Jihad vs. McWorld (53 page)

15.
Even the first time around, in the 1930s, the public interest ultimately was undercut by the compromises won by commercialism: see Robert W. McChesney,
Telecommunications, Mass Media, and Democracy
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

16.
This is not exactly a new story. As William Leach tells it in his
Land of Desire: Merchants, Power and the Rise of a New American Culture
(New York: Vintage Books, 1994), the rise of consumerism from the 1890s through the Depression more or less parallels the rise of American capitalism.

17.
The absence of government interest in America is startling, given the implications of the new media merger mania for freedom of information, equal access to knowledge, and issues of monopoly. A private coalition of sixty nonprofit, consumer, labor, and civil rights groups has convened a Telecommunications Policy Roundtable that hopes to provide public debate about the public interest in these new technologies, but it is unlikely to be an adequate counterbalance to the multibillion-dollar deals currently being struck by private corporations.

  1.
Jeff Miller, “Viewpoints: Should Phone Companies Make Films?”
The New York Times
, January 2, Section 3, p. 11.

  2.
Roger Cohen, “Europeans Back French Curbs on U.S. Movies,”
The New York Times
, December 12, 1993, Section I, p. 24.

  3.
Cited by Roger Cohen, “Aux Armes! France Rallies,”
The New York Times
, January 2, 1994, p. H 1.

  4.
Marselli Sumarno, “Indonesia,” in the
Variety International Film Guide
(Hollywood: Samuel French Trade, 1993), p. 210. The United States demanded easier access for American film exports to Indonesia in return for guaranteeing it would not encumber Indonesian textile imports into the United States.

  5.
Roger Cohen, “Europeans Back French Curbs,” p. A 24.

  6.
Alan Riding, “French Film Industry Circles the Wagons,”
The New York Times
, September 18, 1993, Section I, p. 11.

  7.
Thus, a local hit like
Les Visiteurs
can still outearn a megahit import like
Jurassic Park
.

  8.
Bernard Weinraub, “Directors Battle Over GATT,”
The New York Times
, December 12, 1993, Section I, p. 24.

  9.
Paul Chutkow, “Who Will Control the Soul of French Cinema?”
The New York Times
, August 9, 1993, Section 2, p. 22.

10.
Roger Cohen, “Barbarians at the Box Offices,”
The New York Times
, July 11, 1993, Section 9, p. 3.

11.
In a piece of doggerel called “The GATT in the VAT,” Stuart Elliot captures the mood of ridicule with which Americans view the French anxieties:

      Stuart Elliot, “GATT in the VAT,”
The New York Times
, December 12, 1993, p. E 5.

12.
Germany is more typical of Europe than France. It has offered much less resistance to Hollywood. In the late 1950s, it had over seven thousand screens available and sold over 750 million tickets, with German films counting for nearly half of the business done. America took in only one-quarter of the revenues, while French and Italian films were each earning 10 percent of the market. Germany offered its people a genuinely diversified, culturally heterogeneous culture market. By 1975, however, television
and rising prices had driven ticket sales down to only 128 million, while the number of screens available had been reduced to around thirty-two hundred. Meanwhile, the American share had crept up to over 41 percent while the German share of revenues was down to only 13 percent. During the 1980
S
the German share skidded erratically to and fro between 10 and 20 percent of the market, but American imports climbed inexorably through 53 percent in 1981 to 66 percent in 1984 up to 83 percent in 1992, a year in which nine of Germany’s ten top-grossing films were American, with
Basic Instinct, Hook, Beauty and the Beast, Home Alone
, and
JFK
occupying the top five spots. (All figures are from information provided by the Statistical Department of the Spitzenorganisation der Filmwirtschaft e.V. in a letter dated June 28, 1993.) As in other countries, Germany still is home to a great deal of filmmaking, as many as three thousand productions each year. But only 10 percent of these represent serious productions with real budgets and a far smaller percentage actually find their way to a commercial screening.

13.
David Stratton, “Gone with the Wind,”
Variety International Film Guide
, p. 14.

14.
Figures from the Statistical Department of the Spitzenorganisation der Filmwirtschaft e.V.

15.
“Sleeping With the Enemy: Europe’s Film Industry,”
The Economist
, October 26, 1991, p. 91. Limiting the number of American films cannot prevent the successful megahits from reaping disproportionate percentages of overall revenues.

16.
French film director Alain Corneau warned “Think of a world in which there is only one image.” Cited in Riding, “French Film Industry.”

17.
Uma de Cunha, “India,”
Variety International Film Guide
, p. 205.

18.
Deborah Young, “Iranian Cinema Now,” in
Variety International Film Guide
, p. 30.

19.
In
Dances with Wolves
, Kevin Costner documents the conquest of Native American Indians by the new Americans; will Islam fare any better against Kevin Costner?
Dances with Wolves
turns out to have made more than half its revenue from foreign screenings. This is true for more and more American films, including such seeming “American” hits as
JFK, Pretty Woman
, and
Robin Hood
.

20.
Quoted in David Hansen, “The Real Cultural Revolution,”
Newsweek
, November 1, 1993, p. 74.

21.
Cited by Andrew Horton, “Russia,”
Variety International Film Guide
, p. 324. What is getting made in Russia is tawdry genre films with titles like
The Little Giant of Big Sex, Violence, Whorehouse
, and everybody’s favorite,
Even KGB Agents Fall in Love
. For the rest, traditional studios like Mosfilm and the Gorky Studio are now principally engaged in servicing foreign productions like the American-made
Russia House
to earn foreign currency.

22.
Hollywood’s domination of the global market is evident not only in its revenues and ticket sales, but also in its increased share of imports in every importing market. A survey of the “Best Ten” list of foreign films in Japan published by
Kinema Jumpo
starting in 1924 offers a revealing picture of the
growth and decline of national cinema in countries like India, Sweden, France, and Italy that once supplied Japan with high-quality imports. After an early monopoly by Hollywood in the late twenties and thirties when (from 1924 through 1934) 77 (or 73 percent) of the top 106 foreign films were American, America became only one among many importers. From 1935 to 1940 only 27 (or 45 percent) of 60 top imports were American. After the war, from 1948 through 1968, 59 (or just 28 percent) of imports were American. In 1960, for example, only Charlie Chaplin’s
The Great Dictator
made the top ten, while three Italian, four French, and two Russian films completed the list. As late as 1967 only
In the Heat of the Night
was on the list, the other nine top foreign films coming from a variety of Swedish, Soviet, and other European coproductions. But starting in 1969, between four and seven of the top ten imports were American (70 or 54 percent of 130 top films between 1969 and 1988), and in the last five years the American lock has meant eight or nine of the top ten imports as well as top-grossing films measured against domestic production. All statistics are from the Japanese film magazine
Kinema Jumpo
Best Ten: 1924–89.

23.
Coproduction makes it harder to identify product by a single national culture, but it has been more about financing films internationally than creating them that way artistically, and although coproduction has certainly given an international flavor to films like
The Crying Game
and
The Lover
, its main impact has been to regionalize and thus denationalize what were once specifically French or Swedish or Indonesian or Chinese pictures.
  “The ‘new democracies’ of East Europe are learning some bitter lessons as the air is let out of the cushion of state funding, driving them into unlikely partnerships which threaten ‘national character’; in East Asia, long time enemies China and Taiwan are both depending on the dominant Hong Kong film industry to pump life into their own film cultures; and in Scandinavia, multi-Nordic co-productions have all but obliterated the concept of a film’s ‘nationality’.” David Stratton, “Gone with the Wind,”
Variety International Film Guide
, p. 20.

24.
As Derek Elley, editor of
Variety International Film Guide
, has written, coproducing a film in Italy and Yugoslavia probably means planning the film in a Roman bistro, a cheap and quick shoot in what was Yugoslavia, and then … “An American star who hasn’t worked in Hollywood for some months is signed up for a male lead, a British character actor who has been holidaying in Rome agrees to play the ‘heavy’ for modest terms … an Italian actress who can mumble a few words of English … An American director who is in-between TV series is signed on as director, though it is vaguely explained to him that he will not be credited as director in Italy. The producer now books his studio and pays the expense to Yugoslavia. The Yugoslavs will pay the expenses there and probably leave a lot of the company with useless dinars in their pockets.” Derek Elley, “Coproductions: Who Needs Them?”
Variety International Film Guide
, p. 19.

25.
Another French strategy is to call for the dubbing of French films into English (imitating the dubbing of American films into French, which has
helped Hollywood capture French audiences), but dubbing has the side effect of slightly “Americanizing” French films and enhancing the sovereignty of English. The French resort to the strategy to prevent the even more destructive Hollywood habit of remaking French films—as happened with
Three Men and a Baby
and
Point of No Return
, originally
La Femme Nikita
.

26.
Germany’s Volker Schlöndorff, Australia’s Peter Weir, Canada’s Bruce Beresford, and Holland’s Paul Verhoeven are only a few of the directors who have taken their big talents to Hollywood where those talents have been tailored to its diminutive needs and tastes. Along with Wim Wenders and other European directors, England’s David Puttnam, who tried Hollywood and went home, is calling for an extension of French quotas and French-style subsidies to all of Europe. But if there is any venue from which “you can’t go home again” it is probably Hollywood, and most directors from abroad are trying to figure out how to make the journey the other way.

27.
See Philip Weiss, “Hollywood at a Fever Pitch,”
The New York Times Magazine
, December 26, 1993, p. 22. He auditioned (interviewed) for a job with people like Scott Rudin, the equally celebrated young producer of the
Sister Act
and
Family Values
movies.

28.
Report on France,
Variety International Film Guide
, p. 163.

29.
Movies are about marketing and marketing means deferring judgment to the DAT—the digital audiotape of audience response at the special previews producers arrange to test-market their films. When forced to choose between a Chen Kaige insight and a DAT report on audience response, producers like Scott Rudin will tell you that DAT wins every time.

30.
All Indonesian figures and quotes from Philip Shenon, “Indonesian Films Squeezed Out,”
The New York Times
, October 29, 1992, p. A 19.

31.
For all the fears abroad, America’s global film sovereignty is still just gearing up. As John Marcom, Jr., notes in his
Forbes
essay “Dream Factory to the World,” “Hollywood is already one of the world’s most powerful suppliers of consumer products. Yet it has scarcely begun tapping foreign markets.” John Marcom, Jr., “Dream Factory to the World,”
Forbes
, April 29, 1991, p. 98.

32.
Despite their success, American producers actually complain that the world is radically underscreened. Although half of American film revenues now come from abroad, constituting a $3.5 billion surplus, the United States still has a movie screen for every 10,333 people (24,000 screens for 250 million people), while Japan has only one screen for every 61,500 people. Italy’s film houses are not air-conditioned, and most of the world has not yet seen the lucrative magic of multiplex cinemas—although they are on the way, with Time Warner, for example, scheduled to construct thirty in Japan alone in 1993–94. Alan Citron, “American Films Boffo Overseas,”
International Herald Tribune
, March 31, 1992.

33.
Not literally, of course. There are limits to the direct influence of films. Bosnian and Serbian assassins wear Adidas, sport Walkmans, and know all
about Michael Jordan but still manage to slaughter their neighbors with brutal zest. Saudi Muslims watch Western consumer films without seeming to give up their religion. Both Hitler and Stalin were notorious film buffs while P.L.O. chairman Arafat apparently is enamored of American Westerns, but this is not to suggest that
High Noon
or
Gunfight at the OK Corral
either deterred him from or led him to his fateful handshake with Israeli Prime Minister Rabin in Washington in 1994.