Spyfail, p.5
Spyfail, page 5
On August 17, Lynton and his family headed back to Los Angeles aboard one of Sony’s fleet of private jets, a $44 million Dassault Falcon 900 (this despite accumulating an operating loss of $181 million during the last fiscal quarter). Later, after a meeting with Kaz in New York over the budget, he emailed Pascal. “Meeting pretty rough,” he wrote. “We are just not making enough money… Too much overhead. Not enough hits.”
By late September, the three-month debate over Kim’s melting cranium was reaching its climax. It had become the pro-melt creatives championed by Rogen, versus the anti-melt suits led by Kaz. In the middle was Amy Pascal, vainly attempting to find some middle ground between the warring factions on Rosh Hashanah. “Shana Tova from temple,” she wrote to Rogen. “I too have never ever in all the years I have worked at Sony (since 1988 before you were born) been in this situation ever,” she pleaded. “No one has backed you more than I have and I am trying to do that now in a very peculiar situation.”
Pascal was simply asking Rogen to make Kim’s head “a little less gory” so she could keep her job. “I haven’t the foggiest notion how to deal with Japanese politics as it relates to Korea,” she told Rogen, exasperated. Then she tried to explain how unusual it was for Kaz to involve himself with a film “given that I have never gotten one note on anything from our parent company in the entire 25 years that I have worked from them. And this isn’t some flunky it’s the chairman of the entire sony corporation who I am dealing. With.”
The back-and-forth began taking on the tone of two masters of torture in some medieval dungeon. “Burning face not as important as watermelon head explosion but everything that gets us out of this nightmare is good,” said Pascal. “I hate doing this but maybe there are a few less fleshy parts that spurt out of the fire ball or maybe it’s more chared [sic] than pink.” “Shana tova,” responded Rogen. “We took out three out of four of the face embers, reduced the hair burning by 50%… The head explosion can’t be more obscured than it is because we honestly feel that if it’s any more obscured you won’t be able to tell its exploding… We will play with the color of the head chunks to try to make them less gross.”
Hoping for the best, Pascal notified Kaz of the final version of Kim’s head. “I think this is a substantial improvement from where we were,” she said. “If we force them to go with the version where there is no head explosion it will be difficult but survivable… As you know, they have agreed to completely cut the head popping and reduce the violence generally in any international version of the movie. I’m sorry this hasn’t already been resolved, but you know we will do what you need us to do.” In the end, Kaz gave his approval with the caveat that whatever was done to Kim’s head be removed entirely from any overseas release. Pascal emailed Rogen with the good news. “I need one night without dreaming about head explosions,” she wrote. “But I am damn happy.” Her joy, however, would be short-lived.
As Pascal sat in the synagogue discussing how many burning embers to leave in Kim’s head, back at the studio an employee received an email from someone named Nathan Gonsalez with the address bluehotrain@hotmail.com. It had to do with a company involved in advertising and included an attachment that appeared to be a media file playable in Adobe’s Flash player: “Video Clips (Adobe Flash).exe.” Curious, the employee clicked on it to watch.
At that moment, Kim Jung Un took virtual control of Sony Pictures. Nathan Gonsalez was Park Jin Hyok.
CHAPTER 5
Sony Down
Amy Pascal maneuvered her Land Rover down a secluded stone driveway nearly hidden by leafy, overgrown ferns and tall shafts of bamboo and turned onto a small Brentwood side street. Opposite were a dozen green and blue plastic trash barrels and a sign bearing the image of a camera warning that the exclusive neighborhood was under constant surveillance. It was early on a Friday morning, November 21, 2014, and she was on her way to the studio at the end of a trying few weeks.
“I don’t care if Aaron is sleeping with the girl or not,” she wrote in an email to other studio executives about Aaron Sorkin, the screenwriter and producer. “We paid him his insane fee on flashboys… He want’s to get paid… He’s broke.” Sorkin, the man behind the hit TV series West Wing, was then producing the third season of HBO’s The Newsroom. Sony had backed his hit films The Social Network and Moneyball, and now he was seeking the studio’s financing for an adaptation of Molly’s Game, a book about a woman who ran a star-packed underground poker ring in Los Angeles. Pascal instead wanted Sorkin to write the screenplay for the book Flash Boys, a financial story focused on Wall Street written by Michael Lewis. In the end, Sorkin jumped ship and went to another studio, leaving Pascal in the lurch and very bitter. “They are treating us like shit,” she wrote.
She was also at war over another Sorkin-written screenplay, a biopic of Apple founder Steve Jobs. The film’s producer, Scott Rudin, was demanding $33 million to do it with Danny Boyle as the director, but the problem was they couldn’t find a top-tier star to take the role. Christian Bale turned it down, as did Leonardo DiCaprio, an action Pascal called “despicable.” Instead, Rudin was offering it to Michael Fassbender, who had gained popularity for his roles in The X-Men series and also for his part in 12 Years a Slave, the 2014 Best Picture winner.
But without a DiCaprio-level star, Pascal was only willing to go as high as $25 million, thereby setting off a very nasty battle with neither side willing to budge. Eventually, Rudin shopped it to Universal Studios instead. “Amy, it’s closed. I’m sorry, I begged you to do it,” he wrote. Pascal, having a long professional relationship with Rudin, was shocked. “Why are u punishing me?” Rudin didn’t hold back. “You’ve destroyed your relationships with half the town over how you’ve behaved on this movie,” he fumed, and added that she “behaved abominably” and “it will be a very, very long time before I forget what you did to this movie and what you’ve put all of us through.” Regretting the loss, before leaving for the studio that Friday morning she wrote to Sony colleague Tom Rothman, “I feel like I just gave away a seminal movie like Citizen Kane for our time.”
Once at the office, distracted by numerous problems, neither Pascal nor Lynton noticed an email that arrived that day from someone named Frank David with the subject line “Notice to Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc.” It warned the studio that Sony Pictures had done “great damage,” and they were seeking “monetary compensation” as a result. “Pay the damage, or Sony Pictures will be bombarded,” it threatened. “You know us very well. We never wait long. You’d better behave wisely.” It was signed by “God’sApstls.” In reality, it was from Park Jin Hyok introducing himself as Pascal and Lynton walked out the door for the weekend.
The next day, as Pascal attended her regular 12:15 p.m. yoga class and then baked “cookie people” with Columbia Pictures executive Michael DeLuca and his young daughters, Park in Pyongyang went to work on Sony’s computers. After having spent the past two months robbing them blind, stealing 100 terabytes of confidential internal communications and unreleased films, it was now time to let the show begin.
With long lists of captured passwords and stolen digital certificates, Park began installing a diabolical menu of super-destructive malware hardcoded with the names of ten thousand Sony computer workstations around the world. The nastiest weapon was Destover. A “wiper,” it was similar to Iran’s Shamoon that performed the cyber equivalent of a lobotomy on thirty thousand computers at the Saudi oil giant Aramco in 2012. It is designed to overwrite each computer’s master boot record, the central repository containing key operating instructions. It then overwrites or deletes every file before deleting itself. By late Sunday night the operation was complete. Park and his team would masquerade as hacktivists although they would also leave no doubt about who they were or why they were there.
After a rainy and cloudy weekend in London the sun was bright on Monday morning, November 24, as Sony Pictures employees arrived for work on the tenth to thirteenth floors at the Brunel Building along the Grand Union Canal opposite Paddington station. As they switched on their computers, they were startled by a sudden high-pitched scream, followed by the sound of six rapid-fire gunshots—bang! bang! bang! bang! bang! bang!—coming from their speakers. At the same time a frightening image appeared on their screens of a menacing scarlet-colored skeleton with long skeletal fingers. “Hacked by #GOP,” said the scrolling text message, standing for “Guardians of Peace.” “We’ve already warned you, and this is just a beginning. We continue till our request be met. We’ve obtained all your internal data including your secrets and top secrets. If you don’t obey us, we’ll release data shown below to the world. Determine what will you do till November 24th, 11:00 PM.” Listed at the bottom were links to a number of internal Sony Entertainment files.
Some thought it was a joke, until they had no way of logging on, their machines now turned into giant paperweights. Quickly, what became known as “the screen of death” spread next to company offices in South America and finally to Culver City where early arrivals at work first saw it at around 7 a.m. Lynton received the details from Sony’s top financial officer, David Hendler, as he was driving to the studio from his Brentwood home.
With phones and email paralyzed, the news quickly leaked out. “Things have come to a standstill at Sony today, after the computers in New York and around the world were infiltrated by a hacker,” Deadline’s Mike Fleming reported at 10:50 a.m. Pacific. “As a precaution, computers in Los Angeles were shut down while the corporation deals with the breach. It has basically brought the whole global corporation to an electronic standstill.” The normally loquacious public relations department could suddenly muster up only a few words: “We are investigating an IT matter.” Several dusty boxes of ancient BlackBerrys were retrieved from the basement of the Thalberg Building and the devices passed out to some of the key executives.
Soon a team of FBI agents arrived from the Los Angeles cyber squad and a command center was established in the Gene Kelly Building, not far from the old soundstage where the dancer filmed Singin’ in the Rain sixty-three years earlier. But by the next day, it was clear that the hackers had deftly penetrated Sony’s nearly nonexistent cyber defenses when they posted online four movies, three of which had yet to be released, stolen from the studio’s film vaults. They included Brad Pitt’s World War II battle flick Fury, which had already opened but now quickly became the second most pirated movie ever, with more than 1.2 million downloads. Those not yet released included the upcoming musical remake of Annie; Still Alice, starring Julianne Moore; the biopic Mr. Turner; and To Write Love on Her Arms.
Two days later, a day before Thanksgiving, Park and his team increased the pressure in messages posted to Lynton, Pascal, and a few other top executives. “We Will PUNISH You Completely,” it said. “We began to release data because Sony Pictures refused our demand. Sony Pictures will come to know what’s the cost of your decision.” Shortly thereafter, at 9:11 a.m. on Saturday, an email popped up in the inbox of Kevin Roose. The twenty-seven-year-old journalist had just left New York magazine and was now the news director for Fusion Media Group, a cable network targeting a multicultural, millennial audience.
“This morning, I received a link to a public Pastebin file containing the documents from an anonymous e-mailer,” Roose wrote. “And the breadth and depth of the information I found is just insane.” They included twenty-six large archives containing thousands of very private and confidential personnel files from the studio, including Social Security numbers for nearly four thousand employees as well as salaries. After some analysis, they showed enormously embarrassing gender and race gaps in pay. And over the following days hundreds of other news outlets around the world aired Sony’s dirty linen, such as producer Scott Rudin’s email to Pascal about actress Angelina Jolie. “I’m not destroying my career over a minimally talented spoiled brat,” he wrote. Eventually the release would total an estimated thirty-eight million files. At one point someone stuck their head in Pascal’s office and passed the news: “They have your e-mails.”
While North Korea officially denied any involvement, they made scant effort to hide their fingerprints. Park and his team left little doubt who the “Guardians of Peace” were. Similarly, they made it very clear that the reason for the attack was Sony’s decision to go ahead with The Interview, scheduled for release on Christmas Day. To make their point, they announced that they intended to send a special “Christmas gift” to movie theaters that dare show the film.
“We will clearly show it to you at the very time and places ‘The Interview’ be shown, including the premiere… Soon all the world will see what an awful movie Sony Pictures Entertainment has made. The world will be full of fear. Remember the 11th of September 2001. We recommend you to keep yourself distant from the places at that time. (If your house is nearby, you’d better leave.)” In another posting that day they called the film an act of “terrorism” and said showing it “can break regional peace and cause the War!”
Past the rainbow at Sony’s Culver City lot there was little sympathy for Lynton, Pascal, and Rogen or their film, which was deliberately designed to provoke a reaction to increase box-office receipts. And now that they got their wish, they suddenly began playing victim, complaining that theaters were unwilling to screen the film out of safety concerns for their customers. On December 17 the studio announced that the only choice was to officially scrap its elaborate Christmas Day release plans. “The lapse in judgment happened when they decided to call him by name,” one studio executive told Vanity Fair, referring to Kim Jong Un. “Their failure was to let Seth Rogen and [Evan Goldberg] go ahead with this…. It’s a movie! And not necessarily a good one!”
The only person who came to their rescue was George Clooney, then trying to get another film greenlighted by Pascal. A year earlier it was Pascal who was giving encouragement to Clooney during a troubling period. She had greenlit The Monuments Men, a high-budget film for him to direct and star in. It was about an Allied group from the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives program charged with finding and saving a variety of artwork before the Nazis could steal or destroy it during World War II.
But the reviews were savage. “It’s not only the great works of European art that have gone missing in ‘The Monuments Men’; the spark of writer-director-star George Clooney’s filmmaking is absent, too,” said Variety. “Clooney has transformed a fascinating true-life tale into an exceedingly dull and dreary caper pic cum art-appreciation seminar.” Criticism greatly affected Clooney.
As Clooney read the Monuments Men reviews, he was on Spain’s Mediterranean coast finishing up another film in which he was staring, the futuristic Tomorrowland for Disney Studios. And after a day of shooting in Valencia’s high-tech Ciudad de las Artes, he sought solace from Pascal. “So depressed,” he wrote her in an email. “I need some protection from all the reviews. Let’s just make it a hit. I haven’t slept in 30 hours. And it’s 7 am.” Later he added, “I fear I’ve let you all down. Not my intention. I apologize. I’ve just lost touch… Who knew? I won’t do it again.” Pascal responded, “We will protect you. By making money. That’s the best revenge.” Tomorrowland, however, would also bomb badly both critically and financially.
Now, in early December, Clooney was meeting with Pascal and Lynton for lunch in the studio’s Commissary Dining Room, located in the Harry Cohn Building, still named after the former head of Columbia Pictures despite his well-deserved reputation as the Harvey Weinstein of his day. “Cohn expected sex in exchange for a chance at stardom. And as one of the most influential figures in Tinseltown, he usually got it,” noted journalist Erin Blakemore. “He was one of the men responsible for instituting the system of Hollywood’s ‘casting couch,’ which demanded women trade sexual favors with powerful executives for a chance at a movie role.” During the studio’s major renovation, Lynton decided to keep the name on the building and move the company’s television employees into it.
To help Pascal through the Interview mess, Clooney created a simple petition of support calling on industry executives to “stand together” in order to present a unified front behind Sony. But, as Clooney would sadly tell the pair, he couldn’t get a single signature. “Nobody stood up. Nobody took that stand,” he said later. While admitting that “this was a dumb comedy that was about to come out,” he added, “We cannot be told we can’t see something by Kim Jong Un, of all fucking people.”
Perhaps most surprising to Lynton was the criticism of his old friend and summer neighbor, President Barack Obama. On Friday, December 19, Obama took to the stage in the White House briefing room and began his year-end press conference before a packed crowd of note-taking journalists. The first question was about the Sony attack. “I think they made a mistake,” he said about canceling the film. “I wish they had spoken to me first.” Lynton at that moment was watching the event live while sitting in the green room of CNN headquarters in New York.
From the beginning, it was clear the Obama administration had a quiet but vested interest in using the film as propaganda to undermine the North Korean government. After all, RAND’s Bruce Bennett, who had long advocated regime change, had argued against toning down Kim’s melting head and expressed his hope that “once the DVD leaks to the North (which it almost certainly will)” it would cause “some real thinking” by the public in the North. At the same time, the State Department’s top East Asian diplomat officially and secretly greenlit the film rather than play no role in the matter, as should have been the case. And then there’s Rogen’s comment about making “relationships” with CIA consultants.
Following the briefing, Lynton, in his standard mortician’s black suit, black tie, and white shirt, took a seat opposite CNN’s Fareed Zakaria for the taping, which was to air the following Sunday. “The president, the press and the public are mistaken,” he argued, saying it was the theaters that refused to show it. “We do not own movie theaters,” Lynton said. “We cannot determine whether or not a movie will be played in movie theaters.”
