Hollywood Bribes China

The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, known as F.C.P.A., “forbids American companies from making illegal payments to government officials or others to ease the way for operations in foreign countries.”[1] The practical difficulty facing American companies doing business around the world is that in some cultures bribes are so ubiquitous they are simply a part of doing business.  For American companies to refuse to participate in what is generally expected can be a competitive disadvantage, particularly if substitutes exist and the practice is widespread.

The full essay is in Cases of Unethical Business: A Malignant Mentality of Mendacity, available in print and as an ebook at Amazon.

1. Edward Wyatt, Michael Cieply, and Brooks Barnes, “S.E.C. Asks if Hollywood Paid Bribes in China,” The New York Times, April 25, 2012.

Hollywood on Risk: Snubbing Lucus’s “Red Tails”

When George Lucus showed Red Tails to executives from all the Hollywood studios, every one of the execs said no. One studio’s executives did not even show up for the screening. “Isn’t this their job?” Lucas said, astonished. “Isn’t their job at least to see movies? It’s not like some Sundance kid coming in there and saying, ‘I’ve got this little movie — would you see it?’ If Steven (Spielberg) or I or Jim Cameron or Bob Zemeckis comes in there, and they say, ‘We don’t even want to bother to see it.”[1] According to one newpaper, the snub implied that “Lucas’s pop-culture collateral — six ‘Star Wars’ movies, four ‘Indiana Jones’ movies, the effects shop Industrial Light and Magic and toy licenses that were selling (at least) four different light sabers . . .  — was basically worthless.”[2] As a result, Lucas paid for everything, including the prints, to enable the film’s opening. What can explain this bizarre snub?

Lucus was “battling former acolytes who [had] become his sworn enemies.”[3] This would be Star Wars fans, or “fanboys,” who have been upset because Lucus has made some changes to the films in new editions. “’On the Internet, all those same guys that are complaining I made a change are completely changing the movie,’ Lucas says, referring to fans who, like the dreaded studios, have done their own forcible re-edits.”[4] However, in being directed to black teenagers, “Red Tails” may not be directed to “Star Wars” fans. The snub could simply reflect the way business is done in Hollywood—meaning its tendency to be conservative, or hesitant, toward new ideas.

Regardless of a director’s past filmography, if the film being proposed does not fit with the current tastes of the targeted market segment, there’s not going to much studio interest. Lucus readily admits there’s not really much swearing in Red Tails. Nor is there a huge amount of blood in it; nobody’s head’s going to get blown off. Rather, the stress is on patriotism, and this is supposed to work for black teenagers. The fact that Lucus made Star Wars and Indiana Jones does not mean that he is right on Red Tails. At the same time, it was not as if he were an unknown. Studio execs could have given the filmmaker’s past accomplishments some weight, if only as proffering seasoned judgment from experience.

Moreover, marketing technicians are not always right in anticipating how word might spread concerning a film that could change tastes. Being confined to current tastes, filmmakers could never lead. Cuba Gooding Jr., one of the stars of Red Tails, points out that even a blockbuster can be unanticipated by the studios’ gatekeepers. “I like to say James Cameron made a movie just like this,” he said excitedly. “Instead of black people, there were blue people being held down by white people. It was called ‘Avatar!’ And the studios said the same thing to him: ‘We can’t do a movie with blue people!’”[5] Particularly where new technology and a different narrative are involved, the studios could be far too timid even for their own financial good. Lucus could have been reacting to this more than to childish fans.

“I’m retiring,” Lucas said. “I’m moving away from the business, from the company, from all this kind of stuff.”[6] Byran Curtis,  a reporter, concludes of Lucus’s decision, “He can hardly be blamed.” Rick McCallum, who had been producing Lucas’s films for more than 20 years, said “Once this is finished, he’s done everything he’s ever wanted to do. He will have completed his task as a man and a filmmaker.” According to Curtis, “Lucas has decided to devote the rest of his life to what cineastes in the 1970s used to call personal films. They’ll be small in scope, esoteric in subject and screened mostly in art houses.” Besides understandably being tired of ahistoric, short-term-financially-oriented studio executives and childish fans, Lucus had accomplished his task “as a man and a filmmaker.”[6] He could literally afford to spend the rest of his working life playing in pure creativity without regard to commercial roadblocks.

It will be others’ task to try to narrow the distance between that realm and that of the bottom-line-oriented studios. This is perhaps the challenge—the true bottom-line: namely, how to tweak the studios’ business model so creativity has enough room to breathe. Part of the solution could involve the increasing ease in filmmaking on the cheap, enabled by technological advances in equipment such as digital cameras and in distribution (e.g., the internet rather than theatres), as well as by an over-supply of actors. Young people in particular have taken to watching movies on a laptop or ipad. Any resulting downward pressure on price could affect the costs of even the blockbusters, such that actors making $20 million or more per film could be a thing of the past. As of the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the cost structure in Hollywood had all the distortions of an oligopoly (even monopoly), with the result that movie tickets were too high for two hours of movie experience. From the constriction that naturally comes with high prices, the industry itself could expand in terms of viewers and financially-viable genres of film were underlying cost-structure deflated by competition from the low end.

In retiring to make films “on the fly,” Lucus was once again ahead of the curve in orienting himself to the more fluid, less risk-averse “art house” world of filmmaking. While traditional studios and theatres will not contort themselves to fit it, the industry itself should look more diverse in 2020—running from high-priced “Avatar”-like 3D IMAX “experiences" to more films at a lower price downloadable on an ipad. Looking even further out, I would not be surprised if “films” in virtual reality make traditional movie theatres obsolete. I would not expect the studio executives who were not even willing to hear Lucus out to be among the trailblazers. In an industry like cinema, good far-sighted vision should be, and ultimately is, rewarded even if today’s bottom-line is in the driver’s seat.

1. Byran Curtis, “George Lucus Is Ready to Roll the Credits,” The New York Times, January 17, 2012. 
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.

A Dangerous Method

The method being referred to in A Dangerous Method (2011) is psychoanalysis, as pioneered by Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). The danger referred to is that of freeing people from their sexual repressions. The film revolves around the relationship between Freud and his younger colleague, Carl Jung (1875-1961), and the relationship between him and Sabina Spielrein, his former patient and eventual lover and colleague. She also had an affair with Freud, but it was not shown in the film. Keira Knightley plays the Russian woman a bit too strongly in the first few scenes. In terms of the acting, Knightley exaggerates facial contortions as if fishing for an Oscar out of sheer emotionality. In terms of the narrative, Spielrein’s “transformation,” or cure, is hard to take as credible because it is so drastic within a year or two. Before long, she is behaving completely normal and even attending medical school. The film’s merits lie not with the acting, but, rather, with the intellectual content, whose salience and integration into a good narrative is rare in Hollywood. It is due to this feature that the film is apt to stay with a viewer for some time.

For example, the Russian woman had been beaten by her father when she was a girl. She tells Jung that the experience of being beaten used to excite her sexually. When she and Jung began their affair, she told him to punish her, which he dutifully did (though he did seem to enjoy it, as the sex with his wife was always “tender”). Perhaps Jung’s own animus and anima had each found a home. One of the issues explored in the movie is whether freeing up the woman not to repress what excited her constituted progress toward mental health. A rather free-spirited colleague of Freud and Jung provides the affirmative argument, while Jung is more hesitant (even as he moves from spanking to a belt).

I was surprised that none of the psychiatrists in the film voiced the view that the woman’s “excitement” in being beaten might be a misdirected or misinterpreted desire to recover her father or have the father she never had, emotionally speaking. In other words, the feeling of being hit represented that of her father that she had, so she was drawn to it. If I’m right, the underlying desire was not sexual.

How many women are “attracted” to “bad boys” without realizing that the desire is to recover a father by means of the only thing “father” had meant? Ultimately, the alley is a dead-end. The woman does not get her father back, or even the feeling of having one, emotionally-speaking. Is freeing up a woman from repressing a dead-end a good thing? Does it help her get what she really wants? I think the answer is rather obviously no.

Aside from the questions revolving around Jung’s former patient and lover, the film discusses the interesting question of whether a new field can afford to “take risks,” such as in Jung’s interest in parapsychology and religion. His contribution to the psychology of religion is significant—more so than Freud’s Totem and Taboo. However, Freud voices a legitimate point that the emphasis on sexual explanation in psychoanalysis would be than more than enough scandal in the second decade of the twentieth century, so soon after the Victorian era. At about the same time, or a decade or two earlier, Nietzsche’s controversial writings had been very controversial, particularly on religion. Adding a plethora of sexual interpretation to dreams would indeed arouse plenty of resistance. This debate played out as relations between Freud and Jung became increasingly strained before they parted company altogether.

Both with regard to the question of repression and a “cure” and that of how a new firm should develop, the filmmaker did an excellent job in grounding the ideas to characterization. While I would have enjoyed a PBS special on the ideas themselves, integrating theories around narrative and characters is useful both in terms of understanding and as a fruitful avenue for Hollywood, which could be accused of putting out too many mindless action flicks that catch the biggest market segment and allow for merchandizing. Another film from 2011 that effectively integrates theory with narrative and characterization is Hugo.