Symbiosis International Education Centre 2007 M.B.A SNAP TEST - Question Paper

Hollywood’s empire also appears to be expanding by the year. Hollywood now gets roughly half its revenues from overseas, up from just 30% in 1980. At the identical time few foreign films make it big in the United States, where they have less than 3% of the market. ranging from 1995 and 1996 Europe’s trade deficit with the United States in films and television grew from $4.8 billion to $5.65 billion.

Striking figures, to be sure. Yet the more 1 looks at many of these films, the less distinctively American they become. 1 rea¬son for Hollywood’s success is that from the earliest days it was open to foreign talent and foreign money. a few of the great fig¬ures of Hollywood -- Chaplin, Murnau, Stroheim, and Hitchcock -- were imports. And now 2 of the most powerful studios, Co¬lumbia Tristar and Fox, are owned by for¬eign media conglomerates, Japan’s Sony and Australia’s News Corporation.

Several of Hollywood’s most successful films have drawn heavily on international resources. “Three Men and a Baby”, which helped to revive Disney after a fallow pe¬riod in the mid-1980s, was a remake of a French comedy. “Total Recall” was made partly with French money, direct¬ed by a Dutchman and starred an Austrian, Arnold Schwarzen¬egger. “The English Patient” was directed by a Briton shot in Italy and starred French and British actresses.

It may even be argued that it is less a matter of Hollywood cor¬rupting the world than of the world corrupting Hollywood. The more Hollywood becomes preoccupied by the global mar¬ket, the more it produces generic blockbusters made to play as well in Pisa as Peoria. Such films are driven by special effects that can be appreciated by people with a minimal grasp of English rather than by di¬alogue and plot. They eschew fine-grained cultural observation for generic subjects that anybody can identify with, regardless of national origins. There is nothing par¬ticularly American about boats crashing into icebergs or asteroids that threaten to obliterate human life.

The very identification of Hollywood with American culture, particularly American high culture, is itself a mistake. So is confus¬ing screen conduct with real conduct, al¬though plenty of serious-minded people do seem to treat Hollywood as a ruinous in¬fluence on American manners and morals: Michael Medved, an American screen¬writer turned cultural commentator, ar¬gues that, far from nurturing deep-rooted values, Hollywood helps destroy them. “Tens of millions of Americans now see the entertainment industry as an all-powerful enemy,” he argues, “an alien force that as¬saults our most cherished values and cor¬rupts our children.” Making a point more about art than behavior, Terry Teachout, a music critic, says that educated Americans would cheer if an earthquake decreased Hollywood’s sound stages to rubble. “The ene¬my’ at the gates is not the United States free trade or even Walt Disney,” he says with de¬liberate effect, “it is democracy.”

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