Category Archives: Film

Film news with a particular orientation towards Australia.

WGA Members See Darker Days For Feature Film Work

Far brighter outlook seen for TV writing

While TV offers growing opportunities for scribes, members of the Writers Guild of America East are forecasting a bleak future for themselves in writing screenplays for feature films .

According to a survey released Wednesday by the guild, half of the members who responded said that the declining number of movies being made is the biggest challenge WGA East will face in the next five years. “Many also decried the lack of development deals in feature film and limited revenues from digital/online reuse,” the WGA East said.

The WGA East represents about 4,000 members while the WGA West has about double that number. About 20% of the WGA East’s members participated in the survey.

“Members view television as a more writer-driven medium than feature film, and a growing slate of compelling, creatively satisfying shows is being produced for the small screen,” the WGA East also said. “Although more than half of the respondents said they wrote feature films in the last five years, nearly 90% said they intend to seek Guild-covered work in television in the next year. In other words, screenwriters plan to explore opportunities in TV.”

The finding comes with Hollywood’s major studios opting to continue allocating a growing portion of their resources on a few mega-budget franchise tentpoles. In a report released in July, the WGA West said that Hollywood writer earnings rose 4% last year to $1.02 billion as a 10.1% surge in TV writing overcame a 6.1% decline in feature film work.

TV earnings for the WGA West amounted to $667.2 million while feature film employment slid 6.7% to 1,537 writers earning $343.4 million — the third straight year of declines as the six major studios made fewer mid-budget features. Feature film earnings in the WGA West have plunged 35% since 2007 when pre-strike stockpiling generated $526.6 million in writer earnings.

The WGA East survey also found that about 45% of its respondents said they have also produced; nearly 30% have directed; and about 18% have acted. Nearly 20% of the survey respondents are also playwrights; 20% write novels and short stories; 16% write nonfiction books and articles; 10% write in nonfiction television; and 17% of the respondents indicated they have been paid to write for digital media.

The WGA noted that it first won jurisdiction over writing for digital media as part of the settlement in the 2007-2008 strike.

One of the anonymous respondents said, “What I’ve learned the last few years is that I have to be open to more kinds of work – feature, TV, cable, etc. – and then work much harder to get the job.” Another reiterated a longstanding complaint: “There is far too much ‘free’ work expected from producers and studios. This needs to change ASAP.”

The two Writers Guilds negotiate jointly with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers and the current master contract runs out on May 1. No negotiations have been set.

Dave McNary – VARIETY – September 25, 2013

2014: A banner year for Oz cinema?

By Don Groves INSIDEFILM – [Thu 19/09/2013 03:38:42]

This may turn out to be a premature and fanciful call but 2014 is shaping as potentially one of the strongest years for Australian films, commercially and critically, in recent memory.

The 2014 release schedule has a broad mix of genres although crime thriller seems the most popular genre. “It’s a good slate,” says Mike Baard, MD of Universal Pictures International, while lamenting the dearth of comedies, with the notable exception of Wayne Hope’s Now Add Honey. Universal will release Jocelyn Moorhouse’s comic drama The Dressmaker, which toplines Kate Winslet and Judy Davis and will shoot in early 2014.

The Weinstein Co’s acquisition of US rights to Jonathan Teplitzky’s The Railway Man and John Curran’s Tracks virtually guarantees both will get a hefty marketing push and choice screens in the US.

Matt Saville’s thriller Felony got rave reviews at the Toronto International Film Festival, particularly for the performances by Joel Edgerton, Tom Wilkinson and Jai Courtney. Writer-director Aaron Wilson’s debut feature Canopy, set during the Japanese invasion of Singapore in WW11, got positive reactions in Toronto. Greg Mclean’s Wolf Creek 2 had its world premiere in Venice after being pre-sold to every major territory except the US, where a deal is pending. Robert Pattinson, Guy Pearce and Scoot McNairy star in Animal Kingdom director David Michôd’s crime thriller The Rover. Roadshow will release Wolf Creek 2, Felony, The Rover, Now Add Honey and These Final Hours.

EOne Hopscotch will distribute Son of a Gun; Rolf de Heer’s Charlie’s Country; Tony Ayres’ crime thriller Cut Snake, which stars Sullivan Stapleton, Alex Russell and Jessica de Gouw; and I, Frankenstein, Stuart Beattie’s Melbourne-shot contemporary fantasy thriller which sees Frankenstein’s monster protecting the human race against an uprising of supernatural creatures, featuring Aaron Eckhart, Bill Nighy, Yvonne Strahovski, Miranda Otto, Socratis Otto, Jai Courtney and Caitlin Stasey.

Transmission is handling The Railway Man (which opens on Boxing Day), Tracks, Stephen Lance’s My Mistress and, co-distributed with Footprint Films, Fell, a drama starring Matt Nable and Daniel Henshall from first-time writer-director Kasimir Burgess.

Pinnacle will release Peter and Michael Spierig’s Predestination, a time-travel thriller starring Noah Taylor, Ethan Hawke and Sarah Snook.

Among other titles due for release next year are Craig Monahan’s drama Healing, John V. Soto’s crime thriller The Reckoning, starring Luke Hemsworth, Jonathan LaPaglia and Viva Bianca, Nadia Tass’ comedy The Menkoff Method, Michael Petroni’s supernatural thriller Backtrack and, from first-time directors, Jennifer Kent’s psychological thriller The Babadook, Josh Lawson’s sexy comedy The Little Death and Geoff Davis’ WW1 drama The Stolen.

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How China’s Homegrown Biz Is Threatening Hollywood’s Payday

China’s evolving movie biz shows an increasing sophistication and diversity that
challenges U.S. studios to rethink their approach

In the past few years, Westerners have exulted in the country’s box office boom, which included hefty grosses for major-studio films such as “Iron Man 3,” “Pacific Rim” and “The Croods.” With the liberalization of access to the market and a greater share of distribution money, Hollywood began to see China as the land of opportunity after decades of feeling thwarted by tight quotas for imported movies.

Yes, the China box ofice is growing, but not for everyone. In the current year, ticket sales for local films increased 144% to $1.12 billion, while imported films saw a 21% slump to $670 million — despite the relaxing of quotas.

Is Hollywood doing something wrong, or are Chinese filmmakers doing something right? Both, which is why American studios need to quickly rethink their roles and goals. Continue reading How China’s Homegrown Biz Is Threatening Hollywood’s Payday

Ruin wins prize in Venice

Australian film wins prize in Venice

Date
Rous Mony and Sang Malen in the uncompromising <i>Ruin</i>, a romantic road movie shot in Cambodia.Rous Mony and Sang Malen in the uncompromising Ruin, a romantic road movie shot in Cambodia.

Australian film Ruin, a surreal and meditative love story filmed in Cambodia, won a special jury prize at the Venice Film Festival on Saturday night. Ruin, directed by Amiel Courtin-Wilson and Michael Cody, was shot on a shoestring budget with Khmer-speaking actors. The directors and cinematographer Ari Wegner were awarded the prize in the festival’s cutting-edge Horizons section.

The Horizons jury was headed by American director and screen-writer Paul Schrader, whose many credits include the coruscating script for Taxi Driver. It is the second film the directing duo has screened in Venice; their first feature Hail showed there successfully two years ago. Ruin’s success as an Australian film shot in Asia follows that of The Rocket, made in Laos by Kim Mordaunt, which has won prizes in a succession of  international festivals.

Venice was at its hot, steamy worst for the final night of the festival, having trailed to an end as seemingly the majority of visitors decamped in the middle of last week for the much bigger and more business-like festival in Toronto. A sprinkling of international press remained to see Bernardo Bertulucci, Italy’s greatest living cinematic maestro and head of the Venezia 70 jury for the main competition, give the Golden Lion to his compatriot Gianfranco Rosi for Sacro Gra, an intriguing and frequently bizarre observational documentary about life along a Roman ring road. Australian film Tracks, directed by John Curran, was among the 20 films in competition.


Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/movies/australian-film-wins-prize-in-venice-20130908-2tdnr.html#ixzz2eLc5VkTY

Australian distribution – a major problem?

Distribution: are Australian filmmakers simply wasting their time?
by: Sandy GeorgeScreen Hub
Friday 30 August, 2013
With three key Australian distributors on the podium, a CinefestOz audience played with some honest facts and some ghastly fears. Do you have the courage to read Sandy George`s report?At CinefestOZ on the weekend representatives from Madman, Hopscotch and Roadshow, three distributors who are supportive of Australian film, answered questions about the type of projects they responded to and why Australian films don’t do better at the box office. What they said was utterly sobering which is why everyone who is developing features should read this report, then ask themselves if they’re wasting their time.

“It’s competitive and we are an English speaking market up against the Hollywood juggernaut, which puts incredible amounts of money into film,” says Roadshow Films head of production Seph McKenna in response to the question of why Australian films don’t do better at the box office. “If Australians had $150 million to spend they could compete against Hollywood films, but we don’t have, we can’t afford it.

“On the (Australian) features that Roadshow acquires, which are budgeted at $8-15 million, we spend an average of $40-$50,000 on the trailer and one-sheet. The studios are spending $6-8 million on their trailers and their one-sheets. We are outgunned, a speedboat against aircraft carriers. Which means that when we do have films that find an audience – like Red Dog, Bran Nue Dae, The Sapphires and Animal Kingdom – it really is an incredible achievement. The bad and good news is that we have to be twice as good and work ten times as hard as the people in Hollywood … It’s hard to make films of that calibre, hard to tell stories that good. You’ve got to be at the top of your game and you have to have a little bit of fairy dust sprinkled on top.”

Continue reading Australian distribution – a major problem?

Closing Piracy Powerhouse Actually Hurt Movie Revenues

Only blockbusters benefitted from shutdown of Megaupload; grosses of mid-range
pics declined, according to David S. Cohen of Variety.

Closing the notorious piracy site Megaupload didn’t help theatrical film grosses , according to a new study. Megaupload, which claimed at one time to account for as much as 4% of all Internet traffic, was shut down suddenly by the FBI on Jan. 19, 2012, its domains seized and its management team arrested. That amounted to what the researchers call a “quasi-experiment” on anti-piracy policy.

“We find that box office revenues of a majority of movies did not increase,” said the paper. “While for a mid-range of movies the effect of the shutdown is even negative, only large blockbusters could benefit from the absence of Megaupload.” They add their findings suggest “that there were less average performing movies after the shutdown, while at the same time there were more poorly performing movies.”

The study, from researchers at Ludwig Maximilians University Munich and Copenhagen Business School, looked at weekly data from 10,272 movies in 50 countries, as reported on boxofficemojo.com. Its results contrast with findings of researchers at Carnegie Mellon, who found that the shutdown of Megaupload boosted legal digital sales of movies.

The European researchers attributed the “counterintuitive” drop in theatrical grosses following the shutdown of the site to ”social network effects, where online piracy acts as a mechanism to spread information about a good (film) from consumers with low willingness to pay to consumers with high willingness to pay.” This network information-spreading effect of illegal downloads, they argue, “seems to be especially important for movies with smaller audiences.”

“Piracy has positive externalities,” they wrote, “where information about the quality of a good experience spills over from pirates to purchasers. Once it becomes significantly less easy to consumer pirated content online, we would expect that at least some consumers convert to legal digital purchases or start going to the movies.”

But when that happens, they argue, the positive effects of piracy vanish, and some consumers end up less informed about specific titles.

Blockbusters’ huge advertising campaigns make that unimportant, but pictures without that advantage were hurt on average after Megaupload shut down. The authors argue that these findings imply that anti-piracy policy may have unintended consequences because different kinds of movies are affected differently as piracy declines.

Some entertainment pros and technologists have predicted this might be the case, as anecdotes have long circulated that young viewers, especially young men, like to check out a picture via the web before deciding if they like it enough to buy a ticket.

That has been one argument for ending theatrical windows on some pictures and moving to day-and-date release on streaming VOD.

David S. Cohen, Variety Senior Editor, Features – August 27, 2013

The Menkoff Method set to roll in Melbourne

By Don Groves – INSIDEFILM – Wed 28/08/2013

Director David Parker will start shooting The Menkoff Method, billed as a quirky
“comedy of human resources,” in Melbourne on September 9. The screenplay is by
first-timer Zac Gillam. It’s the debut feature from White Hot Productions, the production arm of the White Hot Group. The producers are David Lee, Jan Bladier and John Kearney, with Ian Kirk as executive producer.

The plot follows David Cork, a young, introverted bank worker who’s more interested in drawing his comic book than his tedious job in the bank’s data processing centre.

All that changes when an enigmatic Russian HR consultant, Max Menkoff, introduces sweeping reforms with devastating effects.

Kirk, a director of White Hot Productions, met Gillam, a solicitor who took up screenwriting, through a mutual friend. Kirk, who owns ROAR Digital, mentored Gillam and introduced him to Bladier and Lee. White Hot Group was set up to develop a slate of films. The Menkoff Method is privately financed. Bladier and Lee produced Simon Wincer’s The Cup.

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Ian Robertson advocates 40% rebate for telemovies

Ian Robertson has been quoted in IF Magazine saying that telemovies should qualify for the 40% Producer Offset given to Australian feature films. He said that this would help to alleviate the problem producers are having getting Australian distributors from signing on to Australian films.

Robertson was described by IF’s Don Groves as speaking on behalf of Holding Redlich at SPAA, but he is also on the boards of Screen Australia and Film Victoria, and therefore his opinion, expressed publicly, is more powerful than most. He was talking at a SPAA masterclass in Sydney on Wednesday.

SPAA has been advocating for the entire television drama slate to be able to qualify for the 40% rebate instead of 20% at present. This would of course be a game-changer. But since Australian movies are already accused of looking like telemovies, I wonder if lifting the producer offset would actually work?

Mark Poole

Perth comic book artists turn heroes in documentary

Comic Book Heroes airs in two parts, on Tuesday August 13 and 20, on ABC1 – go
to ABC iview to catch episode one: www.abc.net.au/iview

Jillian McHugh – Watoday – August 13, 2013 – 4:09PM

Skye Walker Ogden and Wolfgang Bylsma forged the foundation of their company at
a pub in Applecross.

Until comic book artists break into the American market, they’re not going to make
enough money to make it a ‘day job’, says one of the Australian comic book creators
featured in Comic Book Heroes. The documentary, which aired last Tuesday
[available on ABC iview] and next Tuesday on ABC1, follows two Perth comic book
artists who created their own publishing company and are struggling to make ‘real’
money. Continue reading Perth comic book artists turn heroes in documentary

Director Colin Cairnes speaks out on piracy

By Colin Cairnes – Wednesday 14 August 2013

There’s a school of thought that widespread piracy can be to the filmmaker’s benefit
but that seems driven by a defeatist attitude that says the pirates/downloaders are
always going to be one step ahead with the technology and their ability to skirt the
law, so why bother fighting it?

I’ll admit [brother] Cameron and I were both shocked and flattered to learn that tens
of thousands of people illegally downloaded our film 100 Bloody Acres.

But if we’re serious about the sustainability of independent filmmaking in a very
tough environment, we need to deal with the issue that a large portion of a film’s
potential audience believe it’s fine not to pay for your film. The “try before you buy”
claim of some who download seems disingenuous… while no doubt some people
might go off and “do the right thing” when the opportunity arises (and questions of
timing and accessibility are key considerations in looking at solutions), why would
they when there is so much more product waiting to be consumed? Continue reading Director Colin Cairnes speaks out on piracy