"american flops ... european hits" (on the vagaries of international box office)

7/27/2019 "American Flops ... European Hits" (on the vagaries of international box office)

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herican FlopsSO IT DIDN'T PLAY IN PEORIA. Bigdeal. There's always Paris, Palermo, and

Prague. Europe is a movie Mecca, thetouts all say, the land where they trulyrevere fine cinema. Not Iike those audi-ences here, in the land of mall-rats, whodon't appreciate the.bouquet, the nu-ances, or the textures of a Heoven's Gote,an Ishtor, or a Nutty Professor.

Are European audiences really thatmuch more sophisticated, inteiligent,and blind in both eyes? To hear filmpeople tell it, iust about any movie tur-key can fly across the Atlantic and findits rightfui roost. However, Europe is notEUROPE, but a conglomeration of dif-ferent countries and cultures. "There'sno singie European market," says MyronKarlin, president of the MPAA exportdivision. "South Pacific was an enor-mous success here [in America]. And inEngland, it played for five years straight!But in Italy, people walked out." At oneofthe first screenings, he recalls, shakinghis head, "within the first half hour, thetheater was empty!"

The Sicilion, in its uncut cinemaphileversion, although something of a criti-

cal hit, was a commercial flop inParis. It was however, a big hit in

._ Rome. Ishtor, inexplicably,

!|- found its audience in

Denmark. Three Men ond o Bobv was ablockbuster everywhere but in France,

where even one of the most expensivecampaigns lavished on any French-filmremake in history couldn't make a dent.Hoir, which earned more critical ac-claim here than monev, was a massivehit in Spain and Switzerland.

In a strange, ironic twist on the much-vaunted universality of Art with a capi-tal A, the big hits in Europe are usuallythe same dumb comedies and potboilersas here: "Crocodile" Dundee. Three Menond o Boby. Fotdl Attroction. Yet some-how, the number-one box-office moviein Italy for 1986-1987, beating out Top

Gun and Plotoon, was The Nome of theRose. In Spain's all-time top-twenty, set-tled comfortably among E.T. The Extra-terrestriol, Rombo; First Blood Pqrt II,and Bock to the Future, is the GeneWilder-Kelly LeBrock sex farce, TheWomon r'n Red. Yet on the other side ofthe coin, filmmakers underappreciatedhere, like Monte Hellman, Bob Rafelson,and, for the longest time, Buster Keaton,have been European gods from the word8o."European audiences iook at the

whole more so than parts of the whole,"says Hy Smith, senior vice-president ofmarketing for United International Pic-tures (UIP), the giant European distribu-tor for Paramount, MGM/UA, Universal,and other studios. "Set design, lighting,direction-all that's on par with the ac-tors, whereas thatt not generally so inthe U.S. In many European countries,reviews are much more important thanin America. Teenagers in Europeancountries read newspapers," he notes

dryly.The most gratifying phenome-

is the worthwhile fiim

a

Do our European frinds

brow sometbing we don't)Tltqr loue tbe t'ilms we hatet



l

European Hitsthat gets ignored in the U.S. but hitsbig overseas. Another situation, almostas gratifying, is the opposite: the big,'

bumbling American smash that beilyflops in Europe. And finally, there is thbfailout from America's critical and com-mercial bombs: Who's That Girl?, APrayer for the Dying, and Leonord Port 6.These movies bomb fluently in severaldifferent languages as well.

Film lore is filled with examples of thefirst trend, the solid, artistic movie thatAmericans either "don't understand" orelse ignore. The former case generallydoes well at the European box office,and the latter wins awards. MainstreamAmerica didn't "get" The Lost Emperor;until it was nominated for nine Acad-emy Awards, the $23.5-million film hadgrossed $11.7 million after seventy-three days in release. {Compare that iothe flop Brighr Lighrs, Big City, whichmanaged to earn $tz million in tendays.) Yet all over Europe, The Last Em-peror was an immediate hit. MonteHellman's psycho-westerns with jackNicholson, The Shooting and Ride in theW hirlvind, were completely ignoredhere in their time, yei they earnedhigh praise at festivals from Edin-

try's Oscar equivalent) for Best ForeisrFilm and did big box office all over.

Henri Herv6, the director of Audiovi-sual Communications at the French Em-bassy in New York City, says one reasonfor this appreciation of our noble rotmay be Europeans' love-hate relation-

classical theater," Herv6 asserts. ."By the tradition of psychodramalWe respond more to a movie's psy-chological themes than to its'action."

This may help explain why Fotal- -e

Attroction and WaiJStreet did well inEurope, but it leaves a question mark

about such Euro hits as Rombo, The Un-

By FMNK LOVECE

ORick&om. lS

a

ship with the U.S.-their viewof us, culturally, as provincial,iunk-food-addicted hicks."Europeans are influenced by

touchobles, and Innerspoce.

'.^ 1

burgh to Cannes. The bravuraThe Nome of the Rose, whichhe Nome o/ the Rose

wilted in the U.S.,'

won France's Cesar 7Award (the coun-



\Mbfle tbe myth of tbe Eur{pean film sanctuary pmists,

tbae is no predidabllity ooer what utill be a bn in Europe.

love the Hollywood ma-Herv6 confesses. "It is very effi-

very controlled. The film machinevery beautiful. Most French films sim-

do not look as good."

The two impulses-a desire for psy-insight and an appreciation ofslickness-often meet each

halfway. Despite Eddie Murphy'spopularity in Europe, Ed-

MurphyRAW and other comedy con-rarely even lry to go over.

is out of the question, and howyou going to subtitle inflections and

(Subtitles are problematic eventhe best of circumstances. An exas-

William Friedkin recalls that,

mistranslated a line in The Exor-It was supposed to be'The mystery

faith.' The way it came out was 'Theoffote,' " which is quite a differ-

"Since then," he adds with a

"I've learned to supervise all mytransfers closely. ")

Finally, there is the pattern of Europecultural lifeguard, rescuing American

from drowning in a pool ofcreamer and Velveeta proc-

food. Yet like many life-stories, there were far fewer dra-rescues in real life than in

Take the archetypical example of

TheUK

.1. "Crocodile" Dundee ',

2. The living Daylights*

3. Beverly Hills Cop ll4. The Golden Child

5. Platoon

6. Police Academy lV

7. The Witches of Eastwick

8. Labyrinth.

9. The Mission*

10. Superman lV*

' U.S.-U.K. co-productions

Source: Variety

Heoven's Gote, the epic Michael Ciminodisaster that became in the U.S. a de-spised symbol both of bloated Holly-wood and of extravagant directorial ex-cess. Europe took great pride in "redis-covering" the thing. Igrrited by the show-ing of the uncut, 219-minute version atFrance's Cinematheque, European crit-ics explodeil in their assessments. Withfew exceptions, they hailed the uncutHeoven's Gate.(unseen in the U.S. up tothen, except at the infamous industrypremiere two.years eariier) as a master-piece. The complete version then resur-faced in America on cable, in art houses,

and on video to mixed judgment. Yetcritical iaudits or not, Heoven's Gotebombed in Europe.

"l was part of the Heoven's Gote deba-cle," remembers Hy Smith, a United Art-ists advertising executive at the time."Heoven's Gote didn't make money over-seas. It gol critical acclaim in certainparts of the up-market press, but it madefar less than a million dollars. It's 'bigsuccess'in Europe is just a myth." BarryToberman, a London journalist, recallsthat "the word-of-mouth was, 'It's not as

bad as you think, but . . . If you've got toclean out the cooker, you might considergoing to see it instead.'It played aboutthree days," he says. "And there were

animai-rights demonstrators out fromthe first."

On the other hand, Alan Parker's An-gel Heart,

whichalso flopped

here, wasindeed a European box-office hit, espe-

cially in Denmark and West Germany.Part of the reason is the nihilistic qualityof star Mickey Rourke, who could easilyhave wandered into a Rainer WernerFassbinder picture without changing hiscoat. Rourke also helped buoy theAmerican dud A Prayer for the Dytng,which did well on the Continent. Onereason may be the attenUon it receivedwhen the film, about a guilt-ridden IRAguerilla, was pulled from the LondonFilm Festival in response to the IRA ter-

rorist attack at Enniskillen, NorthernIreland.

While the myth of the European filmsanctuary persists, there is no predict-ability over what will be a hit in Europe,This doesn't stop eager marketing exec-utives from trying anything-onything

-to create one. "I was the MGM man-ager in Germany after World War II,"relates Karlin. "Al1 American pictureswere dubbed then [rather than subti-tled]. And there was a wonderful actionpicture called Moioyo [19a9], withSpencer Tracy and

JamesStewart. But it

dealt with Nazis in [what was then] Ma-iaya, and you iust couldn't depict Nazis

Denmark

1. "Crocodile" Dundee

2. The Living Daylightss

3. Coeurc Flambes

4. Beverly Hills Cop ll

5. Platoon


7. The Golden Child

8. Nine th Weeks

9. The Fight lor the Red Gow

10. Forever FriendsSource: Govemment ol oenma*/Varkty

West Cermany

1. 0tto-The New Movie

2. "Crocodile" Dundee

3. Beverly Hills Cop ll

4. The Living Daylights

5. Asterix.in Britain

6. Platoon


B. The Golden Child

9. The Great Mouse Detective

10. Dirty Dancing' Sourcs Vuiety



"Europeans loue the llollywood machine . . . Frencb Jilms simply

do not look as !ood," says lfenri Ileru| of the Frencb Embassy,

willingness to be laughed at, it is theFrench love affair with Jerry Lewis.Smith, who was with Paramount whenLewis broke with Dean Martin to go soio,

remembers that "the first four movieswere tough sledding in. Europe. Thensuddenly critics in France embracedjerry Lewis and said he was a comicgenius. We reissued his movies and hissuccess continued for quite some time"

-to constant sniggers from the U.S. Acomment from a Los Angeles Times re-porter in 1982, putting the French adula-tion of Heoven's Gote into perspective:"So as not to get too lofty in realms cine-matic, be it known that the hospitaliza-tion of ferry Lewis was a major newsstoryhere...."

"In France," Herv6 explains, "we hada comedian named Louis De Funes," a

French superstar from the fifties to theseventies, whose rare appearances state-side include the popular French importThe Mod Adventures o/ Robbi /acob."Louis De Funes comes from the mimetradition," says Herv6, "and in ferryLewis, we also see a comedian from themime tradition. |erry Lewis satirizesAmerican values, He's always chaileng-ing, ridiculingthings of achievement: Heis a lousy surgeon or a lousy busindss-man or a lousy professor. I don t think

soon after the war in Germany. So

had to write a different script topicture, making

Nazis smugglers or something. Thisforty years ago, so I don't remember

but it was very successful."By 1965, however, circumstances had

in both Germany and Holly-When Twentieth Century-Fox's

tried to snip The Sound ofto delete uniformed Nazis, pro-

Robert Wise abruptly putstop to it. More recently, Bernardo

successfully fought Japaneseto edit the "Rape of Nanking"from The Lost Emperor, which

a hit in |apan even with its depic-

of that notorious battle.Most changes for the various Euro-markets are less extreme. In fact,

directors are often allowed toback those few seconds of graphic

(Dressed to Kill, Blode Rurter)whole sequences of graphic sex (Nine

they had to cut from the Amer-release to get an R rating.

THERE'S JERRY LEWIS.If there is any one icon of Europe's

of American movie values, anything that symbolizes Europe's ca-

for both open-minded apprecia-of pop cuiture and self-flagellhting

way," he suggests,Though he's still admired, Lewis's

popularity in France isn't what it used tobe, and he hasnt released a successfulcomedy there in years. "There was a

Tunisian-financed |erry Lewis filmaround 1984 or 1985," recalls StevenLandis, an American photoSapher inParis. "I doubt it was ever distributed inAmerica. It was really horrible. Thehighlight was fifteen bathing beauties bysomeone's pooi. Reaily an embarrass-ment. I oniy went to see it," he sayssheepishly, "because my French girl-friend wanted to."

Is there any surefire way of tellingwhat will or won't hit in Europe? Evenwith blockbusters, nothing's guaran-teed: The failure in France of Three Menond o Boby wasn't all that predictable orthe studio wouldn't have poured so

much money into trying to sell it. "If Icouid predict which American filmswould do well in Europe," says theMPAA's Karlin, "l d hang a sign on mydoor: 'Expert Advice Here.i "

Fronk Lovece is o New-York bosed entertoin-ment writer, ond lhe coouthor of Hailing"TAXT'!

1. Platoon

2. The Name of the Rose

3. "Crocodile'Dundee

4. The Untouchables

5. LethalWeapon6. Children of a Lesser God

7. The Witches of Eastwick

8. ElLute9. Beverly Hills Cop ll

10. Angel Heart

Source: Gowrnment ot Spain^fadety

1.

2.

3.

4.

5,6.

7.

8.

9,"

10.

Switzerland

'Crocodile' Dundee

The l{ame ol the Rose'*Jean de Florette*

The Living Daylights

les FugititsilUlanon Oes Sources(lllanon of the Spring$Children of a Lesser Gsd

Platoon l

The Mission *

Beverty Hills Cop ll' Made in Francer

" Mufthatbnal producrion

Source: Assn. Cioomabgraphi$pSuise6 RomandeAlarbty

Americans like being satirized that

1i, 'Crocodile'Dundeg2. The Living Daylights

3. Leil4. Platoon

5. Beverly Hills Cop ll6. LethalWeapon

7. Mio in the Land of Faraway


9. The Untouchables

10. The Golden Child

Sourca: Gowmment ol SwettmAfarieg

SEPTEMBER 198s 47

"american flops ... european hits" (on the vagaries of international box office)

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