'Top Gun' Tells The Whole Story of China and Hollywood
Tom Cruise on the set of Top Gun. (Paramount Pictures/Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images)
The blockbuster is about taking out a uranium plant in some unnamed country. Really, it's about taking on the Communist Party.
When Erich Schwartzel moved to Los Angeles in 2013 to cover Hollywood for The Wall Street Journal, he started seeing Chinese influence everywhere he looked. China was on its way to becoming the most powerful foreign market for American movies—and those movies were becoming a proxy battleground for the ideological rivalry between Washington and Beijing.
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