# 4 SCREEN AUSTRALIA’S GAME OF MUSICAL CHAIRS

The Australian Director’s Guild declined to publish the following opinion piece in its online magazine ‘Screen Director’.

As there was nowhere else I could publish it I decided to start Screen News Australia - a blog on which pieces such as this, written by anyone with a point of view they feel passionately about, can be published, and where dialogue and debate are encouraged about the issues we all, as screen story-tellers, care about.

SCREEN AUSTRALIA’S GAME OF MUSICAL CHAIRS

On 7^th March an article appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald entitled:

“Screen Australia Board Meetings Must Be a Game of Musical Chairs.

Written by Michael West, this article raises questions that are worthy of debate within the community of filmmakers who are, in one way or another, reliant on Screen Australia to develop and finance their film and TV projects.

No such debate has occurred.

Why?

The article begins with the following sentence:

“Companies associated with actor and film producer Claudia Karvan were paid $10.5 million by Screen Australia last year. Karvan is on the board of Screen Australia.”

It then goes on to list the large amounts of money that members of the Screen Australia board have voted to invest in the projects of fellow board members in the form of development and production funds.

“Companies associated with fellow director Joan Peters, a media and entertainment lawyer, received just under $14.8 million in production grants, consultancy fees, travel grants and assorted transactions with Screen Australia.”

The question of whether or not it is appropriate for members of the Screen Australia Board to continually vote large sums of money to themselves and their associates needs to be debated. 

Why is there no debate?

Is it because this is an elephant in the room that filmmakers dare not speak of in public for fear of retribution?

Given the obvious dangers inherent in Screen Australia board members voting to fund each others projects, what mechanisms does Screen Australia have in place to mitigate against the possibility of corruption?

Are questions such as these of concern to members of Australian Director’s Guild members? If so, has there been any discussion, debate, about them?

Are filmmakers free to be critical in pubic of Screen Australia without fear of retribution?

A few more paragraphs from Michael West’s 7^th March article:

“Companies associated with director and film producer Rosemary Blight picked up $2.2 million in production grants and travel to the Toronto Film Festival.

Payments of $1.5 million were made to companies associated with filmmaker Rachel Perkins and for a project in which a "close family" member of Perkins was involved.

Payments were also made to companies associated with the former chairman of Screen Australia, Glen Boreham, companies associated with deputy chair Deanne Weir and companies associated with another director, Richard Keddie.”

Is the Australian Director’s Guild free to ask, in public, the kinds of questions implicit in Michael West’s article, without fear that its funding from Screen Australia might be cut off?

# 3 Jean Claude Carriere

Screen News Australia is intended to be a venue for the discussion of any and all topics relating to the business of telling stories onscreen that we all share a passion for. If there is indeed a need for a bog such as this I hope that a diverse range of opinions and points of view will be presented.

Please feel free to make a contribution of any kind about an aspect of screen story telling that you feel strongly about.

I have never been overly impressed by ‘scriptwriting gurus’ (or gurus of any other kind) but have great respect for Jean Claude Carriere – a screenwriter who never mentions the three act structure, ‘turning points’, ‘inciting incidents’ or ‘character arcs’ but whose words go to the beating heart of the screenplay:

“The screenplay is not only the dream of a film but its infancy. It goes through a toddling, stammering phase, gradually discovering its strengths and its weaknesses. As it gains confidence it begins to move under its own power.”

Jean Claude Carriere THE SECRET LANGUAGE OF FILM

Jean Claude Carriere’s screenwriting credits include: The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoise, The Tin Drum, The Unbearable Lightness of Being and, in collaboration with Michael Haneke, The White Ribbon.

“Work on a screenplay often operates in a series of waves. The first waves are exploratory. We open all the doors and we begin to seek, neglecting no path, no blind alley. The imagination launches unbridled into a hunt which can lead it into the vulgar, the absurd, the grotesque, which can even make the imagination forget the theme that is the object of the hunt. Whereupon another wave rears, surging in the opposite direction. This is the backwash, the withdrawal to what is reasonable, essential, to the old question: exactly why are we making this and not some other film? Quite simply, what basically interests us here? This is the moment when we survey the road the characters have travelled, but we also look at verisimilitude, structure, interest, levels of audience understanding. By backtracking, by returning to our original garden, we obviously abandon along the way the majority of our illusory conquests – but not necessarily all of them. We return to scholarly, sometimes commonplace and even pettifogging concerns. They help us take stock. In the heat of the chase we might easily have forgotten to bring along our supplies, our drinking water, our maps. Rare are the authors who can afford, on their own, this balanced and impartial movement between the two zones.”

Jean Claude Carriere THE SECRET LANGUAGE OF FILM

“… the most serious, the most pernicious illusion – and here the actor’s and the author’s paths converge, in film as on the stage – is when we convince ourselves that the intellectual approach is enough, that intelligent analysis will cover every contingency. All that is needed, we tell ourselves, is for the author to know what he means, draw up a precise plan, define his structures – and the rest will follow. In which case the actor’s performance, too, would simply be a translation into words and gestures of an idea the mind has already chewed over.”

Jean Claude Carriere THE SECRET LANGUAGE OF FILM

During rehearsals for one of Pirandello’s plays, a high-strung actress said to the playwright, “Maestro, I fail to understand. On page 27 my characters says this. On page 54 she says that. Can it be possible, given everything that has happened to her, her motives, her character, that she has changed so much, that she can say such a thing after having clearly said…” Pirandello patiently heard her out (he was a polite man). She spoke at length, asking the usual questions. When she finally stopped he said, as if it were obvious, “But why are you asking me all this? I am the author.”

Jean Claude Carriere THE SECRET LANGUAGE OF FILM

“This step by step discovery of a theme, a story, a style – a highly erratic process, marked by long dry spells and sudden flashes – closely resembles the work of an actor venturing into a part. What will he find? At first he has no idea. A play – by Shakespeare, say, or Chekhov – always presents a vibrant and indefinable whole, imperious to the most piercing analysis. It is out of the question to tackle those plays as if they were the expression of a particular point of view. To do so would mean stifling them, strangling them, the eternal pitfall of limited directors, who invariably force their own terms on anything which is beyond their comprehension…A true author never knows exactly what he means. He is what Victor Hugo called “the mouth of darkness”. Words are transmitted through him, often quite beyond his control. They come from obscure regions; the richer and deeper his genius, the vaster those regions will be. They are regions he shares with others, and even, in the case of the greatest authors, with all humankind, for he becomes one of humanity’s voices.”

Jean Claude Carriere THE SECRET LANGUAGE OF FILM

A good screenplay is one that gives birth to a good film. Once the film exists, the screenplay is no more. It is probably the least visible component of the finished work. It is the fist incarnation of a film and appears to be a self-contained whole. But it is fated to undergo metamorphosis, to disappear, to melt into another form, the final form.

Making a film is truly a work of alchemy, of transmuting paper into film. Transmutation. Transforming matter itself. I have often compared this metamorphosis to the caterpillar’s transformation into a butterfly. The caterpillar’s body already contains all the cells and all the colours of the butterfly. It is the potential butterfly. But it cannot fly. Yet the urge to fly is deeply buried in its most secret essence. The screenplay is not the last stage of a literary journey. It is the first stage of a film. A screenwriter has to be much more a filmmaker than   a novelist. The screenwriter must bear in mind at all times, and with almost obsessive insistence, that what he is writing is fated to disappear, that a necessary metamorphosis awaits it.

# 2 Have ageing Baby Boomer Bureaucrats lost the plot?

Have ageing Baby Boomer Bureaucrats lost the plot?

As an ageing Baby Boomer myself I can ask this question without seeming ageist.

Are Baby Boomer Bureaucrats, holding the reins of power, the proverbial Albatross around the necks of younger generation screen story-tellers who grew up not with celluloid, Steenbecks and Moviolas but with digital cameras, home edit suites, My Space and YouTube?

Readers younger than 30 may need to ask Dr Google what a ‘Steenbeck’ and a ‘Moviola’ is (was!) and acquaint themselves with quaint terms like ‘splice’ and ‘trim bin.’ The times they are a changing. Fast. Are the bureaucratic structures within which young filmmakers must work keeping up?

Ageing Baby Boomer Bureaucrats will not willingly relinquish their white-knuckle grip on the reins of power. Younger generation filmmakers (and bureaucrats) will have to wrest the reins of power from them/us. We will put up one hell of a fight but if you think strategically, Gen X-ers and Y-ers,  you can beat us at our own game – as younger generations confronted by recalcitrant old men (though these days just as likely to be women!) have since time immemorial.

So, what do we ageing Baby Boomers have anything to offer? Experience?

A quick personal detour:

After 44 years of making films I was informed by Screen NSW last year that I was not qualified, in accordance with ‘the guidelines’ to make an application for first draft screenplay funding. I had not made a feature film in the past ten years. Time to put me out to pasture!

My attempts to argue, using common sense and logic, that this omission on my part had no bearing on my ability (or lack thereof) to write a first draft screenplay, got me nowhere. Guidelines are not a ‘guide’ to Screen NSW bureaucrats. They are, like the Ten Commandments, written in stone.

Six months later I received from Screen NSW a letter that included this:

“Recently, the guidelines were updated and a change was made to the eligibility requirements to enable filmmakers to demonstrate up to date market knowledge and relationships other than contemporary credits. Should you wish to make applications in future, you may be able to demonstrate up to date market knowledge and relationships to support your application.”

My questions for Screen NSW were these:

“What  has ‘up to date market knowledge and relationships’ got to do with the development of a first draft screenplay?”

and

“Is the assumption that the ‘market’ will recognize a brilliant idea at conceptual stage, before a first draft has been written borne out by history?”

I have not yet received an answer to these questions.

OK, so maybe its time for me to be put out to pasture but questions arise.

With some rare exceptions (usually in the case of a best-selling book or a sequel to a previous box office hit) the ‘market’ play no role at all in the process of script development prior to the completion of a first draft.

If anyone reading this can think of an exception to this can you please let me know of one instance, this past 20 years, in which the ‘market’ played a significant role in the development of a first draft Australian screenplay – be it written by an experienced screenwriter or a novice?

No, the ‘market’ is waiting for, longing for, high quality screenplays to come its way – the kind of screenplays it is, in part, Screen NSW’s role to develop.

The question of how high quality screenplays come into being is a complex one (to be dealt with in another post) but if it knew what it wanted, ‘the market’ would simply come up with brilliant script ideas, employ the best screenwriters/directors/producers available, and make film after film that were either box office or ‘art house’ successes.

“Did ‘the market’ let Warwick Thornton know, before he had a first draft screenplay, that it wanted ‘Samson and Delilah’?”

 No.

There is a long list of Australian films that ‘the market’ expressed no interest in, but which were made because filmmakers (screenwriters, directors and producers) kept writing draft after draft, banging on doors, refusing to take ‘no’ for an answer.

The development of high quality films is not driven by what ‘the market’ thinks it wants but by passionate filmmakers with a bee in their bonnet about a particular film/TV/screen project which, in the fullness of time, when the planets align, ‘the market’ thinks it may want.  

‘Thinks’ is the operative word. ‘The market’ doesn’t know. It is making the best  and most informed guess it can. And so too are we screenwriters, other filmmakers and senior bureaucrats whose job it is to greenlight these projects. We are all in this guessing game together.

The modus operandi of our profession, the craft and art form in which we have chosen to work, is more akin to buying a ticket in the lottery than deciding, on the basis of market research, that the story born of our passion is guaranteed to puts bums on seats and/or  garner awards.

The development process, particularly before there is even a first draft, is hit and miss. Many a promising concept results in a lackluster screenplay and many a concept or idea that does not look all that promising at the outset results in either a box office hit or a film that Australia can be proud of, and one which becomes part of our cultural heritage.

Would a pre-first draft synopsis of ‘Samson and Delilah’, by a filmmaker who had never made a feature film before, have passed Screen NSW’s “up to date market knowledge and relationships” test?

Thinking in terms of ‘the market’ at the conceptual stage of script development is not only a bad idea because it is based on the erroneous presumption that  ‘the market’ knows what it wants; it is also a bad idea because it encourages novice screenwriters to develop what they think ‘the market’ wants or, even worse, what they think Screen NSW thinks ‘the market’ wants.

Consider ‘viral videos’, seen by 10s of millions of viewers on You Tube. ‘The market’ doesn’t declare a need for any of these videos. The makers of them have an idea and most often execute it with a minimal budget and wait to see how it fares in the You Tube marketplace.

Does this not provide some clue as to how to develop the talents of young filmmakers with heads full of ideas they want to experiment with? Not with boxes that require ticks (constraints on the4imagination for the most part) but with an application process the subtext of which is:

“Impress us. Blow our minds. If you can get us to respond to your ideas with ‘wow’ we want to help you realize your screen dreams.”

Implicit in this approach would be:

“We don’t expect you to team up with ‘experienced’ filmmakers. We recognize that for the most part their experience relates to a world of filmmaking that no longer exists. However, if you can see value in teaming up with them, please feel free to do so.”

Freedom, not constraints, is what drives innovation. Rigid guidelines, as with rigid Baby Boomer Bureaucrats, stifle both the imagination and the will to innovate.

Great drama, regardless of the platform on which it is broadcast, the screen on which it is viewed, requires a great screenplay. What is required, it seems to me, is screenwriters  with projects that are risky (as a result of their originality) and that, perhaps, ‘the market’ will not want at conceptual or even first or second draft stage. If these stories for the screen are startlingly original, ‘the market’ may well want them two years down the track - when ‘the market’ has changed as a result of audiences/viewers wanting something different from whatever the latest fad is.

I remember well, when I was a film school student back in the early 70s, being told, by ‘film gurus’ of the day, that there were two kinds of films that ‘the market’ did not want – science fiction and sports films. Within a couple of years both ROCKY and STAR WARS came out and were huge box office successes.

The market does not know what it wants until a filmmaker presents it with an idea that induces a ‘wow’ response:

“Wow, this is ‘news’. I have never read a screenplay like this before.”

This requires not just film bureaucrats who can see the potential of a screenplay at its conceptual stage but who are not constrained by guidelines that insist the filmmaker team up with someone who has “up to date market knowledge and relationships”.

Screen NSW’s development policy should be encouraging screenwriters (both novice and experienced) not to look to ‘the market’ today for validation, but encouraging in them the attitude:

“The market doesn’t know that it needs my screenplay just now but the market is in for a surprise. “

Australian screen stories should aspire to being ahead of the market, not following it. Film funding body guidelines should place as few impediments as possible in the way of filmmakers positioning themselves at least on the crest of the broadcast story-telling wave; though preferably in front of the wave, leading the way.