30 years of Encore

In February 1983 the Australian Film Review launched amid a boom in local production. The fortnightly publication would go on to become Encore magazine and report on the turbulent years of the screen industry. As Encore – which is now part of the same media stable as Mumbrella – celebrated its 30th anniversary last week, Brooke Hemphill looked back on the history of the publication  and the industry it reports on.

In 1983 Greg Bright had an idea. The Australian film industry was experiencing a boom due to the introduction in 1981 of a tax rebate known as 10BA. Bright, an assistant editor at the Australian Financial Review, had been charting the film business for some time in a regular column that appeared in the paper. He decided to go out on his own and launched a fortnightly magazine with a similar name to the paper he wrote for. He called it the Australian Film Review.

Bright says: “I took one of the Financial Review journalists with me, Beth Quinlivan, and a couple of others and we started. I hadn’t ever done anything on my own before – I’d always worked for either Fairfax or News – so that was a big learning experience, but because of the climate, which was one of a mini boom, the magazine did quite well.”

The tax rebate at the time afforded film-makers a whopping 150 per cent rebate in the year that the film was made. As a result, 35 to 40 films were being produced each year although, as Bright explains, the quality of the work was fairly average. “There were some great movies made but most of them were straight to video fare,” he says. The greatest criticism of the tax rebate was that it incentivised the producer to go into production as soon as possible when a rewrite or two of the script would not have gone astray.