The old quota argument has been rearing its seductive head recently, in a blog on the guardian and a bit of a discussion on the Shooting people. Being someone on the outside trying to break in, surprisingly I slightly favour it, though I'm far from well-informed on the matter.
However, Saturday night I learnt a little bit more. At a wedding I sat next to a guy who works the association that represents the interests of Cinemas in the UK. As I don't yet have an actual film to sell him I thought I'd fire the quota question at him. Bear in mind I'd had a few drinks so might be misquoting him - or just making it up.
A resounding no. He hates the Quota idea - thought it was an excuse to make crap films and pointed out that it removed competition - that if I made a film under a quota environment, then every other film made in the same environment would earn exactly the same amount as my one, regardless of how many tickets each film sold. Maybe on this I did mishear him, as I do find that rather hard to believe - surely a more nuanced system could be used?
But his other points were harder to argue against and indeed more encouraging - when I pointed out Hollywood's choke hold on distribution, he quickly came back with two factors that he said would soon be game changers:
Digitisation - not in production but in distribution. Currently, each film print (the film roll you put in the projector to project the film onto the screen) cost thousands of pounds to make and has to be physically distributed around the world. It has to be properly stored in cinemas and physically threaded and projected for each and every show. With the advent of digitisation you can send a film across a secure Internet link and just drag and drop it. This will bring costs down, allowing films to be copied for free and therefore involving less financial risk/investment from the distributor, so they can buy and show - hopefully - more films.
Social Media - It's changing our lives and our viewing habits. But it, combined with this digitisation in cinemas, will enable people to democratically vote as to what film they want to see in the cinema on say a Saturday night... interesting and empowering. But then the argument devolves from distribution ruling the marketplace / industry to marketing and hype ruling the industry, which social media can again influence but I think is still ultimately down to the bucks. So a slow improvement there maybe
While this guy was a complete free-marketer – trust the market, it will all work out – and politically my natural place is opposite, I can see some sense in his argument. Handing out free money to self-entitled media brats to make self-indulgent films is a worst case scenario that would come true to some extent – indeed, some would argue it already has under the defunct Film Council.
But my answer is that the market generally sinks to the lowest common denominator and must be artificially righted. The market seduces people into the choosing the easy way / easy entertainment. There is a scenario where people don't want to watch something challenging but if they are pushed into watching it then they are grateful afterward. However, it’s dangerous to say this because you come across as culturally elitist.
But then isn’t that is also part of the filmmaker’s remit – to answer a need they see in the cultural landscape, one that may not be popular but can still be important, and address it narratively. As Churchill said, democracy/the mob/the market is the best of a bad bunch of systems. To say the market it will look after itself is in some ways naive, and maybe self-delusional. It’s a way to wash our hands of the responsibility, put our trust in something we see as bigger than us but is in actual fact just a mess of complexities and not some wonderful self-organising higher intelligence. The market is not God – it is in fact the Frankenstein story, humanity creating a beast that will kill us. The market argument ignores that there’s an almost "moral" sense of quality that should be intellectually imposed – this may sounds hubristic or arrogant but I think that might be a failure of self-confidence more than anything else. Anyway, enough random thoughts on the market economy.
The Quota idea is a seductive one, and while I think it would be a good move I don’t see the government suddenly turning around and giving away money - it just ain't gonna happen. But maybe the future ain’t so bad even without quotas. Films will become more connected to the audience, more reactive to the audience, and fulfil the audiences needs more directly. Maybe it’ll even slim down the exec/middle man level and contact filmmakers directly to their audience. I just hope I’m wrong and people do choose those artistically, morally, and narratively challenging films.
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