Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [186]
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.
Chapter 7. Television and MTV: McWorld’s Noisy Soul
1. For background on the role of television and advertising in American life see the older books by Marie Winn, Plug-In Drug (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1977);