Fabien's blog

Last night, I attended the 1-hour session of Friday On My Mind which is an interview series that hosts professional speakers from the film and TV industry. The session was entitled “an insiders take on acquisitions and what works at the Australian Box Office” and the guest speaker was Seph McKenna who is the head of productions at Roadshow Australia. As the name suggests, the talk was centred around “acquisitions” and what criteria producers base themselves on in order to decide whether or not to support a project. As Mc Kenna points out, there are 5 elements that are taken into consideration. Firstly, the story and whether the plot and screenplay are appealing and engaging. Once past this stage, production companies will look at who the director is, who the producer is, what type of budget is in play and most importantly, “from a sales point of view, who’s the cast”. Once all this is determined, a comparison is made with other similar films within the past 5-10 years to see how they’ve done and come up with an analysis and a chart of how the project should perform at the box office, as well as other sources of revenue including DVD sales, airlines, cruise ships etc.

According to McKenna, cast is an essential element in the value of the film that is being made and viewers will base their choice of film very often in accordance to who is in it. He gives the example of Bran Nu Dae, with actors such as Jeoffrey Rush for an older audience, and Jessica Mauboy and Missy Higgins for the younger ones.

He also adds that he is not very open to first-time directors in feature films, but will more likely back up a first-time director wanting to work on a television project.

When asked what it is to be a producer, McKenna hesitates and admits that he is only just starting to understand what it is that a producer does. He believes that the strongest producers have a lot of experience in the industry, they have a large network of people who are in the film industry such as writers, actors, directors and most importantly with financiers. Producers who have such a track record will definitely give more confidence to distributors, and as a rule, producers are the ones who are usually asked to bring the project to the distribution companies like Roadshow. These companies, he says, are usually interested in films with budgets that sit in the 7-15 million dollar budget bracket because they are the types of films that will usually attract the sort of cast that will add value to the project. There are exceptions like Wolf Creek which was a low budget film but because it was noticed at Sundance, Roadshow decided to take it onboard.

In terms of funding, Screen Australia has a set of standards that demands that when production companies agree to back up a project, they will have to provide a minimum of 5% of the budget. For instance, if a film has a $10,000,000 budget, distributors will have to agree to contribute to a minimum of $500,000 towards the promotion of the film. Another topic that McKenna touched on was the subsidies provided by the government. He spoke about the 40% producer offset which is a rebate offered to encourage the production of Australian films and therefore giving distributors the leverage that they might otherwise have. He said that this system is essentially quite efficient because it aims to ensure that producers have their finances in place beforehand in order to qualify for the rebate. These rebates are however not for any producers, and projects with more significance in terms of cast, crew and content will usually benefit the most. Consequently, this encourages producers to aim for bigger projects, making them more appealing for distribution; as McKenna points out, advertising and marketing campaigns can be quite costly, with wide release targets easily reaching $1.5 million worth of expenses to distributors.

Another interesting point that he makes is that the Australian market for film is very much female driven. He also criticises the trend in Hollywood films to cater for a broad, wide audience as opposed to niche markets, such as the older audiences which is quite prominent here in Australia. One other argument of McKenna’s in terms of what producers should be looking at, is that people nowadays go to the movies to see things that they can’t see on television, and therefore directors really need to surpass themselves, again emphasising on the need for a better cast, crew and content.

This interview was really eye-opening, and one of the highlights for me was about the strategies that were used to promote Red Dog. As Roadshow was struggling to release the film on the planned date because of some of the bigger releases coming up on the big screen at around the same date (and also because television networks were not able to provide the necessary time slots for the promotion of the film through the cast), Coco (aka Red Dog) was used for the promotion of the film and was sent on a tour of Australia until the later release of the film in August (originally organised for April).

The Independent Cinemas Association of Australia holds a conference every year in order to bring together professionals from the Australian film industry. It has a strong focus on the economic viability of the film business and provides informative forums for cinema operators, content distributors, product manufacturers, service providers and more. One of the panels this year was entitled “Australian Film” and had a strong focus on Australian productions at the box-office and some of the trends and challenges that the film industry has been going through in the past few years. A lot of the discussion was centred around the lack of financial backup for the distribution and marketing of films, and one of the reasons why many productions weren’t doing better at the box-office was increasingly linked to the relationship between revenues and the amount of screens on which these films are being shown.

According to figures released by Screen Australia in 2009, the only two films that were released on more than 400 prints in the period of 2005 and 2009 were Australia and Happy Feet. Most films in Australia are released on less than 100 screens, and the total share of Australian films at the box office in 2009 accounted to only 4% of the worldwide figures. As Screen Australia CEO Ruth Harley pointed out at the annual meeting of independent cinema this year, this figure has now risen to 5% and so has the number of mainstream releases on screens (more than 100 prints).

Although this increase is encouraging for the Australian film industry, the figures still remain considerably low compared to those of the US and the confidence amongst distributors and exhibitors is not necessarily high.

While funding bodies such as Screen Australia remain the strongest supporters of the national film industry, they increasingly play an important role as the facilitator in the discussions amongst industry professionals in creating strategies to allow more films to be represented and shown at the box office.

Reference: http://www.screenaustralia.gov.au/documents/SA_publications/Release_boxoffice_20Nov09.pdf 

Today, Bianca and I attended a discussion panel as part of the ICAA’s annual conference. This discussion was entitled “Australian films on Australian screens – up close and personal” and was conducted by Alan Finney, one of the directors of the Australian Film Institute. Some of the main topics that were discussed were centred around quality of content, distribution and marketing, target audiences and financing. This makes us feel right on top of things! Pretty amazing considering that we’ve only been working on this for a few weeks!

Some of the guests who were sitting on the panel included Screen Australia CEO Ruth Harley, Film VIctoria’s Jenni Tosi, and a range of professional from the Australian film industry including film directors, distributors, and cinema operators.

It was really beneficial for us to attend this conference as the topic of the conversation was right at the core of the subject that we have picked for our major project.

Overall, I think that the message was that the professionals within the industry need to keep on collaborating with each other in order to come up with better strategies that will help Australian films perform better. From production to distribution, all parties involved need to make sure that decisions are based on a final product that will be received positively by a bigger audience and that can be done by understanding what stories people actually want to hear (and in my opinion this all goes back to how well organisations such as Screens Australia and Film Victoria and production bodies define their selection process when it comes to funding).

In Imagined Identities: Focus on Australian Cinema, Annette Hamilton offers a brand new perspective on the history of Australian cinema and its focus on a search for a national identity that would eventually become the landmark of the nation’s film industry both locally and internationally.

We were interested in Hamilton ‘s paper in many ways, for it provided some very useful empirical knowledge for the research that we were conducting in relation to the influence of Australian films in local and international markets and how this relates to the ways in which Australian culture was represented in cinema.

According to Hamilton, national cinema usually refers to or compares with a more universal notion of cinema which is very much dominated by Hollywood, and that “national identities are reflected on film through the use of distinctive symbols and narratives which convey hegemonic meanings underpinning a sense of collectivity and mutual recognition” (page 1).

However, as she points out, one of the biggest issues with defining Australian Cinema and trying to shape a model that conveys its identity comes from the conflicting discourses around what and how Australian films should or should not portray Australianness. Hamilton’s paper not only draws the connection between the cultural history of this country and its film industry, but it also shows the complexity of trying to pin down a set of attributes that best  describe Australia’s national cinema.

Some of the questions that we want to ask in our research document are based around what it is that Australians want to see represented in their national cinema and how this approach relates to the success of Australian films in international markets. We will also want to find out how some of the biggest hits of the Australian film industry were more successful at the box office than others and seek whether or not their success was simply the product of a great story, or whether they had a better response from their target audience, or whether their marketing and distribution techniques and their sources of financing were the biggest contributors of their achievement. We hope to be able to answer many of these questions and eventually demonstrate whether or not a connexion exists between the complexity of identity in Australian cinema and the cultural and economic impact of Australian blockbusters. How can Australia produce films that are close to home and be simultaneously acclaimed both locally and internationally? Can a link be drawn between the two? How did successful films such as Crocodile Dundee have such noticeable economic returns and what are the cultural impacts that have resulted from its accomplishment? How could the Australian film industry benefit from a model that is not so concerned about representations of a national identity?

When we met up with Rachel on Friday, we told her about our project and our main areas of focus. As I said before, these are related to financing, audience participation, marketing and distribution and recurring content and themes. As we explained to Rachel, our research on the finance side of Australian films has helped us draw conclusions around budgetting and how Australian films compare to American films. We also looked at how the 10BA is related to a trend in filmmaking in the 80′s and the 90′s.

When it comes to audience participation, we explained that we had looked into different audiences and how these audiences interacted with Australian content. We also found some good information on marketing and distribution systems here compared to the US.

As for content, we drew some links around the types of themes and other factors that had an influence on some Australian film successes.

Rachel was really interested in our mind map. However, she said to us that we would have to work out a more efficient site map for the final project and she helped us break our topics into the following categories:

Part A: Australian films: history of the industry, national cinema and conflicts, commercial push

Part B: Case studies: 3 successes measured according to content, marketing/distribution, financing policy and audiences

Part C: Conclusions and recommendations

After thinking through the topic of our research, Rachel also advised us to strongly direct our focus on the element that make a film successful. This, she says, will have to be the main area of research for us from now on. How do we define success? Is it through the sale of DVDs or through TV ratings? Is it through the box-office figures? Is it shown according to the types of awards and acclamations that a film has had? Is it because of the marketing campaign behind a film and the sort of budget that a film depends on? Is it through cultural reach?

All in all, I think that we are certainly heading in the right direction, but there is certainly a lot of work to be done before we can start putting our webpage together. Firstly, we will need to clearly define our topic by determining the ways in which success is measured, then we will be able to start putting our intro together. Following this we will start going through our case studies according to the criteria and measures that we have agreed on. Finally, we will be able to draw the results of our analysis and hopefully make a few suggestions to whoever is interested in this research document.

Last week we met up with our team and discussed some of the findings that we came up with in our research for our annotated bibliographies. We were quite happy to find that we had all focused on different areas of the project and that in fact, we had narrowed our topic down from Australian representations in Australian films to a study of why some Australian films succeed overseas and why some don’t. We now have a vast amount of information on this topic from finance-related data to research on Australian audiences, marketing and distribution of Australian films and studies of themes and recurring patterns in Australian film content. We have also come to the decision to study 3 models of Australian films that have succeeded overseas, and we have agreed that these films would be Wolf Creek, Strictly Ballroom and Crocodile Dundee. As a counter-example, I feel like my research on Australian genre cinema will help see the cultural influence of Australian films on international directors such as Tarantino and therefore provide a different notion of success from a perspective other than the financial aspect of film performance.

1) Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation 2008, City Films Worldwide,

Collingwood, VIC Australia.

2) Brophy, Philip.1987a. That’s exploitation: Snobs. FilmViews no. 132 (Winter): 29–30.

3) Not Quite Hollywood Interview 2008 (web exclusive), television program, At The Movies, ABC TV, Melbourne, 27 August, viewed 12 April 2013 http://www.abc.net.au/atthemovies/txt/s2335437.htm

4) Archer, D. Australian Cinema, viewed 12 April 2013, http://darrenarcher.name/ftv/PDF’s/Australian%20Film.pdf

5) Karena, C. 1974, The Wizards of Oz: Behind The Scenes Of Not Quite Hollywood [online], Metro no. 158 (September 2008): 18-21.

6) Ryan, M. D 2010, Towards An Understanding Of Australian Genre Cinema And Entertainment: Beyond The Limitations Of ‘Ozploitation’ Discourse, Continuum: Journal Of Media & Cultural Studies Vol. 24, no. 6, 843-854.

7) Heller-Nicholas, A. Ozploitation Revisited: Not Quite Hollywood, Metro 158 (September 2008) 14-17

Martin, A. 2010, Ozploitation Compared To What? A Challenge To Comtemporary Australian Film Studies, Studies In Australasian Cinema Vol 4, no.1, 9-21.

Australian Filmmaker and Academic Philip Brophy gives a harsh critique of exploitation cinema as well. The really interesting point that he is making is that there needs to be a differentiation made between the use of the terms “film culture” and film industry and he describes the Ozploitation cinema as being a reflection of the Australian film industry but a failure in its representation of the Australian culture and identity. 

People often ask : just what is it that makes Australian film culture so predictable, so unappealing? The answer is simple – we don’t have any hard-core exploitation. However the reasons why a film culture should welcome, nurture and promote exploitation is more complex.

Firstly let us separate notions of `film culture’ from notions of `the film industry’. `Culture’ appears to be the pervasive spread of all cinematic exchanges : multiplied throughout social contexts, unspecified and unlocatable in isolation. The `industry’, on the other hand, appears to be an actual place : a solid interlocked framework of production, definable by its presence and its subjectivity to change. Throughout the history of the cinema, different nations have related to this culture/industry interaction in different ways.

Australia – in typical style – has always bemoaned its absent identity noticable through our lack of `indigenous culture’. Sometime ago in the early seventies, some people seemed to decide that the only way our industry could grow was if we also developed a sense of `film culture’ – whammo! Just like a horror movie, monstrous bodies rose up like the Australian Film & Television School and the Australian Film Development Corporation. They in turn produced more monstrosities, which have since been geneologically classified as “Australian films”. You know the type – desperate to tell us (and the overseas markets) how Australian we are, how Australian we must be, how Australian we always have been. The theory appears to have been that if we make films about Australian `culture’ our `industry’ will then develop from this supposed natural, inherent and grass-roots level (as opposed to aping American `imperialist’ models). Well this may have all sounded very well for approaching government bodies to get funding for all the bureaucratic breeding and departmental birthing needed to produce these cultural paradigms, but in terms of actually making films, it stank and still stinks.

Another harsh review of Ozploitation by Adrian Martin explores some of the issues associated with the narrow representation that some critics and cinephiles have made on the recount of Australian cinema. He argues that there is only one text book that gives a solid evaluation of Australian Film history and that is O’Regan’s (1996) Australian National Cinema.

"Not Quite Hollywood is itself, of course, a history composed (in images
and sounds, words and edits) on the basis of taste – and a peculiarly savage taste at

that. In the end, the story it tells is too neat, too singular. It has
certainly helped to shake things up within the frequently moribund scene
of Australian film culture, and it has given some credit where it is due. But
it also – in the face of the scattered riches of Australian film that remain to
be gathered, curated and narrated – represents a closing-down of avenues,
from a paradoxically philistine, anti-intellectual position. Oh for the day
when, once again, a critic like John Flaus will be able to stand before a film
like Yackety Yack and proclaim (as I once heard him do) to an eager, curious
public of committed cinephiles, ‘This movie bristles with more points than an
essay by Meaghan Morris’." (page 20)

In his article Australian Film, Darren Archer tells us more about the AFC era when Australian cinema was increasingly encouraged to promote Australianness. Archer cites Dermody and Jacka’s study of the AFC’s 1970′s films which usually have most of the common features:

” They tend to be art films rather than Hollywoodstyle movies because

they needed to find a special niche in a competitive market.
• They often have a period setting, or focus on historical events,
because they had to prove they contributed to Australia's national
identity.
• They have good production values and a 'beautiful image' because
many of the film crew also worked in advertising.
• They follow the style of television naturalism - with its soap
opera-style close-ups and reverse shots - because many crew also
worked in television drama." (page4)

Archer proposes that as a result, Australian films could be broken down into new categories and genres, but trying to represent national identity proved to be a difficult task. There was the ocker genre which presented Australian maleness in a vulgar, stereotypical way. In the 70′s there was also an art-film movement that presented themes and sceneries that could not be depicted in Hollywood films and dramas such as Picnic at Hanging Rock were produced. An art-film movement also seemed to be prominent in the 80′s, but with the 10BA’s tax concessions, films had a higher budget and tended to be less Australianised and more targeted to overseas markets. Films such as Crocodile Dundee are a good example.