Last Call For The Hollywood Shuffle

So if you recall last week's Sony Pictures data heist, you know crooks have been leaking devastating internal data from Sony Pictures showing just how mindlessly stupid the company really is on a number of issues.  First, the company has a major, major gender gap and diversity problem:

Here are the stats: of the top 17 highest-paid executives at Sony, 88% are white and 94% are men. To put that into actual real-world numbers, 15 of these executives are white (including the list’s sole woman, Amy Pascal, who’s the co-chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment and chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment Motion Picture Group), one is Indian (Man Jit Singh, president of Sony Pictures Home Entertainment), and one is black (Dwight R. Caines, marketing president at Sony Pictures Entertainment). 

And in case you were curious about whether or not the gender pay gap is also an issue over at Sony as well, Columbia Pictures co-president of production Hanna Minghella makes $800,000 less per year than co-president of production Michael De Luca, with whom she partners on many projects. Minghella got her title in October 2010 after working with the company for almost 10 years; De Luca’s only had his since December 2013.

Now we find out the company's executives are pretty clueless on race and President Obama, too.

Before Sony Pictures chair Amy Pascal attended a breakfast of Hollywood bigwigs last November with Barack Obama, she emailed her friend Scott Rudin for suggestions on what she should ask the president. 

In what has become the latest embarrassing email uncovered in a trove of messages leaked by hackers who attacked Sony, Pascal wrote Rudin: “What should I ask the president at this stupid Jeffrey breakfast?” She was referring to a breakfast hosted by DreamWorks Animation head and major Democratic donor Jeffrey Katzenberg. 

Rudin, a top film producer responsible for films like No Country for Old Men and Moneyball, responded, “Would he like to finance some movies.” Pascal replied, “I doubt it. Should I ask him if he liked DJANGO?” Rudin responded: “12 YEARS.” Pascal quickly continued down the path of guessing Obama preferred movies by or starring African Americans. “Or the butler. Or think like a man? [sic]” 

Rudin’s response: “Ride-along. I bet he likes Kevin Hart.”

Hahaha gosh that's hysterical, guys.  Look, like Chris Rock said, Hollywood is run by rich white people and they are entirely tone deaf to everything about race and culture across the board.

It's a white industry. Just as the NBA is a black industry. I'm not even saying it's a bad thing. It just is. And the black people they do hire tend to be the same person. That person tends to be female and that person tends to be Ivy League. And there's nothing wrong with that. As a matter of fact, that's what I want for my daughters. But something tells me that the life my privileged daughters are leading right now might not make them the best candidates to run the black division of anything. And the person who runs the black division of a studio should probably have worked with black people at some point in their life. Clint Culpepper [a white studio chief who specializes in black movies] does a good job at Screen Gems because he's the kind of guy who would actually go see Best Man Holiday. But how many black men have you met working in Hollywood? They don't really hire black men. A black man with bass in his voice and maybe a little hint of facial hair? Not going to happen. It is what it is. I'm a guy who's accepted it all.

So no, not surprising at all that Sony's team assumed the President likes Kevin Hart movies.