Sony hacking: Pascal's head could roll for emails

Sony co-chairwoman Amy Pascal (R) with actor Christoph Waltz who starred in Django Unchained. Photo / Getty Images

It was late 2003, and Amy Pascal was furious. The longtime Hollywood hand, who had risen from a secretary to become an industry kingmaker as a Sony Pictures executive, expected to soon take over the studio's top job. But then her phone rang. And she got the news. She wasn't getting the job. Some guy - an outsider, no less - named Michael Lynton would be her new boss. She had been bumped.

"Amy had a pretty good argument," Howard Stringer, then Sony's chief executive, later told the New York Times. "'Why are you bringing in this guy?'" Stringer wanted someone who could navigate emerging digital technologies - but still, he knew how important Pascal was to Sony.

Known for her aggressiveness, she had a preternatural knack for picking blockbuster movies. Under her leadership, Sony had scores of movies hit No. 1 at the box office. So the Sony big shot devised a unique power-sharing scheme between Pascal and Lynton.

Many thought the union would explode. But it didn't. "We fight, for real, like people do," Pascal told the New York Times. "But nobody sees that but us."

Now, however, following the disastrous leaks of emails in which Pascal appeared impetuous, profane and racially insensitive, her internal battles have become a lot more public. One of her emails to Scott Rudin depicted the epic unraveling of a high-profile biopic of Steve Jobs. That exchange, however, was only an opening salvo before the revelation that Pascal made racially insensitive jokes about President Barack Obama.

Film producer Scott Rudin with Sony co-chairwoman Amy Pascal and President Barack Obama. Photo / Getty Images

"Should I ask him if he liked DJANGO?" asked Pascal, referring to Django Unchained, the Oscar-winning movie about a freed slave. A producer responded: "12 YEARS." Pascal replied: "Or the butler. Or think like a man? [sic]."

The leaks now have Pascal backpedaling big time. "The content of my emails to Scott were insensitive and inappropriate but are not an accurate reflection of who I am," Pascal said in a statement. "Although this was a private communication that was stolen, I accept full responsibility for what I wrote and apologize to everyone who was offended."

It remains unclear what the full scope of the damage will be to both Sony and Pascal.

Some analysts said the drama may actually boost box office numbers for The Interview, the North Korea-focused movie that some news reports claim spurred the hacks. But no one's saying this will help Pascal, who has now come under the greatest scrutiny of her otherwise meteoric career. The embarrassment comes at a particularly delicate moment for the executive. Pascal's contract with Sony expires in 2015, heightening doubts over her future with the company, if not in the industry.

A scene from the movie The Interview. Photo / AP

This being Hollywood, there's no shortage of opinion. "Typically, somebody senior's head rolls when there is a hacking scandal, and the embarrassing email disclosures just help determine who that is going to be in this case," Laura Martin, senior media analyst at Needham & Co., told the Los Angeles Times. "If she becomes the weak link because people believe she can't actually work in the business, it's just, OK, now we know who it is going to be. None of it is particularly fair, but if somebody's head has to roll, they are looking for the path of least resistance."

And for Sony, which has endured a string of humiliating hacking scandals, Pascal has become its most exposed employee. Writing in Deadline, columnist Mike Fleming thinks the drama could knock her from her Sony position. "Is it possible their track records for quality, thoughtful films and collaborations with top talent can be set aside and that Rudin and Pascal could be tarred and defined by momentary lapses and poor attempts at humor that paint them as being racially insensitive?" he asked on Thursday. "How long before Sony's unwillingness to hit back ... topples this regime?"

Public relations expert Ashley McCown agreed. "This is troubling on every level," she told the Los Angeles Times. "She says this is not who she is, but then why did she say it in the first place? There is no humor to be found in that at all. The board of Sony is going to have to take a hard look at this situation and make some tough choices."

Angelina Jolie was targeted in the leaked emails. Photo / AP

The comments represent a sharp fall for what was one of the nation's most powerful female executives. Ranked as Forbes's 28th most powerful woman in the world, hers was a career that started small and got big through pluck, tenacity and the most Hollywood-prized talent of all: an eye for box office gold. Born in 1958, she was raised in Los Angeles County, the daughter of a bookstore owner. She went to the University of California at Los Angeles, graduating with a degree in international relations - never her true passion.

"Movies defined what was possible for a young ambitious girl growing up in Southern California," she once told Sony employees. And it defined her more than most. She caught on as a secretary for a local producer, and spent her free time reading scripts and making contacts that helped her claw her way into the major studios. In the mid-1980s, her career got traction when she developed Groundhog Day and Awakenings for Columbia Pictures, later pushing out A League of Their Own.

Through it, she cultivated a reputation as someone driven by intuition and instinct. "Amy is a gut-level decision maker," Matt Tolmach, a president at Sony's Columbia Pictures, told the Times in 2009. "She responds very viscerally to material and to people."

But now the same candor that guided her ascent for so long may also facilitate her downfall. It's a sequence of events Stringer once fretted over. He said Hollywood needed to move past the egos that entrapped it in the past. Years ago, when he first brought another executive in to co-run Sony Pictures with Pascal, he said the leadership would survive if it resisted drama.

"Studios collapse in on themselves when politics interfere," he said. "But there really hasn't been drama."

Consider that changed.