Jump to: navigation, search

Buffalo News (17/Jan/1993) - British film industry is near extinction

Details

Article

British film industry is near extinction

It seems you can't walk 10 feet in this town without a placard reminding you that "The Commitments" is now available on video. No doubt about it, the Brits are in love with the saviors of soul.

At first glance, it looks like a serious case of local pride. After all, the boisterous saga of a working-class Irish soul band was initiated by British producers. It was filmed in Dublin with an Irish cast. It was named Best Picture by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts. Its British director, Alan Parker, won a separate award. And in 1991, it finished 10th at the United Kingdom box office, just two slots below "Home Alone."

But "The Commitments" wasn't a British film at all. If it weren't for American money, this film never would have been made — a cold fact, insiders say, that demonstrates perfectly why the once-mighty British film industry is now on the brink of ruin.

Or "starved, beaten senseless and plugged into a life-support system," as John Woodward, chief executive of the Producers Alliance for Cinema and Television, describes it.

The industry that once nurtured the likes of Alfred Hitchcock and Alec Guinness, David Lean and Richard Attenborough is virtually moribund. In 1991, British-financed films attracted only 6 percent of all the money spent at the U.K. box office, and every film that finished in the Top 20 was bankrolled by Hollywood. Box office figures for 1992, covering the Top 10, were released last week; again, Hollywood swept the field.

The Brits do even worse on video. Of the top 50 U.K. rentals in 1991, only one film — "The Krays" — was financed in Britain. British videos accounted for just 5 percent of the rental market on their home turf.

This hasn't happened overnight; it takes years of relentless penny-pinching. When adjusting for inflation, the amount of money put up by British investors has dropped by 40 percent since 1984, and the average British film budget has fallen by nearly 50 percent.

All told, one prominent industry analyst, Terry Ilott, bluntly warns, "British cinema is reaching a crossroads. . . . If this continues, Britain will cease to have a commercial film industry, and the fabric of facilities and skills (around London) will fall apart."

"The Commitments" saga is instructive. The producers spent two futile years trying to line up British financing. They failed because the film required extensive location work, and most British bankrollers — notably the TV companies that dominate investment here — won't spend that kind of money. And besides, the British tax laws, unlike anywhere else in the West, make it very hard to fund big-budget films.

But there was more. As Wilf Stevenson, director of the British Film Institute, now recalls, there was also the delicate matter of British provincialism: "It didn't sound right when the producers pitched it: 'Unknown Irish kids get a band together.' Because in Britain, there's a great skepticism about telling Irish stories."

The producers finally turned to the Americans at Twentieth Century Fox. Fox took the film within 24 hours.

In essence, says Ilott, the remnants of the British film industry can't finance big movies, "and the filmmakers who know how to make them have mostly migrated to Hollywood. The filmmakers who remain are not addressing the mass market. Their films are financed by television, and, for the most part, are aimed at audiences too small to deliver profits even for low-budget movies. . . . Would-be investors from outside the industry draw their own conclusions."

For years critics have trumpeted the demise of British film; after all, the glory days of the Ealing Studio ("Arsenic and Old Lace," "The Ladykillers," "The Man in the White Suit") ended in the '50s. But the Brits are still financing some prestigious, albeit modest, movies — "Howards End," "The Crying Game," "Peter's Friends," "The Long Day Closes," "Enchanted April."

Nevertheless, industry leaders don't pretend to see a silver lining. Jane Headland, the finance director of British Screen, which puts up some money for domestic films, says that British production "seems to be on the verge of extinction."

Michael Winner, the British director best known in America for his vigilante classic "Death Wish" (1974), blames producers and his fellow directors. 1992 was "the worst year I have ever seen, and I have been in active film production for 37 years," he said. "British producers have let people down so that it is very difficult to get people to put money into the industry."

But Stevenson, the BFI director, says it's not that simple. British tax policies, enacted during the '80s by the ruling Conservatives, have dried up the money available for high-risk, big-budget films. The philosophy, under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, was that the industry should rise or fall without help from government. So the government did away with a number of policies that had kept the industry alive.

Until 1985, for example, British exhibitors (who show movies) were required to subsidize British producers. Some of the money reaped at the box office was funnelled back to the domestic filmmakers. In other words, says Stevenson, "for every successful American blockbuster that you show, a small portion of that profit had to be put back into British production."

But the Conservatives abolished this levy, and the industry has been fighting for its reinstatement ever since — while pointing out, as Woodward notes, that the same levy on exhibitors is used in Belgium, France, Italy, Germany and Spain.

And until 1984, British financiers were allowed to treat film investment as capital expenditure — hence, a 100 percent tax write-off in the first year. In other words, the costs of a new film could be written off against the profits of the last film. But the government banned this practice after some investors were nailed for tax abuse.

Stevenson acknowledges the instances of abuse, but laments the fallout from the ban: No big film companies, no steady cash flow, no continuity. There is, instead, what he calls "the financial isolation of the production sector."

"In the last 10 years," he says, citing BFI figures, "there were 454 (British) films produced by 342 different companies," because there's no tax incentive for any large company to bankroll a number of films and spread out the financial risks. By contrast, he says, the average Hollywood studio can dish out a number of bombs in any given year, yet be rescued by one big hit.

The industry has been holding extensive talks with Downing Street, in an effort to win support for tax write-offs, and it does appear that John Major's government is starting to give ground. In the long run, industry leaders seek to emulate Hollywood — by creating British-based studios that can crank out mainstream movies, the kind that can compete with America in the world market.

Retrieved from ‘http://the.hitchcock.zone/w/index.php?title=Buffalo_News_(17/Jan/1993)_-_British_film_industry_is_near_extinction&oldid=181123’