Stairways to Heaven

Rebuilding the British Film Industry

Geoffrey Macnab

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781786724090
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film Direction & Production

What has brought about the transformation of the British film industry over the last few decades, to the beginnings of what is arguably a new golden era? In the mid-1980s the industry was in a parlous state. The number of films produced in the UK was tiny. Cinema attendance had dipped to an all-time low, cinema buildings were in a state of disrepair and home video had yet to flourish. Since then, while many business challenges - especially for independent producers and distributors - remain, the industry overall has developed beyond recognition. In recent years, as British films have won Oscars, Cannes Palms and Venice Golden Lions, releases such as Love Actually, Billy Elliot, Skyfall, Paddington and the Harry Potter series have found enormous commercial as well as critical success. The UK industry has encouraged, and benefitted from, a huge amount of inward investment, much of it from the Hollywood studios, but also from the National Lottery via the UK Film Council and BFI. This book portrays the visionaries and officials who were at the helm as a digital media revolution began to reshape the industry. Through vivid accounts based on first-hand interviews of what was happening behind the scenes, film commentator and critic Geoffrey Macnab provides in-depth analysis of how and why the British film industry has risen like a phoenix from the ashes.

‌Chapter 1

Back to the 1980s

The year 1984 is a fitting date at which to begin a survey of recent British cinema. As is often pointed out, this was the nadir – the point at which British cinemagoing slipped to its lowest ever level, with admissions falling to 54 million (a tiny fraction of the 1,635 million tickets sold in the record year of 1946).

In the early 1980s, the atmosphere in Wardour Street, Soho, the home of the main film companies, was akin to that of the City of London before the ‘Big Bang’. It is instructive to speak to those who worked within the industry in this period. There was an air of defeatism. The culture within the business was one of long lunches and very heavy drinking.

Then Screen International editor Terry Ilott remembers the gloomy forecasts that some were making:

Puttnam made a speech in which he predicted that soon there would be ten cinemas in the country. That would be where you would have the gala openings in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Manchester, three in London – and after that, there would be nothing else because it would go onto video and TV.

‘It [the industry] was awash in alcohol,’ Ilott also recalls.

It was extraordinary to be offered drinks, hard drinks, whisky, when you went to see somebody at nine o’clock in the morning. To get in at ten, to go to lunch at 12, to finish lunch at half past three, to wander into a strip club for an hour, to get back to your office for half past four to pick up your coat and go home was completely acceptable. It was tremendously inefficient and the culture was dreadful, truly dreadful.1

His observations are borne out by Puttnam himself, who talks with mixed feelings about a restaurant called the Braganza in Soho, at which the industry converged.

All the distributors – among them senior executives from United Artists and Columbia – they would all gather at lunchtime. They would meet around 12.30. The bar was on the ground floor, the restaurant was on the top floor. They would go up to the restaurant at two and they would roll out at four. It was ludicrous. They’d either go off and play golf or they’d put their feet up and have a sleep. All business was done between nine in the morning and [lunch] and then they’d have to get on the phone to LA at 7pm.2

There was more business done in the Braganza than in the whole of Wardour Street, says Odeon chief booker Stan Fishman.

I could walk up Wardour Street, going on my way to lunch, seeing various people up there, and do as much business as I could in the office. The entertaining and drinking in those days played an interesting part in the business. I was taken to lunch most days by distributors. I am not a big drinker and I never went to pubs and clubs, and most afternoons I was viewing pictures with my viewing panel.3

‘It was an industry that lunched,’ agrees a former trade journalist. ‘A lot of business was done over lunch or on the golf course.’4 In an era before email and mobile phones, and when so many of the companies were based close to each other in Soho, it made sense to meet face to face.

There were still films that were engaging audiences. Star Wars had been released a few years before. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial had been an enormous hit. However, cinemas were in a shocking state of disrepair. Many independent venues were closing down. Trade journalists from the period talk of attending monthly meetings organised by the Cinema Exhibitors’ Association and sister organisation the Association of Independent Cinemas. These would be depressing occasions at which members made it clear they were struggling to stay afloat. Odeon and ABC had dominated the British landscape for as long as anyone remembered and they too were creaking.

Even then, it was clear that the new Tory government wasn’t ignoring the industry. In fact, British cinema was about to be given some extreme Thatcherite ‘shock treatment’ in an ill-conceived bid to revive it. On 19 July 1984, the Minister for Information Technology, Kenneth Baker, presented his White Paper on ‘Film Policy’ in Parliament. In hindsight, the White Paper’s recommendations seem very brutal indeed. Baker made the usual remarks about the British film industry undergoing ‘a renaissance’ and paid tribute to the outstanding technical skills of its producers, writers, directors and actors. He then proceeded to explain just why he intended to remove almost every system of state support for that industry.

The decline in cinema attendance provided the pretext for getting rid of the Eady Levy, which Baker said was now ‘outdated’. Introduced on a voluntary basis in 1950 and made compulsory by the Cinematograph Films Act 1957, this was a tax on a proportion of the price of cinema tickets. Half of the money raised stayed with exhibitors but half went to producers, to fund new production. To be precise, the rules for Eady instructed that a twelfth of the price of a cinema ticket would be paid to the British Film Fund Agency, and that payments would also be made to the National Film Finance Corporation and the Children’s Film Foundation. Later on, some of the Eady revenues also went to the British Film Institute Production Board and the National Film School. The Levy was collected every month by Customs and Excise and paid over to the British Film Fund Agency, which oversaw its administration.

Eady money had helped fund James Bond and Superman movies. It had attracted international production to the UK while also helping local film-makers. Nonetheless, by the mid-1980s, neither the exhibitors nor the distributors supported the Levy. Both groups lobbied hard for it to be scrapped. Odeon’s booker Stan Fishman and leading distributor James Higgins, who headed up United International Pictures (UIP) UK, joined forces to lobby the government.

I took a stand with James Higgins. He and I approached the British government. We explained the situation: the amount of money that both the distributors and the exhibitors were putting into the industry and the costs. It was producers that were benefiting. The irony was that the formula that was set basically gave money from the levy to the more commercial British pictures. Therefore, films that it should have been for, maybe those that were difficult to find finance for, British films or independent films, suffered.5

It wasn’t just commercial films receiving Eady support. ‘All kinds of very odd short films were being made,’ Fishman recalls.

One of the unlikely beneficiaries of Eady largesse was the entertainer, gameshow host and radio and TV personality Nicholas Parsons. He had a production company and was making 16 mm films which would be blown up to 35 mm and shown in cinemas. Parsons recalled:

I used to write, direct and produce them. The most successful one was called Mad Dogs and Cricketers. I approached the charity the Lord’s Taverners, of which I am a member, and said, ‘Would you like to have a film about your activities?’ We went and made a film about their activities. I took a team to Corfu where they play cricket. I made another one about their golfing activities.6

Mad Dogs and Cricketers was narrated by comedian Eric Morecambe. It showed celebrities and ex-professional cricketers playing in a match for charity against Oxford University at Blenheim Palace. The film also followed them on their trip to Corfu. It all made for a perfectly pleasant travelogue but was hardly a groundbreaking piece of British film-making that showed off what Eady money could achieve to best effect.

As director Alan Parker later wrote, distributors had used the Eady Levy in a very opportunistic way.

In 1973 we were approached by EMI to make two short films. Just what their logic was is still a mystery to me. I think it had something to do with the old British Eady Levy still in place in British cinema exhibition. If the distributor could tag on a short British film to the main feature, then they could gather a (disproportionate) percentage of the boxoffice – sometimes as much as 30%.7

Among the apparently most notorious (mis)uses of Eady money was from Paramount on a short skateboarding film called Hot Wheels. By programming it with Grease (1978), the American company was able to work the system and lawfully earn itself a £123,000 public pay-out.8

Fishman warned Baker that if the Eady Levy was maintained or (worse) increased, Odeon would respond by printing on cinema tickets the extra amount that customers were being forced to pay in tax. Baker realised this could make for very bad publicity for the government. With the exhibition sector in near crisis, Baker was ab...