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TARTAN BOOM
film commissions
next five years which offers generous tax concessions to private investors.
Plainly neither Crooks nor the city is about to rest on its laurels.
The first film in which the Glasgow Film Fund invested was Shallow Grave back in 1993. It was Glasgow’s final £250,000 which allowed the film to go ahead. Since
then they have invested in more than a dozen other films. Of their initial twelve investments, four have returned profits, again an impressive strike rate.
For Glasgow the annus mirabilis was 1997 when profits from Shallow Grave and Small Faces allowed the GFF to invest in My Name Is Joe,
Orphans, and The Acid House. Between them these three films won 25 major international awards includ- ing Best Actor at Cannes and a Best Film award at Venice.
The city prides itself on
being cinema-friendly.
Traditionally in terms of cinema-going more Glaswegians have gone to the cinema more often than any other city in the United Kingdom.
Although it cannot compete with the heady heights of the Mayor’s Office in New York for making life easy for film-makers, Glasgow
does have its own Film-makers’ Charter. This is an agreement entered into between the
Glasgow Film Office, the City Council, the police and other
public services to make filming
in the city as painless and effi-
cient as possible.
There is of course an
upside for the city. The
multiplier effect means that every £1 million of direct production finance generates £1.3 million in indirect income for the local economy. In a period when the traditional industries have all but col- lapsed, the film industry is making a significant con- tribution to the city’s eco-
nomic wealth and international profile. It is also a point of pride that
almost all of the films shot in Glasgow have been high profile pro- jects. They have not gone down the road of pursuing low-budget vanity projects which exploit tax loopholes only to languish unseen on the shelf or disappear after a week on screen
25 of a multiplex.
But, says Crooks, even the unsuc-
cessful films play their part. He cites Beautiful Creatures as a perfect example. “Although the film was not a suc-
cess it did something for us”‚ he explains. “There were people in the industry who may not have heard of
Glasgow as a location but certainly knew DNA (headed by Duncan Kenworthy and Andrew Macdonald) as a company. The fact that DNA were filming in Glasgow was good for our profile. Regardless of how it did at the box office the film looked good, there were no location prob- lems, and that doesn’t do us any harm at all.”
In some ways that quality thresh- old may be the reason for the current hiatus in production activity. Directors such as Loach, Davies (The House Of Mirth), Ramsay (Ratcatcher) or Forsyth (Gregor y’s 2 Girls) are not noted for churning out films on an annual basis.
“It takes a lot of development time to get a film into production”, says Crooks. “It is something of an
assembly line, but it’s a bit like assem- bling a Morgan rather than a Ford Escort. It takes longer to produce a high-quality product.”
According to Crooks what they havetodonowislookatawayof regrouping and trying to regenerate the momentum of a few years ago.
“There are two ways to do that,” he says. “One is through our indige- nous industry and the other is through our location and mobile industries.”
As it happens both are showing welcome signs of resurgence. The indigenous industry is about to be well represented by Late Night
Shopping. This low-budget film from newcomers Angus Lamont and Saul Metzstein was a prize-winner at Berlin this year and is due for release by Film Four in June.
But the really good news is that Ken Loach is coming back to the city. After shooting Carla’s Song and My Name Is Joe in Glasgow, Loach is cur- rently in pre-production for a third film to be shot in the city at the end of the year.
It will reunite much of the produc- tion team behind My Name Is Joe and if it emulates the success of that film then the Glasgow Film Office can look forward to another Morgan in the showroom. ■ Andy Dougan
Ratcatcher was originated on Fujicolor Motion Picture Negative
Photos top: My Name Is Joe (courtesy Moviestore Collection); above left: Rachel Weisz and Susan Lynch in Beautiful Creatures; above right: Gregory’s 2 Girls