SUMMER READING: Screenwriting in the International Marketplace

Ray Morton's article in the new issue of Script magazine (an article I believe is only available in print), called "Going Global: Screenwriting in the International Marketplace," features an interesting section, "Remake Out," on the surprising number of properties exported from America to other countries. (We all know about the sheer number of US remakes of foreign titles—which Morton also writes about.) While this section doesn't represent everything I necessarily believe in, it's important food for thought:

Remake Out
Traditionally, Hollywood has always been an exporter—our movies play in every market in the world and our television shows have been dubbed into most known languages. Lately, we have even begun to export our history as a number of US film companies have licensed remake rights to some of their movies to overseas producers. For example, in May 2007, Viacom made a deal with Studio 18--India's largest film company—that will allow the Bollywood studio to do a Hindi-language remake of The Italian Job [itself a remake -ed.], an arrangement that also allows Studio 18 to pursue redos of other titles from the Viacom library. Groundhog Day and 12 Angry Men have also been remade—in Italy and Russia respectively—and plans for many others, including an Indian re-imagining of Cellular, have been announced... Obviously, this is all good news for the writers that penned the original films and shows since, under the terms of the WGA Minimum Basic Agreement, they get paid whenever their work is redone.

But, in the next section, called "Remake In," he shifts to the converse story we're all more familiar with, the number of foreign titles being remade in Hollywood. Skipping ahead to end of that section:

For many observers, the increasing reliance o foreign material is a sign of two distressing developments in the US entertainment industry. The first is how risk-averse the big entertainment companies have become—rather than take a chance on any original material, they seem to be interested only in pre-sold properties that have already proven themselves to be successful in other markets, be they best-selling books; remakes of old US movies and TV shows; classic toys, games and comic books; or popular material from other nations.

The second is the apparent loss of American creativity. "From a writing standpoint, what gets me is that we've stopped innovating," opines Dan Handfield. "We've stopped being the ones who are creating entertainment that the world is coming for. It's like we're out of it. I wish these networks and the studios would take more chances on homegrown entertainment, stuff that might be a little more off the wall, instead of saying, 'This was a hit in a foreign country so let's adapt it.' It's [other] countries that are actually the ones that have the freedom to do the innovation because they're not as constrained."

Despite its dire implications for the industry's ambition and creativity, the remake trend provides a lot of work for established American screenwriters because they are the ones who get hired to adapt all of this material. Of course, it bodes less well for the authors of spec scripts since it means that there's less and less market for original material."

While Handfield's quote probably comes off as more xenophobic-sounding than he intended, what do you—writers, producers, distributors, makers—think of the larger points here? Is this an issue or is it overblown, in your own experiences?

Posted by cphillips at July 21, 2009 3:08 PM