LOS ANGELES, Sept 2 — 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 — 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 multibillion sports enterprise that controls the nation’s most-watched game.
In dozens of studio emails unearthed by hackers, Sony Pictures executives, director Peter Landesman and representatives of Smith discussed how to avoid antagonising 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 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 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 noted that some “unflattering moments for the NFL” were deleted or changed, while 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 emails discuss 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 a disease 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.
The NFL has declined to comment on the trailer or the movie, and several Sony executives, through a spokeswoman, also declined to speak about the movie or the strategy used to produce and market it.
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 license.
He added that like many large companies, movie studios that take on controversial topics try to anticipate how their films might be criticised and prepare defences. 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 chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE.
“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.”
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, called “League of Denial,” that 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 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 discovered a disease and 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 co-producing the film.
In one of the hundreds of emails hacked from Sony by an unknown culprit and posted on WikiLeaks, Amy Pascal, then the 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 criticised to varying degrees for veering from accuracy. “I know these can be dicey waters but none more than this one,” she wrote.
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.” — The New York Times
