Don’t look back… something might be gaining on you
Television producer John Edwards has delivered the Hector Crawford Memorial Lecture at the Screen Forever conference in Melbourne. This is a transcript of his speech.
Don’t look back… something might be gaining on you.
Satchell Paige said that more than sixty years ago (so did the Book of Genesis maybe three thousand years before that).
It’s been something of a watchword for me for all the years I’ve been in this business.
I suspect it is for most of us – doubt and faltering are corrosive, looking back at what we’ve left behind is mostly of little practical value once we’ve chosen our path. Except sometimes you have to…
When I was invited to make this address, quite apart from being very flattered, it of course made me think “why”?
Most of the people who’ve done this have been the great and the good, those with a big or special view of the world and of our culture. But I’m a television drama producer, still practicing. Historically, a couple of producers have addressed, but after they’ve stopped being producers.
Maybe there’s a message here. I was told though that the perspective of one who’s been doing a lot for a long time, and still keeps turning up, might give a useful perspective of where we are as a business, at least in the one area I ought to know something about, tv drama.
So, this might be a much narrower view of the world than usually is preferred in this address. It seems absurdly narrow given the events of the past weekend. But I press on, that’s what we producers do. Given this opportunity, there is one point about the business today, that I really think needs to be made.
Here goes: So at the very outset, I’m being compelled to set aside the Satchel Paige credo. I am going to be looking back, for a moment anyway, because I think something has been gaining on us, and if we’re not careful about how we act, it might just strangle us. I fear many disagree with me, but let me use this glance at my own thirty something years of doing this to make the case.
I started with Satchel Paige. He was a baseball player, a pitcher who made his Major League debut at age forty-two. Most of his career had been in the “Negro Leagues” but he still made it to the Hall of Fame and played into his fifties. He said lots of other famous things… “work like you don’t need the money, love like you’ve never been hurt, dance like nobody’s watching”; “don’t pray when it rains if you don’t pray when the sun shines”; “avoid running at all times”.
And my favourite, “win a few, lose a few, some get rained out, but you’ve got to dress for all of them”. He was a pitcher who was so good he had the trick of having all the fielders sit down, then he’d strike out all the batters. I bring him up not just because of the “don’t look back” thing. It seems to me Satchel Paige is pretty much the opposite of what we producers are.
He was somebody born with enormous natural talent and smarts. It seems to me, and has ever since I wrangled my way into being a producer, that we’re different kind of creatures than that. We producers are recognisers, harnessers, sometimes exploiters of the talent of all the others we need to make our shows, rather than being the naturally gifted ones ourselves.
By seeing the need, figuring out how to meet it by bringing together others, and selling it, we create success. Often it’s like juggling jellyfish, other times it can be like alchemy.
If we do it well enough, we get to do it again. A glance across a few aspects of my experience of doing just this I hope I might help us judge our present and find a basis to look forward again.
At the time I started, there were two main routes to being a tv drama producer – either through the non-commercial way of the ABC or through Crawfords or Grundy’s. There was a fresh offshoot of a few people coming from feature films, but it was not yet a pathway. I was going to stumble onto a different road!
Stumble, because becoming a tv drama producer wasn’t any kind of ambition for me growing up. In fact it never entered my head until the possibility was directly in front of me. I was from a family where cultural pursuits weren’t foreground.
Being reasonably competent at school, and growing up in the era that I did, had meant that I didn’t have much ambition at all other than dreading and avoiding the course my Depression-era-raised parents would have wanted for me, to become a solicitor – my dad was a car dealer but I don’t really think it was because he felt he needed a lawyer in the family.
I drifted through university, then half-graduate degrees, then into teaching for a few years, then facing a personal glitch, in the middle of one Sunday afternoon funk I decided to try something different.
Watching a tv documentary it occurred to me that somebody was having fun making that thing. I didn’t know anybody much in film and television except for Cal Gardiner, a guy I sailed against whose family owned a lab, and my childhood football coach and family friend, Rex Mossop.
I took leave from the Education department. I called on both of them, and both got me intro meetings, but Cal’s advice to sit in an editing room to see what I’d pick up of storytelling grammar and see if I was really interested, was the telling call.
Mike Balson had just won an AFI for Mad Max and was cutting a series of documentaries for SBS that had just started. Streams of film makers were coming through his rooms, conversations were leading to ideas, ideas to contacts, and I swung a six week job at Film Australia doing preliminary research on what eventually became, very unusually for Film Australia, a telemovie co-production for the Nine Network about seeing World War II through the eyes of the Women’s Weekly.
I ended up co-writing that show and had a couple of years of short term contracts amounting to a paid apprenticeship at Film Oz developing and writing films, with mostly commercial aspirations like my first gig had, and working side by side with real stars of the vérité documentary world. I’d fallen into a strange but exciting world.
And I was surrounded by people who revered film craft. For me, this was an educational hot-house. This was heated up further by having found love of my life Joanne, who’d caused me to think more widely than I’d hitherto thought possible, and a new young family.
It forced me to specify my own story telling ambition. I set out my high goal as trying to do on screen what my literary hero William Faulkner did with his town novels.
The most influential movie to me up to that time had been The Last Picture Show, based on Larry McMurtry’s novel, pretty much the same story turf.
So the aspiration felt achievable, at least in principle. At Faulkner’s Nobel Prize address he said that the duty of fiction is to “help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding himself of the courage and honour, hope and pride and compassion, and sacrifice which has been the glory of his past”.
That’s a pretty lofty duty. But alongside this high goal in my mind, my car dealer dad’s cell-memory still resonated. He’d always made the very low bar practical warning that when people said “to tell the truth…” look closely for fibs, when people talk about how honest they are, check your silverware.
Yes, in the new work I was setting out to reach for the stars sure, but very much from the stand point of what I thought was possible, at a time in my industry experience that I didn’t really know the difference between poop and clay.
Very quickly though I knew I wasn’t a good enough writer. I just didn’t have the talent of creatio ex nihilo which seemed to be a pre-requisite. Maybe assembling elements that others initiated was what I was good at, so producing was a possible path.
I optioned a couple of books, one along with former Film Australia production head Tim Read, and two of those were made as low budget feature films, one thanks to Matt Carroll and Greg Coote at Ten who had bought one of my Film Oz ideas, the other was Ray Beattie and Seven-owned Atlab as the backers.
10 BA tax concessions enabled it to happen, The Empty Beach was the third or fourth most successful movie of the year, which isn’t saying it worked, apart from adding to John Seale’s impressive show reel, and I Own the Racecourse was a cute little story but just too small in its scale. But I learnt a lot from the process and was now a producer!
I won a “Creative Producers Support Scheme” award from the AFC, was mentored through the industry by Brian Rosen, and when an American writer producer had to be shunted off the PBL mini-series Tracy, they needed a bunny to make it.
I got that gig and the opportunity to learn about special effects on the run. The scripts had big problems though, and tax years being what they are, meant the show had to go ahead. The learning-curve was a lot steeper.
Don Crombie, one of the directors and I had to write ten pages a day while the other director Kathy Mueller workshopped our text with the actors and the genius DOP Andrew Lesnie, who’d up until then had only a couple of hours of drama experience, worked out the blocking of the whole show and how to bring off the old-school sfx and model shoot.
Tracy wasn’t as good as we’d hoped, but it had very good bits, was a ratings hit and I was becoming a fixture. Then, on the back of that, an ABC series Stringer whose Kate Cebrano and Wendy Matthews soundtrack that went double platinum was much more successful than the show itself.
Other things went wrong and fell over, but opportunities kept popping too and I developed another miniseries for Nine. Then it fell over with a management change but this meant I could take over a pilot back at the ABC when someone ran away to Hollywood.
That became Police Rescue which was subsequently picked up by the BBC and I teamed up with Sandra Levy and Kim Williams dragged us into Southern Star. Now I was becoming entrenched.
The point about this stage of the story is that the world of tv drama production was remarkably open.
There was great diversity in drama production: the soaps, two hours-a-week shot on multicam, forty parters shot on tape, twenty-two parters and thirteen part series shot on film, short series, miniseries, telemovies.
There was even that much diversity within each of the networks! The quality was all three of good, bad and indifferent. Because we producers don’t create out of nothing we need this kind of environment to flourish in.
Yes there of course were difficulties, disappointments and exasperations, idiots to yell at and be yelled at by, windmills to tilt at, but the wider world of making drama felt young, and it embraced and welcomed energy and attack and the enthusiasm to try to make something good.
I’ll now jump forward until about a decade and a bit ago. The second series of The Secret Life of Us had gone really well here, but our English partner Channel 4 hadn’t played it yet and the negotiating of the third series meant we had less financial wriggle room than we’d hoped.
Because of internal network politics here, a not very favourable deal was sweetened by a development deal for a show which was eventually to be called Love My Way.
As it turned out, the show we developed was knocked back by Ten and Claudia and I took it to Foxtel. Brian Walsh seized the opportunity the series offered to do a distinctive subscription tv drama, in lots of ways along the lines that HBO and Showtime had pioneered in the US.
Love My Way was a great experience to work on as we felt liberated from lots of creative restraints, granted license to be bold. We didn’t have much dough though, and the point I’m wanting to make here is I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing.
Not that we cut creative corners, but as you all here know, the main determinants of budget are shooting schedule, cast and art department (which is also really about schedule if the show is period).
Love My Way had a stellar cast, three Logie winners in Claudia Karvan, Asher Keddie, Dan Wyllie, as well as Brendan Cowell and Ben Mendelsohn, and fantastic supporting cast.
To the extent to which quality can be gauged by awards, I’m pretty sure it’s the most awarded drama-series ever with six Logies and eight AFI awards and a bunch of others.
Now here’s the big point. The budget for that show was $500k-$550k an hour, across the three series. Pretty much half the cost of most dramas today and a tiny fraction of the cost of some.
Yes it was straddling a decade ago, but a 100- 400% inflation seems out of whack, especially I’d argue when there has not been commensurate increase in quality and really the only significant cost increases across the board have been in writers’ and cast fees.
Yes I’m glad writers are getting paid more, and I wish directors were, actors’…maybe. But the level of inflation is way out of whack with these increases.
Love My Way was a shorter running series (eight, twelve and ten hours), but I want to stress it was constructed underthe same series disciplines that Secret Life was being made under previously and that my subsequent series Rush, Offspring, Tangle etc. have also been made under.
There were other short running series being made at the same time that cost a couple of hundred thousand dollars an hour more, fundamentally because they took longer to shoot and weren’t submitted to those longer-form series disciplines.
I think it’s fair to say empirically, that more time to shoot them did not mean more quality. And the question I want to ask from today’s point of view is, are our shows today better for costing more than twice as much?
I want to expand on this point a little more (again from the point of view my shows because at least I can be confident of accuracy). Imogen and I started Offspring eight years ago with a telemovie pilotmade on the back of Rush, shot under the same pressures as the series would be, not a regular telemovie schedule.
The series was then commissioned at an episodic cost of a shade over $700k per hour. Even now as we approach Series 6 with two cycles of cast costs behind us and the actors, very correctly, being paid way, way more than they first were, the show is still cheaper per hour than other series in their first time round that were funded with the aid of Screen Australia subsidy.
Now of course I’m not against Screen Australia’s involvement in television – lots of shows can only hope to be made that way – the point I’m hoping to build to though is that we’ve become reliant on the short series form and that this financing structure and this reliance is not doing us any good.
Ours is an industry that does need the help of either subsidy or of quota protection or both. It’s because we need this public support that it behoves us to stay in an active struggle to get the balance and mix right.
We all agree that the broadcasters in return for their licenses should be required to make Australian content, and in the case of drama there has evolved a mix of volume and price that has worked variously well over time and has been tinkered with to meet changing needs.
I fear at the moment, as there are many voices calling for a percentage of spend to be a dominant criterion over that of volume that we’re in danger of getting the mix very wrong. Let me expand on why.
There are no forty-part series left at all on Australian tv, there are no twenty-two part series left.
Thirteen parters are almost an anachronism. Partly this is a function of the ebbs and flow, life and death of series, but there’s also a deeper structural reason.
Starting a new series is high risk and expensive. Even the promo campaign will cost a million dollars or upward on commercial tv, leaving aside the set-up costs. Why wouldn’t the network opt first time around to go with say eight parts and have up to 40% tax payer funded subsidy?
It’s very understandable that this has become the predominant form. Because six and eight part shows ordinarily cost between $1 and $1.2 million per hour, and once those production structures and so on are in place, the problem becomes it’s very hard to bring budgets down, even if the number of episodes is increased in the future – we’re all both creatures of habit and justifiers of our situations.
The million dollar plus an episode series becomes “normal”.
In my view there has been an even worse unintended consequence because of this. In prime-time drama in the last two years (I’m excluding the soaps from this) I’m only aware of there being two new emerging writers! I hope I’m wrong, and if I am mea culpa, but the general point holds.
Networks are risk averse, understandably, and it’s very easy for producers if they want to go on eating to slide along with their risk averse wishes.
Higher volume shows by necessity produce new people. A show like Big Sky, where we made forty eps in a year (it’s not remembered as a success, but all but four of its episodes had better shares than the network average).
Tony McNamara, Steve Worland, Jaqueline Perske, John Polson, Rhett Watson, Kate Dennis all getting their first or second tv gig.
Similarly on Secret Life there was a good handful, on Fireflies, with Mimi Butler on Rush, on Offspring and so on.
Long series need the new people influx, and I do want to say as an aside here, that in my experience almost never are we let down by them. Yes, this is possible on a short series, we had three new ones on Love My Way too, but the odds are stacked against it, simply because on eight episodes, you only need say two or three writers, and the risk-averse pressures of course are amplified as costs go up.
And it’s just easier to work with the fewer bods. This phenomenon spreads more widely. New editors, new DOPs, new designers seem only to be getting breaks on comedies (which is great!), but there’s presently very little new blood in drama series.
I should divert for a moment to discuss how this Screen Australia financing of short series evolved.
Its earlier iteration, the FFC, specifically avoided support of series drama – that area being seen as the commercial spine of the industry, it was a very deliberate choice of FFC architect Kim William’s not to have it tampered with by the intrusion of subsidy.
When Screen Australia replaced it, that specific intention in relation to television continued, to only fund telemovies and mini-series-shows of high cost, but “event” value (but as we’ll see in a moment, definitions had shifted). Telemovies (with a couple of exceptions) have always been a programming problem.
Telemovies had also been popular for a time as series-pilots, but except for those that were shot on close to the schedules and budgets of their subsequent series, empirically they were failures 100% of the time (if a three series- run is a definition of “series success”).
And the two by two hour miniseries form had seemed to just naturally die out. In a time-honoured producer tradition to bend rules against the spirit they were conceived in to meet self-interest, some of us helped remind FFC head Brian Rosen that the statutory definition of miniseries was up to thirteen hours.
To address the television production dearth, Brian became convinced of the value of altering the guidelines accordingly. Provided budgets were over eight hundred thousand dollars per hour and licenses above four hundred thousand dollars.
The first beneficiaries were Underbelly and Sea Patrol, and our television world benefited enormously.
For a time of course. It didn’t take long though for the spirit of the rule bending to kick in and first series of shows that would otherwise have been thought of as staple domestic series began to be constructed as “minis”.
Budgets easily glided up to qualify. Given the networks also benefited by gaining four quota points instead of the series entitlement of three, and because the FCC and Screen Australia prudently applied investment caps, extending beyond eight or so episodes spread the subsidy too thinly. Thus the inevitable outcome that we’d reach this position of the ubiquity of short, inordinately-budget- inflated series.
I should say I have nothing against short running returnable series. I’ve made eight of them, and three of them Love My Way, Tangle and Puberty Blues have been multiple series. (There was also Spirited, but I regard that as being Claudia and Jaqueline’s, not mine). I’m proud of the work that’s in them.
My worry stems from the dual facts that these short shows become the dominant drama form at the expense of the more productive long form. And I’d also argue, the best and most successful short series I’ve ever made have been done under the same pressure and structures of the long form.
It’s partly a quirk of timing and fate that only two out of twelve of these series were made with the support of Screen Australia or its predecessor, and I have to say that although it was tough making Love My Way, Tangle and Dangerous on their budgets, they would have not been better shows for costing more.
The same dad’s cell-memory that causes suspicion about people saying how honest they are makes me always question co-incidence – just maybe, the very tightness of money helps we producers focus attention on the things that really matter on a show.
I’m personally glad that early on we bent the miniseries rule-intentions to experiment with series forms.
The Surgeon qualified for miniseries points, and was made for less than four hundred thousand dollars per hour by shooting only in one location; Dangerous, again tiny budget by shooting with an enhanced documentary crew.
It’s true that both were well-regarded failures. This fact, but I suspect much more importantly the fact there’s no incentive to do such experimental and risky things cheaply, means there is no optimism to see experiments like these happening in drama today.
More importantly still on a different tack, lots of great ideas can only be made as short series. There’s presently not enough room for them to flourish, while returning-series sold as minis take those tipping point public funds and in doing so, all of the oxygen.
Yes of course we need “event” drama as that can only be made with additional subsidy – four hour minis were dead five years ago and are healthily back now. That’s good.
But they’re not our industry’s life-blood. Screen Australia can only, and should only, invest the bulk of its money where the networks want it. Screen Australia is currently keeping us alive!
They have to work within a broader regulatory system that needs a re-jig. The system ought to give us a mix of forms, but at the moment it’s all short series a few two by twos and a couple of telemovies, not a healthy mix at all.
Look at the figures. In the last decade, the volume of drama production has dropped 24%, to 401 hours in 2014/15 from 527 hours in 2004/5.
Despite the fact that the number of potential outlets has expanded enormously. Yet the budgeted cost of that decreased content has increased by 42% in the same period! Just looking at commercial free-to-air (admittedly in a low year) the decrease is 39%!
If you take the two soaps out of this picture, it’s even more alarming. Only 57 hours on commercial free-to-air television across all three broadcasters! Barely more than an hour a week across the three.
A few miniseries, a couple telemovies, the rest short series. Thank goodness that Foxtel and the ABC have increased production, though notably, with budgets increased in line with what I’ve been suggesting. Some will argue the short series form works so well in the UK.
But the UK makes much more than 400 hours of drama a year. And there, too, it’s not just the soaps, but long runners like Casualty and Holby City that draw broad and big audiences and provide a platform for drama viewing, and ITV is increasing the number of hours in its returning series.
My view of the present state the drama production industry is that we have run ourselves into a stagnant billabong.
Less production, same writers over and over, inflating costs for no apparent quality gain, shrinking audiences and increasingly reliant on subsidy.
All the openness and excitement and bringing through of new talent, of new work, has certainly dissipated, and the area that has historically been the largest and most productive sector of the broadcast industry has all but disappeared.
And people keep saying it’s the golden age of television drama. If the emperor doesn’t have no clothes, he certainly seems to be wearing very weird underwear.
Before moving on to the main point of how to get the production flow right I need to meander again for a moment.
In my production experience, almost nothing goes to plan. Of the thirty-eight shows I’ve done, only maybe three or four proceeded to production as planned and expected, and as it happens, (which may or may not be a coincidence) they were probably the least successful.
But you always must have a plan so you have a base, a platform to jump from when the chance appears. It seems to me there’s a curious symbiotic relationship between structure and accident that our business, and I suspect lots of other business, depends on.
I mentioned when talking about Screen Australia’s role in fostering the dominance of the short series that emerged from the apparent death of four-hour minis.
Now the four-hour mini has come back, but as it happens, the etiology suggests accidentally.
Courtney Gibson at the ABC had suggested a series of biopic telemovies. I wasn’t much interested in the biopic form, but was very interested in doing a show set in what my generation regards as “Camelot”, the Whitlam era.
We wanted to make ten hours, the ABC wanted two. We ended up settling on four not because we were trying to re-invent the two by two, that’s all they could do.
Because the Screen Australia structures were still appropriately in place, the show was financed, Brendan Dahill programmed it very cleverly, and it was a hit that caused not just sequels and prequels to flow on both the ABC and Nine.
There’s since been a rush of “true story” two by twos since that have been the real rating stars of recent drama.
The accidental dimension flows on though. We all thought we were making a show by and for baby-boomers, and given the ABC drama audience is overwhelmingly 55+, imagine our surprise when the show won every demo band except 55+! (Though it was a narrow second there.)
I didn’t even know the seventies had become cool! The right structures in place though will allow happy accidents to bear fruit.
So how to get the flow of drama production healthy again?
There’s always a problem in getting our regulation structures working most efficiently, and there’s presently a lot of talk about proportion of broadcaster-spend be a more important criterion than quantity of production.
All that I’ve said so far makes it’s pretty clear that I think that’s a bad idea. Another illustration from my experience, (and again forgive me, but to give a true picture we need to look at this situation sideways for a moment) I hope will make the argument compelling.
Over the last eight years, (it goes back further – but the last eight years is continuous and it’s simpler arithmetic) we’ve done an enormous amount of production in Victoria, with the help of Film Victoria grants and investment.
[Now as an aside at this point I promised to give a shout out to Courtney Gibson’s session this afternoon, now she’s at NSWFTO, she’s promised to be busting to do the things Film Vic has done].
We’ve averaged $20,994,000 of production per year in Victoria, and an average spend from Film Vic of $772,000. But the Victorian government has got more than half of that back in payroll tax!
So at an average cost of $312,590k a year, there has been almost $21 million of production and an average on 1,878 employment notices per year.
One hundred and eighty three hours so far. Five series, sixty-seven hours of Offspring (with more to come); four series, sixty nine hours of Rush; three series of Tangle; the pilot episodes for Rush and Offspring; as well as the miniseries Howzat, Power Games, Party Tricks and Gallipoli.
Yes of course that’s a very cheap, remarkably efficient spend of public funds. Roughly three hundred thousand dollars a year to make twenty million dollars of activity happen is much, much cheaper than attracting foreign feature films (though of course they bring other benefits).
The point is though, this has only been possible because the networks are required to make a certain volume of drama. The shows have to be made, and they have to be made somewhere.
That being the case, very little public money can go a very long way. It has been quantity requirement much, much more than subsidy, that has caused this.
When it’s volume that matters, very small amounts of subsidy becoming a tipping point.
While I was preparing this address, Fairfax columnist Michael Idato wrote in his Saturday piece (October 24, 2015) “much of Australian drama is best viewed with an open mind, an open heart and an open bottle of wine…Most shows applauded as great are… usually a wee bit short of that”.
He goes on to list eight exceptions. Of Michael’s eight shows, only one had a budget over a million an hour, six of them were shot on five or seven days for an hour schedule.
Now I usually agree with Michael in about the same proportions as I agree with various network execs, but if you checked with everyone else’s list I suspect you’d end with a similar picture.
When Mark Scott first took over the ABC, in one of those introduction meet-and-greets, I ambushed him by asking what were the six ABC dramas that stuck in his consciousness.
Five of the six from his seat-of-the-pants response were volume shows, again made at much lower real costs than today’s models.
Do your own mental exercise, I’ll be surprised if you get a different result. Pleased as I might be by event dramas I’ve done, by far the most pleasing and proud memories I have are of the series production, realised as well as possible.
There are a few great exceptions in our natural collective memory – Brides of Christ, Underbelly, Blue Murder, The Dismissal, but for the most part it’s the series that touch the culture.
There is of course a very important place for subsidised higher budget drama on our televisions, but my experience of making at a higher budget compels me to make the point that might seem obvious, but is easily overlooked.
We always want and “need” more than what we get.
Work always expands to fill the available space. Fifteen years ago, it was great to have more than three million dollars an hour on the Showtime USA/Seven mini On the Beach, but we could’ve easily spent another million an hour without feeling profligate.
Yes, it was good for the industry and good to get a couple of Golden Globe noms, but I have to say the six hundred thousand dollars an hour on The Secret Life of Us pilot shot immediately afterwards, less than twenty percent of the budget of the show we’d just shot, was not just more satisfying, its resonance was much more significant.
On the other side of this coin, I’ll never forget when we started on Police Rescue, a volume series but a very high budget one with a luxurious schedule by today’s standards, the line producer stormed in, threw the script onto a desk and blurted “well we can’t make that!!”
Well, it turned out we could and we did, just as we can make even more sophisticated and ambitious shows today on two-thirds of that schedule.
Necessity makes us inventors very often much more than more than just money does. Making the most from what we have is healthy pressure. With practice we get better at it. And more of us get more practice when we make more volume.
This is an argument to get the mix right, not to diminish pubic support – it’s a plea to draw obvious lessons from how things have played out in the real world.
Again in my experience in the earliest stages of my work, I got a foot in the door, and learned while doing, from liaisons between government-funded Film Australia and all of Nine, Seven and Ten.
Then a critical step for me was forty five thousand dollars from the AFC, and I’m very happy that six-hundred and fifty plus hours and about half a billion dollars work resulted. If we want to see Australian series on our television, the assistance of public funds is both necessary and good.
You may have guessed though, I feel some ambivalence about increasing the offset as an unqualified policy.
I was thinking about the increasing offset possibility recently in relation to the ABC. Starting from the perspective of pure self-interest as we often do, I was figuring out how much further the ABC budget could go as a consequence (and of course, how much of it I might be able to get my hands on).
On the face of it, 20% more offset should make its budget spread 20% further. Because the ABC is unhindered by the quota requirements of the commercials it may function as kind of a datum line or an experiment control.
Certainly, if the ABC was to shift to volume production at a lower cost than present ABC drama budgets, it certainly would do a great deal of good – very much more would be made.
I suspect the same would be true of the commercial free-to-airs – and the volume benefits might just come to outweigh the risks of launching new shows.
Everybody would be much better off, new forms of drama would pop up, new people would have to be bought through and the government would collect more tax.
If a policy of making six and eight hour series continues though,
I fear disproportionately less good would be achieved, and more inflation of the kind that’s categorised the last decade across the industry would result.
Not because of avarice or self-seeking, just because that’s how things expand to fill the space. If there’s no incentive to do more, or to drive inventive economies, it won’t happen.
Then we face (or I fear, dodge) the question what should be the case.
Maybe I’m being unduly pessimistic. So I’ll argue against myself for a moment. Maybe the market will self-correct. I take great hope in comedy and its innovations, new people are emerging and there’s such intelligent and adventurous maximizing of resources.
I have to say at this point that although many of the present short series I’ve enjoyed watching, by far the most impressive show to me of the past year is No Activity.
Back in drama it’s interesting lately that Foxtel, who are governed by proportion to spend quota rather than a volume of production are, have been fantastically successful with both Wentworth and A Place to Call Home, their more volume-drama derived and produced shows.
You’d gues, they’d follow that road of great success further. And Seven historically has of course easily and very profitably exceeded quota obligations in very successfully building a very network-loyal drama audience that they’ve managed to evolve through different times.
As a consequence they’ve been historically much less dependent on subsidy support. But even Seven are not immune to the inflationary pressures not of their causing, as they have done the most drama most successfully, facing the changing landscape will cause something new to pop.
Maybe the symbiotic relationship between accident and good structure will come into play. Maybe as one network honcho mentioned in passing a couple of weeks ago, that the two episode-a-week form will return in a kind of zig-while-the-other-zag opposition to reality shows.
It’ll be interesting to see whose game to try first. But overall we producers, and we as an industry, need to rely on a foundation of good policy structure more than good intentions or just the vicissitudes and maybes of the market.
Commercial networks (with the historical exception of Seven) really make only what they have to, no matter how much they’d like to do more.
I doubt the forty part series will ever return, and certainly the kind of script factories that used to be prevalent on those shows I think have met their natural demise.
In my view thank goodness. (It’s my belief that a more appropriate scripting structure at volume could be built, but that’s a discussion for another day.)
Still, new drama forms might blossom, be they two parts a week in short runs to compete against reality shows, or maybe “cable real half hours” playing for 45 minutes on the back of them.
Maybe even someone very bold will toy with reintroducing a primetime strip. Or some form that no-one’s thought of yet.
Our world is changing so fast. But to me it seems a safe bet that it will be the requirement to make volume that will spurn re-inventors, not more funnelling money to ever more expensively repetitive short series playing to ever more diminishing audiences.
I’ll finish by coming back to Faulkner. His last book The Reivers was a long way from his best even though it won the Pulitzer.
It was a bit flowery and romanticised, and maybe he was pissed – you’ll remember he was the purported basis for Barton Fink. The Reivers was about a huge improbable adventure which is at least a bit analogous to our adventures as drama producers.
It’s a story about the glories of “non-virtue”, and it has a great ending. An eleven year old boy and two farm employees decide to “borrow” the family car, the only car in the town in 1905, travel to Memphis for the weekend while the parents have gone out-of-state to a funeral.
It’s a calamitous road trip, then a story filled with heroes and crooks, golden hearted whores and evil ones, of innocence shattered, of dumb trades and scams and crazy racehorses.
When it all culminates in a shambolic whorehouse brawl with broken teeth and hearts and the family grandfather has to come and clean up the mess, the hero Lucius is emotionally exhausted, wracked with guilt over the chaos he’s caused, and in shame he breaks into uncontrollable tears.
His grandfather tells him “you live with it… a gentleman accepts the responsibility of his actions and bears the burden of their consequences, even when he did not himself instigate them but only acquiesced to them, didn’t say No when he knew he should…now go wash your face. A gentleman cries too, but he always washes his face”.
Yes, bizarrely anachronistic, but the point is it’s a rule that makes sense and greatness both of the mess of that particular story and of our lives. The kind of rules we create also create the kind of world we live in.
Not just the individual producer rules like “don’t look back” or “keep turning up” – but the broader systemic rules that shape our business.
They don’t have to be writ in stone, but like the grandfathers’ rule, they have to confront our circumstances and aim us at a future that transcends the mess of our present and what we can presently imagine.
Looking back can be a dangerous business, especially if you’re an old guy. But I hope this isn’t dismissed as a kind of sentimental reverie.
It seems to me to be obvious that our requirement to produce volume has been a much better friend to us than the amount of money we have.
Amidst rapid technological and cultural shifting, it really matters just where we put our weight in the dialectical push and shove to develop the best form of regulation to get a healthy mix of drama forms and yet to be discovered models of storytelling, to enable us to be open and ready to jump at the chances that emerge.
Our history tells us the requirement to do is more fruitful than the requirement to spend.
My maybe narrow but long experience tells me, and maybe us, that if we fail to see this and act on it, our shadow will have gained on us, and eaten us up.
- John Edwards is senior drama producer for Shine Endemol
