FAQ

Why Is Fixing The Australian Film Industry So Important?

Everybody has a theory as to what is wrong with the industry. The Federal and State governments keep spending money to prop it up, and year after year it loses money. The simple matter is, the Australian public is largely, on the whole, generally speaking, not interested in Australian films. At All. And without a strong domestic demand, there will never be a sustainable industry.

Australians spend a lot of money on the movies each year. It is one of the most important markets for films in the world. It’s not like there isn’t a market for films here, unlike say, the middle of a war-torn African nation or a nation with a military junta that is trying to suppress freedom of expression and dissent. It’s just that the domestic market has been raised on American films with high budgets it is very intolerant of Australian films for not being as glossy or polished.

Most of the non-Anglophone cinemas of the world survive because of domestic demand. French, German, Italian, Japanese, Hong Kong cinema, all continue because the domestic market consumes their own films about as much as they consume American product. The language and cultural barrier itself serves as a protective barrier for those film industries to survive.

This is not as easy to do in an anglophone country such as Australia, because we are plugged straight into the American market through our language. This is not a complete tragedy, because it helps our actors, writers and directors to move across to the USA with more ease. The down side however is that it allows America to totally eat up our domestic demand.

Why Should There Be An Australian Film Industry Anyway?

I don’t know. Nobody really has a good answer. If we were totally laissez faire about it, one doubts there would be any industry as such. And yet, successive generations of Australians have undertaken the building of an industry at all levels, from creative to crewing to infrastructure to distribution and exhibition. In one sense, the industry precedes the demand because we as a people would like to express ourselves on the big silver screen.

Part of the problem is that the Australian Industry is partially formed without a domestic market. This is because the American films have essentially commandeered our own market to the point that American films are effectively our film, and we watch our own films with the eyes we would cast to a foreign language film. When we see our own actors on the screen with our accents, we are confronted by images of ourselves we are not used to seeing; because we’re used to consuming American product.

The fact is, we should have our cinema simply so that we can see our selves better, as a people. If we lost the film industry forever, our culture will be absorbed into the US cultural hegemony over time. Some have argued this has already happened. Some have argued that this is not a bad thing.

Why Do Australian Films Do So Badly in The Box Office?

Australian films right now have three compounded problems.

Problem Number One is Branding. An Australian film by definition and dint of it being an Australian film is not attractive to the Australian cinema goer for being Australian.  The branding of ‘an Australian film’ is so bad that people would rather watch something from Hollywood. This predicament has evolved out of years and years of bad products and bad marketing. In marketing terms, it’s a ‘Problem Child’ brand. Actually, it’s more like a ‘Loser‘ brand.

Problem Number Two is Advertising Budget. Your average Australian film hardly has an advertising budget by the time the paltry budget is spent on producing it. And if a film can’t get any kind of market recognition, it has no chance whatsoever of recouping the money. Remember the philosophical question about the tree falling the forest and nobody being around to hear it? Well, it describes the Australian Film Industry most aptly. If somebody makes a film and nobody comes to see it, did it ever really get made?

Problem Number Three is Subject Matter. An Australian Film usually comes up through development funding from governments, as opposed to commercial development that Hollywood films undergo. This means that the reasons a film gets made are actually not connected to the market. It might be a good important film, but in most instance, it probably isn’t the most delightfully entertaining film.

At the end of the day, cinema-film-movies is show business. If it can’t do the basic business of drawing and pleasing a crowd, then it probably isn’t going to work.

Why Are Australian Movies So Crap?

There are two major reasons Australian films are currently substandard compared to American, English or European films.

Reason number one is that we don’t make enough to make good ones. The reality is that we make about 15 feature films a year from a population of 20-odd million people. Japan makes about 300 out of a population of 123million people – and their industry is considered to be old, decrepit and in decline. What is this gap? The best films of USA and Germany and France and UK and Japan are better than our films because they get to choose from a much larger pool of films. We pick our best film of the year for AFI our of a pool of about 15. There are 5 nominees per category. If you make a feature film right now, you have a 1-in-3 chance of getting a AFI nomination in some category. How can anything world-beatingly good come out of such low production levels?

The other reason is that because investors have been scared away from Australian films, government investment has become the only way in which to raise money to make a film. Well, if you’ve ever run the gauntlets of talking to a government agency about developing a film, you will understand that these film bureaucrats have no idea – no idea at all – and they make the worst decisions possible. This is no joke. Their terrible track record is exactly the terrible track record of Australian films in the market place. They have been the culprits behind developing these unmarketable films that ordinary movie-going Australians resent and ridicule.

If you really want to throw excrement in balloons at somebody over the poverty of quality films in Australian cinema, I suggest you aim it at the Film Bureaucrats, who in most part are never held accountable for their appalling, abysmal choices.

Is The Ticket Pricing Right?

No. And that’s part of the problem. If the American studios spend $100 million plus to deliver to us a movie and charge $16.50 for an adult ticket, and our films with government funding cost $10million, you’d think that the price ought to be $1.65. But it’s not.

The exhibitor charges their ticket price on a straight function with real estate prices and labor costs to screen it. It’s not their business exactly how much the damned thing cost to make. If it was going to return a fortune, they’d be happy to screen a Video-8 production or a MiniDV production – and they did with the ‘Blair Witch’.

It has to be said, from the viewing side, there’s no contest that you will get more bang for your buck by watching a generic American pot-boiler than an Australian film without any particular genre. You can see why people choose to stay away. Heck, they’re even ginger about seeing a $197million budget movie by Australians, about Australian, for Australians.

Somebody needs to tell the exhibitors they shouldn’t be trying to charge the same kind of money for an Australian film with a crappy budget that they do for a glossy American production.

What About The Tax Breaks?

Forget the fact that the ATO hates the Australian Film Industry for a moment. Successive Federal Governments of both persuasions have instituted tax breaks for people who invest in films. These, once known as the 10BA have gone from a 150% rebate to a 133% rebate to a 125% rebate to a 100% rebate. The reason it kept going down was because it was contended that the vast majority of the investment went to ‘bad’ films which never turned a profit, and therefore were ripping off the Taxation Office.

There’s a certain truth to the observation, but 2 things immediately come to mind.

1) There used to be private investment – and now there isn’t

2) 9 out of 10 films don’t break even at the box office, even with Hollywood.

So all things being equal, if a private investor who put money into a film that lost money, the Taxation Office argued, the investor was deliberately trying to write off his money by throwing it at a crappy project.

There is a level in the 10BA logic that it rewards many films being made without a care for quality. What the Federal Government should have done was to offer the rebate only on films that made a positive return at the box office. That way, the investors would be properly incentivised to put their money into ventures with the hope of box office success.

The current model of tax breaks still works on the front end. It remains to be seen whether it will produce quantity OR quality.