Independents Take Bite Out of Foreign Market

Time was when you wanted to see a movie with an offbeat vision, relaxed sexual mores or a countercultural sensibility, you’d head for the local art house and see a foreign film. But these days, such films are increasingly facing a tough time just getting into theaters.

While some foreign films have made it into neighborhood multiplexes and a few have hit big at the box office--notably Miramax’s 1992 hit “Like Water for Chocolate” and last year’s “The Postman (Il Postino)”--subtitled fare is making up a smaller and smaller percentage of all films released.

As alternatives to the big studio pictures, foreign-language films must compete with a growing number of independent films--those made outside the studio system, on a small budget and often by first-time or lesser-known directors--as well as numerous English-language films made by British, Australian and New Zealand directors.

Compounding these obstacles is a large segment of the American audience’s predilection for fast-paced action and sophisticated special effects and its disinterest in reading subtitles.

“People used to go to foreign films for a more personal vision, more sophisticated outlooks and less cookie-cutter, formulaic filmmaking,” said Eamonn Bowles, senior vice president of acquisitions and marketing at Miramax Films. “The rise of the American independent has sort of serviced that need without making people have to read subtitles. People don’t have to go outside their borders for more challenging, intellectual and idiosyncratic cinema.”

Consequently, distributors that historically were champions of foreign films have begun to turn elsewhere.

Miramax Films, with 10 foreign-language films set for release this year, is the largest distributor of such films in the United States. Yet the studio will release twice as many English-language films as foreign films this year.

Sony Pictures Classics still releases about a third of its fare in a foreign language, but the remaining two thirds is a combination of American independent films and English-language foreign films, said Sony Pictures Classics co-president Tom Bernard.

Two other traditional purveyors of foreign films--Gramercy Pictures and Fine Line Features--have recently focused more on English-language fare, not out of ethnocentrism, their executives say, but for financial reasons.

“The business is definitely leaning toward English-speaking movies,” said Jonathan Weisgal, executive vice-president of Fine Line Features. “We do aggressively look at all the foreign-language films, but . . . an English-language film speaks to more people. So, the business decision is you will do better with a good movie in the English language than with a good movie in a foreign language.”

The downturn, meanwhile, has hit the ancillary markets, such as the local video store.

“The video business for foreign-language films has virtually dried up,” said ICM agent Robert Newman, who represents several foreign film directors. “It used to be that with small theatrical releases you knew you could go to video and recoup your theatrical exposure, but video stores just aren’t buying them.”

Foreign film distributors also complain that art-house exhibitors are being courted successfully by major studios as outlets for their more highbrow fare.

“The key is exhibitors,” Bernard said. “They haven’t put out the word ‘We want more of these [subtitled] films.’ In fact, the last thing they want is a foreign film that’s going to do $3,000 when they have a studio film that’s going to do $7,000 and appeals to the same audience.”

He noted that such mainstream movies as “The Birdcage,” “Sense and Sensibility,” “Fargo” and “Leaving Las Vegas” played in art houses as well as multiplexes.

“I know there are many exhibition companies that feel [showing foreign-language films] is a very limiting thing for them. They try to show mostly English-language specialty films,” said Bob Laemmle, stressing that his Southern California theater chain makes an effort to show every available foreign film.

Although films like “The Postman” and “Like Water for Chocolate” have each grossed far more domestically--$19 million for “The Postman” and $22 million for “Chocolate”--than classics by such foreign filmmakers as, say, Federico Fellini, Francois Truffaut or Werner Herzog in the ‘60s (considered the heyday of foreign cinema), foreign-language films are regarded differently these days. Once a staple of entertainment for students and the coleducated, foreign films have lost some of their cache, distributors say.

“Young people in particular have lost the habit of seeing subtitled films,” said Cassian Elwes, who runs the independent film division at the William Morris Agency. “What emerged in the ‘60s and into the ‘70s was a real sense of shared countercultural values that audiences would feel a part of when they went to those films. They viewed foreign films as the antithesis to ‘Airport’ or ‘The Love Bug’ or any dominant studio film. Today, the idea of having cinema that is outlaw per se, that is a reaction to a prevailing societal ethos, is just not there anymore.”

Consequently, the core audience for foreign-language films is now over 40, said Miramax’s Bowles, and today’s college students have less interest in the genre.

“They don’t want to read subtitles and there are so many choices available they don’t have to,” Bowles said.

In their homelands, European directors face other hurdles.

“Even in the countries where those films are made they’re having a harder time getting distributed,” Elwes said. “It becomes harder for native cinema to compete.”

Foreign filmmakers must now compete not only with one another for distribution, but also with a record number of American movies. More and more American films are being marketed overseas as aggressively as they are in the U.S. They are also being released almost simultaneously in U.S. and foreign cities.

“Globalization in the release of motion pictures has increased the appetite for Hollywood cinema,” Elwes said.

In most foreign countries, American films dominate the entertainment landscape. For instance, box-office tabulations for the past week show that in Germany and Italy, eight out of the top 10 pictures were American. In France, indigenous films did slightly better, with half of the top 10 films made in the U.S.

Having been nurtured on American-made fare, many young foreign filmmakers have been lured to the U.S. to direct movies and those who remain in their home countries often make films that are heavily influenced by American motion pictures.

“Filmmakers around the world are being educated far earlier by producers and distributors as to the necessities of financing movies and have been encouraged by those people to try to make films that will break out to larger audiences,” Newman said. “So, in a way, they’ve compromised their unique cultural visions by trying to make international films.”

The European effort to internationalize films has surged over the last five years or so, resulting in co-productions between governments. In several European countries, the government has helped to subsidize films, in an effort to preserve a unique heritage of cinematic storytelling. But these co-productions can result in clashes over language, cultural traditions and habits, said Frances Schoenberger, U.S. representative to the German Federal Film Board.

“It’s very hard with all these different mentalities,” Schoenberger said. “It becomes more like a travelogue. . . . You have to employ, say, five French, seven Germans. They work differently, . . . they have different traditions. It just kind of makes it very difficult to keep your team together.”

But industry officials agree that a truly great foreign-language film will find its audience.

Exporting indigenous product is difficult and will continue to be more difficult, but I believe there are films that are capable of it,” Elwes said. “If it’s a good movie, it doesn’t matter what language it’s in, people will go see it. It all comes down to how much money will be behind it and how good the movie is.”