Want a film distributed in regional Australia? Do it yourself!

Film-maker Warren Ryan has just emailed me, pointing to a feature in the online industry magazine Inside Film about his aims and methods in making Shadows of the Past, in which rodeo bull-riding is the backdrop for a simple but powerful story

Shadows, you may recall, won my praise in a post on May 28 (“An excellent film stuck in the bush”).

It seems Grumpy Old Journo may be a bushie at heart, because my response to the film has been matched by enthusiastic audiences in those Australian regional centres where it's been seen.

Interviewed by Simon de Bruyn, Warren says:

I strongly believe the regional Australia is largely ignored when it comes to entertainment they can relate to. Distributors cater solely for the city market and yet a huge slice of the box office comes
from regional cinemas. When I got into film making it, I spoke to a lot of people from all over regional Australia about what they would like to see in an Aussie film. I took a lot of their feedback on board when I was writing this script.

We made sure the film was authentic, grounded and believable.

The reaction so far has been phenomenal . . .

On distribution, Warren told Inside Film:

We’ve been very happy with the cinema release we’ve put together ourselves and we have an extensive plan for the DVD release in October. Counting this week's release in Tamworth, Orange and Wagga, we’ll have been through around 20 cinemas and we are approached each week by more . . .

We have also received several US distribution offers which is great. I hope to finalize the North American deal this week. The distributor we are leaning towards has a proven background in westerns and I believe will be a great fit for Shadows of the Past.

We have another US company that wants the remaining world wide rights, so we’re currently negotiating that as well.

We don’t look like we’ll get an official Australian distributor which is surprising, but it doesn’t overly concern me.

Much of the rest of the Inside Film interview covers technical information mainly of value to other film-makers, but the feature also raises matters which should be of general concern.
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Vale Frank Devine, a conservative with wit

When Grumpy Old Journo was a schoolboy in Perth, his newspaper reading was brightened by the work of a young journalist with a flair for colour stories from the busy Perth Police Court.

Frank Devine (pictured), whose death at 77 after a long illness was reported on The Australian's website today, wasn't the first journalist to trawl the magistrates' courts for Runyonesque yarns, but he may have been one of the best.

Some 55 years later, I can remember his stories were marked by their humanity – by the reporter's empathy with the losers and the spivs and the sad alcoholics in that daily parade before the beak.

Frank Devine went on to a stellar career as a foreign correspondent, a senior editor of Reader's Digest in Australia and the US, of US newspapers, and on returning to Australia, as editor of The Australian.

He was a staunch Catholic and clung to hard-line conservative views. He was a stalwart of Quadrant magazine.

Yet Frank Devine was one the few conservative columnists I could read without becoming angry (well, most of the time, anyway). I could seldom agree with him, but his weekly contribution to The Australian's Wry Side comment space was marked by intellectual verve and a devastating wit.

He mocked the pretentious, the groupthink lefties and the woolly minded greenies with all the intellectual force he could muster.

Unfortunately, I cannot recall his turning that force against his groupthink Quadrant colleagues, or those conservatives who made up their minds fifty years ago and they're not going to change now.

Still, Frank Devine was a great journalist. His contribution to Australian intellectual life will be missed.

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Grumpy Old Journo had planned a post rejoicing at Annabel Crabb's replacing Miranda Devine as a columnist in the Sydney Morning Herald yesterday. Miranda is one of Frank Devine's three daughters, so I guess we can understand why she took leave, leaving Annabel to stand in.

I would have remarked that Annabel Crabb's piece, about the proliferation of saucy innuendo in food and beer advertising, was a delightful contrast with Miranda Devine's somewhat prudish, conservative views.

Annabel crammed just about every double entendre possible into her piece. The only one she seems to have missed is the Bondi Blonde beer slogan.

But we'd better not go down that path.

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Were we prescient, or what?

See, I did write about Malcolm Turnbull:

"Alas, it doesn't take long for a respected journalist, lawyer and merchant banker to sink into political life when he's elected to the Federal Parliament."

Okay, I'll come clean. That was posted to Grumpy Old Journo on December 23, 2006. Is that prescient, or what?

In the post, GOJ said:

Alas, it doesn't take long for a respected journalist, lawyer and merchant banker to sink into political life when he's elected to the Federal Parliament. Take Malcolm Turnbull, our new Environment Minister, quoted in this morning's Weekend Australian: “The whole climate change phenomenon has informed and underpinned the policies of the Australian Government for more than a decade.”

The truth, as Malcolm must well know, is that Prime Minister John Howard has denied evidence of climate change for a decade. A stubborn man who overestimates his own intellectual abilities, he
listened only to those scientists who had the Quadrant Seal of Approval.

The result: We lost 10 years in which we could have been looking for ways to deal with the crisis.

It's a pity to see Malcolm Turnbull getting down to their [political spin doctors'] level with such misinformation . . .

But then, he's the Republican who once wrote of Howard: "Whatever else he achieves, history will remember him for only one thing. He was the prime minister who broke a nation's heart. He was the man who made Australia keep a foreign queen."

A politician, unlike a leopard, must change spots to survive in the jungle. But surely, one can stop short of telling porkies.

Sorry Malcolm, you've lost me. Once I thought you'd be a great prime minister.

Australians expect political confrontation to be full-on, with no punches pulled. But they also expect their politicians to tell the truth, and to be sure of their facts when they make serious allegations against opponents, and to have the decency to apologise if they're proven wrong.

Our Federal Opposition Leader, Malcolm Turnbull, did none of those things when he accused Prime Minister Kevin Rudd of lying to the House of Representatives, and in essence, also accused him of corruption.

That's why the public turned against him so dramatically in the three newspaper opinion polls published this week. The Herald/Nielsen poll revealed the proportion of Australians who disapprove of him had jumped from 47 per cent to 60 per cent, and those who approved dived from 43 per cent to 32 per cent.

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My apologies to readers who looked to Grumpy Old Journo last week for enlightenment on "UteGate", aka the OzCar affair. Two factors kept GOJ silent. First, anything I could say would do little more than repeat the news and commentary splashed across all the newspapers.

Second, I was frantically trying to file the past three years' overdue income tax returns by June 30, hoping to qualify for the Federal Government's $900 tax bonus. That money could pay off the credit card after I spend $645 on compulsory third-party personal injury insurance before re-registering my old motor cycle -- almost twice the cost of our car's "green slip".

In rushing to file those overdue returns, I wasn't alone, as this report shows.

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Sorry, Tim, but I still can't buy that argument

Here's a link which will take you to the pre-recorded video in which author Tim Winton uses his Miles Franklin acceptance speech to argue that Australia should retain "territorial copyright" protection for our authors and publishers.

Sorry Tim, but as I said in my previous post, I can't buy the proposition that Australians should be required to pay more for Australian books than they otherwise would, all in the name of protecting our culture.

If there are inequities in a free international book trade, they should be addressed by competition policy and anti-dumping rules.

If our authors don't receive full royalties on their books when they're imported from international publishers, it's up to our authors and literary agents to seek better contract arrangements. If they need government support to do so, it would be a valid role for government to play -- especially in international negotiations.

Some may think Grumpy Old Journo's comments mark him as a right-wing fundamentalist. On the contrary, a left-of-centre, socially progressive commentator should have no problem in also being an economic rationalist.

Here's the ABC report about Tim Winton's winning the Miles Franklin for the fourth time with his novel Breath, and the report from the Trust which administers the awards.

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How much should we tax bookbuyers to support Australian culture?

Your blogger has had too many distractions lately, so he's only just read the full text of the closing address by novelist Richard Flanagan (pictured) to the Sydney Writers Festival on May 24. Click here if you'd like to read it before I tell you that it's a superb, elegant speech – and that it's full of claptrap.

I was a finance journalist for much of my career, and when it comes to arguments for tariffs and protection from international competition, I heard them all back in the 1970s.

Let's see. There's the infant industry argument – protect us from overseas competition until we grow enough to take on the big boys around the world. Worked well for BHP, didn't it?

Or the defence capability argument – we need strong industries so we can ramp up production of war materiel if we're under threat of invasion. Except that in the 21st Century, we'll all be blown to smithereens before we convert those railway workshops to producing Liberators and Lancasters.

Or to protect our pristine primary production, don't introduce disease with imported apples/pork/fish/poultry/etc. – sometimes a valid argument, but often too self-serving.

All have something in common. Corporations, unions and primary producers plead that the public should pay more for goods and services than they otherwise would, whether it's in the shops or paid by their taxes.

But culture is different, isn't it? Australians should pay more for their books to allow our stories to be told with Australian voices.

We must continue “territorial copyright” so that our authors, publishers and independent booksellers thrive under protection from those unscrupulous overseas publishers and our greedy retail giants like Woolworths and Coles and bookstore chains like Dymocks.

That's the proposition Richard Flanagan tries to sell us in that beautifully constructed speech (it really is worth reading, so here's the link again). His exposition is so good, even I almost succumbed.

But I can't go along with it. Stripped of all its high-falutin' good intentions, it's an argument that higher authority – the Australian government – should decide that a cultural issue is so worthwhile ordinary Australians should pay more for their books than they would otherwise.

And that's a decision the Australian people should make, not their governments. The only place Australians can register their vote is in a free marketplace. All the government should do is make sure the marketplace works properly, and is regulated by well-administered competition policy.

[Richard Flanagan alleges our market would be flooded by dumped books which would otherwise have been remaindered or pulped by US publishers. If he's quick, he's just got time to lodge a submission to the current Productivity Commission inquiry into Australia's anti-dumping legislation.]

Flanagan also troubles me with his suggestion that the Australian government should stuff our dollars into a bloody great milch cow with plenty of teats, so that an entire Australian cultural industry – authors, publishers and independent booksellers – can take sustenance and thrive.

He's envious of the government money which subsidises some film-makers. I don't blame him. But when did you last see a government-subsidised Australian film and say,"Wow!” ?

The last Australian film Grumpy Old Journo enjoyed was Shadows of the Past (GOJ post, May 28, “An excellent film stuck in the bush”, a movie for which film-maker Warren Ryan received no government assistance). Should we go that way in boosting the publishing industry?

I have another worry. Should – God forbid! – Australians ever elect another John Howard as Prime Minister, he will have a ready-made structure to implement a Quadrant-inspired purge of Australia's “culture industry”.

But the biggest flaw in Richard Flanagan's argument is its total failure to look to a future in which many readers will use the internet to obtain books by digital downloads to home computers, laptops or specialist e-book readers such as Amazon's Kindle.

The internet is international, and trying to rope off Australian writing into "territorial copyright" will become difficult to enforce and probably counter-productive.

The Australian government would serve our writers and our cultural interests better by developing policies which earn authors exposure and proper royalties in the emerging world of digital publishing, and it should make sure its voice is heard in forums which develop the protocols for internet publishing.

Perhaps we could allow "territorial copyright" to continue – but only while the Productivity Commission, or a specially set up inquiry, develops those policies.

If you type "territorial copyright" into Google or another search engine, and restrict it to Australian pages, you will come up with hundreds of results. All of which disagree with me. Still, they might be worth your time.
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Supporters save Senator Bob Brown

Any need to comment?

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Loathe him or love him, Senator Bob Brown gets responses

Surely this takes the prize for the nastiest letter to the editor this week. Published in today's Sydney Morning Herald, it drips with a sneering loathing for greenies generally, and Senator Brown in particular.

Perhaps letters editors should commission anti-tripe software, to screen out any submissions which say, “How silly of me,” along with those which start, “Is it only me, but . . ?” – terms which usually say the writers are pompous old gits.

This letter's writer appears not to have troubled himself to learn the facts behind Senator Brown's huge legal bill. Nor does he feel it matters that Brown undertook the legal actions not for his own benefit, but for what he perceived to the need to protect natural environment. And that his bankruptcy would rob the nation of a unique political leader.

But the letter writer needn't listen to a Grumpy Old Journo – if he flicks to the Opinion page right opposite his letter, he'll find the background fully explained. (He might have problems with the big words, however – Elizabeth Farrelly is erudite, and isn't shy in showing it. Even your GOJ had to look up guddling and manky.*)

And Elizabeth Farrelly says she loves Bob Brown. “Nothing personal. Never met the guy. But I love his articulate, undaunted, un-self-aggrandising and untiring defence of the planet.”

*Guddling: To try to catch fish by hand, esp. by groping under rocks or in murky water.

Manky: Inferior or unpleasantly dirty.
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