Read Online In Defense of America by Bronwen Maddox - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Bronwen Maddox
Tags: POL000000
Ads: Link
circumstances forced editors, writers, and producers to invent cosmopolitan techniques for reaching out to the largest possible crowd of readers, listeners, and viewers,” argued the academics Michael Werz and Barbara Fried in their study of anti-Americanism in 2007. Hollywood, “a community of émigrés,” provided “entertainment to an audience that otherwise lacked common traditions or backgrounds, thus serving as a tool of orientation amid the unfamiliar living conditions of the New World.” 12
To dismiss this pursuit as “mass culture,” uninterested in subtleties, is to ignore the intelligence of the techniques and Hollywood’s importance as a unifying factor in the United States. But in any case, you could not reasonably call it an exercise in trying to dominate the world with a uniform American culture. As Hollywood knew best of all, there was no such thing.
And as Hollywood’s investors have been all too aware, its global reach has not been matched by steadiness of profits. For all that critics attack the “Hollywood formula,” there is no such thing as a reliable recipe for a hit. The unpredictability of the winners, the expense of the failures —the studios have had limited success in shielding themselves against these constants from the start. According to
Screen Digest,
the major studios’ entire list of 132 films in 2006 was set to lose $1.9 billion over the five-year period when all the revenue from cinemas, television, DVDs, and the Internet would come in. 13 Also the studios, terrified of Internet piracy, have not been sure-footed in exploiting this new medium.
Now, heading toward the same fate as that suffered by other iconic American brands, Hollywood is gradually losing share as other countries realize they prefer their own movies —and can make them, too. For example, India’s Bollywood appears finally to be breaking out of the box in which it has been trapped for two decades, making extravaganzas out of singing, dancing, stories of evil landlords and brothers separated at birth —movies which packed cinemas but failed to make much money by international standards. Between 1985 and 2000, its revenues stalled at about $1 billion a year, less than a third of the box office take of a leading Hollywood studio, according to an analysis in
Newsweek.
14 But more recently, buoyed by the emergence of an Indian middle class and an affluent expatriate audience in Europe and the United States, Bollywood is producing movies that appeal to the new market.
It would be hard to call Bollywood conservative, given the sexiness of the costumes and the dancing. But all the same, many countries have found that developing their own movies and television shows offers them an escape from what they perceive to be an American wave of loose morality, violence, and materialism bearing down on them.
Declining Influence of the American Media
The same pattern of gradually waning influence is true more generally of the American media, preeminent for most of the twentieth century. As Jeremy Tunstall, a professor of sociology at London’s City University, reported in his book
The Media Were American,
the United States and UK in 1948 had 98 percent of the world’s television receivers (although U.S. TV sets outnumbered UK ones fourteen to one). The American lead peaked around that same year, particularly in its movies and popular music, in its news magazines such as
Life
and
Time,
and in its news agencies, the AP and the UPA. But after that, while “looking superlative,” American media actually began to lose market share, while McCarthyism and then Vietnam chipped away at their moral authority, Tunstall suggests. He also describes how the world outside the United States now devotes only 10 percent of its time to American media; 10 percent to other media imports; and 80 percent to domestic national media. 15 It is astonishing how quickly that change can take place. In Pakistan, President Pervez Musharraf, who seized
To dismiss this pursuit as “mass culture,” uninterested in subtleties, is to ignore the intelligence of the techniques and Hollywood’s importance as a unifying factor in the United States. But in any case, you could not reasonably call it an exercise in trying to dominate the world with a uniform American culture. As Hollywood knew best of all, there was no such thing.
And as Hollywood’s investors have been all too aware, its global reach has not been matched by steadiness of profits. For all that critics attack the “Hollywood formula,” there is no such thing as a reliable recipe for a hit. The unpredictability of the winners, the expense of the failures —the studios have had limited success in shielding themselves against these constants from the start. According to
Screen Digest,
the major studios’ entire list of 132 films in 2006 was set to lose $1.9 billion over the five-year period when all the revenue from cinemas, television, DVDs, and the Internet would come in. 13 Also the studios, terrified of Internet piracy, have not been sure-footed in exploiting this new medium.
Now, heading toward the same fate as that suffered by other iconic American brands, Hollywood is gradually losing share as other countries realize they prefer their own movies —and can make them, too. For example, India’s Bollywood appears finally to be breaking out of the box in which it has been trapped for two decades, making extravaganzas out of singing, dancing, stories of evil landlords and brothers separated at birth —movies which packed cinemas but failed to make much money by international standards. Between 1985 and 2000, its revenues stalled at about $1 billion a year, less than a third of the box office take of a leading Hollywood studio, according to an analysis in
Newsweek.
14 But more recently, buoyed by the emergence of an Indian middle class and an affluent expatriate audience in Europe and the United States, Bollywood is producing movies that appeal to the new market.
It would be hard to call Bollywood conservative, given the sexiness of the costumes and the dancing. But all the same, many countries have found that developing their own movies and television shows offers them an escape from what they perceive to be an American wave of loose morality, violence, and materialism bearing down on them.
Declining Influence of the American Media
The same pattern of gradually waning influence is true more generally of the American media, preeminent for most of the twentieth century. As Jeremy Tunstall, a professor of sociology at London’s City University, reported in his book
The Media Were American,
the United States and UK in 1948 had 98 percent of the world’s television receivers (although U.S. TV sets outnumbered UK ones fourteen to one). The American lead peaked around that same year, particularly in its movies and popular music, in its news magazines such as
Life
and
Time,
and in its news agencies, the AP and the UPA. But after that, while “looking superlative,” American media actually began to lose market share, while McCarthyism and then Vietnam chipped away at their moral authority, Tunstall suggests. He also describes how the world outside the United States now devotes only 10 percent of its time to American media; 10 percent to other media imports; and 80 percent to domestic national media. 15 It is astonishing how quickly that change can take place. In Pakistan, President Pervez Musharraf, who seized
Similar Books
