LEGLESS, AND DEAD IN THE WATER

The Australian film industry has been tootling down winding roads on its bicycle and now an American road train has come through and blown it off the road.”

Actor Chris Haywood's letter to the Prime Minister

“The (Australian) industry is now dead in the water. Legless.”

Public perception, because of Fox Studios, is that Australian film is on a roll. But industry players are saying there are really two industries – an offshore American one with Sydney digs and a barefoot bunch of Australian cousins. Panavision, Atlab and Kodak all report sales to the Australian industry are down. The managing director of Atlab, Murray Forrest, said it wasn’t only Australian made films, but television drama, documentaries and commercials too. CEO of Panavision, Denis Noonan, agreed saying income to his company was down 50% and that all other sectors of the film industry were also in decline. “If you look at the local industry, it’s a diminishing thing,” he said.

The president of SPAA, Tom Jeffrey, said, in a letter to members, there was a “false impression that everything is fine and dandy in the local industry”. At the recent Australian Movie Convention, Bill Bennett said politicians and the public probably had the impression that the industry was flying high but this was misleading. “The Australian film industry is still plodding along.” He expressed a concern about the country’s studios if the exchange rate with the American dollar became less favourable. “It worries me that a lot of local companies are putting a lot of good money into this whole thing. But if the wind changes, if the US dollar drops… I can’t see why people would want to shoot here.” Bennett also said the industry was being held back because producers were not being rewarded for success, which meant their major incentive seemed to be winning awards.

Producer of The Matrix, Andrew Mason blamed the Federal Government’s 1992 decision to allow 20% of television commercials to be foreign-produced for the serious downturn in Australian production. This decision cost the industry commercials production probably worth “$100 million” a year, a loss masked until recently by extra advertising for deregulated telecommunications companies and public offerings by government-owned corporations.

Adding to the grief of the industry was the Tax Office which disallowed film industry investments worth $800 million in the last week of June because they were deemed rorts by “high wealth individuals” and not genuine film- making proposals at all.

The new government initiative FLICS has been criticised for failing to deliver funds to film-makers. It also seems to have attracted the attention of the Tax Commissioner. The tax crackdown, timed as it was just before the end of the financial year, has been blamed for scaring away investors. The result was that at least two big film projects collapsed and film industry contractors worried how they would placate their bank managers.

Out of work actors, such as Haywood, are calling on the Government to do more.

“Having found time to go to the US for a leg of lamb,” Haywood wrote, in his letter to the PM, “I hope you will also find the time to do something here for a legless industry, whose problems have been created by your own government.” John Jarratt and Haywood teamed up to spin a tale to Bob Carr’s chief-of-staff that went like this: “The Austra ian film industry has been tootling down winding roads on its bicycle and now an American road train has come through and blown it off the road. Now we’re weaving and wobbling around in the jibber. What we want is for the Government to run a little concrete path down the edge so we can get going again.”

Compiled from articles in the S.M.H.