I’d like to begin with a number of generally accepted but paradoxical facts.
British Television is the best in the world. It’s renowned for the quality of its drama, its documentaries, and especially its comedy with its history of regularly inventing new genres that the rest of the world tries to copy. British television exports its programmes to the rest of the world.
The British music business, despite the efforts of a few old men who believe that music should be a manufactured product which substitutes spectacle for content, is regularly re-invented by bands from places such as Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield, Bristol, and, as producing quality digital recording can now be done in bedrooms, even Hastings!
British Television is the best in the world. It’s renowned for the quality of its drama, its documentaries, and especially its comedy with its history of regularly inventing new genres that the rest of the world tries to copy.
The fact of this paradox shows that there’s something very rotten at the heart of the British film industry. But for too long the finger has not been pointed at the cause of this rottenness. The blame gets put on the lack of decent scriptwriters, media education, Hollywood, the government, the Film Council, and so on. But the British film industry is actually dominated by a tiny handful of maybe less than fifteen small companies, who are virtually all located in the same Soho square mile, that decide which British films get sold, and which prefer it if they are also deciding which films get made, that they are involved from the start. This means that the number of real decision makers may be less than fifty people.
OK, but these companies are having to advance large sums of money, either to acquire rights, or to greenlight productions. Why then should they risk investment money on anything other than tried and tested formulas? Why? Because, when compared with the British music and television industries, their performance has been abysmal. But why should they worry, after all it may well have bought them a company yacht? Well because it’s all set to change, that’s why.
High Definition is going to be around for a very long time. It’s not the future of the film industry, it’s the future of consumer electronics. How long will it be before HD is the only format available on the high street with HD camcorders being sold in Argos? Filmmaking will no longer require hiring cameras costing as much money as a Ferrari (how could that ever have been justified) nor tens of thousands of pounds of stock and lab charges. No longer will filmmakers have to seek the patronage of the tiny coterie that controls the access to the market, but they will have to get out of the begging-bowl mindset which thinks, ‘I’ve got a great idea, where can I go for some script development money?’, Is this how musicians think? Do they go, ‘I’ve got some ideas for some great songs, so I need to go out and find someone to pay me some money to write them?’, or ‘If only someone would stump up thousands of pounds we could hire Abbey Road studios, as well as some instruments, and record them?’ Let’s face it, even a local band has probably spent more money on instruments and amplification than the equipment costs involved in shooting a ‘Dogme-style’ HD feature. And they didn’t go looking for a grant before they started rehearsing!
The market for films is also changing at a phenomenal pace. Go into any HMV record store and half the shop’s given over to DVD’s with a huge range of titles, including many foreign, underground, art house and cult titles. Of course virtually none of these are British – because certain people have always thought that such films aren’t worth making. It’s the same with the DVD rental market. Once upon a time you could forgive your local video shop for only stocking mainstream movies, after all they did have very limited shelf space. But now they’re closing down as people come to rent from net-based companies who compete with each other for who’s got the biggest catalogue. And when it comes to theatrical exhibition, by next Easter more than 200 UK cinema screens will be running on HD digital light projection. Let’s face it, film is – or rather the old ways of making and selling films – dead. In future it needs to look to the music business for models of how it can be developed.
Today we live in a Europe of regions, of Barcelona and Milan and Manchester, rather than of countries and capital cities. I’m British but I live in the North-West, a region at least the size of Holland or Denmark, with a population the size of Sweden. Soon the region will have around 50 HD cinema screens, with more to follow. That’s a heck of a lot more than the number of limited release art-house screens that have ever existed nationwide. By heck, there’s venues that our movies can play in, all we have to do is start making and promoting them; there’s stores that we can sell the DVD’s in, net-based companies that will rent them out, all we have to do is get out there and sell them – after all, it’s about time somebody did!
