Film News That's Fit To Punt - 14/08/09

Conflict Of Interest At The BBC

It seems that there's a certain lady at the BBC handing out development money to her spouse.

A staggering £1.2million has been paid by the BBC in the past year to companies owned by relatives of corporation executives.

Details of the huge pay-outs emerged as another BBC boss came under fire yesterday over her husband's lucrative links with the broadcaster.

Days after the revelation that BBC1 controller Jay Hunt helps run her husband's media training company which coaches BBC staff, the second row involved Jana Bennett, the third highest paid executive at the corporation on a basic salary of £406,000 a year.

The BBC vision director's husband Richard Clemmow is a director and 10 per cent stakeholder in Juniper Communications, which received £715,000 of the £1.2million in the last year.

Altogether the company has raked in more than £2million of licence-payers' cash for making programmes for the BBC.

The chief executive and majority shareholder in Juniper is Samir Shah, a non-executive member on the BBC board, and his wife Belkis is the third shareholder.

The fresh revelations raised new doubts about the BBC's conflict of interest regulations and prompted renewed calls from MPs for a formal investigation by the corporation's governing body.

Sound familiar? Yeah...

I just can't figure out where I've seen this story line elsewhere... Ummm... Argh, I can't... errr... recall... Hmph.

Kit Denton Fellowship shortlist Announced

For some reason the shortlist for the Kit Denton Fellowship was published in the Sydney Morning Herald before I actually got my newsletter from the AWG. It's a bit like the terror raids the other day where The Australian went to the press with the raids before it actually happened. A bit rude, isn't it?

Anyway, this year's shortlist looks like political correctness gone berserk.

The 2009 Kit Denton Fellowship Shortlist:

Robert Reid - The New Black
The New Black was developed in response to the controversy of the 2008 Bill Henson exhibition and the reaction of local communities to the relocation of Dennis Ferguson. The play uses satire to investigate the superficiality of the contemporary Australian cultural response to these events.

Karl Madderom – Face Value
Karl received burns to 50% of his body when at the age of two he was left with two other children in a car which caught fire. He was the only survivor and spent the next five years in hospital. His dream is to have the protagonist of his film played by a real life victim instead of an actor in prosthetics and do away with the notion that people that look like him can only be characters in sci-fi or appear on daytime television.

Lisa Hoppe, Margot O’Neill and Bobbie Waterman – Blind Conscience
Based on Margot O’Neill’s acclaimed book, Blind Conscience is the story of an unlikely coalition of Australians who shake off the easy comfort of political disengagement to defend those who can’t defend themselves and the life-changing, often traumatic and sometimes frightening journey of these advocates.

Back to Back Theatre – Ganesh vs. The 3rd Reich
Ganesh vs. The 3rd Reich is co-authored by members of the Back to Back Theatre, who have developed an original distinctive artistic voice and a working process that supports its Ensemble of actors with intellectual disabilities.

So, there's a guy who's taking on the censorious idiots from the Bill Henson thing, which is hardly a tilt at the windmills; there's a burn victim who wants real burn victims to play him in a movie because that would be politically correct (uh..., Box Office death that one's going to be); A film about the refugee activists (and not the refugees themselves. O, the courage!); and a workshop script wherein retards take on Nazis.

Fuck me dead.