Front Page
Consider This...
Research Review
Global Hollywood
By Ann Litowitz
In Global Hollywood 2010, Toby Miller states that although Hollywood transcends even the aerospace industry as the largest export industry in the U.S., Hollywood is in crisis. It is held responsible for the poor esteem in which the United States is held across the world. Although the Motion Picture Association maintained in the wake of September 11, 2001 that ‘Going to the movies is the American remedy for anxieties of daily life,’ many in the U.S. attributed that attack and subsequent critiques of their country, in part, to Hollywood.
Marketing Tip for Film Producers
By JD Ramat
According to the website Nation Master, which compiles statistics on movie attendance in 78 countries, India ranked #1 with an incredible 2,860,000,000 movie-goers for 2006. The United States ranked #2 with about 1,421,000,000 ticket buyers. Whether the majority of these movies are Bollywood or Hollywood, this fact may provide a strategic incentive for more movie-makers to cater to India audiences.
Novelist Don DeLillo suggested that the problem lay in ‘the power of American culture to penetrate every wall, home, life and mind.’ The Council on Foreign Relations argued that anti-Americanism is partly fuelled by ‘the broad sweep of American culture. Hollywood movies, television, and advertising.’ Woody Allen thought it was ‘Too bad the terrorists of the 11th of September learned life in Hollywood movies.’
In That’s Entertainment? Michael Medved asserts that Hollywood's cultural exports provide the primary lens through which foreigners view American culture. He argues that in the era of the John Wayne-cowboy spirit, this lens was beneficial. But he says that since movies such as Midnight Cowboy, Hollywood has delivered a degrading image of the American spirit.
In stark contrast, Robert Greenwald, a filmmaker and political activist, in an NPR debate titled, Hollywood and the Spread of Anti-Americanism, says that Hollywood's cultural exports are not the primary representation of U.S. culture, and that they pale in comparison to the enormity of the Iraq war and U.S. foreign policy when it comes to global opinion. He also says that making films that are critical of the U.S. government is not the same thing as being “anti-American.” With heavy sarcasm he concludes by saying that it must be films such as Ocean's 11, Shrek, Spider-Man and Men in Black that inspire hatred for America, and not the mounting death toll of the Iraq war and destructive U.S. foreign policy.
A Chinese woman walks past a poster for the movie Broken Arrow at the entrance to theater in Beijing. (AP Photo/Greg Baker)