Baz Luhrmann's going to bring his Great Gatsby production to Sydney. Strikes me that he's missed the point already, but be that as it may he's bringing it down under, and he's going to qualify for the 40% producer's off-set. Predictably, this has set off a bit of a row.
The Warner Bros-backed film is believed to be eligible for a producer offset allowing filmmakers to claim back 40 per cent of qualifying expenditure from the Tax Office. Neither Luhrmann nor Screen Australia would confirm the film had the offset, which would mean Warner Bros would get a $120 million movie for less than $80 million.
Australian producers say they are not angry about Gatsby; they are angry that other films that met similar criteria had been rejected.
There have been claims of inconsistent decisions by Screen Australia on television projects, and several companies have or are planning to appeal.
Beyond International's fifth series of the documentary Taboo, about faith healing, was produced and filmed in Australia and employed Australian producers, directors and writers, with most of budget spent here, said its chief executive, Mikael Borglund. But it failed to get the offset, partly because it had little Australian content. An appeal to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal failed.
Mr Borglund said that made no sense in light of the other Beyond projects that had received the offset.
''We just think that the same assessment tests and criteria should be applied by Screen Australia to our projects as those films that are produced with Warner Bros, Universal or Fox,'' he said. ''With Gatsby, it is set in New York in the 1920s. So how could you argue it has significant Australian content?''
Indeed-a-mundo. Pray tell, right?
Anyway, the same article goes on to report Screen Australia's response as:
Some applications might be rejected because they are more suited to the 15 per cent location offset, said Screen Australia's chief operating officer, Fiona Cameron. ''Our role is to differentiate between the location offset and the producer offset.''
Which is a total non-sequitur response to the question at hand: how can Screen Australia reject other Australian productions, only to hand out the welcome mat and the 40% off-set to a Warner Brothers picture just because it's Baz Luhrmann's production? And the answer is of course, it can't explain how that happened - hence the very strange, borderline idiotic non-sequitur.
I dunno. Sometimes the emperor has no clothes and knows it, and still just doesn't give a shit. I was talking to some people just today, and came up with the metaphor that the Australian arts industries as a whole is a flee on the back of a dog, riding a ute called the mining industry. That's us.
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