The Great Gatsby trailer released
The first trailer has launched for one of the most expensive films ever shot in Australia.
Baz Luhrmann’s 3D interpretation of F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby has debuted on YouTube and Apple Trailers this morning.
The film received a reported $10-12m rebate to shoot in NSW by the NSW Film & Television Industry Attraction Fund.
With a budget of an estimated $127m, the film was shot Sydney’s Fox Studios involving a key Australian crew of creative’s including Luhrmann’s Oscar winning wife Catherine Martin as both producer and production/costume designer, producer Anton Monsted, editor Jason Ballantine, screenwriter Craig Pearce, as well as Kiwi Simon Duggan, with hundreds of extra crew and cast employed.
Sounds like Jack White did the soundtrack.
No, no no! What a terrible music choice — why isn’t this scored? It’s a classic US tale set in the 1920’s!! The opening trailer track has ALREADY BEEN USED in the SAFE trailer with Denzel Washington.
Warner Bros have neither confirmed or denied that The Great Gatsby has received the 40% of Australian expenditure rebate for this film on the basis that it is an “Australian Film” under the tax act. It is commercial in confidence with the ATO however there is little doubt it will receive a rebate in the vicinity of $30-35 million. Wake up ATO and the Federal government. This is not an Australian film. It is just a blatant manufacturing subsidy for Warners Bros topped up with 10-12 million from the NSW government. But unlike other manufacturing industries this is a one-off with no long term benefits and all the profits will flow to Los Angeles. It is time to tighten the definition of an Australian film and understand that the subsidy which has gone to it for over 30 years has been a cultural subsidy so Australians can tell their own stories and not a manufacturing subsidy for Hollywood studios so they can remake American classics.
The track Jack White is singing is U2’s Love Is Blindness. So it’s bit even an original, but at least he does it justice.
Why should the local film or auto industry expect to get my tax money ! Get over it No 3!
Hey Harry,
Why should the Australian movie industry or auto industry be singled out for Government (aka my tax money) when others are not.
Get over it buddy. If you want to tell Australian stories then pay for it with your own Australian money.
What will Australian taxpayers get for their $40 million contribution to the coffers of Warner Brothers’ GATSBY – an American producer of film and television entertainment whose primary market is the United States? What will NSW taxpayers get for their $10 million contribution to Gatsby’s budget? We are not allowed to know precisely what these figures are.
That a substantial part of Gatsby’s $120 million budget was spent in Australia was good news in the short term for the film technicians who worked on it and for the providers of other services required in its production – but was it good news, in the long term, for the Australian film industry?
Why is it important that we have an Australian film industry? Would it really matter if the federal and state governments stopped subsidizing it and allowed it to die a natural death as other inefficient industries are? (The Chinese could, after all, make Australian films for a fraction of the cost!) Or if, for whatever reason, we feel that an Australian film industry is in some way important to our culture, are there ways in which $50 million of taxpayers’ money (or whatever the secret sum is) might be better spent?
The word ‘industry’ is problematic – conjuring up, as it does, a product for which there are identifiable consumers and from which a profit is expected to accrue. Virtually no Australian films make a return on the investment in them (the Australian taxpayer being a major investor) and to pretend that they ever will is to delude ourselves and lead to the wrong questions being asked. Imagine if we referred to ‘the Australian ballet industry’, ‘the Australian Opera industry’, the ‘Sydney Symphony Orchestra industry’, ‘the poetry industry’ and so on. As industries they are all abject failures so why do we bother to subsidize them? Drop ‘industry’ and think only in terms of ‘Australian film’ and the questions become both more interesting and more pertinent. Baz Luhrman’s Gatsby may well be a box office hit. It might be a masterpiece. It will not, however, be an Australian story told for Australian audiences and reflecting aspects of our own culture for the benefit of present or future generations of Australians. It will an American story with zero relevance to Australia above and beyond the relevance that all great cinema (all great art) has for mankind in general.
So, how might Gatsby’s $50 million of Australian and NSW taxpayers’ money be better spent to nurture the production of Australian films that speak to and of being Australian? In this new digital era in which it is possible to produce feature films for comparatively low budgets and to distribute and broadcast these on a variety of different platforms. As Paranormal Activity revealed a few years ago (budget $11,000, worldwide box office in excess of $100 million) if a story captures the imagination of the audience, it matters little whether it is shot on widescreen 70 mm or with a mobile phone.
But that’s just a one-off, like the Blair Witch Project, it might be argued. Fair enough. How about The Kids are Alright – budget $4 million, worldwide box office $30 million. Yes, the film was undoubtedly helped at the box office by the presence of film stars (Annette Benning, Julianne Moore and Mia Wasikowska) but why did they choose to work on the film for a fraction of their usual fee? Because it was a terrific screenplay. Could we make 10 Australian films of the calibre of The Kids are Alright (with or without stars) for the cost, to the tax-payers of one Great Gatsby? Yes, if there were 10 screenplays as good (why there are not is an important question but space does not allow it to be gone into here).
I am prepared to love this movie.
the Baz Luhrmann formula – Throw a bunch of flamboyant shit at the screen to distract people from my horrible screenplay.
The subsidy is about $9-10/person in NSW.
Free tickets to every person in NSW would be nice 🙂
If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck. It’s probably a duck !