Sleepless in Hollywood: Tales From the New Abnormal in the Movie Business by Lynda Obst Page B

Productions (FIP) banner under Sanford Panitch, which as of the date of writing has made more than $300 million in local-language box office. They are not remaking Fox properties.
    One of their most recent hits is My Name is Khan, about an Indian man with a unique point of view and his great but ultimately ill-fated love for a single mother, which became one of the biggest-ever Bollywood films outside of India. According to Gianopulos, who along with Panitch gave birth to the division, during one weekend in February 2012 Fox International Productions had the biggest movie in China, the most populous country in the world, and the biggest movie in India, the second most populous country in the world. Now Panitch and FIP have planned, made and cofinanced European, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Indonesian and Korean indigenous productions all around the world. What does he offer that they don’t have? Global reach.
    Panitch explained why it worked. “What you’d normally hear is, ‘We don’t need you, we have our own stories, we have money, we can get our films distributed, we’ve managed to do fine without you.’ Bollywood is a perfect example of that. They don’t need anybody. So why do we need you? The only reason we do need you is to get us into the United States and beyond our borders. Well, the answer is usually no, because your movies don’t usually go from India to China. My Name is Khan is a love story about an Indian man with a tragicomic way of looking at the world who moves to San Francisco and meets a vivacious single mother. It played around the world. We proved it can work. We provide that.”
    They also had an executive with a producerlike mentality who thought up the division and let him run with it. He had a philosophy that worked.
    “Let’s study the market, just like you would as a producer,” Panitch explained. He had grown out of the Fox culture before he ran minimajor New Regency Enterprises at Fox. I had known him for years, before he ran the world, when we worked together in the Old Abnormal when he was just starting. He was recommended to me by my great friend Dawn Steel.
    Even back then he was the world’s greatest information gatherer; he was the first person I know who kept compulsive files on a computer. It was in the eighties, and I had no idea what he was doing. And now, in a world where information is king, he reigns. “Other companies have tried and failed,” he said as we chatted about the quick success of his division.
    I noted that Disney tried, with High School Musical; it worked everywhere else in the world, so they made a Chinese version. But it only did $110,000 at the box office. “Why?” I asked him.
    “You could say it’s a strangely imperialistic point of view. Exactly the opposite of what we are trying to do. We are trying to figure out what would work in China; for example, what’s the best-selling novel there?”
    More and more, U.S. film companies are becoming global financiers and distributors, with coproduction and tax rebate deals (which incentivize local production through tax credits) commingling our limited cash resources and creating genuinely international product. We have built theaters to play our movies and the movies we finance with local filmmakers. If there is product, we should distribute it. Fox has long been doing this in Germany and Russia. Now it is doing it almost everywhere.
    I cannot understate the advantage that Fox had with an infrastructure already in place with pay TV (cable and satellite) all over the world. They had offices with well-connected locals all overAsia, the Middle East, China and Latin America who could hit the ground running and knew who was who in the local movie community. This is invaluable, as connections are vital in any business, especially a preciously gate-guarded one like the movie business.
    Panitch told me one of the things he had learned in Bollywood. When we were developing movies together, one of the organizing