PS68060

My cousin was in a Canadian made film once. It was set in a the cotton mills of NW England. I did see it once but I don't think it got a second showing.

"Oh! Pete!"

MarkG

Not sure if it's still the case, but for years many (most?) Canadian films were tax write-offs, so the financiers didn't really care whether they were shown. That's how Cronenberg got started.

IMHO the real problems for British movies are funding and distribution. There's not much private funding other than tax write-offs, and tax funding has historically tended to go to the mates of the people who hand out the money, with a proviso that it's not to be used for 'commercial' movies... then we complain when the movies they make vanish without a trace. Worse, whereas many people in other countries will go out of their way to help people get low-budget movies made, in this country it appears that many people will go out of their way to stop them.

And even if you do make a commercial movie, getting it shown is hard because the cinemas are booked solid with Hollywood movies, while TV stations are often forced to buy a dozen crap Hollywood movies in order to get the one blockbuster they really want, and since they now have the right to show those crap movies they'll generally do so rather than buy a British movie instead.

Beyond that there still seems to be a strong belief in some quarters that you can't make a British movie unless it's something depressing about unemployed people on council estates.

orpheum

At least you have a decent vintage movie channel in the states.Here we have none.TCM just seems to show the same couple of hundred films time and again.The Sky film channels have nothing of remote interest and Film 4 shows the same films so often that if they were actual prints they would have long worn out by now.The time when you could open the weekly Radio Times and look forward in anticipation to the week's films has long gone.

clitheroekid

Very true, sadly..........

ChristineCB

TCM-USA has been our favored channel for years, but in the last year, they have been displaying - and even championing - a much larger treasure chest of never-heard-of jewels.

Unfortunately, they've not only expanded their playlist of '30s, '40s and '50s films, but are wasting viewing time by showing '80s and even '90s films. I am hard-pressed to see how these qualify as "classics" even by the Automotive Definition ("25 years"). There's only about 10,000 older films they could show.

And I think GW could finally become the popular savior that His Own Mind so desperately needs if only he'd liberate the BFI, Hammer, Amicus, etc. archives into the light of TV broadcasting days.

Free Stanley Baker! Free Margaret Rutherford! Free Will Hay!