FILM FINANCE
SIR,—The Boulting brothers—pretty petulant them- selves, I would say—complain of the nonsense talked about the film industry. Surely most of the ballyhoo about stars, their high fees and high behaviour, emanates from the film industry's own publicity men. I agree that the House of Commons, when it dis- cusses film matters, tends to treat the subject as light. comic relief from the monotony of dull legislation. But the film producers have only themselves to blame for putting out all the nonsensical stuff about their super — colossal — epoch-making — 'sensational star-studded films.
I cannot recognise myself as `Korda's ambassador extraordinary to the City of London,' but as this title was no doubt intended to denigrate my claim to speak with some authority on film finance, I would like to say that as long ago as 1938-39 I raised the reluctant syndicate capital (including some of my own money—hardly typical of a 'Dickensian capitalist' !) which brought Shaw's Pygmalion and Major Barbara to the screen. The introduction of Shavian dialogue to the cinema world—a revolution at that time—un- doubtedly lifted the standards of British film produc- tion. 1 would always vote for a State subsidy for producers who improve the quality of British films and bring new ideas as well as art to the cinema screen, but I am utterly opposed to the way in which the subsidy is handed out by the NFFC, which keeps alive so much that is artistically and intellectually dead. I was an original member of the NFFC and resigned within a few months when 1 saw the hash it was going to make of its job, although 1 for one had alWays supported the principle of subsidisation.
I never advocated our making epic films of the type of The Big Country, The Ten Commandments, etc. I -knew our producers were quite incapable of it. I said: 'No British company, even with NFFC loans, has felt able to produce the epic films . . . this is the type of film which has been making the outstanding profits of the industry today. The rest of the profits seem to go to a few producers of adult, human- interest stories who do not go as often as they might to the NFFC.' The implication of this sentence was surely clear—that British film producers, alas! do not seem to know how to make enough films of the adult human-interest English sort, which, as Pharos sug- gests, should be their métier. It was grossly mislead- ing of the Boulting brothers to twist these paragraphs and attribute to me the nonsense they parade in their article.
I confess I find their talk about the 'fundamentally creative process in entertainment' the most odious humbug. 'Each film is a prototype,' they say. This is a cliché which Korda always used, with a twinkle in his eye, when he wanted to excuse 'a flop. The majority of entertainment films are nothing but fac- tory jobs manufacturing a drug product made up of the stock ingredients of the studios—known to the trade as the four S's—sex, sentimentality, sadism and suspense. (The Boulting brothers, 1 see, may have added a fifth—slapstick.) Let us by all means strive after cinema art but the real creative artists of thc screen are so few and far between that in thirty years of experience I could count them on the fingers of two hands.—Yours faithfully,
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