Erich Schwartzel has reported on the film industry for The Wall Street Journal since 2013. Previously, he covered energy and the environment for The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, where his work won the Scripps Howard Award for Environmental Reporting. He lives in Los Angeles.
“Red Carpet sketches out a frightening pattern in US-China trade
relations . . . A fine book.” —Orville Schell, The New York Review
of Books
“Schwartzel tells the story of how Chinese investments in Hollywood
and the Communist Party’s role in deciding what Chinese audiences
could see swiftly inverted the power relationship between China and
the United States in this immensely influential industry. . . .
Schwartzel makes this story of big stars and big money a
page-turner, but its implications are much larger.” —Foreign
Affairs
“Red Carpet is the story of the nexus that formed when Hollywood
realized it needed China’s cash, and China realized it could first
manipulate—and then appropriate—Hollywood’s special gifts for
enchantment, coercion, lifestyle control, and inducing audiences to
tear up by means of orchestral swells and Tom Hanks talking
earnestly to small children. . . . The two stories, the humbling of
Hollywood and the swelling of Chinese soft power, twist and combine
across Schwartzel’s masterfully organized book. . . . This is a
fascinating book. It will educate you. Schwartzel has done some
extraordinary reporting, and a lot of legwork.” —The New York Times
Book Review
“Gripping. . . . Scrupulously reported. . . . Scary and true.”
—Esquire
“An extraordinary narrative. . . . A fascinating and timely account
of how Hollywood’s once-promising relationship with its most
important market has gone horribly wrong. . . . Schwartzel’s trove
of colorful and at-times-ludicrous anecdotes are invaluable.”
—Reuters
“Red Carpet will change the way you watch movies. . . . A
fascinating exploration of the Chinese entertainment apparatus and
how seemingly innocuous American films can become international
flashpoints. . . . Red Carpet is both a movie nerd’s dream and
nightmare in the sense that it contains fascinating information
that may make readers more wary of the entertainment they consume.
If you love movies and are willing to take that risk, you won’t be
disappointed by following Schwartzel down this particular rabbit
hole.” —The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“Fascinating and disturbing. . . . Avid viewers will be surprised
by this exposé of the seedy partnership between Hollywood and the
Chinese government.” —Kirkus (starred review)
“Schwartzel makes an eye-opening debut with this accomplished
account of how soft power—namely, entertainment—helped China become
one of the most influential players on the global stage. . . . An
illuminating look at what China learned from Hollywood, and why
Hollywood needs China to survive. It’s a fascinating take on the
crossroads of film and global politics.” —Publishers Weekly
“Schwartzel’s narrative emphasizes the trajectories of specific
films and is leavened by interviews with directors and studio
executives as well as a sophisticated understanding of internal
Chinese political dynamics.” —Booklist
“China’s growing influence on Hollywood has been one of the
biggest, and least understood, stories in the world. Erich
Schwartzel brilliantly blends groundbreaking reporting, riveting
stories, and brave analysis to reveal the enormous stakes involved
for American popular culture and democracy itself. Like a great
movie, this book is hugely entertaining and changes the way you
look at the world.” —Ben Rhodes, author of After the Fall
“Wow. It’s no secret that, for years, Hollywood moviemaking has
been in a substantive free-fall. But saying so would get you called
a Cassandra because you’re ruining so-and-so’s dinner party with
your slanderous conjecture. Well, now Erich Schwartzel’s written a
whole book—a lucid, engrossing, rigorously, adventurously reported
book; a shocking book, honestly—about one industry’s acquiescent
collapse in the face of another’s ascent. For money. The studios
might now be flush with cash. But this book reveals the ways in
which the American end of the business is near its end. It
illustrates how there is no American movie industry if in greedily
seeking to conquer China it just wound up conceding to it. Here’s
the rare feat of investigative culture journalism that doesn’t aim
for gossip yet, somehow, is all the juicer for it. Every couple of
pages holds another jaw-dropper. It’s made me smarter about both
Hollywood and China. No more conjecture from me. Next dinner party,
I’m making the skeptics eat Schwartzel’s receipts.” —Wesley Morris,
two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism
“What’s the Hollywood version of the U.S.-China relationship? A
story in which John Wayne plays Genghis Khan, and Kung Fu Panda
inspires great angst among Communist Party officials, and Avatar,
the highest-grossing movie of all time, gets pulled from Chinese
theaters and is replaced by a biopic about Confucius. The fact that
all of these things really happened is what makes Erich
Schwartzel’s Red Carpet so vivid and entertaining. By examining the
history of Hollywood and China in unprecedented detail, Schwartzel
illuminates the larger geopolitical culture clash that is likely to
shape the world for years to come.” —Peter Hessler, author of
Oracle Bones and The Buried
“In the ongoing ideological struggle between democracy and
authoritarianism, popular entertainment has emerged as an unlikely
but critical battleground. Epic in scope and meticulously
researched, Red Carpet reads like dispatches from the front lines
of this war, whose outcome will help to determine our future.
Always compelling and often chilling, Erich Schwartzel's invaluable
work shows how the power of narrative continues to change the
world.” —David Henry Hwang, Tony Award winner for M. Butterfly and
Pulitzer Prize finalist for Soft Power
“It's often presumed that American companies have to toe the
Communist Party's line to access China's markets. Erich
Schwartzel's new book offers us a commanding and fly-on-the-wall
account of how Beijing has come to own Hollywood and change a
hallmark of the American culture.” —Lingling Wei, co-author of
Superpower Showdown
“Erich Schwartzel sheds fresh light and understanding on the
evolution of Hollywood’s fraught relationship with the Chinese
Communist Party as well as the nature of this century’s high stakes
competition between totalitarianism and democracy. The story
in Red Carpet demonstrates how, in art and in life, the Party
coopts and coerces leaders across the free world to support its
violent self-conception as a one-party nation with no room for
plurality except on its own rigid terms. Please read this book and
demand that those who sit in Hollywood’s board rooms stop
sacrificing principle on the altar of profit.” —Lt. General H.R.
McMaster (Ret.), former National Security Advisor and author of
Battlegrounds and Dereliction of Duty
“In this highly entertaining but deeply disturbing book, Erich
Schwartzel demonstrates the extent of our cultural thrall to China.
His depiction of the craven characters, American and Chinese, who
have enabled this situation represents a significant feat of
investigative journalism. His narrative is about not merely the
movie business, but the new world order.” —Andrew Solomon, author
of Far from the Tree and The Noonday Demon
“In the ongoing ideological struggle between democracy and
authoritarianism, popular entertainment has emerged as an unlikely
but critical battleground. Epic in scope and meticulously
researched, Red Carpet reads like dispatches from the front lines
of this war, whose outcome will help to determine our future.
Always compelling and often chilling, Erich Schwartzel's invaluable
work shows how the power of narrative continues to change the
world.” —David Henry Hwang, Tony Award winner for M. Butterfly and
Pulitzer Prize finalist for Soft Power
“Erich Schwartzel has told a hugely entertaining and deeply
revealing story about China’s disturbing aspirations. Red Carpet is
juicy and quietly damning, a brilliant anthropology of both
Hollywood and Beijing. It’s one of the most fun books about global
politics I’ve ever read.” —Franklin Foer, author of World Without
Mind and How Soccer Explains the World
Ask a Question About this Product More... |