Sen. Ted Cruz is drafting legislation that would prevent movie studios from receiving Department of Defense assistance if those studios censor their films in China.
The Stopping Censorship, Restoring Integrity, Protecting Talkies Act would keep the Defense Department from participating with studios that censor movies for a Chinese audience.
“The Chinese Communist Party spends billions and billions of dollars to mislead Americans about China and shape what our citizens see, hear, and think,” Cruz said in a statement. “For too long, Hollywood has been complicit in China’s censorship. The SCRIPT Act will serve as a wake-up call by forcing Hollywood studios to choose between the assistance they need from the American government and the dollars they want from China.”
Each branch of the military has a liaison office that assists productions with accuracy, and access to military installations, personnel, and machinery. China places strict limits on the numbers of foreign films that can be screened each year, and foreign films are censored.
Cruz’s announcement follows a litany of examples of China censoring movies.
The 2012 remake of Red Dawn, for example, was completely rewritten to change the antagonists from China to North Korea but still was banned. World War Z featuring Brad Pitt was also banned because either the zombie outbreak originated in China or due to Pitt’s involvement in the film Seven Years in Tibet, Axios reported.
A joke about Chinese President Xi Jinping’s resemblance to Winnie the Pooh led to the country denying the release of Disney’s Christopher Robin.
Former Disney CEO Bob Iger also refused to comment on pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong because it could hurt Disney profits.
“What we learned in the last week — we’ve learned how complicated this is,” Iger said in 2019. “The biggest learning from that is that caution is imperative. To take a position that could harm our company in some form would be a big mistake. I just don’t believe it’s something we should engage in in a public manner.”
Others in Hollywood, including filmmaker Judd Apatow, have criticized Hollywood for kowtowing to China.
“I think it happened very slowly and insidiously,” he said. “You would not see a major film company or studio make a movie that has storylines which are critical of countries with major markets or investors. The question becomes: What’s the result of all of this? The result is, there are a million or more Muslims in reeducation camps in China, and you don’t really hear much about it.”
