Gillian Armstrong lends her voice to campaign to save Australian screen content
By Karl Quinn
September 17, 2017 — 7.42pm
"I didn't see an Australian film until I was 18," says Gillian Armstrong, the veteran director who rode the so-called New Wave all the way to Hollywood on the back of her 1979 debut feature My Brilliant Career.
"People often ask me, 'When you were young and going to the movies, did you think, one day I'll do that, the way Scorsese and Spielberg did?' And I have to say to them, 'Actually no', for two reasons. One, I'm a woman, and two, I'm Australian, and we just didn't make films."
Armstrong – whose most recent feature was the 2015 documentary Women He's Undressed, about the costume designer Orry-Kelly, who left Australia for Hollywood in 1932 and wound up winning three Oscars – fears the return of such a fallow period if the federal government decides to drop the various programs of assistance and protection that have supported local film and television production since the early 1970s.
And she, like many others in the industry, fears that is a real possibility.
Gillian Armstrong. Credit:Tim Baure
In response to that threat, four major industry guilds – Screen Producers Australia, the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance, the Australian Directors Guild and the Australian Writers Guild – have joined forces to launch the Make it Australian campaign. That traditional enemies the MEAA and SPA have put their sparring aside for the cause gives an indication of how seriously they take the threat.
There are two reviews currently underway that could shape the future of the industry: a parliamentary inquiry into the sustainability of the film and television industry, and a departmental review.
Adding to the uncertainty is the massive wave of change passing through the media industry generally, including the impact of the streaming giants and the media reform package having been passed in the Senate. The commercial television networks want an end to their obligation to make children's content, and the ABC and SBS have had their budgets for local drama drastically reduced, while Ten is (probably) about to be taken over by US broadcaster CBS.
Australian TV production is underpinned by local content quotas and tax subsidies. The film industry relies heavily on government support through state assistance programs, support via the federal agency Screen Australia, and tax rebates. Foreign productions are attracted by the skill levels of our crews, an attractive shooting environment and the fact this is a stable English-speaking country, but they are deterred by location offsets (tax subsidies) that lag far behind the rest of the world.
Made between 1954 and 1959, the US series The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin was a staple of Australian TV well into the 1970s.
All these matters are on the table at the moment. In response, the Make It Australian campaign is calling for:
reform of local content rules to include the burgeoning digital platforms, including streaming video on demand;
the restoration of funding to public broadcasters and Screen Australia, who commission a significant proportion of local comedy and drama; and
the modernisation of our production incentives to make them globally competitive at all levels.
The campaign echoes one launched in 1969, a time when the once-thriving Australian film industry had shrivelled to almost nothing as a result of the influx of Hollywood product and operators, and when local television screens were dominated by cheap imported content.
"I remember when I first got to Hollywood, and they were wining and dining me, we all started chatting about childhood, and we bonded over Flipper and Rin Tin Tin and Lassie," recalls Armstrong. "They were like, 'You've seen all these programs in Australia?' It was only much later that I realised that in my childhood the amount of Australian content on TV was only 1 per cent."
In preparing for the speech she will give to launch the campaign on Monday, Armstrong went back to her files – and found she had given similar speeches on four other occasions.
The message? Without eternal vigilance, local content is always at risk.
"We've got incredible talent that we're proud of here, but we need controls," she says. "Otherwise it will just be a brain drain, like it was when I left film school. Are we just going to train people to service the American film industry?
"People sometimes ask me, 'Why does your industry matter more than the car industry?' and I say, 'Because it's so important that we see things that are about us, that talk to us, that make us think about our lives.
"Without support, we won't have our own jokes, our own culture, our own stories on screen."
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Karl Quinn
Karl is a senior entertainment writer at The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.