Page 6 - 01_Bafta ACADEMY_Lara Croft_ok

Academy First Person
FILLINGTHE BLACKHOLE
ALAN PARKER, INAUGURAL CHAIRMAN OF
THE NEW BRITISH FILM COUNCIL, OFFERS A FEW CHILLING HOME TRUTHS
Dawn-of-the-new-century thoughts,” the editor suggested when he asked me to contribute a few words for this first issue of ACADEMY. As I write, the hang- overs from the bonhomie of the “M-word” celebrations have cleared. The Dome is now deemed an “inverted blancmange” by Prince Charles and a possible film studio by those who never filmed in one. As Chairman of the new Film Council I am biased, if not honour-bound, to be a positivist with regard to the future of the Film Industry in this country. But new centuries bring new truths and there is no easy panacea: the Film Council cannot be Clark Kent scooting into a phone box and turning the Film Industry into Superman.
My “new century” hope is that the perennial question facing all those involved with film gets answered before the end of the next decade. Namely: how is it with such a massive creative talent pool, accomplished technicians and history of great filmmaking, that, as an industry, we are still standing on the world’s street corner with cap in hand? The dilemma facing our industry is painfully simple: that in this brave, new world of bewildering technological change, one thing remains the same. There are those who provide content and those who deliver it, and whenever the twain doesn’t meet, you get the cardboard city we presently inhabit.
AOL has now taken over Time Warner, a company with five times AOL’s resources and revenues but one-fifth of its profits. In doing so they decimated all of the last century’s notions of what an entertainment media company actually is. The British Film Industry (such a lovely old phrase considering the bewildering speed with which our vocabularies and our lives are being downloaded) faces a challenge that the present level of production dangerously camouflages. The fact is that at the centre of our industry is a large, black hole that you don’t have to be Stephen Hawking to explain. On the day the Americans announced their mega-merger, I received an invitation to the old PolyGram company’s wake (or goodbye party, as they politely described it).
PolyGram, gobbled up and spat out by Seagram, who bought it a year ago, has finally closed its doors. PolyGram, the dear old Dutch company we loved to call British, was our best chance in recent years of a substantial, vertically integrated European entertainment company. The catastrophe of losing this exceptional com- pany, management and staff, is only just dawning on those of us who preferred to believe that it wasn’t really happening. In large, dramatic letters on the front of the PolyGram invitation it said, “The End.” But ends mean new beginnings, and now should be the time to be honest enough and smart enough to put things right.
Hand on heart, we can’t blame everything on the Americans (and Canadians). The black hole at the centre of our industry occurred because, in the formative Sixties and Seventies, our own traditional film and entertainment companies appeared to experience the business equivalent of a frontal lobotomy.
4
Continued on page 6