This one came in from Pleiades today. It's about how our tax dollars end up helping Hollywood productions and how awful this is.
Confirming Sir Humphrey Appleby’s famous principle that you should “never commission an inquiry without knowing the outcome first”, the federal Arts Department’s 2010 Review of the Australian Independent Screen Production Sector makes a series of rosy findings about the state of the sector and the effectiveness of the government’s Australian Screen Production Incentive, a large tax refund to film producers.
More money is certainly leaving Treasury coffers: the report states that “in the three years since the introduction of the Australian Screen Production Incentive, the government has provided $412.1 million in support through the tax system, compared to $136.7 million in the three years before the package.”
But delve further into the report, and all sorts of questions start to pop up. First and foremost is the crucial question of whether those extra taxpayer dollars are really stimulating an upswing in domestic production across the board, or merely co-financing large Hollywood studio films such as Happy Feet 2 and Australia.
Arts Minister Simon Crean trumpeted the review’s findings. “The boost in government funding is a great achievement and contributing to the viability of the local film production industry,” he announced in a media release.
“Although it’s still early days, the increase in activity, particularly the production of Australian large budget films, such as Baz Luhrmann’s Australia and George Miller’s Happy Feet 2, and the box office performance of films such as Tomorrow, When the War Began shows the government support for the sector is having a significant impact.”
In fact, a close reading of the review suggests that the effect of the new funding arrangements is far less positive than the minister and the department claim. Much of the extra money — $169 million, in fact — has gone to foreign movie studios in the form of international production subsidies, though that’s not a fact that the review chose to highlight. But despite this, levels of foreign production in Australia have actually been falling, as the strengthening Aussie dollar and strong competition from other countries and locations have made the foreign production incentives less attractive.
On the surface, it's true, it is awful; But there are many other considerations, namely just how marketable Australian Films are in the international market place, and what is the likely return on the investment, that couch the awfulness of this happening. A film industry can't exist without an audience for it, has been the painful lesson of the Australian Film Industry during the FFC years. Trying something else is worthwhile.
There are many gremlins in that discussion of what that something else might be as well, but to cut a long story short, in an international distribution market that is half dominated by Hollywood, a film industry would be crazy not to put half its eggs in that basket. Rightly or wrongly (and there are many who say it's all wrong) American cinema dominates the market place in the anglophone world to the extent it is the representative cinema of the English speaking world. The rest of the anglophone cinemas of the UK, Australia, Canada, South Africa and New Zealand are in effect voices of the opposition in the wilderness, so to speak.
However, the audience makes no such distinctions. They go out to watch movies they think would be worth their ticket price. If that involves car chases an explosions and sex scenes (but without genitals) then they're happier than quirky Australian films about homosexuals and misfits with no particular point of joy. And God only knows the FFC was responsible for cavalcade of unwanted films like that. As Doug Mulray famously joked, you could have a story like 'Pitch Black and the Seven Pygmies', and if you had a one-legged Aborigine lesbian in it, we could get government funding to turn it into an Australian Film.
On the FFC, the article has this to say:
The review confirms a subtle shift in Australian screen funding priorities away from backing emerging film-makers and new voices and towards big budget, Hollywood-financed productions. This may result in bigger box offices for bigger-budget Australian films — or it may not. The federal government’s last effort at supporting commercial film finance was the Film Film Corporation, a 20-year initiative that acted as a for-profit investor in feature production. The FFC lost more than a billion dollars in that time-frame, booking investment returns of negative 80%.
The new policy gets around this problem by simply giving tax refunds to big producers, regardless of how much money their film eventually makes. And it’s uncapped and open-ended: the bigger the budget of the film, the larger the taxpayer contribution.
Obviously you can't win them all. It would be an ideal world where the Australian Film Industry didn't need any government funding at all. It would be even better if we didn't have to keep qualifying it with being an 'Australian' film industry - just, the film industry in Australia. It would be a nice day when every film made in Australia i a worthy world beater and a classic in cinema to parallel 'Citizen Kane' and 'Battleship Potemkin'. Like, that's ever going to happen.
All the same, because a film industry in Australia isn't viable, and yet there is so much cultural pressure that there ought to be a film industry no matter what, the governments of both Federal and State levels end up handing out monies. Undeniably , it is a bleak form of corporate welfare. The fact that a lot of it goes to Hollywood who don't seem to need it is perhaps besides the point, as it is used to employ Aussies to ply their trades.
Mind you, a better use of the money might be to buy shares in the Hollywood studios and appoint a board member from Australia who uses his clout and *forces* these studios to make more films with Australian content in Australia. But of course nobody thinks of that, right?
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