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Dogs and Demons :: Керр Алекс
Страница: 231 из 270In contrast, pachinko is a huge source of income for the police, whose retired officers run pachinko associations. (The police also profit massively from prepaid pachinko cards through their ownership in the card finance companies.) Therefore every tiny village and hamlet must raise a pachinko parlor.
Monopoly bred boredom among the public, and this actually had some good results in that the Big Three ceased to rely on their own products and started to buy independent films and put their own logos on them. This has been one way that independents break through. The other way is to find motion picture houses that are unaffiliated, and quietly these are increasing. After 1996 the number of movie theaters began to grow, for the first time in half a century, as American-style multiplexes entered big-city suburbs. Most of these, however, have foreign backing, such as Warner Bros., so it remains to be seen what these new theaters will do for the domestic industry.
By the end of the century, the Big Three were quietly running out of money. The budgets of Japanese films ran to a few million dollars at most, a scale of magnitude smaller than Hollywood's. In 1997, Shochiku reached the point where annual receipts from its entire movie division totaled only ¥3.4 billion-approximately $30 million, which would hardly produce one modest Hollywood feature. By 2000, Shochiku had given up: it sold its famous studio complex at Ofuna, fired most of its production staff, and retired from filmmaking, keeping only its distribution licenses. The Big Three had become the Big Two. As funds dried up, technological advance in film simply ceased. There were few inventive minds to spur innovation and no money to pay for it.
In 1995, I helped prepare the English subtitles for a Shochiku film, and I visited the famous Nikkatsu studios where so many of Japan's postwar films have been produced. I felt I'd stepped into a time tunnel: machinery decades old, cameramen standing on old orange crates to get height, piles of wires snaking over earthen floors, almost no computerization, no advanced lighting techniques – all in an aluminum Quonset hut.
There are other problems besides lack of money and outmoded technology, notably the degraded environment. The cities and countryside are so changed that it is difficult to produce a film with a beautiful backdrop, which Kurosawa complained about in his last days. When he directed the van Gogh episode in his Dreams (1990), he had to scour the entire country to find a site with no modern buildings or electric pylons where he could reproduce a French cornfield.
Monopoly bred boredom among the public, and this actually had some good results in that the Big Three ceased to rely on their own products and started to buy independent films and put their own logos on them. This has been one way that independents break through. The other way is to find motion picture houses that are unaffiliated, and quietly these are increasing. After 1996 the number of movie theaters began to grow, for the first time in half a century, as American-style multiplexes entered big-city suburbs. Most of these, however, have foreign backing, such as Warner Bros., so it remains to be seen what these new theaters will do for the domestic industry.
By the end of the century, the Big Three were quietly running out of money. The budgets of Japanese films ran to a few million dollars at most, a scale of magnitude smaller than Hollywood's. In 1997, Shochiku reached the point where annual receipts from its entire movie division totaled only ¥3.4 billion-approximately $30 million, which would hardly produce one modest Hollywood feature. By 2000, Shochiku had given up: it sold its famous studio complex at Ofuna, fired most of its production staff, and retired from filmmaking, keeping only its distribution licenses. The Big Three had become the Big Two. As funds dried up, technological advance in film simply ceased. There were few inventive minds to spur innovation and no money to pay for it.
In 1995, I helped prepare the English subtitles for a Shochiku film, and I visited the famous Nikkatsu studios where so many of Japan's postwar films have been produced. I felt I'd stepped into a time tunnel: machinery decades old, cameramen standing on old orange crates to get height, piles of wires snaking over earthen floors, almost no computerization, no advanced lighting techniques – all in an aluminum Quonset hut.
There are other problems besides lack of money and outmoded technology, notably the degraded environment. The cities and countryside are so changed that it is difficult to produce a film with a beautiful backdrop, which Kurosawa complained about in his last days. When he directed the van Gogh episode in his Dreams (1990), he had to scour the entire country to find a site with no modern buildings or electric pylons where he could reproduce a French cornfield.