Film Fund-amentals: The World According to Hollywood

 First published December 21, 2011

Thank God for Chris Dodd and the Motion Picture Association of America. Without them, I would still be living with the warped illusion that other countries were making movies. But Dodd has set me straight about those durn foreign dumb bunnies. They don’t do squat.

At least that seems to be part of his point. Dodd recently delivered an address at the Center for American Progress in defense of the Stop Online Piracy Act. While explaining the importance of the American film industry, he decided to expound upon the lack of filmmaking elsewhere on the planet. Especially in Sweden, Spain and Egypt.

OK, Dodd’s main job is to spin things for the MPAA (which Dodd runs in lieu of a political career that was steering toward major ethics investigations before he bailed out). But his spin is slightly off the mark. All you have to do is go to the nifty interactive chart provided by Chartsbin.com, click on a country and see how many movies they have produced recently. By the way, Egypt is currently listed as producing 45 movies, which isn’t bad for a country in massive turmoil. Add the documentaries currently being made by cell phones for release on Twitter and the count would shoot through the roof.

The gist of Dodd’s remarks were wrapped up in the usual MPAA line that Hollywood is the global film industry and gosh, when Hollywood feels threatened by anything then it is a global threat because gee gosh golly, the whole world is completely tied into Hollywood. In some circles, this is better known as the Homer Simpson defense. Fortunately, Dodd also managed to deftly (if inadvertently) demonstrate that it is a defense based primarily upon total ignorance. To be honest, Dodd is beginning to make Jack Valenti look like Albert Einstein, which is a pretty scary thought.

Dodd was supposed to be explaining the MPAA’s zealous support for the SOPA bill, one of the most controversial if under-reported pieces of legislation currently facing Congress. Personally, I feel that SOPA goes way too far in attempting to stop online piracy and would have devastating effects on technological development and the internet. But it is interesting to know that Congress has been willing to make sure that the sweeping restrictive measures offered by SOPA will be available to the porn business in its fight against amateurs who are ruining the online adult movie trade. After all, making porn is a dangerous job and requires highly trained professionals.

But what really stuck me about Dodd’s recent yammering is the sorry and hopeless state of the Hollywood mindset when it comes to the rest of the planet. Foreign movies only exist for one of two reasons. The first is to provide producers with raw material for Hollywood redos. The other is to gussy up the international appeal of the Academy Award broadcast by an occasional reference to movie titles that the host has trouble pronouncing. Otherwise, the rest of the globe only exists as part of a distribution package. The earth is simply an extension of Hollywood.

This mindset is especially evident in the current crusade by Hollywood to engage the rapidly growing Chinese film market. Chinese box office for 2011 is about to go past the $2 billion mark, and an increasing range of successful Chinese businesses are looking to get into the movie industry. The recent announcement of the plans for a co-production deal between Legendary Pictures and the Hong Kong construction firm of Paul Y. Engineering is the ideal model for Hollywood. Especially the part about how the Hong Kong company will leave the complex questions of producing movies to the California experts. Gosh, you can almost hear some one in an office in Burbank right now muttering the word “Suckers” even as I write this piece.

However, China is kind of a different place. To be honest, I don’t know much about China (except that it is big). But I have a funny impression that they may have their own unique perspective on things, and becoming a mere extension of Hollywood just might not be part of that perspective. I sometimes get the distinct impression that they might even be viewing Hollywood as eventually becoming an extension of China and not the other way around. I have even (on occasion) gotten the impression that some of the Chinese may view some of the folks in Hollywood as a pack of dopes, and I would suggest that people in the industry might want to find out what the Chinese word is for suckers.

Movie making in China plays by its own rules, with a focus that is strongly maintained on China. There are lots of strings attached to things in China, as Christian Bale recently found out when he attempted to use his position as the Western star of a major Chinese epic for a political statement. But the strings in China are not just political. They are also social, cultural and business-related. A recent example can be found in the issues surround GM’s attempt to work with China in developing the Volt electric car.

The Chinese have a lot of rules, and when it comes to movies, they are looking to increase the size of the rule book, as demonstrated by a new proposal in Beijing concerning banned content in movies. Heck, the part that bans material that would “…propagate obscenity, gambling, drug abuse, violence or terror” is enough to quash a sizable number of movies from Hollywood.

Which I suspect is part of the idea. Hollywood is so used to throwing its weight around in the foreign market that they have even forgotten that it exists. But I suspect that China is going to be a very different experience. I have the impression that the Chinese will even push right back. Based upon my marginal experience with them, they can even push hard.

But at least they are polite about it. The same cannot be said about Hollywood.