Final Report: Associate Professor Phillip McIntyre Hunter Creative Industries Professor Mark Balnaves Associate Professor Susan Kerrigan Evelyn King Film Claire Williams N1wcasll1 TH[ UNIVERSITY The University of Newcastle I April 2019, ARC Grant LP 130100348 or Now NEWCASTLE AUSTRALIA fMlii& :......�� n! 13. FILM 13.1 Introduction The Australian film industry, its history, structure, business models, operational methods and important personnel are detailed below, followed by a closer look at these components in the Hunter Region. By locating the Hunter’s film industry within an Australian film history and in relation to the US industries, this scaled approach provides a global perspective on national and local activities. For example, the Australian film industry is as volatile as all importing and exporting industries are. The industry tends to be vibrant when the Australian dollar is low, as it is economically attractive to foreign producers to use Australian crews and facilities. This foreign income is of course beneficial to the Australian economy but it also helps filmmakers to be internationally recognised and keeps them globally connected. Structurally the film industry they work in is comprised of three major and related sectors, i.e. Australian film production, foreign film production, and distribution and exhibition. The last of these three has the primary function of generating box office revenues. Associated with each of these major industrial structures are training institutions, hire companies, funding agencies, legal firms, regulators and affiliated media. There are various business models used within the sectors while operational methods are both formal (e.g. use of contracts, government funding) and informal (e.g. sharing of labour and equipment within a gift economy). The film industry’s production personnel include screenwriters, producers, directors, cinematographers, art directors, editors, colour graders, VFX supervisors, actors, musicians, sound designers and many others. These people are in many ways dependent on the work of the distributors who play a significant role in the success of a film at the box office. Audiences who judge, support and appreciate the work of the filmmakers, are also vitally important in relation to the business of filmmaking. 13.2 A Brief History of Film in Australia. The first screening of films began in Australia in Melbourne in 1896. The first feature film ever made, The Story of the Kelly Gang, was made in 1906 in Australia. It was then exhibited in the UK and was a commercially successful enterprise. A boom in Australian cinema then began with over 150 local films being made in the short period leading to WWI and the Depression. The First World War and its consumption of material and resources negatively affected the production of Australian films. After the process of distribution was consolidated into what was effectively a single company, the way lay open for a takeover by foreign interests. In those early days, American distributors, who were better financed than the Australians, made the most of this opportunity by buying the extant Australian distribution businesses. As a result, by 1923 the industry was crippled as there were only a few locally produced films being screened in Australian cinemas. The American owned distributors now preferenced US films over Australin releases. By 1939 Australian film critics had recognised the harsh reality that Hollywood film producers needed to pick winners that appealed to audiences (Weaving 2016) and by 1945 newspaper articles written for the Sydney Morning Herald confirmed the overwhelming box office successes of American musicals and murder films (Weaving 2016). The takeover by US interests seemed complete. At the same time production companies such as Frank Thring’s Efftee Studios in Melbourne succeeded for a short period, but succumbed once they realised the government would not put a quota on American films which had already recovered their costs in the USA before being exhibited here. The local industry, again, simply could not compete. There were other successes however. Ken G. Hall was the main driver behind Cinesound Productions and they made 17 feature films, most of which were produced by Hall. Cinesound, based very clearly on the Hollywood model, demonstrated that commercial success was possible for Australian 390 companies despite the competition from the US. Cinesound went on to win an Oscar for Kokoda Front, but as with WWI, WWII and the military consumption of resources, this impinged on their activity and they eventually went out of business. Just as Cinesound was beginning its journey, director Charles Chauvel gave Tasmanian actor Errol Flynn his start in The Wake of the Bounty. Chauvel also helped stars such as Chips Rafferty with the war films Forty Thousand Horsemen and Rats of Tobruk and in the 1950s Chauvel made the socially daring film Jedda. This was the first colour film shot in Australia and Chauvel’s last movie. What these few local successes had demonstrated was Australia’s long-term adoration of most things from Hollywood. In fact, several Australian filmmakers were so enamoured of Hollywood that some producers, together with the established distribution and exhibition interests of the late ’60s and early ’70s began to focus on what, to them, would hopefully be ‘Hollywood Down Under’ (Jacka 1993, p. 182). After the Australian Film Institute was set up in 1958, and quickly established the AFI Awards, local producers continued to face great difficulty in the early ’60s in keeping local production going and the US and UK distributors and exhibitors appeared to be content to leave things as they stood. However, there was a second and highly coupled impetus at play in the revival that was soon to occur. This was the simple fact that Australians at the time appeared to have ‘no daydreams of our own’ (Fitzgerald quoted in Jacka 1993, p. 183). As a result of not being able to adequately tell our own stories on screen there was a strong desire to foster a national cinema and a campaign began, mainly by film societies, critics and buffs, to have government support for a national film culture. Most filmmakers and especially the unions simply ‘wanted a film industry to provide work for their members’ (Ibid). Then, after a 1968 report from the Interim Film Committee of the Australia Council for the Arts, the Government implemented its recommendations. They included ‘the establishment of government support in three key areas: the creation of a film development funding agency; the establishment of an experimental film fund; and the formation of a national film school’ (Verhoeven et al. 2015, p. 152). The establishment of the Australian Film Television and Radio School (AFTRS), also pushed for by film producers like Philip Adams who had had success with The Adventures of Bazza Mackenzie (see Section 7.7.3), was a direct result of this campaign for a national cinema. Most significantly a series of tax incentive schemes launched by the Federal Government in the 1970s, stimulated a resurgence in the production of Australian films. This resurgence became known as the Australian New Wave. The early films to succeed are now Australian classics such as Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) and Sunday Too far Away (1975). This generated two almost diametrically opposed ideas for Australian cinema. One was the business imperative to emulate Hollywood and the other was driven by the national cinema group who saw Hollywood as the enemy of all local cinemas. As Elizabeth Jacka writes, ‘the history of Australian cinema production since 1970 is marked by the changing patterns of tension between those two poles’ (1993, p. 185). While the 80s, marked by the use of tax incentives known collectively as 10BA, saw a proliferation of Australian films, some of which quickly disappeared, it did produce successful films such as Gallipoli, The Year of Living Dangerously, Mad Max and Crocodile Dundee and allowed several Australian producers, directors and actors to establish international reputations. Many of these filmmakers are still trading on that reputation today. These include Bruce Beresford, Gillian Armstrong, Peter Weir, Mel Gibson, Jack Thompson, Bryan Brown and a host of others. Inevitably, as neoliberal policies took over and governments changed, the huge 10BA tax incentives, were peeled back. However, ongoing government support in other ways has led to the Australian film funding sector being recognised as now providing sustainable opportunities for a limited number of Australian filmmakers (Olsberg SPI 2016). The 1990s saw Australian successes with films such as Muriel’s Wedding, The Castle, Strictly Ballroom and Romper Stomper all of which were shot on relatively low budgets. These films gave actors such as Toni 391 Colette, Nicole Kidman and Russell Crowe the start they needed in the global film industry while films such as George Miller’s animated production Babe demonstrated what Australian film makers could do in the international market place. In the early 2000s Ray Lawrence’s Lantana showed, yet again, where and how Australian films could find their niche, but this last decade proved to be a lean time for Australian cinema. Films such as Animal Kingdom, Bran Nue Dae and Tomorrow, When the War Began were notable exceptions. Since 2007 an average of 30 Australian films have been produced annually, with budgets around $6.92 million (Screen Australia 2017). Unfortunately, these films have not had any impact at the global box office (Verhoeven et al. 2015). In 2011 the Australian film industry ranked 11th in the world (Screen Australia 2011b) with the local industry being financially dependent on government funding agencies like Screen Australia and the various state-based agencies. The production of Australian feature films has been in a slow decline for a few decades. 13.3 Structure of the Film Industry The current film industry, like the screen production industry more generally which also includes television and digital games, supports a broad range of individuals and organisations that in turn constitute the structural sectors of the industry.