Today the papers report the latest BS to spill forth from our Prime Minister, David Cameron, this time about the film industry (Guardian; Telegraph). Now, David clearly doesn’t know the first thing about the film industry. That’s not to say that I know everything, I absolutely don’t, but there’s some things I do know that make the crap Cameron spewed forth sounds utterly ridiculous.
Here’s how the afore-linked Guardian reports it:
During a visit to Pinewood studios in west London, the prime minister will meet small and medium businesses in the £4.2bn UK film industry, and suggest he supports the expected findings of a review that aims to rebalance the industry’s national lottery funding in favour of supporting independent pictures that have mainstream potential. Successful film companies would receive greater support, rather than government funding going to unproven film-makers.
What he’s basically saying is that only films that are going to do well at the box office should be getting funding, because that will solve everything.
Except it won’t solve anything at all. In fact, it’s literally impossible to achieve in the first place. What David Cameron clearly has no idea about (amongst many, many things) is that in the movie industry…
“Nobody Knows Anything”
William Goldman, movie screenwriter extraordinaire, famously stated this in the opening chapters of his book, Adventures in the Screen Trade. It refers simply to the fact that you can write a movie, cast a movie, make a movie and promote a movie, but until it gets released to the public, nobody knows anything whatsoever about how successful it will be.
Now there are executives around the world who think that actually they do know. Of course they think that, or else nobody would be funding any movies at all. Executives with the purse strings make assessments on the likely success of a movie and weigh that against how much money they’re going to put in and make a judgement on the risk involved.
The problem is that no matter how experienced they are, and how many successes they’ve had in the past, they still don’t actually know. Movies that were expected to soar actually bomb all the time. And movies that came from nowhere can go on to capture the zeitgeist and the public’s attention in ways nobody ever predicted.
So what Cameron has done is weigh in on a problem he knows absolutely nothing about, by making out like he actually has the solution. And the solution is:
(and I’m paraphrasing)
“Only fund movies that are going to make money.”
Brilliant, Dave. Just one question: how are we going to know what those movies are, exactly?
Actually, two questions. Second question: doesn’t this clever idea lead us gayly into the gaping maw of Blockbusterland, where only the loudest, flashiest, most anodyne films ever get made because they most closely match the depressing monotony of Hollywood’s annual summer release schedule?
And once we’re there, how is that going to make it ultimately easier for Britain to support the creation of the sorts of thoughtful, intelligent movies that the medium, and Britain in particular, can do so well? This decision of Cameron’s (I keep saying it’s his decision but in fact he’s actually just supporting some other investigation that has come to this conclusion, and will no doubt have been advised to do so because it might make him look more like he’s down in the trenches sticking up for the Brits he’s supposed to be governing) just bolsters the notion that only blockbusters can be counted on, which in turn drives more creative films even further into the styx (that’s if they can even get funding any more), which means they make even less money, and so on.
I have no easy answers. But the one thing I do know is that nobody knows anything, and that Cameron’s idea that we should only fund films that will make money is in fact an empty series of words designed to make him look like he’s got a plan; this isn’t it.
