When Barack Obama strolled into the White House briefing room on December 19th, 2014, you could tell he was happy the year was finally

over. Hello, everybody. I ain't really got a full house today, huh? Well, all I want for Christmas is to take

your questions. It was the president's year-end press conference. One last chance for reporters to grill Obama before he headed out for vacation. Not that he'd get much time to relax. Overseas, he was dealing with an escalating war between Russia and Ukraine, not to mention an Ebola outbreak in West Africa. And at home, Obama was feuding with Republicans over immigration. But the first question that afternoon was about a different crisis altogether, one that was unfolding on a 45-acre movie studio lot in Culver City, Los Angeles. Let's start on our 3X, that seems to be the biggest

topic today. What does a proportional response look like to the Sony hack? The

Sony hack. It's probably been a while since you heard those words. Maybe you've forgotten all about the hack. Or maybe you worked at Sony at the time and have spent the last decade trying to forget about the hack. Which is totally understandable. Either way, here's a quick download. Ten years ago, a group of cyber terrorists pulled off the most daring and most damaging Hollywood heist of all time. They broke into Sony Pictures' computer system and stole hundreds of thousands of Sony documents. Documents that were eventually made public. That included everything from employee medical records to salary statements to some very personal email exchanges. Eventually, reports emerged that the attack had been carried out by North Korea as retaliation for a forthcoming Sony comedy called The Interview. It stars Seth Rogen and James Franco as American TV journalists who were recruited to assassinate one of the most mysterious political figures of the 21st century, Kim Jong-un. want us to assassinate the leader of North Korea? Yes. What? The interview was supposed to open on thousands of movie screens on Christmas Day 2014, but then the hackers, or at least people claiming to be the hackers, threatened to attack theaters that play the film. In one message,

they even invoked 9-11. Soon all the world will see what an awful movie Sony Pictures Entertainment has made. The world will be full of fear. Remember the 11th of September, 2001.

After that warning, several big movie chains decided not to play the interview. Then, Sony announced the movie simply wouldn't open at all. To some Americans, the message was clear. The terrorists had won. So it makes sense that Sony's response to the hack was on reporters' minds during Obama's press conference. Or

does that set a dangerous precedent in place

for this kind of situation? Obama

acknowledged the damage Sony had suffered. I am sympathetic to the concerns that they faced.

Having said all that, yes, I think they made a mistake. I wish they had spoken to me first. By

then, the hack was nearly a month old. Yet there were still so many unknowns. Were these warnings for real? And if so, why would anyone get all worked up about a buddy comedy full of poop and dick jokes? Even Obama couldn't figure that last one out. 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 starring Seth Rogen and James Flacco. Yes,

he said Flacco. Look, he'd had a long couple weeks. 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. They caused a lot of damage. And we will respond.

Ten years after the Sony hack and the fallout over the interview, the whole thing is still so weird. The idea that a bunch of American entertainers could create an international incident seems ridiculous, even to a guy who made a movie about that exact same thing. It was very surreal. That's Dan Sterling, who co-wrote the interview and was one of its executive producers. The implications were so massive that I didn't know how to look at them any other way than kind of comedic. Like, oh, that'd be funny if I wrote a movie that somehow led to a nuclear detonation. While that never happened, the Sony hack did have long-lasting repercussions, especially in Hollywood. At first, all those leaked Sony emails seemed like just a gossipy distraction. A look at the sometimes boring and sometimes chaotic conversations that go on between actors and filmmakers. For example, here's how Channing Tatum reacted in 2014 when he learned that Sony's 22 Jump Street had just had a big opening weekend. One even bigger than that of a certain talking teddy bear movie. F you Ted, second of all time, biatch! A few quick things I should note here. First off, that's not actually Channing Tatum's voice. Like all the email passages you'll be hearing on this show, it's from someone in the ringer office, in this case Steve Alman. Second, we found these emails through WikiLeaks, which put the contents of the Sony hack online in the spring of 2015. And finally, the rest of Channing's email is basically him going hahahahaha in all caps for several pages. So yeah, there was a lot of ridiculous stuff to be found in the stolen Sony data. But as the documents began to leak online, sometimes in random batches, sometimes in giant bursts, readers found things that didn't reflect well on Hollywood. Specifically, a lot of emails that, when taken together, revealed some hard truths. Truths about the overwhelming whiteness of corporate America. About how women are valued less and paid less than their male colleagues. About how powerful people talk when they think no one's listening. Everybody knows how studios work in a way that they didn't know before. That's Ben Fritz, who covered the Sony hack for the Wall Street Journal. As far as penetrating the public consciousness and really demystifying and to a certain extent de-glamorizing, Hollywood Studios is one of the biggest impacts the hack had. For a hundred years, Hollywood's greatest product has always been, well, Hollywood. Through a mix of spectacle and spin, the industry could always put a good face on pretty much any disaster. But this was a story Hollywood couldn't control. And the revelations from the Sony hack laid bare what most people already suspected, that the business of making movies and TV could be nasty and petty and unfair, just like every other business in the world. And when those leaks came out, when people saw big time Hollywood players making racially charged jokes or learned that female actresses were getting shafted over money, it reminded people of the screwed up politics at their own workplace. Still, while the Sony hack was a seismic event, one that reverberated from Hollywood to the White House to the rest of the world, it feels like it's faded from memory a bit. And I get why. After all, this was a story that changed from hour to hour. And when you look back at the 2010s, the Sony hack is just one of several fucked up events in a decade that was full of them. It's no wonder a lot of people have forgotten about it. But the hack is worth looking back on now. This was a moment when the worlds of entertainment, media, technology, and politics all collided. A moment when a ridiculous buddy comedy became a global target, and then a national rallying cry. So if you want to understand how the Sony hack upended Hollywood, and the lives of the people within it, stick around for the next three episodes. We'll relive an unusual battle in modern American history. One that began not with a bang, nor even a whimper, but with, well...

Excuse me. Did you just shart? No, I didn't. It wasn't that camera guy. It wasn't me. Ladies and gentlemen, Kim Jong Un has just pooed in his pants.

From Spotify and the Ringer Podcast Network, I'm Brian Raftery. And this is the Hollywood Hack. Episode one, the world will be full of fear. In 2012, just two years before the hack was discovered, Sony Pictures decided to celebrate its big screen history by erecting a giant rainbow on the northeast side of the studio lot. The rainbow is a thick, twisty piece of steel that reaches nearly 100 feet high. It's a nod to The Wizard of Oz, which was filmed on a soundstage here back in the 1930s when MGM owned the property. The rainbow is a towering reminder of the Sony lot's history and a symbol of good old Hollywood magic. That is, until you reach the end of the rainbow and see a giant parking lot. That's when you realize, oh yeah, people actually work here. About 3,500 people, in fact, from sound editors to carpenters to accountants. Still, as far as corporate offices go, the Sony lot is pretty cool. If you wander around long enough, you can look inside the massive sound stages, where scenes from some of Sony's biggest films were shot. Films you can recognize from a single line. With

great power comes great responsibility.

Prestige! World wide! Wild wide! Wild wide! Show me the money! some of Sony's biggest TV shows like Breaking Bad or The Crown were filmed outside of LA, the lot is still home to two of the studio's long-running game shows. Shows that make your parents yell back their answers at the screen. I've been writing about movies and TV for more than 25 years now. And while I realize I should be totally jaded about these kinds of things, I still love visiting the Sony lot. I mean, you're just a few feet away from where they shot parts of North by Northwest, and singing in the rain, and Starship Troopers. Come on, how is that not exciting? And I'm not the only one who feels that way. Even people who worked at Sony for years would still get a thrill from stepping out of that lot. You

would see the actors and the productions driving around on our golf carts as you're walking on your way to lunch. You really feel like there are movies being made 100 feet from you. That's

Marisa McGrath-Lister, who spent nearly two decades at Sony. I

remember one day looking out my window and just sitting right below my window, like kind of on the backside of the lot, was the Ghostbusters car. And it was the Breaking Bad RV.

That was another moment where I was like, okay, this is cool. There is something magical about being on the lot. That's Michael Fisk. He spent more than 12 years at Sony, where he oversaw an international marketing team. get to feel how the creative business works. You get a sense of seeing actors on set and makeup and hair walking around. You see the sets that are being put up. I mean, you do get that sense when you're on the lot and you're part of it. For the most part, the Sony lot in

2024 looks a lot like it did back in 2014, the year the studio was hacked. That's when it was home to one of the most powerful movie executives in Hollywood, Amy Pascal.

Will you explain to us about what you do? Oh, gosh, OK. I do something that I love.

That's Pascal being interviewed by a group of middle school students in the fall of 2011. They're all cramped together on an office couch.

Most of the day, what I get to do is look at scripts and movies and try to understand why something is working and why it's not working and who would be the best person to tell the story? That's on a good day.

Pascal joined Sony in the late 1980s, back when it was still Columbia Pictures. Over the next several years, she helped develop some of the studio's biggest hits, everything from Groundhog Day to Sense and Sensibility to a league of their own. By the early 2000s, Pascal was running Sony's movie division, making the kinds of films she loved. There were splashy literary adaptations, like The Da Vinci Code, juicy real-life dramas like Captain Phillips, and crowd-pleasing comedies like Hitch and Pineapple Express. Around Hollywood, Pascal was known as a talent whisperer, someone who could charm actors and filmmakers until they saw her way. For example, in the late 90s, Pascal wanted Adam Sandler to star in a comedy about a 30-something doofus who adopts a five-year kid. At the time, Sandler was big, but not big big, and he wasn't into making family comedies. But Pascal was desperate for him to do it. So she traveled to Atlantic City, where she cornered Sandler and his dad by the slot machines. As Pascal later said, I followed him around and stalked him. She was joking, but all that stalking paid off when Big Daddy became one of the highest-grossing movies of 1999. We

stopped serving breakfast at 10.30. Ah, horseshit!

No, no, no, don't cry. I'm sorry. I wasn't cursing.

And Sandler would go on to make a ton of money for Sony in the years ahead. All because Pascal wouldn't take no for an answer. She exudes passion and she cannot hide her opinions and thoughts. That's Ben Fritz from the Wall Street Journal again. She, you know, she has like chunky jewelry and sits there in meetings with Chris Cross, sitting on her couch, like chewing gum. She just is who she is and she lays it out there. It's true. I mean, it's not often you hear a movie exec, or really any executive, talking about their own career with this kind of honesty. I've made some of the worst movies ever. Instead of making some of the best movies, I turned down Forrest Gump, Speed. And Pascal's not being self-deprecating there. She really did make some bad movies for Sony. The Tourist, Stealth, Jack and Jill. But sometimes, even bad movies make money. And overall, for much of Pascal's time at Sony, the movie division had a great run. It even topped the box office for a few years. Though to be fair, a lot of the credit for Sony's financial success has to go to the company's CEO, a guy who is Pascal's polar opposite. And welcome all of you to Sony Pictures and this historic studio lot, where movies have been made since 1915 at the dawn of Hollywood. That's Michael Linton, speaking to investors in 2013. He's wearing a dark suit and a sensible haircut, and he's standing on a giant glitzed-up Sony soundstage. But Linton hadn't even stepped foot on the Sony lot when he took the CEO job in 2003. By then, he had been a top-level executive at companies like Disney, Penguin, and Time Warner. As Ben Fritz notes, to most of Hollywood, Linton was an outsider. Michael Linton rarely cared about the actual content of the movies. In fact, it's almost impossible to find a clip of Linton talking about movies at all. Though when he does, like in this podcast interview from 2022, his comments are pretty controversial. You're a big Tom Cruise fan? I

am a big Tom Cruise fan.