Oral evidence

Taken before the Culture, Media and Sport Committee on Tuesday 20 May 2003

Members present:

Mr Gerald Kaufman, in the Chair
Mr Chris Bryant
Mr Frank Doran
Michael Fabricant
Mr Adrian Flook
Ms Debra Shipley
John Thurso
Derek Wyatt

__________

Memoranda submitted by Association of Independent Exhibitors

and Cinema Exhibitors' Association

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: MR JASON WOOD, MR DICK PENNY and MR IAN CHRISTIE FBA, Association of Independent Exhibitors, MR JOHN WILKINSON, Chief Executive, and MR BARRY JENKINS, Chairman, Cinema Exhibitors' Association, examined.

Chairman: Gentlemen, thank you very much for coming to see us as we continue with this inquiry.

Q253  Derek Wyatt: We have heard a lot of evidence in the past couple of weeks about distribution and the problems of distribution in British films. We have heard terrific criticism of the way in which films are exhibited in the UK. Would you like to make a comment about it or any of the evidence you have read through or heard or read in the newspapers?

Mr Christie: There is an historic problem in British exhibition and distribution which is that until the 1980s we had very much fewer screens than equivalent sized countries. The exhibition business was rescued in Britain by a massive building and investment programme in the 1980s which was very successful at pushing admissions up but it was successful for mass-market films. What has failed to happen since the 1980s is investment in the smaller complexes, screens that are suited to the showing of British films and European films and that is where a lot of the problem lies. If you compare the number of prints of an average European or British film release in Britain compared with, say, France, Germany or Italy, you will find that it is about a half or a third of the number, so there is a non-virtuous cycle.

Q254  Derek Wyatt: But that was 20 years ago, the eighties. Are you telling me that you are all incompetent and cannot manage to change the world or cannot lobby effectively or just do not care about British films?

Mr Jenkins: It is not a case of incompetence. It is a case of distributors having their own agenda and as far as exhibitors are concerned, and I talk for the major circuits, we always ask for the specialised products, we ask for prints, and we are told, "It is going out on a limited release. There will just be so many. I am sorry; we cannot supply you".

Q255  Derek Wyatt: Who says that?

Mr Jenkins: Distributors.

Q256  Derek Wyatt: So they are the difficult people in this relationship?

Mr Jenkins: I think everybody has their own agenda. To be honest, in fairness to distributors, when you have a specialised film it is very difficult before the event to work out whether it is going to be successful or not and whether you should spend X amount of money on producing the prints and doing the marketing behind those. They like to go out on a small release. If word of mouth gets out and yes, it is going to be successful, then they will lay on more prints, but that may be some time later.

Q257  Derek Wyatt: Do you think that the planning legislation should change at a local level and that any multiplex permission that is granted should have a part of it that it has to show art films and British films but not at 2.30 on Tuesday afternoon?

Mr Wilkinson: That has happened already, has it not? The planning has changed in that for all cinemas now you have to start at the centre if you are building or seeking permission for an edge-of-town, then out-of-town and the larger cinemas now are all showing some more (in some people's opinions) interesting films, both British and foreign.

Q258  Derek Wyatt: I must confess, I have multiplexes to the left and right of me at home. I am not conscious of any change whatsoever to what is shown on my multiplexes at Rochester, Maidstone or partly in Canterbury. You will tell me differently.

Mr Christie: I have made a list of the places where you could not see a more specialised film. It starts with Leeds. Leeds is the most seriously under-screened city in the country. It has also one of the largest potential student audiences. In most of the south east and in Birmingham you would have difficulty, the London suburbs, the Cotswolds, most of the south coast; all of those are areas where there are not the kinds of cinemas of three to six screens which will show the range of films that you are primarily interested in in this inquiry.

Q259  Derek Wyatt: That is my issue, though, that the planning legislation could be changed to make sure that if you have a multiplex you must show these films, not at your will but at the will of the local planning authority. You do not think that is possible?

Mr Jenkins: Then you are putting that restriction on the cinema owner. If the cinema owner is unable to get prints from the distributor how can he fulfil that obligation?

Mr Penny: It is a very interesting concept but all of the research in this country and in other countries demonstrates that what we term a specialised film plays better in specialised houses. The key difference is that the specialised houses are very much seeking to promote film as a cultural form. They have localised marketing. They build and sustain audiences for product that is seen as more difficult. It is not necessarily always more difficult. It is just that it has not, for whatever reason, broken through into the mainstream. There are many instances of film makers who are now playing very happily in the mainstream. Last week you took some evidence from Gurinder Chadha and we have got Bend It Like Beckham, which has played quite well. I note that she complained about how much the distributor gets of the tickets.

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 La Gamme(?) 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, ten 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 22^nd 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, 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 interesting film generates more interesting 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 Bargie 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 your 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 per cent.

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 per cent 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 per cent. Bargie on the Beach, which did not take as much money, played in the specialised sector and returned 35 per cent. 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 R Feeney(?), were dedicated to cultural exhibition. That was 15 per cent 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 per cent that was cultural. By 1999 there were 69 screens and there was a new cultural screen, and 5.8 per cent 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 none the less 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.

Q280  Mr Bryant: Yes.

Mr Jenkins: I would honestly admit, and I was one of the chief executives of one of the major companies, that we were very reluctant in those days to try to put specialised product into new multiplexes because we felt that the big blockbusters were where we were going to get the return on investment to pay for the five or six million pounds that we had spent on the multiplex. That view has definitely changed over the last few years and I do not think there is one multiplex circuit that is not prepared to show one or two screens of specialised product if they can get the product. One of the problems we have with the Film Council is that they are talking about £15 million and where they spend it and included in that £15 million is one million pounds to distributors on prints and advertising. To be quite truthful, they should give more to distributors to spend on prints and advertising because if there is an injection of money into distributors to bring out more prints of specialised product certainly there are enough screens out there in the country now to show that product.

Q281  Mr Bryant: Can I ask something which is not really about British films but is about the British cinema-goer, and that is foreign language films? We see remarkably few of them outside the very specialist, and at the same time we have fewer and fewer people going on to study foreign languages at university, which means we have fewer teachers, which means that fewer kids are studying it at school and so on. This is a very vicious circle, it seems to me. Where do you think the responsibility lies? I know you are commercial operators; it is not your prime responsibility to do that, but how can you get more foreign language films available and accessible to people?

Mr Penny: We see it very much as our responsibility. The fact is that it is not commercially viable on the whole. A limited number of foreign language films break out and are commercial. Offering it on a regular basis is usually not commercial. Also, we can add in the access through educational programmes, through educational materials, through workshops, through bringing over film makers. Recently as a group we have brought some films into distribution in this country to take them on a tour from Europe. It is an area that needs support. One of the issues that the independent sector feels quite strongly about is that we very much support the establishment of the Film Council and the Film Council has made some very strong statements. I will just quote you one: "Film and moving images are the single most important source of education, information and culture in the world today"; yet I feel that the DCMS has given the Film Council such an overtly industrial remit to build a sustainable British film industry and then tacked on cultural diversity and education and social inclusion at the bottom that it has just got lost in the credit roll.

Q282  Mr Bryant: Are you saying that the watching of films should be just as important a part as the making of films?

Mr Penny: Absolutely, and that it is about a diversity of world cinema. Our nation is culturally very diverse. We need our young people to be seeing messages from different cultures. We need different cultures to be reflected in our daily consumption. We need our new film makers to be sparked by ideas and inspiration from around the world. If one looks at some of the other art forms, let us take drama as an example, through the nineties regional theatre was having a very hard time. It was getting some very bad press. The Arts Council commissioned a major review of regional theatre and the conclusion, to everyone's surprise, was that these are absolutely vital resources, not just for the local community, not just for education, not just for developing social inclusion, but are also vital resources for the next generation of talent for theatre, which was absolutely acknowledged by the commercial sector. What we have in the cinema world is a spectrum that does go from, if you like, high art at one end to out-and-out entertainment at the other but people cross over between them. There are no divisions. What we have missed in trying to build a sustainable British film industry is the sense of film as a cultural form. I think that if you look at what happened with the drama situation, the Arts Council before that review, the Boyden Report, was spending £40 million a year on drama. They are now spending £70 million a year, real investment in development and access. If we acknowledge that film is, of all the art forms, the most popular, it certainly is as diverse as any other, then I think at the minute the level of investment across exhibition, distribution and production is inadequate to meet all of the industrial, social and educational goals that the Government, the DCMS and ourselves would like to see hit.

Q283  Michael Fabricant: I get worried that people will start making films that people ought to hear and watch and then do not want to watch them. It is a bit like nanny BBC before ITV came along. If I can direct this mainly at the Cinema Exhibitors' Association, I want Barry Jenkins to reiterate something he said in answer to a question from Christopher Bryant. Did you say that there are sufficient screens available that if a half decent film were made and a print were available there would be no problem with getting it shown?

Mr Jenkins: That is correct.

Q284  Michael Fabricant: When we did our last inquiry about four or five years into the film industry it was lack of screens, we were being told. We were told that the reason why British films and other noteworthy films could not get shown was because they were being crowded out by films which were blockbusters. Has the situation changed?

Mr Jenkins: I cannot remember exactly how many screens there were in the UK four years ago. Perhaps we have got it on a piece of paper somewhere, but there are certainly a lot more screens now than there were four years ago. There is no doubt that if you take all the major circuits, especially when you are coming to eight, ten, 12 screens in a multiplex cinema, there is normally always available one screen at least where we could show specialised product if the distributor is going to produce a print and also if he is going to spend money on marketing that print.

Q285  Michael Fabricant: I have just been told that it was 1996, seven years, so the situation may indeed have changed.

Mr Jenkins: Oh yes.

Q286  Michael Fabricant: Dick Penny was talking at some length about digital technology and it is not quite there yet but it is getting there. Quite clearly that would get round the problem of the cost of a print, which is a thousand pounds per print which, if you are showing it on several thousand screens, is costing a great deal as a proportion of the marketing and indeed the production budget. What incentive is there for major cinemas to invest in the capital items required? We heard that a projector might be £50,000 at present. Then you have got the storage medium, and we know that that can be very expensive. Then you have got the reception medium for actually downloading it from satellite or from cable or whatever, big infrastructure. What is the incentive from the exhibitor's point of view to invest in that sort of projection equipment if a distributor can provide a print for you anyway?

Mr Jenkins: The only incentive is that you get a better picture on the screen and that you can call on it immediately. There is no incentive financially and that is really why there is a sort of go-slow on digital projection at the moment. The people who are going to benefit are the distributors or the producers on there, and they are not prepared to help fund the cost of the projection equipment.

Q287  Michael Fabricant: Would you like to make a guess as to when you think it will start to be accepted in mainstream cinemas?

Mr Jenkins: There are already digital projectors in certain cinemas. When it becomes general throughout all cinemas, I really do not know. We have been talking about digital projection for ten or 12 years now or more than that. Every time it comes up we come back to who is going to pay. When you are talking of perhaps £70,000 or £80,000 per screen there is a huge investment there. The exhibition industry has already invested since 1985/1986 something over two billion pounds on building new multiplexes for the general public. We just have not got the money now to invest in the digital projectors unless we get help from elsewhere.

Q288  Michael Fabricant: Back to your statement that the screens are available in commercial cinemas. What is the role then for the independent sector like Dick Penny? In the past he was showing films which would not be shown by major exhibitors like yourselves, but you are saying that if the prints are available you would show them if they were half decent films.

Mr Jenkins: I do not think the major circuits are out there to put the independents out of business. With all respect to my colleagues on the left, they only cover a certain part of the country. There are great gaps throughout the country where there is not the independent arthouse cinema. What we can offer as circuits is filling in the gaps without the huge cost of building new arthouse cinemas anywhere in the country. There are screens available. Bristol is very successful so I would not say that there will be a great clamouring from the multiplex operators to put a specialised screen into Bristol because it is already being well served there. However, there are many other areas of the country that are not being well served.

Q289  Michael Fabricant: In Lichfield we do not have a specialised independent cinema or indeed a multiplex. In fact, some would say the only entertainment in Lichfield is me. If I can pursue the line of questioning, back in 1996 when we did our original inquiry it seemed to us that one of the reasons why British film, and we are looking at British film after all in this particular inquiry, did not get the opportunity for exhibitions was because of lack of vertical integration between the production companies, between the distributors and then the ultimate cinema which shows the movie. You are saying all that has changed since then and it is simply down to distribution, insufficient prints?

Mr Jenkins: That is the main problem, yes. Going back to your digital question, I think I am correct in saying that in 2002 there were over 350 films released in the United Kingdom. Out of those 350 there were only 12 that were in digital format. Where is the great incentive for exhibitors to go and spend money when Hollywood or whoever are just not producing them?

Q290  Michael Fabricant: I think you have answered our question.

Mr Wilkinson: Last year there were 62 British films released and 15.6 per cent of the box office was obtained by British film. It has all changed since six years ago.

Q291  Mr Doran: My constituency is in Aberdeen. It is very frustrating to read the London papers and see all these reviews, knowing that most of the films will not reach us. I have to congratulate City Screen because we have had a City Screen cinema now for the last four or five years and that has improved the situation markedly. It does seem to me that your end of the business is remarkably conservative. The major new development over the past ten years has been the multiscreen. Things have got a bit more comfortable, a bit cleaner and tidier, but there is not a lot else in terms of marketing, and you are remarkably risk averse. Is that an accusation you would accept and, if you are going to reject it, tell me why?

Mr Wilkinson: I do not believe that cinema exhibition in this country is risk averse. It is the most innovative area in the world as far as exhibition goes. Our colleagues from the so-called independents, most of whom are members of the CEA, are at the cutting edge of showing films that would not generally be shown. In the multiplexes we have invented ideas, we have increased the screenage but we have also increased the type of screenage. We have gone into luxury builds in certain areas because that is what people have wanted. We have invented things. You might not like it, but the pick-and-mix in cinemas was a British invention. The idea of ringing up and being able to book your seat on the telephone, the UK did that the first of anywhere in the world. We had the first national coverage of information on the telephone of what was on in every cinema in the land set up here. I would say that we do take risks and that we have moved exhibition worldwide. If you look at exhibition where it has expanded in Asia, and if you look at it in China, which is trying to be broken into by, I will accept, many American companies, you will find that the management there has come from the UK. It has come from the independent, subsidised cinema, it has come from the small operator who runs the social screens in the small market towns, which we have not touched on in this conversation so far, who is doing so much to push cinema out into the population of the UK and bring culture to everybody.

Q292  Mr Doran: In the main, if you accept some of the figures I am about to give you, you have failed. The Chairman of easyJet, for example, is obviously looking to compete in your market. I read an article of his in the Financial Times earlier in the week and he is talking about 20 per cent occupancy rates of seats in cinemas in Britain. If that figure is true it is staggering, despite all the efforts that you have talked about.

Mr Wilkinson: I totally agree, but if you look at the population, most people are at work during the day. We open our cinemas at midday and we do not get many people in the afternoon. It is a social service. We make our money on Friday, Saturday and Sunday when we get 60 per cent of the trade. It is effectively ten per cent of our admissions on a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday.

Q293  Mr Doran: He has been a fairly successful businessman in other areas and he seems to think there is a market there if you go out and grab it.

Mr Wilkinson: I do not dispute it.

Mr Jenkins: Sorry; I do dispute that. He is a very successful businessman but I think he has only got one company that is making a profit, so I cannot totally agree with what you are saying.

Q294  Mr Doran: I am not in a position to argue with that, but he has certainly got a lot more money in the bank than I have, so that to me is success. This whole question about programming is one that concerns me because when I look at my local listings in the newspaper at the weekend, even the City Screen cinema, which is our local art cinema, if you like, is having to show the blockbusters. I understand that because they have got to break even. The same films are repeated time after time, and then when I go along to see some of these films, because obviously they are worth seeing, I am sitting in an empty cinema even at peak times often. That is something that concerns me because if there is such pressure to show these films why are people not coming to see them? Clearly, they have got a shelf life but I cannot remember the last time I went to the cinema and found it absolutely jam packed, even 60 per cent which you mentioned just now, Mr Wilkinson. You are all fighting for the same product in the same market.

Mr Jenkins: I think it is true to say that Aberdeen is now over-screened and it is going to be even more over-screened when Odeon open their multiplex. I was the owner of ABC Cinemas for many years and there was the conventional Odeon in Aberdeen and the conventional ABC, so between us we had six screens.

Q295  Mr Doran: Are you saying that is not mirrored in other parts of the country, like Manchester, like Liverpool, like Newcastle, like London?

Mr Jenkins: There are a lot of places that are over-screened, like Aberdeen, and that is why I am saying to the earlier question that there are screens available around the country to put specialised product on at.

Q296  Mr Doran: That takes me on to the next point. There was a discussion earlier when you were speaking to my colleague, Mr Bryant, about the amount of take that there is by the exhibitors. We had the Director of Bend It Like Beckham, Gurinder Chadha, and she said directly to us in evidence that despite the fact that her film was extremely successful it did not make a profit in the UK and she blamed the fact that the exhibitors and distributors took 75 per cent and it did not make a profit until she broke into the American and Australian markets. That is a fairly worrying situation, particularly for us, if we are looking at the health of the British film industry. Can you tell me how that can happen?

Mr Jenkins: No. To be honest, I am quite astonished that she said that she could not make a profit in the UK.

Q297  Mr Doran: She was quite explicit about that.

Mr Jenkins: We can only answer for exhibitors, everyone at this table. We know roughly what the split is, what exhibitors give distributors. I could not tell you what distributors give the producers.

Mr Christie: The cinema industry obviously is a very strange kind of industry. Somebody once described it as a prototype-only industry: every film is a prototype and has to bear all the costs of development, of being that unique prototype. A film like Bend It Like Beckham, which will be very successful indeed, has reached the lift-off point and a great deal of its revenue will come after money has been spent on it in the early stages to give it that visibility, to give it that reach and that spread. It will continue to earn money at a much higher level than most British films as it moves down through all the secondary stages of its economic life. It will be on video shelves, it will be on television, etc, and that is increasingly where a film of that type earns its money. Indeed, it is where large budget films also earn their money, but the prototype effect is very damaging for low budget British films. It simply cannot get over the hump in the early stages when everything it stacked against it. Much film exhibition is done at a loss to the producer.

Q298  Mr Flook: Can we quickly look at what the cost is of going to see a blockbuster and in the same town going to see an independent film?

Mr Wilkinson: The average price paid last year was £4.25 for cinema admissions. That was the average over the year for everyone. The average cost of going to a multiplex on a Saturday night after six o'clock when the full prices come in was £5.37. I am not saying that there not higher ones but that was the average.

Mr Penny: The independent sector tends to have a more common pricing structure across the week. There are some variations but not as many. Just below £5 would be the average, no marked difference.

Q299  Mr Flook: So about ten per cent cheaper?

Mr Penny: Yes.

Q300  Mr Flook: I get the impression that you are different parts of the same industry in the sense that you guys are not asking for any subsidy and you guys are asking for a bigger subsidy.

Mr Penny: Again, there are shades of grey within it. The largest operator in the specialised sector is City Screen. In the main they operate totally commercially, but of course what that means - and you have heard the example of Aberdeen - is that the degree of specialism is not as great. What we have is shades right across the spectrum. Where City Screen have benefited from having support is in being able to develop new sites, so capital assistance which had previously come from the Arts Council. If I could ask Jason to come in for a minute, there has been quite a bit on education as well.

Mr Wood: Yes. Not only have we developed new sites, but what we have tried to do is significantly contribute to film culture through education, touring packages, as well as taking many of the BFI touring packages on great film makers, such as Visconti(?), who is doing very well at the moment with The Leopard, Bergman, Ozou(?). We have also put together our own touring packages, retrospectives and seasons throughout City Screen sites. We recently brought over a series of films from Kazakhstan. We are doing a new European season of ten films from countries about to enter the European Union in 2004. We do very much try and implement our own culturally varied programmes of films and, as I say, we tour those throughout the City Screen sites and make them available to our colleagues in the AIFE. We also try and support film makers that would not ordinarily get screened. We recently distributed a film ourselves called AKA by a film maker called Duncan Roy. The reason we were able to do this was that we only released it on 135 ml print. We actually released it on digi-beta and beta tapes, which is the very low end; it is very cheap to do. We are trying to provide screens and screening spaces for people that otherwise would not have a voice and also to serve the community.

Mr Penny: It is not so much that we are asking for more subsidy. What we are suggesting is that if we do want to promote amore diverse cinema culture we need investment and that needs to be targeted and sustained investment.

Q301  Mr Flook: But is that not a local authority issue rather than a parliamentary one?

Mr Penny: As I say, if you look at any other art form you will find that it is about partnership between national bodies and local bodies, and certainly that is what happens with specialised exhibitors. It is just a much smaller network than it is for, say, theatre or for visual arts.

Q302  Mr Flook: In Taunton the local authority, which is now no longer controlled by the party that did control it, kept Odeon from expanding because they wanted a cinema in the centre of the town rather than one on the edge of the town. The fact is that the one on the edge of the town was very successful; their hopes for one in the centre of town are not going to come to fruition for several years, and I am sure that the people of Taunton would want an expanded Odeon before they would want an art house, by a long shot.

Mr Penny: I suspect that the majority would. We represent a very specialist part of the market. We are probably three per cent of the market.

Mr Wilkinson: It is 1.58 per cent.

Mr Penny: However, what we would argue is that that is an absolutely vital part of the market for the future. Yes, we are specialist but does everybody eat at McDonalds? They do not. What we need is a diversity of culture and a diversity of offer.

Q303  Mr Flook: We are here to look at whether there is a British film industry. If we were to subsidise you we would be subsidising not just the British film industry, so technically it does not come within the remit of what we are looking at, whereas if we subsidised film makers, film producers, film distributors, we could as a country much more direct it at the British film industry rather than what you choose to see as culturally relevant, which could come from anywhere in the world.

Mr Penny: Anywhere in the world, absolutely. I would argue that cinema is a world industry now, that if British films are going to make a profit they need to make a profit on the world stage. Our film makers need to understand what is coming from other cultures in the world so that they can really express in the most exciting, innovative, diverse way the messages that they want to put out. If we see ourselves as an isolated territory then we are guaranteed to fade.

Q304  Mr Flook: But you do not need to go to the cinema to do it. You can watch it on TV.

Mr Penny: You can watch it on the TV. The cinema is the shop window for film. There is no doubt that a film will play better on all other media if it has done well in the cinema. Also, what cinema offers is social collective experiences. It offers the opportunity for people to debate a product, to debate the ideas, to share cultural experiences. Just go back to the statement I made from the Film Council's own policy, that film and moving images are the single most important source of education, information and culture in the world today, what goes out from the British film producers that works goes across the world. TV programmes do not necessarily do so.

Q305  Ms Shipley: You said that you aimed to bring culture to everyone. How do you define "culture" in that context because obviously blockbuster is a culture.

Mr Jenkins: Specialised culture, I suppose.

Q306  Ms Shipley: Do you think it is important by your definition that that is supported?

Mr Jenkins: Supported, as I said earlier, meaning really supporting the distribution companies.

Q307  Ms Shipley: Do you think this cultural aspect by your definition of culture is an important part of the industry?

Mr Jenkins: Yes, I do.

Q308  Ms Shipley: Why?

Mr Jenkins: Because it gives a much broader outlook for the public.

Q309  Ms Shipley: Having established that, you told me that you cannot get hold of prints and so on, so what could you do that you are not doing that would help support this need for cultural diversity, that would enrich the industry? What could you specifically do?

Mr Jenkins: We cannot do anything. Without the actual product there is nothing we can do.

Q310  Ms Shipley: So the only way to get the product would be to pay, obviously?

Mr Jenkins: Yes.

Q311  Ms Shipley: So you think that the taxpayer should pay?

Mr Jenkins: No.

Q312  Ms Shipley: Who should pay then?

Mr Jenkins: The producers, the distributors, they should take as much of a gamble as we take in putting that film out hoping that it is going to make a profit.

Q313  Ms Shipley: At the moment you do not think they are paying enough?

Mr Jenkins: There is a reluctance on their part.

Q314  Ms Shipley: With a percentage of profit from the various segments of the industry specifically hypothecated to feed back in, would that be a useful loop?

Mr Jenkins: No.

Q315  Ms Shipley: Why not? You have just said the producers and distributors should pay. I only added you in as exhibitors and you could negotiate different percentages. Why could you not all pay a small percentage of your profit?

Mr Wilkinson: We would not be paying, would we, the public would be paying. When there was the Edie (?) levy it was passed on and it was 11 per cent. In the same way in France currently the VAT is 10.3 and the balance is paid on the levy which makes it up to the standard rate of VAT of 17 per cent, so they do not notice the difference. So if you wanted to suggest ---

Q316  Ms Shipley: I am not suggesting that actually. I am quite interested then that you really do think the producers and distributors are taking too much profit out of the industry and really they should be required somehow to put it back in. You did say when I asked should it be the taxpayer, no, it should be the distributors and producers, so what mechanism would you use?

Mr Wilkinson: Retained profit. One of the problems of the British film industry, as you noted at your last inquiry, was that films in the United Kingdom were made in one-off episodes and that there were no companies. The Lottery through the Arts Council did put funding into six organisations to try and create embryonic British studios.

Q317  Ms Shipley: I am sorry, that is not what we were just discussing. I was interested in the idea that producers and distributors should pay more of their profit, I understood to support the industry, because it is vital for cultural diversity and everything, that was the argument, so I do not understand what the mechanism is for them to do it. I am interested in knowing because I think it would be useful.

Mr Jenkins: I do not think they should put more of their profit in. What I am saying is the exhibition industry, be it independents or majors, has invested over the last few years an awful lot of money in bringing to the UK 3,800 ---

Q318  Ms Shipley: But you have only done that to make yourself profit, it is not philanthropic.

Mr Jenkins: So distributors and producers should look at it in the same way. They should invest in the product that is put into the cinema.

Q319  Ms Shipley: You have not invested and you just said you would not invest a percentage of your profit to enrich the industry. You are only doing it to make profit for your investors, presumably, nothing wrong with that, but you are not ploughing it back into the industry.

Mr Jenkins: We are ploughing it back in by giving people the luxury and comfort they want to go and see these films.

Ms Shipley: No, you are not, no.

Chairman: I am going to have to move on. We are 13 minutes late for the next group of witnesses. Gentlemen, I would like to thank you very much for your different and variegated experience. You have been extremely helpful.

 

Memoranda submitted by the BBC and ITV Network Ltd

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: MR ALAN YENTOB, Director of Drama, Entertainment and Children's Entertainment, MS CAROLINE THOMSON, Director of Public Policy, BBC; MR CLIVE JONES, Joint Managing Director of ITV Network Ltd, MR JOHN CRESSWELL, Chief Operations Officer, Granada, and MR PIERS CALDECOTE, Corporate Planning, Mergers and Acquisitions, Carlton Communications, ITV, examined.

Chairman: Lady and gentlemen, thank you very much indeed for coming, sorry for a bit of a delay due to the large number of questions to the previous collection of witnesses. Michael Fabricant?

Q320  Michael Fabricant: I would like to ask Alan Yentob, first of all, about the BBC, with fewer people now working for the BBC and more contract staff, training has rather been reduced in the Corporation from what it was. In that sort of context what is it that the BBC does offer British film?

Mr Yentob: I would like to correct that assumption, as I understand it. The fact is that the BBC is certainly looking at our training again but we are not training less than we did and we contribute to the key funding areas for Skill Set, for instance, and for the National Film School. In addition to that, we are still training cameraman. I knew this was an issue here and I can say that there were three camera training courses last year and there were over 2,000 delegate days and, of course, in that sense we are training a much wider cross-section than just people in the BBC. I think the issue arises for some of these crafts because we are not training for film any more, we are training essentially for video, but we are as committed as ever to training and to making a significant contribution to broadcast skills.

Q321  Michael Fabricant: There is a very different technique involved in filming and using ENG and other techniques. Caroline, you were trying to come in.

Ms Thomson: I was going to say, if I could add to correct the factual point, the training on these skills areas, outside management training and radio training, has gone up from £4.8 million to £6.1 million in the last three years.

Q322  Michael Fabricant: I am glad you have set the record straight because that is contrary to what we were led to believe with previous witnesses. There is a perception, and perhaps that is wrong as well, that the number of films produced by the BBC for theatrical and television broadcasts has reduced over the last five years? Can you give us some indication of the number of finished films that have been produced in each of the last five years? I do not know if you have that data.

Mr Yentob: I can give you a proportion if you are trying to compare it with the amount of money and investment and numbers of American product. Is that what you are referring to?

Q323  Michael Fabricant: Not really, I am talking about British film, that is what our inquiry is about. The BBC makes good British films on the whole but the perception is that the amount of films produced by the BBC has reduced over the last five years.

Mr Yentob: It is not true. I do not know if I can give you an absolute list but let me just show you something I have as a little prop here. I have just come back from Cannes and I got them free of charge at the Carlton Hotel, and that is BBC films on the front cover of Variety this week. This Variety is not just in Cannes, it is Hollywood Variety.

Q324  Michael Fabricant: Is that an advert or editorial?

Mr Yentob: This is actually an advert and if you want to know how much, I can tell you how much it cost. The point is there are about ten British films in production currently or which have gone out this year, so we have absolutely increased that investment, and there is also an article in today's Newsweek referring to the phenomenon of the smaller independent producer who provides an alternative to the American studios which, by and large, are increasingly franchising their product. In other words, whether it is Men in Black or The Matrix, which is opening just now, there tends to be a methodology now that you do a film and then you replicate it, and I think increasingly there is a space for the smaller European independent unit.

Q325  Michael Fabricant: You mention 10 films, are these feature length films or does this include shorts?

Mr Yentob: No, these are feature films. It is a fact that we are making more films than we made before. Can I make one point about it which is about how people make films. Films, by and large, are made in partnership, and a number of people invest. The key money is in development. Can you invest in development? Are you prepared to take risks? The more you invest in development the more you ought to be able to control the product and be able to concede the film and therefore I think the investment early on is absolutely crucial, so these are films and the BBC, with the investment that we make which is a minimum of £10 million, can actually deliver quite a lot of films.

Q326  Michael Fabricant: Finally, may I just ask you this, it is very encouraging what you have had to say so far, but once you have made these films what are the arrangements you have with distributors? I think you were present when we identified that the main problem it would seem with getting British films distributed is the number of prints being made available. Does the BBC invest in the production of the prints and the marketing? Do you do it through an outside distributor? What are your arrangements overseas for the distribution of films for cinematographic display?

Mr Yentob: I think one has to acknowledge that the key distributors are very often the big American studios. As far as the BBC's policy is concerned, we have made a point of not having an on-going relationship with any one distributor because we believe that each film requires an appropriate distributor. We have found some of the British distributors to be good at that job. It is a fact that you need marketing skills to distribute effectively and clearly the American studios, especially if they are investors in the film, can put some clout behind them, but the truth is that quite a lot of smaller films do not necessarily get distributed. I have to say that the BBC's record over the years has been pretty good. We do not tend to make films which we do not believe have distribution outlets. I think the problems come with the art films, the smaller films. I can give you one example which would not have been made without the BBC, In This World, the Michael Winterbottom film, which is currently in distribution here, won the Golden Bear at Venice, that film is in very small cinemas, places like the ICA and maybe eight or nine cinemas. I was listening to this idea that you could be more imaginative about how you window films, in other words, you could spread them over a longer period but do not put them out on every screen all the time. I think the real problem arises around the issue of smaller films. As you know, Chanel Four attempted to be a distributor as well and they found that very difficult to achieve.

Q327  Mr Doran: £10 million sounds like quite a lot but as a proportion of the expenditure on British films it is quite a small proportion. There was a survey recently by Screen Finance which suggested that around about five per cent of the UK industry is financed by the television companies, including the ITV companies, and others, whereas in France and Spain the figures are very much higher, around 37 and a half per cent. French film production is financed by the various commercial and state television companies. In Spain it is about 35 per cent so on that parameter we do not do very well in the UK.

Mr Yentob: Again, I may not hold the same views as everyone else. I believe that films, if they are going to be made for the cinema, have to be seen at the cinema. There does not seem any point to me making a lot of films that do not get distribution. The French have subsidised, it is true, French film-making over the years though it does not make French films better than they were 20 or 30 years ago.

Q328  Mr Doran: They are pretty good 20 or 30 years ago.

Mr Yentob: They were, exactly. Again, it is how strategically you use that money. The key thing is getting those films off the ground. Once they are off the ground and you have got talent attached, I think it is quite possible to get investment from other areas. Production money can be high risk, again as Channel 4 discovered.

Q329  Chairman: The ITV witnesses are very welcome indeed to answer questions which they feel relate to their activities.

Mr Jones: I was going to respond once Alan had finished.

Mr Yentob: Go ahead.

Mr Jones: I think it is important to recognise that broadcasting is orchestrated in a different way and regulated in a different way in the United Kingdom than it is in France particularly and other parts of Europe, therefore TFR, which is the French equivalent of ITV, is paying 100 million euros into the French film industry whereas ITV is paying £250 million in supertaxes to the British government. We are investing over £350 million a year into the top end of drama - Dr Zhivago, Bloody Sunday - some of these things are shown on theatrical release in the UK, and TFR is paying nothing like that. You will not find a lot of American product or a lot of acquired product in peak time on ITV, you will find original production, original British programming. That is what we are required to do, that is what we are encouraged to do under the previous Broadcasting Act and under the new Communications Act, so they are not directly comparable.

Mr Doran: I was not going to ignore ITV just in case you thought I was before the Chairman intervened. Figures for the BBC by national comparison are poor enough but ITV, with the exception of Channel 4, is a lot worse.

Chairman: Could you memorise that question. We will come back as soon as we can.

The Committee suspended from 15.56 to 16.07 for a division in the House.

Chairman: Order, we have a quorum.

Q330  Mr Doran: I was asking about the contribution that the ITV network makes to film-making and I think the BBC figure I quoted was around about five; I think the ITV figure is close to zero.

Mr Jones: I do not think it is close to zero. First of all, there is the training point, the ITV licences invested £12 million last year in training, and I would argue very strongly the investment we put into training, whether it is into writing, whether it is into cameras, or whether it is into sound recording, is certainly at the top end of drama production. There is an enormous interchange between television and film. We support that interchange between television and film and we constantly contribute to support that pool of talent whether it is acting talent or writing talent which works in drama and works in films made in Britain and films financed in Britain and made by British technicians entirely. You have to look at the cycle. Investing in films is a very risky business. You can lose your shirt and I am running a commercial, public company and I am here to make money, not lose my shareholders their shirts.

Q331  Mr Doran: Is that because historically, and Chanel 4 is the best recent example, they have not done it particularly well or is it because it is an innately risky business? We have heard from Mr Yentob that you can do it selectively and carefully and I think the BBC had some significant successes, as did Channel 4 previously.

Mr Jones: I think we have and I applaud Alan's success and I applauded Channel 4's success, I think it is a very good thing, but it is an innately risky business. You can have success and you can have failure and I am trying to run a mass market channel and deliver success to viewers and advertisers every night of the week, so I am cautious about investing money up-front. I could buy a package of films virtually sight unseen but film-makers rarely want to sell them that way. I do invest in another way, I do buy films from both British film-makers and American film studios on the basis of their success at the box office so I am investing in film, I am just investing at the back end. There is one further point. Of the 500 top programmes shown on ITV last year, none of them were films. Only 3.7 per cent of the top 1,000 programmes shown on ITV last year were films.

Q332  Mr Doran: Is that not because by the time you get a film it has been on widespread release, it has been through the video process and pay TV, et cetera?

Mr Jones: I think that is a factor in it. There was a time 10 or 12 years ago where they did not go through that cycle where films were more successful on ITV than BBC but fundamentally I think British television viewers want to watch British production. They would much prefer to watch the Caroline Quentin drama that we showed last night and at the weekend or Inspector Morse or Inspector Frost or Midsomer Murders or Foyle's War than they would ever want to watch movies.

Q333  Mr Doran: Obviously Continental television producers see some virtue in having some control over the products that you both spend an awful lot of money on, because you both buy in films for display, and clearly for the films the BBC produces you have some control over when you show them on television, what you do with them, whether you release them on video and all the rest of it, whereas now in competition with pay-per-view companies and the satellite companies you are quite a little bit down the pecking order.

Mr Yentob: We are. If you pay for it you get it, but you have to pay for it so the window for satellite does mean your transmission is delayed. One of the reasons that these figures are slightly out about how many films we show at any time is the period after a film has been made and distributed in the cinema to the point it gets onto terrestrial television can be as much as three and a half years. It can take a very long time. If you want the first window you have to pay more. I look at it in each case for every film. If it is a film that we have made and had substantial input in, like Billy Elliot, there is a not a Sky window or satellite window, it goes straight, but lots of other films go through that windowing process.

Q334  Mr Doran: I understand that but you are spending millions on buying these films in and obviously the Spaniards and French and perhaps other countries that I have not mentioned see a commercial reason for making the heavy investment they make, which clearly you do not see, so what is so different?

Mr Yentob: First of all, the French film industry and, until Vivendi took it over, however you want to look at it (that was a short-lived scenario mind you) and the Spanish film industry are in a sense autonomous, they are not dominated by the American distribution system but if you are, by and large, involved with the American distribution market and the American studios, if you invest equity and if it is net when do you get it back? You see all these disputes going on with the American studios about what it costs and when they have got their money back so it is a risky business to invest £5 billion in equity because you may not get it back for a very long time and our business is to get the very best work on screen, to try to get the work which features the British actors and British writers, and we have been pretty successful at that lately. That does not mean, however, that when it comes to a very profitable film that you might necessarily get a huge amount out of it. You will have of course British rights in perpetuity for a considerable amount of time and that in itself can be a very valuable asset.

Mr Jones: I think it is also the point of the differing viewing habits and tastes in the different parts of the European Union. Whether it is France, whether it is Germany or Italy, there will be a lot of American acquisitions on the screen, whether they are series or whether they are movies, yet if you look at British television, particularly the main terrestrial channels, I doubt there is any night of the week when there is not good home-produced drama available on the BBC and ITV and possibly on Channel 4 and Channel 5 as well, so it is about this British desire for original British production as distinct from American acquired series or American movies.

Ms Thomson: If I can add one point, I do not know the detail about the different regulatory systems, but just looking through some briefing notes I have here, it may be that the difference is partly accounted for by the mix of regulation and tax break systems there are in France and Spain. For example, in Spain you can offset 25 per cent of your corporation tax against investment in films and it may well be that that encourages the private broadcasters to invest in film.

Mr Yentob: It is the same in Germany.

Ms Thomson: In France, Canal Plus has a regulation that it has to spend a fifth of its budget on films so that a combination of stick and carrot in the regulatory tax framework may be one of the things that accounts for it.

Mr Doran: Do you foresee something like that for the BBC and ITV network?

Q335  Mr Bryant: I take from that point the fact that we could if we wanted address the concerns that we have had from a lot of other people who have appeared before us as witnesses, their concern as broadcasters in the world of film, and we could start to insist on a few more sticks and carrots.

Mr Yentob: First of all, if you are going to provide incentives - and tax breaks are very valuable, nobody is going to resist that - remember you cannot prescribe that people are going to go and see the films and in Spain, I suppose, they want to see French language films and German language films on the screen. So I would say it is still high risk. Whatever you put in in terms of incentive, we would have to take the money from something else, British drama I suppose.

Q336  Mr Bryant: I would have to check the figures but I think it is true that French cinema-goers watch more American films than the British do.

Mr Yentob: They do.

Q337  Mr Bryant: It does not seem as if their quota system really works very effectively. There are two things that broadcasters do in relation to films. One is you make films and the other thing is you show films and I guess many of our childhood experience of watching television was the big Bond movies on ITV, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and the Sound of Music every Christmas and Easter in perpetuity on the BBC, and a hefty dose of things like Spencer Tracy and the old films like Brief Encounter and so on and that world does not seem to exist any more. I am not sure, Clive, whether you are saying that people do not want to watch films any more on TV.

Mr Jones: They are still watching the Bond movies. We are still buying the Bond movies and we are still putting them out on a regular basis, so that tradition still continues. I suppose it was discussed earlier, films go through various iterations before they now get to television. There is the theatrical release, there might be a first premium pay release, a pay section in video, a rental section in video and DVD, you are then going on possibly to a second tier pay window, so it is three/three and a half years before it gets to television, so they do not have that magical appeal, it is not a new experience or a relatively new experience by the time they come to television. Apart from a limited number of American blockbusters in the case of the BBC and ITV we are buying far less films than we ever did before because it is usually more effective to invest £600,000, which is the going rate for a hour of British drama, because you get a high-quality product and in our experience we get a lot more viewers than buying in American movies. That said, we still do deals with Universal and Warner Brothers and we still buy American films and British made films; we just buy less than we did.

Q338  Mr Bryant: You referred to Midsomer Murders. Some people accuse American movies of having too much violence but in Midsomer there is hardly a person standing in such a small village.

Mr Jones: I think we have murdered most of Oxford.

Mr Bryant: Can I ask about foreign language films because it was great to see The Devil's Backbone on BBC4 ---

Chairman: I honestly do not want to control what you are saying and I could not if I wanted to but this is about British films.

Q339  Mr Bryant: In which case I think you have forbidden me from asking the question I going to so I shall not ask it.

Mr Yentob: We have responded in the paper.

Mr Bryant: If you are saying I cannot ask my question, I cannot ask my question.

Chairman: Go on and ask it.

Q340  Mr Bryant: Mr Yentob, you said that one of the jobs of the BBC is to bring the very best work on film to audiences in the UK. If you look at the some of the very best British films or European foreign language films over the last ten years, how many of those have been seen on BBC1 or BBC2?

Mr Yentob: The very best British films have been seen on British television I would say, unequivocally, in fact some of the not very good British films have been shown on British television because Channel 4 particularly commission so many, and they did not get into the cinema. I am sympathetic to your view about foreign language films. One of the things I would say to you is that the world has changed and the cinema distributors sat here and told you that people are not even going to the cinema to see foreign language films so what you are getting, paradoxically, is a situation where the broadcaster, certainly the BBC, has now gone in to partnership with a number of European film makers so that they are joint ventures and BBC4, in particular, has done this. Although I am sympathetic I would say that there is less viewing of foreign language films.

Q341  Mr Bryant: When was the last one on BBC1 or BBC2?

Mr Yentob: My memory is that the last significant presence of a foreign language film was a repeated Drug addicts Boot for the nth time apparently very successful. They have been but they are not a regular feature and they are not a feature, more importantly, of Channel 4's portfolio.

Q342  Mr Bryant: Or a British Shakespeare film?

Mr Yentob: That is different. A Shakespeare film has been made and shown and the BBC is about to invest in a significant Shakespeare initiative which will see Shakespeare projects on all three channels. That is slightly beyond your remit.

Q343  Mr Bryant: There have been quite a few British films in recent years of Shakespeare, Much Ado, for instance.

Mr Yentob: They have, Chris, they have all been shown. Much Ado was shown on the BBC.

Chairman: Okay, Chris?

Mr Bryant: Thank you for allowing me to ask my question.

Q344  Derek Wyatt: Mr Murdoch is quite good at looking at things and turning them upside down because he has a film studio in his remit and television and pay-per-view. If he were to move the goalposts to premiering pay-per-view first before it had theatrical release, would that alter any of your thinking about investing in film, if that proved to be successful?

Mr Jones: I do not think so necessarily. I think there is a change happening in the distribution chain. It would seem to me, I am saying this anecdotally because I have no statistical evidence or analysis to prove this, that theatrical release in some films is getting shorter and shorter and shorter and they are moving very nimbly and quickly to areas of DVD and video release and then into pay per view. I suspect that is going to shorten and quicken, but I do not necessarily think that it will change the way that we approach it because it is still that extended tail before it can come to us and we can put it into distribution. So I think the debate we would constantly have both within ITV and I guess within the BBC is do we invest in TV drama or occasional TV movies or do we invest in films that go into theatrical release first?

Mr Yentob: I do not disagree with that. I think there will be new methods of distribution and I think we will have to accept that that is going to change. That is why, of course, the bigger films are always the ones which in the end become more of a treat on television, more surprising to get on television, so this question of cinema distribution for the smaller films in a way goes against the grain because there ought to be enough television channels to show these kind of films anyway. Would they cost that much? No, they would not. So even £1 million for a film that would get a small audience in a cinema it is difficult to get a return on investment. Probably a lot of that will come from television at the end of the day and DVD and distribution, it is just a window, a marketing opportunity.

Q345  Derek Wyatt: Looking at the European model of films, which seem different in each country, do you think there is a line where you could start to say there should be some sort of cultural licence fee that is different as we move towards the future of how we might fund culture on television? Perhaps we ought to look and say ten per cent of that might be allocated to British film and culture. Do you think that is a development that is likely to happen?

Mr Jones: I am very wary of having further quotas on ITV. I am very happy to show British films as long as they are good British films, and they can be very popular and attract big audiences at peak time. I do not want a quota that I have to put out poor British films.

Mr Yentob: I agree, I think it would be imprudent to do that.

Mr Jones: So the government should not do anything more to help British film?

Mr Yentob: I think tax incentives are important but 10 per cent is quite a significant figure. I think you need to feel that that is going to actually deliver culturally as well.

Ms Thomson: I am going to have to go back to the point Alan was making originally, which is that the point in doing this is to fund films which will get a theatrical release and people will want to watch in the cinema. It seems to me the risk about developing a big fund, a bit like the Arts Council for film, if this is what you are meaning, is whether you will get any more films that people want to see that will get theatrical release, and I think the experience with Channel 4 was that it was very difficult.

Mr Jones: There are three areas which government should concentrate on in support. There is the Communications Bill which has gone through the Commons and is currently before the Lords, maintaining a strong public service broadcasting sector with a big emphasis on original production for both ITV, Channel 4 and the BBC, which I think is essential because of all the training points I made earlier. There are loads of directors from Coronation Street or BBC drama who have gone into making movies or writing movies so I think that training synergy is important. I think retaining section 48 tax relief is important. It works and it has put a lot of money into British film alongside the Lottery. I would focus on distribution. I think that is where the problems are, that is where the stranglehold seems to be. It does not seem to be a problem with training, it does not seem to be a problem with potential monies being available to British film-makers. The problem seems to be the films are made and they do not get distributed. I am not expert enough to resolve that problem.

Q346  Derek Wyatt: Do you think that is something for the OFT or the National Audit Office? How do we tickle this? It seems to me they have too strong a say over what is going on.

Mr Cresswell: For Granada we produce a lot of drama and until recently quite a few films. The difference between the two is that TV production is demand-led whereas film is supply-led so what you have to try and do is incentivise the people who are choosing, which is the distributors, to put more money back into the production somehow because you need to enable them or encourage them to invest in that way. At the moment the tax breaks all go towards the producer so as a producer I am quite keen to get tax breaks to get my production made. The risks I generally pass on to the distributer and the distributer needs some incentive to come back and actually invest in British films.

Chairman: Thank you, Derek, and thank you very much indeed for your very valuable evidence, we are most grateful to you. We are sorry for the interruption.

 

Memorandum submitted by Women in Film and Television

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: MS JANE CUSSONS, Chief Executive Officer, MS SARAH CURTIS, Producer, MS SALLY HIBBIN, Producer, MS BARBARA BENEDEK, Chair, and MS JOY CHAMBERLAIN, National Film and Television School, Women in Film and Television, examined.

Chairman: Thank you very much indeed, I will ask Frank Doran to start the questioning.

Q347  Mr Doran: I have read your submission and there are a number of interesting points that you make, but it does not seem to me that you distinguish women in film from other parts of the industry. Can you say a little bit about what makes film-making different and why there should be more influence from women in film?

Ms Benedek: I would start by saying that the limited research that exists and that we have done to date shows that there are more women within the television industry than there are within the film industry, possibly because television has more employment, is less freelance. Many of my colleagues who work in the film industry can contribute more. Secondly, we feel that women particularly in the creative areas should be better represented than they are.

Q348  Mr Doran: Let's move back a bit. One of the areas that we have looked at is the way in which training is done in the industry. Is that an area that you have looked at?

Ms Cussons: Yes, it is. I know that we have been in continual touch with Skill Set and we work quite closely with the Film Council because obviously there are certain areas which we have identified where there are significant gender imbalances, particularly in the technical grades in directing and screen writing, and I know that they try and ensure that they have a good proportion of gender balance within the courses, but we believe that for the technical grades certainly girls need more encouragement in schools. I recently did a schools careers advisory day which I wanted to do to find out if this was true, and it does seem to me that a lot could be done at school level with careers advisory officers. A lot of them came up to me and they had no idea that girls could do things like camera, sound, lighting, they were not considered options. I think it would be really helpful if this could be a focus, whether it is for government or through the Film Council or Skill Set, that they could focus to encourage more women to come into that area. The second one that concerns us is work returners, which is a big issue, women stopping to have children when they want to come back. There is a lot of advanced technology and they find it very difficult to retrain. They find childcare a problem and I think they find it very difficult to get back into the industry after stopping to have a family, and if they do not come back you lose a huge powerful part of the workforce, a great creative loss, with a lack of a voice from the woman.

Q349  Mr Doran: Is that not something to do with the nature of the industry? We have recently had introduced new maternity rights, for example, which will affect every female employee, but the industry is basically freelance, is it not?

Ms Benedek: Yes it is and that is a problem. That is one which perhaps Sarah might like to answer.

Ms Curtis: My view about why there is such an imbalance in the technical grades is two-fold but it is partly related to the fact that there are no role models for women working in technical grades in the industry. The statistics on the number of female DPs, or any member of a camera team or any member of the grip team, which is the support team for the camera team, all of those more technical grades, sound recordists, you simply do not find women there. I have been producing films for 14 years and in that time I have had three children and done 10 films. In that time I have seen a lot of very good women. For example, there is someone we call a boom swinger, who is the second person on the sound team, and I was told by the sound recordist who worked with her that she was the best boom swinger he had ever worked with. She had a child and disappeared from the industry because it is not just not possible as it stands at the moment for most women to have children and carry on working on a film. It is just not possible. In all the time I have been producing the only person who has been able to have their children on location is me and that is because I have got sufficient power to make it work that way for me because I am the producer. What I would like to see is a situation in which more women can have the opportunity to have children and carry on working in the film industry. If that can happen you will have more women making their way through to the top grades because, for example, to be a DEPARTMENT it can take 12 to 15 years of apprenticeship. There are four separate stages and for each stage it is accepted you are going to spend three or four years. For men it is no problem and they are happy to become a DEPARTMENT when they are 35 because they have then got 20 or 30 years of useful employment ahead of them. For a women who does not get there until she is 35 it probably means she has had to made some very tough decisions along the way. I think that is a major contributing factor - the fact that women cannot make the sacrifices that they are currently required to make to rise to the top of their technical grades.

Q350  Mr Doran: You sound as though you are a fairly good role model but as a producer you are not in the grades you are mainly concerned about. In a freelance industry how can you make it attractive for the employers? What proposals have you put to them?

Ms Cussons: Sarah did a very useful exercise this morning about the idea of perhaps having childcare facilities available on films.

Ms Curtis: I am the employer so essentially it rests with me, except I have to be forced to do it, which sounds ridiculous but I am accountable for every single penny that is spent on a film and every single penny is pre-allocated and the people who are financing my films are not going to agree to me having a one per levy on their budget to provide childcare for the women on the film that I know need it. I am not sure how it is administered but I think the only way is a percentage of the budget which is ring-fenced and made available to those women that need it.

Q351  Mr Doran: Who would be responsible for that? Would you expect government to introduce a regulation?

Ms Hibbin: When we do a film that has Film Council money in it, we sign off on the equal opportunities policy that we operate as an equal opportunities employer, and in many ways we do actually. I think women probably do give preference to other women and to people from ethnic minority backgrounds, but in public bodies there are far more demands on equal opportunities employers than there are in the film industry. For instance, there is often a duty to have to publicly advertise a job. That would be a non-starter. You could not possibly for 60 jobs of four weeks' duration publicly advertise, you would get 2,000 replies, but it seems to me there ought to be some sort of discussion in the film industry, perhaps led by the Film Council, to look at working conditions so that women with children do get to work, and that would create our own equal opportunities policy which then the Film Council is watchdog of in the way that they are at the moment, if you see what I mean. It seems to me it needs to be much more specifically tailored for the film industry.

Q352  Mr Doran: Appearing before the Committee means that people in the industry will be able to hear what you think and your views. Obviously it is important if you can get on the record some positive ideas about the way forward. You have mentioned one or two. Here is your opportunity.

Ms Benedek: I would like to add that within the Film Council it is not at all clear that they have done a needs audit for freelance women. It is a freelance industry but the focus of the Film Council, quite rightly, has been on creating a sustainable industry and there is a real focus now on training and on diversity and there is a feeling within the Film Council, and more generally, that gender has not been or is not a focus. We feel that in all the auditing that is being done and the monitoring that is being done and the research that is being done, gender must also be a focus and out of the research it is often possible to come up with strategies. There is some very interesting American research that has been done both on films and on television by Professor Martha Lawson at Santiago State University that shows that the more women creatives or executive producers you have, the more women you have on screen and behind the camera, so there is a snowballing effect. There are no good figures on the British film industry, there are not very good figures on the television industry either, so there is a number of things the Film Council can do with the funding they get from government and other bodies, like Pathe and Skill Set, and there seems to be a willingness to do it.

Q353  Mr Doran: Have you spoken to the Film Council about this?

Ms Cussons: Yes, we have. There is a perception that gender is a ticked box, that we are on to other areas of diversity now, which obviously need attention also, but although you might walk into the offices and the administration departments of film and media companies and see lots of women, that is usually the secretarial/administration roles. There are still significant problems out there and women are still hampered in getting on in certain areas throughout the entire industry, and it is not something that has been achieved. There is no assessment, there are no records, there are no figures of where we are now. We sent into you a report that we commissioned recently and obviously we are a charity and we do not have great funds available for this, but we were aware that there is very little research available on where we are now. There is a small proportion done in the Skill Set Census every year but that is just about all and it would be really helpful if the Film Council could continue to include gender in their diversity programme so that it is monitored and we can see where we need to help. We know there are areas like directing. The BFI at the end of last year told us that 350 films were made in the UK in the preceding two years, eight were directed by women, which is not a very good figure. We have set up a scheme to try and address this problem but we cannot do this on our own and we do need help. We need this to be recognised throughout the industry that there are huge problems and if you do not allow the women through you will not get a diverse and interesting reflection of the culture of British society in our films.

Q354  Mr Bryant: Incidentally, congratulations, you represent quite a lot of really good things that many of us will have seen - Land of Freedom, Mrs Brown, A Very British Coup, a whole series of different things. It is good, but I guess that is not known to the vast majority of people in Britain that there are women involved in the film industry at all because every time you see representatives of the film industry it always seems to be men and that is what has come before us for the most part in this Committee. I have been trying to think through, and I may have this wrong, Britain has probably had more women winning Oscars, if you leave out directors, than men - from Wendy Hiller through to ---

Ms Cussons: It is probably true in acting.

Q355  Mr Bryant: Yes, that is partly what made me think. Glenda Jackson, Vanessa Redgrave, Judy Dench, Emma Thompson (but not for acting, for writing) and also I think the designer of Elizabeth who has designed quite a lot of other films won an Oscar for costumes.

Ms Hibbin: And the girls on costume and make up for the Mike Lee film recently.

Q356  Mr Bryant: I just wonder what we could do to build on that because that is quite a body of enormously successful people.

Ms Hibbin: But they are all in these grades that women take, they are all in acting, et cetera. There a joke that goes round the film industry which says that if a job involves sitting down women do it, if it involves standing up, men do it. It is very clearly that divide. All those fantastic awards that you have said are about people who largely sit down in jobs, they are in costume, design, the areas that women get into. It is not at the level of directing or of writing or of camera or of sound or of gripping, even gaffing, electrical, whatever, it is just not in those territories.

Q357  Mr Bryant: And special effects?

Ms Cussons: Just about.

Q358  Mr Bryant: Is that because it is a boys thing to do?

Ms Cussons: Yes, I think it is looked on as a boys thing. The one thing that really concerns us is the directing and the writing because Sarah and Sally are both hugely experienced and successful producers and they are right at the top of their field, but the director is the one that is out there and the director is the one that is reflecting it onto the screen and it will be essentially the director's vision. If it is always a male vision then you will not have a film that can speak with a woman's voice.

Ms Benedek: There are some statistics from America which show that when there is at least one woman in the senior creative positions the films do better at the box office, aside from the big weapons films, but they do speak to an audience which is a cinema going audience.

Ms Chamberlain: I would like to say something further about training because you were asking what positive things we could suggest. I am in the business of training the next generation of directors and cinematographers and at the National Film and Television School we are very concerned to try and promote diversity as much as possible. I went back over the last ten years to look at our figures and we are actually doing much better than the industry as a whole but it is still not that great. Basically the number of applications from women applying to do directing over the last ten years has remained fairly steady, it is about 30 per cent of the applications to the directing department come from women and we take in between 40 and 50 per cent. With cinematography it is about 21 to 25 per cent of the applications came from women ten years ago and that is now up to 30 per cent, so that has been a growth area. In terms of the intake, that has gone from 30 to 35 per cent. I do not know how much you know about the film school, but we take people after they have already made a start, so they have to have made a film directly or worked on films before they come to the school and they are usually in their mid-20s by the time they come and when they graduate they do go straight into the industry and we have a very good record. All those women who have graduated in the last six years are all working at the moment. Most of them are working in television, they tend to work on things like Hollyoaks, but we have had two who have had funding, one from the Film Council to make a feature film and she only graduated three years ago. There are the women out there and they are all extremely talented and once they get out into the industry and start work they get hired again and again. What we are finding is that we have hit a level now where we are not really getting more women applying and my feeling about this is that we are struggling to find education and training for the people before they come to our school. A lot of the courses that people go on are media studies courses which are pretty useless, but a lot of the women have got their start by going on regional training schemes, working as assistants to other people, doing short courses here and there. What I have found when tracking through the applicants is that the ones that have been successful are the ones who have had the most technical training before they come and that includes the directors as well. I think that gives them more of an all round experience and it also gives them much more confidence in terms of working with their careers and things. I think it is important to start way back at secondary school and encourage women to do computer courses and to do photography courses. I am getting women students who know much more about computers than I do although that seems to be changing a little bit at the moment, so they are coming in and they already now how to edit their films on computers and some of them are interested in doing special effects. There is that level before they come, but then there is also that level afterwards because they can go in and they can work on Hollyoaks and Casualty and things like that, but to make that leap up to directing feature films is the real problem and it is something that is really across the industry, not just women, but since the industry has become virtually freelance we have lost those benefits that we used to have from the great days of the BBC and Play for Today. Most of the great British film directors did their apprenticeship with the BBC doing Play for Today and one-off dramas and we need to find more of those slots to give women experience. The feeling seems to be that the industry is willing to take a chance with men based on what they think their potential is, but women actually have to have proved themselves, you are taken on what you have done, there is less willingness to take risks.

Ms Curtis: The female director is a relatively rare species. The majority of male executives do not come across one very often and that is the problem. Part of the problem with female directors is they do not see other female directors out there doing it.

Q359  Mr Bryant: That is true in the theatre as well. There is Katie Mitchell, but there are not all that many, are there?

Ms Curtis: No, there are not.

Q360  Mr Bryant: Interestingly, one of the things you are saying is about directors being the key but the other is the writers because if you have not got women writers producing women parts it is a vicious circle. There are lots of women writing novels.

Ms Cussons: Yes there are, absolutely.

Q361  Mr Bryant: I know this is a sitting down profession, but I think we are accepting it is an important sitting down job. Why are women not writing for film?

Ms Benedek: I chair the jury of the Film Council screen writing award for the women in film and television awards and the head of development and a number of directors were astonished that our long list was our shortlist and we sat around talking about why this was and how we could help it and we are now beginning to work with the Film Council on ways of encouraging women into writing, but we did not know the answer.

Ms Cussons: I did go to see the Film Council last week about this very issue and we sat there and we were discussing why and what the reason is, I am trying to persuade the Film Council and I would like to see them do something in this area to try and encourage more female script writers and we came up with the fact that perhaps we could do some small scheme which is open just to women script writers. They had to admit that the majority of the scripts that they get in were written by men.

Ms Hibbin: I think it is also to do with the mystification of work. In the same way that all the talk about camera lenses and what stops is all very mystified, there is also something about writing with people like Robert Key and all those people who talk about the art of script writing which is a mystification process and when you are writing a novel you sit down and write your own, but when you write a script there is this body of stuff that people cite such as incidents after the 13th minute or whatever it is that people think you have to abide by. It seems to me script writing has exactly that same mystification as you get in the more technical grades.

Ms Curtis: And yet it is my view that for those companies in receipt of the Film Council development funding that ought to come with a little postscript saying "... and you will commission one screenplay a year from a female writer as part of the deal" because those deals which the companies get are a fantastic bonus for those companies and there is absolutely no reason why they should not have to work a little bit harder and go out and look for those female screen writers and maybe take a bit of a risk, but it is only going to be one project out of four or five that they fund each year and it will be worth doing. I am a great supporter of a little bit of positive discrimination from time to time.

Q362  Mr Bryant: I am sorry that the Committee today is solely male, but our female colleagues had to present their apologies.

Ms Hibbin: Barbara talked about gender being a disappearing subject, it is like a box that we have already ticked and we have done that, passed that, it is out of sight. You are aware that the Government appointed film board of the Film Council has one woman on it.

Q363  Derek Wyatt: I would like you to be less timid about fighting for what seems to me not an unreasonable request. Forgive me, I have had a marketing background in media, but surely a deal with Marie Claire and the British Film Council and I do not know who the other people ought to be in that stakeholding pattern --- This is public money and we should encourage women to be proactive. It is not good enough, I think you are too timid, although it is probably because you are realistic as well.

Ms Hibbin: It could be that we are sitting here and we are less timid ourselves.

Q364  Derek Wyatt: The Committee might reflect on it when we come to our report, but that would be my view.

Ms Cussons: It would be good certainly to see more women in the boardroom and the Film Council would be a very good start and to see that there is sufficient balance in the Ofcom committee.

Ms Benedek: A word that does not get used very often these days is affirmative action. We held a session of the London Film Festival last autumn where a number of directors and teachers of directing spoke, and I noticed that again in Andrea Calderwood's evidence to you she said that she benefited from a programme targeted directly at women in Glasgow. All of the directors there, Sally Parker, Carrie Adler and Lizzie Franker (she is not a director, she is a producer), benefited from a programme targeted at helping women and we suggested that this should not be an old fashioned term.

Q365  Derek Wyatt: We cannot just keep having Catherine Cookson and Wilber Smith in W H Smith, there must be something else out there. Twenty years ago they were approached because they are the distributer for about 70 per cent of all books in the UK and they had the writer of the year and those first books and first novels have brought massive new writers to the screen.

Ms Cussons: We have just started a scheme. I went to UIP and said that we had to do something about directors, so we have.

Q366  Derek Wyatt: It should be the Film Council's role, should it not?

Ms Cussons: Yes, it should be, but it was not, no. We now have up and running the first round of applications for a scheme called Directing Change which will give two women per year placements with top feature film directors, major commercial features and that is being funded by UIP thanks to Stuart Till. We find it increasingly difficult to get any level of sponsorship and funding for anything. We have just lost a major sponsor.

Q367  Chairman: Is there a difference in the opportunities given for women in film compared with TV? I made a film for the BBC last year and the executive producer was a woman and the director/camera operator was a woman and there was somebody overseeing both of those as well. Are opportunities easier for women in television simply because it is not such a vying world as film is?

Ms Curtis: I think it is a more similar environment. If you are not producing through an independent company, maybe you are working directly for the BBC or one of the ITV companies, it is a much much more stable environment, you can predict your work patterns and you are supported a lot more, whereas the feature industry is a ferociously freelance industry and what happens with women who cannot throw themselves 100 per cent into it at any moment in their lives is they become more and more freelance. They are reduced to taking jobs on a day by day basis because without the back up of the childcare they cannot commit to a long film and that has its own knock-on effect because they never get the prestige jobs, they never get the big films because they cannot say I am going to go away for six weeks to film in France, they just cannot do that unless they have the support. They may be still working in a piecemeal way, they may be doing what they are very good at and doing it well, but they are not getting on to the films that would give them profile and awards and might lead to more women entering the industry.

Ms Hibbin: I think television still has some remnants of public service ethic about it which does encourage those kinds of entry level and upwards. Film has become a very market orientated world and I think a very cut throat world which makes it very hard for women particularly with children. You talk about four weeks, but I have been away from home since last October, it is sort of a level of madness and for long periods of that you are working 12 hours a day. That just is not possible if you have children or if you want to have a relationship with your children.

Q368  Chairman: Is it catch-22, ie you cannot get the opportunities if you have not got the cv and you cannot get the cv without the opportunities?

Ms Chamberlain: I think so. I think it is also to do with the vast amounts of money that are involved in film, people are very loathe to take a risk. It is my feeling that women are seen as a risk.

Ms Cussons: Particularly in areas like directing or script writing where because there are few of them they are a less accepted people that you would be prepared to take a risk with. There are a few A-list directors that you would take a risk with, but a new and untried woman is considered much more risky, so they will play safe. If you are looking after $20 million then of course you are more likely to play safe and go for a director who is known and experienced and that is far more likely to be a man.

Ms Curtis: At this stage, yes.

Ms Cussons: After our scheme I will come and talk to you again.

Q369  Chairman: It does seem to be at that particular point. It is like classical music and the very small number of women conductors possibly for comparable reasons. Barbara Benedek, do you mind if I ask you a personal question?

Ms Benedek: Not in the slightest.

Q370  Chairman: Yours is a very unusual name. Do you have any connection with the director László?

Ms Benedek: I do, I am his daughter.

Chairman: Wonderful.

Mr Bryant: And that is not relevant, it is not about the British film industry.

Q371  Chairman: No, but it is about one of the finest, most remarkable breakthrough films ever made, The Wild One.

Ms Benedek: I am impressed with your knowledge of his films.

Q372  Chairman: Thank you very much.

Ms Cussons: Thank you.