Talk about getting real, Sony’s former co-chair Amy Pascal got right down to business yesterday in a candid talk with journalist Tina Brown at a Women in the World conference in San Francisco.
“All I did was get fired,” Pascal told Brown, according to this report by Variety.
While Sony announced Pascal’s exit last week as “stepping down,” Pascal is telling press that she was pushed out. Not only did she take on questions about that, but everything involved in her downfall, including the hack, the leaked emails, the racial emails about President Obama, and those other comments about Angelina Jolie and Hollywood elite.
Pascal was incredibly candid in the Q&A. Here are some gems:
On getting hacked:
“I ran this company and I had to worry about everybody who was really scared…People were really scared…But nagging in the back of my mind, I kept calling (the IT department) and being like, ‘They don’t have our emails, tell me they don’t have our emails,’ ” she said. “But then they did. That was a bad moment. And you know what you write in emails.”
On those Obama emails:
“It was horrible. That was horrible. As a woman, what I did was control how everybody felt about themselves and about me…and there was this horrible moment when I realized there was absolutely nothing I could do about whether I’d hurt people, whether I’d betrayed people.”
On Jolie:
“Angie didn’t care…Everybody understood because we all live in this weird thing called Hollywood. If we were all actually were nice, it wouldn’t work.”
On dealing with Hollywood people in general:
“They’re bottomless pits of need. You’ve never seen anything like it.”
And what she’s learned from the whole debacle:
“Say exactly what you think directly to people all the time. In the moment, the first time.”
It’s not all downhill. With her new production deal with Sony Pictures Entertainment, Pascal is already set to work on the new Spider-Man universe and the Ghostbusters film featuring the all female cast.