Kazakhstan's least favorite nonnative son won't be exposing himself to the U.S. quite as much as he had hoped to.
Twentieth Century Fox said Wednesday that Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan will premiere in only 800 U.S. theaters, down from the 2,000 venues that were scheduled to unleash the Stalin-loving, Uzbekistan-hating journalist Borat Sagdiyev on unsuspecting Americans Nov. 3.
But that's just it. The Los Angeles Times reported that surveys indicated not enough people were aware of who Borat is and what he's all about. And, as fans of Da Ali G Show know, it works better if you're in on the joke.
Like the hilariously ignorant wannabe gangsta Ali G, Borat is the creation of the Cambridge-educated British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, whose third trademark character is a gay Austrian fashion show reporter named Brüno.
"Our research showed it was soft in awareness," Bruce Snyder, Fox's distribution chief, told the Times. In turn, Borat will start off in 800 theaters Nov. 3 and then expand to 2,200 the following weekend, after interest in the movie is piqued and audiences have gotten Borat's opening-weekend competition—Disney's The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause and DreamWork's Flushed Away—out of their system.
A National Research Group survey found that only 27 percent of moviegoers were aware of Borat's unveiling.
The Larry Charles-directed mockumentary focuses on the title character and his travels across the United States to make a documentary at the behest of the Kazakh Ministry of Information. While on assignment, he spies Pamela Anderson on an episode of Baywatch and makes it his mission to find the former Playmate and make her his bride.
On his way out West, Borat conducts a host of interviews, many with people who have no idea that the crude, matter-of-factly anti-Semitic foreigner they're talking to is a fictional character.
Cohen, the son of middle-class Jewish parents, uses his made-up personas to both shed light on what makes the average American tick and expose some of the shadier stuff lurking beneath the surface.
On Da Ali G Show, he lays the ignorance on pretty thick, and sometimes his subjects try to explain Western values to him. Other times he is rewarded with some real eye-openers, such as ordinary folks in Tucson, Arizona, joining him for a rousing chorus of "Throw the Jew Down the Well."
Before the premiere of Borat at the Toronto International Film Festival last month, Cohen rode in, dressed up as the mustachioed journalist (the facial hair is real), in a wagon being pulled by six women dressed as peasants.
The day before the film's Washington debut, Cohen/Borat showed up at the White House gates to announce that a screening would take place in honor of "Premier George Walter Bush."
Cohen, who described his Borat segments as a "dramatic demonstration of how racism feeds on dumb conformity, as much as rabid bigotry," has been castigated by the government of Kazakhstan, which has not taken lightly to the country being cast as a land of misogynist, anti-Semitic, illiterate criminals. Borat's own father, in fact, is lovingly referred to as Boltok the Rapist.
The deputy foreign minister of the former Soviet republic extended an invitation to Cohen last week to visit Kazakhstan, so that "Borat" could discover that "women drive cars, wine is made of grapes and Jews are free to go to synagogues."
Acknowledging people's right to be angry, Rakhat Aliyev reminded his countrymen that "we must have a sense of humor and respect other people's freedom of creativity...It's useless to offend an artist and threaten to sue him. It will only further damage the country's reputation and make Borat even more popular."
Aliyev doesn't need to worry. Borat didn't catch any Kazakhs admitting that they would "have no problem" running a ranch where hunting Jews was legal.
While trailers and deleted scenes from Borat are some of the most popular offerings right now on video-sharing and social-networking sites like YouTube and MySpace, industry analysts have determined that the less Internet-savvy majority of people in this country may not be quite ready for Jew hunting and the search for Pam Anderson's "vagin."
"It's gotten a lot of publicity, but publicity does not necessarily equal an audience," BoxOfficeMojo.com's Brandon Gray told the Times.