Why do most British films fail?
September 20, 2015 About twelve years ago I gave a talk at an event in Cardiff. I called the talk
‘WHY BRITISH FILMS AREN’T WORKING, Or how to improve the global
success of the British film industry and those who work in it.’
I would like to look at some of the changes in the film and television industries since
the mid-1990s, but first I will post what I said twelve years ago, and then later will
comment on the changes in another post. Here is the text of the talk:
“It is usual to praise anything one can find to praise about the British film industry.
You don’t win friends by denigrating the industry you work in, and it really is good
news that at the moment there are 10 UK Film Council supported British films
selected for the Venice, London and Toronto Festivals, and even better news that
Mike Leigh’s film won Venice.
But there are a number of endemic problems that perhaps explain why British films
are not performing that well in the global market and it is some of these that I wish to
look at.
But first…WHAT RIGHT DOES AN AGENT HAVE TO PASS JUDGEMENT ON THE
HARD-WORKING PRODUCERS, WRITERS AND DIRECTORS IN THE FILM
INDUSTRY?
There are many misconceptions about agents. Here are three of them:
The first is that we are shark-like creatures who care only about money. It is simply
not true. We are pussy cats…who care only about money.
The second is that we work for writers…and all the time I thought they worked for
us!
The third is that we are parasites, living off the pain and suffering of the beating
creative heart of our society and that we do very little real work. This is also not true.
Orchids are parasites. We are extremely hard-working. The proof lies in the fact that
agents in California – rather than rats - now provide most of the guinea pigs for
scientists doing cancer research: the scientists claim that there are three reasons for
this:
1 there are now more agents in California than rats
2 you cannot get emotionally involved with an agent
3 there are some things that rats will NOT do!
Some of us will do nearly anything for a free lunch.
To give us our due, a good agent has been described as a marriage broker, a bad
one like a pimp! This is a rosy tinted view of most agents, but for a more cynical view
you need to know something about the realities of Hollywood, to get you out the
state of denial that most people in the British film industry exist in, sentimentally
clinging – as if the British Empire still covered the globe in pink - to the faded
glamour of what our film industry once was.
To most of us Hollywood seems to be a fabled place that if it didn't exist in fantasy
stories would have to be set up for real. One of the best descriptions of the place and
its inhabitants comes from a novel written by Steven Bochco, the creator of famous
American TV series like Hill Street Blues, LA Law and NYPD Blue.
The novel, called Death by Hollywood, is written from the point of view of an agent. I
want to read you two paragraphs because I think he says it better than I can:
"In my naivete I thought that writers and directors would be different from actors. Fat
chance. They're just as loony. In fact the entertainment industry as a whole is one
giant dysfunctional family. Everyone's terrified - of their own failure, or of everyone
else's success - and as a general rule, you can assume that everyone lies about
everything.
Have you ever looked at an actor's resume - at the bottom, under SPECIAL SKILLS?
Rides horses and motorcycles. Juggling and acrobatics. The truth is, your'e lucky if
they can drive a fucking car.
And agents? By and large, we're nothing more than well-paid pimps who represent
our pooched-out clients as if they're beautiful young virgins, offering them up to a
bunch of jaded johns who know better, but these are the only whores in town. As the
saying goes, denial is not a river in Egypt. It is a river in Hollywood, and it runs deep,
and brown."
So you have to prepare yourself for endless rejections, usually by people less
talented than you are. Most successful writers and actors have had many more
rejections than deals. It is the nature of the business. It is painful being rejected by
people who know less than you do, who can’t write as well and who sometimes have
not even been taught to read scripts. Can you wonder why producers are seen in
such an ambivalent light by others in the industry?
To help you deal better with rejection here is a famous rejection letter, which was
sent to a writer who had submitted an article to a Chinese Economics journal:
"We have read your manuscript with boundless delight. If we were to publish your
paper it would be impossible for us to publish any work of a lower standard. As it is
unthinkable that in the next thousand years we shall see its equal, we are – to our
regret – compelled to return your divine composition, and to beg you a thousand
times to overlook our short sight and timidity."
This is an industry made up of people with widely differing ambitions – well, not very
much ambition to judge by the results. Widely differing agendas might be a better
word. And it is against this background that I want to look at solutions to some of the
endemic problems of the British film industry.
Why am I so convinced that the British film industry is in bad shape and is – in
fact - getting worse, despite all the efforts of Skillset, the UK Film Council,
Sgrin and the other usual suspects?
I am not actually making a subjective judgement, because there is a very worrying
statistic, researched carefully over the last 10 years by the European Audiovisual
Observatory. The statistic relates to the audiovisual balance of trade deficit between the USA and
the EU: 5 years ago the deficit was just over $3 billion dollars a year. Last year it
was over $8 billion dollars a year and getting bigger.
We are losing out in an essentially economic marketplace. Our audiences prefer to
see American films, whether on television or in the cinema. And the cost-per-viewerratio
for American shows in television suggests that it is more cost-effective for our
broadcasters to schedule as much American programming as they can get away
with.
We don’t compete well in the global cinema marketplace. We are not profitable. And
all the training and quango effort that is going into propping up the industry with
subsidies and tax breaks is achieving little that will reverse the audio-visual balance
of trade deficit.
I am going to suggest 10 reasons for the failure of the British film industry to compete
more effectively on the global stage. These 10 points are not the only arguments or
criticisms that can be made of the way the British film industry looks these days, but
they’ll do for a start. I will also try to suggest some solutions.
1. The first problem is that we – in the industry - are largely to blame for
this predicament
Many in the British industry think that the Americans are to blame for our
impoverished state. I believe that it is our failure to understand why American
movies are so successful, that is a major cause of our non-profitable film industry.
The usual knee-jerk moans heard in Soho are that the Americans dominate our
cinema chains, have bigger budgets than we do and that theirs is a star-based movie
industry and ours isn’t. Why is this the case?
They dominate our cinemas because British audiences prefer American movies.
Their budgets are bigger because their industry is profitable so they can invest more
in developing and marketing their new products. And of course they have stars – the
world wants to see their movies, so their lead actors become stars.
But in addition to these points, their scripts are more accessible and more
sentimental, that is, they set out to provoke emotion in the audience, because this
is what audiences in general want from movies. We don’t do it often although there
is no reason why we could not do so, and therefore – all of us in the industry – share
some of the culpability for our impoverished state.
As for the unavailability of cinema screens for British movies, when we do have a
British film that takes off – like the ‘famous five’ : 4 Weddings, Trainspotting, Billy
Elliott, Bend it Like Beckham, East is East – screens are available and British
audiences flock to see them, so that complaint lacks some credibility.
What are the solutions?
If the Americans are so successful in a competitive market, what can we do to make
ourselves more competitive? There are 4 very inexpensive solutions (all to do
with scripts)
1. First, Choose stories with accessible characters that are easier to identify
with. This is not common in British scripts.
2. Second, Have more upbeat or ironical endings
3. Third, Use less dialogue: why? To understand this you need to go back to
the time that movies went from being silent to being talky. In Europe it
happened and in America it happened, but there were critical differences in
the context:
4. Think about the population of America at the time, the demographic
makeup? There were enormous numbers of immigrants, for whom English
was not their first language; there was a high proportion of illiteracy. These
were serious problems for the new film studio bosses. How did they deal with
the problems?
5. Well, who were those bosses? Many were mainly middle European Jews
who themselves had emigrated to the New World. They were educated and
cultured businessmen, but first and foremost, like so many immigrants, they
were concerned about the welfare of their families. And what does a nice
Jewish father want for his children? That his son should become a lawyer or a
doctor and his daughter should be a good catch for a nice boy who is a lawyer
or doctor. Which means they saw this new-fangled business they were going
into as a means of making money, NOT as a means of making movies. One
of them – I don’t remember who – perhaps Meyer – was a glove manufacturer
in the Old World.
6. So what was happening in Europe at the same time? The governments
after both world wars poured money into ‘culture’ – it encouraged those
involved in the arts to reaffirm the cultural values of the societies we were
living in. In other words, in Europe the emphasis was on making movies as a
cultural activity, not as a money making activity. We had a glorious heritage in
theatre which the American’s didn’t have. Our dramatists were dialogue
kings…..so we made movies in which using dialogue to tell stories was far
more dominant than the Americans, who could not rely on the audience’s
abilities to understand dialogue, so they made moving pictures.
7. Which is one of several reasons why American movies can often make
sense even with the sound turned off! But it makes them far more accessible
to far wider audiences, in almost any culture, since culture is embedded more
in language thatn in visual images.
8. American movies have on average about 2/3rds the dialogue of European
movies. Films with less dialogue travel better both domestically and
internationally: they do not rely on higher levels of literacy or education.
Visual storytelling also has a greater impact on audiences, for a strangely
obvious reason: we believe what we see not what we hear, so a film made
with less dialogue will impact on a wider audience with greater intensity!
9, Finally, Use shorter scenes: American movie scenes are on average just
over half the length of European movie scenes: more scenes means faster
pacing and more engaging storytelling, because you leave gaps that the
audience fills in. This makes the audience feel good about watching your film.
It moves the audience from being passive observers of your film into being
active participants.
So insist on less dialogue and shorter scenes and the films will be more successful. I
kid you not… The story is not the same thing as how you choose to tell it.
Because it IS a good story – or a good story idea – does not mean that it will be
successful. THAT depends to a great extent on how you choose to tell the story.
…So, why is it that we don’t make more movies using techniques like these? There
are various reasons, one of which is….
2. My second reason for our uncompetitiveness:
We don’t have a thorough understanding of how to use genre.
To many in the industry, genre means a formula. Copy it and your script will make a
successful film. After all, the majority of the American films are genre films. But genre
is not about formula, even though there are genre conventions that need to be
respected. Genre is about the audience’s expectations, expectations of a largely
emotional nature that your film needs to satisfy.
In ScriptWriter magazine Phil Parker examined a little-known genre called
Personal Drama. All 5 of the British hit films I have just mentioned –‘The Famous
Five’ - are in that genre; our audiences love them, but we make relatively few films
like that.
What are the common elements of personal drama films? Phil identified theses as:
1. A thematic desire for validation or a desire for order
2. A single isolated protagonist (or group) who undergoes or attempts a
major transformation of themselves or their world
3. A distinct world with which the protagonist is at odds
4. The central characters have a personal quest, like Lester in American
Beauty, who is determined not to be a loser.
5. The dramatic structure has a linear framework although often an
episodic form – ie the action can take weeks, months or even years.
6. The central characters’ dramatic arc is enormous compared with the
changes within the characters in other genres.
7. The dominant style is naturalism but expressionism is also used.
Very few people really understand the conventions of most genres and how to use
them, especially how to splice two genres together to make a broader audience
more inclined to see the film.
For example, Amadeus is the only biopic of a composer to have really made money,
some 80 million dollars. Do you know what genre it is, apart from biopic? It is also a
murder mystery. Cleverly the writer chose Salieri as the main character who
announces “Forgive me Mozart. I have killed you!” So the audience is presented with
a suspect and a murder right at the beginning.
What is the solution?
Education in genre, not in genre theory : articles about using genre are the most
common regular features in ScriptWriter magazine [like the one about Amadeus] and
– thanks to support from the Film Council – we will be doing whole issues on how to
use genre to make more successful films.
Lucy Scher, one of the regular ‘genre’ contributors to ScriptWriter Magazine, ended an article called ‘The
Hitch-hiker’s Guide to Genre’ with the words: “Audiences have an extremely
sophisticated understanding of genre. If you can identify your (and their)
expectations, it is much more likely that you will enable them to obtain greater
satisfaction from their choice of film…If you simply think of genre as a predictable
formula, your script will almost certainly fail.”
In trying not to copy American films we often ignore what makes them work, which is
largely their ambition to give the audience a powerful emotional experience.
What we should copy or steal from Hollywood is its craft skills, which we should
apply to our local stories.
3. The third reason we are in difficulty in the industry is the attitude of
many of our producers, who are undoubtedly responsible for some of our
uncompetitiveness.
Producers:
1. Often think that because they are paying, they know best about the writer and
the script
2. often select the wrong writer, e.g. they commission an original script from a
writer who is only good at adaptations, or an emotional story from a writer who
is good at action not character
3. Few producers are properly trained at script analysis or are good at talking to
writers.
4. They usually prefer big-name writers even if they are not right for a project,
because if the script turns out to be bad, they can avoid the blame by claiming
the writer was so experienced.
5. Producers are often more interested in the deal than in the script: it is – as we
all know - very difficult raising money (largely because the industry is not
profitable), but the definition of a producer is not simply someone who
produces money. Until producers understand scripts and the development
process better they will be a potential liability.
6. Like estate agents, anyone can be a producer. All they need is £4.50 worth of
business cards from Rymans and because there are so many would-be
writers, producers can pick up pretty reasonable scripts for nothing down. At
Blake Friedmann we get more than 8000 writers applying every year to be
represented by the agency, so there is clearly no shortage of scripts
desperate to be bought, in what is clearly a buyers’ market.
Fortunately there are some very good producers and usually they and agents like
dealing with each other. It is a relationship of mutual trust, which means unpalatable
things can be said to each other.
What is the solution?
To encourage more professionalism in producers.
We need to require producers to attain a certain standard and experience, and to be
signatories to the Writers’ Guild minimums, like they do in the States.
PACT must continue the fight to get independent producers a better share of the
back-end, and they are beginning to make progress in this. But individual producers
must be more ambitious and more willing to invest sensibly in development. Writers
do not need more money, they need more rational money, which I will come to in a
moment.
In the States, producers are blatantly ambitious about making money by reaching
audiences. Being difficult to be understood doesn’t make you an artist.
In the UK we have an oddly puritanical attitude. Populist genre films, such as
audience-pleasing B-movies, are often looked down on by critics, wannabee filmmakers
and by film-funders., as though identification with the audience is distasteful,
and as if what distinguishes us film makers from the great unwashed public is our
superiority in taste and judgement. WE know what THEY should watch. After all, we
are the creators, they are the recipients of our superior knowledge and talent. The
EGO is a very dangerous influence, especially on producers making creative
decisions.
I have a cartoon in my office, from the Spectator, which shows a corpulant, pin-stripe
suited Hollywood-like movie mogul, fat cigar in one hand, telephone in the other. He
is saying “Well, at least we are only morally bankrupt!”
4. This leads me on to directors, the second in the holy trinity of producer/
director/ writer.
The British film industry loves writer-directors. Of the 43 British films released
between January and August this year (2004), more than half - 24 - were written by writerdirectors.
14 were not, there were 4 documentaries and 1 re-release.
The fact is that few directors can write really well, yet many of them persist in doing
so, even though they often end up directing bad scripts. I am approached by
enormous numbers of young writer-directors and my response is that if they are any
good as writers they should want someone who is a better director than they are to
direct their work; and if they are any good as directors, they should have the
ambition to direct better scripts than they can write!
Until the industry and the subsidy funds and journalists and critics moderate their
love-affair with directors, we won’t get the best scripts coming through. I believe the
Film Council’s own statistics show that over 80% of first-time British directors never
direct another feature. That figure speaks for itself.
What is the solution?
What to do about writer-directors? Only much more ambitious, script-literate and
tough producers will get us out of this mess in which directors who can’t write well
enough do, and writers who can’t direct well enough do. Until we get more
producers who can read, the director will pull the wool over their eyes.
There is too much trust and respect paid to neophyte directors and not enough
industry training of everyone to read so that the films that do get shot are better
written.
5. So what about writers, those lovely people who get you to work
on an egg?
The problem isn’t so much with writers per se, as with the encouragement that is
given to anyone who thinks that writing is a good career move. Everyone knows that
being a scriptwriter in LA – where there IS lots of work – really means waiting tables.
Yet our film industry, Skillset, and the hordes of academics who usually couldn’t earn
a living working in the industry, are all offering more and more writing courses.
As the doyenne of film critics – Pauline Kael – said: Hollywood is the only place you
can die from encouragement. Well it is now possible in the UK and the rest of
Europe too.
The problem with writers is their sheer naiveity and enthusiasm. As Chris Vogler
says in a recent issue of ScriptWriter, just because you are film literate doesn’t mean
you are script literate. Where in the school syllabus is the reading of feature film
scripts considered as a legitimate literary form? Final Draft, bless it, does not help
you write better scripts, only better-looking scripts.
And what the industry needs is not more scripts, it IS better scripts. As Dr Johnson is
supposed to have said of someone’s manuscript in the 18th century: “Your work is
both good and original. Unfortunately the part that is good is not original and the part
that is original is not good.”
With lemming-like enthusiasm, every year, tens of thousands of people in the UK
declare themselves to be scriptwriters, yet few of them read the trades every week,
few have read more than a handful of scripts, few have any real ambition. It is a
dilettantish fantasy for most would be writers to be a feature-film scriptwriters.
Yet they are encouraged by the large and rapidly growing training industry to take
endless short or long courses, a small number of which are actually very good, but
the majority are simply inadequate. The writers never become professional because
they can never earn enough money to do it full time.
We may not have a sustainable film industry, but we certainly have a healthy and
well-sustained training industry.
Writing a script is no easier than writing an opera or a symphony, but we don’t
encourage music lovers off the streets to do those things. We need to give stringent
health warnings about scriptwriting as a career if we are to be honest and put the
students before the teachers.
What is the solution?
1. Make the bar higher. Make it more difficult to get into scriptwriting and
media degree courses. Skillset has a great opportunity which I fear they will
waste if the democtratisation of training for all continues to dominate the
agenda.
2. Put scripts on the school syllabus. Film and television is a far more
potent and ubiquitous cultural influence than novels in the 21st century. Let’s
make sure our kids understand it.
3. Ban all general Media Studies and Film theory degree courses. Instead
make writers study abnormal psychology, how the body reacts to stimuli, and
how the media really operates. Media is the cutting edge of capitalism and
profit seeking, so it tries to understand its audience, which is more than our
young film makers seem to do.
Did you know that the warm, lovely feeling you get from a feelgood film is caused by
the release of a particular chemical in the bloodstream? It is phenyl-ethyl-alamine,
which is also released when you take Speed or Ecstacy, eat chocolate or have sex.
So perhaps we could save the British film industry by getting the Film Council to do a
deal with Cadburys or set up a chocolate factory – come back WILLY WONKA - and
with every ticket for a British movie you receive a bar of chocolate. Sex might be a
cheaper and more ecological way if the Film Council is short of cash, as it is an
easily renewable resource?
6. The training industry is not alone to blame for uneducated
producers, directors and writers, but inadequate training is a massive
problem.
I have not seen a significant increase in the quality or quantity of really good
scripts over the past decade, despite the vast increase in training offered to those
who want to be writers, and an even larger increase in the number of scripts that are
submitted. As unemployment goes up, so does the slush-pile.
It would appear therefore that the academic, theoretical teaching of scriptwriting is
failing the industry. Most of the would-be writers want to write features, yet there are
so few made in Britain that this career choice is truly quixotic. You really learn to
write by working on scripts that are produced, not studying how to write, or studying
film theory, or filling up pages on your own and rarely getting feedback.
What are the solutions?
1. The film and television industries must develop and run training
courses, not leave it to academics, many of whom failed to make a living in
the very industry that they teach about.
2. Most scriptwriting training and How-To books are ‘structuralist’ – their
teaching is based on the assumption that creative writing needs an
understanding of structure. How did the Greek dramatists or Chaucer,
Shakespeare, Checkov and Jane Austen manage before they had Syd Field
and Robert McKee to tell them how to write?
3. The structuralist approach appeals to people with strong left-brains –
the analytical half of the brain, and it puts off the truly creative people with
strong right brains.
4. The implications of this are far-reaching; most of the books on
scriptwriting approach it through structure: the three=-acts, sequences, beats.
Most of the courses do the same. If you have a strong left brain this will be
attractive to you. You will think “I can do this!”. If, on the other hand, you have
a strong right brain and are a chaotic but hugely creative person you will be
put off and go and do something else.
5. So, we train the wrong people to learn the wrong things in the wrong
way. The best training is by doing not by studying and television is the only
place where there is enough writing produced. Writers need to hear their
scripts read, see them acted and directed and then edited, if they are to learn
how badly they actually write. I think that universities are not the best place to
teach vocational skills for the film industry.
7. My 7th point is that the denigration of television by film-obsessed people is
very damaging to the very film industry they wish to work in.
How many of the feature-film writing courses utilizing public funding adequately
recognize that – in career terms – it is television that is critically important?
Television, soaps especially, are seen by most would-be script writers and the
majority of academics teaching scriptwriting as a poor relation to the feature film
script, despite the ability of soaps to attract and communicate with millions of viewers
night after night.
These attitudes towards television seriously damage the film industry because
seeing and hearing what actors and directors and the camera do with your script is
the best place to learn how to write better. Writing unproduced script after
unproduced script does little to teach or develop creative skills.
What is the solution?
1. Change attitudes towards soaps and television drama. There is
stunning drama and comedy on television if you know where to look for it.
Next time someone says to you that there is nothing good on television, you
should know that they are ignorant and probably snobbish too.
2. Point out that there are virtually no career prospects for students
wanting to write only feature films, and that jumping ship to becoming a
neophyte director isn’t much better.
3. But making it more difficult to get into writing courses will have the most
beneficial effect, if those courses encourage writing as a craft not a lifestyle,
and encourage writing for theatre, radio and television as well as film.
My 8th point is about a specific aspect script development:
8. The treatment – the document written before the script should be written
- is undervalued and widely misunderstood.
For this I blame producers for being tight and short-sighted. Writers too. Our industry
pays far too little to writers for the development stages of an idea, before the script
is written, and far too much for the first draft script.
The current PACT/Writers’ Guild agreement allocates 20% of the total writer’s fee to
the treatment. I surveyed 20 of my most experienced clients and they said – without
exception - that to do the work properly they needed to spend between 50 and 70%
of their total time on the stages of the treatment. But too often writers won’t spend
enough time on the treatment because they are paid so little. So they deliver an
inadequate treatment.
This means that the producer who doesn’t know better, then commissions the script,
which is a failure, so valuable development money has been squandered on
producing a document that has no commercial value in the marketplace. Everybody
loses.
If the producer can read and realizes that the treatment doesn’t work, they usually
fire the writer and commission another writer, which reinforces their belief that
treatments usually don’t work. Hence they refuse to pay enough for treatments and
the negative cycle continues.
Seven times out of ten, if the right writer was chosen, that writer should do at least
the next two drafts (and the script will probably work).
How long it should take to write a script? Up to six months, but you shouldn’t start
writing the script itself for 5 and a half months. The first draft script should absolutely
not be the most expensive stage in the development process.
What is the solution?
Simple: pay reasonably for at least three treatment drafts (a selling document, a
more detailed treatment, and a step outline, and preferably always do at least two
drafts of each with written notes from the producer or script editor between each
draft or document). Then, pay less than usual for the first draft script (which will
anyway take less time if there is a satisfactory step outline). The total amount paid to
the writer will be the same. The results will be far better with a much higher incidence
of commissions that are successfully greenlit.
This will hopefully be part of the PACT Writers’ Guild negotiations in the coming
months.
9. Point 9 is that development as a whole is also undervalued and
misunderstood.
The British industry has always undervalued development. This is quite obvious but
nothing much is done about it. For a start, a British development person almost
always has a lowly status and is underpaid. So no one wants to stay in development,
as a result most of them are not actually very good or experienced. In the States, to
be a script editor you have to be a successful writer to start with. In the UK it is the
first stepping stone into the industry, instead of a vitally important role that can
guarantee a greater chance of success for a film.
It has been variously estimated that in America the total development costs are
between 7 and 9% of the total budget. In the UK it is closer to 3%.
Our industry is not profitable so there is not the money to invest. But this is no
excuse for repeatedly making the same mistakes. “Those who do not learn from their
mistakes are condemned to repeat them.”
A couple of weeks ago Tim Bevan – in the Sunday Times – said that Working Title
needed the backing of a major studio (it was Polygram at the time) because, ‘quote’:
“We needed to be in a position where we could write off development spending
without it breaking the company.”
Most of the production companies in the British film industry, even with the Film
Council’s help, don’t have the money or the skills to develop competitively.
Remember every film is a new product. In any other business not doing proper
research and development would be expected to result in failure. What is it about the
beguiling, crazy world of the film industry that we ignore economic laws that work in
all other businesses? Is it just because we are in love with the end result, or are our
egos are driven on by the idea we might sit next to Nicole Kidman at an industry
event?
The truth is that few people in the film industry think of it as a business. To them it is
a lifestyle. They do not apply the same criteria as they would if they made rivets.
What is the solution?
1. To get better development, we should demand better trained script
editors and script readers. They should be given more power and money to
go with their responsibility and authority, and it should be made mandatory for
every producer to do the Script Factory’s course on how to read a script.
2. Budgeting more cash for development isn’t the answer unless the
development work is done by skilled and experienced specialists. Any fool
can waste money, and the history of the British film industry demonstrates just
that.
3. Properly trained development executives should be paid much the
same or more than directors are paid. You can’t make a good film out of a
bad script. And if the directors and producers knew it was a bad script, that
would be a good start too.
10. We are naturally very obsessed about tax shelters and tax breaks: I
believe that they also damage the British film industry.
This is probably going to alienate those few people in the room whom I haven’t
already offended. But the truth is that deal-driven films in Europe rarely become
commercially successful, because the agenda of those making the film and the
agenda of the creative inspiration of the film are usually so different.
When did you hear a financier say they will actually delay filming because they think
the script could be better? Or when did a writer refuse payment because they were
not happy with the draft they had handed in?
Throughout Europe subsidies of various sorts have been like life-support systems
keeping alive industries that need to be reborn, not maintained as doddering,
unprofitable indulgences.
What is the solution?
1. Tax breaks are fine if they complement a healthy, profitable industry.
But when they dominate the financing of films, which primarily enables
footballers, other very rich people, and the growing ranks of financial
advisors and consultants connected to them, to become even richer, don’t
complain when the Treasury closes abused loopholes.
2. There are always – thankfully – individual films that are exceptions.
Let’s hope Vera Drake will be one. But do not cling onto it as if it alone will
save the film industry. As Colin Welland, writer of Chariots of Fire, said in his
Oscar acceptance speech in 1981: “The British are coming!”. Well, we are still
waiting…
3. A final solution might be for the Film Council to give much more of the
Lottery cash to the New Cinema Fund, where originality and ambitiousness
are encouraged within a healthy development support system. The future of
the film industry will – I hope - come out of there, for much as I admire
Working Title, they are really part of the American film industry since that is
where their profits go.
In CONCLUSION, I am actually rather optimistic that the recent debacle over the tax
breaks will finally make the money begin to realize that a good script is essential.
If producers, directors, writers and agents won’t listen to anyone else, they will listen
to the money. Well, I would like to think that they will.
I know I have not been kind to producers, directors, writers, lawyers, financiers,
consultants and accountants, but please remember that it is also tough out there for
us agents.
We are expected to help our clients make a living in a very problematical industry.
We are constantly caught in the middle: our clients think we don’t get them enough
money or work and the publishers and producers think that we make them pay too
much for writers who are not always able to deliver.
And all the writers whom we reject, dislike us for not seeing the brilliance of their
ideas and their work.
Lawyers are traditionally the butt of cruel stories by ungrateful clients, but
increasingly agents are getting the treatment from mischievous writers.
A writer rings his agency: “Hello, can I please speak to my agent, Jeremy?”
Receptionist: “I am so sorry sir, didn’t you know that he passed away last
weekend?”
Writer: “Goodness no. Thank you for telling me. Goodbye.”
The next day the writer rings and asks the same question and gets the same
answer.
On the third day he rings and asks the question again.
Receptionist: Excuse me Sir, didn’t you ring yesterday, and the day before?”
Writer: “Yes, I just like hearing you say it!”
Thank you.