Whipping A Dead Horse Some More
Pleidaes sent in some links to do with the recent Antony Ginnane comments.
Here’s the article in the Australian and here’s the readers’ responses.
The reasons for the industry’s deep malaise are complex. One obvious factor is the vast opportunities that beckon successful Australian filmmakers to Hollywood, which quickly recognised and captured the talents of such masters as Bruce Beresford, Peter Weir, Robert Luketic and George Miller.
Another issue is the size of the local talent pool, especially of writers. Sometimes, this can result in good subject matter failing to reach its full potential when translated to the screen. Romulus, My Father, based on the memoir of philosopher Raimond Gaita, warmed the hearts of many audiences, especially migrants. A stronger script and fewer silences could have lifted it from being good to outstanding.
The industry’s tax breaks, too, warrant attention. Initially, they played a positive role, helping establish a promising industry in the 70s and early 80s – the era of Sunday Too Far Away, Newsfront, The Getting of Wisdom, Gallipoli and Stormboy among many others. Their current impact, however, is debatable. Perhaps authorities overseeing the incentives should question whether they are facilitating – primarily for tax purposes – the making of films that otherwise might never see the light of day.
Critics, too, must bear some responsibility for the malaise. Despite strings of box office failures, it is difficult, sometimes impossible, to find a biting critique of Australian films. Rather than representing the public paying at the box office, too many critics act as advocates for the film industry. As a result, lured by glowing reviews, cinema-goers will be disappointed, and will not waste scarce leisure time on the next Australian film.
The grim, small budget Oyster Farmer is a such an example. Lauded by The Sydney Morning Herald as “seductive and affectionate”, a film that “sparkles and broods … its surface glimmering with speckled light and shade” it was awarded four stars by this newspaper’s David Stratton. Encouraged by such accolades to see it, many cinema-goers found it pedestrian and disappointing.
Generally, the industry has been unambitious, priding itself for years on producing small films – so small as to be invisible. They are not cinematic and have all the qualities of an average telemovie. One of the problems appears to be the rush to production without adequate script and character treatment.
Oh dear. Let’s go through this bit by bit.
The idea that Hollywood steals our best talent is something that’s always held up as a reason why our industry is in trouble. This is not true. Even the example of people cited here are long-gone practitioners that got their start in the 1970s, except for one Robert Luketic who I wouldn’t put on the same level as the two George MIllers, Peter Weir or Bruce Beresford. Those guys not being here is not why this industry hit the ditch and rolled over.
The stark reality is that Hollywood is always going to lure the best talent through money, but somehow our industry has failed to thrive when other anglophone industries have thrived under this exact same pressure. In the case of New Zealand, Peter Jackson singlehandedly brought a large chunk of the world’s cinema back to Wellington. Why haven’t our directors and producers done the same? England’s industry continues to thrive, as does Canada. South Africa seems to be behind but their social policy agendas probably have more pressing issues than cinema in general or whether it is right that they get portrayed as the bad guys in ‘Lethal Weapon 2’. So why has our industry failed so badly.
The answer lies in the sad fact that the funding bodies have repeatedly punished any and all productions that might have an actual international appeal through bad selection criteria and obstinate refusal to listen to actual practitioners as to how to actually help them get their film made. An international director of renown such as Fred Schepsi no less has pointed out just how perverse and anti-filmmakers these funding bodies with their film bureaucrats really are.
The usual complaints about scripts goes back to the point of development. If people want better scripts, they’re going to have to reward writers better. That means producers, executives, directors and the funding bodies have to put much more money into the writers an their writing. It just hasn’t been happening after many a promise. I know lots of good writers. Students of the craft who have toiled and toiled for very little money to reach… nowhere. And when I see just how much each and every film bureaucrat who goes to a SPAA conference to hear why the industry is in the toilet actually makes, I go for the vomit bag.
It’s been going on for years. Nobody seems in the least bit interested in addressing this; the Labor Party seem to like it this way, and the Liberal Party want to wage a ‘Culture War’ instead of actually fixing it so that the market can dictate what gets made – which happens to be what should happen, which also just happens to be Liberal Party policy for just about everything else under the fucking sun. Well they sure flubbed their shot during the Howard years and Kevin Rudd is actually spending more money to reinforce the crappy institutions that suck the money out of the State coffers and returns 40 cents on the dollar.
That brings me to the next point about the tax breaks. None of these things work because the ATO adjudicates these things; and it is in their interests time and time again to not let anybody actually merit from the tax breaks. For nearly 12 years, 10BA’s last years languished as people *failed* to prove how their film was Australian and therefore warranted the tax break. It just doesn’t seem to matter what the government of the day says or does – the ATO is there to willfully fuck it up, free-of-charge, obligation free.
The result of all this has meant that nobody who actually is an investor in films wants to invest in an Australian film any more because they just don’t want to go toe to toe with the ATO over definitions about what exactly constitutes ‘Australian Content’. The ATO in turn have passed amazingly astygmatic judgments that said that if a film could be shot anywhere other than Australia, it couldn’t possibly have ‘Australian Content’. Yes, just try figuring that one out.
It’s this kind of insanity that has led to just about every film ending up needing government assistance, and this usually means the crappy film bureaucrats get their stupid little mitts into these projects, effectively fashioning the cinema output in their criteria-driven agendas. And people wonder why it is that the Australian film industry serves up ‘Oyster Farmer’.
As to the critics, it has to be said that their inability to separate out the bad from the good isn’t their problem. It is that they spend so much time in knee-jerk bashing of Hollywood fare that they feel compelled to pitch hard for any Australian film. The way the industry is going, these tend to be fewer and farther in between, so they get all carried away just because somebody actually made something -*anything* – through what is perhaps one of the least productive development systems in the world.
While I do have a bone to pick with the critics, I will cite that elsewhere. For now, it has to be said that critics such as David Stratton are *not* the reason our industry sucks so badly. It’s the people who *think* they can pass critical judgment as well as David Stratton who actually don’t have his knowledge or experience, who happen to decide which films to fund or which people to fund, that are killing it every day, every week, every month, every year, year after year.
I’m sorry but it’s that simple. The Australian Film Industry would be much better if they got rid of the film bureaucracies and directly invested that money into US studios in Australian soil with the single proviso that all that money HAS to be spent on Australian writers, producers directors and crew, with proper accounting at the end of each year to show that the money has been spent on such people. It would be exactly the same thing they did with giving Toyota that money to produce Hybrid cars in Australia. They would see much better returns, and it would provide the proper opportunities for our creative talent. The days of keeping inept film bureaucrats in cushy jobs, who stifle the industry more than they help it, just has to end.
Because he Australian Film Industry is an English speaking industry, it inevitably leads to being a sub-system for the US system. It is its curse, but it is also its blessing – a blessing that enables our talent to flourish as international talent. Talent from say, Serbia or Burkina Fasso don’t share this advantage because they speak another language. That being the case, it is insane to try and keep it separate and independent when globalisation is the order of the day in just about any and every industry.
Speaking of Bad Critics…
This bit in the same article made me see red:
Obviously, international cinema styles have moved on from the great Hollywood movies of the 40s and 50s in which dialogue was everything. The move has been to the adventure epics, aimed at younger audiences and laced with special effects. Survival means producing something that people will go out for rather than wait a very short while for the home theatre experience.
Currently, the broader range of international films also provides good reason to stay home with a book, with offerings such as Burn After Reading, Body Of Lies, The Duchess and Beverly Hills Chihuahua on offer.
You see, I actually paid to see both ‘Burn after Reading’ AND ‘Body of Lies’. They are worthy films by worthy directors in every single way. They are worthy of deeper analysis and discussion. If this opinion piece really thinks that these films are not worth heading out to the cinema, I think they are never going to set foot into the cinema to watch an Australian film.
If you can’t be bothered to venture out to see a good film, avoiding it sight-unseen, how will you ever know if there is a good Australian film out there? The notion that they only want to watch good films that aren’t American is exactly the kind of criteria the film bureaucrats use to bully the creatives in this country to make our pictures smaller, less universal, less interesting and entertaining, and ultimately less profitable.
The Art Neuro Weblog 
Art
All good analysis with a sense of explosive frustration about it all, with which many readers will empathise. A la Dante – there is a special circle of Hell to which all film bureaucrats will be consigned – and soon, if in the formidable Dr Ruth Harley delivers the mortal blows to them which is she is supposed to upon her arrival as CEO at SA (Screen Austaalia) virtually on the day of the premiere of the Lurhmann epic Australia this week , a timing either deadly or fortuitous we shall soon find out
So re your suggested solution of the direct studio investment into Australian writers and directors, well that may well be what the upcomng ‘Australia’ epic will demonstrate for better or worse. If the latter, then proof of concept will be savagely reinforcing of the existing mindset – we can’t make Hollywood style epics so let’s pull up the drawbridge on The Castle., so to speak
If the former, then there may be a slim chance that a slate of larger scale productions being given greater support but subject to:
The interesting scenario being the rapid reduction in US feature budgets due to the financial/ credit crisis and the very high attraction of the Aussie dollar/ US dollar to lure productions here under the existing 15% offset which may well take up the production facilities that could otherwise be used for more Aussie epics under the 40% rebate scheme! The recent pork barrel provisions for the US film industry tax breaks shoe horned into the Wall Street bailout bill will be another factor in determining in how all this plays out.
There are a number of larger Australian stories which can be made in different genres and which can travel globally as well as capturing local audiences but their develoopment and successful productioncan only be brought about by radical break from past cultural and buraucratic timidiy and the Treasury bean counter mindest behind the new rebate scheme.
Chances of that happening? The casino looks a better bet. As for those with real cash, they ar aren’t about to squander it on a long shot at making a motza from a Croc Dundee clone.
Between the rock and the hard place lies the magical cubic centirmetre of chance, as Castaneda put it. Whether Baz grabs it or one of our colleagues, time witll tell,
I think the period in which the Australian Film Industry has been a government sponsored cultural project ended in 2000, according to ‘The Plan’. ‘The Plan’ was instituted with making the Industry viable over 30years, back in the late 1960s, but the people who designed it were not to know what would happen to the business globally.
The industry as delivered by ‘The Plan’ would have been good enough had Hollywood not grown so amazingly in the same time span, on the back of successive blockbusters, which in a sense has redefined what a movie *is*, to such a point that a small Australian production simply doesn’t look like a proper production any more.
Still, the pieces for a productive, profitable industry in a proper sense are all there. It’s just that the money keeps going into the ground instead on to the seeds that are sown. The SA had better address that part quickly or else it is doomed to fail, just as all the other government sponsorship programs that have preceded it.
Australia
by Wade Major
Print Articleposted November 20, 2008 12:27 PM
It’s no Outback Titanic…
There’s something almost deliciously audacious in naming a film after an entire continent—it conjures up an intoxicating sense of majesty and scale, the kind of sprawling, romantic epic that movie studios simply don’t bother making any more. Normally, this would be ripe territory for a nostalgia-kitsch auteur like Baz Luhrmann, whose passion for splattering his passions across the screen in such operatic indulgences as William Shakespeare’s Romeo+Juliet and Moulin Rouge would surely be multiplied tenfold if the subject were his native land. Normally. But Australia is anything but a normal film.
Undeniably ambitious, unabashedly melodramatic, unyieldingly Baz in every conceivable way, this costly, much-troubled, forever-in-production epic nonetheless falls short of its lofty ambitions; undone by an unfortunate combination of hubris, predictable studio meddling and fate. That’s not to say the film won’t have its admirers—there’s plenty to relish and enjoy in the nearly three-hour opus—but distributor 20th Century Fox’s hopes for an Outback Titanic should fall precipitously back to earth after second weekend word-of-mouth catches up with the hype.
It’s a particularly bad sign, in fact, when a film begins with a spoiler, the usual “historical backdrop” crawl going the extra step of telling audiences precisely where it’s all headed. That’s one thing if it’s the most famous maritime disaster in history but entirely another when the event in question is both little-known (outside Australia) and, in the overall dramatic context of the film, of relatively little importance. Nonetheless, audiences are immediately informed of the tragic events that befell the Australian port city of Darwin in the wake of Pearl Harbor, a similarly brutal Japanese attack that all but leveled the city and decimated its population.
With that anticlimactic detail now firmly embedded in viewers’ heads, Australia flashes back to that rosier time just a few years prior, when men and women of sturdy constitution lived an unmolested frontier lifestyle amid the pastoral beauty of a mystical land. The dirty little open secret tainting this backwater paradise is the longstanding government practice—detailed more seriously in Philip Noyce’s Rabbit-Proof Fence—of removing mixed race Aboriginal children from their families and placing them in the foster care of whites.
Not that any of this is even the least bit on the mind of Lady Sarah Ashley (Nicole Kidman), a proper Englishwoman who has made the long trek from the North Atlantic to the edge of the South Pacific to find out just what the devil her scoundrel of an absentee husband has been up to on their Down Under cattle ranch, Faraway Downs. What she finds instead is a dead husband, reportedly murdered by a local aboriginal magic man known as King George (David Gulpilil), and a ranch that is quite near total ruin. The source of the ruin—and quite likely the key to her husband’s death as well—appears to have less to do with the hardship of Australian life than the greed of monopolistic cattle baron King Carney (Bryan Brown) and a the treacherous station manager named Neil Fletcher (David Wenham) he has placed as his inside man at Faraway Downs.
To resurrect the ranch and beat Carney and Fletcher at their own game, Lady Ashley will need someone rugged, someone extraordinary, someone sweaty, hairy and manly with a Hugh Jackman-like square jaw, broad shoulders and throbbing pectorals—the kind of man who would star in a movie opposite Nicole Kidman if Russell Crowe had dropped out. A man just like… well, Hugh Jackman.
Though undeniably charming, Jackman’s itinerant cattle man Drover isn’t a terribly original archetype—like Humphrey Bogart’s Charlie Allnut in The African Queen and Michael Douglas’ Jack Colton in Romancing the Stone, he’s the frontier spit to a city woman’s polish, the diamond in the rough who puts the bloom into a lovelorn woman’s wilted soul—among other silly analogies and mixed metaphors. And when the two of them get together, by golly, they’re an unstoppable force of nature!
What has yet to be discussed here is the film’s narrator—a mixed-race Aboriginal boy named Nullah (Brandon Walters) whose mother works as a servant at Faraway Downs. Always at risk of being taken away by the authorities, Nullah serves the dual purpose of providing the film a kind of Greek Chorus while validating its cultural soul. Simply put, it’s okay to root for white colonials if an indigenous child this beautiful and this beguiling loves them, too.
As the years roll by and World War II moves to the fore, it becomes clear that Luhrmann is aiming higher than he ought. The African Queen, Places in the Heart, Out of Africa and Doctor Zhivago as well as the 1948 Howard Hawks/John Wayne cattle opus Red River, all figure into the potpourri he desperately hopes will become the movie to forever define what it means to be Australian. Unfortunately, the result is more about what it means to be Baz. Luhrmann’s retro-art fetish and love of theatrical artifice are more subdued than in previous films, but still unmistakably present. Liberal use of CGI is well-integrated, as it was in Moulin Rouge, but ends up unduly distracting from Mandy Walker’s otherwise mesmerizing cinematography of Australia’s unique natural beauty.
Even still, whether or not Luhrmann’s aesthetic sensibilities were the right fit for a story of this type—and it appears they weren’t—the greater problem centers on the story itself, which aspires far too hungrily to be compared to great screen romances of the past to ever take on a life of its own. Nearly everything here feels derivative, like a flashy touristic bauble, a souvenir replica of the real thing. It’s a magnificent fraud, but a fraud just the same.
Just how much of this is the result of studio meddling one can only guess —Fox’s reported insistence that Luhrmann change the downer ending to something more upbeat is only one apparent point of interference and probably the least objectionable. That even the film’s harsher moments feel sanitized for the sake of a PG-13 rating is indicative of the more stifling contractual restraints with which studios now routinely blunt even the dullest narrative edge.
Nevertheless, Australia is not a complete failure. Though it repeatedly falls short of its lofty aspirations, audiences with appropriately tempered expectations will find much to enjoy. Beyond a clunky and often embarrassingly corny setup, the film eventually settles in with a steady tone and pace, yielding enough honest moments to at least draw even with the missteps.
To some, it may seem a spectacular sin to spend so much money and effort on a film of such little ultimate consequence. But if movies themselves are an art form of little consequence—which they are—then Baz’ worst sin here is to have attempted tackling a film ill-suited to bringing out the best in him. Whatever the film’s demerits—or Luhrmann’s—they’re a small thing compared to the countless Hollywood studio films of far greater expense which fail so routinely that they scarcely even appear on the public radar. That so much attention, both positive and negative, has already been lavished on Luhrmann’s effort suggests that this magnificently messy epic, despite all appearances, may yet have its day.
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