by Seth Rogen
Halfway through the Q and A, a security guard came in and whispered in Lynton’s ear, and he excused himself for a few minutes, during which time I had to tread water with Sony’s international-distribution partners. It was sweaty as fuck, but what really stood out to me was that when Lynton returned, he looked like he had seen a ghost. He was pale, clammy, and obviously not in the mood to be mid–Q and A with me of all people. It would be like if George Bush was reading that pet goat book to Osama bin Laden when he found out about 9/11 and then had to keep reading.
The next few weeks were…chaotic. The press packaged the contents of various emails into stories that were blasted everywhere throughout December. I try not to be too judgmental of anyone, including journalists, but there was some shit that went down during the hack that was debatable.
Imagine you had a safe with your secrets in it—secret ideas and projects that you were working on in hopes of selling them to the world. Things of both emotional and monetary value. Imagine those things were stolen and given to, say, The Hollywood Reporter. And imagine The Hollywood Reporter, instead of saying, “Oh, man, you were robbed, that’s too bad! You were the victim of a crime. Let’s not add insult to injury! Here are your possessions back!” said, “Oh fuck! You got robbed! Well, we’re gonna go through ALL THE CONTENTS OF WHAT WAS STOLEN from you, and we’re gonna take the best shit, and we’re gonna sell that shit ourselves, motherfucker!”
At least, that’s kinda what happened. Sony was robbed, and the media took the contents of that robbery and sold it off to the public bit by bit, which wasn’t necessarily how I thought that would go down but ultimately shouldn’t be that surprising. There was some juicy shit in there, so it was hard to resist.
Amy Pascal had sent some racially insensitive jokes to Scott Rudin, and the media was all over it. At least the Amy part of it. Nobody seemed to give a shit about Scott.
Despite all this, the movie was supposed to open well and was tracking for a thirty-million-dollar-plus weekend, which is fucking great. Like the kind of thing that might never happen for an actor or writer or director ever in their career, and I wasn’t taking that for granted at all. It’s hard to make a movie that really resonates with audiences, and it seemed we had made one.
The next day, we were going to have the Los Angeles premiere. We’d settled on a decent middle ground on the head blowing up, but Lynton was getting cold feet. The morning of the premiere, I was called into his office. The flames licked around his giant throne made of bones.
Lynton: Look, we’re going to put together a version of the death where the whole thing is obscured by fire, so you don’t actually see anything. And also, because of the hack, the press now knows that there’s been some back and forth about this, so if you are asked about this, I need you to say you wanted to do it.
Me: But I don’t.
Lynton: Yeah. But it’s best for the movie if you just say you do.
Changing the movie in a way you think is bad and then lying about it publicly isn’t usually a good thing, never mind the best thing. It’s usually a fucking terrible and dumb thing. I hate lying to the press in interviews. I pretty much reverse engineer a lot of my career decisions knowing that one day I’ll be promoting my work, and I don’t wanna feel like I’m lying to anyone. I don’t wanna trick people into seeing my shit. I wanna make shit they wanna see, and then talking about it is easy. I know one day I’ll be sitting across from Howard Stern and he’ll grill the shit out of me for everything I’ve done since seeing him last, and I truly want to be able to speak openly and honestly about my life and career choices. So this seemed like it was gonna fuck all that up. But the chairman of the studio releasing your movie is a hard dude to say no to, so I said yes. We’d screen the movie as it currently was at the premiere that night, but tomorrow we’d change it to ready it for release.
That night, we had the L.A. premiere at the United Artists Theater downtown. It was pouring rain, which always makes L.A. feel like the movie Se7en. In other words, a wonderful vibe. We took pictures on the red carpet but didn’t actually talk to journalists, and I vaguely remember running away from someone from Variety when they tried to interview me.
Halfway through the movie, I took two large capsules filled with MDMA crystals. By the time the movie ended, they were kicking in HARD. We went to the top floor of the hotel for a party, and the mood was oddly good. The movie had played well, and even though there was a tornado of shit swirling around us, for a moment it seemed like we were in the calm eye of the storm. Then the head of visual effects for Sony came up to me and Evan.
VFX Guy: I got the new version of the shot!
Me: Huh? What?
VFX Guy: You know. The conversation you and Michael had this morning? About the new version of the shot? I have it.
Evan: Where?
VFX Guy: On my phone. We gotta approve tonight.
Me: And we gotta approve it on your phone?
VFX Guy: Yep! We have to deliver the movie to theaters tomorrow. We have to approve this now.
We went into the bathroom of one of the hotel rooms, and I was rolling my goddamn ass off. My face was sweating. My body was tingling. With every breath, a wave of euphoria swept away the anxiety that was fighting to take over.
The VFX Guy held up his phone and we watched the shot, which essentially was just CG flames rolling over the frame for, like, fifteen seconds. You really couldn’t see anything at all. And it was on a phone, circa 2014.
Evan: Can we shorten the shot?
VFX Guy: What do you mean?
Evan: Well, the length of the shot is what it is because we’re holding to show his head explode, but without that, there’s no reason to hold the shot for so long. It’s just kind of weird.
VFX Guy: No, we can’t open editorial again. Just VFX.
Me and Evan looked at each other. It just sucked so bad. It’s an odd feeling when you’re on tons of MDMA and something really shitty is happening. Your body doesn’t quite know how to compute it. I started seeing spots as my torso went numb.
Me: I’m gonna talk to Michael tomorrow. I don’t think we can do this.
I emailed Lynton that night, saying we needed to talk in the morning—FIRST thing in the morning.
When I woke up, I realized maybe I should have made the meeting second or even third thing in the morning, because I was still incredibly high. I’d say about 64 percent high. But the meeting was set. I showered and took a cab to Sony because I honestly didn’t think I could drive. I was nervous when I got there, so I stopped at the Coffee Bean to get a big cup of coffee, thinking that might keep my sober edge sharp. I chugged the coffee and hurried to Lynton’s office, but the mixture of the caffeine and my heart pumping from being nervous made the remnants of the MDMA start to race through my veins. As I walked up to the desk outside his office, I found myself 100 percent high again.
Me: Hi. It’s Seth for Michael.
Assistant: You can head in. He’ll be with you in a second.
I went into his HUGE office and sat across from the empty desk. I felt like I was in the movie Network, about to be yelled at for meddling with the forces of nature. I thought to myself: Alright, maybe he’ll leave me waiting in here for a bit, and I can chill out, take a few deep breaths, maybe drink some water, and by then I’ll be a bit less high—and then he walked in.
Lynton: Yes?
Me: Look…I can’t do it. I can’t lie. Either we leave the shot how it is, which I already don’t love, or we can change it. But I’m not gonna pretend that it was my idea, and if anyone asks me, I’m gonna be honest and say you made us change it.
He stared at me for a while with a look that made me think, Has this motherfucker had people killed? He kinda looks like he has. And if he has, is this a killable offense?
Then he said…“I understand.”
; Me: That’s it?
Lynton: Yep. That’s it.
Me: …Alright.
Everything went WAYYYY worse from there on out.
I went to New York to start doing the final week of promotion, and reviews started to come out, and they were pretty shitty. There’s nothing more fun than reading a terrible review of your movie in USA Today on your phone as you walk into an interview with a journalist from USA Today. “Here’s my stamp of approval on your trash-talking of my film! I condone this outlet and their message!”
Meanwhile, the media kept delving more and more into the hacked emails and finding more and more stuff that they deemed publishable. Hilariously, the original shot of the head blowing up was released online by Gawker, which I could appreciate the irony of in a Morissette-ian way. But it’s also never great when the grand-finale shot of your film is released online by a website a week before the movie is supposed to come out.
On December 17, we were supposed to have a New York premiere, and I was in a car on my way to do Fallon. As we got close to 30 Rock, the news reported that there were threats of violence against theaters that showed the movie. All of a sudden, the idea of doing a lip-synch battle to promote the film seemed wrong. The premiere was canceled that night, and I was flooded with calls for comment. I didn’t know what to say—which is an admission I should probably arrive at more often—so I said nothing.
The press was split in a lot of ways at this point, but there was a ton of “don’t poke the bear” messaging being thrown our way, which is crazy. I agree, don’t poke a bear. But dictators aren’t bears. Bears are animals that don’t know any better than to follow their natural instincts. Dictators are pieces of shit who deserve ridicule. A lot of people I knew from Hollywood were giving me advice on what to say: “Pull the movie!” “Tell Kim Jong Un to go fuck himself and get behind free speech!” “Ask the government to get involved!”
The best advice came from Sacha Baron Cohen, who of all the people in the world was probably in the best position to understand how to navigate this. After Borat, he, too, had alienated an entire country, Kazakhstan, and although they didn’t have nearly good enough technology to hack a studio, the situation was comparable. “Say nothing. Just keep your fucking mouth shut. If you want more attention, talk. If you want less, say nothing at all. If you talk, you give them more to write about. More quotes. If you just shut up, there’s nothing to report.”
I said nothing, and of all the shit I did throughout that time, it was one of the smarter things. But it’s clearly advice I’ve since stopped listening to.
Sony didn’t really communicate anything with me directly at that point, so I just went back to L.A. While I was on the plane, they announced that they were pulling the movie from its planned theatrical release.
I landed and was pissed. I called Lynton.
Me: You specifically promised me you wouldn’t pull the movie. You knew all this was going to happen.
Lynton: Nobody could have known this was going to happen.
Me: Actually, the RAND Corporation, who you hired, knew this was going to happen, and they told us as much about five months ago. I was there! That’s why I hired cybersecurity, and I wasn’t hacked!
Lynton: Look, right now you feel we’re making a mistake. But you’re alone in that feeling. Everyone I’ve talked to feels we’re making the right decision. Industry-wide, it’s being viewed as the wisest choice.
Me: I really think it’s wrong, and I’m gonna come out and say it, unless we work on a way to let the theaters that want to show the film be allowed to show it and we find a streaming platform to release it before the end of the year.
Lynton: Again, I understand that right now you feel like we’re making a mistake and new actions need to be taken, but let’s just wait a day. Tomorrow, President Obama is giving his year-end press conference. Let’s see if this comes up, see what he says, and move forward from there.
This was incredibly ominous for one big reason: Lynton knew President Obama. He was a huge supporter of his, and from the way he was talking, it felt like he had some sort of inside track on what the president was going to say. And it really seemed like he thought whatever President Obama was going to say would support him and his decisions, which was terrifying to me.
The next morning we all gathered in our office, which was actually on the Sony lot, and turned on the TV just as the press conference was about to start. Part of me didn’t really think the president would even mention us. It was the year-end press conference; surely there’d be more important things to talk about.
Nope. It was the first question. And the second question. And a bunch of ones after that.
Reporter: I’ll start on North Korea….Did Sony make the right decision in pulling the movie, or does that set a dangerous precedent when faced with this kind of situation?
President Obama: Sony is a corporation. It suffered significant damage. There were threats against its employees. I am sympathetic to the concerns that they faced.
We were devastated. It seemed as though Lynton had pulled some magic trick and gotten the president of the United States himself to support his argument. But then he continued…
President Obama: Having said all that, yes, I think they made a mistake.
We literally exploded in applause. He went on…
President Obama: We cannot have a society in which some dictator someplace can start imposing censorship here in the United States. Because if somebody is able to intimidate folks out of releasing a satirical movie, imagine what they start doing when they see a documentary that they don’t like or news reports that they don’t like. Or even worse, imagine if producers and distributors and others start engaging in self-censorship because they don’t want to offend the sensibilities of somebody whose sensibilities probably need to be offended. So that’s not who we are. That’s not what America is about. Again, I’m sympathetic that Sony, as a private company, was worried about liabilities and this and that and the other. I wish they had spoken to me first. I would have told them, “Do not get into a pattern in which you’re intimidated by these kinds of criminal attacks.”…I think it says something interesting about North Korea that they decided to have the state mount an all-out assault on a movie studio because of a satirical movie….I love Seth and I love James, but the notion that that was a threat to them, I think gives you some sense of the kind of regime we’re talking about here.
He put Sony on blast. Lynton called a few hours later to figure out how to get the movie to theaters that wanted it and to find a streaming platform to partner with.
It premiered on Google Play at the end of December. And that’s when even more reviews started to come out. In what is definitely the most revealing thing about me, the piece of all this that I still carry around is that the film was negatively received for the most part.
The question of “Was it all worth it for this movie?” became a popular one. If critics had liked it more, would it have been more worthwhile? Because it didn’t align with their taste, it wasn’t? That conversation was frustrating, and frankly really painful. But getting shitty reviews always hurts. I’m not sure if critics don’t realize how much their words can hurt someone or they just don’t care? Maybe they see brutal criticism as a painful but necessary part of our lives, like going to the dentist? All this is to say that it actually hurts.
But what hurt much more than critics talking shit was other comedians talking shit.
I try not to publicly malign the work of other comedians (unless I genuinely dislike them on a personal level), probably because I’m so sensitive to it that the idea of subjecting anyone else to it seems crazy. But around the release of the movie, and in the months following, people I really respected started mocking the movie—not just what happened with it; they literally were saying it was shitty. A joke Amy Poehler and Tina Fey made at th
e Golden Globes that year was particularly painful, not only because I look up to them so much but because I knew they were right and that the movie itself wasn’t as good as it could have been.
For the weeks surrounding the release, the studio demanded we all have armed security with us twenty-four hours a day. I didn’t like it. It made me uncomfortable. And the whole time we were like, “Do we really need these guys? This is silly. Aren’t we just drawing more attention to the whole situation? Like North Korea is gonna send an assassin to West Hollywood?”
Then one day in early January, I came outside to walk to the coffee shop, expecting to see my guard, but he was gone. Vanished, nowhere to be found. At first I was like, Was he taken out? Is this an attack? I called Evan.
Me: Is your guard still there?
Evan: No! I just went outside! He’s gone!
Me: I guess…we’re not in danger anymore?
Evan: I guess not?
Me: Did the studio call to say they were relieving the guy of duty or whatever?
Evan: No. He’s just…gone.
Me: …I’m starting to miss that guy.
Evan: Me, too. I felt so safe with him around.
In the following weeks, I worried that the movie would be on me like a stain forever. That people would never look at me the same way again, and that maybe people just wouldn’t think I was funny anymore. What I really learned, though, was how fucking fast people forget shit and move on. Once again, an inflated sense of self-importance ultimately made the fallout not as bad as I thought it would be. By mid-January, I was in San Francisco rehearsing for the Steve Jobs movie. Kate Winslet turned to me and was like, “What was with that whole North Korea mess, dear? Did anything ever come of that?”