Bollywood to plagiarism: Bye bye?
Filmmakers in Bollywood, India’s movie industry, are notorious for borrowing liberally from foreign films far and wide, especially Hollywood.
Even when they don’t copy an entire film frame by frame, Bollywood directors often borrow from several films at once, melding story lines and adapting them to an Indian setting, complete with song and dance. They do this, of course, without buying the remaking rights. Despite a lot of original cinema coming out of Bollywood, plagiarism is rife.
Hollywood hasn’t cared until now, The Washington Post’s Emily Wax reports. Twentieth Century Fox recently settled a lawsuit with BR Films — a well-known banner — over its remake of the 1992 hit “My Cousin Vinny.” Fox accepted $200,000, paving the way for a release of the Hindi version, called “Banda Yeh Bindaas Hai” or “This Guy is Fearless”.
The Times of London has reported that a lawyer representing major American studios has recently sent warning letters to producers who he believes are copying Hollywood films. Among the titles are “Ghostbusters”, “Jerry Maguire”, “The Departed” and “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”, the paper reports.
Will Fox’s action finally put a stop to the widespread plagiarism in Bollywood? More likely, Bollywood producers will just have to cough up the money to buy remaking rights, which is how it should be.
Keep an eye on:
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- Channel 4 will drop Big Brother as it focuses more on public service broadcasting. (Financial Times)
- Alcatel-Lucent shares jump on rumors of Chinese bid. (Reuters)
It’s 8:00 p.m. — do you know where your TV is?
The new prime-time TV season is starting and that means all eyes are on Nielsen ratings. While that’s the case every fall, this one is a bit different — the industry is recovering from a writers’ strike that threw the 2007-08 season into disarray.
AdAge points out, for instance, that serialized dramas already appear to be having trouble getting their footing back. It says two NBC dramas, “Chuck” and “Life,” both opened the season to sharply lower viewing numbers for the 18-49 demographic than they did a year ago.
Both are indicative of how many serialized dramas lost media momentum last year due to the strike, and how hard it will be to rebuild it without the buildup of free media any new show receives
Unscripted shows might hold up better, the article says.
Since nature — and TV — abhors a vacuum, many viewers during the strike got sucked into reality shows like “Dancing With the Stars” and many are coming back.
Overall, the Wall Street Journal reports, the big five broadcast networks saw a 4.3 percent decline in viewership from the first week of the season a year ago. The article cites Nielsen figures.
General Electric’s NBC faced the steepest overall declines, with 16.3% fewer viewers. Older-skewing CBS, a unit of CBS Corp., was down 9.6% among viewers between the ages of 18 and 49. News Corporation’s Fox and The CW, a joint venture between CBS Corp. and Time Warner Inc.’s Warner Bros., were both up over last year, but still ranked Nos. 4 and 5 in viewers among the English-language networks, respectively.
Just as Bollywood looks to Hollywood for inspiration, Hollywood too often remakes European movies!