News Release
May 8, 2007
Thomas Jefferson Professor’s Article on Hollywood’s Disappearing Act Gets Special Recognition
Judged One of the Best in Entertainment and Communications Field
SAN DIEGO - Hollywood’s Disappearing Act: International Trade Remedies To Bring Hollywood Home, an article written by Thomas Jefferson School of Law Assistant Professor Claire Wright has been judged one of the best law review articles published last year in the fields of entertainment and communications.
Professor Wright’s article has been selected for inclusion in the 2007 edition of the Entertainment, Publishing and the Arts Handbook, published annually by the Thomson West Group of New York, according to its editors. The handbook provides in-depth treatment and comprehensive coverage of the latest issues, regulations, legislation, and case laws affecting the entertainment and communications industries.
The U.S. film industry is dying, according to Professor Wright, who paints an alarming picture of how one of this nation’s most preeminent industries is being killed off by enormous subsidies granted by foreign countries. Professor Wright argues that the foreign film subsidies are inconsistent with the underlying policies of the WTO free trade rules, in that the countries providing the subsidies are attempting to “steal” the U.S. film business by artificially lowering foreign production costs.
In the article, which was recently published in the prestigious Akron Law Review, Professor Wright exposes Hollywood’s dirty little secret: the fact that an enormous number of “American feature films” are no longer even “Made in the U.S.A.” Her article is causing a stir in film industry circles among those who agree with Professor Wright that legal action is needed now to save the U.S. film industry.
According to Professor Wright, who is monitoring the situation, a large number of the unemployed U.S. film workers are now poised to file a petition with the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative in Washington, D.C., requesting that the U.S. Government file a case against Canada and other countries in the WTO, based on the enormous film subsidies that those countries are providing to the U.S. film producers. The petition will be based largely on the arguments made in the above law review article.
“The U.S. production companies and the Motion Picture Association, in particular, are very opposed to this action because they benefit financially from the subsidies, so it promises to be a very interesting case,” says Professor Wright.