The dead would be moved for Disneyland. Generations of villagers lay buried under the acreage outside Shanghai that officials had allocated for China’s first Disney theme park, but the ancestors would not get in their way. Homes could be razed, remains excavated and families relocated.
Like China’s ruling party, the Walt Disney Company operated in five-year plans, and in the mid-1990s, a crucial part of that plan was generating more business overseas — and even, eventually, building a theme park in mainland China. Just a few decades earlier, Western entertainment had been banned in China, and only top officials had TV sets. The 1990s would be a decade in which China, in the eyes of American business, turned from a country into a market.
All of that promise and ambition were suddenly endangered in 1996, when Peter Murphy, Disney’s head of strategic planning, received a phone call to his Los Angeles office. It was the Chinese Embassy in Washington.
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“You started, in the last 48 hours, shooting a film in Morocco about the Dalai Lama called ‘Kundun,’ ” an embassy official said.
Murphy was dumbstruck. He had never heard of a movie called “Kundun.” A 34-year-old Wharton MBA and strategic planner known as “the Enforcer” within Disney’s notoriously political C-suite, Murphy barely paid attention to most movies Disney made.
He had to ask around about “Kundun.” His colleagues told him that it was, as the embassy official had said, a drama being directed by Martin Scorsese about the Dalai Lama. It had taken only two days after cameras started rolling for word of the production to travel from its set in Morocco to Beijing, where officials were not happy. After learning about the film and the story it told, Murphy realized that the making of this movie endangered Disney’s entire future in China.
He didn’t know it at the time, but that phone call to his Burbank office was the start of a cautionary tale for all of Hollywood — in fact, it was a sign that the capital offered in China was inextricably tied to politics. On the afternoon of the call from the Chinese Embassy, a future in which China would exercise remarkable power in Hollywood — the ability to green-light projects and change scripts like an invisible studio chief — began to take shape.
In the meantime, though, Murphy needed to put out this fire. He called the person who was already on retainer to help Disney navigate the Chinese power structure. Henry Kissinger listened to Murphy as he laid out the “Kundun” issue. Murphy’s mind was racing with the implications it might spell for Disney’s plans in China, but the former secretary of state remained unfazed by the whole thing.
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Granted, Kissinger had negotiated Nixon’s meeting with Mao Zedong in 1972, a detente that reorganized the world order. Given China’s economic growth and the political power it had accrued since Nixon and Mao shook hands in Beijing, it was fitting that, 24 years later, Kissinger would be called in to save Mickey Mouse.
Across town at Sony Pictures Entertainment, a government relations executive named Hope Boonshaft received a perplexing phone call of her own only a few months later, in the spring of 1997. Of all things, it also concerned a politically sensitive movie about the Dalai Lama, this one called “Seven Years in Tibet.”
Howard Stringer, Sony Corporation of America’s top executive, explained that the film had been shown to some Chinese officials, and it had so offended them that there was now concern that they might expel all Sony business from the country. The film wasn’t just putting Sony movies at risk; in the mid-1990s, the Chinese box office could have hardly covered a few executive salaries anyway. It was threatening “big Sony,” as employees put it — the manufacturer of computers and televisions that had led Japan’s electronics boom since its founding just after the end of World War II. The prospect of losing access to China’s factories and customers meant billions of dollars were on the line.
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Work on “Seven Years in Tibet” had begun innocently enough. Jean-Jacques Annaud, a French director known for little-seen but well-respected art house movies, read the memoir of Heinrich Harrer, a mountaineer who’d left Nazi Europe to summit Nanga Parbat in British India, only to be taken prisoner and eventually find himself tutoring a teenage Dalai Lama as war broke out between Tibet and China.
“Fabulous,” thought Annaud as he read the book and assessed its cinematic potential. “Here’s a blond Aryan Nazi who becomes the teacher of the Dalai Lama.” Brad Pitt, Hollywood’s most famous blond, got the part.
The movie was perfectly timed for the Dalai Lama’s own star-making moment in Hollywood. He was born in a shed and identified as the 14th incarnation of the Dalai Lama at 4 years old, and now the docile monk lived in Dharamsala, where a government-in-exile of about 113,000 Tibetans sandwiched between China and India is based. As repression of Tibet grew, the Dalai Lama’s public persona rose.
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In 1989, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1992 he guest-edited the December issue of French Vogue. The next year, Richard Gere went off at the Academy Awards to decry the “horrendous, horrendous human rights situation” in Tibet. Sharon Stone called herself a disciple. In a 1997 ceremony in India attended by 1,500 monks and nuns, Steven Seagal, the star of ultraviolent revenge fantasies like “Hard to Kill,” was anointed a tulku, a “reincarnated lama and radiant emanation of the Buddha.” Disney’s ABC put “Dharma & Greg,” about a young American woman embracing Buddhism, in its prime-time lineup. A charming monk who encouraged others to shun all earthly possessions had become the patron saint of Beverly Hills.
His holiness was so popular, in fact, that soon there were not one but two movies about him underway.
The history that both “Kundun” and “Seven Years in Tibet” explored was nearly 50 years old, but it was fresh in the minds of Chinese officials. China invaded Tibet in 1949, its soldiers sweeping through the region and ordering monks into reeducation camps. Soldiers destroyed temples and killed villagers. Bronze statues from the region were melted down for copper. A decade later, Chinese soldiers handily defeated a Tibetan insurrection, and the Dalai Lama escaped to India, worried his murder or capture would spell the total end of Tibetan Buddhism. He still lives there today, his power defined more by where he cannot go than by where he can.
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To Americans, Tibetans can be viewed as spiritual brethren to their country’s own colonists, persecuted for their beliefs and forced to find refuge elsewhere. But to many Chinese, the Tibetans’ argument for sovereignty, as one scholar put it, is akin to an American hearing about a “rally calling for Hawaii to be returned to the descendants of the last king of those islands.” His mere presence — let alone his star power — is a one-man rebuke to what China considers its rightful borders.
There was at least one U.S. executive who knew making a movie about this history was bad for business. Edgar Bronfman Jr., the CEO of Canadian beverage company Seagram, had acquired Universal Studios in 1995. Scorsese had a distribution deal with Universal at the time and brought the boss “Kundun.”
“I’m not doing this. I don’t need to have my spirits and wine business thrown out of China,” Bronfman said.
For Sony, China was threatening a disruption of an electronics supply chain that would cost billions to rebuild. At Disney, where Scorsese took the project after Bronfman’s refusal, it was the TV channel, theme park, and Mickey Mouse plush dolls that might not pass through Chinese borders because of a midbudget drama.
When he had started filming, Annaud visited Tibet on a production scouting trip. Soon, he sensed the long reach of an angry China. Officials in the town where production was based, a border region called Ladakh, told him that India, under pressure from China, had threatened to cut off their electricity if filming continued. Then the production was denied permission to open a local bank account. Chinese pressure stopped the production for the 30 minutes it took Annaud to secure permission to move “Seven Years in Tibet” to a friendlier country.
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The cast and crew decamped to the Andes Mountains along the border of Chile and Argentina, a range that broached the same altitude as their original location in Ladakh but was safely located halfway around the world. Laborers reconstructed Lhasa. The roughly 100 monks cast in the movie, some of whom had signed their contracts with purple-inked thumbprints, flew to South America, crying when they saw the movie-set simulacrum of their lost city. When Argentine customs agents wouldn’t allow Asian yaks in, fearing they carried disease, Annaud’s crew sourced yaks from Montana.
When she sat down to watch the completed film soon after receiving the call from her studio’s CEO, Boonshaft had only a cursory understanding of Chinese politics, but it didn’t take a Sinologist to see why China was going to be offended. Chinese soldiers mow down statues of Buddha with machine guns, bomb villages and chase out terrified citizens. The Chinese send officials to reason with the Dalai Lama, offering autonomy and religious freedom if the country accepts China as its political master. The Dalai Lama’s teachings of nonviolence and compassion make the Chinese officials look like boorish fools. The movie’s final image: text on the screen reminding the audience of the 1 million Tibetans dead at the hands of the Chinese occupation.
The lights came up in Boonshaft’s screening room on the Sony lot. Years later, Sony would learn how easy it was to cut a single scene or line of dialogue from a movie to get approval from Chinese censors, but this was a 130-minute humanization of a Chinese state enemy and an assault on its most sensitive political issue. Boonshaft hustled to manage damage control.
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She traveled across town to introduce herself to the Chinese consul and the Chinese cultural attache in Los Angeles. Then she went to the Tiffany in Beverly Hills to buy offertory presents. She brought herself up to speed on the history of China’s relationship with Japan. She hosted a Mandarin tutor in her office each week.
Chinese officials took advantage of Sony’s willingness to please. The country asked Sony and the other studios to support its bid to join the World Trade Organization — a request they all accommodated. They asked Sony to sponsor a table at a Los Angeles event honoring the Chinese prime minister — a request it accommodated.
Disney CEO Michael Eisner and his team huddled to figure out what to do with their inherited mess. Like “Seven Years in Tibet,” Scorsese’s “Kundun” portrayed the Dalai Lama as a rambunctious toddler and typical teenager caught in a war with an imperialist China. But “Kundun” went even further, saying the country was “trying to rewrite history” when it insisted Tibet belonged to it.
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Releasing a movie that so blatantly threatened Disney’s ambitions in China offered no perfect solutions or even good ones. Disney executives ultimately decided on a Goldilocks option: They would release the movie, but as quietly as possible. They would spend as little money as possible to market the film in a limited release. Once that dearth of marketing led to lousy returns in its opening weeks, Disney would have justification to tell Scorsese that it wasn’t worth expanding to theaters nationwide.
Murphy flew to D.C. to explain Disney’s decision to the Chinese. He brought Kissinger with him. The diplomat didn’t say much, understanding that his role was to sit and lend some gravitas to the situation. He joined Murphy on one side of the table; more than half a dozen Chinese officials faced them. Murphy told the Chinese that the limited release for “Kundun” was good for them, since it would avoid any critics saying China had censored a Hollywood movie.
“Seven Years in Tibet” premiered in October 1997, to a so-so critical reception. The controversies and Pitt’s star power didn’t fill seats; the movie collected a middling $38 million, the worst wide-release performance of Pitt’s career until that point.
“Kundun” opened on Christmas. The other releases that day included a remake of “An American Werewolf in Paris,” which opened on 1,728 screens; a reboot of “Mr. Magoo,” which opened on 1,857 screens; and “The Postman,” a Kevin Costner sci-fi thriller that opened on 2,207 screens. “Kundun” opened on two screens. It would eventually expand to about 400, but tepid reviews and Disney’s efforts to have it disappear as quickly as possible had worked. The movie collected $5.7 million.
Hardly anyone had seen the movies. China’s leaders didn’t care.
Annaud was banned from China. Brad Pitt was, too.
This article was excerpted from Red Carpet: Hollywood, China and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy by Erich Schwartzel. Reprinted by arrangement with Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, A Penguin Random House Company. Copyright © Erich Schwartzel, 2022.
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