Yes, its true. Little slingshot has gone and got into bed with Goliath

Story here

We’re going to have *beautiful* babies.

We have just got through to the final 3 of the MyMovieMashup - which is more than a little exciting. If we win, the very talented director Vito Roco, will get to make the very wonderful script Faintheart into a movie, with the collboaration of all the interweb (or at least the MySpace bits of it).

Please help it happen by visiting MySpace (you have to join to vote) and cast your vote for Vito and Faintheart: www.myspace.com/mymoviemashup2

What The Independent 6/7/07 had to say about Vito….

http://arts.independent.co.uk/film/features/article2737901.ece

 

GOODBYE CRUEL WORLD is the beautifully photographed tale of a bullied schoolboy’s relationship with his best friend, the recently deceased pensioner Mr Carter. Rather than melancholy social realism, director Vito Rocco goes for the touching black comedy, as the boy devised a novel way to deal with his companion’s death. Situated somewhere in the previously unmapped territory between Cinema Paradiso and Weekend at Bernie’s, it has the bittersweet feel of a Wes Anderson movie.

 

Please vote for VITO and help him win!

Many thanks!

I spoke at the Ingenious hosted Ministerial Round table earlier this week, when a group of about 20 of us from the industry were invited to give Minister for Culture and Tourism, Sean Woodward,some thoughts on the relationship between intelligent finance and a successful creative industry, and what government can do (and should not do) to encourage the latter.
I’ve done a number of these things before, but its still an odd experience, being asked to advise the government on policy, calling on one to transcend for a brief moment one’s own, or corporate, needs and try and see the world through the view point of the public good. Odd, but also refreshing and very appealing.
Sean seems a thoughtful, bright man - amusingly the only MP with a Butler - and I hope my contribution, a summary of which I append below - gave him some useful grist to his mill.

Arvind Ethan David, CEO Slingshot

Ingenious Round Table: Top Line Thoughts

Context:

I am a founder and CEO of slingshot, a film production and distribution company, which is structurally unusual in that it combines venture capital from Arts Alliance and the Creative Capital Fund, with public funding (Skillset, RSA) and angel investment. As such, I thought I would focus my introductory remarks on the merits and demerits of the different sources of finance available, and how they contrast, one to the other.

Slingshot is the 4^th creative business I have run or helped establish over the past 8 years. In total I have been involved in raising approximately £6 million in funding into these businesses, of that sum, funds have been fairly evenly split between the various categories of finance:

· £1.5m from angel investors,

· £1.75m public funding,

· £1.5m from corporate, strategic

· £1.25m from venture capital firms or other institutional financiers.

I have come to think about the different sources and nature of finance through a three dimensional matrix, which might be of general use:

1. What do the investors demand in return for their cash, i.e. How EXPENSIVE is the money
2. What do the investors provide above and beyond their cash, i.e. How VALUE ADDING is the money
3. How TEDIOUS is the process of raising the money.

By and large, it is my experience that:

• VC money is the most expensive and often extremely value adding, and generally not too tedious.

• Strategic money is often the most value adding, but often very tedious to raise, on a corporate/equity level (though transactional / project finance is easier). It tends to be quite expensive.

• Public money is the cheapest, but the least value adding and the most tedious.

• Angel money typically gets stuck in between, being more expensive than public funding, but less value adding than VC or strategic investors and has high variability with respect to its tedium factor (unsurprising given the variability of individuals).

3. portia Says:
   March 6th, 2007 at 12:30 pm My comment doesn’t actually relate to the script competition blog (though i appreciated it greatly) but I couldn’t find a direct email address & I have a request for you…. - your thoughts on the recent blocking of GAAP funds by the government. Does this change impact you directly as a producer in the UK? Is slingshot run in such a way that it is not effected by the recent changes and prevention of sale & leaseback? I’m curious because the Varietys and Screen Internationals are painting a very negative, dramatic picture with this news simply about how much money will not be invested in the UK industry & that it makes it ‘nearly impossible for the independent producer’ etc etc, so was just wondering what your perspective on it was…

Three years ago, almost to the day, the Inland Revenue closed a number of GAAP loop-holes, which scuppered a selection of film funds, causing the shut-down or rescheduling of a bunch of high profile films and the loss of lots of revenue from the boutique finance firms that put together these limited partnerships. Independent producers and the trade press were up in arms, there was talk about the end of the British film industry, letters were written, producers bemoaned on talk-shows; the Revenue remained intransigent.

Sound familiar?

I was embroiled in the thick of that episode (melodramatically christened ‘Black Tuesday’ in the film industry), because I was involved with the biggest budget and highest profile project to be killed by the tax change. TULIP FEVER, was to be a period romantic epic, re-uniting the multiple Oscar winning team of John Madden and Tom Stoppard, the script based on a novel by Deborah Maggoch, told of star-crossed lovers against the back-drop of the Tulip boom of 17th century Amsterdam.

We were 6 weeks into pre-production, millions had been spent, entire fields of tulips planted, big stars committed. And it all fell apart. In vain protest against the inevitability of tax, I added my voice to the chorus of despair, and on behalf of my then boss, the film’s producer Alison Owen, drafted letters to the Chancellor, and worked frantically to try and rescue the picture. It didn’t work.
So my heart goes out to all those producers in similar binds this time round. I know their pain.

But actually, the horrible dirty secret, then as now, is that I’m with the Revenue on this. There, I said it. Why?

First, because lets call a cat a cat. The GAAP schemes are tax avoidance. That’s the view of the revenue, and if you sift through the protesting voices, you won’t find a compelling argument to the contrary. There’s a reason that all the tax funds are bemoaning the effect of the decision, not the rational of it. The truth is that the structure of most of these funds is so complex and obscure as to suggest either Columbian drug cartels money laundering schemes, or (as is the case) avoidance.

So much as I love people giving money to film, I also like the fact that we live in a civil society, where the cost of being rich is paying tax.

That’s my left liberal reason for being with the revenue on this one. Now for the free-market capitalist reason. Subsidy distorts markets. And distorted markets, as the story of the Tulips of Amsterdam showed, are bad things in the long run.

The availability of money for films that is motivated not by profit, but by tax, means that films get made that don’t have market justification, or they get made at price points that would be unsustainable in the absence of tax breaks. In short: bad films get made, or good ones get made inefficiently.

And that makes us less competitive as an industry.

So, no, slingshot was not affected by the ruling. We made it a principal of our financing that we don’t depend on such schemes, we utilise the Film Tax Credit and EIS structures, both of which are statutorily approved and strike an appropriate balance between motivating investors and encouraging a valuable cultural industry on the one hand, and allowing the market to do its work on the other.

And in the long run, that balance will make us healthier. Despite the short-term pain (as intense now as it was in 2004 after black Tuesday), the industry will absorb the shock and evolve to be better - that’s what sustainability means, and that’s what we all say we want, right?