How Godzilla Helped Slumdog Sweep the Oscars
There are a lot of individuals to thank for Slumdog Millionaire's eight Academy Awards and its best picture win, but the biggest is a stories-high radioactive reptile with an extreme distaste for Tokyo.
Yes, Godzilla. Without him, most foreign films wouldn't make it past customs. Few could have imagined the impact Godzilla: King of the Monsters would have had when it was released here in 1956, but a half-century later it's the most important foreign film in American history.
Crude as it was, Godzilla unlocked foreign film for even the most slackjawed of American filmgoers. Sure, they had to chop it up, re-dub the whole thing, and add Raymond Burr long after the film was wrapped, but Godzilla took its nuclear breath to the cultural obstacles (lingering racism and resentment following World War II, a long and storied national history of xenophobia, etc.) preventing meat-and-potatoes, movie-watchin' Midwesterners from enjoying Metropolis, La Strada, Grand Illusion and nearly every other subtitled foreign standard.
It all begins with a simple, transcendent idea: A big monster crushing a big city. Godzilla was the post-World War II, post-nuclear Japanese culture's coming out party, with its ravenous monster, terrified populace, and emotional center: the upstaged, eyepatch-wearing Dr. Daisuke Serizawa. Godzilla may get all the glory, but Serizawa did all the emotional heavy lifting. See, the one-eyed scientist invented an "oxygen destroyer" that could stop the monster, but won't use it for fear of going down as Japan's version of Robert Oppenheimer.
The film doesn't come together during Godzilla's big attack on Tokyo, but when a children's choir sings for Tokyo's dead. Hearing this, Serizawa resolves to give his own life to save Japan from further suffering and Godzilla ceases to be a silly monster movie. It's not about the damn monster at all, but about the pathos and suffering of an entire people.
Like many foreign films, Godzilla was initially misunderstood -- American critics couldn't look past the cheap theatrics. (The New York Times panned the film, saying, "As though there are not enough monsters coming from Hollywood, an organization that calls itself Jewell Enterprises has had to import one from Japan.")
Like tin-foil planes on strings, the insults bounced off Godzilla, as Jewell Enterprises' $100,000 lease of the film from Toho Pictures turned into a $2 million run at the box office. A monster was born -- along with the business model that still drives foreign films today. (In 2008 dollars, Jewell's initial investment was $790,000 against a gross of $15.8 million, proving that decidedly cult films could make big bucks, even if they didn't make the mainstream.)
While Godzilla entered the American consciousness one Saturday afternoon TV matinee at a time, it literally bankrolled the Japanese film industry. The film was an immediate hit in Japan and Toho moved to capitalize, licensing Godzilla and his monster buddies for comic books, cartoons, video games, and apparel. Flush with cash, Toho used the money to not only fund the films of Akira Kurosawa, but also all of Miyazaki's anime work and the Pokemon movies, too.
In the decades to come, foreign films became a staple side dish at the American box office. From couples watching the romantic French-fantasy Amelie in the suburbs to stoned-out college students passing out to Godzilla's thematic anime cousin Akira in their dorms, there are few foreign film fans who don't fall within the big lizard's footprint. That includes Slumdog Millionaire director Danny Boyle, who has followed the Godzilla blueprint better than anyone in decades.
Boyle started with a simple, transcendent idea: Who Wants to Be A Millionaire? By making the Regis-deprived game and its contestant the main focus, he tied in elements of Indian culture (including sectarian violence, caste discrimination, crippling poverty and a booming Mumbai) before the audience is able to give its final answer. The game and the events surrounding each question nearly destroy the man playing it, but he fights on and keeps living to play another day.
No, Slumdog doesn't have a giant monster. There aren't cheesy toy planes and radioactive breath. It won't lead to decades of appalling sequels and billions of dollars worth of merchandising. It did, however, benefit from the seemingly simple fare that came before and offered many Americans their first look at a culture other than their own.
And all this time you thought Godzilla was just another guy in a rubber suit.
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I encourage everyone to watch Godzilla again, the version without Raymond Burr if at all possible. It has some genuinely creepy, haunting shots, and the postwar angst (and possibly guilt?) is palpable. Watch one of the truly good Japanese movies first, just to give the film a cultural context. For some reason, that seems to enhance the movie. I'm not sure why. You'd think it would make it seem worse, up against Ran or Seven Samurai.
The movie wasn't that good
History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of man.
Truer words were never spoken, at least not with that amount of fuzz and cowbell.
oh no. they say he's got to go.
When I was all of 11 years old I went to the Strand Theater in Gloucester MA to see "Godzilla" with my younger brother. It scared us to death, but we loved every minute of it! If someone had told us then, that the movie we were watching would open little-noticed doors for future generations of film enjoyment we would have thought the radiation had gotten not just to the monster, but to you too, Mr Notte! But as with most things in life, they always seem to happen for a reason, and until you verbalized it here, I really hadn't realized what an impact that one movie has had on so many aspects of our culture. Thank you!
Unfortunately, my brother and I were pretty much the last generation to sit in the Strand Theater to not only scream with fear, but also with delight. How I wish that grand old theater was still standing. What stories it would tell of subsequent generations enjoying the fruits of Jewell Enterprises' seedling!
wait a minute:
"See, the one-eyed scientist invented an "oxygen destroyer" that could stop the monster, but won't use it for fear of going down as Japan's version of Robert Oppenheimer. "
Does Jason Nott not mean Edward Teller?
and
"The film was an immediate hit in Japan and Toho moved to capitalize, licensing Godzilla and his monster buddies for comic books, cartoons, video games, and apparel.
video games? Wikipedia says that Godzilla was released in 1954
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godzilla
otherwise a good read
Uh, hello... "licensing" is eternal. "Godzilla" HAS been seen in video games, Saturday morning cartoons, and so forth. Sorta like "Star Wars" came out in 1977 and you can still pick up a Millennium Falcon at Wal-Mart.
Too bad that the 2005 paperback novel, "Q&A" by Vikas Swarup, is apparently not available through the usual online bookstore.
The book is compelling, entertaining, and it gives twelve great fictional slices of life in India that are told as the boy, under police interrogation, explains how he came to know all of the answers that happened to be the correct ones on the quiz show that had been rigged with questions supposedly too difficult for anyone to get right.
Slumdog Millionaire (atrocious title!) is a highly dumbed-down bastardization of the book. Recipe: remove 95% of the good stuff, boil down remainder to boy-meets-girl formula, serve with hype.
The movie industry sure loves to pat itself on the back. It's younger writers must think that The Ten Commandments was an idea that germinated in the mind of Cecil B. DeMille.
Interesting point of view, I like it.
This blog entry completely ignores the fact that Americans have been seeing foreign films for as long as there have been movies. The first "feature-length film" shown in the United States was the Italian 1912 version of QUO VADIS?, and was credited by D.W. Griffith as being responsible for his desire to make American feature-length films.
Honorary Oscars for Best Foreign Language Films had been handed out by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences since at least 1947 - nearly a decade before GODZILLA was released in the US.
It wasn't even the first well-known Japanese film in the US - that was the 1951 Outstanding Foreign Language Film, Akira Kurosawa's RASHOMON.
He's pretty much right, though, that Godzilla: King of the Monsters was the first lowbrow foreign picture to hit big with a lowbrow American audience. (Also, foreign movies from the silent era did MUCH better here - for obvious reasons - they weren't in a foreign language.) There was ALWAYS an "arthouse" audience for foreign pictures. After Godzilla, you could play foreign genre trash, at drive-ins.
Not that the system was "perfected" by that: for instance, the eighties boom/golden age for the Hong Kong cinema, which included seminal movies from Tsui Hark, Jackie Chan, and Jet Li - was little more than a rumor stateside - those movies had to find cult followings in bootleg editions, in the U.S., the first fifteen years they existed.
Oh, and SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE wasn't even the first non-US produced film to win Best Picture - that would have been Laurence Olivier's 1948 version of HAMLET.
Umm, you said "Sure, they had to chop it up, re-dub the whole thing, and add Raymond Burr". Have you watched the original? They completely decimated it in order to make it more Americanized, removing most of the movie's original message. And they did it so badly to be laughable (every scene with Raymond Burr has the backs of the heads of stand-ins for the main characters, or he's off-scene looking on).
That is precisely the movie's charm.
I never miss a rerun...
I disagree with your comment that Godzilla had "an extreme distaste" for Tokyo. Near as I can tell, Godzilla thought Tokyo was delicious.
Interesting point about cinema history, and something I never would have thought of. Now I know who to thank for favorites like Farewell, My Concubine and City of God. Domo arigato, Mr. Godzilla!
Ya know, after reading this, it wouldn't surprise me at all if somebody came up with an "Ed Wood" or "Barton Fink" type movie based on how the original "guy in the rubber suit" ate Hollywood.
Love the article. May I suggest you go out and rent the Korean film 'The Host' right now. You'll appreciate it.
Seconded. The Host is one of the best and most exciting monster movies made in ten years. It makes a great double-feature with Cloverfield.
Great film, and the director's 'Memories of Murder' is a masterpiece as well. Also for a brilliant modern take on the horror genre rent 'Let The Right One In' when it comes on DVD next month.
Oh yes! Memories of Murder is worth seeing. Speaking of 'memories', Memories of Matsuko is worth seeing, too.
Yes, I also saw those Godzilla movies as a child, but, I am also a fan of Bollywood movies as well. I haven't seen Slumdog Millionaire, but I look forward to seeing it soon.
I grew up watching those movies.
Run! It's Godzirra!
GoJIRa, for heaven's sake!
And you don't say it you yell the name like it the last thing you ever yell! GoJIRa!!!!!! lolll
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