New Documentary Criticizes Hollywood’s Relationship with Communist China

It’s unusual when a movie is made to disparage the movie industry.

But that’s what the filmmakers behind the documentary, Hollywood Takeover: China’s Control in the Film Industry have done.

In the trailer, stars like Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Matt Damon and Robert Downey Jr. are shown promoting their movies in China as a commentator says the medium “is very powerful, but for some, that power isn’t used for good.”

The film, though, doesn’t take aim at the celebrities, but at the studios that they allege have been bending a knee to the Chinese Communist Party.

Therefore, it contains plenty of examples of edits and additions that the makers of the documentary say were made to mainstream movies at the behest of the CCP, or to avoid the party’s negative feedback and risk box office potential.

“They could basically take over America without firing a shot,” one director says of the CCP in the trailer, “because they control access to our minds.”

Apparently, such claims were deemed sensitive enough that YouTube took the unusual step Monday of removing the trailer for review. When Newsweek asked the Google-owned platform why, it responded: “Upon review, we determined the video is not violative of our Community Guidelines.” The video was reinstated late Wednesday.

Hollywood Takeover is produced and narrated by Tiffany Meier, who hosts a show called China in Focus for NTD Television, a subsidiary of the right-leaning, often controversial Epoch Media Group.

Meier told Newsweek that she’s used to hostile treatment from YouTube as three years ago the platform demonetized her show and stopped promoting it, causing viewership to plunge from a high of 2 million per episode to about 20,000.

She claims it was because she and her team, some from within China, were reporting the hypotheses that the COVID pandemic might have leaked from a Wuhan lab and the country was engaging in “draconian” lockdown policies, and also that food donated to people locked in their homes was ending up in garbage cans.

“There’s a history: Whenever you say something critical of the CCP, things disappear from various platforms,” Meier said.

YouTube confirmed it removed the channel from its Partner Program, meaning uploads are allowed but monetization is not, but declined to say why.

But for now, Meier’s focus is on Hollywood Takeover, which has scheduled a red-carpet premiere next week at the Harmony Gold Theater in Los Angeles before heading to Epoch TV. Negotiations are underway for further distribution.

Newsweek has viewed the film ahead of its release. In it, Chris Fenton, a production executive who did business in China for two decades is described in the film as a “fixer” and a “diplomat” who gets China what it needs so that movies are allowed to be exhibited in the giant market of 1.4 billion people.

He says in the movie that he was “punched in the nose,” figuratively, by people, including his wife, who wondered if he wasn’t doing China’s bidding. He justified his actions by telling himself his work was helping the U.S. economy and that it was encouraging the embrace of democracy in China.

Since then, he authored the book: Feeding the Dragon: Inside the Trillion Dollar Dilemma Facing Hollywood, the NBA & American Business.

One of his earliest successes was helping to get the Bruce Willis movie, Looper, into China, even though the country typically eschews time-travel films because it wants to control the way the past, and the future, are displayed.

One way the movie appeased the Chinese censors was by throwing in a conversation with characters played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Jeff Daniels. “I’m going to France,” says Gordon-Levitt. “I’m from the future; you should go to China,” Daniels responds.

One section of Hollywood Takeover takes particular aim at Marvel, and uses the Disney-owned studio as an example of growth in China: Iron Man, released stateside in 2008, set a record there with $15 million; Iron Man 3 exceeded $121 million in 2013 and in 2019 Avengers: End Game raked in more than $600 million in China, according to BoxOfficeMojo (though Hollywood Takeover uses slightly different numbers).

Film producer Jason Jones says in Hollywood Takeover that the birth of Hollywood’s relationship with China was in 1997 with Titanic, which so impressed Jiang Zemin, then the general secretary of the CCP, with its emotional power that he insisted the most powerful party members give it a viewing.

Jones also says Hollywood’s relationship with China became “really perverse” with Disney’s 2020 live-action remake of Mulan because it insinuated that the Uyghurs were the villains. Both Presidents Joe Biden and Donald Trump have accused China of engaging in the “genocide” of Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities.

Disney didn’t respond to Newsweek’s request for comment.

“The Chinese Communist Party is after control, and they need to script a narrative to be something different than what they are,” Republican Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn says in the documentary.

Newsweek reached out to China’s embassy in Los Angeles for comment and will update the story should it respond.

The same year Titanic was released, movies like Red Corner, Kundun and Seven Years in Tibet so angered the CCP that, for a time, it wouldn’t allow other movies from the studios behind them into the Chinese market, according to Hollywood Takeover.

In Red Corner, Richard Gere plays an American in Beijing accused of murder who is informed that if he doesn’t take a plea deal he’ll be executed and his family will be billed for the cost of the bullet.

The other two are about the 14th Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual leader of Tibet, which China annexed in 1951.

Another example used in Hollywood Takeover is the trailer for Top Gun: Maverick, where Paramount Pictures stripped out the patches representing Tibet and Japan (a bitter Chinese rival) on Tom Cruise’s flight jacket, and backlash ensued. By the time the movie was released in 2022, the patches were reinstated. The movie was released in Hong Kong but not in mainland China.

Film reviewer Christian Toto says in Hollywood Takeover that in 2006’s Mission: Impossible III a scene was altered because Cruise is seen running through neighborhoods in Shanghai where clotheslines were visible, suggesting residents didn’t have the means to purchase clothes dryers.

But he said the most egregious example of Hollywood kowtowing to the CCP is the 2012 remake of Red Dawn, where the villain was initially the Chinese military but all flags and uniforms were digitally altered in post-production to indicate it was the North Korean military that invaded a small town in America.

Hollywood Takeover also features an interview with Chen Guangcheng, the blind human-rights activist who gained international attention for challenging China’s one-child policy and spent four years in a Chinese prison and an additional year under house arrest.

The movie shows news footage of actor Christian Bale attempting to visit him, and the two became friends after Guangcheng was spirited away in 2012 by U.S. officials.

“We engineered this almost maneuver out of Mission: Impossible to bring him into the embassy,” former U.S. ambassador to China Gary Locke says in a clip used in the film.

Guangcheng says, speaking in Chinese with subtitles, that for Bale’s efforts, the CCP banned his movies in China.

Guangcheng also says that when he arrived in the U.S., a film producer attempted a movie based on his human-rights activities and subsequent suffering for them, but the CCP somehow interfered and the film was scrapped.

“It was during this experience that I came to understand how much the CCP cared about influential American institutions like Hollywood and how many people and money the CCP has invested in order to influence Hollywood,” Guangcheng tells Meier.

It’s not all bad, though. Fenton told Newsweek that Hollywood has lately been holding its ground against CCP censors.

The reinstated patches on Cruise’s jacket in Top Gun: Maverick is one example. Also, in Marvel’s Doctor Strange, an Epoch Times newsstand appears in a scene, even though the outlet has been highly critical of China.

And Fenton also says that in the most recent Spider-Man movie the CCP asked Sony to remove the Statue of Liberty, but the studio refused.

Fenton said movies are often tweaked for various markets, but Americans should be alarmed when China mandates edits for global audiences, as is too often the case.

Fenton says he’s no whistleblower, given how high-profile the movie industry is and how well-known many of the anecdotes are.

“My mission is to protect the industry I love and the creative freedoms of filmmakers,” he told Newsweek. “As someone who was a big part of the cause of the problem initially, I’m proud to now be a part of the solution.”