Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [184]
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:
They note with delight GATT’s roiling the French,
The folks who make teeth around the world clench.
The French claim our movies, TV and such,
Will put their own film makers in Dutch.
They clamor their culture’s in peril, The French,
Terrified Spielberg will make them retrench.
Overshadowed by “Jaws” and “Terminator 2,”
How will Gerard get his Depar-dieu?
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 1980S 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;