The End Of Cinema As We Know It: American Film in the Nineties

6. Marketing Marginalized Cultures: The Wedding Banquet, Cultural Identities, and Independent Cinema of the 1990s

6 Marketing Marginalized Cultures The Wedding Banquet, Cultural Identities, and Independent Cinema of the 1990s Justin Wyatt AC C O R D I N G TO VA R I E T Y ’ S 1993 Profit Chart, a ratio of return-tocost reveals that 1993’s most profitable film was not Steven Spielberg ’s dinosaur extravaganza Jurassic Park (with a return of 13.79:1), but rather the gentle cross-cultural social comedy The Wedding Banquet , directed by Ang Lee (with a return of 23.6:1). The film’s financial success (a $30 million worldwide gross) was matched by widespread critical praise, including an Academy Award nomination for best foreign film and a most commercially significant “two thumbs up” from Siskel and Ebert. The film’s commercial and critical prestige was tied to the national and ideological position occupied by the film. It was a curious hybrid, classified as “United States/Taiwan” by distributor Samuel Goldwyn, a foreign film by the Motion Picture Academy, and (implicitly) an American film by the Independent Spirit Awards. Such is the fluidity of cultural production in the “communities” of independent film. The film tells the story of two gay lovers—one Asian (Wai-tung), one Caucasian (Simon)—who fake a marriage to placate Wai-tung’s traditional parents. The plot revolves comically around issues of sexual orientation, discrimination, and “family values.” Critics generally applauded both the cross-cultural and sexual elements of the film. Consider Georgia Brown’s assessment in the Village Voice: “If this movie doesn’t become hugely popular and thereafter increase tolerance for gays, Asians, and emigrants, as well as reconcile the generations, it will make you glow just imagining that it might.”1 61 This “glow” comes at a price, however. In this essay, I will address the commercial, economic, and aesthetic determinants of The Wedding Banquet, with an emphasis on how the larger institutional forces of independent filmmaking and marketing have created a work that replicates and reinforces dominant notions of cultural difference. THE TRANSFORMATION OF AMERICAN INDEPENDENT CINEMA To better understand the box office success of The Wedding Banquet in the shifting marketplace of American independent cinema, we first must take a look back at the early 1980s, a time in which independents had great difficulty securing a market presence. As Myron Meisel wrote in Film Comment’s sixth annual “Grosses Gloss” in 1980, “Independents generally had a hard time of it, with majors glutting the marketplace and competing with them in the horror and comedy genres.”2 Looming on the horizon, though, were cable and video, which, like the early days of television, seemed to provide an endless market for product of all kinds. The introduction of these various home box office markets did not lead immediately to an increase in production/distribution at the studios. But a dramatic increase occurred in the independent film sector . Suddenly, companies that had been either dormant or small in market presence (e.g., Cinecom, Goldwyn, DEG, Cannon, Vestron, Island, Alive, and Atlantic Releasing) increased their production schedules. The boost in independent film production (including titles released directly to video) created a market in which, by 1988, independently produced films accounted for 70 percent of the U.S. market, an increase of over 20 percent compared to only five years earlier.3 The configuration of the market in 1993 developed from this volatile period—a period marked by a surge in independent production linked to the cable and video boom. As critic David Ansen commented in 1987, Why are there so many new companies joining the low budget bandwagon —companies like Cinecom and Island, Goldwyn and Alive, Skouras, Cineplex, Atlantic, Vestron, and Spectrafilm? The answer is home video. For one thing, the independent home-video companies need product to fill their pipelines. Since the studios already have their own video companies, new movie sources need to be created.4 62 JUSTIN WYATT At first, the dollars from video and cable acted as a large buffer so that, if the budget was comparatively low, an independent film could not fail to break even. But the video market has proven to be an “A” title market. Independents are viewed increasingly as a risky venture in terms of capital investment. Hemdale’s John Daly described this situation in 1991: “It’s tougher for independents to raise money today, no question about that. People are still in...