Making our own model
Australia should forget about modelling its film and TV industry on the US or UK. Soon they’ll be following our lead claims Lee Zachariah.
It’s a rite of passage for any budding film and television wannabe and every self-important media commentator to point at the enduring successes of the US and UK industries, and – with a tremor of incredulity at how nobody has thought of this before – suggest that Australia simply does what they do.
Why, they ask, does it always feel like we’re starting from square one? Why is the ABC not a brand like the BBC? Why don’t we have a local movie studio that could lure all of those big stars back home? Why am I the first person to think of this?
Naturally, we have moments of glory. Wolf Creek 2: The Legend of Mick’s Torso Collection has just entered production. Channel Nine’s Underbelly continues its unforeseeable success, even as it attempts to undercut itself with a series of increasingly silly subtitles (coming in 2014 – Underbelly: Can Haz Crime Noms?)
And yet each success feels like one we’ve stumbled across in the dark. The awards dolled out to The Sapphires at the AACTAs came across as not just a celebration of a fun, endearing film, but as a relief that something managed to engage audiences and make some money.
So, why is the idea of modelling our industry on a more successful one so absurd? When we tread down this path, we often forget the key differences between Australia and the US. The US has roughly 10 times the population of Australia, and necessarily more channels of entertainment. But even creating a one-tenth-sized Hollywood fails to recognise the fundamental truth of the US entertainment industry: America does not have an America of its own.
There is no three billion-population country looming over its shoulder and feeding it an unending stream of slick, refined content. American entertainment comes from America, and is then sold to much of the world.
A similar equation works with the UK, only that is three times our population, and underlines the fact that the film and television we don’t import from the US is often imported from the mother country.
Before we’ve even begun typing that screenplay or pitching that pilot, we already have all the cards stacked against us. Clinging to the government-mandated local content minimums, the best thing our industry can do is sit back and wait for one of those initialled countries to collapse. But before you sardonically respond with a ‘good luck with that’, like a pithy character in one of those Chuck Lorre sitcoms whose ubiquitousness is now only the second obstacle in a Hey Dad! reboot… we might not have long to wait.
As the BBC faces budget cuts from a Conservative government (despite a recent study from accounting firm Deloitte showing that for every pound of licence fee money the BBC gets, it puts two back into the economy), its numerous murder mystery mainstays are drying up. The ABC, whose lineup has long relied on a stream of quaint British bludgeonings, has had to put its own brand of Anglophilic detective tales into production: Miss Fisher’s Mysteries is proving a big hit, and The Dr Blake Mysteries has now premiered. Any day now, Michael Rowland will stop reporting on murders from the ABC Breakfast set, and instead rush out the studio doors armed with a deerstalker hat and magnifying glass.
The plan seems to be working. Miss Fisher and Dr Blake have already been sold to UK channels, in an apparent student-becomes-the-master situation.
A similar trend is happening in the US, although that country seems keener to supplant our accents and production values with their own. Stateside remakes of Laid, Rake and The Strange Calls are all on the cards from networks who have forgotten how badly they messed up Kath and Kim. The selling of remake rights is becoming such a standard practice, we are surely days away from Ben Stein hosting Fox News’ Ayn Randling. (‘The game show just got objectivismeder!’)
Perhaps the impossible is finally starting to happen, in the television world at least. As we begin to capitalise on low-cost, high-concept ideas that work in any culture, it may be soon be our industry that is used as the model.
Lee Zachariah is a writer and critic best known for ABC comedy program The Bazura Project and the film podcast Hell Is For Hyphenates. Find him on Twitter @leezachariah.
This feature first appeared in the tablet edition of Encore. To download click on the links below.
A fair appraisal of the state of play in film. Having worked on the pointy of end of film finance on a few projects here in Australia (ie a couple successfully funded, many not). The main issues seem to be these:
> In the US, film-makers even the Independents, can finance films on selling rights (both foreign and domestic). It doesn’t seem to work too well for us going the other way
> Other than the help from Screen Australia there is no knowledge sharing in the industry. So every project ends up being a two year lead-in on getting ducks lined up before pre-production can begin, and by then all the people who were interested and dropped off.
> No stars, just talent. There are very few stars in the eco-system that can get investors/producers excited enough that they’ll stump up cash by having names attached. However, there is a very good talent pool so if a project does get funded it ends up being a good product.
Like you say, Australia is becoming a territory in which concepts are tested before being bought and Americanised, but until something is sorted at the funding stage those concepts are still few and far between.
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Reg Grundy capitalised on low-cost, high-concept ideas that worked in any culture over 30 years ago, taking his bag of drama and games shows around the world and getting into bed with local production companies in around 17 countries. He’s now enjoying life in Burmuda on his spectacular boat !
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Lee I’d like to hope so but the remakes you mention are just indicative of how small our world has got. Foreign shows have been pludered for years by the Americans and with the proliferation of digital channels internationally they require content. Unfortunately the prices paid for this content is incredibly low and a tiny fraction of even an Australian budget. Rather than making poor imitations of British detective genres such as Miss Fisher and Dr Blake it would be nice to see our government broadcasters learning from the Scandinavian countries who despite their tiny populations have managed to create some stunningly original modern detective dramas such as The Killing and Phoenix – The Eagle Oddysey. What are they doing that we’re not? Perhaps the key lies with our film schools (are there too many) and specifically their writing programs. It is fine to have a high concept or even just a good idea but when you have Australian TV writers who on the whole have not mastered the basics, the export of our intellectual property will remain spasmodic. I think an inquiry into the current state of the AFTRS which nolonger even teaches a three or even two year undergraduate degree would be a good start if we want to really elevate our standards and have a really rigourous film/TV education.
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+1 for the Reg Grundy comment…
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In years past, I worked in Canada on feature films (in the trenches as a shit-kicker, shovelling ice for Hillary Swank and suchlike) and there were two things I observed that were markedly different to my experience working in Australia.
The first was that the word “industry” truly applied. People did their time working up through the ranks before they qualified as technicians, very similar to the way tradespeople work their way up through apprenticeships in industries like construction here.
They did this with a reasonable expectation that they would a/ learn the requisite skills to become qualified and b/ have the opportunity to apply these skills for the entirety of their careers, moving from one job to the next.
That they were able to do so was as a consequence of the second major difference I observed – genre.
As we’ve seen in the past year with “Bait”, there is a global market for genre films. Certainly that film is a good example of how to turn a profit when making a film in Australia, which not many filmmakers can reliably claim to do.
In Canada, when not making Hollywood blockbusters or TV series, the industry thrived on making MOW’s – movies of the week, and low budget genre films, often for the straight-to-video market.
Art? No. A legitimate way to earn a buck and feed your family? Hell yes.
Unfortunately for Australian film technicians the people looking to chart the future of the film industry seem too focused on the “film” and not enough on the “industry”.
They eschew the possibility of developing a viable industry through keeping people working on films with broad appeal, in preference for developing artful tripe that no-one in this country wants to see, and certainly won’t find an audience internationally.
As long as that’s the case – and it has long been the case – there is no future for our industry.
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Good article Lee… it’s shit up hill here and I think it’s the numbers game that’s to blame.
I want a channel that Dares to Be Different – an HBO if you like – not a brand that becomes a medium as per Logan’s recent run at it suggests – but a truly innovative, nurturing, dangerous channel.
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Hey Aktiongirl, I think he sold ‘Boadicea’ a few years ago – maybe to offset his Photon stakeholding.
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Sorry Andrew but Canada has a huge level of State and Federal subsidies in the form of Labour rebates and direct subsidy and struggles for any kind of cultural identity with the US sitting on its borders with the box office for Canadian films worse than ours. It doesn’t even have a long running soap such as Home & Away or Neighbours. And as for the comments re. Bait is was a large budget FX movie which performed woefully here and its sale to China I suspect was a prebuy and you can be guaranteed that none of overage after the great box office there will flow to the film makers. I would love to see the returns as I think it is far from being in profit and this is with a 40% rebate.
If you want to make an Australian film that makes a profit then keep the budget very low and produce a brilliant genre piece such as Wolf Creek.Or try to make a reasonably budgeted and intelligent populist piece that performs brilliantly in its own territory, eg. Priscilla, Muriel’s Wedding or Strictly Ballroom and then captures the attention of the rest of the world with strong completion sales as these films did. But with the exception of Bait in China (a highly political market with foreign releases government controlled) if your film doesn’t get a really high Australian box office, doesn’t work in its own territory then it is highly unlikely it will work anywhere else.
I think some serious research by Screen Australia, and together with its predecessor the Film Finance Corporation of the probably three hundred Australian films they’ve invested in over the past 30 years would confirm my view. But some good analysis rather than mere opinion is in order and would be invaluable to film makers.
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Hey Harry, you might be onto something with AFTRS – what is going on there? Having studied there in the last 3 years and known others in years since – I can’t say I fully understand what the school is trying to achieve. They’ve restructured the Grad Diploma in Directing course in a big way three times since 2010 (not sure if they did it again for 2013).
There’s also the introduction of a new Masters Program and the internal cultural divide – I remember one lecturer hammering into us the need for ‘high concept, conflict-ripe internationally-sellable script ideas’, which clashed with another higher-up’s response to a student project that involved a firearm: ‘Guns? We don’t make that kind of film here.’
As for Lee’s piece – I appreciate the “ideas that work in any culture” angle. Universality should be one of the key criteria.
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You’re right Harry, I should have disclaimed “in my mere humble opinion”. Jibes aside, I concur.
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Sorry to get verbose on this topic but Reg Grundy was way ahead of his time. I met him when he still controlled Grundys and he had his theory of “international parochialism” for television,i.e. that TV was a parochial medium and locals wanted to watch locally produced shows. So he took the shows to them and remade many of his soaps for local markets. Then as many of these these countries learnt how to make them themselves with his production line technique he sold the company. He was a brilliant guy. I think the same model generally applies to films except with very parochial, culture specific comedies such as The Castle. If you tell a great local story and add something to a well established genre your film will travel well commercially. If you merely imitate it is late night television fodder at best. Sorry I’ll stop now!
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