Spectator

By KURT ANDERSEN

It's not the heat, and it's not the humidity: what's really enervating is day after relentless day of news reports about the G-7 trade negotiations in Tokyo. GATT. Market-share targets. The Uruguay Round. Consultations with the Canadian Prime Minister. Drowsy yet?

Part of the problem is that trade talks always focus on desperately unexciting commodities; given the choice between reading about tariffs on nonferrous metals and, say, Julia Roberts' marriage, many people will skip the trade-barriers story. So here's an age-of-Clinton hybrid: movie stars and arcane trade issues, together in one convenient package.

The most contentious point in Tokyo was the Americans' demand for quotas on Japanese imports of U.S. products. But the U.S.'s whining about one export category -- movies, TV, records; in short, pop -- was muted. And that's because America rules: America's market share of movies in Japan is 49.7%, up from 30% just five years ago. In the lands of cinema -- France, Germany, Italy -- Hollywood now accounts for two-thirds of all movie tickets sold, twice the share a decade ago. The standard explanation has been the economics of special effects: only Hollywood can produce the big, dumb, violent blockbusters that every earthling understands. But these days, movies like Sommersby and Groundhog Day do well in places like Taipei and Hamburg.

So far, Helmut Kohl isn't making any GATT demands that U.S. theaters show a fixed percentage of Wim Wenders movies, and Francois Mitterrand, mercifully, has not asked Clinton for a Godard quota. But for TV the Europeans have drawn a line in the sand: the E.C. now requires that 50% of each nation's programming be produced in the E.C. -- and the French, being French, go further, requiring that 40% of their TV shows be produced in France. Still, the glossy American product flutters in, and prevails. Beverly Hills, 90210 is wildly popular all over the Mediterranean; in South Africa, Major Dad (the hilarious story of a retrograde white militarist outnumbered in his own home) is a big hit. And MTV is now second only to God in omnipresence: people in 232 million homes around the world may now watch snarling guitarists and half- naked go-go babes 24 hours a day.

U.S. record companies move even more product overseas than the TV and movie studios, although American singers aren't quite so exportable. It is almost exclusively black American women (and black men with long hair) who have current hits overseas -- Janet Jackson, Tina Turner, Gloria Gaynor, Terence Trent D'Arby. The one U.S. band with a Top 10 hit in Japan, curiously, is the has-been Kid Creole and the Coconuts -- a fact that was not, happily, raised by either side in Tokyo last week.

Despite the pop ubiquity, U.S. trade hawks say foreign governments contrive to deprive American show business of its due. "Without the barriers," says a senior Administration official, the U.S. take "would be significantly higher." Still, the repeatedly cited trade deficit that's creeping past $100 billion is just for manufactured goods -- cars, stuffed animals, nonferrous metals. In the services category, which includes all show-business output, the U.S. is running a $50 billion worldwide trade surplus. Hooray for Hollywood? Sure, except that nearly all our current hit movies -- Jurassic Park, Sleepless in Seattle, In the Line of Fire -- were released by studios that happen to be owned by the Japanese.