Harvey Rochman
(305) 295-9228
901 Eisenhower Dr, Apt 2
Key West, FL 33040-7238
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Harvey Rochman Speaks the Hard TruthPosted by Michael St. John on Nov 23, 2008 - 6:15:02 PMProducer Harvey Rochman has a message for Hollywood, and it's a message that many in the U.S. film industry don't want to hear. Harvey's message? You're going the wrong way! And Rochman is on a one-man crusade to set Hollywood back on the right course.Rochman's point is simple. The audience for Hollywood movies is international, but Hollywood isn't telling international stories. “Studio chiefs still act like they're living in the days when the target audience for movies was Main Street, U.S.A.,” Rochman told me during an interview from his home in Key West, Florida. “But they're wrong. That type of thinking is outdated. Today, the fastest-growing audiences are not on Main Street. They're in Beijing, New Delhi, South Korea, Indonesia, and Mexico, to name a few. These are countries in which people want to see their stories up on the big screen. When Hollywood doesn't deliver, a home-grown film industry will inevitably take its place. Hence the phenomenal growth of Bollywood over the past two decades.”
Rochman knows his business. A successful Wall Street financier who was a multi-millionaire by the time he turned twenty-five, Rochman has helped finance a slew of well-received films, including “Lost Junction,” starring Neve Campbell and Billy Burke (the star of the just-released blockbuster “Twilight”), and “Misconceptions,” starring Orlando Jones and A.J. Cook (the star of ABC's “Criminal Minds”). And now he's urging Hollywood to look beyond its traditional borders. “The cultural founding myths of the non-Western world, China, India, Latin America, Africa…those are going to be the next big global stories. ”
Rochman is hard at work arranging financing for movies that tell those global stories. And as adamant as he is that the U.S. film industry must begin looking for stories from abroad for its next generation of movies, he's equally adamant that telling those stories will benefit the West just as much as it will benefit the rest of the world. “Right now, I'm packaging a movie biopic about Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey,” Rochman told me. “He is barely known in the West, but he took a theocratic, ruthless, despotic empire, and turned it into a modern, democratic republic, over eighty years ago. This is exactly what the West would like to happen in the rest of the Muslim world, and here's a great historical figure who did just that. Yes, there's an audience of hundreds of millions who know the Ataturk story, and who would flock to see such a film. But it's equally important for us to know that story, and to learn from it.”
“The decades of Western dominance, of American and European dominance over world culture, is coming to an end. If Hollywood can see this trend, understand it, and grow accordingly, there will be a treasure trove of new, fresh, and exciting movies to make, and a global audience of billions to pay to see them. But if Hollywood insists on remaining trapped in the previous century, it will see its global importance and relevance diminish, year by year, until it's too late.”
Shakespeare wrote, “All the world's a stage.” To Harvey Rochman, all the world's a movie theater, and if the movies that come from Hollywood don't resonate in that global theater, then Hollywood's days as the symbolic capitol of the film industry are surely numbered.
http://www.canyon-news.com/artman2/publish/Michael_St_John_s_Confidential_File_1175/Jimmy_Walker.php
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'Harvey Rochman Speaks the Hard Truth" blared the headline on the Nov. 23 edition of the Beverly Hills Canyon News, a newspaper that serves Beverly Hills, Bel Air, Brentwood, Westwood, Laurel Canyon, Malibu, Pacific Palisades and the Hollywood Hills.
Rochman is a local resident who has messed with movies for most of his life. As co-producer he was involved in "Lost Junction," starring Neve Campbell and Billy Burke (the star of the just-released hit, "Twilight") and "Misconceptions," starring Orlando Jones and A.J. Cook (the star of ABC's "Criminal Minds").
This year, Rochman traveled to Alaska for location scouting and to Boston to visit Harvard ("I always told my mother I would go there"). This week, Rochman hosts an alfresco party at his home to welcome Carmello (Mel) Cottone, for half a century a presidential advisor in Washington, D.C, with whom he is scripting a movie about Sam Rayburn that will star Ed Asner.
"Producer Harvey Rochman," trumpets the Beverly Hills paper, "has a message for Hollywood, a message that many in the U.S. film industry don't want to hear. Harvey's message? You're going the wrong way! And he's on a one-man crusade to set Hollywood back on the right course.
"Rochman's point is simple. The audience for Hollywood movies is international but Hollywood isn't telling international stories. 'Studio chiefs still act like they're living in the days when the target audience for movies was Main Street, U.S.A.,' said Rochman from his home in Key West, Florida. 'But they're wrong. That type of thinking is outdated. Today, the fastest-growing audiences are not on Main Street. They're in Beijing, New Delhi, South Korea, Indonesia and Mexico. These are countries in which people want to see their stories up on the big screen. When Hollywood doesn't deliver, a home-grown film industry will inevitably take its place. Hence the phenomenal growth of Bollywood over the past two decades.
"'The cultural founding myths of the non-Western world -- China, India, Latin America, Africa -- those are going to be the next big global stories. The decades of Western dominance, of American and European dominance over world culture, are coming to an end ... If Hollywood insists on remaining trapped in the previous century, it will see its global importance and relevance diminish year by year until it's too late.'"
