Copyright infringement, the New Wave, imperialism

A while back, someone from the MPAA was belly-aching about the scourge of video bootlegging. If it went on, he said, Hollywood would be reduced to making movies that were little better than TV soap operas.

Imagine a world---a paradise---in which movies all looked like daytime soap operas!

Well, it might not be paradise, but you'd get used to it. And if you didn't, you'd just have to find some other way to pass the time.

Of course, there are movies made with little money and they don't look like soap operas.

I would have liked A Beautiful Mind better if it hadn't cost $60 million. It grossed less than $180 million, so it broke even. It was just a guy walking around hallucinating. I wouldn't want it to look like a soap opera, but I wouldn't mind if it looked like an episode of T.J. Hooker, or maybe Ironside.

I read in a discussion of Dogme 95 that the average Danish movie cost something like two million dollars. Somewhere else, I read that Iran had made its most expensive movie ever, and it cost less than two million dollars.

Hollywood is spending too much on these things. The indigenous movie industries of the world are being crushed under its massive weight, which I assume is the whole idea.

After World War Two, the final demand the U.S. made of the French was that they lift the limit on the number of American movies allowed into the country before they could get aid under the Marshall Plan. This was while British youth culture was being taken over; their children dressed in blue jeans and hung around malt shops--what they call "milk bars"--listening to rock and roll.

But it all came back on the U.S. The American movies flooding France inspired The French New Wave which left Hollywood bewildered and confused. The subversion of British youth inspired their own musicians and led to the British Invasion.

But now what? You think anything like the French New Wave could challenge Hollywood? Could a few intellectuals makes films that would compete with movies costing hundreds of millions of dollars? It doesn't seem likely. A small group of filmmakers taking on Hollywood now would be like twenty or thirty thousand lightly armed insurgents in a backward, mountainous third world country trying to fight the massive, technologically advanced U.S. military.