Bigger than a tempest in a show biz teapot

Rogen. His controversial film has ballooned into a political hot spot.

Controversies are never absent from the global entertainment scene, but a year-ender shocker has become much bigger than just a tempest in a show biz teapot.

In fact, it’s ballooned into a political hot spot, with additional complications related to diplomatic contretemps—and even cyberterrorism! This is the recent hacking of Sony Pictures’ digital repository of top-secret communications about some of its TV-film productions through the years.

At first, it appeared to be just the stuff of embarrassing gossip, like what studio executives really felt about some of the stars they hired to topbill their projects.

Later, however, things got much worse when it was discovered that there was a North Korean connection involved, especially related to the new Sony Pictures production, “The Interview,” starring Seth Rogen, in which the controversial nation’s supreme leader, Kim Jong-un, was unsympathetically and even derisively portrayed.

Security problems

That’s when the excrement hit the fan, and many people got really spooked by threats that theaters showing the film could experience “extreme” security problems!

This made big cineplexes rethink their agreement to show the controversial and now potentially “dangerous” film—which in turn “forced” Sony to withdraw the satirical flick from exhibition!

—Nor was that the end to the movie’s lengthening tale of woes—because no less than US President Barack Obama chided Sony for folding in the face of the cyberterrorists’ spooky threats and demands.

What would happen, he sternly lectured, if a documentary was met with disfavor by its powerful targets—would it similarly be prevented from being released?

Citing “The Interview” and Sony’s “fear and trembling” reaction as a very bad precedent, Obama vowed to definitively unmask the hackers and perpetrators of cyberbullying, and urged Sony to rescind its no-show order.

The studio ended up agreeing and released the film on multiple platforms, so the key freedoms of expression and information were upheld. —But, what will happen the next time around?