tailieunhanh - Boom and Bust in Australian Screen Policy: 10BA, the Film Finance Corporation and Hollywood‘s ‗Race to the Bottom‘

Previously, we (Cutting et al 2010; 2011a; 2011b) amassed 150 films for cinemetric analysis. We chose ten films fromfifteen release years at five-year intervals from1935 to 2005. All were English-language films, 139 were at least partlymade in the United States, and 124 were in color. Films were selected from among those with the highest box-office gross for their given year or, before these statistics were systematically kept (beginning in 1977), from among the most rated films on the InternetMovie Database (). They were also selected to represent five genres—action films, adventure films, animations, comedies, and dramas | 1 Boom and Bust in Australian Screen Policy 10BA the Film Finance Corporation and Hollywood s Race to the Bottom Alex Burns1 Faculty of Business and Law Victoria University Melbourne Australia Ben Eltham2 Centre for Cultural Research University of Western Sydney Parramatta Australia Centre for Policy Development Sydney Australia ABSTRACT In recent years a narrative has emerged in the Australian popular media about the box office unpopularity of Australian feature films and the failure of the domestic screen industry. This article explores the recent history of Australian screen policy with particular reference to 1 the 10BA tax incentive of the 1980s 2 the Film Finance Corporation of Australia FFC a government screen agency established in 1988 to bring investment bank-style portfolio management to Australia s screen industry and 3 local production incentive policies pursed by Australian state governments in a chase for Hollywood s runaway production. We argue the 10BA incentive catalysed an unsustainable bubble in Australian production while its policy successor the FFC fundamentally failed in its stated mission of commercial screen financing over its 20-year lifespan the FFC invested billion for million recouped a cumulative return of negative 80 per cent . For their part private investors in Australian films discovered the screen production process involved high levels of risk Goldman 1984 Malkiel 2007 . Foreign-financed production also proved highly volatile due to the vagaries of trade exposure currency fluctuations and tax arbitrage. The result of these macro- and micro-economic factors - often structural and cross-border in nature - was that Australia s screen industry failed to develop the local investment infrastructure required to finance a sustainable non-subsidised local sector. KEY WORDS Australian cinema motion-picture industry finance cultural policy media policy cultural economics tax arbitrage 1 email 2 .