“Scott Rudin got me to run at a speed I didn’t know I could run,” Chris Rock told Charlie Rose Thursday in effusive comments about the “superproducer” who has become the victim of a witch hunt after North Korean hackers stole and fenced his emails with a Sony executive through The New York Times and other mainstream publications.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=GF9LtxYCOrw
“Scott believed in me as a leading man,” said Rock, whose highly praised new movie Top Five was co-produced by Rudin, in a PBS appearance.
The extraordinarily successful Rudin is being pilloried over candid comments made in a stolen email thread. Sony co-chairwoman Amy Pascal, Rudin’s correspondent in the frequently testy exchange, is “under intensifying pressure,” according to Daniel Miller of the Los Angeles Times — who backs up that claim with quotes from a UCLA sociology professor, a crisis PR flack with no Hollywood clients listed on her web site, and actor Mark Ruffalo, whose film Foxcatcher was called by National Review Online critic Armond White “the worst film of 2014 no matter what movie opens between now and year’s end.”
But in some self-effacing comments, Rock, whose movie career to date has been extensive but less spectacular than his work as a comic, writer, producer and social commentator, credits Rudin for pushing him to higher artistic attainment on his new movie. “A leading man has to have a certain level of sex appeal,” Rock said. “I don’t think of myself as having sex appeal. A leading man has to lead. I don’t think of anybody as following me.”
Rock made no mention of the ginned up controversy that is sourced entirely from Sony’s stolen property.