The newly forming Screen Australia is going to get a new CEO, Dr Ruth Harley. Dr. Harley has been in charge of the NZ Film Commission for 10 years and that track record is worth a little bit of scrutiny if only to decipher what she might do with the newly formed SA.Today, Pleiades sent in this link, which might shed some light on her modus operandi, as seen by one of NZ's top producers.
The New Zealand criticism came from John Barnett, the head of South Pacific Pictures, which has produced the film Whale Rider and TV series Shortland Street and Outrageous Fortune, among many others.
He archly questioned the performance of the NZFC without mentioning its CEO of 10 years by name. "There will be some who will say the timing of this article is due to the departure of the chief executive," Barnett wrote in New Zealand screen magazine Onfilm.
"It's not. I've expressed this frustration and these views to politicians and NZFC board members over the past seven to eight years. There is no willingness to even debate. There is a mistaken belief that all is well, and a consequent complacency."
Barnett expressed many views of the NZFC that have been thrown at its equivalent Australian screen agency, the FFC and now Screen Australia: that its development schemes are flawed, funding choices poor and it is unaccountable for its decisions.
He highlighted NZFC's poor track record in developing and funding commercially successful films. He wrote that the highest-earning eight of the top 10 NZ films by box office revenue alone were developed outside the NZFC development scheme.
"Over 80 projects are now being developed for an industry that makes four films a year. One hundred producers, writers, directors are kept on a drip feed from development -- but where are the outcomes?" Barnett asked.
Dr Harley comes to the position with a great deal of goodwill and respect from those Australian producers and bureaucrats who dealt with her at the NZFC.
Hang right there. I've not really looked closely at Dr Harley, but I'm immediately suspicious to find Australian film bureaucrats like this person. Let's be blunt, they probably like her exactly because she is unlikely to change the overall function and modus operandi of the new Screen Australia from that of its ugly and ineffectual predecessors. That fact alone rings alarm bells in my head because if it's going to be business a usual, we can surely expect the same old outcomes as before.
I imagine the Australian film bureaucrats are collectively breathing a sigh of relief that at least they can keep pulling down their Commonwealth Government paychecks as they pay off their mortgages and make their leasing payments for their European cars. If Dr Ruth Harley were anything like a Hollywood exec like, say, a Michael Ovitz, the first thing to happen would be to sack all these incompetents and bring in proper development people from LA - in which case those people would be mounting a public and private war to stop it from happening. The seemingly very placid nature of the transfer from the FFC to the Screen Australia betrays the fact that it's going to be business as usual for these film apparatchiks. *ugh* The more I think about it, the more it pisses me off that they make such a good living out of killing what I chose as my business, my industry.
Indeed, the figure of 80 projects in development limbo while only 4 films get made each year in New Zealand has a very familiar ring to our situation over here. These are not remarkable or good results. I am now convinced that we are going to continue to make crap movies nobody wants to see under this new arrangement.
Count me amongst the depressed.
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