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Ed Laser is a six time Telly Award winning filmmaker and film historian based out of Champagne, Illinois. In addition to writing about international remakes, he's restored and remastered Turkish adaptations of Rambo and Star Wars, as well as published the first English translation of Dracula in Istanbul. His new book out is an interesting read. It's called How the World Remade Hollywood at Glazier. Let's start with what brought you to this topic?
Sure, well, I was in college and I was, for whatever reason, watching all of the Hannibal movies. I think I'd just read the books, and Red Dragon had been made a couple of times as Manhunter in the eighties and then again in the two thousands, and I was wondering if there were any other versions that I was just unaware of. And so I was kind of surfing IMDb and all of the connections pages and discovered a Bollywood film called Song Harsh, a remake of Silence of
the Lambs. And let me tell you, you have not lived until you've seen Hannibal Lecter sing and dance in a Zoro costume. And from there I had to find out what else existed in this world of remakes, authorized and unauthorized, and came across the Star Wars and it started snowballing from there.
How the world remade Hollywood Global interpretations of sixty five iconic films. It's ed Glazer? Who's a Glazer? Who's joining us? Now? So were these films? You said some of them were authorized, some of them were not. So many of them did have the permission to be remade by the creators of the original film.
I would say far fewer of them than you would expect.
I thought so too, because they didn't have the budgets either, did they.
No? No, I mean you're talking about countries like Turkey or Nigeria, and you know they were. I mean, Turkey was at the time in the in the seventies, like the third most production productive film industry in the world, but it was really fly by the seat of your pants, and they didn't have the ability to spend money internationally.
They couldn't import stuff, so their budgets were super low and film was really hard to get hold of, so they really were kind of dealing with insurmountable odds to make some of these films.
That was my next question as to, Okay, why why didn't they just import the film and dub it into their language and off you go.
Well, in some cases, when I say film was hard to get, I really mean the film stock. But yes, in some cases some of these films weren't released domestically or in some cases, the thing about Hollywood films is that they would offer these films for international release, but they would be more expensive than their older films, and so in countries like Turkey, they'd say, well, we're going to wait a little bit to bring this one in because we want to wait for the price to go down.
But hey, we've heard that The Exorcist is really super popular all over the world. So since we don't have it here yet, I'm going to go off and do my own version and see if I can kind of make some money based on the hype before the original comes here.
Ed Glazer with us how the world remade Hollywood global interpretations of sixty five iconic films. You've already mentioned Annibal Lecter. What are some of the other hilarious remakes that remade Hollywood.
Sure, well, you've got Japanese Spider Man. You've got Turkish Batman, also Turkish Superman. You've got an Indian version of The Fast and the Furious, a Russian version of Commando, the Arnold Schwarzenegger film. You've got Turkish James Bond. You've got a Chinese high school musical. You've got Italian Jaws, Italian The Warriors, a Japanese paranormal activity. There's just there's so many of them, and they're all so fascinating.
And some of them I'm wondering how legal they were in the countries where they were produced. I mean, we're talking about some Muslim countries which don't allow a certain amount of skin to be shown, or women's faces, or certain stretches of sexuality.
You know that's really true. There is actually an Egyptian remake of the Rocky Horror Picture Shows that I talk
about in the book. And the thing about the Rocky Horror Picture Show is that you really can't get away with showing that in Egypt, or at least you couldn't at the time that this was me and so the director of the Egyptian version, who was a big fan of the original had to change a ton of stuff, like the entire second and third act basically needed a complete rewrite, and so they kind of reworked it into a story about Dracula, but there's so much of the
original that's still there, as well as kind of an interesting sort of sociohistorical slant that has a lot more to do with Egypt at the time than the original had to do with American culture. Or you get say Indian versions of horror films where the originals are gory or there is a lot of skin shown, and it's probably not it wouldn't normally be the best option for a wide release in India because you get censorship problems.
But they are releasing these films to the sort of lower budget uh you know, the the rural theaters and things like that, where you're not getting the sort of big budget stuff where you can kind of get away with some of that.
How the World Remade, How the World Remade? Hollywood Global Interpretations of sixty five iconic films and Glazier is with us. And did any of these filmmakers get rich?
Yes, maybe not rich, but you know, there's the one of the most famous ones is the Turkish Star Wars, which steals footage from Star Wars and also music from Indiana Jones and a bunch of other films. The whole story is kind of a Flash Gordon sort of thing, so it's really kind of a hodgepodge. But it's become kind of infamous as one of the worst movies ever made, which I think is not fair because I think it's it's wild and wonderful and relentlessly entertaining.
So you watched you watched most of these?
Yes, Oh yeah, I watched. I watched so many of them. And uh, you know that film came out and and you know, it bought the director a new car, It paid off the offices of the film company. So yeah, these movies made money. I mean not all of them. Some of them tanked. There's an Indian Harry Potter movie that just made back twenty percent of its budget or something.
And that was my next question. We're not talking just old films like Batman and Superman. I mean, are they still doing this?
They are, but we're now in an era where they kind of can't get away with doing it on the qt They kind of have to really pay for the rights. They may still remake it in a different way, but there's more scrutiny.
And I would think there are more larger Hollywood studios that are willing to produce those versions for the different languages and the different cultures because they ultimately get the money out of that.
That is exactly right. And Disney's in China right now doing co productions, and they did the High School Musical China. There's a lot of companies that are working with Indian companies to do remakes. There was an Indian remake of that Tom Cruise Cameron Diaz movie Night and Day that came out not too long ago.
And we're seeing it in television too. I mean, how many of our current television shows are inspired by a British original?
Oh? Absolutely, so many.
Yeah, which is a lot easier understandable than.
Yes. And well, and you know, a lot of us are kind of aware of all of the ways in which Hollywood remakes international films, a lot of the Japanese war films and so forth, and I kind of wanted to turn the mirror around and see how our culture was reinterpreted.
And he goes backwards and does just that, how the world remade Hollywood Global Interpretations of sixty five iconic films and interesting and amusing read from Ed Glazier. And if you're a film, if you're a fan of cinema, you will be a fan of this book. And I thank you for joining.
Us, sir, absolutely, thank you so much.
Thanks for listening to Later with Lee Matthews, the Lee Matthews Podcast, and remember to listen to The Drive Live weekday afternoons from five to seven and iHeartMedia presentation