Preview
  • Red Carpet

  • Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy
  • By: Erich Schwartzel
  • Narrated by: Sean Patrick Hopkins
  • Length: 11 hrs and 55 mins
  • 4.6 out of 5 stars (135 ratings)

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Red Carpet

By: Erich Schwartzel
Narrated by: Sean Patrick Hopkins
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Publisher's summary

"This is a fascinating book. It will educate you. Schwartzel has done some extraordinary reporting." (The New York Times Book Review)

“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)

An eye-opening and deeply reported narrative that details the surprising role of the movie business in the high-stakes contest between the US and China

From trade to technology to military might, competition between the United States and China dominates the foreign policy landscape. But this battle for global influence is also playing out in a strange and unexpected arena: the movies.

The film industry, Wall Street Journal reporter Erich Schwartzel explains, is the latest battleground in the tense and complex rivalry between these two world powers. 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 is packed with memorable characters who have - knowingly or otherwise - played key roles in this tangled industry web: not only A-list stars like Matt Damon, Angelina Jolie, and Richard Gere but also eccentric Chinese billionaires, zany expatriate filmmakers, and starlets who disappear from public life without explanation or trace. Schwartzel 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.

©2022 Erich Schwartzel (P)2022 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

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

What listeners say about Red Carpet

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