Bigger Picture Research

The BBFC at 100: A personal tribute

Contains scenes of mild self-indulgence, moderate impertinence and some strong whimsicality

Recently my Grandma celebrated her 100th birthday. Though increasingly commonplace thanks to improved living standards, medical advancement and the somnifacient magic of daytime television, it is still a remarkable demonstration of sheer, bloody-minded staying power.

For well over 36,000 days (imagine!) Grandma has fought off wave after wave of bacterial assault and avoided numerous genetic tripwires, all the while maintaining a stately pace through a world of ever quickening transformation. And until recently she still had her own teeth.

Now, it just so happens I have the pleasure of acquaintance with another venerable centenarian, and one no less admirable. Between 1998 and 2001 I was a Film and Video Examiner at the British Board of Film Classification. A few years later I sat on the Board's Advisory Panel on Children's Viewing.

Film Policy Review 2012: Some initial thoughts

The Film Policy Review Panel, chaired by Lord Smith, finally reported today.

It’s impossible in a blog post to give a balanced assessment of every one of the Panel’s 56 recommendations, so what follows is a selection of first impressions.

This is a companion piece to a guest post on BOP Consulting’s blog,  published here. 

 

Why Donna Anton gets my vote for BFI Governor

The election is underway to find David Thompson's successor as BFI Member Governor.

To quote the blurb, Governors are no less than “the guardians and shapers of Britain's moving image heritage and culture, as well as being responsible for awarding Lottery film funds and for the strategic direction of the Government's lead agency for film.”

Guardian, shaper and administrator: you need a special kind of person for this unpaid public office of poetry and prose.

It’s a testament to the BFI’s standing that it has attracted four excellent candidates on paper, including Watershed’s Head of Programme Mark Cosgrove, Professor Sylvia Harvey of the University of Leeds and BAFTA magnet Peter Kosminsky.

As impressive as these candidates are, my vote goes to Donna Anton. I’ve known Donna for several years now, first when she chaired the British Federation of Film Societies and latterly in her capacity as Director of the Cornwall Film Festival. Donna can guard and shape and administrate with the best of them, and she’s by far the most responsible person I know in West Cornwall.

But it’s not the fact of our acquaintance that secured my X in the box. When the election materials arrived in the post I was prepared to judge each candidate on the strength of their supporting statements.

It’s here that I feel Donna scores highest marks. She’s the only one to pitch her candidacy in terms of the needs and interests of the BFI membership. Hardly surprising given Donna’s film society background, with community action and volunteering at its core.

As importantly, I’m hoping audiences will feature at the heart of the next iteration of film policy (not producers, or distributors or any other sectoral interest group). The BFI is uniquely positioned to capitalise on this in a way the UK Film Council never was. If elected, Donna’s experience as festival director and film society volunteer in tune with non-metropolitan audiences will add further heft to a Board already well served by industry and academic voices. Somebody needs to speak up for members from a demand-side perspective, and that's why Donna gets my vote.

Voting, open to all BFI members and Sight & Sound subscribers, closes at noon on Tuesday 20 December. Full details here.

What do we need to know? Part 3: Means and ends

Much has changed since this series began. It was unclear at the time of the first post whether publicly funded film research of the kind undertaken by the UK Film Council had any real future. Now it seems there’s reason for hope.

I’ve been told research was one of the topics discussed at the first Ministerial Film Forum chaired by Ed Vaizey. Meanwhile, attendees at last Thursday’s BSAC Film Conference learned the UK Film Council Research & Statistics Unit (RSU) is transferring to the BFI. This is a welcome development, for all the reasons given by contributors to earlier posts.

More dispiriting is news there’s no money attached to the transfer, which means the BFI’s shrinking pot will have to be further eked out. Unfortunately, research is an expensive business. The last UK Film Council three-year plan earmarked £500k for the task, a figure that looks fancifully high now. To do a half-decent job you’d need a low six-figure sum annually…but even that looks like a stretch too far in the present circumstances.

What do we need to know? Part 2: Academic and other contributions

 

“The global film industry is potentially able to provide a rich and fruitful research basket for those wishing in particular to straddle industrial practice with academic study.”
Angus Finney, The International Film Business: A Market Guide Beyond Hollywood

 

“Openness and transparency has the potential to transform government. It can strengthen people's trust in government and encourage greater public participation in decision-making.”
Cabinet Office web site, February 2011

 

“There is nothing a government hates more than to be well-informed; for it makes the process of arriving at decisions much more complicated and difficult.”
John Maynard Keynes

 

Industry practitioners are not the only ones with an interest in the fate of publicly funded film research activity. The audience for this output goes far wider, and includes academics and those involved at all levels in education, plus observers and commentators of every hue, of old media and new.

The contributors included below are drawn from different parts of this wider research constituency, though what they have to say covers much common ground and connects with many of the views expressed by industry contributors in the previous post.

What do we need to know? Part 1: industry contributors

“The lack of authoritative, widely available statistics for UK film, video and television, is both a symptom and a cause of the troubles affecting the industry.”
Introduction to the BFI Film and Television Handbook 1993, the first to include a section dedicated to market intelligence

“If we cannot measure trends in performance, we cannot establish with any degree of certainty whether this action plan is having any effect and whether and how it needs to be modified.”
A Bigger Picture, Film Policy Review Group, 1998

“[T]here are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don't know we don't know.”
Donald Rumsfeld, former United States Secretary of Defense

 

What do we need to know? That is the question I put to a number of film industry insiders, analysts, academics and interested observers over the last few weeks.

As worded, the question implies some degree of empirical evidence is necessary to the film business and the state apparatus that supports it, though I was quite prepared to hear from people who felt the contrary was true. Of course, nobody did. In fact, everyone I approached was clear that research and statistics are essential in one form or another, as a means to a variety of ends.

Guest post: Russian film distribution market

In late 2009 I flagged up a report on the Russian film industry authored by Nevafilm Research and Rfilms on behalf of the European Audiovisual Observatory.

Nevafilm has recently launched a new, and more detailed, study of the Russian distribution market, available to purchase from their web site (in the interest of full disclousure: I'm not working on commission).

Here Xenia Leontyeva, Senior Analyst at Nevafilm Research, explains what the report covers and how it can benefit industry professionals with an eye on the Russian market:

In a recent blog post, Jim Barratt asked what market players need to know about the film distribution market in the UK. Specialists at Nevafilm Research asked themselves the same question about the film distribution market in Russia last year.

We wondered: do many producers (in Russia and abroad) know what it takes to effectively sell their film on the Russian market? What fundamental knowledge will help them navigate Russia’s vast expanse? Let’s not forget that Russia, with a population of 141 million, boasts a truly massive market, spanning nine time zones and one-third of Eurasia.

Film data: what do we need to know?

Last night I was musing on which, if any, of the historical, headline data reported in the previous post can tell us anything useful about the ‘sustainability’ of the British film industry.

Unable to sleep (and still reeling from the awfulness of 10 O’Clock Live), connections formed in my mind between the data and certain recent developments, including Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt’s appearance at a London School of Economics event (I  know. On reflection I should have taken a sleeping pill).

Contrary to what we’d been told about perniciously high salaries and quango combustibility, the Minister informed his audience the decision to abolish the UKFC was down to their ‘failure to arrest the relative decline of the British independence [sic] film-making sector, compared with those of France, Germany and even Italy’ (as reported by Raymond Snoddy).

“There ought to be a huge opportunity for British independent filmmakers to grow and grow to a significant size”, the Minister is quoted as saying in Snoddy’s report in The Spectator.

UK feature film production, box office and admissions in 2010

In keeping to its research publication schedule, the UK Film Council has published summary statistics for film production and box office returns over the last year, while the Cinema Exhibitors Association has also released annual admissions figures.

The UKFC press release can be found here, and though I won’t repeat the full detail the headline numbers are as follows (you can click to enlarge any of the charts below):

 

• 119 feature films with budgets over £500,000 began principal photography in the UK during 2010, down from 144 in 2009.
• There were fewer inward investments features in 2010 than the previous year (28 compared with 35), and the number of domestic features and co-productions also fell (to 72 and 19 respectively) (see Figure 1):

Using movie reviews intelligently

We're in the thick of awards season, that febrile period of movie marketing madness when professional film criticism helps to gauge the year's best offerings, and not simply advise us which ticket to buy at the box office.

But as David A. Gross, Editor & Publisher of MovieReviewIntelligence.com, makes clear in the guest post below, we should be wary of aggregated results that smooth over subtle gradations in opinion. Methodology is critical.

There is a lot of commentary at the moment about which movies were well reviewed in 2010, which is the best reviewed movie, and the implications for Awards.

The Social Network and Toy Story 3 were both exceptionally well reviewed.  The Social Network's reviews are slightly better.  For example, Roger Ebert, Ann Hornaday and Christy Lemire each gave Toy Story 3 three stars, and Peter Travers gave it 3.5.  Each of these critics gave The Social Network four stars.

Some of the confusion comes from the methodology that Rotten Tomatoes uses to generate their score.  They classify each review as either positive or negative and then take the percentage of positive reviews.  That means that a B- review is the same as an A review, and a C- review is the same as an F.  They consider a C review or 2 out of 4 stars negative.  By not recognizing any gradation or anything in the middle, they push scores higher and lower.

How to Train Your Dragon was very well reviewed.  Critics gave it lots of Bs along with As.  But it is not in the uppermost echelon (its reviews were 77.2% positive; Rotten Tomatoes has it at 98%).

(An example of a movie in the middle is Eat Pray Love.  By pushing its middle scores down, it ended up with a 36% Tomato score.  According to the scores that the critics themselves chose, Eat Pray Love reviews were 56.2% positive.)

According to the critics themselves, which is what counts, the best reviewed movies of 2010 were

The Social Network (94.4% positive)
Toy Story 3 (92.1% positive)
The Kids are All Right (91.7% positive)

Rotten Tomatoes recently awarded best reviewed movie to Toy Story 3, while most critics groups have called The Social Network best movie.  The disconnect comes from the methodology flaw described above.

This is an issue the industry is currently focused on.  It would benefit from some clarification.

The following is a complete list of best reviewed movies in 2010, per Movie Review Intelligence.

David A. Gross
Editor & Publisher
MovieReviewIntelligence.com