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I'm afraid I have a bad feeling this isn't a competition, which I'm afraid also means NO PRIZES!!!

Sorry to break it to you Richard.

 

Now I bet you are wondering why you spent so much time on this thread! ;)

 

Freya

 

It's always a competition Freya. I'm British, I have a natural innate desire to be #1 at all costs.

 

R,

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Allow me to be the first to disown you.

 

I'm now wondering if I should go to this union meeting tomorrow...

 

P

 

 

Oh don't worry Phil I'll make it a point to remind people on this forum that not all British people are like you, far from it. A few actually make something of their lives instead of exposing their lonely bitterness for all the world to see on internet forums.

Please go to the meeting, you can commiserate with people like Maxim. Oh those big bad terrible producers are ruining our lives! cue sounds of babies crying.

R,

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Is that Margaret Thatcher? Great lady and an amazing PM!!

 

"The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money"

 

M. Thatcher.

 

R,

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Y'know, I really don't understand the need for anyone to lionise that woman. She wasn't even a good capitalist. She oversaw the dismantling and destruction of huge amounts of enterprise. To tedious lefties you can understand her being a hate figure, but I really don't get why that makes her a heroine to equally tedious suit-wearing moneygrubbers. She was, ultimately, an equal-opportunity screwer-over.

 

I suppose that gets us back on topic, really: producing seems to be all about giving the right impression and making nice to everybody, at any cost. At absolutely any cost whatsoever.

 

P

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Maxim, one of my best friends is a Producer. I see the huge amount of work she puts into raising finance, developing scripts, babysitting directors, massaging actors egos, soothing disgruntled crew, untangling legal knots, and dealing with idiots, every single day. To say that she has no skills and is unneccessary is insulting and entirely inaccurate. I have to say, frankly, that you are talking out of your arse.

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You've seriously got to be kidding me? You want to go back to life behind the Iron Curtain? Ok away you go then.

 

BTW, you evil capitalist pig you, I want a share of your time-lapse shots revenue! Look at the rates you are charging!

 

http://www.time-lapse.co.uk/library_prices.html

 

What kind of person are you? One minute you openly advocate for state ownership of a finished film, all the while you are gouging fellow filmmakers with ridiculous rates for your stock footage!! 600 UK pounds per second for a commercial? SHAME!!!

 

Maxim I am going to call on you to either A. Give your work away for free B. Share the proceeds equally with all of us in the film industry.

 

If you don't agree to either A or B, then nothing you have said on this site carries any weight and you frankly are the biggest hypocrite to ever post on here and you should be ashamed of yourself!!!!

 

Come on Maxim, I am calling on you publicly to practice what you preach and disavow capitalism. I'm waiting.......

 

R,

Richard; you're frightening me....

You're starting to sound like Jim Jannard.

 

In fact ... now that I think about it ...

 

Yeah ...

... buying an Alexa. What a stroke of genius!

And that hair; nobody would ever think it was a wig, because, I mean, who would actually pay for hair like that?! *

 

Has anybody ever seen "Richard" and Jim in the same room together...?

 

Hang on, it's just gone midday; time for my medication....

 

 

 

* Disclaimer: I actually don't actually know what your hair looks like; reality is just being re-edited for dramatic effect

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but it certainly is desirable that the status quo, in which people are forced into the role of charicature bad guys, does not persist.

Whaddya mean they don't persist; they've managed to sell an awful lot of groceries in Australia:

https://www.google.com.au/webhp?hl=en&tab=ww&gws_rd=cr&ei=X6J1UruBO8SEkwWSXA#hl=en&q=ststus+quo+coles&safe=off

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And that hair; nobody would ever think it was a wig, because, I mean, who would actually pay for hair like that?! *

* Disclaimer: I actually don't actually know what your hair looks like; reality is just being re-edited for dramatic effect

 

Who's hair? Mine or Jim's? I'm 45 and she's still thick like shag rug baby. I know quite a number of 45 year old males that can't say that. ;)

 

R,

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Maxim, one of my best friends is a Producer

 

Stuart, I think the point is that she's a producer in Los Angeles, where filmmaking is a business, as opposed to here, where it's a fringe artform and a toy of the rich and unpleasant. You presumably know that as well as I do. In LA there is enough money flying around that treating people fairly is at least an option. Less so here.

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Who's hair? Mine or Jim's? I'm 45 and she's still thick like shag rug baby. I know quite a number of 45 year old males that can't say that. ;)

 

R,

"Yours or Jim's?!"

Last time I looked Jannard was somewhat follicularly challenged, so...

But then again, if you can produce a purchase receipt for a toupee, does that then count as "your own" hair?

Or is it like "his" airliner, that was actually leased by Oakley, and which he was allowed to use when they weren't.

Now be quiet; any minute now Emanuel is going to chime in here, and he'll no doubt expostulate (without prompting) that he's not Jim Jannard either.

I mean chrisssake, there's only so many people who can NOT be Jim Jannard surely?!

 

Disclaimer: If you think this is a silly post, it is designed to fit this thread.

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Maxim, one of my best friends is a Producer. I see the huge amount of work she puts into raising finance, developing scripts, babysitting directors, massaging actors egos, soothing disgruntled crew, untangling legal knots, and dealing with idiots, every single day. To say that she has no skills and is unneccessary is insulting and entirely inaccurate. I have to say, frankly, that you are talking out of your arse.

 

 

A producer has skills. So does a bank robber. Just because someone has skills does not mean they are needed. Or that because of those skills they should have all the profits and ownership.

 

Separating the production manager work that some may do, the producers as the owner, employer and controller of the film is not needed if other social organisations are put in place. Such as proper funding of the industry as a whole and not individual films.

 

As I have worked on films without a producer. I know this to be true.

 

The idea that the rich deserve all the rewards because they risk their money is laughable.

 

On every film a techniction risks not being paid. I doubt if there is a film worker alive who has not been stiffed , paid late, cheated over long hours.

 

Do producers or the critics have a plans for the British film industry?

 

For all their ranting and insults some posting here have ignored the facts

 

UK film budgets have fallen from £3 million to £1/2 million

 

Wages and condititions are poor and falling (if that is possible)

 

The films made are poor, they don't find an audience go STD

 

There are thousands of graduates looking for work in the industry raedy to be exploited

 

Media courses exist to make money

 

Address the problems don't rant about Thatcher

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Maxim, honestly, I think you're in the wrong business. I don't know what sort of socialist utopia you're envisaging, but the movie industry is capitalist to its core. It exists to make money. Crew are employees and have no share in the profits, anymore than the guy who fixes my car has a share in its ownership.

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Maxim, honestly, I think you're in the wrong business. I don't know what sort of socialist utopia you're envisaging, but the movie industry is capitalist to its core. It exists to make money. Crew are employees and have no share in the profits, anymore than the guy who fixes my car has a share in its ownership.

 

I think it's totally possible to organise labour along other lines if you wish to do so. To a certain extent it's a free country. Maxim could produce his own films along with other people along the lines he wishes, there's presently no law against this. It's more difficult as you are kind of battling against the dominant way of thinking but it has been done before and it can be done again.

 

Wasn't beasts of the southern wild a film that was made as a co-op or something?

 

The big issue will be distribution as many indie producers have discovered.

 

I don't get this antagonism against producers tho, producers are just people working withing the dominant system and usually they don't get to keep the rights as they have to sell them on to a distributor and lose control.

 

To complain that producers aren't doing anything about falling budgets is a nonsense. What are other crew members doing about falling budgets? What has Maxim himself done about it? All this talk of Producers is a straw man to avoid confronting the real issues in the system.

 

I'm glad that Maxim is going to this meeting thing because that's doing something positive about things, however finding solutions is going to be hard if you havn't identified the REAL problem areas.

 

Freya

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The idea that the rich deserve all the rewards because they risk their money is laughable.

 

Maxim this is now becoming laughable. As I pointed out you have a nice little capitalist venture going with your stock footage business, charging exorbitant rates. You are quite comfortable collecting the profits from your little enterprise, but you don't think anyone else should be allowed to do the same thing?

 

Who the heck is earning all the "rewards" from your stock footage? Are you sharing all of that revenue with your fellow film industry types?

 

You mentioned that you did your film transfer at Technicolour LA was it? You didn't run the DaVinci yourself, and I'm sure there was also a tape op working for you. Are you sharing your stock footage profits with those guys?

 

If not you are the biggest most laughable HYPOCRITE to walk on God's green earth!

 

R,

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I think what Maxim is talking about is the degree of risk faced by various people doing various things. I am not as hardline a leftie as Maxim, but it's worth recognising that the issue of relative financial risk is a principal source of social injustice at the moment, and one of the ways in which laissez-faire capitalism importantly fails.

 

The easiest way to understand this is to consider that in order to start a business, one needs capital. When a wealthy person risks an amount of money that they can easily afford to lose - by which I mean that their lifestyle and future prospects are not significantly in peril if it all goes wrong - they are, to all practical purposes, taking no risk at all. On this basis, it is not obvious that a wealthy investor has an absolute and inalienable right to profit from the work of a considerably less wealthy employee. Additional responsibilities are imposed by the inequality in degree of risk. $1 is not worth the same amount to everyone.

 

Modern society constantly forgets this, although it has been recognised in the past. I am not a socialist; I do not expect a film producer to build me a house, but I do expect that this inequality of risk is recognised.

 

In a practical sense, most producers are by definition wealthy, and an awful lot of crew are not. If a production fails to pay its crew, the consequences for crew can be crippling: loss of home, car or other posessions, failure of relationships, and so on. This has to some extent happened to me, and I could (but of course won't) give you at least three names of people who were effectively financially ruined by the british "film industry".

 

All of this would be easier in a more equitable society in which the gap between rich and poor was considerably narrower than it is now. Industrial high-fliers (such as film producers) need to stop pretending that their abilities are so unique and powerful that they should earn fifty or a hundred or two hundred times more than someone who flips burgers for a living. Accept that, and it becomes a lot easier to pay everyone else a wage that removes them from the extreme-risk bracket as well.

 

P

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Industrial high-fliers (such as film producers) need to stop pretending that their abilities are so unique and powerful that they should earn fifty or a hundred or two hundred times more than someone who flips burgers for a living. Accept that, and it becomes a lot easier to pay everyone else a wage that removes them from the extreme-risk bracket as well.

 

P

 

As to you first point, no I certainly cannot accept that a film producer should not earn 50 times what a "burger flipper" makes. People that can pull together millions to make a movie possess the most unique skill set of skill sets. Frankly I don't care what you and comrade Maxim believe on this point. Fact is, you are both WRONG.

 

As to the wages of film workers...unionized film workers earn pretty damn good money for what they do. Especially when you consider that there isn't a single unionized film position that requires so much as a high school diploma!! You don't need to have a high school diploma to be a grip, 1st AC, costume designer, production designer, or even a DOP or director or a producer for that matter. In fact now that I think of it, the only people on a film set that actually always have university degrees are the accountants!!

 

Name for me another job in the film industry that one is required by the union or government regulators to have even a high school diploma? Was Steven Spielberg kept out the DGA because he didn't have a university degree?

 

Now let's take teachers on the other hand....they are ALL required to have university degrees and be graduates of a teachers college and keep their credentials current with the various governments that regulate their profession. Teachers in the USA, especially, earn notoriously low wages. We've all heard the stories of teachers in the US collecting food stamps.

 

As to the non-union and the famous "lo/no" ads on mandy.com for film crew, again, no one is forced to take those positions.

 

We do have endless threads on here from younger people complaining about the difficulty of getting into the film unions. Oh wait a second *gasp* I thought unions were socialist organizations designed to protect workers, and help the working common man succeed in the film industry. They couldn't possibly be criminal organizations set up to keep people out of the film industry and ensure that only their existing members find work? Naw that can't be true, they would never do a thing like that.

 

On my last two movies I signed contracts with the various Canadian unions. Those contracts were 100% honoured by me as the producer. What the unions cannot force me to do is shake hands with their reps on set, or sign the bond cheque with a smile on my face.

 

How these unions are able to trample my constitutional rights in Canada is beyond me? This is one of the main reasons so much work is shifting to Romania, Ukraine, and Czech Republic, the unions can't touch producers over there. Even Kevin Costner shot his Hatfields and McCoys TV mini-series in Romania. Gee I wonder why?

 

R,

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I think what Maxim is talking about is the degree of risk faced by various people doing various things. I am not as hardline a leftie as Maxim, but it's worth recognising that the issue of relative financial risk is a principal source of social injustice at the moment, and one of the ways in which laissez-faire capitalism importantly fails.

 

The easiest way to understand this is to consider that in order to start a business, one needs capital. When a wealthy person risks an amount of money that they can easily afford to lose - by which I mean that their lifestyle and future prospects are not significantly in peril if it all goes wrong - they are, to all practical purposes, taking no risk at all. On this basis, it is not obvious that a wealthy investor has an absolute and inalienable right to profit from the work of a considerably less wealthy employee. Additional responsibilities are imposed by the inequality in degree of risk. $1 is not worth the same amount to everyone.

 

 

There is not limited to film producers tho and there is a variety of film producers out there just as with everything else. However you are right of course that the extent of risk is different for different people.

 

This is of course nothing to do with producers. It exists outside of the UK film industry too.

It's about the system.

 

If we had quotas tomorrow I know exactly how that would play out.

Probably a lot like it did last time with quota quickies to make a fast buck.

 

 

It might be helpful to look at what happened recently to the film council. The government correctly identified the film council as being a quango that wasn't doing a lot for the film industry, so they did away with it. Then there was the issue of what to replace it with, which was a problem because they obviously needed people who had the right experience and knew the UK film industry. In the end they settled on the BFI. I imagine that what happened then was that the BFI needed to take on new staff to deal with the added workload, so they looked around for experienced people who could do the job and which people would have plenty of experience of this sort of thing? Probably people who had previously worked for the film council...
On a similar note look at Father Abrahams attempts to re-vitalise channel 4.
I think a major part of the problem in this country is that we have far too few Lew Grades and far too many Michael Grades to put it simply.
Too much fishing over and over in the same tiny pond, instead of checking out the lake.
Freya
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The government correctly identified the film council as being a quango that wasn't doing a lot for the film industry, so they did away with it.

 

The same will happen to TeleFilm Canada in the not too far distant future.

 

R,

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Just to make it clear that this is a change of subject, you haven't addressed my concerns over the equitability of very wealthy people profiting, at zero effective risk, from the risk of others.

 

But anyway.

 

 

 

As to you first point, no I certainly cannot accept that a film producer should not earn 50 times what a "burger flipper" makes.

 

I fundamentally disagree with you. No human being is fifty times smarter, or harder-working, than any other. The entire concept is absurd. Even if I agreed, my concerns over the nature of the skill set to which you refer stand. These are not nice people, they do not behave nicely, and this should not be encouraged.

 

But practically speaking, it doesn't make any difference, anyway. At some point - as with bankers and their bonuses, famously - the extra money just becomes a tool in the dick-swinging contest of life. Eventually you're handing over money that isn't going to really affect anyone's life, just to make them feel important. Stroking one person's ego is not a good enough reason to disadvantage, perhaps seriously, other people.

 

 

 

People that can pull together millions to make a movie possess the most unique skill set of skill sets.

 

Again, this is so fatuous I hardly know how to address it. You really want to argue about the relative uniqueness of abilities as a guide to their remuneration?

 

I don't know very much about the US (and possibly similar Canadian) film unions. The evidence I have seen suggests that they are not particularly socialist, instead working on the basis of artificially narrowing the labour market, which is questionable on all sorts of levels.

 

What I do know quite a lot about, more than ten years into doing it, is how people tend to be treated when there is no union, or at least no union with any real authority. Well-paid union crews represent a tiny minority of workers who could reasonably be said to operate in the fields the unions cover. We outnumber them almost certainly hundreds to one, and despite the visibility of the work produced by American union crews, and despite their prominence in the trade press, there is a lot more work, of all levels of quality, being done outside Hollywood than within it.

 

It's these people I think Maxim and I are talking about. I don't want to be rich (I know what most rich people are like), but it should not be an impossible dream to own a house and a car and make regular contributions to a pension. This currently out of the question for the overwhelming majority of people who work in the film industry because, and solely because, people like you think themselves to be so very, very clever that they deserve hundreds of times more money than anyone else. There will always be some people on hard times, but I currently work in a field where everyone but the top few percent is permanently dirt-poor, and that's crazy.

 

If you cannot understand why this situation is morally incorrect, I cannot help you further.

 

P

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If you cannot understand why this situation is morally incorrect, I cannot help you further.

 

Because essentially you are referring to an issue that exists in all societies the world over. Is it fair that there are rich people while others go hungry? This question has been debated since Old Testament times and we certainly are not going to resolve the question on cinematography.com. If we do, I'll be sure and share the Nobel Peace Prize with both you and comrade Maxim.

 

As for:

 

"Again, this is so fatuous I hardly know how to address it. You really want to argue about the relative uniqueness of abilities as a guide to their remuneration?"

 

I think you're the one who is frankly being silly here. You expect a heart surgeon to earn the same as a "burger flipper?" Is that what you are advocating here?

 

Phil, I think YOU should earn the same as a burger flipper. But like comrade Maxim you only seem to believe that the philosophies you espouse should be applied to everyone else, except........you!

 

I'm sure you command a good buck when you are contracted to do work. You have a lot of technical knowledge that is far beyond the vast majority of people in this business. Why you think you should be compensated accordingly is beyond me?

 

R,

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The reason bankers had large incomes is because they could take them. they where at the centre of financial capitalism and they could pay themselves what they wanted. The skill required to sell bad morgages into financial products, to sell poop as gold, almost destroyed capitalism. For more effect than me.

 

Producers find themselves (the rich, clever or dishonest ones ) of owning a property that cost them x to make and which is worth 100x.

 

They have skill, so does a pickpocket, they have access to capital.

 

Well dear film makers, why don't we go an organise the industry so that the people who watch the films pay the people who make the films and cut out the middle man?

 

This is what the French have sort of done in taking the levies off people who live by showing films and giving it to film makers. No need for those oh so special, so talented people whose main line was "what is you rate? , "Well I am sorry I have only got y in the budget"

 

BECTU the film Union has a film policy commitee and it has commisioned a report into the French Film industy and its funding. We think that this could be introduced in the UK putting £1 billion into UK independent feature film production.

 

I have been involved in supporting this.

 

Do PACK the producers organisation have a policy?

 

Do producers care that budgets, wages and conditions are falling?

 

That the films being made are poor?

 

Well us lefties do, and we are doing something about it. It does not mean we will succeed, that could depend on how many support it. But we are trying.

 

The first few films I made, when Channel Four just started, we made as a group of us as a cooperative. It was very successful for a few years. No very special producer people were needed at all.

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Well us lefties do, and we are doing something about it. It does not mean we will succeed, that could depend on how many support it. But we are trying.

 

I will look forward to visiting you on your hippie film commune comrade Maxim, sounds like fun.

 

I can't wait until the first feature you make wins the Oscar for best picture and 317 people from your film commune go up on stage.

 

R,

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