Whatever else you might think about the British film industry, you've got to admire its chutzpah. On the eve of a swingeing Budget, certain to hit the pockets of almost everyone in the country, 72 leading British film producers decided that yesterday was the day to have a bit of a moan in a letter to The Daily Telegraph.
They're not happy, you see. Though they get public subsidy from bodies such as the UK Film Council, BBC Films and Film 4, if their films make a profit, they have to give the subsidy back. Doesn't your heart bleed?
You might indeed wonder why we are subsidizing films in the first place. There's a simple market mechanism, surely: make films that people want to see and you will make a profit. If you don't, you go out of business and someone else gets to have a go. That's what Hollywood does.
The producers' answer to that is "British films are critical both to our culture and our economy". Really? Was Sex Lives of the Potato Men – voted number seven in the 50 Worst Movies of All Time in Empire magazine – critical to our culture? Would our economy have been damaged without the endless series of hopeless East End gangster movies that got made in the wake of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels?
And even when we do make good films, hardly anyone in this country can be bothered to see them. Two British films were nominated for Oscars last year – In the Loop and An Education. Each grossed just £2.2 million in Britain, a fraction of the figure for an average Hollywood film. Fish Tank, Andrea Arnold's critically acclaimed study of a mouthy Essex teenager, selected for the Cannes Film Festival, made £600,000.
