Dec. 17--As Sony made the decision Wednesday to scrap the Dec. 25 release of "The Interview," casual observers found themselves asking some very logical how-could-this-happen questions. A broad, benign Seth Rogen comedy causes an international incident that threatens to bring down one of the world's biggest entertainment conglomerates and throws Hollywood into crisis? It's a development you'd expect only in a Seth Rogen comedy.
But those who've been following the studio and its films had a slightly different reaction: Things like this seem to happen a little more often to Sony than to anyone else.
This is not the first time the studio has been caught in a political firestorm over a holiday release. Two years ago Sony seemed to be on a smooth course with its Osama bin Laden assassination story "Zero Dark Thirty" -- critical love, awards nominations -- when a host of Democratic politicians led by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D.-Calif.) seized the opportunity to decry "Zero Dark's" message after noticing that the movie suggested torture produced critical intelligence. Two years before the Senate's torture report came out, Sony found itself embroiled in a debate over CIA interrogations it neither expected nor wanted.
Many of Sony's provocative movies and their, well, provocations are due to the leadership of Amy Pascal. There's been a lot of talk about whether the longtime studio chief will survive this latest flap.
After a rough 18 months -- the studio seemed to crank out bomb after bomb in the 2013 -- the prospect of intimate emails splashed across the Internet in Pascal's casual, from-the-hip style didn't exactly scream long-term job security.
But to the agents, managers and producers I've spoken to around town over the past week, there is only one reaction to the prospect of a Pascal ouster: deep sadness.
Perhaps more than any studio chief, they point out, Pascal has been willing to roll the dice on difficult films -- the kinds of films that make so many want to be a part of the film world.
From its Culver City lot, Sony has long conducted business a little differently than many companies around town. That starts with its co-chair executive structure -- the yin and yang partnership that Pascal and the more corporate-minded Michael Lynton have -- which is in many respects unique among major studios and probably aided by the fact that its conglomerate bosses are thousands of miles away on another continent.
It's also reflected in the films themselves: In the last few years alone, the company has released Kathryn Bigelow's "Zero Dark Thirty," David O. Russell's "American Hustle," David Ayers' "Fury," Paul Greengrass' "Captain Phillips" and Bennett Miller's "Moneyball." That's a list that would make the prestige-minded Harvey Weinstein jealous, and it looks a lot more like a studio slate circa 1974 than franchise-heavy 2014.
True, Sony is hardly shouldering the financial risk it once might have -- "Zero Dark" and "Hustle," for instance, were bankrolled by the independent scion Megan Ellison, and it was notable reading the email leaks that for the recent Steve Jobs biopic, the studio was unwilling to give Danny Boyle a relatively paltry $33 million to make the movie unless it had a major star to go with it, a decision that led to producers exiting for Universal.
And let's not sugarcoat it. Sony is still a studio with plenty of the kind of interchangeable tent poles that inspire the justifiable eye rolls toward modern Hollywood -- this is still the home, after all, of "Smurfs," "Spider-Man" and Sandler. Corporate realities must be met, and Sony gets its hands dirty in the sandbox with the best of them. It's on the hunt for Spidey spinoffs the way most of us are on the hunt for Christmas presents.
But the company's unusually high enthusiasm for risky films (you once just called them good films) and Pascal's more gut-based approach to making them give rise to what might be called the Amy Anomaly.
That was encapsulated by "Moneyball." A decade ago, Michael Lewis' book seemed unfilmable, a numbers-based look at baseball stats. Pascal was willing to try, and when she didn't like Steven Soderbergh's approach she fired him, just days before everyone as ready to decamp to the set.
At the time, many in the industry thought it was a strange move -- improvisational at best, misguided at worst. Yet Sony went back to the drawing board with Miller, and the finished product proved vindicating, the kind of polished and smart grown-up entertainment most of us came of age thinking studios were supposed to do all the time.
Even when Sony takes commercial swings, it can do so with a bit more style and verve. The upcoming "Goosebumps" falls onto this category, with the movie aiming for a more subtle, "E.T."-like take on R.L. Stine's classic series. When Pascal works with A-listers, they tend to be those with the best material, as demonstrated with repeat go-rounds with Brad Pitt and George Clooney, the latter of whom moved his company to Sony when he didn't feel he was getting the best shake at Warner Bros.
And let's not forget, Pascal and her team put Marc Webb -- a hipster hero who has done exactly one movie in "(500) Days of Summer" -- on one of the biggest franchises in Hollywood when it hired him for "The Amazing Spider-Man" a few years back.
These swings mean there can be some backlash, especially when it comes to charged, fact-based stories. Pascal is undoubtedly aware of it. After Jobs fell apart, she wrote to her staff:
"Let's make sure we learn every lesson here, but believe me, it won't be the last mistake we ever make. ... And between us, how would we like to be at the screening with Kaz and Yoshida-san [top Sony Corp. executives] when they see the movie for the first time ... iPads and North Korea and even Dian [sic] Feinstein will seem like child's play."
It's hard to imagine a major studio head -- to say nothing of Hollywood's real cash-generator, Marvel -- ever having a need to write those words.
Sony doesn't necessarily plan well for what happens. The studio has, throughout the "Interview" controversy, seemed genuinely blindsided by the North Korean response and been late to react. Ditto for "Zero Dark," which was cruising to an Oscar win until a kind of lockdown, say-nothing approach allowed Feinstein and point-scoring pols to get the upper hand.
You can argue that if "The Interview" had been a sly satire instead of a broad comedy, it might have earned more of a pass (though who really knows even there). But the very idea of using a real-life villain comes with a certain boldness -- the kind that gives Wall Street fits, sure, but should hearten anyone worried that the suits have snuffed out artistic vision. It remains to be seen whether Pascal, even if she stays, will feel as emboldened in the future. But for a Hollywood so afraid to take swings, it's nice to find a studio that, at least sometimes, still trains its eye on the outfield fences.
