Lion couchant
FILM FINANCE NICHOLAS DAVENPORT
Those of us who would like the Government to practise more economy than it preaches will have observed with some satisfaction that it has not been handing out any more money to the National Film Finance Corporation. An inter-departmental committee has been looking ''OA into the whole question of Government film finance for some time and the corporation plaintively remarks in its recent report for the year 31 March 1968 that a decision as to its future has become a matter of increasing urgency. Lord Goodman, the chairman of British Lion Films (Holdings), which claims to be the largest independent film producer in Britain, has declared that a decision to destroy the NFFC would be 'short-sighted in the extreme.' I beg, as a mere commoner, to differ.
In the first place, the NFFC in its present form is already a dead duck. Here is its record of losses for the past four years beginning with the year to 31 March 1968: £199,098, £369,699, £292,245, and £265,555. A large part of these losses is due to interest paid to the Board of Trade on moneys which have been irretrievably lost. Up to date the corporation has lost—and will never recover—£5 million out of the £6 mil- lion advanced by the Board of Trade. But this is not the end of the story. In nineteen years it has advanced over £251 million on 'approved' films and had received up to 31 March last only £16,191,957. Of the £3 million originally advanced to British Lion it lost the lot but recovered £1 million by the sale of shares and a special dividend from tax reliefs. The final NFFC loss may be well over £6 million.
Enough is enough, as Mr Cecil King would say. It is all very well to incur a capital loss in order to secure a bright future for our film producing industry but what has the NFFC done? It has kept alive a few producers who should have been dead ages ago seeing that they drive the public out of the cinemas; it has enabled us to export 'horror' films to America and earn an export medal for the producers; but it has utterly failed to maintain a British film producing industry which is independent either of the Americans or the two great combines (an Pictures and Rank) dominating the cinema trade. The original purpose of the film subsidy was to prevent our native producers from being dominated by these two powerful forces. Yet the last report of the NFFC revealed that 72 per cent of the British first features exhibited on the two main circuits was wholly or partly financed by American companies (or in terms of money volume approximately 90 per cent). So much for the independence of the 'inde- pendent' British producer for whose salvation the NFFC was established. To add bitterness to the joke, the more British films are backed by Americans, the more money flows out of the British Film Fund (the box office levy for pro- ducers) into the pockets of the American backers.
I am not suggesting that the NFFC has not financed any British films worthy of support. There have been a few unusual and compelling films which may be said to have been peculiarly English and free from foreign influence. But the public are still not interested in the stock conventional films offered at the box office. Last year box office admissions were down again—by 5.5 per cent—to 274 million—they were once over 1,000 million—and the number of cinemas open has fallen from 3,000 in 1960 to 1,772.
Clearly, a radical change has occurred in the tastes or habits of people seeking public enter- tainment. They will not go to the cinema except to see (a) a current human problem dealt with in an adult unconventional way—nothing hidden, nothing unspoken, as in Joyce's Ulysses; (b) a super-sensational film, like the James Bond series, in which the male audience can project its vision of the tough he-man raping women and killing national enemies and the female audience the fulfilment of its more primitive passions; and (c) a super-colossal film far outside the range of television on which many millions have been spent. It is sad to record that while the NFFC has been losing millions on films which bore the public the producers of the super-colossal have never made such an enormous killing. I believe that The Sound of Music which cost $4 million has made a profit so far of $20 million. British producers have not seen themselves cast in the role of the super-colossal but I am glad to learn that John Woolf has broken the ice with a musical of Oliver on which over £2 million is being spent. It is, of course, a joint Anglo- American financial proposition.
Some exhibitors have understood the impli- cations of this radical change in the tastes and habits of the cinema-goer and are modernising their old cinemas, making two or three out of one. The Rank Organisation are making six twin and one triple theatre in which the minority type of experimental film can be shown to the more selective small audience and the majority type to the larger unsophisticated audience. And bingo perhaps played in the third. In the view of this company the decline in cinema- going is due to the bad old-fashioned theatres. `Where we build new theatres,' they say, 'the admissions are rising significantly.' I disagree. It is the product at fault more than the theatre.
I am not totally against a handout of state money to select British film makers. The Government wastes so many millions in sub- sidies of one sort and another to British industry that it can well afford a few to British films on a more rational basis. But I am wholly opposed to making loans through an institution like the NFFC which will always attract the, second-rate. What is wanted is a panel of wise, cultured and experienced men who will select the best film producers and directors we have and approve a subject sub- mitted from each team for loan finance from the Treasury. This will form a basis of a Board of Trade contract, like any other business contract financed by the Government and when four or five contracts have been awarded the money from these prestige films will form the basis of a revolving fund. Enough again is enough. What better ideas can you put for- ward?
It may be that Mr Clifford Barclay, the un- paid and resourceful new president of the British Film Producers Association, will have the answer. It may be that he will suggest an inter- national film bank which will attract more Americans into our studios. The important fact for us all to remember is that film production is an international business and that all that we British can hope for is to keep our little local school of film making alive and independent and original. But we may have to abandon the system of circuit-booking before we achieve it.
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