Holy Grail Loses Its Lustre For Wizards Of Oz
Sydney Morning Herald
Sunday June 4, 1995
IN 1969, the Australian Government made the first moves which would see a revival in filmmaking and the development of a local film industry: it set up the Australian Film Development Fund and the Experimental Film Fund, and announced that a national film school would be established. But it wasn't the Government that created the climate for making films, it wasn't the Government that experienced that urgency to work in film.
Everyone in the film community has heard how Phillip Adams and Barry Jones went to John Gorton to sell the idea of government support for filmmaking. But what inspired them to put the argument?
What had been happening, out there, that made so many people want to be filmmakers, want to carve out some sort of career in film? At the beginning of the 1960s there was no real production infrastructure, no government support, no official source of funding, few role models or examples: despite this, creative people wanted to work in film. Perhaps, it was the films people were seeing and the improved critical climate of the times: a number of small city arthouse cinemas screened, several years late, films by Antonioni, Bergman and Fellini, while university film societies ran extensive programs, and l6mm equipment became more portable and accessible - and people began to buy their own cameras and sound equipment.
At Sydney University, in 1963, Bruce Beresford, John Bell and Richard Brennan all worked on The Devil to Pay, a 30-minute thriller.
In Melbourne, Tim Burstall, who had worked at the film division of the National Library in Canberra after leaving university, set up Eltham Films and made his first film, a half-hour children's film The Prize, in 1959.
Brian Davies, a theatre director in Carlton, started to make The Pudding Thieves in 1961; it was finished in 1967 and its screening encouraged others involved in the Carlton scene to make films.
The political climate was changing, too. The introduction of television in 1956 and the gradual increase in local production coincided with a breakdown in the cultural cringe and an emerging cultural nationalism, that further gained impetus after Sir Robert Menzies retired in 1966. There was a groundswell of support for a "genuinely Australian culture" that included film, and the lobbying for the "TV - Make It Australian" campaign worked closely with the film lobby.
When the film and TV committee of the Australian Council for the Arts (which was to become the Australia Council under the Whitlam Government) produced an interim report in 1969 which recommended the feature film fund, the experimental film fund and a national film school, as well as some unspecified protective measures, a blueprint was finally there.
Committee members, Phillip Adams and Barry Jones, urged Gorton to adopt these measures, and the blueprint was put in place.
The next 25 years have seen the film community go through many changes. The first 10 years of development and production were directly supported by government funding, at first through the Australian Film Development Corporation (AFDC), which acted as a film bank for wholly Australian film and television production. Films AFDC supported included Alvin Purple, Petersen, The Cars that Ate Paris, Sunday Too Far Away and Picnic at Hanging Rock.
In 1975 the Australian Film Commission (AFC) was created, taking over the role of the AFDC, but with an increased budget, adding a marketing branch, and taking over responsibility for the government production unit, now to be called Film Australia.
The next year the Film and TV Board of the Australia Council became the creative development branch of the AFC, giving the AFC funding responsibility for a whole range of film activity.
In 1980 a new method of supporting film production was introduced. It allowed investors to claim 150 per cent tax concession on their investment at risk, and a further 50 per cent concession on profit up to the amount invested.
At first, all seemed well, despite the suddenly much more complicated arrangements for setting up a film including the provisional certificate guaranteeing the film's substantial Australian content. But with each year more money was raised and more films produced, while the overall quality of the films seemed to decrease. There was more and more talk about ways of rorting the system. Investment and production companies were set up by people who were new to film, and it showed.
The new Labor Government addressed these issues in 1983 by reducing the tax concessions to 133/33. In 1985 they were further reduced to 120/20, but this still didn't have much effect. About 40 films were being produced each year, as well as documentaries and TV mini-series - a production level that was far too high for a country with our population.
A lot of good films were produced under 10BA - Malcolm, Careful He Might Hear You, The Year My Voice Broke, Grievous Bodily Harm, The Empty Beach - but they were greatly outnumbered by the bad films we saw.
Once again the various bodies in the film community got into the lobbying mode. The unions (Actors Equity, in particular) were concerned by the increasing levels of overseas content creeping into films and television production; mainly actors, but technicians, stories and locations were being affected.
Equity's new tougher guidelines on imported actors, introduced in 1980, led to an ongoing dispute between the union and producers. And as the decade drew to a close, filmmakers' concerns were addressed by the establishment in 1988 of the Australian Film Finance Corporation (FFC).
The FFC is a film bank, but one with carefully structured checks and balances, which takes responsibility for investment in features, documentaries, TV films and mini-series, and the AFC has resumed its more developmental, cultural support, role.
There have been two reviews into the FFC since 1988, the most recent being earlier this year. This short - but highly concentrated - look at the FFC and its role in the industry was completed in time to have input into the Government's deliberations for the May Budget, resulting in the FFC's funding being guaranteed at $50 million a year for the next three years.
Changes in the FFC's role and structure after both reviews have improved the way the organisation interacts with the industry. The sorts of films financed by the AFC are becoming more carefully targeted, with most of the successes of the last five years being FFC-funded.
A whole variety of other filmmaking practice has also developed over the years, and this is vitally important to the feature industry, however indirectly. They include experimental films, political and social issue documentaries, indigenous film-making, and films made by, for and about women. After 25 years of the "renaissance of Australian film", we're beginning to get it right.
It's now recognised that the film most likely to succeed, both critically and at the box office, is the small, low-budget feature that is quite distinctly Australian, with unusual, even oddball characters, a distinctive milieu, and events that are funny or perhaps disturbing. This is not to say that all the films made to this loose definition will succeed - the ratio of success to failure in Australian movies remains at about one to five - but more of these films are earning media attention and at least a limited release, and, because they are being made on smaller budgets, have the chance of breaking even on the local market.
It's taken a long time for this notion to gain much credibility, with a continued argument being made over the years for the larger budget, mid-Pacific film, despite the abysmal failures of most examples of the genre.
US success has been the Holy Grail for many filmmakers, despite the well-known parochialism of American audiences and the relative rarity of a non-American film, from anywhere, succeeding at the US box office.
Success in the Australian market is a much more relevant and necessary aim. And here Australian films have suffered an often unacknowledged handicap: the fact that through regular exposure in women's magazines and on TV, US films and film actors are better recognised by Australian audiences than most local actors.
At last, however, all this seems to be changing. At the end of the 80s, after the disasters of 10BA, being an Australian film seemed to be a kiss of death, both at the box office and in the video shop; by 1992 the successful release of both Strictly Ballroom and Romper Stomper had turned that around. The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and Muriel's Wedding have continued the trend, receiving great reviews and excellent box office in the US and many other markets.
There have, of course, been flops from some very interesting films, and marketing is still a chancy business. But many films have had a limited success - Spotswood, Sirens, Proof, The Last Days of Chez Nous, The Sum of Us - and there is always the possibility of the big breakthrough.
There is more of an air of confidence in the local industry these days, too, and there's a widespread belief that the image of the industry has indeed turned the corner. The industry is buoyant, and overseas companies are investing in Australian films; Miramix, Ciby, and PolyGram have all made commitments in several films over the last year or so. And what's more, they're interested in investing in Australian films on our terms: there's little talk of creative control, or foreign elements.
Steve Vizard, president of the Screen Producers' Association of Australia, raised several issues at last year's conference, from the commercial and structural challenges confronting the industry, the diverse and sustained chance promised in the near future, and the plethora of government review and policy overhaul taking place.
However, he encouraged his audience by pointing out that "we must remember that the only reason these structures exist, indeed the only reason that the production industry itself exists is to achieve one fundamental objective - to realise the creative vision ... to make productions that talk about ourselves, that show us ourselves, say something about us."
© 1995 Sydney Morning Herald