E-mails show Sony eased up on NFL
When Sony Pictures Entertainment decided to make a movie focusing on the death and dementia that professional football players have endured from repeated hits to the head — and the NFL’s efforts toward a cover-up — the studio signed Will Smith to star as one of the first scientists to disclose the problem. It named the film bluntly: “Concussion.”
But in the end even this studio, which unlike most others in Hollywood has no significant business ties to the NFL, found itself softening some of the blows it might have inflicted on the multibilliondollar sports enterprise that controls the nation’s mostwatched game.
In dozens of studio e-mails unearthed by hackers, Sony Pictures 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 story, rather than as a condemnation of football or the league.
“Will is not antifootball (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 e-mail to three top studio executives about how to position the movie. “We’ll develop messaging with the help of (an) NFL consultant to ensure that we are telling a dramatic story and not kicking the hornet’s nest.”
Another e-mail noted that some “unflattering moments for the NFL” were deleted or changed, and in another correspondence, 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.” Another string of e-mails discusses an aborted effort to reach out to the NFL.
The trailer for the movie, due out in December, was released Monday. It prominently showed Smith as Bennet Omalu, whose pioneering work diagnosing an illness 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 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 NFL has previously pressured business partners to step back from issues that are potentially embarrassing to it.
In 2013, NFL officials complained to ESPN executives about a documentary, “League of Denial” (based on a book by former Chronicle writer Mark Fainaru-Wada and his brother Steve Fainaru), which it 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 2003, the NFL complained to the chief executive of the Walt Disney Co., the parent company of ESPN, about “Playmakers,” a hard-hitting television series on the sports network that delivered an unsavory depiction of professional football players. The show ended after one season.