Less Sturm und Drang at the Movies

By MARY WILLIAMS WALSH

Nov. 18, 1997 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

MUNICH, Germany — For years, even decades, the movie screen was a place where German directors sought not to amuse, not to thrill--certainly not to make money, ach du Lieber!--but to work through the brooding, pessimistic, guilt-ridden consciousness that has consumed the German intellect and soul in the postwar era.

At its best, the last wave of German cinema brought forth such art-house classics as Volker Schloendorff’s true-to-the-novel “The Tin Drum” and Werner Herzog’s “Fitzcarraldo,” a hypnotic tale of a madman hauling a ship through the hilly jungles of South America.

But as the years wore on, the increasingly cerebral fare earned German cinema the reputation of being too slow, too hard to understand and finally, downright unwatchable. Germans voted with their feet: As recently as 1991, there wasn’t a single film made here that could boast 400,000 viewers--and this is a country of 83 million.

How things change. The last couple of years have seen the maturing of a new generation of filmmakers in Germany, and suddenly, a hot new genre has been born, called “relationship comedy.” The films have funny, engaging story lines and are set in everyday places, showing people and situations that ordinary Germans can easily identify with.

Some of the films are attracting huge crowds, and better still, since they’re relatively inexpensive to produce, they can make lots of money.

“It’s a paradigm change in the heads of the filmmakers,” says Thilo Kleine, head of Munich-based Bavaria Studios, Germany’s largest movie-making enterprise.

The sudden commercial success of the comedy genre is reshaping the movie business in Germany, which has the second-largest film-going audience in the world and is, historically, the only country ever to give Hollywood a run for its money (you have to go all the way back to the 1920s).

In 1995, just 8% of movie tickets were sold for German-made films, with at least three-quarters of moviegoers flocking to dubbed fare from America. But this year, German-made films are expected to account for an impressive 20% to 25% of ticket sales, and the U.S. majors are substantially stepping up their activity here, distributing and co-producing films in German, for the German market.

“This is the first period in Germany since the war where filmmakers want to make films for an audience, and not just for the critics,” says director Soenke Wortmann, whose credits include the 1994 “Der Bewegte Mann,” a gay-themed comedy that was Germany’s most successful film of the decade.

Lack of Faith

It isn’t that there were never any smart, funny films made in Germany; you just had to be a detective to find them. Mainstream movie houses were too busy touting sure-thing Hollywood imports to give the domestic output much of a run, and advertising campaigns for German films were desultory at best.

“The German distributors didn’t believe in German films,” says Wolfgang Braun, head of Disney’s German subsidiary, Buena Vista. “We have a subsidy system in Germany, so that in the past, films could be produced with no real risk to the producer. It was possible to make a film without caring what became of it.”

Kleine, of Bavaria Studios, thinks today’s film phenomenon can be traced back to the flowering of commercial television in Germany. There was nothing but public television here until 1984, and when commercial TV finally made its belated appearance, there wasn’t nearly enough German content to fill the air time.

That meant the 1980s were the age of “Dallas” and “Miami Vice” in Germany, and the generation that spent its formative years watching these shows has now reached maturity. The upshot, says Kleine, is that today’s young German entertainment professionals have instincts about viewer-friendly pacing and camera work that their forebears either forswore or simply lacked.

And for them, he says, it is a bold, satisfying challenge to the older generation to announce that they actually like Hollywood stuff, and want to emulate it.

“They were never educated in the strong ideological teachings of the ’68 generation,” says Kleine, referring to the Germans who spent their youth protesting the Shah of Iran, throwing eggs at Amerika Haus and reveling in the highbrow, anti-commercial films now considered passe.

“They want to make films, they want to have audiences for their films, they want to make money,” Kleine says. “They are not afraid of commercialism. This is very important.”

Untapped Potential

German industry observers often credit a 51-minute feature called “Abgeschminkt”--the name can be loosely translated as “Forget It”--as the film that woke up this country to the untapped commercial potential of domestic movies. Released in 1992, it was the senior thesis project of Katja Von Garnier, then a student at the Munich Film Academy. The story line concerned the stresses on the friendship of two women as they fell in love with two different men.

“Nobody wanted to release the film because nobody thought it would work,” recalls Xavier Chotard, marketing director at the independent Munich distributor Kinowelt. “But the film exploded in Germany. It was a big surprise.”

Another big surprise came in 1994, when Wortmann’s “Der Bewegte Mann,” which translates literally as “The Shaken-Up Man,” reached theaters here.

It told the comic story of a Don Juan who, after getting the boot from his girlfriend, moves in with a gay man who introduces him to an alternative social whirl. After the roommate expresses a romantic interest, the Don Juan starts to wonder whether he too is gay, setting off a sexual identity crisis that lingers even after he reconciles with his girlfriend.

“Der Bewegte Mann” hit the jackpot in Germany, attracting 7 million viewers over 1994 and 1995, more than any German film in a decade. It brought $48 million in domestic box office receipts, after costing less than $4 million to make. It also made a nationwide sex symbol out of the previously unknown actor Til Schweiger, who played the Don Juan. In the U.S., it was distributed under the name “Maybe . . . Maybe Not.”

“It didn’t do well in places like the Midwest,” says Wortmann, who divides his time between Munich and Los Angeles and says that, when he was growing up, his own favorite directors were Americans. “It was subtitled, and that’s hard in a comedy. I wasn’t surprised that it wasn’t a big blockbuster. It was an honor for it to be distributed there at all.” Wortmann’s subsequent film, “Das Superweib,” or “The Superwife,” was the third most popular German film of 1996.

With “Der Bewegte Mann” showing the industry just how much money there is to be earned here on well-made domestic films, the character of the German movie industry started to change. The American majors--which have long had a presence in Germany, but mainly as distributors of dubbed American films--jumped onto the “relationship comedy” bandwagon. Disney’s Buena Vista subsidiary made the first experimental move, distributing a German children’s film about a goblin in 1993.

‘Nobody Loves Me’

It got good results, so Buena Vista next picked up “Keiner Liebt Mich,” or “Nobody Loves Me,” a German film about a morbid single woman who gets involved with an actor whose work requires him to wear a skeleton costume. It attracted 1.7 million viewers.

“That was very encouraging, since it wasn’t a totally light comedy,” Braun says. “Now we have a couple of comedies every year.”

For better or worse, the Hollywood way of releasing films here proved rather jarring for tradition-loving Germany. In the past, a distributor might launch a German film with 50 copies or so, throw together a trailer and some posters, and try to get theater owners to stop scheduling the big Hollywood blockbusters long enough to give the German product a chance.

Buena Vista’s style, by contrast, was to pick a film with box office potential, buy hundreds of prints, hire professionals to run a dead-serious, high-visibility marketing campaign--complete with a full-dress, star-studded premiere--and drop a great deal of cash on TV advertising.

“A lot of people were very upset,” recalls Kinowelt’s Chotard. “They complained that as soon as there was money to be made here, [Hollywood] wanted to invest in this new market. And they invested a lot of money. People were wondering whether it would work.”

It did. Buena Vista’s first German co-production, “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” a film about two terminally ill men who bust out of a cancer ward, steal a mafioso’s car and go joy-riding with gangsters and police in hot pursuit, is poised to be the No. 1 German film of 1997, with 3.35 million tickets sold as of mid-November and revenues of $21 million. Ranked against all films, German-made and foreign, “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” is currently the year’s fourth most popular in Germany.

Even the story behind “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” sounds more like a Hollywood fantasy than the workaday German real world. The scriptwriter, Thomas Jahn, was in fact a film-loving taxi driver who happened to bump into Schweiger--the unknown actor who had just become a national heartthrob with “Der Bewegte Mann”--in a record shop. The taxi driver complimented the movie star on his acting, then mentioned he had a screenplay back home in his desk drawer.

Just the thing to send Schweiger fumbling for his car keys, right?

Wrong.

“Til Schweiger said, ‘If you have a script, just send it to me,’ ” recalls Buena Vista boss Braun. The two spent a year revising the script, then persuaded Buena Vista not only to co-produce it but to make Jahn the director.

“We sent him to a course in New York, where he learned directing in seven days,” says Braun, adding that this weird-sounding project worked because Jahn, who had an academic background in film, is a cinema addict with a powerful “big-screen” vision that he refused to water down.

“A normal director in Germany would have given it a TV look, and we didn’t want this,” Braun says.

Meanwhile, two other Buena Vista offerings have also made it into the 1997 Top 10 for domestically made films. “Jenseits der Stille,” or “Beyond Silence,” a film about a family in which both parents are deaf, is currently ranked seventh and will be the German industry’s Oscar nominee for best foreign film. And Buena Vista’s “Bandits”--Von Garnier’s follow-up to “Abgeschminkt,” again with a women’s theme--is currently the German industry’s eighth most popular film of the year, with a widely played soundtrack and admissions of about 917,000, good for $5.7 million in revenues.

With successes like these, says independent distributor Chotard, the big-name directors of the new generation started wanting to link up with big-bucks American studios. And in fact, the other American majors have substantially increased their activity here. Columbia TriStar has opened a co-production company in Cologne, Warner Bros. distributed four German films this year, and United International Pictures released one--though none of the other U.S. majors has as yet matched Buena Vista’s luck with German productions.

Warner has also built a splashy, $250-million theme park, called Movie World, in the western German town of Oberhausen, featuring both rides and studio tours. And now Warner is working with cab-driver-turned-scriptwriter Jahn on a follow-up to Buena Vista’s “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.”

Hits at Home

The big German studios have meanwhile stepped up their own marketing campaigns accordingly, and are reaping a satisfying harvest of hits. The latest home-grown favorite is unquestionably Munich-based Constantin Filmproduktion’s “Ballermann 6,” a raunchy comedy set in a real-life bar on the Spanish island of Majorca. The bar is a well-known haven for beery German tourists--the kind who drink sangria out of buckets and hold contests to see who has the most profound beer gut--and German viewers seem to find this parody of their worst stereotypes irresistible.

“That film couldn’t work outside Germany,” Chotard notes. But here, where the humor makes sense, “Ballermann 6” has attracted 1.9 million viewers since it opened Oct. 16.

Film executives here say they aren’t troubled by the poor export potential of their new comedies.

“The German market is so huge that you don’t have to be successful abroad to make money,” Chotard says.

And the success of “relationship comedy” is, for now, keeping them from venturing off into other genres, particularly the special-effects-laden thrillers that Hollywood does so successfully.

“It’s like comparing a German Mercedes to a Chinese bicycle,” says Kleine, with a laugh, about the difference between a Hollywood thriller and its German counterpart. “Perhaps we have the technical equipment in Germany to make ‘Air Force One,’ but we don’t have the money, we don’t have the stories, we don’t have the actors, and we don’t have the structures around the world to distribute this type of product.”

For the moment, that doesn’t bother Kleine.

“The one product that Hollywood doesn’t have is German comedy,” he says. “Comedies must always reflect the character of a nation, and the jokes must be very national. So far, this is a product which Hollywood can’t produce.”

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What Germans Watch

Although earnings from American-made films were down in 1996, they still accounted for more than 75% of fees charged by distributors to movie theater owners.

Percentage of revenues distributors get from theater owners for the right to show films in the Germany market, according to nation of origin:

1996 American films: 75.1%

1996 German films: 15.3%

Note: These figures reflect the theater owners’ perception, prior to showing of the films’ commercial value. They don’t reflect the number of tickets sold.)

Source: Assn. of Film Distributors, Wesbaden.

The Top 10

The 10 most popular films in Germany for 1997 (as of Nov. 11):

1. Title: “Men in Black”

Country: U.S.

Admissions: 7,175,497

Box Office (in millions): $46

2. Title: “Bean”

Country: Britain

Admissions: 5,563,721

Box Office (in millions): $33

3. Title: “Lost World: Jurassic Park”