The Sony Pictures lot in Culver City.
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  • The Sony Pictures lot in Culver City. Amy Pascal was the film industry's "most prominent female executive," Hollywood Reporter notes.

Remember a few months ago when "North Korea" (or rather "Guardians of Peace") hacked into the top-secret servers of Sony Entertainment and publicly shamed a bunch of rich white people by publishing the contents of their private texts, e-mails, and contract documents (oh, and also trying to prevent that Seth Rogen movie from coming out)? Well, in the immortal words of N.W.A., the motherfucking saga continues.

The Hollywood Reporter reported this morning that Amy Pascal will be stepping down from her position as cochairman of Sony Entertainment when her current contract expires in March. And while it MIGHT be true that she has "always wanted to be a producer," it's also true that she could have left her job as one of the most powerful, influential, and well-paid women in the entertainment business any time before being branded a racist backbiter in public for comments she made in private, the true tone of which might be subject to some debate—though even to suggest that there might be shades of meaning worth considering is utterly beside the point that none of us had the right to read her correspondence.

In case anyone was wondering, the new model for class warfare—or maybe just a variation on good old high-stakes corporate intrigue—has claimed a very significant casualty.

The story goes on to report that Pascal's "major new production venture" projects will include "the new Ghostbusters film as well as future Amazing Spider Man outings."

“I have spent almost my entire professional life at Sony Pictures and I am energized to be starting this new chapter based at the company I call home,” she said in a statement. “I have always wanted to be a producer... As the slate for the next two years has come together, it felt like the right time to transition into this new role. I am so grateful to my team, some of whom I have worked with for the last 20 years and others who have joined more recently. I am leaving the studio in great hands. I am so proud of what we have all done together and I look forward to a whole lot more"...

As part of a four-year agreement, SPE will finance Pascal’s venture and retain all distribution rights worldwide to the films. She will be based on the Sony Pictures lot in Culver City.

In the two-plus months since Sony first noticed that its servers had been breached by an unknown group dubbing itself Guardians of Peace, the studio watched powerlessly as huge swaths of its most sensitive documents and correspondence were leaked on the Internet. Among the most damaging were the personal information and social security numbers of some 47,000 past and present staffers as well as film budgets, profitability figures and thousands of e-mails sent to and from Pascal...

As one of Hollywood’s longest-serving studio heads and the industry's most prominent female executive, Pascal reigned during a time of box-office success and relative calm for the studio, which only began to endure upheavals in its upper ranks in the past year. Perhaps her biggest coup was spearheading the nearly $4 billion Spider-Man franchise, which remains the highest-grossing superhero franchise in Hollywood...

Pascal says she got her first industry job — working as a secretary answering phones for the legendary BBC producer Tony Garnett — after answering an ad in The Hollywood Reporter. Early in her career, she worked under Scott Rudin at 20th Century Fox. Ironically, it was a nasty email exchange between Pascal and Rudin that was leaked by the hackers on Dec. 8 and posted on Gawker a day later that may have been the final straw for Pascal. That raw exchange, which covered everything from a Steve Jobs biopic that failed to get off the ground and was eventually jettisoned to Universal Pictures to unflattering comments about Angelina Jolie and Michael Fassbender, was followed by Dec. 10 leaked e-mails between the two that appeared to mock black movies. It all proved to be just too much candor in a town that likes to keep its machinations well behind the scenes.