BUCK: As you know, the Winter Olympics underway in China right now, and you might have even seen what I guess is the artificial snow ski slope next to the nuclear cooling towers in what looks like a dystopian hellscape of some part of Beijing.

I’ve been in Beijing; let me tell you, that place is huge. It’s a giant city, goes on forever. Let’s talk a bit more about China, though, with Erich Schwartzel right now. He’s the author of Red Carpet: Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy. Erich, thanks for being with us.

SCHWARTZEL: Hey, thanks for having me.

BUCK: First let’s just start with the basic thesis you have of your book. Clay and I talked before about how they actually edit out Taiwan patches from Maverick’s leather jacket in the Top Gun remake, that Hollywood bends the knee to China, our elites bend the knee to China. What do you see going on here?

SCHWARTZEL: Yeah, I think it’s a story that’s probably years in the making. Hollywood movies have been flowing into the Chinese market since the mid-nineties, but it’s only been the past decade and a half or so that the Chinese box office has grown exponentially. The Chinese box office — a lot of people don’t realize this — is now the biggest in the world.

And the U.S. market was flatlining before covid and then covid took a big punch to it. And so the studios, because they want to stay in business, need to get those movies into Chinese theaters, and that means passing approval from Chinese censors.

So that explains why as you said the patches on Tom Cruise’s jacket on a Top Gun reboot can’t show Taiwan or Japan, because those are countries that were in poor a favor with China, so the Hollywood movies have to make sure they follow those rules in order to be screened in that country and have access to its box office.

CLAY: Erich, I read a fantastic excerpt of your book in the Wall Street Journal over the Weekend Edition — and Buck and I had actually talked about this recently. So Red Dawn, 1980s movie. A lot of people remember that movie, Patrick Swayze, Charlie Sheen, the idea that Russians are suddenly going to land. These kids from Colorado fight back against them.

They decided to do a remake, and according to that excerpt, there were Tom Cruise, everybody sitting around, and they say, “Okay, it’s China that’s definitely going to attack.” They film the whole movie and then suddenly realize, “Wait a moment. If China is the villain here, MGM, which is distributing and making this movie, is in real trouble.”

And so they spent, I believe you said, a million dollars to turn it into North Korea that was actually attacking the United States instead of China. That’s a wild story for our audience out there. Explain that, and you say it was an interesting pivot point in the history of United States and China film because since that point basically there have been no bad guys from China because Hollywood is terrified to offend the Chinese.

SCHWARTZEL: That’s absolutely right. It was the last movie put into production by a major Hollywood studio that had cast China as the villain. But as you said it didn’t even get released with China as the villain because after MGM had finished filming the movie, Chinese state media outlets made it clear that they were not going to be happy if it came out. And they could punish the company elsewhere.

And so one of the dynamics we’ve seen emerge is that Chinese authorities will punish studios however they can. So it’s not enough to make a movie that’s critical of China and then not plan to release it in China. Even if you release it just in the U.S., China has shown it will punish you elsewhere. Whether it’s blocking consumer products or toys made in the country or forbidding you from building a theme part like Disney and Universal have in the country.

There are larger corporate interests threatened by these movies that anger China and Red Dawn, like Top Gun, is such a deeply ironic example because as you mentioned the original — which is considered a classic by so many people I think of my generation and yours — is such an emblem of the rah-rah era of American moviemaking.

You know, almost every movie, it seemed, had a Soviet bad guy because we were in the middle of a Cold War with the USSR. And today whenever those movies are remade, China is the obvious choice. If you’re thinking of a country that would plausibly invade the U.S. and that has tensions with the U.S., China makes a lot more sense than North Korea. It’s just that economically it’s a nonstarter.

BUCK: Speaking to Erich Schwartzel, author of Red Carpet: Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy. Erich, how do you think we should best handle this? I mean, would it be…? You mentioned the way that, yeah, there were all these movies. I remember watching Rocky IV and I don’t know if I’ve ever been so fired up is when he squared off against Ivan Drago.

And there was a clear messaging there about life behind the Iron Curtain and fighting the Soviet evil empire. Would you like to see China be a country that at least the Chinese Communist Party is treated in a somewhat similar way? I mean, how do we go about this? How do we win the cultural battle? We already know the places where they have a tremendous amount of influence and are dictating are cultural product in many contexts.

SCHWARTZEL: Yeah, you know, I think it’s interesting ’cause what you just described I think everyone can relate to, right? Leaving a movie theater and just feeling amped up for whatever you just saw. And I think that’s a real power. And I think Hollywood sometimes is rightfully cautious about that power when it comes to demonizing certain countries or trafficking in certain kinds of stereotypes or stereotypical portrayals.

But it feels to me like over the past couple of years, Hollywood has really — for the first time in its history — been add odds with its own government. I mean, if you look at Hollywood history from World War II through the Cold War era, Hollywood has not done America’s bidding, but it’s been seen as something of an adjunct of the American government and really the most effective tool we have for soft power in hearts and minds around the world.

And I think what we’re seeing now is there’s a bit of a divergence of opinion where you have politicians — and I would say politicians on both sides of the aisle — as well as consumers losing patience to not just Hollywood, but also corporate America’s acquiescence to China. And I think that’s the balancing act that a lot of these studios are going to have to strike is how do we maintain access to that market, which is very important for our bottom line, but not find ourselves on the wrong side of criticism here at home.

CLAY: Erich, one of the things that’s fascinating — you kind of hinted at this — is even as the Hollywood industry and the movies in general have tried to bend the knee and avoid offending China, they’ve been allowing fewer and fewer American movies into their country. That’s happening with the Marvel movies. I’ll use as an example the recent Space Jam remake.

I really believe that one reason LeBron James has been so easygoing on China and not ever spoken out and said anything is ’cause he wanted his movie to play in China. Is China actually embarrassing Hollywood even more by not only making decisions about what is and is not allowed to be said about them, but also now not even allowing many of these movies to have access to their massive moviegoing market?

SCHWARTZEL: For the past six to eight months, I’d say that has become the case. It really feels like China has ghosted Hollywood. And it is not allowing movies in that traditionally would have made hundreds of millions of dollars at the box office. And it’s not just the Space Jam reboot you mentioned. I mean, movies as big as Spider-Man and Shang-Chi and Black Widow are not being accepted in the China theaters, and it’s leaving a big, fat zero on the balance sheet of the studios.

CLAY: I think that’s fascinating. What do you attribute that to? Because the Space Jams and the Marvels are not political in nature in many ways, and you would think a movie like Shang-Chi — which has an Asian star, right — in many ways would be the essence of why Hollywood potentially is even considering making that movie because of them? Why is China suddenly exerting that power even in movies like that that don’t really have a political bent, necessarily, superhero-style movies?

SCHWARTZEL: Yeah, you’re right. These are not movies about the Dalai Lama. These are not movies about Taiwan. These are movies that were supposed to be global products. Listen, there are a lot of theories. There’s no one answer. One tricky thing about working with China is that you never really get a memo saying (chuckles), “We’re not accepting your movie and here’s why.” So you really have to kind of read the tea leaves and see what the signals are, and it seems like a couple things have happened.

One is the China’s own film industry has grown more and more sophisticated in recent years, and Chinese audiences have understandably grown to prefer Chinese entertainment to American entertainment. I always say, you know, “Would we expect Americans to go see a Chinese version of Davey Crockett?” It makes sense that as the Chinese movies have gotten better, that people there would gravitate towards those.

But the other thing that’s happened is as Xi Jinping has consolidated power, there’s just been more of a turn inward. And I think there’s just been an overall greater skepticism about Western and outside influence. And this has ebbed and flowed throughout Hollywood’s relationship with China. When Disney was building a massive theme park in Shanghai, there were pockets of Chinese government who said, “Do we really want Chinese children becoming affectionate toward Western characters or Disney characters?”

This happened over time, but we’ve never seen anything this severe, and I think it’s going to lead to a lot of uncertainty here in Hollywood because when you’re green lighting a movie for 250 or $300 million, you all but need China to turn a profit. That’s how expensive these movies are, and if it’s that much of an uncertainty, I don’t really know what the studio chiefs can do.

BUCK: Erich Schwartzel, author of Red Carpet: Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy. Erich, thanks for being with us.

SCHWARTZEL: Appreciate it. Thanks, guys.