Pick Your Villains Carefully

The Cold War is over. The Soviet Union is dead. So who plays the enemy in a remake of the 1984 Cold War drama "Red Dawn"?

For MGM in 2009, the answer was simple: the Chinese. Just substitute one really big communist country for another.

By 2011, that didn't look like such a good idea. China is a rapidly-developing superpower that allows only 20 foreign films into its theaters each year. For MGM and other movie distributors, angering the Chinese government might mean "Red Dawn" and all their other movies would be blocked from Chinese theaters.

Enter the post-production miracle of digital editing. Take out references to the Chinese as aggressors, take out the Chinese flags and uniforms. Substitute North Korea, a country so poor and closed to the West that the movie industry has no money at stake there. The Los Angeles Times reports.