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DUNCAN KENWORTHY
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But it did leave me thinking that maybe it was time to have at least a nudge at the way that journal- ists do love to slag off British films. And how poten- tially destructive their sheer glee can be - something I’m pretty aware of at the moment after my film The Parole Officer received a bit of a rocky ride from one or two of the broadsheets.
So I thought I’d just look at a few elements of this strange phenomenon - the desire to be so energetical- ly hostile to home-grown films.
WEIRD THING ONE
‘Bring me a negative story about the British film industry...’
You’d think this were a weekly edict of tabloid and broadsheet Fleet Street editors. Knocking copy clearly sells, especially if it contains the words “lottery”, “low- budget”, “British” and “film” in close proximity.
And there are weapons to hand for every eventu- ality. If a Brit film is considered to be a failure (this can be engineered - see below), trumpet the fact. If it has lottery money in it, it’s an outrageous and immoral failure and every-
one associated with it
should be ashamed of the
day they were born.
If it’s a success, but
financed by the Hollywood
studios (like The Full
Monty), it’s a national dis-
grace that the profits are
going back to America. If it
has lottery money in it and
succeeds, why on earth should the British public be financing commercial movies?
Finding a negative angle is like taking candy from a baby, and there’s plenty of candy theft around at the moment.
WEIRD THING TWO
‘Let’s slag off a British movie so no-one goes to see it – then next week pretend to be shocked by how big a flop it is...’
This is the classic ‘two slags for the price of one’ (or ‘two sftpoo’ for short) that we’re seeing a lot of at the moment. It’s a no-lose technique. It doesn’t even matter if the flop isn’t a flop – no-one, least of all the general public, knows how to read the numbers any- way (how many times have you read media experts who should know better refer to a movie’s box-office gross as the amount of money it’s made?).
Once the sidebar with the photo has made its incontrovertible point, we’re on to the next target.
The ‘two sftpoo’ technique can of course be mod- ified by the ‘false puff gambit’ - write an article the week before the opening of Lucky Break claiming that the film is going to gross Full Monty numbers, and how Film Four’s future is riding on it. Then double the size of next week’s “It’s A Flop!” headline when the film fails to live up to your projection.
The great thing for exponents of ‘two sftpoo’ is that British movies can’t afford big (American) stars, and without positive copy they have almost no mar-
keting momentum - so this technique can fatally hole any British movie below the waterline.
WEIRD THING THREE
‘Every movie must have something to say about the state of society – unless it’s an American film, when it can just be entertaining...’
Releasing The Parole Officer in August made me realise several things. First, that broadsheet reviewers are more interested in their own expectations than filmmakers’ intentions.
And secondly, that British movies aren’t allowed to be simply entertaining; they must have something to say about the state of society, or be found wanting. (Remember how Four Weddings was repeatedly taken to task because Hugh Grant’s character didn’t have a proper job?)
This would be fine if it was a requirement applied exactingly and uniformly to all movies. But there are double standards here - American movies are curiously exempt.
This was brought home to me most forcibly by a reviewer who praised the entertainment value of Jurassic Park 3 , a film in which cloned dinosaurs mirac- ulously talk to each other, was highly amused by Cats and Dogs, a film in which cats and dogs vie to take over the world , but found The Parole Officer “implausible”.
WEIRD THING FOUR
‘Let’s review every British comedy at 10.30am on a Monday morning in a huge empty cinema...’
Newspaper movie reviewers have such cast-iron faith in their individual ability to judge the qualities of a film that, apart from rare exceptions, they refuse to view it with an audience.
After all, they reason, they don’t want their opin- ion affected by the punters. This may work for a small drama with intimate effects, but isn’t film intended to be a conversation with a big audience?
That’s at least the assumption that the moviemak- ers I’ve worked with use to gauge their work in the
cutting room. Comedies, in particular, are all about building waves of laughter, not designing an individ- ual, internal, intellectual chuckle.
We had a multi-media screening of The Parole Officer some weeks before release with an audience of 400. There was much laughter and enjoyment and it can’t be entirely coincidental that we had consistently good reviews from the long-lead press - and, for instance, from the News of the World reviewer, who was to review the film the Sunday before we opened and had to see it with the crowd.
The film was then screened, early one morning in an empty 800 seat Odeon, for the reviewers of news- papers who did not or would not come to that screen- ing. With one exception they said the film had no jokes in it at all. Well, when they saw it, it didn’t. To all intents and purposes they saw the wrong film.
Screening a broad comedy in an empty cinema seems to me as sensible as reviewing a stand-up comedian playing to an empty club.
...AND A FUNERAL
Of course it’s not my argument that reviewers should lie in their reviews. It’s not their job to sell films. And who knows, perhaps they were right about The Parole Officer, which may very well not be perfect (though the audience liked it enough to make it a solid box-office hit in competition with some huge US blockbusters).
But I genuinely believe that we are all in this together. Reviewers would love there to be a good, strong British film industry, both popular and artistic. That the audience wants to see well told British sto- ries as well as megabudget, star led US movies and that the film industry wants to get beyond struggling for survival to a place where it can make movies that please both of those audiences.
But before we get there, there has to be an accep- tance that an industrial process which produces a lot of films, and employs a lot of people, will inevitably result in many different kinds of films, differently realised, some good, some mediocre, some brave fail- ures with first-time talent, some perhaps outrageously bad, some wildly entertaining and successful.
This is what it means to have an industry, not a series of cottages making one film each every four years. An occasional box-office or artistic failure is not the end of everything but an inevitable building block en route to an industrial model where the hits pay for the flops.
So I would plead that we try to create an environ- ment that is at the very least fair. That we take the glee out of the pans, the energy out of the hostility, the slagging-off out of the weighing-up.
Otherwise it will be a funeral for all of us - and reviewers will find the rest of their lives are spent sit- ting through Hollywood movies with the numbers 4 or 5 (or 10 or 11) after the title. ■
Duncan Kenworthy is an independent film producer and a director of the Film Council
“An occasional box-office or artistic failure is not the end of everything but an inevitable building block en route to an industrial model where the hits pay for the flops.”
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