adult self lost the courage to disappoint the other kids. And the company, its employees and my family and I all paid dearly.”

Dusty Weis

You go on to say in the book that you never really felt like you fit in in Hollywood, that you hoped that this movie was going to be your ticket to the cool kids table in Hollywood, and that maybe blurred your judgment a little bit.

Do you think that it might be kind of surprising to folks from outside the industry that the CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment, someone who has worked and succeeded in a cutthroat entertainment industry for decades, someone who has achieved at the very highest level in an industry where so many people aspire to just get a foothold.

Do you think that it might surprise people to hear that someone like you could still feel like an outsider there?

Michael Lynton

Yeah, I do. I mean, I'd been in the job at that point for almost, for over a decade and I would then go on to do it for another five years. And you would have expected me to be feel part of things at the time. And there was an excerpt of the book that came out a few weeks back in the Wall Street Journal and I got a bunch of emails and texts from people I knew on the West Coast in Hollywood.

And the reaction was either one of three things. Wow, I'm really surprised that you felt that way. Two, why would you ever admit to what you've just admitted?

Or three, which actually was the majority of them, people saying, I've had similar feelings about things. And, you know, I'm very glad that you've expressed them because it gives me the license and the courage to do the same.

And coming back to the book and the process of the book, well, what we discovered was that a lot of our sort of biases or the way we see the world are defined by what's called a schema. A schema is sort of a shorthand for how to analyze or view something in the moment.

A version of a schema by way of example is you're going into an elevator, right? And the first person who goes into an elevator, normally if there's a bunch of people about to go in, goes into one corner, the second person into a second, each corner.

That's the schema that we understand how to go into an elevator with. If everybody just piled in, it would be awkward. And we sort of subscribe to that.

These schemas are formed throughout our life, but especially early in our life. And they're very helpful for us to make decisions along the way because they give us a quick way of understanding things, analyzing things, understanding how to respond to things.

But in certain cases, those schemas can take us to a place we don't want to be, particularly when they're used out of context or incorrectly.

And in my case, I had developed a schema as a kid. My sister and I were moved with our parents from America to the Netherlands, to Holland, when I was eight or nine years old. And I was put right away into the schools there.

I didn't speak the language. And as a result, I was a lonely kid. I really wanted to be part of the gang and to be accepted. I wanted to be part of that cool group of people.

That schema stayed with me and traveled with me throughout my life.

And I think what happened in that room after the read-through was that schema came up out of me and it informed the decision to say, let's make this because I wanted to be part of that gang and that group. I didn't want to be in my suit any longer. And, you know, a big mistake was made as a result.

Dusty Weis

One thing that’s easy to miss about Michael’s story, but really interesting to me, is that he is serious when he talks about owning his mistake.

Sure, lemons were handed out. Lemonade was made.

But when I served him up the opportunity to try to “bright side” the whole thing, he really shut it down in a way that I haven’t seen before as an interviewer.

Dusty Weis

Was there anything good that came about as a result of all this from your perspective?

Michael Lynton

Umm, no. Part of what Josh and I agreed to when we decided to write this book was not to make it one of those humble brag things, not to say, it was a giant mistake, but you know, because of it over in the corner, there was a billion-dollar opportunity that presented itself.

The truth of the matter is nothing good came of this. It was a real mistake that had really bad consequences. And you know, I just need to own that. And I do.

Dusty Weis

So as the narrator of this story then, I have to check my impulse to try and tie this episode up with a neat little bow, as we storytellers like to do.

I went back and I watched The Interview. And, bluntly, if it weren’t for the hack and all the fallout from that, it would be a pretty forgettable flick.

It’s intentionally dumb, it’s certainly not a masterpiece, and I think even Seth Rogen’s superfans aren’t going to put it in his Top 10.

But this movie came out in an era when the internet and media were beginning to bring global cultures into conflict with one another in ways that we had never seen. And certainly more frequently than we’d ever seen in all of history.

In fact, it was less than two weeks after the release of this film that 12 people were killed in Paris when Islamic extremists attacked the satiric French newspaper Charlie Hebdo.

BBC News

Saïd and Chérif Kouachi shot dead staff in the offices of Charlie Hebdo, and a policeman outside. They targeted the satirical newspaper because it had repeatedly published cartoons of the prophet Muhammad. The brothers claimed the attack in the name of Al-Qaeda.

Dusty Weis

Here in the United States, and more broadly in Western culture, we have a long history of using comedy to hold the powerful to account of holding nothing so sacred as to be above mockery.

There’s been a backlash against that, in the current political climate.

But from Mark Twain to Charlie Chaplin, from Jon Stewart and the Daily Show to Pussy Riot in Russia, artists and comedians have always proudly been a force for social change.

Seth Rogen himself said that he hoped that bootlegs of The Interview would be smuggled into North Korea and inspire a democratic resistance there.

And Dan Sterling, the screenwriter of The Interview, said this:

“If all countries made satirical movies about each other, and that was the only way we all fought – what a great world we’d live in.”

So while Michael Lynton stands steadfast in his belief that greenlighting The Interview was the wrong thing for him to do in 2013, he is equally resolute that, once the hack had happened, releasing the movie was the right course of action in 2014.

Michael Lynton

You don’t, in my opinion, get to pick the battle you want to fight on the censorship front. Meaning, there are many more important movies than The Interview. There are many movies that have more significance and consequence.

But the issue isn't that you're defending something that's important. The issue is you've committed to putting that creative work out and to just stop doing that because some external force tells you you can't, that is censorship.

And that you cannot bow to. And that we made every effort not to do.

Dusty Weis

Well, it doesn't take a whole lot of creative extrapolation to see how this story of clashing cultures can be applied to modern day events, but I really appreciated the insight and the honesty that you brought both to our conversation here, but also to the book.

More broadly, I really like what you and your co-author Joshua Steiner are trying to do with the book, “From Mistakes to Meaning: Owning Your Past So That It Doesn't Own You.”

And if folks want to learn more about the book or get their hands on a copy, where do they go?

Michael Lynton

They go to Amazon, go to Barnes & Noble, they go to their local independent bookstore. It's available everywhere.

Dusty Weis

Well, Michael Lynton, it has been an absolute pleasure to get to speak with you today. The former CEO and co-chair of Sony Pictures Entertainment, current chairman of Snap and Warner Music Group, Michael Lynton, thank you for joining us here on Lead Balloon.

Michael Lynton

Thank you very much for having me.

Dusty Weis

And thank you for tuning in. Thanks as well to Michael’s publicist Elizabeth Hazelton for putting us in touch.

And extra special thanks are due to our old pal Jesse Russell. Your may remember him from episode one of Lead Balloon. He heard about Michael’s story and pinged me because he knew I would find it irresistible.

Because here on Lead Balloon, these are the sorts of PR and marketing stories that we live to tell.

So we hope to see you back here in this feed again sometime soon. Follow us on your favorite podcast app, and tell a friend if you dig the show.

Lead Balloon is produced by Podcamp Media, where we help global brands use podcasting to tell worthwhile stories and connect with their audiences. Our podcast studios are located in the heart of beautiful downtown Milwaukee, Wisconsin. We work with brands all over North America to help them launch and build podcasts that work. Check out our website, PodcampMedia.com.

Music for this episode by Falls, Famous Cats, Matt Wigton, Sparkz, Stephen Keech, The Revolution, and Tiger Gang.

And until the next time, folks, thanks for listening. I'm Dusty Weis.