julian_craster

An interesting article in today's paper....

Do we need tax subsidies for more films like
'Sex lives of the Potato Men' and exploitative variations
on Michael Winterbottom's '9 Songs' ?

Sadly, I am old enough to remember the 1970s and the type of films
('Come Play with Me' and its ilk (which I stayed away from) , that brought the much lamented Eady Levy
into disrepute, and enabled Thatcher to abolish it
without much fuss...)

From The Guardian:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Colum...1663352,00.html

Carry on chancellor

A points system to judge the Britishness of films for tax relief will take
no account of quality

Mark Lawson
Friday December 9, 2005
The Guardian

In the register of members' interests at Westminster, Gordon Brown lists as
his only privilege a series of upgrades on Virgin Atlantic flights. We can
guess that the chancellor has responded to this generosity by watching
in-flight films, because this week he tweaked the monetary supply in favour
of movie buffs. In the pre-budget report, Brown revealed that film producers
will receive a substantial tax break (up to 20% on big budgets) if they can
prove that they are making UK movies.

The last part is the key financial plot twist: an earlier tax-relief system
was abandoned because of fears that American film and TV studios were using
loopholes to classify their films as British. Now Brown and the Department
of Culture, Media and Sport have come up with a scoring system designed to
establish cinematic nationality. Up to 32 points can be scored - by shooting
in the UK (six), or having a Blighty director or writer (two each), right
down to the one point you can get for doing your laboratory processing
within these isles. Reach 16 points and, taxwise, Gordon's your uncle.
The system seems quite generous. By my reckoning, if Anthony Minghella
directed, wrote and produced a movie that was shot in Britain, with British
stars playing British characters, his project would have qualified already,
although every other element of the movie could be foreign. Conversely, the
DCMS has calculated that Batman Begins, although produced by an American
studio and based on specifically American material, could qualify as a UK
movie because so many of its personnel come from or work here.

The welcome effect will be to create more demand for local talent and
facilities, but the dividend is so beneficial that it encourages movies to
try to qualify as British, running the risk (like the previous system) of
fat American projects suddenly posing in Union Jack pants. The department
insists that the points system is a simple mathematical judgment, but it may
not understand what a shadowy business cinema is. Establishing who actually
wrote a movie is often a matter of theological complexity, while many movies
have up to 16 producers. You can get a point for "majority of cast" being
British, but is that a simple numerical majority? In which case, 200
girl-guide extras walking past the camera could technically make a film
British.

The DCMS was shocked that worries were expressed that the government might
seek to influence the tone or content of movies, but it was a reasonable
assumption. Taxation is a moral matter: most adjustments to the revenue
system are intended to achieve some kind of social engineering, whether by
giving more disposable income to the poor or allowing the rich to keep more
of their capital gains.

Indeed, in the same pre-budget statement that sought to make Britain a
better place for Batman, Brown abandoned a plan to allow houses to be
purchased as pension plans, presumably on the grounds that this break was
immeasurably more favourable to the rich.

This financial intervention in the film business, however, will be morally
and artistically neutral. As a test, I pitched to the minister responsible,
James Purnell, my synopsis for a low-budget horror movie called Blair is the
Devil.

We're still at script-development stage, but here's the basic scenario: in
the remote Scottish village of Cameron, the locals discover during a
black-magic ceremony that Satan has come to earth and taken human form as
the leader of a third-term New Labour administration. Accordingly, they burn
the premier at the stake during a campaign visit to Cameron. As the flames
engulf him, the sizzling Satony reveals that the Department of Media Culture
and Sport is a front for Beelzebub.

With nine points alone for the Britishness of the subject matter and the
writer-producer, we would only need to shoot Blair is the Devil in Scotland
with a British cinematographer in order to qualify for the tax relief. I am
assured that this would be enough; there would be no demand for script
revisions.

Less reassuringly, this also means that the new rules will make no judgment
on quality. So, Sex Lives of the Potato Men - generally regarded as one of
the worst films ever made - would score an almost perfect 32 points out of
32, and Carry on Emmanuelle, a late and lame addition to an exhausted
franchise, would certainly have been on for 31, vulnerable only on the
technicality of the screenwriter, Lance Peters, being a New Zealander.

So the best hope is that the tax credit will further encourage American
producers to employ the likes of Christopher Hampton, Stephen Frears and
Simon Russell Beale to write, direct or star in movies filmed and
post-produced in the UK. The worst fear is that every dog-eared and
coffee-stained script for a witless laddish sex comedy set in Neasden will
suddenly be greenlighted by the chancellor's largesse.

comment@guardian.co.uk

smudge

Of course the obvious assumption here is that all these dog-eared 'laddish' scripts will get financing to start off with. (Cue the thunder of a hundred studded boots heralding the approach of another football players consortium, to trigger yet another tax review...)

SMUDGE

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