Concussion makers step lightly around NFL
Leaked emails show Sony cut ‘unflattering moments’ from upcoming Will Smith film
When Sony Pictures Entertainment decided to make a movie focusing on the death and dementia professional football players have endured from repeated hits to the head — and the NFL’s efforts toward a cover-up — it signed Will Smith to star as one of the first scientists to disclose the problem. It named the film bluntly, Concussion.
In the end even Sony, which unlike most other major studios in Hollywood has no significant business ties to the NFL, found itself softening some points it might have made against the multibillion-dollar sports enterprise that controls the nation’s most-watched game.
In dozens of studio emails unearthed by hackers, Sony executives, director Peter Landesman and representatives of Smith discussed how to avoid antagonizing the NFL by altering the script and marketing the film more as a whistle-blower story, rather than as a condemnation of football or the league.
“Will is not anti football (nor is the movie) and isn’t planning to be a spokesman for what football should be or shouldn’t be but rather is an actor taking on an exciting challenge,” Dwight Caines, the president of domestic marketing at Sony Pictures, wrote in an email on Aug. 6, 2014, to three top studio executives about how to position the movie.
“We’ll develop messaging with the help of NFL consultant to ensure that we are telling a dramatic story and not kicking the hornet’s nest.”
Another email on Aug. 1, 2014, said some “unflattering moments for the NFL” were deleted or changed, while in another note on July 30, 2014, a top Sony lawyer is said to have taken “most of the bite” out of the film “for legal reasons with the NFL and that it was not a balance issue.” Other emails in September 2014 discuss an aborted effort to reach out to the NFL.
The movie is due out in December, but the trailer was released Monday. It showed Smith as Bennet Omalu, whose pioneering work diagnosing a disease in U.S. football players known as CTE — a degenerative brain disease linked to repeated blows to the head — led to one of the NFL’s biggest crises: a possibility that the game itself could be lethal.
Suicides by former star players, including Dave Duerson and Junior Seau, have heightened the scrutiny on the NFL, which has agreed to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to settle a lawsuit brought by about 5,000 retired players, who accused the league of deliberately hiding the dangers of concussions.
The trailer showed several scenes depicting Omalu with jaw-dropping surprise in his lab and angrily demanding “the truth” from people who appear to be from the NFL. Many other scientists have built on Omalu’s work, which began in 2002, and the NFL has since donated tens of millions of dollars to study the effects of concussions and develop ways of treating them.
Landesman, who also wrote the movie, said in an interview that the email conversations do not show Sony bowing to the NFL, but rather trying to portray the characters and story as accurately as possible to reduce the chance that the league could attack the filmmakers for taking too much creative licence.
He added that like many large companies, movie studios that take on controversial topics try to anticipate how their films might be criticized and prepare defenses. He confirmed that Sony lawyers deleted some material from the film, but he declined to elaborate on the cuts beyond saying that they did so to make the story “better and richer and fairer.”
Those changes, he said, did not to alter the thrust of the story, which focuses on Omalu, a forensic pathologist who identified CTE, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy.
“We’re just being smart because any large corporation will design a response to something it considers to be a threat to its existence,” Landesman said of Sony’s efforts. “We don’t want to give the NFL a toehold to say, ‘They are making it up,’ and damage the credibility of the movie . . . We didn’t have a need to make up anything because it was powerful and revelatory on its own.
“There was never an instance where we compromised the storytelling to protect ourselves from the NFL.”
Still, the issue of how to portray the story of players living with the lethal hazards of the game has been fraught, even for a studio that has no substantial ties to the NFL. The league had previously pressured business partners to step back from issues that are potentially embar- rassing to it.
In 2013, NFL officials complained to ESPN executives about a documentary, League of Denial, that the network had produced with Frontline, detailing the league’s response to the dangers of head trauma. ESPN stopped working on the project with Frontline, which later broadcast it.
In 2004, the NFL complained to the chief executive of the Walt Disney Co., the parent company of ESPN, about a hard-hitting television series on the sports network that delivered an unsavoury depiction of professional football players. The show ended after one season.
In this case, the dozens of emails, some of which were first reported on Reddit, suggested that Sony saw a dramatic story behind Omalu, a Nigerian immigrant who became an unexpected whistle-blower when he tried to warn the NFL about the risk of playing football. Landesman, a former journalist who has written for The New York Times Magazine, was asked in November 2013 to join the project by Scott and his wife, Giannina, who are producing the film.
In one of the emails hacked from Sony by an unknown culprit and posted on WikiLeaks, Amy Pascal, then a co-chairwoman of Sony Pictures, called the movie “important and controversial” and said the studio was “committed passionate and enthusiastic” about making it.
But in the same email, from July 2014, she urged caution. “We need to know exactly what we can and can’t do and if this is a ‘true’ story or not,” she wrote, taking note of other movies about real events, including Zero Dark Thirty, Moneyball, Captain Phillips and The Social Network, all of which were later criticized to varying degrees for veering from accuracy.
In other emails, Sony executives discussed how to make the movie appear less threatening. In several emails they said that press materials should note that Smith likes football and one of his sons played the game. In September 2014, Landesman wrote to Paul Hicks, the top spokesman at the NFL, to set up a meeting with NFL commissioner Roger Goodell. Hicks asked Landesman for a copy of the script, but several Sony executives were aghast that Landesman had reached out to the NFL independently and the idea of a meeting was scuttled. The only comment the NFL has made is that it welcomes attention to health and safety issues.
“We are encouraged by the ongoing focus on the critical issue of player health and safety,” the league said in a statement when asked to comment on Concussion. “We have no higher priority. We all know more about this issue than we did 10 or 20 years ago. As we continue to learn more, we apply those learnings to make our game and players safer.”