American Film Market Opens With High Hopes

More than 10,000 film buyers, sellers and gawkers are expected to converge here during the next week for the biggest-ever American Film Market exposition. The ninth annual event opened Thursday at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, hoping to rival Cannes as an international marketplace.

In addition to giving film distributors and producers a showcase for their latest wares, the Culver City-based American Film Market Assn. will be hosting a series of seminars, focusing on controversial topics in the entertainment business. This year the seminars range from selling movies inside the Iron Curtain to the use of European money to pump new life into the flagging fortunes of many of Hollywood’s independent producers.

But the chief subject being discussed among film marketers this year centers in Europe, not Hollywood.

In his keynote address, a former cultural affairs commissioner for the Commission of the European Communities zeroed in on the topic that seems to be driving the most fear into the hearts of moguls and would-be moguls these days: the possibility that European nations might begin imposing a quota system on American film and television producers after 1992.

“Both the U.S. and Europe are producing around 600 films per year, give or take 10 or 20% . . . ,” said Italian-born Carlo Rippa di Meana. “Now, American films account for 60%, on an average, of films in European theaters.”

In the United States, on the other hand, only about 3% of the films shown each year are European products, he said.

“Don’t you find this appalling?” he asked an audience of about 500 exposition delegates at the keynote luncheon on Wednesday. “I do.”

Di Meana remained optimistic when questioned from the floor about quotas, however, stressing that “a quota system will not solve our problem” and suggesting that such a proposal has limited support among European Common Market nations.

Of the movies that European film makers produce, only about 20% are ever distributed out of their country of origin, said Di Meana.

Recently, delegates from the 12 member nations of the European Executive Commission suggested that a ceiling of 60% might be imposed on the number of non-European produced films and TV programs that could be shown in Western European countries by 1992.

According to some industry estimates, the lucrative European market ($1 billion in TV sales alone in 1987) could double by 1992. If quotas are imposed, however, the American share of that windfall might shrink.

The American Film Market will wind up next Friday with a seminar on television programming opportunities and pitfalls in Europe, circa 1992.