4 Why Hollywood Rules the World, and Whether We Should CareRead more at location 1234
In no other cultural area is America’s export prowess so strong. Movies are very expensive to make, and in a given year there are far fewer films released than books, CDs, or paintings. These conditions appear to favor dominant producers at the expense of niche markets.Read more at location 1239
Moviemaking also is prone to geographic clustering. Many cultural innovations and breakthroughs are spatially concentrated. If a good Italian Renaissance painter was not born in Florence, Venice, or Rome, he usually found it worthwhile to move to one of those locales.Read more at location 1242
European movies, in particular, have failed to penetrate global markets and also have lost ground at home.Read more at location 1246
television, excess subsidies, demographics, language, the size of the American market, and Hollywood’s more entrepreneurial environment.Read more at location 1252
The United States has at least one natural advantage in movie-making—it has the largest single home-market for cinema in dollar terms (although total attendance is higher in India).Read more at location 1255
The United States, for instance, has been a large country for a long time, but only recently have European movies held such a low share of their home markets. In the mid-1960s, American films accounted for 35 percent of box office revenues in continental Europe; today the figure ranges between 80 to 90 percent.Read more at location 1259
Furthermore, only certain kinds of cinema cluster in Hollywood. In a typical year the Western European nations make more movies than America does. In numeric terms most of the world’s movies come from Asia, not from the United States.Read more at location 1263
The Hollywood advantage is concentrated in one very particular kind of moviemaking: films that are entertaining, highly visible, and have broad global appeal.Read more at location 1266
As recently as 1985, French movies outgrossed the Hollywood product in their home market. Since that time, Hollywood’s ability to capture so much of French film revenue (often up to 80 percent) has come largely because French revenues have declined, not because Hollywood revenues have risen so much.Read more at location 1276
The turning point in this dynamic appears to have started in the 1970s. Before the 1970s, most national European cinemas still experienced a significant degree of export success, whatever problems the industry as a whole had.Read more at location 1279
In Germany, 800 million movie tickets were bought in 1956, but only 180 million were bought in 1962. At the same time, the number of television sets rose from 700,000 to 7.2 million. In the U.K., cinematic attendance fell from 292 million in 1967 to 73 million in 1986. In France, movie attendance dropped from 450 million in 1956 to 122 million in 1988.InRead more at location 1283
Hollywood became strongest when European competitors were most vulnerable.Read more at location 1289
American moviemakers had experienced a similar audience crisis, but much earlier, due to the more rapid spread of television in the United States.Read more at location 1290
Hollywood responded actively to this challenge. Starting as early as the 1950s, American moviemakers responded to television by making high-stakes, risky investments in marketing, glamour, and special effects. In the 1960s American directors found greater latitude to experiment with sex and violence; this trend was formalized with the abandonment of the Hays Code in 1966. By the 1970s, Hollywood movies had become significantly more exciting to mass audiences than they had been a decade before. Jaws and Star Wars were emblematic of this new era.Read more at location 1293
Demographics have worsened the problems of European movie-makers.Read more at location 1300
In most countries, individuals older than thirty-five no longer go to movies in significant numbers, preferring instead to watch television. Moviegoing is the province of the young. Most European countries suffer twice here. First, they have older populations than does the United States. Second, the traditional “art house” styles of European film are better suited to old audiences than to young ones.Read more at location 1300
Television has cut into the American and European cinematic markets in different fashion. Video rentals are a more important income source in the American market, whereas the sale of television rights plays a bigger role in most of Western Europe.Read more at location 1309
The revenue reliance on broadcast television makes European movies less suited for the export market.Read more at location 1316
They do little to enforce high standards of quality production.Read more at location 1317
Glitzy special effects are rare. We find these same features in made-for-TV films in the United States. A few of these films are excellent (such as Steven Spielberg’s early Duel), but most are undistinguished and boring, despite the immense talent in Hollywood.Read more at location 1318
The home video market, more prominent in the United States, is more competitive and demanding than television, and imposes greater discipline on the moviemaker.Read more at location 1322
television stations that are owned, controlled, or strictly regulated by their respective governments,Read more at location 1332
Typically the stations face domestic-content restrictions, must spend a certain percentage of revenue on domestic films, must operate a film production subsidiary, or they willfully overpay for films for political reasons. The end result is overpayment for broadcast rights—the most important subsidy that many European moviemakers receive. Audience levels are typically no more than one or two million at the television level, even in the larger countries such as France—too small to justify the sums paid to moviemakers for television rights on economic grounds.10Read more at location 1333
European films receive many other forms of subsidy. In France, for instance, direct subsidies are available from the national government, regional governments, European subsidy bodies (such as Eur-images) and coproduction subsidies through other national governments. Often French producers need only put up 15 percent of the budget of their films to receive subsidies. French producers also receive “Sofica” tax shelters (estimated worth of more than 5 percent of total budgets), automatic box office aid from the government (estimated at 7.7 percent of total budget), a discretionary subsidy called avance sur recettes, which takes the form of an interest-free loan (estimated at over 5 percent of total budget), and subsidies for the promotion of French films abroad.Read more at location 1337
Martin Dale, a cinema industry analyst, has estimated that the state provides at least 70 percent of the funding for the average continental film,Read more at location 1348
European moviemakers; rather, they have become the primary customer.Read more at location 1351
Subsidies encourage producers to serve domestic demand and the wishes of politicians and cinematic bureaucrats, rather than produce movies for international export. Many films will be made, even when they have little chance of turning a profit in stand-alone terms.Read more at location 1352
The training of cinematic talent in the United States and Europe reflects these differences. American film schools are like business schools in many regards. European film schools have become more like humanities programs, emphasizing semiotics, critical theory, and contemporary left-wing philosophies.Read more at location 1355
The European directors that survive tend to be established and to have longstanding political connections;Read more at location 1357
By numerous measures, such as attendance or number of films released, the Indian movie industry is the largest and the most successful in the world. Indian movies are frequently criticized for their generic nature or sappy plots, but in terms of music, cinematography, and use of color, they are often quite beautiful and even pathbreaking compared to Western productions.Read more at location 1363
The Hong Kong film industry has experienced export success from the 1970s onward, mostly throughout Southeast Asia. At its peak it released more films per year than any Western country, and as an exporter it was second only to the United States. Furthermore, Hong Kong cinema arose in a market that was dominated by Hollywood up through the late 1960s.Read more at location 1365
At first Hong Kong movies focused on the martial arts, but they subsequently branched out to include police movies, romance, comedy, horror, and ghost stories, among other genres. The best of these movies, such as John Woo’s The Killer, or Hardboiled, are acclaimed as high artRead more at location 1370
David Bordwell, in his recent Planet Hong Kong, claimed, “Since the 1970s it has been arguably the world’s most energetic, imaginative popular cinema.” Hong Kong movies are made on a commercial basis and have received no government assistance.Read more at location 1373
But by most common critical standards, cinematic creativity has risen in Taiwan, China, Iran, South Korea, the Philippines, Latin America, and many parts of Africa, among other locales. Even within Europe, the creative decline is restricted to a few of the larger nations, such as France and Italy. Danish cinema is more influential and more successful today than in times past, and arguably the same is true for Spanish cinema as well. Mexican and Argentinean film-makers are enjoying a resurgence.Read more at location 1377
At the time of the transition, equipping the theaters with sound and making movies with sound were costly. To recoup these costs, theaters sought out high-quality, high-expenditure productions for large audiences. The small, cheap, quick film became less profitable, given the suddenly higher fixed costs of production and presentation.Read more at location 1385
More generally, the higher the fixed costs of production, the greater the importance of drawing a large audience and the greater the importance of demand forecasting and marketing. Today costly special effects and expensive celebrity stars drive the push for blockbusters in similar fashion, and favor Hollywood production as well.Read more at location 1389
The talkies, by introducing issues of translation, boosted the dominant world language of English and thus benefited Hollywood.Read more at location 1391
During the silent era, in contrast, European films enjoyed an even footing in the export market, as language was not an issue.Read more at location 1395
Dubbed or subtitled movies have a difficult time in the United States to this day, whereas most other audiences accept them with few complaints. In Germany, the individuals who dub the German-language voices of prominent American actors and actresses can become celebrities in their own right, if their manner of speech is sufficiently memorable.Read more at location 1400
The move to sound, and the rise of English as an export standard, provided a strong boost to the movie exports of Great Britain. While the U.K.Read more at location 1406
India has fifteen languages and two thousand dialects, but the Hindi cinema of Bombay dominatesRead more at location 1419
In essence, talkies made it easier for non-Hollywood producers to capture part of their home markets, but made it harder for them to export abroad.Read more at location 1425
French film production doubled between 1928 to 1938, and French movies commanded over half of their domestic market throughout the 1930s.Read more at location 1429
In comparison, in 1925, at the height of the silent era, American exports accounted for 70 percent of the French market.Read more at location 1431
The sound era also transformed movies through the introduction of recorded musical soundtracks.Read more at location 1438
Music provided a similar protective role in Argentina, where hundreds of musical comedies were made in the early years of sound. The Argentinean Carlos Gardel, more of a tango singer than an actor, became the hottest Latin cinematic star of this era.Read more at location 1443
There is more trade and mobility across the United States of America than across the disparate countries of Western Europe. This trade causes the economic profiles of the American states to diverge. In economic terms, the countries of Western Europe are more likely to resemble each other than are the American states. Most of the American states have no steel industry, no automobile industry, and no wheat industry;Read more at location 1450
clustering eases the finding, lining up, and evaluating of the movie’s critical assets, such as stars, directors, and screenplays. These tasks are still done in Hollywood rather than in Vancouver or Sydney, regardless of where the movie is filmed.Read more at location 1468
In Hollywood, studios scrutinize projects intensely and refuse to finance projects that do not have a good chance of commercial success.Read more at location 1472
Hollywood is a cluster, in part, for the same reasons that New York and London are clustered banking centers. In both cases talents for large-scale project evaluation gravitate towards a single geographic area.26Read more at location 1473
When European directors want to make popular movies, they now go to Hollywood, as we have seen with Ridley Scott, Paul Verhoeven, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Jean-Jacques Annaud, among many others.Read more at location 1478
one “turnaround” event can shift a cluster from one locale to another. In the case of cinema, the French lost their dominant market position only with the First World War, which caused the major combatants to virtually cease film production for four years. Hollywood stepped into the vacuum and first penetrated world markets on a large scale in the 1920s. The snowball effect shifted the directionRead more at location 1481
Yet all the primary distributors in Europe are owned by European media groups and regulated by European governments. When the Cineplex Odeon movie theater chain in the United States was Canadian-owned, and for a while jointly Canadian- and British-owned, it made little difference on the screen.Read more at location 1487
Hollywood dominates because it can sell its movies so cheaply abroad, having recovered their costs in the home market.Read more at location 1489
If the critics are correct that Hollywood’s fundamental advantage is on the cost side for film rentals, we should observe relatively empty theaters for American films in Europe.Read more at location 1495
Similar points apply to many media industries, such as when Canadians claim that America dump television shows or magazines at very low cost, since the producers are already making a profit in the U.S. market. But again, we typically do not observe American products preferred for their cheapness, we observe them preferred for their superiority in entertaining the audience.Read more at location 1504
Hollywood TV programs or movie rights have been sold cheaply in Europe, it is because European TV stations have held a strong bargaining position (a “monopsony,” in economic language).Read more at location 1512
Without monopsony, the price of movie rights would be bid up to reflect the potential popularity of the movie.Read more at location 1516
Note that America has had much less success in exporting its television programs than its movies, despite having the largest domestic television market in the world.Read more at location 1517
Some are unhappy with the global spread of the American ethos of commercialism and individualism. Other complaints focus on the strong global-market position of a relatively universal cultural product, rather than local products based on national or particularist inspirations.Read more at location 1534
Many of the leading Hollywood directors are non-Americans by birth, including Ridley Scott (British) and James Cameron (Canadian), who were among the hottest Hollywood directors circa 2001. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Charlie Chaplin, and Jim Carrey have been among the leading non-American U.S. stars. Most of the major studios are now foreign owned. A typical production will have Sony, a Japanese company,Read more at location 1537
Non-American movies, when they pursue foreign markets, must strive for universality as well. The Jackie Chan Hong Kong movie Rumble in the Bronx was marketed in the United States with success.Read more at location 1548
The most successful Canadian cultural export is the Harlequin romance novel.Read more at location 1552
The Harlequin romance does not reflect a specifically Canadian perspective, whatever that designation might mean, but rather targets a broad circle of female readers.Read more at location 1555
values of heroism, individualism, and romantic self-fulfillmentRead more at location 1558
United States, have an advantage in exporting their values and shaping the preferencesRead more at location 1563
Consider food markets. Many Third World citizens like to eat at McDonald’s, not just because the food tastes good to them, but also because McDonald’s is a visible symbol of the West and the United States. When they walk through the doors of a McDonald’s, they are entering a different world. The McDonald’s corporation, knowing this, designs its Third World interiors to reflect the glamour of Western commerce, much as a shopping mall would. McDonald’s shapes its product to meet global demands, but builds on the American roots of the core concept.Read more at location 1563
American cinema, like American cuisine, has been a synthetic, polyglot product from the beginning. Hollywood was developed largely by foreigners—Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe—and was geared towards entertaining American urban audiences, which were drawn from around the world.Read more at location 1570
Hollywood’s global-market position is a Faustian bargain. Achieving global dominance requires a sacrifice of a culture’s initial perspective to the demands of world consumers. American culture is being exported, but for the most part it is not Amish quilts and Herman Melville.Read more at location 1576
Jurassic Park, a movie about dinosaurs, was a huge hit abroad, but Forrest Gump, which makes constant reference to American history and national culture, made most of its money at home.Read more at location 1578
“Microbudget” films are far more common in the United States than in Europe. A microbudget film is one made by a previously amateur director on a minuscule budget, typically less than $100,000. Among the best-known microfilms are Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It, the Coen brothers’ Blood Simple, and The Blair Witch Project.Read more at location 1586
A healthy commercial base is needed to support an infrastructure of theaters, production companies, film schools, and marketing institutions. Independent or innovative filmmakers benefit from this infrastructure just as the major studios do.Read more at location 1592
The major studios typically seek to buy out and “corrupt” the independent filmmakers, and in this sense the two cinematic worlds are always at war with each other. But in a larger sense they are complements.Read more at location 1594
In addition to the Coen brothers and Spike Lee, Francis Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, David Lynch, Sam Raimi, John Sayles, and Jim Jarmusch all first made their names with micro-budget films. The directors of The Blair Witch Project were courted for a Hollywood sequel, which earned them millions, despite its low quality.Read more at location 1597
Notable European directors such as Godard, Bertolucci, Truffaut, Besson, and Pasolini found their start with microbudget films, but the overall commercial weakness of European cinema is making those kinds of opportunities harder to find and exploit.Read more at location 1603
European movie-makers pursue different markets and produce different kinds of creativity.Read more at location 1608
The non-Hollywood productions that have success abroad, such as Four Weddings and a Funeral or Like Water for Chocolate, often have many of the flaws that plague mainstream Hollywood releases: saccharine, cliched characters or an unrealistically happy ending. European pictures from the silent era, which had a greater chance of export success, were more like the American moviesRead more at location 1612
The Hong Kong movie Dr. Lamb was a success in the Hong Kong market of the 1990s. The movie was explicitly patterned after Silence of the Lambs, a U.S. and global hit in 1992,Read more at location 1619
In the short run, laissez-faire would likely lead to a greater Hollywood presence in European cinema. But in the long run, European moviemakers would be induced to make a more commercially appealing product, and not necessarily at the expense of artistic quality.Read more at location 1634
Hollywood holds a potentially vulnerable market position, given how much it spends on celebrity salaries and marketing.Read more at location 1637
The history of cinema shows many times over that a truly great movie can be made for very small sums of money.Read more at location 1640
In 1973, Hollywood held only 23 percent of the Italian market, and large numbers of high-quality Italian movies were commercially viable. Hollywood had dominated the Italian market after the Second World War, but Italian movie-makers fought back, in part using the techniques they learned from studying Hollywood releases.Read more at location 1644
These years show that the strong presence of Hollywood in world markets does not mean an end to European moviemaking.Read more at location 1647
Truffaut, Fellini, Visconti, Bergman, and others were fundamentally money-making endeavors, aimed at the competitive marketplace, despite the involvement of government at various levels.Read more at location 1650
Going back earlier, the 1930s in particular were a “golden age” for French cinema; the best-known French films of this era include L’Atalante (Jean Vigo), Le Jour se lève (Marcel Carné), La Chienne, The Grand Illusion, and The Rules of the Game (all by Jean Renoir).Read more at location 1652
American filmmakers charged the French with cultural imperialism and asked Washington for trade protection. It was commonly charged that European movies encouraged lax morals and corrupted American culture. The French responded by noting the openness of their cinematic markets and asking America to compete on equal terms.Read more at location 1659
Global cinema is in any case flourishing today, most of all in Asia.Read more at location 1662
