Hollywood Conquest

▪ 1995

by David Robinson

      Hollywood did not set out to conquer the world. There was just no way of stopping it. The U.S. began its domination of the world's screens at the time of World War I, but only in the final decade of the century did Hollywood's hegemony reach such proportions that critics could talk seriously about the likelihood of extinction for many national film-production industries.

      The reasons for this sudden crisis point are not entirely clear, though they are evidently linked to a changing industrial economy in Hollywood, whose success has come more and more to rely on a small annual group of productions that command phenomenal audience appeal and earnings counted in hundreds of millions of dollars. In 1993 and 1994 such films included Jurassic Park, The Fugitive, Aladdin, The Lion King, and Forrest Gump.

      The universal appeal of such films as these had, by the mid-1990s, given the U.S. control of some 85% of the world film market—excluding India and China (although at the close of 1994, Hollywood distributors were making strenuous efforts to break into the huge Chinese market). In almost every country the box office was dominated week after week by U.S. titles. In Britain all 20 of the most successful films at the box office in 1993 were U.S., and American films earned some £300 million of the total British box-office earnings of £ 319 million. The situation was comparable in Denmark, Spain, and Sweden, and Hollywood films were increasingly taking over the screens of the former communist countries of Europe. Even in those countries with formerly strong national production, such as Japan, France, and Italy, as many as 8 out of the weekly top-10 films were regularly of U.S. origin. Until 1990 France was the only country in Europe to maintain a majority audience for its own product; by 1994 even that bastion had fallen, and it was estimated that French films accounted for no more than 30% of the national box office.

      The historical explanation of Hollywood domination is geodemographic. Apart from China, the United States has the largest monolingual audience in the world. Thus, even the most expensive Hollywood film has the possibility of recouping its cost in the domestic theatrical market alone. Everything else, including television, video, and overseas distribution, is profit. This economy supports a level of production and marketing with which no other country can compete.

      Hollywood films have an overwhelming attraction for a world audience because they are more opulent in production (in 1993 the average budget for a Hollywood film was $15 million, compared with $2 million for a British picture) and thus are more polished and assured in technique and more calculatedly popular in appeal. Moreover, the great vertically integrated Hollywood corporations, involved in both production and marketing, provide an incomparable infrastructure for distribution, marketing, and publicity throughout the world. The economic self-sufficiency of U.S. cinema permits its film and television productions to be sold abroad at the most competitive prices.

      Hollywood, too, has always had the means and perception to buy up talent from the rest of the world. During the past 30 years, 20% of the winners of Academy Awards have held British passports, though their work was for the most part performed on American-produced films. Successful foreign stars, from Pola Negri and Greta Garbo to Ingrid Bergman, Sophia Loren, Mel Gibson, Sean Connery, Liv Ullman, Daniel Day-Lewis, Max von Sydow, Joan Chen, and Emma Thompson, have constantly been recruited by the American cinema, impoverishing their native production at the same time as they enrich Hollywood's.

      More than with other industries, this domination by one nation has enormous economic, industrial, and cultural implications. For generations the dreams of the impressionable, film-consuming young in every part of the world have been formed in the American image. Blue jeans, Coca-Cola, and McDonald's are universal. The German director Wim Wenders voiced this concern when he said, "People increasingly believe in what they see and they buy what they believe in. In the long run if we ever give up the European film industry as a pawn, then all the other European industries will suffer in the future. People use, drive, wear, eat and buy what they see in the movies."

      Certainly, to crush indigenous film industries is neither in the American plan nor in the American interest. As the Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci pointed out, in the long run Hollywood itself would stand to lose by the collapse of European and other world cinemas: "Hollywood has absorbed a lot of European talent over the years. If European creative talent withers away from lack of financial resources, Hollywood will ultimately lack the oxygen it needs."

      In Britain and Italy the survival of some level of film production has so far almost entirely been due to the film-production programs of television companies. The German and French cinemas, on the other hand, have depended upon a high level of financial support from the government. Europeans—particularly the French—fought fiercely to have these self-defensive measures exempted from the provisions of the 1993 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT).

      The effect of GATT as originally framed would have been to prohibit any future national policies designed to protect the indigenous product against foreign importations and to freeze any similar arrangements already in place. The final confrontation was between the Americans, who objected to any form of protectionism for national film and television industries, and the French, who resented the "industrial" tag and demanded a "cultural exception" that would exclude the audiovisual media from GATT regulations altogether. The Europeans eventually won their GATT point, and the U.S. seemed ready to recognize that the price of cultural freedom may sometimes be commercial control.

      The GATT debate nevertheless stirred European filmmakers to ask if all the troubles of European cinema could be blamed wholly on Hollywood, or even the threat of GATT, or if there is not something inherently wrong with the European film itself. Audiences—U.S. as well as European—will go to see a European film—Cyrano de Bergerac, The Crying Game, Four Weddings and a Funeral—if it appeals to them. The trouble is that very few European pictures do make that appeal. The 1994 success of Four Weddings and a Funeral, however, made many begin to suspect that the surest way to compete with Hollywood is to make good pictures.

David Robinson is a film critic and historian in London and author of A History of World Cinema and Chaplin: His Life and Art.

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