Ari Karpel reports on recent developments in the field of remaking major feature films for foreign audiences. When talkies first came in, it was standard practice at many Hollywood studios to shoot foreign-language versions of new movies at the same time the English-language releases were being made, sometimes with the original stars babbling their dialogue in phonetically learned Spanish. In some rare cases, such as that of the Spanish-language version of the 1931 Dracula, directed by George Melford and starring Carlos Villar as the Count, these instant remakes have shadow reputations among cultists who hold that they're more cinematically inventive than the movies they were spun off from. But the practice died out as soon as some genius invented dubbing. But, writes Karpel, "As film industries in China, Russia, Japan and India have grown exponentially, particularly when it comes to homegrown fare, United States studios have taken the phrase 'Think globally, act locally' to heart. Nearly every studio has set up an international operation for producing and distributing original movies made in local languages. Now a handful of those studios are scouring their catalogs, seeking films (box-office smashes and middling performers alike) to remake for new audiences." For a start, the "Walt Disney Company is turning its High School Musical franchise into a cottage industry, redoing the teen song-and-dance phenomenon one country at a time." The real trick, though, is finding solid material that can be translated into something appealing to foreign audiences but that wasn't such a megaton international hit the first time around that seeing it again with a local cast would strike filmgoers as redundant. Taking that into consideration, a movie like Titanic is less tantalizing than something like the crackerjack 2004 thriller Cellular, with Kim Basinger and William H. Macy, which was recently turned into a a Chinese film called Connected. And then there's Sideways, Alexander Payne's much-loved, middle-aged road comedy starring Paul Giamatti as a failed novelist and alcoholic wine connoisseur and Thomas Haden Church as a TV actor hell-bent on enjoying one last fling before his wedding. A Japanese remake, still called Sideways but with the lead characters' names changed from Miles and Jack to Michio and Daisuke, is currently in production.

Interviewed by the Times about this development, Alexander Payne indicated that he can live with it: “I don’t know a damn thing about it, but I hope it’s better than the original. No, I’m really delighted. I got a check for it, and the check cleared.” Payne, who Karpel claims responded to the information that has an executive producer credit on the remake with the observation, "Oh, I do?", added, “I cared desperately about Sideways while making it, but now it’s behind me,” he explained. “So it has its own life, and if part of its life is having a twin in a parallel universe, then so be it.” The people who are currently making Sideways presumably care about it a lot right now, though some of the changes they've adopted serve as a window into the world of remaking other people's movies for a different culture. Although the film is being made on location in California, the heroes' getaway destination has been changed from Santa Barbara to the Napa Valley, because Japanese audiences are assumed to have heard of Napa Valley. This also accommodates the director Cellin Gluck;s theory that “You can’t do a road trip in California without going over the Golden Gate Bridge.” The filmmakers also tweaked the details of Miles's/Michio's wine snobbery, as a conciliatory gesture to wineries where they wanted to shoot on location: wine sellers blamed the original Sideways for a drop in merlot sales, and so the movie's hero no longer deliveries a savage tirade against the stuff. Gluck doesn't see that this choice, and the fact that "In the resulting scenes each location gets a plug that approaches parody... [with] signs visible in nearly every scene, close-ups of wine labels and real-life employees, in bit parts, stiffly reciting lines like 'Welcome to Old Faithful Geyser, Calistoga, California,' ” compromise the movie. “We didn’t set out to make a tourism film,” Gluck says. “If there’s going to be a benefit, let it be for those who helped us out.” He added, “When you’re a small film, that’s sometimes all you have to offer.” There, perhaps, is the most revealing change of all. The new Sideways is budgeted at $3 million; the original, the very model of an "indie" feature about grown-ups, made without big stars or expensive locations or special effects, cost $17 million.