How One Huge Mistake Exposed Hollywood’s Darkest Secrets

The one time former Sony Pictures CEO Michael Lynton changed up his routine, he made the biggest mistake of his career.

“I normally didn’t attend read-throughs because I was always the suit. I was the guy who was sitting in the background trying to make sure that nobody went off the rails,” Lynton, 66, told Obsessed: The Podcast guest host—and fellow Snap Inc. board member—Joanna Coles. “But in this case, I had to be in the room because we had to make the choice.”

In response to the movie, a state-sponsored hacking group executed a devastating cyber attack on Sony Pictures.

In his new book, From Mistakes to Meaning, written with former Treasury Department Chief of Staff Joshua Steiner, Lynton described how he learned of the hack on his morning drive to work.

“They wiped out 70 percent of our computers, so everything was brought to a standstill,” Lynton said, not to mention leaked scripts, full film cuts, and celebrity emails.

The thousands of leaked emails included film producer Scott Rudin calling Angelina Jolie a “minimally talented spoiled brat,” and studio executive Clint Culpepper insulting comedian Kevin Hart with, “I’m not saying he’s a whore, but he’s a whore.”

In one email thread, Ben Affleck asked producers of Finding Your Roots to conceal that one of his ancestors had been a slave owner.

“To do this would be a violation of PBS rules, actually, even for Batman,” the show’s host, Henry Louis Gates, wrote in response—though the revelations were ultimately left on the cutting room floor.

The leaks also exposed the gender pay gap in Hollywood, with Jennifer Lawrence and Amy Adams revealed to have received less money for American Hustle than their male co-stars.

“They put out all of these salacious emails from all over the studio, which had a lot of correspondence with movie stars and agents,” Lynton said, “which the press picked up on, and that made it a big media event, and it went on for months.”

Ultimately, Sony Pictures co-chair Amy Pascal took the brunt of the public fallout, including for her racially insensitive emails regarding then-President Barack Obama.

Lynton said Sony had been in a “competitive situation” with Universal Studios over the film’s acquisition.

“I didn’t want to be the parent. I didn’t want to be the cop. I didn’t want to be the person who said, ‘No,’” Lynton said. “In fact, what I wanted to do was be with the cool kids—meaning Seth Rogen and James Franco—and all those people around having a great time reading the script.”

“So I said, ‘Yes, let’s do it,’ when the reading was over, and everybody was cheering and saying how funny it was,” Lynton added. “And nothing good came of that.”

Lynton attributes the mistake to his lonely childhood. During his upbringing, Lynton’s family moved to the Netherlands, where he didn’t know anyone or speak the language. “And what I developed as a result of that is a deep desire to belong. I really wanted to be with a cool group of kids,” Lynton said.

It was that specific desire to fit in that resurfaced in 2014.

“I think it was the impulse that caused me to do this," Lynton said. “And I had not really understood that until we went through the process of this book.”