09.01
Princess Diana, The Stig, Top Gear, Tony Blair’s attack on Gordon Brown, Simon Cowell and The X Factor, Lady GaGa and Why The Facebook Campaign to Save The UK Film Council Was A Total Flop.
Jonathan Stuart-Brown for SAVE THE BRITISH FILM INDUSTRY
The Facebook and other Petitions to Save The UK Film Council have now failed and flopped in the most embarassing manner.
Meanwhile, Princess Diana is in the news again thanks to Tony Blair’s revelations in his book. So is The Stig after his successful case brought against The BBC. Did Top Gear manipulate the media to grab frontpage headlines or was this a genuine case they felt they should fight ? Indeed will there be any appeal ? Tony Blair, Jeremy Clarkson, Top Gear, The Stig, Princess Diana all could command lead stories on The BBC, Sky, ITN, Channel 4, Channel 5, The Sun, the Daily Mail, The Express, The Mirror, The Times, The Telegraph, The Metro, and leading World Papers such as The Washinton Post and New York Times but somehow the UK Film Council can not. Why ? Well because most news editors had never heard of it until it was axed ? Most of the kneejerk petition signers had never heard of it until it was axed and they were presented with false facts which should have got 12 million signatures within two weeks. Instead the truth came out and the signatures dried up fast and have now petered out. Many wish they had not signed. But regardless the petitions flopped.
So did the official march on August 28. No one really cared about The UK Film Council especially after they realised it did not love the UK nor love film. The march to save it was a total flop. No-one turned up. Well about five people did but the staff of UKFC did not, nor the 50 actors who signed a letter to The Telegraph, not Steven Spielberg, nor Clint Eastwood, nor the staff of the hugely expensive PR company hired by UKFC on public money to whip up a false grass roots campaign. Top PR companies do not work Bank Holidays. UKFC aristocrats do not march with the hoi poloi.
Who did not turn up at the march ? The Stig did not turn up, Jeremy Clarkson did not turn up, Tony Blair did not turn up. Lady GaGa and Simon Cowell certainly did not turn up. The march and the petitions have flopped.
The UK Film Council misused public money to prevent its axing by the lawfully elected UK Government. Happily, it failed. Justice and Truth have prevailed. But UKFC actions were wrong. There should be the most severe consequences. There should be surcharges of salaries. The UKFC should be axed immediately. MPs should demand it. But the monies should also be repaid.
The Government may be able to reclaim many millions and in an era in which nurses will be axed, and the disabled lose their carers, this is something MPs of every political party should be asking questions about.
The “third party advocacy” PR strategy of The UK Film Council Press Officers has blown up in their face as people learned the very ugly truth about this organisation which has repeatedly failed to warn the Government, the media and the public how very near they have brought Britain to losing both Hollywood inward investment forever and any indiginous film industry which gets new British talent on the real movie business ladder. See: http://www.savethebritishfilmindustry.com/2010/08/the-uk-film-council-betrayal-of-the-british-flm-industry-is-about-to-be-fully-exposed-in-the-battle-for-pinewood-shepperton-sound-stages/
Thanks to UKFC Britain may from 2012 have sound stages on a par with Kenya when in 2000 we were the global market leaders. These were the edge, the usp, the magnet for Hollywood finance which created all the film jobs on the big budget blockbusters filmed in Britain.
Huge credit is due to Jonathan Gems, Jon Williams, Chris Atkins, Matthew Vaughn, Julian Fellowes, John West, Robin Jacob, Michael Winner, Michael Booth, Joe O’Bryne, Colin Warhurst, Alex Cox, and very many many other people who lobbied The Government with truthful facts. They also fought the hugely expensive well staffed PR company and UKFC press officers (with a massive PR budget all on the public purse) who tried to spread disinformation, spin, lies, alarmism to keep fat cat aristocrats in fat cat six figure jobs and £3 million to £4 million handouts.
UKFC has lost and should go with dignity or be made to go.
As Jonathan Gems said: ” The UKFC actively suppressed British Cinema. … many thanks for delivering us from the treasonous UKFC. Hm…UKFC – looks like an anagram, doesn’t it?”
The fact is that good hearted people passionate for film to succeed as an industry in Britain can do something which involves campaigning. They can campaign to save Pinewood and Shepperton Studios as film factory facilities. They can campaign to stop the plc trying to expand on greenbelt in South Bucks and in every country in the world (Malaysia, China, Canada, Germany etc). They can campaign to get film studio sound stages and state of the art film sets built all around The UK on unwanted ex-industrial land.Please read:
http://www.pleasedsheep.com/forums/topic/9080-jonathan-gems-on-the-abolition-of-the-ukfc/
http://www.savethebritishfilmindustry.com/uk-film-council/
http://www.savethebritishfilmindustry.com/the-proposal/
Jonathan Stuart-Brown
www.savethebritishfilmindustry.com
http://www.gopetition.com/petition/38332.html
http://www.savethebritishfilmindustry.com/2010/07/ding-dong-the-witch-is-dead-save-the-british-film-industry-kill-the-uk-film-council/
http://www.savethebritishfilmindustry.com/2010/08/the-uk-film-council-betrayal-of-the-british-flm-industry-is-about-to-be-fully-exposed-in-the-battle-for-pinewood-shepperton-sound-stages/
http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/Business/Pinewood-Shepperton-Film-Studios-To-Build-Film-Studio-In-Malaysia-To-Make-Films-For-China-And-India/Article/200912315501803
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/cutting-edge-radical-arts-funding-2060055.html
What one is not hearing, apart from that brief mention in Edinburgh, is the notion that the cuts, however savage, could also present an opportunity. Instead there is a refusal to accept that the current model of public funding may not actually be the only reasonable and civilised one, or that the present reliance on largely unaccountable quangos to fund and administer most arts bodies, small and large, is not necessarily a democratic one, even though it would be pilloried in novels, plays and films if it existed in any other walk of life.
That is the huge irony of the way the arts are paid for and run in Britain. On stage and screen there is a constant message of imagination, radicalism and challenge to the status quo. But in the way it runs itself, the arts world is one of the most unimaginative and conservative industries in Britain.
Much has been made in recent weeks of the damage that will be done to the nation’s culture if public funds are cut. But, inconvenient as it may be, should we not then be asking how such institutions as the Glyndebourne Opera Festival and the Royal Academy manage to exist on no public funding at all? These are smaller institutions, of course, but the Royal Academy mounts lavish blockbusters, sometimes every bit as stunning as those of the publicly funded Tate and National Gallery and Glyndebourne’s productions can be every bit as stunning as the Royal Opera’s. How does it do it – and keep an expensive building going in Piccadilly – without a penny of public funding? Shouldn’t the arts world that can rouse itself to lobby against a threat of cuts, also rouse itself to study the way the country’s most successful private arts institutions make contacts, find sponsorship, run membership schemes (the RA’s Friends scheme brings in £6m a year) and generally raise money and make a profit? Does Clint Eastwood not have a view on this?
And it’s not just private organisations that can share their wisdom. Julia Fawcett, chief executive of the Lowry Centre in Salford, turned down an offer of increased public funding to cut a deficit. Instead she developed commercial activities, running a conferencing business at the centre and selling tickets for cultural events across the country at her box office, and turned a loss-making arts institution around. Public funding is not a universal panacea.
There are other opportunities to be grasped – both by the arts world and by government. One could, for example, rather than just cutting funding by a set percentage, re-examine the whole way that the arts are funded. Most arts companies in England are funded by the Arts Council, a quango which decides on how to distribute millions of pounds without a single one of its meetings being open to the public or public scrutiny. Question after question in the House of Commons to the arts minister receive the response: “That is a matter for the Arts Council.” It is not the most democratic way to proceed. Again, one can imagine what merriment would be had on stage and screen and in contemporary novels if any other walk of life practised such a lack of accountability. The much-cherished “arm’s length principle” by which the Government department responsible for the arts does not actually run the arts may well have run its course. Democracy is also held at arms length. Again, is this major review of arts funding not a time to at least discuss this?
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/cutting-edge-radical-arts-funding-2060055.html
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/cutting-edge-radical-arts-funding-2060055.html
A diminution in financial assistance from the public purse for the Arts will destroy it. Nor am I convinced that all the present models of funding and arts administration are the correct ones. If the inevitable cut in public money going to the arts brings with it a new energy to find different models of funding, a new accountability, a new reaching out to the regions and a Government-led change in attitudes to audiences, then cuts can be turned to culture’s advantage.
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/cutting-edge-radical-arts-funding-2060055.html
http://www.savethebritishfilmindustry.com/2010/10/the-british-film-industry-is-much-safer-than-we-thought-now-louise-bagshawe-mp/