Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [185]
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