Examination of Witnesses (Questions 260
- 279)
TUESDAY 20 MAY 2003
MR JASON
WOOD, MR
DICK PENNY,
MR IAN
CHRISTIE FBA, MR
JOHN WILKINSON
AND MR
BARRY JENKINS
Q260 Derek Wyatt: Seventy-five pence
in the pound, she said.
Mr Penny: I also notice that VAT
was not mentioned in that equation, that the Chancellor takes
17.5p before anyone else starts. Her earlier work was shown in
the specialised houses. It is this developmental role of seeking
to bring film makers on, to give them a chance to develop their
art, to introduce audiences to new product, which is aimed at,
I regret to say, a relatively specialist audience. All of the
evidence says that specialised films play better in specialised
houses and although I like the idea of encouraging multiplexes
to play more films, if they do not play successfully I suggest
that that would end up having a negative impact.
Q261 Chairman: What is a specialised
film? Is Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon a specialised film
just because it was exotic and remote? Is Lagaan a specialised
film when it is all about cricket? What is a specialised film?
Surely it is in fact the distributors and the exhibitioners who
put films into a ghetto by labelling them as specialised films
and not giving them a chance? I am not a great fan of Mr Mike
Leigh, far from it, but his Topsy-Turvy was regarded as
a specialised film and not given wide exhibition, and it won an
Oscar.
Mr Jenkins: Crouching Tiger,
Hidden Dragon came out as a specialised film with a limited
release, but then the general public wanted to see it and the
admissions were very good, and then all of a sudden it became
a commercial film. A lot more prints were put on and it was spread
across the country.
Q262 Chairman: But what about, say,
Croupier, which was given very limited exhibition in this
country, was regarded as a specialised film and then American
cinema goers decided they wanted to see it and it came back here?
That is what happened, did it not, with Four Weddings and a
Funeral?
Mr Jenkins: Yes.
Q263 Chairman: Four Weddings and
a Funeral did not make an initial big impact in this country.
It went to America, made a huge impact there, and it was sent
back here and then became a smash hit here as well.
Mr Christie: When you pose that
question, "What is a specialised film?", you have also
got to think about how long the film plays for. That plays back
into the question of how many screens are available. If a film
is able to be played for a considerable period of time, not necessarily
very profitably, that is the best advertisement for the film.
Mike Leigh's films would be a very good example of films that
are very rarely played for any length of time and have not had
time for word of mouth to develop. Word of mouth is the best way
of a minority film becoming a crossover film and reaching a wider
audience.
Q264 Derek Wyatt: I am trying to
draw an analogy between two contrasting thoughts. One is Miramax.
Disney set up Miramax to provide basically movies between approximately
eight and 12 million dollars, which was at the low end of making
films, but they were largely seen to be art films. Now every studio
in Los Angeles—Fox, Universal—has an equivalent of
Miramax where they tempt back some of the big players, not to
take the $100million but to take the two million and perform.
Just put that to one side. On the other side, 10 and 20 years
ago W H Smith, in order to promote young writers, produced the
Young Writer of the Year list which I remember 20 years ago was
William Boyd, for instance. They were very fine writers, all of
whom made it. Why is not possible, (a) to do that for British
writers, and (b) to see the screening of it? That is the issue,
is it not? Why can we not get the marketing and that side of it
organised here in the UK?
Mr Wilkinson: Exhibitors are limited.
If there are only six prints, with the best will in the world,
if you cannot get hold of it you cannot show it. If we look at
Gosford Park, which was last year 22nd in the top 40 films
released in this country, the number of people who wanted to get
hold of it, exhibitors in small market towns as well as multiplexes,
just could not get hold of the film. It was on about 120, I think
it was, to start with and then it went up a bit, but we just could
not get hold of the print. Exhibitors will show anything if they
believe that it will attract an audience, and quite often they
would like to show films that they believe would attract an audience
but they cannot get hold of the print. We are restricted on prints.
Somebody has got to make a commercial decision, whether it is
for a limited release or a large release, whether it is for a
specialised product or a general product. Somebody has to make
a decision that this is what they can afford to go out with.
Q265 Derek Wyatt: In France and Germany
and Italy and Spain they do not get any more help from the government,
they do not have any other system that is more favourable?
Mr Christie: In France, of course,
there is quite an extensive integrated system of support for cinemas
at different levels and for distribution. It is steered by an
industry-led group which makes decisions based on their estimate
of the potential market that the film could reach if it is given
support. In Britain currently the Film Council has, I think, a
one million pounds, rather experimental P&A support fund which
is far too little for a market the size of Britain. Britain is
now the second largest cinema market in Europe, coming close to
France. As France declines Britain is going up and there is absurdly
little subsidy and support to rebalance the market within Britain.
Q266 Derek Wyatt: What if the George
Lucas way of actually sending out a film becomes common currency
in the next five years, of a single distribution centre that uses
satellite and digital to enable films to be distributed quickly?
I know it is costly at the moment. Is that a solution, do you
think, in the medium to long term?
Mr Penny: I think it offers both
opportunities and challenges. In Bristol, Watershed, very much
a champion of new digital technologies, came back really because
we do a lot of work with short film and we started to exhibit
a lot of short film on the internet, but when we were showing
work to people on the big screen which was coming off an LCD projector,
they said, "The quality just is not good enough. Digital
is not there yet", so we invested in a DLP projector and
suddenly people said, "Oh, right, okay, Dick. We see what
you mean".
Q267 Derek Wyatt: How much is that?
Mr Penny: A DLP projector is what
people are calling e-cinema.
Q268 Derek Wyatt: How much does that
cost?
Mr Penny: Upwards of £50,000
just for the projector. You have then got to invest in whatever
storage capacity you need. At the minute there is no standard.
It is a big problem. It is a very new technology still. There
is no standard, but we see it for the specialised sector as having
a huge potential in that a lot of the problem is that what we
are seeking to do is encourage audiences to see a film and, as
we have heard, if there are not many prints you cannot get it
out there. A classic example at the moment is Russian Ark,
a very distinctive film using the new technology of one tape,
90 minutes, digital. It comes out on very few prints on 35 ml
because there is no other way for it to be seen. We said to the
distributor, "Look: this is going to take time to build.
This is not going to find an audience straightaway. Can we please
have a digital copy and we will show it for three months",
not three months every screening because we only have two screens;
it would block out everything else. We are showing it every weekend
for the next three months. We are getting people to introduce
it. It is in a small screen but it has been selling out at the
weekends and the distributor is very pleased about the experiment.
That is operating on a relatively low budget medium of digi-beta
which works absolutely fine because it is a relatively small screen,
but it is beginning to demonstrate that through digital you can
play titles thinner and longer and therefore allow word of mouth
to work so that you do not need the distributor to make the big
decision up front about how many prints and how much marketing.
The converse of that, of course, is the George Lucas position.
If the movie is big enough you could press a button and have that
movie on every screen in the world at the same moment. Where digital
offers you the opportunity for more diversity and more flexibility,
it also offers you the opportunity to make your marketing buck
work much harder. What we have seen with blockbusters is a growth
in the number of prints that they are going out on. You could
see that quadruple very easily. Therefore you would reduce the
diversity that was available. The cinema exhibitor has to make
a profit. They are in the business to make a profit. If a film
does not perform on the opening weekend, I am sorry, it gets fewer
screenings next week or it goes on a smaller screen or it is off.
One could theoretically see a situation with digital where it
is all being beamed out from one place where, if it does not perform
first screening on a Friday, it is off. Equally, if it works,
it could expand very quickly.
Q269 Derek Wyatt: Let us give another
scenario. What if one or two of the moguls in Hollywood said,
"Okay: first screening is on pay-per-view television digital
and we will take $20 and we can make $300 million on the first
night whether it is good or bad"?
Mr Penny: They could. All of our
experience of each new technology as it has come in, and video
has to be the classic example, is that more interest in film generates
more interest in cinema. I think digital will be of huge benefit
to the specialised sector to the new film maker. I think it will
allow us to have more diversity, but it is not a straightforward
solution and it is not going to happen very easily, and I think
we have to guard against that. It is the balance between the large,
multinational chain and the very specialist, local operator. There
is room for both. I think it will change the market but I do not
know whether it is an instant solution.
Q270 Chairman: When did this dictatorship
of the first weekend start? If you read William Goldman's book
Adventures in the Screen Trade, in which he deals with
the making of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, that
had terrible reviews. It did not have an audience and then it
did. Are you telling me now that if the first weekend is so dominant
even a film of that quality or that eventual popularity will not
get the opportunity to build?
Mr Jenkins: It depends what other
product is in the market at that particular time. If you have
a release of a film that does not perform that well over the first
weekend but there are other films that are coming up the week
after or a couple of weeks after that, then the head of booking
department has to make a decision: do you keep that film on and
hope it might build, or do you just take it off after the first
week because there is other large product coming through?
Chairman: I can see that in the days
of the old one-screen cinemas where, if you were showing a movie
and the movie did not have an audience then, even though they
had booked the film for whatever period they had, there would
have been a disinclination to continue it, but now, when you have
got multiplexes, such as the showcase in my constituency with
14 screens, are you telling me that it is not possible to accommodate
a situation like this in which a film is decided by an exhibitor
that it has a chance to build? This Committee a couple of years
ago went to Coalville where a guy had put all his savings into
buying a small cinema, a marvellous man. The Committee fell in
love with what he was doing, but he is never going to get a chance
really to have a go if he is going to be starved of the opportunity
to show films which his audience might like. After all, you talk
about Bend It Like Beckham, but Bend It Like Beckham
would have been a small success, like Bhaji on the Beach,
if its director, as she told us, had not talked Odeon Cinemas
into putting it on their screens. In that sense it was a flook:
a strong-minded, persuasive woman who managed to get things going
and now it is in the top ten in the United States. That is an
expostulation; it is not a question.
Q271 Mr Bryant: Can I go back to
this issue about the money because several people, when they appeared
before us, raised this issue about how much money ends up staying
with you and with the distribution company. Can we imagine for
a moment that somebody pays £10 to go into either your cinema
or another cinema, and we accept that £1.75 has already gone
to the Chancellor, so we are left with £8.25. Where is that
money going?
Mr Penny: In our situation we
normally do a flat rate split where we pay the distributor 35%.
Q272 Mr Bryant: And you keep 65?
Mr Penny: And we keep 65, and
that stays the same however the film plays.
Q273 Mr Bryant: And whoever the film
has come from?
Mr Penny: Yes.
Mr Wilkinson: The majority of
cinemas in this country would be paying anywhere between 40 and
50% of that £8.25.
Q274 Mr Bryant: To the distributor?
Mr Wilkinson: Over the year to
the distributor.
Q275 Mr Bryant: To a whole set of
distributors, you mean, so there would be an individual negotiation
each time and it might be different according to whether—-
Mr Wilkinson: Whether it is week
one, week two, week three. It might also depend upon whether it
is a release from a major distributor or one of the smaller distributors.
Q276 Mr Bryant: Or a related distributor
as opposed toa non-related distributor?
Mr Wilkinson: No. It does not
make any difference. The last Monopolies and Mergers report said
that there was no correlation between a distributor and exhibitor
that may have a shareholding that is connected.
Q277 Mr Bryant: I think most people
in Britain would probably accept that over the last ten or 20
years cinema-going has become a much more pleasant experience.
I suppose it depends whether you smoke or not, but there is the
fact that people do not smoke in cinemas any more, the seats are
far more comfortable and all of that kind of stuff, and the multiplexes
do not tend to be just one old big cinema cut up into ten tiny
little bits. The bit that still seems to be missing, however,
is that choice element. I remember when the multiplex opened in
High Wycombe when I used to live in High Wycombe. We were delighted
because there were going to be seven screens and I remember they
showed seven screens full of exactly the same film for the first
eight weeks. Do you think that that is a fair analysis, that choice
is not increasing?
Mr Penny: Before I speak on that,
just to come back on the point about the split of the take, if
we go back to Gurinder Chadha's evidence last week, when she said
that they got 25p playing in multiplexes, the situation in the
multiplex is that the more successful a film is, the higher percentage
is paid, so that produces a decent overall percentage. For the
more difficult, specialist product, if it does not play well it
falls to the bottom of the scale, which is about 25%. Bargie
on the Beach, which did not take as much money, played in
the specialised sector and returned 35%. You have got a slightly
different dynamic happening there. Overall, Bend It Like Beckham
took a lot more money, but the percentage was slightly smaller
of the take. Taking your point about choice, if I can again pick
up on a point that was made about the 1980s being 20 years ago,
and again I will if I might refer to my own situation in Bristol,
in 1982 when Watershed opened, there were 20 screens in Bristol,
of which three, two at Watershed, one at Arnolfini, were dedicated
to cultural exhibition. That was 15% of the available screens.
By 1998 the multiplex boom had finally begun to take off in Bristol.
It was late to take off. There were 40 screens, of which three
were still cultural. That meant that there was 7.5% that was cultural.
By 1999 there were 69 screens and there was a new cultural screen,
and 5.8% was cultural. What we were seeing was that across those
multiplexes, although there were a lot more screens, they were
not offering anything very different one from another, whereas
each of the cultural venues was offering a choice. The cultural
sector had as a proportion of the growing market shrunk by a factor
of three. Despite that, in the year we showed more different titles
than our showcase. What that means, of course, is that we showed
those titles for much shorter periods of time and per title returned
a lot less to the distributor, but what we were seeking to do
was to offer choice. That is really the job of the specialised
sector, the people who are members of the Association of Independent
Film Exhibitors. We are also members of the CEA. We are in the
cinema business too, but what we are trying to do is expand on
the mainstream; we are trying to encourage audiences for a more
diverse palate. Some of those films will move into the wider market
place.
Q278 Mr Bryant: I am thinking of
my own constituency here but the truth is that there are many
constituencies like mine which are geographically isolated and
for those people the independent sector is the only means of seeing
the mainstream film. Otherwise it is simply out of their reach.
It might cost them only three pounds to see the film in their
local community centre which has got a screen set up and so on,
but that does nonetheless expand choice. I wonder whether there
is any means of getting anything alternative to the five blockbusters
of the month shown in that world.
Mr Christie: That is where one
might look to the Film Council to try to take a strategic overview
of the fantastic inequalities of provision. It is very difficult
to see any film, as you say, in many parts of the country because
of the clustering effect. People tend to build cinemas where there
are existing cinemas. There are very few efforts to cover the
country systematically. Large areas, really quite densely populated
areas, especially in the south, are very badly served for any
kind of exhibition, let alone specialised. The Film Council had
a consultation process 18 months ago. It has not been able to
act on it for various reasons which are not fully understood,
and it is a relatively small amount of money, £15 million.
I think everybody in the field would love to see that money spent
in an exemplary and effective and practical way, not commissioning
another report, another study, but actually showing how something
could be done with the money and making a case for more.
Q279 Mr Bryant: But it makes me slightly
nervous about this cultural concept that you are using, that there
is a cultural screen and there are other screens. I am just aware
that, for instance, with Billy Elliott, a film set in a
mining area, it was phenomenally difficult to see it anywhere
in a mining area because most of these areas do not have multiplexes
and do not have cinemas of any kind. But you think that that is
a potential area where the Film Council could be making a difference?
I am aware that you have not answered either of those questions.
Mr Jenkins: I think the view of
the major circuits has changed. When you referred to the cinema
at High Wycombe, that was about 1987-1988.
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