Check it out on www.frenchfilm.com

(sorry, some weird bug is stopping me linking to it direct, work those fingers though, its worth it)

DSC_0011Originally uploaded by division6

Was great to celebrate with Jackie, Ash, Jude, Stew and all the cast and crew yesterday. Also wonderful that a bunch of my non-industry friends came and loved the film and also now, in the words of the ever pithy Dennis Chua, ‘have a clue what it is Arvind does”. More photos of the celebrations,that ended up going quite late into the evening are here

So I didn’t watch the Rugby this weekend. Or rather I did. but not the England-France match. I did catch the last half of South Africa’s rout of the Argentines.
Since I am, more or less, British, and since I have just finished making a movie about British - French rivalry, this decision might strike many as odd.

I was discussing this with a friend, explaining that on the whole I rather watch movies than sport, and in exasperation he said to me “but nobody wins in movies!  I mean they are fun, but its a different TYPE of fun. Nobody wins!”

Fair point.

Or is it.

Thinking about it, I come to realise that the reason I prefer the narrative of most fiction to the narrative of sport is PRECISELY BECAUSE in good fiction nobody wins. Because life, unlike sport, is more complex than winning and losing. And so is the business of film-making
But you wouldn’t know that from reading about the business of film-making in the press. According to the press, both trade and national, film-making is entirely about winning. About winning the weekend box office. About topping last weekend, or last years, or last Augusts. The highest three day weekend in box office history, the highest 2nd weekend in September in Box Office History. The biggest opening of a James Bond movie in a leap year since Goldfinger.

Honestly, who cares.
Well, you might think I should. I am after all now a film distributor, and we are supposed to care about such stuff. The studio boss with his finger on the pulse of the box office numbers, staying up late every Friday night to see the opening night figures in from EDI is a figure of movie legend. Surely I should care.

And in one sense, of course I do. Even if I wasn’t a distributor, I have long maintained that all involved in the film business need to be conversant in the fact that it is a business, and should take a healthy interest in the number side of things, since numbers are after all the same thing as audience.

So what’s my beef?

Well I have two, actually.

First I don’t understand why the public should care about the box office of a film. What conceivable difference can it make to their enjoyment of a particular movie to know that it is the 26th highest grossing movie with a title with 4 Rs in it or not?

All the film-going public should care is whether the movie is any good or not, and if they in particular will like it. They can get the first information from a reviewer, or an aggregation of reviewers such as rotten tomato; and they can get the second set of information from asking a friend who knows their taste and has seen it, or from such peer review sites as Flixster. None of that information comes from knowing the opening weekend numbers. When you buy a car, you don’t ask how many other people have the same one - you want to know that it is properly engineered, safe, efficient and sexy looking. When you buy a tooth-paste, you don’t check that it is the best selling tooth-paste; when you choose a new partner, you don’t want to know that they’ve slept with more people than anyone else in the world.

Why should movies be different? How did a discussion of box office somehow escape from the business pages and make it into the culture pages? How did we come to confuse popularity with quality? Oscar Wilde once remarked that there is no such thing as a moral or immoral book. A book is either well written or badly written, that is all. If you believe the vast majority of our press, there is no longer such a thing as a good movie or a bad movie - a movie is either a block-buster or it is nothing.

My second beef (you remember, I had a pair of them) is about the industry.  Now, of course we have to care about the numbers, but here my concern is that we are fixating on the WRONG numbers. Never mind that Box Office itself represents only a small share of a movies ultimate audience; and never mind that the co-relation between Box Office and, for example, DVD sales is far from perfect; the real problem with a fixation on Box Office is that it completely fails to distinguish cost and return. The interesting question is not how many people went to see a particular movie, but how much did it cost to get them there.

To take an extreme example, which would you adjudge more successful, a movie with a production budget of $1m and a marketing budget of $500k that succeeded in a UK Box Office of $1m, or a movie with a production budget of $100m, and a marketing budget of $5m that resulted in a UK box office of $5m?

And in case that seems to leading or unrealistic an example, consider as recent a movie as SUPERMAN RETURNS, which took $30m at the UK Box Office, which sounds pretty damn healthy, till you realise the movie cost $270m to make and had a UK marketing spend of circa $10m. Contrast that with, say RUN FAT BOY RUN which is close to taking $20m at the UK Box Office for a budget of around a 10th of SUPERMAN. Does that mean that Simon Pegg’s flabby jogger is a greater hero than the Man of Steel? Or that David Schwimmer is a greater director than Bryan Synger? No, but on this evidence he’s a more profitable one. Not that the Box Office would have told you than.

We need new better metrics, and headlines less obsessed with Box Office.

Sorry its been so quiet on the slingblog these past few weeks and months. There’s been a lot going on in the real world. In no particular order:

- We’ve been locking picture on FRENCH FILM; which we are really delighted with. Its turned into a hugely romantic, very funny but still very intelligent movie. A tribute to the talents of writer and director and our wonderful cast and crew. The website will be going live over the next month and then there will be chances to catch previews and get involved in the run up to the pictures UK release, which should be in Q1 next year.

- We’re in prep on FAINTHEART which starts shooting in 4 short weeks. In addition to all the excitement and business in the film itself (Vikings! Romans! an Owl called Odin! A P.E. teacher called Gary!) is the excitement of the experimentation that we get to do with MySpace in really involving all of you out there in the film-making process. MySpace is calling it “the world’s first user generated film”, I think a more accurate description would be a mixture between open-process and open-source. The trick is working out which bits can be open source (e.g. choosing the bad, cutting multiple trailers) and which need the controlling minds of the film-makers but can be open process to observers. Its a careful balance and I think we will learn much from the process

- we’ve also got our first DVD release going on, and if you are a fan of Gypsy music and charismatic front-men, run do not work to the PIED PIPER OF HUTZOVINIA website and check out this wonderful tale of Eugene Hutz, lead singer of Punk-Gypsy sensation GOGOL BORDELLO, and also check out in glimering newness our DVD store, yes we are an e-talier now. Gosh.

Amidst all of that, we continue to be on the look out for fresh new projects and will shortly be announcing our 2008 slate, or rather I should say, our joint slate with the BBC (see below announcement our our co-dev, co-finance deal with them); and also are fundraising like busy bees to support the expansion of our distribution business.

On a personal note, it has been no less busy - I’ve also moved house (and now even own a new bed) and sadly, have parted ways from the lovely Kate; so am now sling-single ;-(.

So amidst all that I hope you will forgive me for not being too active on the blog. The real world has kind of taken over. But here I am, back with you, where I belong on the blogosphere. Soon you will forget I was ever away, and be wishing for me to leave you alone again…

At least according to filmstalker:

I wonder if this [FRENCH FILM] has been sparked by the idea of that Renault advert? The one with the man and the woman debating the best things about their respective countries and coming to the conclusion that they are better together, a la the Renault itself.

It probably hasn’t been, but that just sparked off a momentt of recognition. Aschlin Ditta has written the screenplay, Ditta is most known for her script Scenes of a Sexual Nature.