Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1
- 19)
TUESDAY 29 APRIL 2003
MR BERNIE
CORBETT, MR
JULIAN FRIEDMANN
AND MR
CLIVE DAWSON
Q1 Chairman: Gentlemen, I would like
to welcome you very much to this, the opening session of our inquiry
into the British film industry. Our last inquiry, thanks to the
information and evidence we were given, resulted in some major
changes in, among other things, the taxation regime, particularly
thanks to Mr Fabricant who drew up our proposals at that time.
We are hoping on this occasion that once again we will be able
to have an impact, particularly with the Treasury as well as the
Department for Culture, Media and Sport. I am not quite sure how
to take this since you are all independent persons, but is any
one of you elected as your spokesman to make a very brief opening
statement? Mr Corbett?
Mr Corbett: I am. I am Bernie
Corbett, the General Secretary of the Writers' Guild of Great
Britain. In case you do not know (and there is no reason why you
should), we are a trade union, a very small one, affiliated to
the TUC. We have prepared a submission for you and I suppose the
first thing I should do is to thank you very much for inviting
us to come before your Committee and we are honoured to be the
first people to do so if that is the case; secondly, to apologise
to you that our submission was asked for relatively recently and
was only supplied very recently, so I do not imagine you will
have had an opportunity to read through it. We do not claim to
come before you with vast expertise on film matters because, small
as we are, the number of film writers who are members of the Writers'
Guild, which was originally (although not now) exclusively a screenwriters'
guild, is extremely small because of the small number of opportunities
for film writers in the British film industry. We are all complete
novices at this procedure, so we would welcome your guidance.
I will not make a long spiel of going through what we have written
down because obviously you will be able to study that at your
leisure. We have got a long and perhaps rather ponderous preamble
around the question of whether or not there is a British film
industry, which is the question we were asked, and if only I had
had an e-mail from a member in time for this submission I might
have substituted it because it is only two lines long and I will
read it out: "That the question, `Is there a British film
industry?', can be sensibly asked—and it can—is evidence
enough of our problem. The answer is clearly no. We have an ounce
or two of activity and you can't call that an industry."
That is not what the Guild is saying because I do not think we
say there is no British film industry; we acknowledge that there
is a British film industry, but we do not think there is a complete
British film industry. A complete film industry would consist
of an industry that was able to produce all kinds of films from
the most experimental short film to the global blockbuster from
its own resources, with its own finance, through its own creativity
within the UK and, most importantly of all, the rewards for the
success of those films being reinvested in that same British film
industry. I take the example of Gosford Park, which is
a recent, excellent, very successful film frequently described
as a British film—British actors, British writer, British
location. All these things are valuable, they have economic value,
they have cultural value, but in the end the rewards of the success
go to the United States of America where they fund the next production
of the United States of America, which might be in Mexico or Australia
or who knows where? If I can just say a word or two about our
submission, and I promise not to extend this, I have mentioned
the preamble. We have given specific answers to the questions
that were circulated in so far as we can and we have done so very
specifically from the point of view of the writer, not always
a point of view that is very much taken notice of, and we have
appended, perhaps somewhat controversially, what I might call
a vox pop of opinions solicited more or less at random from our
members. We do not wish you to look on these as opinions that
we state as the policy of the Writers' Guild but we hope it is
helpful for you to see them as the sorts of things that professional
writers say about their opportunities (or lack of them) in the
British film industry. Finally, there are two appendices to our
report. One is an editorial from the forthcoming issue of The
Scriptwriter magazine, edited by my colleague Julian Friedmann,
who is here, which is very germane to the subject, and, secondly,
an article published last autumn by my other colleague, Mr Clive
Dawson, who is that rare example, a professional writer in Britain
who has had a film produced, and he sets out in concise and, I
think, very dramatic terms, if I may say so, the experience of
the 12 years of writing a film and having it produced and how
he feels about it at the end of that withering experience.
Q2 Mr Bryant: Do you think that writers
get enough of the dosh?
Mr Corbett: Writers tend to get
a fee for writing a script for a film. We would prefer a system
where the writer naturally got a fee, perhaps even a lower fee
initially, but also a share of, ideally, the takings of the film
but at least the profits of the film, although we are aware that
there is an old saying that no film ever made a profit.
Q3 Mr Bryant: What is standing in the
way of that?
Mr Corbett: We have for many years
had a collective agreement as a trade union with PACT, who I believe
you are going to be speaking to later on today, the Producers'
Alliance for Cinema and Television. That agreement is now about
12 years old and has not been revised. It splits films into low,
medium and high budget areas and each of those categories sets
a minimum fee. That fee is a cash sum. It does acknowledge the
possibility that there may be individual arrangements for percentage
shares but it does not set those out as binding terms agreed between
ourselves and PACT. That agreement is going to be renegotiated
and we would like to explore those areas, although we cannot say
with hand on heart that we are very confident we will be able
to make much progress. Who knows? It may be that the time is right
to reconsider that kind of arrangement.
Q4 Mr Bryant: Several of the people that
you quote in your submission refer to the screenplay and the script
being essential to the film; without them there is no film, in
essence. Do you worry sometimes that it is said that there is
only one British film, which is the triumph over adversity? It
is about people in miserable, wet, dark, dank places discovering
that there is a better life. When we came back from the States
last time there was a film on the aeroplane, Solomon and Gaenor,
which must be the most depressing film I have ever seen in my
life. Is that the nature of British films and is it the writers'
fault?
Mr Corbett: Redemption rather
than justice. Perhaps I could invite my colleague, Mr Friedmann,
to answer.
Mr Friedmann: I think Solomon
and Gaenor actually got an Academy award.
Q5 Mr Bryant: Which was for a Welsh-speaking
film?
Mr Friedmann: It was for a foreign
language film.
Q6 Mr Bryant: For being in Yiddish and
Welsh.
Mr Friedmann: I am an agent representing
writers and I also publish The Scriptwriter magazine. The
question as to whether writers get enough money or not can depend
upon the negotiation and there are cases where writers do very
well and there are cases where they do not do very well. There
are also cases where the producers do very badly themselves and
I think that if there is going to be structural change in the
industry, and I hope that a Committee like this ultimately will
lead to there being structural change, we cannot divorce the role
and the benefits and the problems that writers face from other
parties in the industry. The difficulties faced by writers I think
start from the fact that there are too many people writing feature
film scripts for too few slots. This is partly down to the fact
that a lot of academics are very keen to secure their jobs in
film schools and universities by offering more and more courses
which promise to train writers how to write feature film scripts.
We have the same problem to some extent with directors. Europe
produces a lot of graduate directors and does not make enough
films for them all. I think there is a false set of expectations
and I think we should be pushing for better scripts and better
writers and the conditions that would lead to that rather than
more scripts. There is not enough money going around because most
writers do not earn any money but whether they should be getting
money or not is another question.
Q7 Mr Bryant: Can I go back to this issue
about the nature of the film? I am not making a flippant point.
It seems to me that there is a very real issue.
Mr Friedmann: I do not try and
answer that but I will if you like.
Q8 Mr Bryant: I remember going to see
Boyz'n the Hood, the first version, which was tested on
audiences in Britain and on audiences in America. The British
audience much preferred the downbeat, sad ending when everybody
died, and the Americans much preferred the happy ending which
was rather unrealistic to our perspective. Is that a problem for
British writers trying to write for the biggest market in the
world, which is the States?
Mr Friedmann: There is a problem
in that the producers in Europe as a whole are so dependent upon
subsidies that to some extent their judgment is affected by cultural
issues rather than by commercial issues. The Film Council appears
to be trying, by initiating some commercially oriented schemes,
to change the thinking. I do not know if they will be successful
or not because I am not sure that that many British writers are
able to write movies that will work globally. If producers knew
what would work globally you would think that they would in a
sense find the writers who could do it or push the writers to
do it. I do not think the films that are made are being made because
that is what writers are writing but ultimately because that is
what the producers are producing. There is an argument that if
you took all subsidies away we would have a terrible time for
five years and we would then have a very vibrant film industry.
Certainly it is the case in Germany where subsidies are huge and
the critical judgment as to who gets the money has in the past
been very poor. British Screen had the best record of any subsidy
organisation and I think it was very ambitious of John Woodward
to say that he was going to try and better that. Whether he does
or not I think we have to give him at least five years. The fact
is that subsidy money skews the decision-making process as to
what films to make.
Mr Dawson: Can I come back to
your original question about do writers get enough dosh? Speaking
as a writer at grass roots level, I do not think enough money
goes into development, the actual creation of the idea and the
development of writing the script in the first place. I think
there is a sad shortage of development money in the industry.
I also take Julian's point that there are probably too many writers
competing for the same slots. The various universities do tend
to turn out lots of students who expect to be able to work in
the industry. It is a very tough business.
Q9 Mr Bryant: On this development issue,
as I understand it, in the United States of America quite often,
especially on comedies, will have a whole team working, whereas
on the whole the British model has been that maybe there are instances
of two working together but rarely more than that.
Mr Friedmann: It is entirely due
to economies of scale. If you are going to get an order from a
role caster for 26 episodes you can afford to—Karen Manderbach,
who is the Executive Producer for Karcy Werner, one of the most
prolific producers of sitcoms in the States, spends more on the
script of any one of their shows than any British sitcom producer
spends on producing the entire show. Their shows sell to 80, 90,
100, 120 countries around the world and therefore they make profits
which they can reinvest. We do not have a particularly good record
for selling our programmes internationally, partly because of
the point you made, that they tend to be downbeat and some people
abroad say they tend to be very class-oriented or class-based.
There is not enough money for development but the interesting
point is, is there enough money altogether? Given the number of
films that are made, the answer probably is yes, but there are
structural problems. Producers pay very little for the treatment,
which is the documents that get written before the script starts.
I actually did a survey of writers—admittedly, it was amongst
my better-known clients—and discovered that between 50%
and 60% of the total time spent on the entire writing of the project
from first day to last was spent on the treatments prior to the
script; yet the agreements that the producers have signed up to
with the Writers' Guild do not give more than a maximum at the
moment of about 25% of the total would for the treatment. A writer
is going to be hard pushed to spend 70% of his or her time working
on a document for which they get 20-25% of the money. At the moment
that is something which is fundamentally damaging the industry.
We need fewer scripts, we need better scripts, we need more time
spent on development, we need more money in development. Where
is that money going to come from? It has got to come from the
other end, in other words, pay less for the script and more for
the work that is done before the script gets written. That I believe
would actually produce significantly better scripts.
Mr Corbett: Can I make a separate
point in response to Mr Bryant's question, which is, if you like,
about the cultural heritage of the British film, and this is speculative
and not original. There is a derogatory phrase of "talking
heads" that has been used about British films. What that
refers to is a theory—and it is only that—that the
heritage of the British film is Shakespeare and Shaw and Rattigan,
ie the theatrical play dialogue in static settings, whereas the
cultural heritage of the American film is the silent movie where
the story has to be told through visual images. In this context
it is interesting that the film I have referred to in our report,
Gosford Park, although a successful film and USA-financed,
written by a British writer, is actually quite unusual in modern,
successful, global films in being entirely led by dialogue. Although
it is in sumptuous settings every single element of the plot is
led on by dialogue. It may or may not be a difference between
the British and American film but I think it relates perhaps in
some way to the suggestion that Mr Bryant was making.
Q10 Mr Bryant: Would that explain why
sometimes a film which has obviously been very expensive, such
as Titanic, can still end up with a terrible script?
Mr Friedmann: Who says it is a
terrible script?
Q11 Chairman: Who is to judge, Chris?
Mr Friedmann: The intention was
to make a film that would take an awful lot of money and it succeeded,
so by the standards it set out to achieve it is not a terrible
script.
Mr Corbett: And visually spectacular.
Q12 Mr Bryant: Is it fair to draw a distinction
between a script and a screenplay?
Mr Friedmann: No, I do not think
so.
Mr Dawson: I think there are different
cultural expectations between the US and Europe in terms of what
audiences like, in terms of storytelling. I think US audiences
do like to have very upbeat endings and European audiences tend
to want something a bit darker. It is a sweeping generalisation
but there is a difference in audience expectation in some cases
in the different storytelling styles.
Mr Friedmann: I think that is
true when it comes to lower budget, what we call art house movies.
I do not think it is true for other movies, and in fact I think
the statistics are that something like 75-80% of all box office
receipts in Europe go to American movies which would suggest to
me that Europeans prefer happy endings and upbeat endings. However,
I think it would be wrong to assume that that has to do with the
choice of the subject or even just the ending. It is a much more
sophisticated thing because basically American films are distinguishable
from European films in other ways. Companies who do dubbing and
subtitling have done very specific research and American movies
have approximately on average two-thirds the dialogue of European
movies. The scene length in American movies is approximately half
that of the average and obviously if it is an average it is a
big generalisation. This has a huge impact on the way the audience
interacts with the movie. First, if it is visual storytelling
it has greater impact because it is not mediated depending upon
your education, your literacy and so on. You believe what you
see. Secondly, short scenes tend to be more involving, whereas
very long scenes tend to allow the audience to wander. These are
craft skills which were developed by the studios who were run
by Europeans in the early part of the last century and, for reasons
that I cannot fully understand, and in fact Clive made the point,
we have a heritage which comes out of theatre and Shakespeare
and radio and so on. We do not tend to write like that but that
has a far greater impact in my view than simply choosing a downbeat
ending. There are lots of very successful American movies like
Chinatown, which has an incredibly downbeat ending but
is a hugely popular and successful film.
Q13 Chairman: I noticed on a recent occasion
when I saw The Third Man again that it consists of a huge
number of very short takes, unlike, say, very prolonged dialogue
scenes in lots of films. I am including, say, Hitchcock's Rope.
With regard to what Mr Bryant has said, obviously there is going
to be a limited number of things always. The movie that we see
is going to have its premiere in Penistone is basically the same
movie as The Full Monty and Brassed Off. The reason
why The Full Monty was a huge success and Brassed Off
was a success but not on that scale was because of distribution,
was it not, not because of content, namely that The Full Monty
got a big American distributor who really sold it and therefore
it became an international success, whereas Brassed Off
remained a niche film? When we did our previous inquiry one of
the things that we noticed, and it appeared insoluble and we looked
at ways of trying to deal with it, was that in the end, although
obviously content, technique, acting, all of those things are
important, none of them stands for anything if audiences cannot
actually see the film.
Mr Corbett: We would agree very
thoroughly with that point and we would note that the mass distribution
of films, if we can call it that, through the major Multiplex
cinemas is entirely under the control of the American film industry
and, not surprisingly, it gives preference to their output. There
is a difficulty for British films that are not part of that complex
to find an audience because of the lack of the possibility of
distribution. There would be some help given to British films
if there were, at least in the major cities, places where those
films could be reliably available to see on a release basis in
the way that the major Hollywood films are, but at the moment
it is almost a lottery really whether films that are not part
of that distribution system get any significant audience at all,
and that is a problem we think that the Committee should address.
Q14 Alan Keen: I am sure I am sitting
between two people who know more about this than I do. I always
imagine that if somebody decides they are going to make a film
they have got lots of money from somewhere and they read a book
and say, "That is a wonderful novel. That would make a great
film. I will employ a good writer to write it". What percentage
of film work to writers comes that way? There surely are not lots
of people who come out of university, having gone through a couple
of years' course, who sit down and think, "I think I'll write
a film", and they write a film. What is the percentage of
that sort of thing?
Mr Corbett: First of all, there
are thousands and thousands of people in this country writing
a film that is not based upon a book, who have chosen to write
a film script rather than to write a book, for whatever reason.
Their chances of getting that film produced are close to zero.
I think it is the case that by far the majority of films are not
in fact based on books. Of course, a lot of very well known films
are based upon books, new books, like About A Boy and so
on, and old books, such as the works of Jane Austen, but they
are vastly outnumbered by films that are "original concepts".
There is a debate about how many stories are original anyway,
but on the whole the film industry is more comfortable with somebody
who comes along with an idea, with a treatment, with a storyline
which can be developed into a script and produced into a film.
Mr Friedmann: I would not entirely
agree. I think in America the proportion of movies that start
out with a book is a higher proportion than in Europe. It is still
quite significant here but it is not the majority. I actually
think that the majority of films start with producers, not with
writers. In other words, I think that one of the reasons why so
many writers are excluded from a chance of getting their film
made is that a lot of producers will put more effort into trying
to develop and make a film that stems from an idea that they had
or that they found. It is often said that speculatively written
scripts very rarely sell and it is true and everyone always gets
very excited when one does get turned into a movie. Writing a
film script in your attic or wherever in the hope of selling it,
as Bernie said, is very unlikely to produce a result. If it is
a good script what it is likely to do, and I represent about 80
scriptwriters and I have had this experience, thankfully, fairly
recently, is that it is likely to get you to work on someone else's
project, ie on a project initiated by a producer. I think the
answer to the distribution question is, I do not think it is enough
to say, "Let's put the movies into more cinemas". The
truth is that when we have had outstanding British movies that
were small, that were ethnic, that had everything stacked against
them, like East is East and Bend it Like Beckham,
which are not movies that one would assume a big Hollywood promotional
machine would get behind, they have done phenomenally well and
they have done well because word of mouth is important. I do not
believe that we will automatically get a significant increase
in audiences going to movies just by forcing them into cinemas
which probably do not want them. It is absolutely true that the
Americans, particularly Miramax, have shown a way to market films
that I believe I saw in Screen International a couple of
weeks ago, the description of how a working title works, choosing
the dates when they were going to release films, which seemed
to suggest tremendous strategic sophistication which I think has
been lacking before. Clearly how you distribute a film, not just
how many cinemas it is on at, will make a bigger difference, I
think, than putting it on in cinemas and not backing it up. If
the film is not any good it will not get word of mouth and if
it does not get word of mouth it is not going to be a success.
Q15 Alan Keen: From the point of view
of creating British writers, what changes would have to be made
to give those people a chance to get their good work recognised
and used?
Mr Friedmann: Someone once asked
at a workshop I was attending, "How long should it take me
to earn about £50,000-£60,000?", and the person
giving the workshop—I do not know if it was an American—said,
"Probably for about six years or seven years you would have
to work 50 weeks a year, six days a week, 12-15 hours a day".
Everyone was completely silent and someone said, "What do
you mean?", and he said, "That is how long it will take
you to qualify as a doctor. Why do you assume that writing scripts
is any easier?" They need experience, which you do not learn
in university, you do not learn at film school, you do not learn
by going to short courses. You learn by having your work put through
the process of being script edited, of having a director come
in and make changes or suggest changes, of having actors read
it and then you hear how bad some of the dialogue is, and you
see what actually happens to it. The only place you can get that
experience is on television. The biggest problem in the film industry
is the fact that the film industry is incredibly snobbish about
television. A lot of people who work in the film industry do not
want to have anything to do with television. I think it is a grave
mistake that the Film Council has nothing to do with television.
In the same way that the Government forced the broadcasters to
take 25% of their production from independent producers, if the
Government forced the broadcasters not only to buy and show more
British films but to try and make more films, even if they are
television movies, and we have a tiny number of television movies
in this country compared to—
Q16 Chairman: But the difference is that
the broadcasters are licensed; they are under a regime and therefore
the Government can make broadcasters do things.
Mr Friedmann: But these are some
of the things we think would help writers.
Q17 Chairman: But the Government cannot
make film-makers do things because film-making is a private enterprise
industry.
Mr Corbett: But the Government
did not make independent television producers set up companies
and make television programmes. The Government required the broadcasters
to have a significant proportion of their output being made by
independents and the independent television production industry
grew up in the wake of that regulation.
Q18 Chairman: I accept all of that, but
the fact is that even the BBC, we read this morning, has suddenly
got a conscience and decides it needs to pose as a public service
broadcasting organisation, and it does that because in three years'
time its charter is coming up for renewal and it has suddenly
caught up with the fact that it needs Parliament and the Government
to be convinced that the BBC is an appropriate organisation to
be run in that way and be given vast sums of money from the taxpayer.
The other organisations, every single one of them, are licensed
in some way or another. There was the time, of course, of the
Eady Levy and so on, but that was what Sir Alec Douglas-Hume would
have called a donation to a private sector industry. Apart from
the Crown Post Office Unit we have never had a nationalised film
industry in this country and, speaking as a devout socialist,
I hope we never will.
Mr Corbett: All the broadcast
networks show considerable numbers of films. It would be open
to the Government to introduce a regulation requiring them to
show a certain number of films that they had themselves contributed
to the production of. In the recent past there have been some
extraordinarily successful films by both the BBC and, in particular,
Channel 4, some of which have been so good and so marketable that
in fact instead of being shown on television as was originally
intended they have gone on distribution and been successes and
in some cases worldwide successes. Unfortunately, that has tailed
off. It seems to us completely plausible that it would be a matter
of regulation or conditions of licences for broadcasters.
Mr Friedmann: And it would have
a significant trickle-down impact on writers, which is what we
are qualified to talk about. Film on Four, if you remember, started
out as Channel 4's television channel and in the end a significant
number of those films did remarkably well financially. It was
a huge boost to the economy, a huge boost to the confidence in
the film industry which we need to have; we need to have confident
producers, and it created a lot of work for a lot of people, including
writers. Things have changed, people were employed at Film on
Four to the point that it did not work as well as it had worked,
and now we have Granada Films who have stopped making that many
films, the BBC does not make as many films. I am not sure what
Film on Four is going to do. As far as writers are concerned,
if television could be made to support the production of single
films, whether they are features or television films, from independent
producers, it would be of significant benefit to writers, which
is our concern. That is why we would very much encourage this.
Also, I would think it was perfectly plausible for there to be
a digital channel which shows nothing but films and shorts. There
are very few places for people to see shorts. Shorts are where
young directors cut their teeth. If you want to show their talent
in order to give them a chance of being picked up to work on bigger
things, broadcast is the only way to do it, so the interaction
between film and television is an area, we think, that would be
of great benefit right across the industry, but particularly to
writers.
Q19 Michael Fabricant: You are saying
that the British film industry is snobby about television but
if that is the case, how can you make a career or get any experience
at all in writing for films in Britain when there are so few of
them?
Mr Corbett: You have to work in
television. The trouble is, it is not the same thing. The strictures
and controls of working in television, particularly with the trend
towards long-running series rather than discrete dramas, mean
that working for television is becoming less useful to developing
the skills you need for making a feature film but, still, it is
the only place where you are going to get anything like those
skills. There is so much more work, there are so many more people,
hundreds and hundreds of writers, who can make a good living writing
television drama and that is really the only place they have to
go. I am sure Clive will speak to that.
Mr Dawson: Absolutely. It is incredibly
difficult for writers who want to work in film. I personally do
not think there is enough support. I do not think there is enough
development money filtered down to writers at grass roots level
to enable them to spend time writing feature films.
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