Category Archives: Television

Andrew Knight on Jack Irish: “I’m really pleased with it”

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Asked how he’s doing after a whirlwind year, screenwriter Andrew Knight is characteristically understated: “I’m alive and trying to construct a breakfast at the moment”. In between film work last year, Knight wrote new seasons of Rake and Jack Irish simultaneously, a process he calls “a blur”.

The new Jack begins tonight – a six-part series instead of the earlier telemovies.

Knight calls the change “liberating. We had more time to tell a story. The hard part was working out where everything would fall. We had an overall story, but assigning things episodically was a constant trade-off and shifting game”.

“I worked closely with the other two writers, Matt Cameron and Andrew Anastasios. The three of us would go away and write our bits, then we’d come back and say – that needs to move, this needs to shift”.

“If you’re just writing a tele-movie, you know where you’re starting, you know where you’re ending, you know where the cards will fall. It’s harder to work out over six hours. Right up to shooting we were saying ‘uh-uh, this doesn’t belong here’. Even in the cut we moved quite a few things”.

“You’ve got more time to spend with characters. The tension with a series like Jack Irish is that you want the humour and the warmth of the characters, but sometimes if it’s not plot-related they can feel like spackle. Thrillers demand plot. It’s a constant balancing act”.

“It was harder in the telemovies to cut to the guys at the bar or Harry (Roy Billing) and Cam (Aaron Pedersen). I would artificially weave plot in there, just so the audience feels like you haven’t completely walked away from the story, and sometimes that makes it just a little bit muddy. I felt I muddied up the first telemovie, the one I wrote”.

“I hadn’t done thrillers before. I think I was probably trying to put too much of the book in there. As John Collee said, books are contemplative and films are immersive, and the distance between that is really rather great.

The first two episodes of the new series are directed by Kieran Darcy-Smith, the rest by Mark Joffe and Daniel Nettheim. Knight describes a helter-skelter shoot.

“In England you’d get fifteen days per episode to shoot something. We get half that time: seven and a half days per ep. You don’t have thinking time once you go”.

“[Essential’s Ian] Collie and I had to be constantly thinking: where the hell are we in this series? As my father in law once said: it’s a bit like trying to fart Annie Laurie through a keyhole – it’s an achievement, but you want to make sure the end result is something you want”.

The new series is the first whose plot has not been taken from one of Peter Temple’s original novels, a change Knight calls “great and fearful at the same time. You don’t want to lose his voice – the Temple tone or humour. But it was also fantastic to be able to keep his world but come up with a plot that we owned”.

The TV veteran calls the changing landscape for local drama on the small screen “an absolute thrill. I think we’re doing some really interesting stuff”.

But Knight also sounds a note of warning.

“I think the problem is that we don’t have enough long-running series. 26-parters. Because nobody’s going to risk a six-hour, eight-hour series, on new talent. And new talent has to find a starting level”.

“When I started at Crawfords as a production manager and producer, they were pumping out hours and hours of soaps and series. Even though at the time I hated what I was working on, you definitely picked up a skill base, you definitely understood how the process worked, you definitely understood what a screenwriter did as opposed to a novelist, you definitely began to understand how to work under pressure and with urgency – and that’s missing now”.

“I would really love to see the ABC find time-slots for new talent. I started with John Clarke and the Working Dog guys. We didn’t know what we were doing, but we learnt it”.

“At the same time, I think the industry is in a spectacular place now”.

Selling War and Peace to the Russians: global cash drives UK drama

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As BBC shows off its high-quality drama to international buyers, producers balance home values with global appeal

For its 6 million Sunday-night viewers, BBC1’s recent Tolstoy adaptation War and Peace felt like a classic British costume drama, with cut-glass production and a blue-chip cast. The average licence-fee payer wouldn’t realise that, like the majority of UK TV drama in 2016, the series was made with money from all over the world. BBC Worldwide, the BBC’s commercial arm, has already sold War and Peace to dozens of countries – including Russia – and will this week present it to 700 more international TV buyers, at the company’s annual Showcase event in Liverpool. Its star James Norton will make a personal experience at a glitzy on-stage sales pitch on Monday night.

But does so much international funding put the purity of Britain’s prized TV drama heritage in danger, with big BBC series being made to satisfy lucrative viewers in America – or, God forbid, in Germany?

Helen Jackson, BBC Worldwide’s chief creative officer, believes not. “To get a show right, you need to be clear who is the lead creative commissioner,” she says, explaining that Worldwide’s role was to help fund the public-service BBC’s vision.

“War and Peace started with BBC Wales, who commissioned the writer Andrew Davies to develop the initial script. At the point when the BBC decided they wanted to move forward with it, we at Worldwide got more heavily involved in the financing.”

The show became a co-production between the BBC, BBC Worldwide, the British independent production company Lookout Point and US studio The Weinstein Company. It was, says, Lookout Point co-chief executive Simon Vaughan, a “collaborative” process, rather than one in which the Americans started to throw their weight around. “If Harvey [Weinstein] or anybody else had script notes, everybody’s always interested to hear what those are,” he says. “Good notes are good notes, no matter where they come from – but it was always clear that there was one primary customer, the BBC.”

Vaughan adds that Weinstein himself added value for British viewers, particularly by delivering the kind of cast that even the BBC might struggle to attract by itself.

“There’s no question that when actors such as Lily James are being offered lots of different parts, Harvey’s weight – and his personal relationships with talent – are a massive factor,” says Vaughan.

Certainly, British TV drama talent – both in front of the camera and behind it – is in greater demand than ever before. US networks are co-producing ever more British shows (such as Showtime with Sky Atlantic’s Penny Dreadful), and now the insurgent online TV providers are snapping up huge runs of British-produced drama (most notably Netflix’s The Crown, made by London indie Left Bank). Experienced writers, such as costume-drama doyen Davies, are in particularly high demand. “What we want to hear from a writer is the thing they want to do most, not the thing they want to do next,” says Vaughan, who has signed up Davies to adapt Les Misérables. “Our deal in return is that we’ll get it made, or die trying.”

British producers and broadcasters also have to adapt to changing tastes at home.

“Viewers’ growing familiarity with what’s available on Amazon or on Netflix increases the appetite for things that feel like they have a real global scale,” says BBC Worldwide’s Jackson – though she adds that that doesn’t necessarily mean expensive runs of 13 or 22 episodes, as is traditional in America. “It’s more that people want to build franchises with a longer life. There’s not a huge volume of Sherlock, but it’s so deeply loved and anticipated that it has a really important place.”

Another cult hit, the sci-fi drama Humans, was developed for Channel 4 alone – but ultimately became a co-production with the US network AMC. That American money, says C4’s head of drama Piers Wenger, allowed the show to reach the kind of scale that would appeal to today’s British viewers. “To put it bluntly, it allowed us to do robots well,” he says. “Making sci-fi work for a mainstream audience, at 9pm, meant rendering it so that it didn’t feel in any way homemade.”

Wenger also counsels against seeing Netflix and Amazon as invaders, whose only purpose is to suck up British talent and put it behind their paywall.

“To think that America is asset-stripping the UK is missing the point,” he says. “What the US has got wise to is that the UK’s TV drama is an incredibly valuable cultural export – and that is largely driven by the BBC and Channel 4. So there’s a happy and helpful symbiosis between the two.” Netflix is co-funding the upcoming E4 series Kiss Me First – which, as a result, can have a budget more than double what the digital channel usually pays.

As well as high production values, British viewers are now much more used to seeing European dramas – which opens the door to foreign-language co-productions with British broadcasters. “I think The Killing was the show that changed things,” says Elaine Pyke, who, as head of Sky Atlantic, commissioned the first big UK-French co-production, in the shape of The Tunnel. “The great thing about The Tunnel, as a co-production, was that it felt creatively natural – it wasn’t just a bit of foreign casting. So it didn’t worry me that half of it was in French.”

Pyke is now co-founder and executive producer at the indie New Pictures, which makes co-productions Indian Summers for Channel 4 (and PBS in America) and mega-hit The Missing for BBC1 (and US cable channel Starz). “In The Missing, Tchéky Karyo – who is neither British or American – is the returning star for series two,” says Pyke. “Isn’t that interesting? That’s the brilliant thing about co-producing – when everyone involved can see what’s great creatively, and go with that.”

But, stresses Pyke, the increasing flow of international money doesn’t in any way diminish the role of the traditional British broadcasters. “They are still very key to our business as producers – they are absolutely our backbone,” she says. “And that’s why it’s important not to forget about contemporary British stories. I’m really glad that Happy Valley still gets 8 million viewers on BBC1, because it’s bloody brilliant: great stories, well told, brilliantly written.”

Neil Midgley – The Guardian – Monday 22 February 2016

Sundance: How Netflix and Amazon Are Dramatically Shaking Up the Market

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This wasn’t the first Sundance where Amazon Studios and Netflix hit the Park City slopes, but 2016 marked a turning point when both streaming services proved they are formidable buyers in the movie world.

After a fairly low-key Toronto and Cannes, where some questioned just how serious Amazon was about its film ambitions, the Web giant turned up the volume by landing one of the biggest deals at the festival. It beat out Fox Searchlight, Focus Features, and other studios for Kenneth Lonergan’s searing drama “Manchester By the Sea,” which received a rapturous standing ovation at the Eccles Theatre reminiscent of “Boyhood’s” debut two years ago. The $10 million sale could give Amazon its first front-row tickets to the Oscars — in 2017.

Amazon also snatched up the Whit Stillman’s “Love and Friendship,” based on the Jane Austen novella, and “Author: The J.T. LeRoy” story, a buzzy documentary about the infamous literary fabulist. The latter was the first documentary acquisition for Amazon, which intends to aggressively build up its catalogue offerings, Variety has learned. The move comes at a boom time for documentaries, albeit one driven almost entirely by TV — with CNN, HBO, Showtime and now even PBS’ “American Masters” all straddling the lines between the big and small screen.

Not to be outdone, Netflix flexed its out financial muscles before the festival had even started, locking up worldwide streaming rights to three anticipated titles: “Tallulah,” starring Ellen Page; “The Fundamentals of Caring” with Paul Rudd; and “Under the Shadow,” an Iranian horror movie that drew comparisons to “The Babadook.”

Theatrical rights to these films are still up for grabs, but by siphoning off an important revenue stream, Netflix dampened interest among would-be suitors.

Netflix also seemed to dominate the chatter in Park City, by flying in Chelsea Handler to promote her new docuseries “Chelsea Does.”

The streaming service also is responsible, in part, for the largest Sundance deal on the books: Fox Searchlight getting Nate Parker’s “The Birth of a Nation,” about the 1931 slave uprising led by Nat Tuner, for $17.5 million. Netflix is said to have driven bidding up by offering $20 million, but in the end, the producers decided to go with a more familiar theatrical distributor of prestige titles for less money (but still more than anybody has ever bid on a Sundance movie).

It wasn’t long ago when directors were scared to experiment with how their films would reach the masses. But in interview after interview, major talent was asked to reflect on the presence of Netflix, and the new message seems to be a ringing endorsement. “I love Netflix. I just sold a TV show to Netflix,” Selena Gomez, who co-stars in “The Fundamentals of Caring,” told Variety. “It’s incredible the traffic that they get. It’s all that I watch when I’m at home.”

There is a downside and an upside to Netflix and Amazon’s rise. As Gomez notes, the audience that both services reach dwarf those of traditional indie distributors. And their business model, one that is built on streams, not ticket sales, means that they can take a chance and pay top dollar for the kinds of risky fare that is Sundance’s stock-in-trade.

But the online video revolution that both companies are fostering also raises questions about the longterm health of the arthouse scene. Most of the films that earned big deals at last year’s festival collapsed at the box office, from “Dope” to “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl,” and studio buyers are grousing about how disconnected many of this year’s crop of movies seem from popular tastes.

“Sundance hasn’t exactly put its best face forward,” one studio executive griped. “It’s terrible,” said another buyer.

Some of the movies have not been well-received. “Swiss Army Man,” which featured Paul Dano riding a flatulent corpse played by Daniel Radcliffe across an ocean, inspired an exodus of studio buyers and will be lucky if it sells for seven figures.

Others, such as the cancer dramedy “Other People,” Kelly Reinhardt’s three-vignette “Certain Women,” Antonio Campos’ “Chrstine” or the Obama first date movie “Southside With Me,” have been effective, even finely-wrought pictures, but face questions about their commercial viability when they leave the nurturing confines of the mountainside gathering.

With Netflix and Amazon offering hours of shows and films for free, paying money to see smaller scale comedies and dramas has become less appealing. Even good reviews may not be enough to attract big audience, which may be why traditional studios — such as The Weinstein Co. and Focus Features — have been quiet during the festival so far.

“The audience for movies I might make is much smaller than what it once was,” said Todd Solondz, director of “Wiener-Dog” and a film school professor at NYU. “Most of my students, they watch things on the Netflix or the download, so they’re not going to theaters. That’s why things are so difficult.”

Although Amazon and Netflix’s buying spree seems to usher in a new era for Sundance, there are still time-honored traditions that won’t be going away anytime soon. Amazon will find a theatrical distributor to release “Manchester by the Sea,” and promised that it would launch a competitive awards season campaign for the much-loved drama. So, in the end, multiplexes will carry “Manchester By the Sea” — even if some audiences would prefer to wait and see it on a laptop.

Brent Lang & Ramin Setoodeh – Variety – JANUARY 26, 2016

Oz pubcaster ABC wants more broad-appeal Australian drama that can connect internationally.

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ABC TV head of fiction Carole Sklan is keen for more drama that appeals to under-50s. The Australian pubcaster’s flagship channel has a persistently older-skewing audience profile, and Sklan says the challenge is “about how to appeal to a broader audience without alienating a huge, significant older audience who are devoted to the ABC.”

Sklan’s fiction remit covers a varied slate of both drama and scripted comedy, including international coproductions. “We support a diverse range of shows, always with external production companies – there’s no in-house production at the ABC,” she says.

The exec adds that a key focus is “to tell Australian stories for Australian audiences that hopefully make a connection internationally and sell throughout the world.”

She adds: “We look for a very diverse slate, a mix of returning series and original series… So we’re looking to do a mix, showcasing extraordinary local talent.”

Past successes include literary adaptations and factual drama, which can be stories about remarkable Australians, Sklan says – citing miniseries such as Paper Giants, about the rise of Kerry Packer and Rupert Murdoch’s media empires in Australia, and Carlotta, which profiled Australia’s first transgender person, a high-profile cabaret artist in the 1970s.

One hit for ABC in 2015 was The Secret River, a two-part adaptation of Kate Grenville’s award-winning bestselling novel. The show was developed by producers Stephen Luby and Mark Ruse of Ruby Entertainment, along with director Fred Schepisi, and adapted by screenwriters Jan Sardi and Mac Gudegon. Airing in a Sunday night 20.30 slot last June, the drama was one of ABC’s top 10 local productions of 2015, attracting 1.2 million viewers in linear transmission and an average 90,000 plays on ABC’s online platform iview per episode.

The Beautiful Lie was another success for the channel. The six-part contemporary drama adaptation was made by Endemol Australia Production in association with ABC TV, Film Victoria and Screen Australia.

“What I thought was incredibly bold and imaginative was that it was inspired by Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina but set in contemporary middle-class Australia,” explains Sklan. “And it was absolutely fascinating the way the psychological insights and social observations of the 19th century Russian aristocracy also seemed to translate extremely well to contemporary life. So those universal themes of love, infidelity, relationships and survival are explored in a contemporary context.”

The pubcaster also aired six-part paranormal drama Glitch, from Matchbox Pictures, releasing the series on iview first to allow viewers to binge-watch ahead of its linear release. The show generated 1.2 million iview plays across its run, and although linear ratings were not as strong, a second season has now been commissioned.

ABC’s 2016 slate includes the return of Jack Irish in February, this time as a six-part series, which will kick off its season of Thursday-night homemade drama at 20.30.

Other returning series include Janet King, The Doctor Blake Mysteries and Rake.

Also upcoming is a second season of thriller The Code, which first premiered on ABC in September 2014. “It’s very exciting – big ideas, action, serialised storytelling across the six hours – but essentially it’s grounded in a relationship between two brothers,” says Sklan. One of the brothers is a hacker with Asperger syndrome who comes across a range of conspiracies; the other is an investigative journalist.

“Though we’re dealing with big stories and ideas, and quite a dark world with the possibility of nuclear technology getting into the hands of terrorists, it’s driven by these very emotional and personal relationships of the two brothers, navigating their way in the world,” Sklan adds of the show.

Made by Playmaker Media, The Code was developed under Australia’s Scribe Initiative, with production funding assistance from Screen Australia, Screen NSW, Screen Queensland, the ACT Government and Screen ACT. One of the ABC’s goals is to engage and nurture great creative teams – including producers, directors and writers – but Sklan has concerns over retaining the country’s writers. “Our writers are all being snaffled up by the US and the UK,” she says.

Sklan and ABC’s big swing in 2016 is upcoming miniseries Barracuda (4×60’) from Matchbox Pictures. Adapted from Christos Tsiolkas’s follow-up to his book The Slap, it counts the author as an associate producer alongside producers Tony Ayres and Amanda Higgs. Elias Anton and Ben Kindon star.

The drama, timed to coincide with the lead-up to this year’s Olympics, is “essentially a very different sports story… about the pressures on young elite athletes and the nature of success and identity,” says Sklan. Barracuda follows a working-class boy who wins a swimming scholarship for an elite private boys’ school, but finds he has to navigate a world of very wealthy, privileged young men.

Also coming to the channel is futurist drama Cleverman. The six-parter from Goalpost Pictures Australia and New Zealand’s Pukeko Pictures is coproduced with Red Arrow International and SundanceTV.

“It’s about really vivid characters and fascinating, addictive relationships that you want to revisit every week,” says Sklan, summarising ABC’s drama output. “Also, as the public broadcaster, our stories need to reflect something about our worlds and our lives. But I do think characters and relationships are the key.

“With returning series, we’re probably looking at genre because of the dramatic stakes and stories they give you. We’re not at all interested in generic procedural shows – we want fresh and entertaining takes on medical, legal, crime series and so on.”

Gün Akyuz reports – C21 Media – 20 January 2016

ABC TV appoints new Head of Arts

Documentary, Latest News, Television

ABC Director of Television Richard Finlayson has announced the appointment of Mandy Chang to the role of Head of Arts, ABC TV.

Chang joined the ABC in 2013 after a stint producing and directing documentaries for major UK broadcasters including the BBC, Channel 4, ITV, PBS and Sky Atlantic.

Her feature-length documentary The Mona Lisa Curse for Channel 4 won the Rose d’Or, Banff World Media Festival Grand Jury Prize, Grierson and Emmy Awards.

In her three years at ABC TV, she has overseen the creation of Autopsy on a Dream – the Story of the Sydney Opera House, Hannah Gadsby’s Oz, The Art of Australia, Art and Soul II, Getting Frank Gehry, Comic Book Heroes, The Cambodian Space Project, Cast from the Storm, The Divorce and Matilda and Me.

Recently Chang worked on the creation of the ABC iview Arts channel and the development of David Stratton’s Story of Australian Cinema, due to premiere this year.

“The ABC has a steadfast ambition to become the home of Arts in Australia”, Finlayson said. “Mandy’s appointment to this role is a clear signal that we intend to commission and produce world-class content across all our platforms and bring the best of the arts to a wide Australian audience.

“Our Arts team has produced some of ABC TV’s best work over the past few years and we are fortunate to have great depth throughout the group. I’d particularly like to thank Kath Earle for her outstanding leadership during the past year, particularly her work bringing our innovative iview Arts channel to life.”

Mandy Chang said: “Having done what I feel is a rigorous three-year apprenticeship, I’m both excited and honoured to be taking on the Head of Arts role.

“We have accomplished much within ABC Arts over the past few years, delivering innovative, high-quality Arts content for audiences, across all of our platforms. I look forward to leading the Arts team as we continue to find ambitious and exciting ways to celebrate and share the artistic achievements and dynamic cultural life of this country.”

Chang commences in her new role this week.

Media Release Monday 18 January 2015

BBC commissions Kris Mrksa’s Requiem for late 2016

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Australian screenwriter Kris Mrksa (Glitch, Janet King, The Slap, Underbelly, The Secret Life of Us) will write a six-part series for BBC Drama.

Requiem will be made by New Pictures (coming off the back of a great success with The Missing, starring Australia’s Frances O’Connor) and will consist of six one-hour episodes. The show will be executive produced by Willow Grylls, Elaine Pyke and Charlie Pattinson for New Pictures and Polly Hill for BBC One.

A thriller which flirts with the supernatural, Requiem is the story of a young woman who discovers, in the wake of her mother’s death, that everything she thought she knew about herself was a lie.

Mrksa is in esteemed company. Controller of BBC Drama commissioning, Polly Hill, said “I want the BBC to be the best creative home for writers and it’s exciting to bring audiences new shows from Mike Bartlett, Jimmy McGovern (Cracker), Jo Ahearne and Hugo Blick (The Honourable Woman); plus have Kenneth Lonnergan (You Can Count on Me), Connor McPherson and Kris Mrksa all writing their first dramas for us”.

By Harry Windsor INSIDEFILM [Wed 06/01/2016)]

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Screen Australia’s Documentary Producer Program Supports 11 Diverse Projects

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Media Release – Tuesday 22 December 2015

A diverse array of 11 documentaries tackling everything from the challenges of Year 12, to the murder case of child beauty queen JonBenet Ramsay are set to receive funding as part of Screen Australia’s Documentary Producer Program.

This round includes six feature film documentaries, two iview premieres, and three television docos, proving the innovative and wide array of ways Australian producers are connecting these unique stories to audiences.

“Not only are we supporting a record number of documentaries for the Producer Program with this round, but we are hitting every platform, from online to television to features,” Screen Australia Chief Operating Officer Fiona Cameron says.

“These documentaries present a fascinating array of stories, told from established as well as emerging filmmakers.”

Casting JonBenet, about the unsolved death of the six-year-old beauty queen, is the second feature film from emerging director Kitty Green. Green’s first feature premiered at Venice Film Festival and her most recent work won Best Documentary Short at Sundance Film Festival. Green is producing, along with Scott Macaulay.

Another true-crime flavoured doc is the feature length Ghosthunter. From first-time director Ben Lawrence, producer Rebecca Bennett and executive producer Margie Bryant, it follows the story of a man whose life-long search for an absent father leads to an horrific revelation.

Equally terrifying, but in an entirely different way, is what the final year of high-school presents for young Australians. Produced by Karla Burt and executive produced by Laura Waters, Year 12 Diaries tells the true story of that intense journey, through the kids living it.

Meanwhile Spookers isn’t as scary as it sounds. Australian production company Madman (That Sugar Film) have teamed up with New Zealand filmmaker Florian Habicht for this tale about a close-knit farming family who open the most successful scare park in the Southern Hemisphere.

Making its premiere online is 10-part documentary web series No Strings Attached, where producers Lisa Kovacevic and Emma Watts tackle the topic of trying to connect in the 21 st century through a cast of puppets, who re-enact stories of dating app users.

Moving from social phenomena to social impact, Blue tells the story of our changing oceans and the crisis looming beneath the waves from director Karina Holden and producer Electra Manikakis of Northern Pictures.

The arts also feature heavily, from Ella’s Journey, which follows Ella Havelka, the first Indigenous dancer accepted into the Australia ballet, to multiplatform project Slam TV – a series about slam poetry, which is set to premiere on iview.

Meanwhile An Australian Nightmare presents a kind of Shakespearean film-within-a-film as producer/writer/director Gary Doust follows the journey of actor/filmmaker Craig Anderson making his first really low budget horror film with his own life savings.

And arts-inspired docos with a biographical edge include Gurrumul- Elcho Dreaming,  about the celebrated Indigenous musician, and a television documentary about visionary architect Harry Seidler titledSeidler – Brutal or Beautiful.

“This round of documentaries delivers a bit of everything, from chilling true crime, to spooky fun, to important issues impacting Australians now and in the future,” Ms Cameron said.

Continue reading Screen Australia’s Documentary Producer Program Supports 11 Diverse Projects →

Report warns of resource gap for emerging filmmakers after Screen Australia shuts off funding

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Sydney’s Metro Screen is closing its doors on December 23 with the loss of 15 core staff and 60 contractors. Hobart-based Wide Angle Tasmania will close next June and Brisbane’s QPIX shuttered last year.

The closure of state-based screen resource centres after Screen Australia cut off their funding will deprive many emerging filmmakers of a vital bridge between tertiary education and entering the workforce.

That’s according to a new report, Emerging Visions: Career Pathways in the Australian Screen Production Industry, commissioned by Paddington-based Metro Screen, which lost its annual $250,000 grant from the agency.

Launching the report on Wednesday night, Metro Screen president Kath Shelper tells IF she hopes there will be a broad-based campaign to restore funding for emerging practitioners, similar to that mounted by arts organisations, from the smallest to the largest, after the Australia Council’s funding was cut.

The ADG and Screen Producers Australia had reps on the working party which commissioned the study.

“In our industry there has been very little backlash to Screen Australia’s cuts,” Shelper said. “Screen Australia does not see funding the emerging sector as its responsibility.”

The report notes federal government support to the screen industry including the producer offset jumped by 90 per cent since 2006/07, while funds for emerging screen practitioners will have shrunk by around 80 per cent by 2016/17.

Goalpost Pictures’ Rosemary Blight told the researchers, “I think there’s an issue with isolating yourself in an academic environment, and then coming out the end and standing there going ‘what am I going to do?’ I’m just concerned about what types of people are coming out and whether they are prepared for it.”

In 2013 the state resource centres received nearly $6 million in funding (including $1.47 million from Screen Australia). That year they supported 316 productions including 90 films selected for festivals and skills development for 3,300 participants.

The study found 36 per cent of producers surveyed believed that emerging practitioners are ‘over-qualified and under-skilled,’ while 24 per cent disagreed. The report concludes, “If Screen Australia isn’t responsible for taking the lead, who is?”

By Don Groves INSIDEFILM [Thu 12/11/2015]

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http://if.com.au/2015

New dawn of TV drama: Director Glendyn Ivin

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INTERVIEW

Australians have entered a new and exciting age of television, says the director behind shows including The Beautiful Lie, Gallipoli and Puberty Blues. By Caris Bizzaca

Television drama isn’t changing, it’s already changed, director Glendyn Ivin says.

With moody, atmospheric series such as The Code and Top of the Lake, television has become more cinematic in look and is presenting itself as a strong alternative to the movies.

“It’s also not just the look, but in the storytelling and the kind of storytelling. It’s smarter if you like,” Ivin says.

“Whereas it’s very hard to get an audience to go to the cinema to see that sort of story, it’s far easier and the audience is much greater, when it’s delivered either free-to-air, or catching up on streaming services later on.

“It’s almost like the new dawn of drama, that’s where it’s ending up.”

Traditionally, when you talked about the notion of exploring characters in a long-form production, you were referring to a 90 minute feature film. But Ivin says he’s relishing the chance to tell stories over a number of television episodes like with The Beautiful Lie, a modern-day adaptation of Anna Karenina.

“If you look at The Beautiful Lie, it feels cinematic, it feels like it could be a film but it goes for six hours,” he says of the Melbourne-set show starring Sarah Snook.

“So whether its six hours or 13 hours, long-form television series feel like the new way of telling dramatic stories, particularly in Australia.”

And as an audience member, it’s also exciting.

Ivin, a self-confessed Mad Men fan, says even the notion of ‘binge-watching’ was unheard of just a few years back.

“It’s such an unusual term, but being able to tell a story like that and being able to watch it when and how you watch it, it’s so much better for the audience… the fact that streaming has provided a multitude of different ways to consuming good storytelling, (shows) we are in a golden age of television.”

Ivin directed the 2009 feature film 2009, but the vast majority of his work has been in TV, working with producer John Edwards on Offspring, Puberty Blues, TV movie Beaconsfield and miniseries Gallipoli.

It was actually that collaboration that led to The Beautiful Lie.

While working in the dark editing suite on Gallipoli and dealing with the heaviness of war stories, Edwards would keep raving about a new project screenwriter Alice Bell was writing.

“I think he was just tempting me with it or baiting me,” Ivin says, particularly because Edward knew how much he enjoyed working with Bell (who was a writer on Puberty Blues).

Toward the end of 2014, Ivin got his hands on a screenplay and by March filming had kicked off.

Ivin, who directs three of the six episodes, says when dealing with adaptations like The Beautiful Lie or Puberty Blues he doesn’t necessarily feel like he has to stick to the story religiously.

“Great adaptations aren’t just saying ‘oh they’ve got the story right’, but that they’ve got the feel, the energy and the spirit of the text,” he says.

“For me, trying to capture the way that someone felt when they read the book is just as important.”

Watch The Beautiful Lie on ABC TV Sunday nights at 8.30pm or catch-up on iview.

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West Wing director Thomas Schlamme says TV more experimental

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The director of The West Wing, Thomas Schlamme, enjoyed what was considered the best of times in television. Audiences were predictable and the budgets for him to direct series from E.R. and Sports Night to The West Wing and Aaron Sorkin’s follow-up, Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip, were massive and growing.

Yet even as audiences fracture to different platforms and television budgets consequently shrink, Schlamme remains even more optimistic for his craft.

“People are using a business model where they made enormous amounts of money,” he says of television’s apparent malaise. “In fact, (now) you can actually have a fairly successful company just making less money.”

Schlamme recalls the downside of the boom budget times, when their drama based in a television network, Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip, didn’t work and “I literally felt I was bringing down the Western economy! Warner Bros came to us and said we were being hit,” he recalls. “I thought the yen was going to fall and the world would implode because of the budget we were spending on that show and we weren’t getting an audience.”

The series still broke even but, Schlamme adds, “They just weren’t able to print money off it and they were so mad at us they couldn’t print money because it looked like a show that could.”

Schlamme is directing Manhattan, a drama about the making of the atomic bomb and starring The Code’s Ashley Zukerman, for the WGN America cable network. Schlamme, who is earning the best reviews of his career for Manhattan after coming from the similarly revered series The Americans, says his optimism as a storyteller is because there “are just so many different avenues”.

“I remember if I had a project it used to be: Should we go to NBC or ABC?” he says. “Now it’s like we can go to five places I’ve never heard of and, no, they’re not going to give me as much money to make the show so I’ve got to come up with a way to make it). Now, much more is being demanded artistically of a television director than ever before,” he says.

Schlamme notes that the medium is becoming more sophisticated, particularly visually, compared to his early years in which there was a very limited television vocabulary and networks said, “You’re in somebody’s home, don’t do any fancy work, make them feel comfortable.”

Once The West Wing and HBO — with The Sopranos — changed the visual and narrative possibilities of television in the late 1990s, Schlamme says, “I felt like I was liberated as a director to use anything that was in my toolbox. And, in fact, if you really look at it, outside of big C-G (computer-generated) movies, movies have become safer and television has become more experimental.

“It’s a little bit, for me at least, in America, television is much more like independent filmmaking. You can actually be braver and in some ways the confinement of time actually opens up creativity rather than closes it.”

More Here: www.theaustralian.com.au/business/media

Michael Bodey – The Australian – November 09, 2015