Erich Schwartzel is the author of Red Carpet: Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy, published in February by Penguin Press. Red Carpet details China's growing influence over the American film industry, and its effort to replicate Hollywood's success with its own cultural exports. Schwartzel reported the book over several years and three continents. He has covered the film industry for The Wall Street Journal since 2013, and previously wrote about energy and the environment for The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. He lives in Los Angeles. REGISTER HERE.
A brief description:
In RED CARPET, journalist Erich Schwartzel explains how the movie screen became the latest battleground in the tense and complex rivalry between the U.S. and China. In recent decades, as China has grown into a giant of the international economy, it has become a crucial source of revenue for the American film industry. Hollywood studios are now bending over backward to make movies that will appeal to China’s citizens—and gain approval from severe Communist Party censors. At the same time, and with America’s unwitting help, China has built its own film industry into an essential arm of its plan to export its national agenda to the rest of the world. The competition between these two movie businesses is a Cold War for this century, a clash that determines whether democratic or authoritarian values will be broadcast most powerfully around the world. RED CARPET combines original reporting, political history, and show-biz intrigue in an exhilarating tour of global entertainment, from propaganda film sets in Beijing to the boardrooms of Hollywood studios to the living rooms in Kenya where families decide whether to watch an American or Chinese movie. Alarming, occasionally absurd, and wildly entertaining, Red Carpet will not only alter the way we watch movies but also offer essential new perspective on the power struggle of this century.