In time, the treasure trove of Sony emails will cease to be a daily pipeline for gossip and schadenfreude and will harden, slowly, into a timeless artifact of Hollywood culture in the 21st century.
With distance, we will have an unprecedented 360-degree view into Hollywood's cliqueish byways, its entitlement, pettiness, self-satisfaction and sweat-soaked fear. For those of us who know all too well the people involved, it's literally too much information. Please don't send me emails about someone's marriage -- I absolutely don't want to know.
But in the future, the flesh and blood people revealed in the emails will recede into archetypes of Tom Wolfe proportions: the self-obsessed, manic mogul, the quietly calculating studio boss, the professional sycophant.
The torrent of revelations has now become a trickle, but it continues nonetheless, and is no less damaging for that. The big reveal started with the document dump that laid bare the salaries of the top 20 executives making $1 million or more, and went on to expose how much less leading women were being paid at Sony over the men. We knew most of this, more or less -- but here it was, in black and white, stamped on a spread sheet. (On the salary list, those who were absent -- Andrew Gumpert, Hannah Minghella -- were every bit as conspicuous as those who were included.)
And yet between those embarrassments Pascal emerges as an incredibly hard-working executive, scrambling to keep projects together, juggling budget and schedule while attempting to mollify difficult directors (calling David Fincher) and give moral support to others (Cameron Crowe).
The revelations trundle forward. Never mind my own self, dismissed lightly as "crazy" by a Sony executive in one email, or competitor-colleagues like Janice Min and Matt Belloni who are deemed "moveable" by the same person. Never mind the unctuous exchanges of New York Times' Brooks Barnes loving up Pascal ("All I saw today was an executive working her guts out, trying to be in two places at once, making the correct decision to keep her eye on the prize") and then the other way around, Pascal gushing her "loving" Mike Fleming of Deadline.
The damage has gone far and wide. How did Dr. Mehmet Oz become a victim of North Korea? Leaked emails reflect business opportunities that he explored, along with worries that he was being accused and investigated over health claims he made on his show, produced by Sony.
I keep veering between pity and disgust, and I don't think I'm the only one. The latest Gawker story about Michael Lynton's pulling of strings to help his daughter get into Brown would be of no business relevance except that it was Tom Rothman who made nice with the university president on Lynton's behalf. And it was Rothman who was promoted to studio chief by Lynton just a few months later. That's the stuff you never really put together.
Information is all. Knowledge is everything. The Sony hack allows us to know more than we ever wanted to know, and ever thought possible. It has left a battlefield strewn with bodies, but once the flesh wounds have healed over and scar tissue formed, it is a museum piece for the ages.
11 Hollywood Hacker Movies: From an Angelina Jolie Stinker to a Potential Oscar Winner (Video)
"Hackers" (1995): It's only on the top of the list because of the name, since this cyberpunk adventure starring Angelina Jolie, Jonny Lee Miller and Matthew Lillard didn't exactly impress critics. It was, however, on the forefront of predicting a cyber crime wave that has finally hit Hollywood.
"The Net" (1995): The trailer tells viewers that "computer analyst Angela Bennett was just doing her job when she stumbled onto something she never should have seen." The same could be said about future Oscar winner Sandra Bullock, who was just doing her job by leading the cast of this terrible science fiction movie nobody should have seen. Still, people around the globe paid $110 million to see it in theaters.
"Antitrust" (2001): This Silicon Valley techno thriller earned "Cruel Intentions" star Ryan Phillippe his first million-dollar paycheck, which ended up being 1/18 of what the entire movie made in theaters. The critically panned MGM release followed a gifted computer programmer being given a dream job by a Bill Gates-like genius who will do whatever it takes to make sure his computer firm remains the most powerful in the world.
"Live Free or Die Hard" (2007): This worthy addition to the beloved Bruce Willis action franchise revolved around John McClane joining forces with a young hacker (Justin Long) to stop a cyber terrorist (Timothy Olyphant) from crippling Washington D.C. with his keyboard. Fortunately for America, the world's toughest cop was too old at that point to understand technology, so his fists won out in the end.
"The Matrix" (1999): Keanu Reeves' character in this sci-fi classic was a computer hacker before he was "the One," and the Wachowski siblings went ahead and ruined the franchise by completing the trilogy that never lived up to fans' expectations. But hey, remember the first time Neo dodged all those bullets in slow motion? Yeah. That was awesome.
"WarGames" (1983): Matthew Broderick proved in this Cold War thriller that hacking into your school's computer system to change your grades is a gateway activity that could lead to accidentally starting global thermal nuclear warfare. In his defense, this movie makes playing global nuclear warfare from your desktop computer look really fun.
"Swordfish" (2001): Long story short, Hugh Jackman plays a hacker hired by John Travolta to help him steal millions of dollars to pay Berry to show her breasts, or something like that.
"Firewall" (2006): Cyber criminals force Harrison Ford into robbing his own bank when they break into his home and hold his family hostage. It wasn't very good, but at that point in Ford's career, just about anything could have been considered a step up from "Hollywood Homicide."
"Blackhat" (2015): This movie hasn't hit theaters yet, but since the majority of movies about hackers aren't memorable for being good, here's to hoping director Michael Mann's will be. Chris Hemsworth stars as the sexiest hacker alive who is released from prison to help law enforcement catch a cyber criminal threatening to take down international financial markets.
"We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists" (2012): We've all read about Anonymous at some point or another -- the hackers united under a Guy Fawkes mask and a mission for truth -- and this documentary charts the organizations rise and evolution, while even unmasking a few members.
"The Internet's Own Boy" (2014): This documentary about hacker and Reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz just landed on the short list of films competing in the Oscar race for Best Documentary Feature, and for good reason. It explores the computer prodigy's relationship with technology, and how its affecting our civil liberties.
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Sony is reeling from being hacked, but Hollywood has been producing stories around cyber crime for years. Here are 11 of the most memorable.
"Hackers" (1995): It's only on the top of the list because of the name, since this cyberpunk adventure starring Angelina Jolie, Jonny Lee Miller and Matthew Lillard didn't exactly impress critics. It was, however, on the forefront of predicting a cyber crime wave that has finally hit Hollywood.
