Australian Films Tank At Box Office

Our Own Market Still Hates Us

It's not a laughing matter that the trend continues. The top 4 Australian films combined have grossed less at the box office than a mediocre offering from Hollywood.

In a sign of how Australia's independent film industry is struggling, the best film nominees at this year's AFI Awards - The Black Balloon, The Jammed, The Square and Unfinished Sky - took a combined $3.9 million at the box office. In comparison, American-made films romped in at the Australian box office - even those universally panned by critics.

Step Brothers, the Will Ferrell gross-out comedy that scored 3/10 from The Sun-Herald film reviewer Rob Lowing, took in $8.7million from Australian audiences, while Alvin And The Chipmunks earned $17.63million. The highest-earning US film was The Dark Knight with $45.6million in Australian takings alone.

"We had a number of small films this year but, let's face it, that's what we have the budgets for," said Elissa Down, director of The Black Balloon, which scored 11 AFI Award nominations this year. It was made for just over $4 million but took in just $2,265,000 at the box office.

"We had a great screen average and we were told by a number of exhibitors at art-house cinemas that they were seeing teenagers in there for the first time, which was great," Down said.

The comparison with big-budget American films is often painful for independent filmmakers because it is not an even playing-field financially. But some filmmakers believe it is important for the industry to become more aware of what Australian audiences want to see.

"It is a shame because we're competing against American, big-star, $100 million films," said Dee McLachlan, director of The Jammed. "But I think it's up to us to get Australian audiences engaged back in Australian stories."

Australian films have been competing against bigger budget American films for a long time, and have continued production in spite of losses for over 3 decades. It's nothing new. The result we are seeing comes directly from the funding bodies' collective disregard for the Australian audience for that 30 years span.

There's been much confusion as to what form an Australian Film Industry should take, but that discussion alone is fraught with ideological culture wars. There is an old Doug Mulray joke that went, you could easily get funding from the AFC if you pitched 'Pitch Black and the Seven Pygmies' provided you had a one-legged wheelchair-ridden Aborigine woman playing the main character. Yes, it's highly racist and inflammatory, but it wouldn't be so funny if it didn't have a modicum of truth. I was on my way driving to AFTRS in North Ryde when I heard the joke on-air and burst into laughter at the bitter truth of it, feeling paralysed by the poisonous wit.
I was surrounded by the very ideological adjustments (and cognitive dissonance I might add) that these things are important.
Well, yes, they are important, but not to the market. Not even to an Australiasn market, whose culture we are allegedly trying to preserve by making these government funded films from their tax-payers' money. Get that. We're taxing people to make these loser films to preserve an Australian identity on the screen, even if the people stay away in droves not to watch it.

The simple fact is, the various funding bodies have hardly cared about Australian audiences since inception. It's only when in the late 1990s under the Howard government that film bureaucrats were asked to explain their successive years of losses that the notion of market returns crept into the discussion - which leads us to today's article above. It's a bit hard to ask Australian audiences to suddenly take notice of Australian films after 30 years of being served the film equivalent of the Coogee Bay Hotel Gelato.
They don't trust us to tell a story that they might find interesting or satisfying or worth consuming on a Friday night or a Saturday with a date or with buddies.

So Much To Blog, So Little Time - Part 2

The Credit Crunch
Pleiades has been sending in some interesting stuff relating to the film industry of late.
One of the more interesting side-effects of the current credit squeeze is that banks in Europe are pulling out of cinema.

A slew of film projects are expected to be forced on to the backburner because of tough new funding terms set by Wall Street banks.

One senior executive at a big Hollywood studio, who declined to be named, predicted that the increased cost of financing the film industry would lead to fewer films being made, particularly by smaller, independent companies.

“Deals are hard to get done right now,” he said. “This is just how the banks are dealing with uncertainty. They are being very cautious.”

Although a number of the leading studios, including Fox, Universal and Disney, managed to raise funds before the credit crisis began, many independent film-makers are believed to have had less luck.

The executive said: “Fewer films is not necessarily a bad thing - people have only so much money to spend - but what you will see, increasingly, is film companies going to India and the Middle East for their funding.”

New York investment banks have become a key source of funding for Hollywood only in the past five years. However, studios such as MGM, Fox, Universal and Sony quickly began to rely very heavily on Wall Street for the financing of new films.

Since the credit crisis erupted last year, investment banks have increased the cost of lending for the studios and, in some cases, banks have pulled out of film finance altogether.

The suggestion is that they will be back, once the market terms are right, but in the short term it augurs badly for the reformed Australian film bureaucracies' plans because they were counting on that money to be there.

Eulogies For Indie Cinema
Here's another one from Pleiades. It's in an e-mail so I'm just going to post it up whole:

"Yes, The Sky Really Is Falling."
Mark Gill , CEO, The Film Department
Keynote Speech
L.A. Film Festival Financing Conference
6/21/08

Good morning.
Last week, an old friend who is a director called to catch up. It almost seemed as if he was seeking reassurance. "You good?" he asked.

My answer was simple: "How good can I be? I work in independent film."

He laughed. And then he wondered aloud: "Do you think maybe Chicken Little was right—I mean, about independent film." Leave it to a director to hope Chicken Little might be a cinephile. And again, my answer was simple: "Yes, the sky really is falling."

The last thing I heard him say was "I have to go throw up now."
Unfortunately, he's not alone in that feeling these days.I know I don't have to repeat all the ways that the independent film business is in trouble. But I'm going to do it anyway—because the accumulation of bad news is kin of aweinspiring:

1: Picturehouse and Warner Independent have been shut down.

2: New Line's staff was cut by 90 percent, and the survivors were sent to hell…I mean… Burbank .

3: Paramount Vantage was folded into the mother ship (this one may not be all bad news, by the way, but it still scares the hell out of independent film people).

4: Sidney Kimmel shrunk his company in half.

5: ThinkFilm is being sued for not paying its advertising bills, even as the unions repeatedly close down their David O. Russell production with the prophetic title "Nailed" for failure to meet weekly payroll.

6: Another five companies are in serious financial peril. And those are only the ones I'm sure of.

7: The $18 billion that Wall Street poured into Hollywood over the past four years has slowed to a trickle, and shows no signs of being replaced at even remotely the same levels from any new source.

8: There's a glut of films: 5000 movies got made last year. Of those, 603 got released theatrically here. And there's not room in the market—as there used to be—for even 400 of those. Maybe there's room for 300. So everything else just dies. Most of these pictures are preordained flops from independent distributors who forgot that their odds would have been better if they'd converted their money into quarters and taken the all-nigh party bus to Vegas.

9: Advertising costs have radically outpaced inflation even as media delivery of audiences falls through the floor. So movie companies now enjoy the privilege of paying way more to be far less effective marketers.

10: Movies now routinely fight with really compelling leisure alternatives that nobody in the last great era of cinema—the 1970s—even imagined: from ipods to Xboxes to tivos to you tubes to the radically improved behemoth that is cable television.

11: The international marketplace may be growing dramatically, but all of that growth is eaten up by studio movies, a couple dozen top independent films, an burgeoning local language productions. Everything else we make in this country doesn't sellfor less—as it has for the past 20-plus years. Now, most American independent films don't sell at all overseas. I've never seen more depressed people in my life than I did in Cannes last month. The phrase "worst market ever" could be heard from every corner. a lot of film market veterans were musing about never coming back. It's that bad out there.

12: One entertainment industry banker I know believes another 10 independent film financiers will exit the business in the next year. I think he's low. And finally, just for bad luck:

13: The average cost of an independent film released theatrically in North America shot up dramatically last year (not as much perhaps as the 60% the MPAA reported for its member companies, but a lot nonetheless). And this of course makes it a hell of a lot harder to break even or squeak out a small return and stay in business. Aside from that, everything's great.

We've heard "the sky is falling" in the movie business before—notably with the introduction of TV, home video and DVD. On all three occasions, the business survived. And DVDs arguably helped grow the worldwide movie-viewing habit considerably—even as they threw off a ton of cash. But this time, at least as it relates to independent film, the sky really is falling.

The marginally good news is it won't hit the ground everywhere. The strongest of the strong will survive and in fact prosper. But it will feel like we just survived a medieval plague. The carnage and the stench will be overwhelming. Of course, it's fashionable to bitch in the independent film world. It's what we do. We brood. We wear black. We drink too much coffee, followed by too much alcohol. And we bemoan a future devoid of real culture, homogenized to death by unfeeling conglomerates, and increasingly determined by ADD-addled 14-year-olds with nothing but internet porn and Grand Theft Auto on the brain.

The Major Studios

Every now and then we get tempted to look over the fence to where the grass is greener. We're human. We can't help it. We see all that cash rolling into the major studio coffers,and we secretly covet it. But it's not so easy for the big boys anymore either. The average cost of a major studio production is $70.8million, and the average marketing budget in NorthAmerica alone is $35.9 million. In other words, there's an average of more than $100 million at risk every time they get up to bat. And if they're going to lose $75 million or more, they know it by 2 p.m. Los Angeles time on opening day.

As the press has chronicled ad nauseum, the major studios have been forced largely to embrace the world of the tentpole movie—the big budget spectacle that tries to be for everyone. In market research terms, they call it the four-quadrant film, meaning it appeals to all four demographic quadrants of moviegoers: men and women, over and under 25. In economic terms, this means a movie that invariably costs more than $100 million, and on occasion more than $300 million.

The amount of effort and cash devoted to these tentpoles—and the enormous rewards that follow when they work—has radically altered the focus of the big studios. And generally speaking, these films don't have to be great to work. They have to be just good enough. It's the last place in the movie business where the old habits still apply, where the phrase "execution dependent" doesn't matter so much. Hollywood has spent a lot of time and money making films that are at best mediocre and then hoping for marketing to save the day. We can blame a good movie for this very bad habit. "Jaws" ushered in the era of wide-release marketing-driven movies. It lasted for more than 30 years. A lot of bad films got made under the theory that quality didn't matter. But it's not working like it used to.

Here's why: fooling the audience is getting harder for the major studios in the age of blackberries, instant messaging and cell phone texting. Good buzz spreads quickly, bad buzz even faster.

A tentpole movie has to be truly atrocious to be victimized by this. But for any movie smaller than a tentpole, the bar has been raised. Good isn't good enough anymore. It used to be that a film with a nice performance, a cool look and a broken story could get through. Not any more. Unless you're making a tentpole, your movie now has to be very good—in the eye of its intended audience.

I may have liked "Juno" and "The Bourne Identity." My female colleagues loved "Sex in the City." And there was a big, happy audience for the last "Halloween" movie. In each case, the intended audience got what it wanted: a movie that satisfied them.

We're entering an era where the only films with any chance for success will be the $100 million-plus tentpoles, and reasonably priced films of some perceived quality.

I've had far too many fight-the-power wannabe filmmakers cheer this vision of the future, which they believe will usher out the bloated, soul-less big studio retreads and usher in a new democratic era of access to moviemaking fame and glory for all.

Lots of people are drinking this Kool-Aid. Fifteen years ago, the Sundance Film Festival got 500 submissions. This year, they received 5,000. Virtually all of these are privately financed. There's only one problem: most of the films are flat-out awful (trust me, I have had to sit through tons of them over the years). Let me put it another way: the digital revolution is here, and boy does it suck.

It's not enough to have access to the moviemaking process. Talent matters more. Quality of emotional content is what matters, period. In a world with too many choices, companies are finally realizing they can't risk the marketing money on most movies. Here's how bad the odds are: of the 5000 films submitted to Sundance each year—generally with budgets under $10 million—maybe 100 of them got a US theatrical release three years ago. And it used to be that 20 of those would make money. Now maybe five do. That's one-tenth of one percent.

Put another way, if you decide to make a movie budgeted under $10 million on your own tomorrow, you have a 99.9% chance of failure. OK, so now that I've battered you into severe depression, let's move on to the hopeful part of these proceedings. The famed film editor Walter Murch (of "Apocalypse Now" and "English Patient" renown) likes to say there are only two important elements of any movie: the beginning and the ending. And the beginning isn't really all that important.

With that in mind, I promise, by the end of this talk, you won't want to slit your wrists. There actually are some hopeful signs amid all the carnage. Those terrible odds for movies under $10 million? Ironically, they get far better if you spend more money. All the financial data I've looked at—and it's a lot—clearly shows that the sweet spot is between $15 and $50 million. But that has a lot to do with being able to pay professionals who know what they're doing to create quality emotional content that has a market. And it has a fair amount to do with the prices that international distributors can afford to pay in the top 12 countries, which is what gives financiers enough comfort to commit capital.

I can hear my nauseous director friend now: "So what are you saying: should we all just quit?Not at all. I'm saying we have to do better. Much better.

The sky may be falling, but in the end, it isn't going to hit the ground. We will be left with a little breathing room. And the question will become: what will succeed in this much narrower space? I believe that a fair number of people—call them what's left of the theatrical audience if you like—will always need to get out of the house: in part because they enjoy the benefits of a communal experience.

Clearly, only the better films will succeed in the theaters of the future. Certainly the number of releases will drop—by half or more. Probably everyone other than the folk who work on tentpoles will be paid less. The words "theatrical necessity" will take on greater and greater meaning. Probably a lot of theaters will close.
But I think the best theaters showing the best films will always have an audience. And the rest of the films will have their premiere in Walmart, or on your cell phone. Interestingly enough, in this Darwinian new future, there will absolutely be a premium

for good films on tv, pay per view, on-demand, internet—or whatever that large pipe that goes to all of our houses will be called.Why do I know this? Because one of the big research companies conducted a study recently which gave viewers on-demand everything. No more schedules. No more appointment television. Just tune in anything—any movie, any TV show—at any time. And guess what: the best stuff won out. Hands down. In a nutshell, the audience is sick & tired of the atrocious but all too familiar version of television on a schedule: 500 channels to choose from, and nothing to watch.

Some of this is purely a function of demography. There actually is a growing audience for quality. *It's not hard to figure out why: the baby boom is aging. And as they do,their tastes mature. But they don't behave like their parents at the same age. They are smarter, more active, have more disposable income. And because of pay cable, home video and DVD in particular, they've become much more movie literate — and more sophisticated in their tastes. *Traditionally specialized films accounted for 5-6% of tickets sold. In the last few summers, it's been over 10% on average. And that's the season when Hollywood is supposed to dominate and indies are supposed to cower in the corners, waiting for the arrival of fall.

*And to back that up, for the first time in the roughly 20 years I've been looking at this data, more than 10% of the audience now is telling pollsters they prefer independent films. We also know there's an opening for quality based on data from the good folks at Netflix. Yes, they rent plenty of tentpole movie dvds, just like everyone else. But they also have the most accurate collaborative filtering technology I've seen. Type in 50 movies you like, and Netflix will tell you—with remarkable accuracy—what other films you will like. This is how a relatively obscure film from 1974 became the most popular picture among Netflix's six million subscribers: because it's really good. The movie, by the way, is "The Conversation."

I keep telling the Netflix people they should start sampling audiences on Friday nights outside movie theaters, so we'll all know by Saturday if people whose taste we share like a movie. But of course they're probably rightly worried about their biggest suppliers, the major studios, who are terrified that the audience will find out even sooner just how bad "Speed Racer" is. Yeah, like we couldn't tell just from being forced to watch the trailer. The result of all these changes—especially the catalyzing effect of lower costs and high technology—is very good news for people who care about the quality of cinema, singularity of voice, resonant themes, and all the other things that today can rarely be found outside independent film.

It all comes down to what a former glove merchant named Schmuel Gelbfisz said more than 50 years ago: "Make Fewer Better." This isn't by any means the most famous Goldwyn-ism. In fact it isn't even on most of the lists alongside such classics as: "An oral contract isn't worth the paper it's written on"; "A wide screen just makes a bad film twice as bad"; and "Don't pay any attention to the critics. Don't even ignore them!"

But for my taste, "Make fewer better" is the one Goldwyn-ism that should never go out of style. If we give the audience fewer and better movies, we might even create a virtuous cycle. People might start saying: "Hey, the movies are good again." They'll start going more often, tell their friends…you get the idea. So how do we get to "Fewer and Better"? The studios have already done it. Disney once released 47 movies in a year. This year: the number will be 12. Warner went from 35 to 20 in less than 10 years. The rest of the majors have also slimmed down. Now of course anybody can reduce budgets and the number of films they make. That part is easy. The hard part is quality of content—or, well, taste. How the hell do you improve that?

The cynic's view—encapsulated in the famous dictum of Oscar-winning screenwriter William Goldman—is: "Nobody knows anything." Meaning: Nobody knows what will work. It's hopeless to try to inflict taste on the movies. Give up immediately. If that were entirely true, we should just shut down the business right now. But of course this isn't entirely the case. There are changes we can undertake that will make a difference. Odds are that most of show business won't make these changes until they're in serious danger of going under—which is …any day now. Anyone who changes sooner will have an enormous advantage. The single biggest change should be to only make movies that we absolutely love. Not ones we like. Not ones we need to do as a favor. Not the ones we do because they seem like a good "piece of business." Not ones we do because we think, hope or wish that "the kids" will like them. Not the knock-offs of the ones that worked at the box office last year. In a word, we should only pick the films we're passionate about—and that have an audience. Another way of articulating this is: we need to thread the needle twice: once for quality, and then for audience demand.

Let's talk about quality first.

As simple as it sounds, it all comes down to a good story, well told. And that's a lot harder to do than it is to say. But not as hard as Hollywood would have you believe now—in an era where until very recently aiming high was considered an effete eccentricity. Or where, as the New York Times recently put it, "quality is considered a genre." It's a show business cliché that "it all starts with the script." This is usually uttered by some semi-literate, mouth-breathing, prada-wearing, 24-year-old hipster poseur who wouldn't know a good story if it hit him in the head. We could spend an hour or two just on the topic of what makes a good script.
But not today. In the most reductionist fashion: tere's the holy trinity of structure, character and dialogue, of course; the crucial if more ephemeral notions of authenticity, voice, theme, and tone; and the imperative for originality of utterance and perception. In the end, all of this has to add up (seamlessly if possible) to something that moves us — to the quality of the emotional content. It doesn't matter if we're talking about thrills, laughs, tears, or an adrenaline rush. What matters is that we are engaged and, ideally, emotionally transformed and satisfied.

In a world increasingly dominated by numbers—financial, technological and most importantly the finite number of hours in a day, our very human desire for contact, meaning and emotional transformation isn't going away. It's growing. Those who remember that will survive and most probably win. By the way, notwithstanding my 10-year-old son Jack's question: "Dad, why do movies suck so much?" our quality control isn't as bad as it could be, and this has enormous implications for our not following the music business down the toilet.

Here's why: when the music business went from tape to digital, they nearly doubled the wholesale price of an album, and proceeded to pump out albums that have very few good songs. Like one or none. When the movie business went from tape to digital, we dropped the wholesale price per unit from $65 to $10. And everyone said: "Oh my god, they're killing the business. Our profit margins are ruined." Well, the margin was smaller, but sales exploded. The studios made tens of billions of dollars on the difference. And consumers mostly like what they're getting. So much so that movies are the second-highest rated consumer value for the money. Behind only chicken. Not so for albums, which are so far down the list you can't find them.

The next big change will be when we start shooting movies to mobile devices in a big way. The wholesale price will drop again—probably to $3 per unit. But we'll sell so many more of them that revenue will explode all over again. This has very favourable implications for getting past piracy problems that helped kill the music business: the charge for downloading a film will land on your phone bill. And the moviemakers can hold the phone companies accountable (whereas now internet providers duck and hide when we try to pursue them for what amounts to transfer of stolen goods).

So now you're probably wondering: if all this money is going to flood into Hollywood in a few years, why can't we get some of it for independent film and just keep on doing what we do? The answer, in a word, is marketing. Or, how do you get noticed in a world of endless possibilities? And that brings us to the second crucial threading of the needle: for audience demand. The first and most important thing to remember is that two-thirds of the tickets are sold outside the U.S. now. So if you're making a film that only appeals to Americans, start cutting your budget now. Or better yet, make one that the whole world can embrace. This is mostly about subject matter. The rest of the world doesn't care about westerns or American sports movies. I've gone out of my way to tell people we won't make them. And yet, no matter how many times I say this, it still doesn't seem to stop some people with a passion to get their story told. Not too long ago, a producer called me up to tell me the true story, circa 1890, of cowboys and Indians in the Arizona territory who put down their weapons to play a friendly game of baseball. I offered to scalp him. After you get past subject matter, the next most important factor is "who's it for." Women of all ages. Men under 25? The dating audience 18-34. Please don't tell me "everyone" unless you have a $100 million budget. And then I like to think about the rest of the audience demand question in the way that we analyse titles. A good title should have many of the attributes that a movie needs to embody now: Succinct & Descriptive: the film has to lend itself to brief encapsulation. A high concept is no longer the thing that studio movies do and independent films shun. In this age of info overload, it's crucial for every picture to have this. Without it, your odds shoot through the floor. *Distinctive: not the same story we've heard five times before; something that at least takes the cliché and twists it; not something we get too much of somewhere else in our lives (Exhibit A: Iraq movies; who wants to see more of that mess? We already get too much of it every day in the news media).

*Provocative: something that cuts through the clutter, stands out, gets attention; not "So then Phoebe sat by her mother's bedside, suffering in silence for eight weeks." Give us incident, conflict, excitement, ideally something that hits a cultural nerve. *Memorable: this is essentially an accumulation of the other traits, or sometimes altogether separate. It's the avoidance of cotton candy. The possibility of resonance. Something sticky. *Not too dark: these are very dark times, for audiences the world over. Audience enthusiasm for dark films is as low as I've ever seen it. There are a lot of reasons for this, of course. But the one I hear almost nobody articulating and everyone feeling is this: in the western industrialized world, wages haven't even remotely kept up with productivity demands, and that stresses us out.

Will some films get made that defy all of these conventions? Yes. Will a couple of them go on to achieve enormous success and acclaim? Probably. The romantic in all of us hopes for David to triumph over Goliath, for the visionary individual to beat the system. Scratch a successful person in Hollywood , and they'll tell you about their movie that did this. I happen to have quite a few stories like this. The best is probably this: In its April 2005 issue, Premiere magazine famously intoned: "What was Mark Gill thinking when he paid $1 million for a French documentary about a bunch of penguins?" What I was thinking was very simple: "we can fix it, and it will be emotional." So we did. Yes, I did save that article. And yes, I am happy that the magazine subsequently went out of business.

Here's the problem with that brand of romanticism: the odds of it happening to any of us with any reliable frequency are extremely low—and getting much worse. As some famous wag once said: "You can die of encouragement in Hollywood ." I frankly don't want to be responsible for your death. Instead, let's just tell the truth… If you want to survive in this brutal climate, you're going to have to work a lot harder, be a lot smarter, know a lot more, move a lot faster, sell a lot better, pay attention to the data, be a little nicer (ok, a lot nicer), trust your gut, read everything and never, ever give up. If you're looking for a cool lifestyle, you're in the wrong business. If you want work-life balance, go get a government job.

But if you really want to make movies — even after all the unvarnished bad news I've dumped on you today—then by all means do it. For starters, by whatever legal and moral means necessary, come up with a great script. How will you know if you have one? That's easy. It's the day you stop chasing talent. Because everybody—from the directors to the actors to the editors and costume designers—starts chasing you, and will show up and make the film for a
little — or a lot — less.

And if we do it for less, we can afford to make something that's not a moronic, homogenized piece of lowest-common-denominator drivel. If we get all of that right, the sky might fall further than we like, but it won't hit the ground. And the independent film business—leaner, harder-working, but still wearing black and drinking too much caffeine—will indeed survive.

Thank you very much.

So there you go. On a related tangent, I want to briefly go over my own thinking on this phenomenon.

Some years ago, I got into a conversation with a guy who was the reader at Fox-Icon in Sydney. I explained to him that the whole Indie cinema thing predicated on screen numbers exploding (this was back in the late 1990s) was a crock. What I told him was that the market wasn't going to grow exponentially because the demographic wouldn't support it. There actually isn't the time for people to watch exponentially more films.
"You're crazy, he said. Build it and they will come. "
"Yeah but," I told him, "if everybody builds them, *they* can't go everywhere at once."

Imagine your average cineaste. In those days of being single and dating, I used to go see 2 new films in a week. I was in the business, and on some weeks, rent a whole bunch of DVD so releases I missed. So in any given year, I think I watched around 80-120 films without thinking much about it, and in some years I watched 200-300 - but that was during my time I was at film school. I had a lot of time to give to cinema back then. So in any given year I would watch 100 or so new films.

I'm anomalous. Most of the market watches fewer than 50. But let's be generous and say the way people watch is different , so the effective *reach* of the cinema is 100 films a year per cineaste - and I'm being extremely generous here. I think it's more like 20 movies per annum.

The thing about it is, if there were suddenly 1000 additional new product, people would still only physically have enough time for the 100 or so - short of going back to Film School. So in a sense, the market is competed for from the top 100 films, not from the bottom 500-1000 films. People don't work up the market, they pick the most prominent film and work their way down the list.

What this means is that the visibility of your film is probably more valuable than the actual content. Sure, there are variations and variance in individual viewing habits, but it really matters what is in the Top 100 marketed films, because that is what determines the shape of the market. (So far this decade, the shape it is in, is more comic book movies with recognisable, colorful, dynamic characters, but that's another story. )

If you applied the 80/20 rule, it's easy enough to see that 80% of the market is the 100 films each year. The other parts of the market will only ever account for 20% gross. So making an Indie film is always going to be a losing proposition knowing you're going in the latter bucket of films. In other words, you could duke it out all you like for the scraps, but the upside of an Indie film is a miraculous breakthrough by accident - which dos happen with the frequency of winning lotto. Otherwise chances are, it's going to remain unwatched.

The flip side of that is that the only game worth being in is going to be the top end studio product, and these films will always account for the 80% of revenue in all of cinema's forms.
When I explained all of this to the reader at Fox -Icon, he looked at me and said, "you're fucking crazy. People will ALWAYS watch GOOD movies."

I rest my case.

Obituaries - The Australian Film Industry

A Doco On Australian Genre Movies!
There's a film doing the rounds that chronicles the genre film days of the Australian cinema. Yes, the on that would occasionally make some money, but above all, the politically-correct cadre spent a hysterical amount of energy burying. I hope they're happy with the industry they have now. Here's an article here sent in by Pleiades.

THE official history of Australian cinema records that the modern industry flourished in the 1970s on the back of new interest and investment from prime ministers John Gorton and Gough Whitlam.

A clutch of well-received art films by directors who would become respected Hollywood figures, such as Fred Schepisi, Phillip Noyce and Peter Weir, consolidated that investment.

The reality, of course, was more complex and, for some, a little more embarrassing. The '70s also generated a raft of genre films that were culturally regressive, provocative and occasionally very successful.

The Barry McKenzie and Alvin Purple films are the best-remembered commercial beachheads for what became a fertile period for soft porn (including The Naked Bunyip and Pacific Banana), action (The Man From Hong Kong), horror (Dead-End Drive In, Patrick) and thriller films (Turkey Shoot, Road Games, Long Weekend).

Many were atrocious, particularly in the '80s as mediocrity flourished under the 10BA legislation that allowed film investors to claim a 150 per cent tax concession.

But most were ambitious and, despite their narrative shortcomings, they often recouped their money or played well overseas.

"Whether these films are good or bad, there's certainly an energy you don't find in a lot of contemporary Australian cinema," says Mark Hartley, the director of a loving, frenetic and very funny paean to this forgotten period of Australian cinema, titled Not Quite Hollywood.

"There was an enthusiasm and a can-do attitude in them that possibly doesn't exist today," he says.

Hartley's film is an exercise in can-do. The Melburnian's energy and scholarship excited the interest of some early investors but notthe Film Finance Corporation, which rejected funding for the film despite its historical significance.

"The FFC was a major, major stumbling block," Hartley says. "I could be totally wrong but I always got the sense we were suffering the same fate these films do, that we were still being seen as a documentary that wasn't necessarily worthy enough.

"It's not the public's reaction to these films that has remained; what has remained is the critics' reactions, which were scathing. When you talk to anyone who saw them or worked on them, they're fond and not embarrassed by these films."

Sometimes it just makes you want to cry when you think about the opportunities lost.

A Heckler Says...

AussieProductsSux.net?

Here's an entry into the herald by some funny person who derides all things Aussie-made but kicks off her rant with the film industry thus:

ONCE again I have suffered through an appalling Australian film. No need to identify the culprit, because we all know how the Australian genre of late is concerned in the main with addicts, the abused, the dispossessed and the unhappy, expressed through overacting and directorial pulling of the pud.

What are they trying to teach us? That the vast majority of us live inauthentic lives because we are not all unhappy junkies?

I would love to support Australian industry, but I am so often stung. At Country Road I can't spend any dollars because, no matter what the cost, the size 16s are finished. The 16s are size 14 with a 16 tag, I think, so more pieces can be made from a single bolt of cloth. Other Australian clothing labels have threads hanging or even buttons missing. At one "quality" shop in the QVB recently, I was told it would be simpler if I just sewed on the missing button.

I told you so.

Is There Any Point In Even Trying? - Part 2

Sorry About The Comments Section
I'm sorry that the comments section isn't working. Encouragingly, I received a number of phone calls to that effect after my last entry. People wanted to tell me they felt strongly enough about this situation in Australia. They wanted to comment, but couldn't. I don't know what's going wrong with google, but you might just have to bear with me a little bit.

An AFTRS Graduate, You Say?
I've been reflecting some more on how this situation even came to pass in Australia. Back in my days at AFTRS, it was bleeding obvious that there was an industry and that it was on the verge of making s big mark on the world. Films were getting made. People who graduated only years ago were making feature films. They had distributors and were winning spots in prestigious international festivals. It seemed the Australian Film Industry was finally coming of age as an industry.

Well, I can report to you the simple fact that none of the people I graduated with have directed a feature film on film. It's amazing, really. Daniel Kriege and Samantha Lang from the years after me have made their films, but I don't think anybody from my year has directed their feature film. It's a sorry tale, but it's true.

Last December I was working a Christmas party for some Pay TV company and ran into the guy from the year above, who was once the "the Most Likely" to go and make his films. In all this time, he hadn't gone on to be that. Neither have I - well, I hve Key Psycho, but what the hey? We both were just 2 guys who had not fulfilled the expectations that were placed on us by the lofty institution - That night he was the DJ, and I operated the video camera as people who barely knew anything about lighting gave speeches in the dark. We barely acknowledged one another and kind of walked off with a shrug. It's sad, really.

From a bird's eye point of view, what happened was that the investing part of the industry contracted severely in the wake of the 10BA rule changes in the early 1990s, and this was followed by a general contraction of the scope of the industry to the point where the market for Australian Films in Australia itself evaporated. My part in the story has been the year in year out struggle t convince people that I can actually direct a film, but each year the hurdles get higher, the terms get tougher, the opening gets smaller until I can no longer even get an application accepted by the NSWFTO for project development.

You'd think that anybody who graduated AFTRS and was still in the business decade later was committed to the business in spite of its state was somebody you would want to at least look into, but no - they really didn't want to know. Why the hell is the Federal government even funding AFTRS to create graduates like me, if the State government isn't interested? The mind boggles. And I'm not alone.

I'm not really here to go over that terrain again, but needless to say, there's a gigantic disconnect between what the government thinks it's doing and what actually happens at the policy level. If you're going to produce 10-20 film makers a year at AUD$9 million p.a., you'd think that you wanted an industry that was making at least 50 films a year. nobody seems to be doing the maths. Nobody seems to be copping the blame for the fact that only 14 get made and all f them have government funding. There are a lot of angry people out here as a result.

PB was telling me he knows a Sydney based producer who is working with a Brisbane based Director, and neither can get support from the NSWFTO or Film Queensland because one of the 'Key Creatives' is not living and working in the state. This is notwithstanding that the film is about something overseas. Yeah, the NSWFTO won't help because the director attached is a Cane Toad and Film Queensland won't help because the Producer is a cockroach. Hooray for State of Origin!

Russell Crowe Isn't Interested, Why The Fuck Should You Be Interested?
The bottom line is this: our top talent want to come back to work in Australia as a perk. The world is a big place. Once you are out of Australia and you become a bankable star in the world market, it's really hard to justify coming back to Australia.

The problem is, any time you want to talk to the commercial entities such as a distributor about making a film, they always seem to ask for big names (And the big names ask for distributors to be lined up before they read your script but that is another travesty). It's wishful thinking that the A-Listers who have effectively *graduated* to the world market would be interested in working on a small Australian film when they would be working for mega-bucks playing a comic book super hero (Yeah, I'm talking about you Hugh Jackman!). By insisting on the unrealistic, producers, directors and writers are forced to wait. And wait. And wait some more... until they get no answer and they move onto the next A-Lister who won't return communications (That would be you Guy Pearce!)

The question that begs to be answered is, why on earth do the distributors and production companies keep on insisting on these pipe dreams instead of just developing new talent? All you gotta do is look. Untapped talent is the 'market inefficiency', but nobody with any money seems to have sense - which seems to confirm the adage: 'Money is Wasted On The Rich'.

Ask The Market, Stupid!
Year after year, Australian films fail in the market place. They do. It's just the stark reality of it all. They get made half-cocked, and they they get to markets half-heartedly. After 20 years, the Australian public has learned to totally mistrust the brand. Ironically, there's probably a stronger market for Australian product in say, Europe than Australia simply because we're exotic to them. Until we're successful overseas again, I just don't think we're going to win back our own public. The thing about the 1980s was that the market didn't hate Australian Films as much as they do now.

How did this happen? Imagine if I was a parochially loyal customer of say, a local cheese company. You keep buying the cheese even if the quality is uneven because you're loyal to the brand. Until one day you come across a string of really bad cheese and you say, "That's it. I'm done with the local cheese factory. I've supported their product for years but this last run of cheeses has been dreadful." And so you stop buying from them on principle. This has been happening for years.

The most commonly asked question by non-film people is "why don't we make Mad Max type movies any more? That was fun". Why don't we make exciting action movies?"
The answer is not: "because Mel won't come home to do anything."
The answer is: there's a whole cabal of people in government and in the private sector who don't want the Australian industry to be commercially driven.
"But why not? I'd love to see a kick-arse Aussie action movie."
"I'd love to make one myself," I tell them. "But it just won't happen."
You should see the bewildered looks. They're the market. They hate our cheese.

Is There Any Point In Even Trying?

The 'Australian Film Industry' Is Not An Industry - It's A Rort For Superannuated Bureaucrats

I always get some flack when I call it as I see it, but put frankly, the Australian Film Industry is not an industry proper when you consider that it only makes 14 feature films a year and every single one of them gets a government grant to get to the crank in. Let's not even forget to mention that when it does get made, the Australian public lines up in queues NOT to watch them. They discover them years later and ask, "why do our films suck? I mean, why, do, they suck so-o-o-o MUCH?!"

That's right. The average Australian film goers hate our films and would much rather spend money on Hollywood fare or English fare or some exotic European movie than pay to see our own low budget, state-sanctioned, ideologically controlled, politically correct, historically-revisionist, culturally cringing craptastic, BORING MOVIE. I don't blame them as lately, I've felt the same way. Heck, for $12.98 at K-Mart, I'd rather buy an old, odd, DVD title than see a dumb Australian picture at the cinemas for $15.50.

The rest of us who (sometimes) toil in this business hoping to make anything are just in denial of this fact. Your average Australian tax-payer is always astounded at how much money goes to the filmmakers who manage to get funding out of this system - and then they promptly vote with their wallets not to support this system. It's been going on for years. Any time anybody says "I'd like to make a kick-butt genre picture," they get given the cold shoulder. Any time any body wants to make a picture that might go and earn export dollars, the funding bodies tell the producers developing the project claim it is "not an Australian Story".

Sometimes it seems it is a lot more important that the story is parochially Australian than the fact that Australian filmmakers are struggling to make their films. It's an insult that gets repeated year after year, after year. I wish I could vote them out like I would a government - but alas, I can't. Think about that. Think about the oppressive tyranny of that utter lack of options. That, my friends is the stench of bullshit emanating from these 'Film Bureaucracies'.

And with that, I bring to you the latest brouhaha in the disaster that is known as the Australian Film Industry.

GEORGE MILLER: We're kind of stuck in those old paradigms, where anything big, or anything Hollywood is bad. Hollywood is in turmoil, Warner Brothers is cutting down its production, the biggest studio in the world is cutting down its production by half.

So they're in turmoil, everyone's bewildered there, and we're somehow back here in this little back water, resting on our laurels, and we don't have a film industry anymore.

ANNE MARIA NICHOLSON: George Miller's tilt for the rebate is being hotly debated by the powerbrokers of Australian cinema. Many of them gathered in Canberra to celebrate the merger of the three major film funding agencies into Screen Australia. But it's the change to the way movies will be financed that was causing most of the excitement.

SIGRID THORNTON, ACTOR: I think this gives back some ownership to filmmakers. It's a very exciting period. It's going to go through some teething stages, and I'm sure that the Government will be responsive to those teething stages, and I think it will take time to settle.

BRIAN ROSEN, FILM FINANCE CORPORATION: It will allow Australian filmmakers to tell bigger stories. Because an offset basically delivers 40 per cent of your budget, which is a big step in the right direction to get your film financed.

ANNE MARIA NICHOLSON: Finding the right formula to finance films has always been tricky. the controversial 10ba tax incentive paid for many of the films in the 80s. It was a generous tax incentive which was often abused and eventually dumped.

Private investors scampered, and although the new Government incentive guarantees a refund of 40 per cent of a film's budget, the producers still have to find the other 60 per cent.

GEOFF BROWN, SCREEN PRODUCERS' ASSOCIATION: Financial markets are collapsing around us. Films are a very risky business. But that's the challenge for us. We've got to change our profile with the investment community. We've got to engage with them on a different level than we have in the past. It's not Government handout, it's bloody hard work.

ANNE MARIA NICHOLSON: Making films is one thing. Attracting audiences is quite another. Last year Australians spent nearly $900 million on movie tickets. But they spent only 4 per cent of that figure on the 25 Australian films released. And half of that was on George Miller's Happy Feet.

GEORGE MILLER: I heard a critic the other day, a serious critic, say "going to an Australian film is like going to the dentist; you know you ought to, but you know you're in for a lot of pain".

ANNE MARIA NICHOLSON: There were high hopes for Gillian Armstrong's new film Death Defying Acts. An a-list cast, a proven director and a good story. It was an Australian Scottish co-production. In the top 15 films, it came in a disappointing ninth on its first outing last weekend in spite of sophisticated marketing.

Another lower budget movie, The Black Balloon was the only other Australian entry coming in at number 11. Gillian Armstrong is used to the cut and thrust of movie financing and the whims of those who decide whether or not to fund a film.

GILLIAN ARMSTRONG, DIRECTOR: When we would tried to make me a career, we were knocked back by the AFC, the Australian Film Corporation, and it was lucky we had the New South Wales one to go to, because the AFC said there's been too many period films, go away.

ANNE MARIA NICHOLSON: So it could backfire?

GILLIAN ARMSTRONG: It could backfire by putting them all together and making a small number of people decide which films are made, so it's no easy answer.

ANNE MARIA NICHOLSON: And even star power is no guarantee.

CATHERINE ZETA-JONES, ACTOR: I've had a few little projects I've wanted to do in Wales and I've been just been knocked down. And I've gone personally knocking on doors. And it's like it's not really... it's too kind of like, it's too Welsh.

ANNE MARIA NICHOLSON: There's no doubt that this is a watershed moment for Australian films and why the key players are nervous about George Miller's criticism.

If he walks he says he'll take not only Justice League away, but also Happy Feet Two, which would probably qualify for the 40 per cent producer rebate.

GEORGE MILLER: We've virtually lost them to this country now. I just got off the phone trying to keep Happy Feet Two in this country.

Justice League is absolutely borderline. And we're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars circulating through the economy, and more importantly, thousands of high-end skilled creative jobs in a sustained industry. Work for the next five or six years and it's been frittered away by people who do not understand the industry, they're stuck 20 years ago in the past.

BRIAN ROSEN: Look, there's a truth in what George has to say. Definitely the industry is a cottage industry.

There is a underemployment in the industry. We all know that, that people really only work six months of the year. And what we're hoping with the offset over the next five years, is that the industry will grow from $600 million to $1 billion, that's where it should sit to have gainful employment from everybody in the industry as it is at the moment.

ANNE MARIA NICHOLSON: But two important questions remain. What is an Australian story? And do audiences here really care about them any more?

Yeah, getting your teeth pulled is about right. It's just as I said. And in all the kerfuffle, you don't really get the sense of urgency from these government bodies that maybe this is not working out the way it should. My own personal experiences of this make me feel like there needs to be a serious revolution and these bureaucrats need to be shot against the wall or placed under the guillotine. It's criminal that they pull down immense amounts of money in government salaries while they put up roadblocks every which way to stop films from getting made. They all make Beth Morgan look like the Virgin Mary - at least with Beth Morgan, you had a shot at getting your building put up if you shagged her.

Meanwhile, the distributors are pulling out:

Palace Films was until recently the most active and sometimes very successful distribber of niche Aussie pics ("Chopper," "Ten Canoes"), but after suffering from an oversupply of underperforming fare, the shingle reined back its investment.

"We tried to reach a critical mass, but we had too many; it's so much work," Palace Films manager Benjamin Zeccola says.

"We are shifting our focus back toward international titles," he adds. "We will still support certain Australian titles, although we will be far more selective."

Roadshow Films has been the major distrib of broader Aussie fare, but the shingle has none dated, and only actioner "The Square" is confirmed for 2008.

Last year, Roadshow released "December Boys" with Daniel Radcliffe and Greg Mclean's frightener "Rogue," but neither met expectations.

Topper Joel Pearlman says the shingle isn't gun-shy. "It just depends when the scripts are ready," he says.

According to some producers, there a two reasons development as stalled -- first, the drawn-out review of film-funding prior to the introduction in mid-2007 of the new rebate; and now, the many questions about how the rebate can be best used.

Pearlman, though, has Roadshow raring to go. "Traditional funding mechanisms are still there," Pearlman says, adding that the company has a staff working on just Australian films. Roadshow has significant plans to capitalize on the new 40% rebate, Pearlman says.

Christ almighty, I hate my industry right now. Having gone past the fear, I absolutely loathe it.