TUESDAY 29 APRIL 2003

MR BERNIE CORBETT, MR JULIAN FRIEDMANN AND MR CLIVE DAWSON

  Q20 Michael Fabricant: Can you teach someone to be creative? If the money were there could you do it, or is it something that is either in you or it is not?

  Mr Corbett: It can give them opportunities to learn on the job and that happens through television in this country.

  Mr Dawson: You can teach the craft of writing. I do not think you can turn a non-writer into a writer, but you can certainly teach the craft of screenwriting and television writing.

  Q21 Michael Fabricant: Julian Friedmann says you have got to have the talent. Do you think we have the talent in the UK? Certainly when it comes to TV comedy Britain used to lead the way on sitcoms. Now it is Frasier and Friends.

  Mr Friedmann: We have the talent in every other area in which writers write and there seems to be no reason why we do not have the talent. I think we do. We do not have the opportunities. We have a film industry that is having to reinvent the wheel almost every time. There are too many young producers being put out into the market place from the training programmes, there are too many directors, there are too few films being made.

  Q22 Michael Fabricant: Is there a brain drain to the US?

  Mr Friedmann: By some of the very successful, yes. In one sense that is perhaps for some writers a good thing because it is going to give them an opportunity. If Troy Kennedy Martin and a number of other distinguished British writers had stayed here I have no doubt that they would have been getting much more screen time. The distinction between a TV series and between films which are single stories about 90-120 minutes where one story is encapsulated and a television movie like Four Weddings and a Funeral—and we should not forget that it was only a television movie—can nevertheless be commercially very successful. About two years ago before the German television industry imploded, the Neue Market crashed, the Kirsch Group went bankrupt, Germany was making 350-450 television movies a year. I happen to have been involved in the start of that. It gave the most wonderful opportunities for people to learn their craft writing single stories, some of whom have now gone on to write feature films. Some of those TV movies became feature films. We do have the possibility here of using television to provide basic opportunities and training for people to learn the craft of writing films. I do think there is a snobbishness amongst people in the film industry. I give lectures to universities' career days and when you ask, "How many of you want to write feature films?", it is usually about 90% of them. When you ask, "How many of you want to write television?", it is about 10%. I think it is a terrible mistake to waste a lot of money, whether it is state money or not, training people to work in an industry that has no jobs for them. It seems to me crazy. It creates false expectations, people feel very bitter, they whinge a lot, because they feel, "I have done my training. Why isn't anybody taking any notice?". The reality is that the jobs are not there.

  Q23 Michael Fabricant: Is it not unrealistic to make comparisons between the United Kingdom and the rest of Europe when possibly our greatest strength, but also the greatest weakness, is that we speak English, when it is a big global market?

  Mr Corbett: There is a global market but there is a specialness to the Britishness of British films. Just to respond in a chauvinistic way to the question about the talent, it would be fair to say that you will find the best British writers working in America and Los Angeles, Hare or, on the television side, Clement and Le Frenais, to give examples. You will not find the best American writers working in London or in Britain.

  Q24 Michael Fabricant: You commented on the Film Council's initiative to try and train people to be better at critiquing, if there is such a word, film scripts, but does it not say something pretty grim about the film industry, that you have to tell the film industry how to look at a film script and determine whether or not it is any good and whether it is commercial?

  Mr Corbett: This is illustrative of the fragmentary nature of the British film industry. In my opening remarks I stated that an industry that was really worthy of the description would be complete and would encompass every stage and would be self-supporting and would grow itself from its own resources. What you are referring to is an illustration of the fact that we have bits of an industry here and there that feed into somebody else's industry.

  Q25 Michael Fabricant: The Film Council had this project, "25 words or less", but then they said, "Unless you have got an agent we are not interested". Is that not destroying the whole point of it?

  Mr Friedmann: We were very opposed to that.

  Mr Corbett: We were baffled by that and we have written to the Film Council, we have been to see them, we have argued and pleaded. I have had meetings with them. Julian Friedmann has had meetings with them. I have to say that I am absolutely bewildered as to why they should make such a stipulation. It is completely baffling.

  Mr Friedmann: We know why. It is because basically they do not want to be swamped with 5,000 scripts and they are hoping to have a filter, which in this case is agents. Our argument is that they should be getting scripts for this from professional writers and the Writers' Guild members are also professional writers. Their counter to that—and you can see both sides here—is that anybody can still submit a proposal in exactly the same format, in exactly the normal way. It will not necessarily fall within the catchment of that scheme but there is nothing stopping anybody at all submitting the project that they would have submitted had they in this case had an agent, in which case you say, "Why bother to make the distinction?" I think it is a small bureaucratic problem and it is something which we are having discussions with them about.

  Q26 Mr Flook: I slightly provocatively ask: do scripts ever make a film from Joe Public's point of view? Do people ever come out of a film going, "Great script!"?

  Mr Corbett: I do not think people are likely to come out of the cinema humming the script, if you like, but Hitchcock it was who said, "What you need for a great film is a great script, a great script and a great script", and yes, they do make films.

  Mr Friedmann: People do not come into a building and say, "Great engineering".

  Q27 Mr Flook: They might in this one.

  Mr Friedmann: They might, but they generally do not. In fact, you do not want the public to see all the gubbins that make it work. That in a sense I think would be a distraction.

  Q28 Mr Flook: Beckham gets paid a lot of money because he very obviously scores the goals that we all want him to score at the last moment, but that is not quite the case with scripts. Does that damage your ability as scriptwriters to get a better take?

  Mr Corbett: The Beckham point is not helpful because anybody who is as good as Beckham in whatever field of life they happen to wind up in is probably going to wind up on the plus side. Of course, there are scriptwriters like that. The fellow who wrote Gosford Park is inundated with offers and is no doubt going to have a glittering career and be very highly rewarded. We have just seen that apparently J K Rowling, whose books are the basis of the Harry Potter films, is now richer than the Queen. That is not the problem area. The problem area is, if you like, the second and third division. A footballer in the second or third division can make a pretty good living and go round the night clubs and be at least a local celebrity. A writer of films in the second or third division is earning no money whatever and is working on hopes and dreams.

  Mr Friedmann: There is an interesting point in Mr Flook's question which I think is that writers are not perceived to be perhaps as important as maybe they would like to think, and this does come to some extent from film reviews. It is very rare to see a review of a film which describes it as the writer's film, whereas 90% of film reviews talk fulsomely about it being the director's film. That happened on Clive's. There was one review and it talked about it entirely as though it was the director's film. In fact, what the director did was that he shot Clive's script. That is a small thing which has got to do with the fact that film reviewers like to hobnob with directors who seem to be much trendier and perhaps better party-goers than writers. It is not a major problem but it is a little perceptual problem.

  Q29 Mr Flook You mentioned about a scriptwriter's film. When Brideshead Revisited came out as a TV serial, amazingly it was 12 or 13 hours long, and when it did come out, 23 years ago or whenever it was, it was almost verbatim, word for word. Would a scriptwriter have had to give much to that, because I am told that they are trying to remake Brideshead as, I presume, a two-hour film?

  Mr Dawson: I do not know specifically what happened in that case. Obviously that was largely down to the writer of the TV series, I would imagine. Just to answer your earlier point about the Beckham scenario, people like Richard Curtis can obviously earn a great deal of money as a writer but you only get anywhere the league of the Richard Curtises by getting experience so that more and more people will be prepared to employ you, and it is very difficult for writers coming through, even very talented writers at the bottom. You only prove that you can write a feature script by writing a speculative feature script, so, in the case of The Bunker, for example, there was an awful lot of work that went into that which was totally unpaid for. That comes back to my point about there being a lack of development money for writers to be able to spend time learning the craft of writing for film. A writer can earn a great deal of money writing for television, so it has been an incentive for writers to want to write for film rather than earning a perfectly good living at television.

  Q30 Mr Flook: And you are not expecting to get a transfer to Rio or Hollywood or something like that?

  Mr Dawson: Not on the strength of The Bunker, no.

  Q31 Mr Flook: Is that an aim for everyone?

  Mr Dawson: To go to Hollywood? Not for everyone. A lot of writers do want to write in Hollywood, but not everybody by any means.

  Q32 Mr Flook: For those who do want to go to Hollywood, is it for the sunshine and the money or either?

  Mr Dawson: Probably the money, I would imagine, because writers do get paid a great deal of money in Hollywood compared to what they can expect over here.

  Q33 Mr Doran: You have got a particular perspective: you represent scriptwriters and obviously you are a trade union which gives you a particular focus. I was re-reading some of Raymond Chandler's writing recently and particularly the bits when he is looking at the media. It seems to be a constant battle between the scriptwriter, who is the artist, and the rest of the world, mainly in Hollywood in his case. Is that a perspective you recognise?

  Mr Corbett: It is indeed. This is endlessly debated. We do have to acknowledge that the creation of a movie is a collaborative effort and it is futile for the writer to imagine that they can write something down on the page and then it will be faithfully reproduced frame by frame, scene by scene, and I think the account that you have of Clive's experience will certainly demonstrate that as somebody who is very committed to his personal original idea. Nevertheless, both in film and indeed in television there are very legitimate complaints of writers that their work, which may well be the outcome of years of experience and craft knowledge and talent can be hacked about by junior script editors and by inexpert people in the so-called development process. There is a question about the resources that are put into the development process in this country compared to that in the United States. These are two conflicting directions that probably cannot ever be resolved.

  Q34 Mr Doran: Does that say something about the status of the scriptwriter in this country?

  Mr Corbett: I am not sure that there are enough films made in this country to generalise about that. Certainly in television the status of the scriptwriter is quite a difficult issue and there is a lot of feeling that scriptwriters are pretty low down the food chain and that, arguably, we might have better television programmes if they were respected a bit more. I would be cautious about drawing that inference in the film industry because I think the film industry is too small to generalise about.

  Mr Friedmann: I think that is true, but I think where we do get better television in general, and I am thinking in particular of some of the smaller budget British films, is that they have a much more proactive script editing role with script editors, some of whom have a great deal of experience. A lot of the script editors who work on feature films have relatively little experience. What has not been touched on, and I am not sure if this is quite the right place, is moral rights. In Europe, certainly in France, I understand, you cannot waive your moral rights. Producers here will not be able to raise the money if they do not get a waiver from the writer that they have to waive their rights, and it raises in a sense the question of the relationship between the writer and the producer. As an agent whose job it is to try and make money for my clients, my advice generally is, "Once you sell the rights it is not your film any more". I am not saying I like that but that is just the nature of the beast. If producers are going to find it difficult to raise the money without having the right to meddle with whatever it is, we have to accept that. What one would hope is that the editing that is done by the production companies is of a higher standard than it perhaps sometimes is. Clive's point is that there is not really enough money to pay for that. I know the Film Council has been trying to do something about improving the training of script editors. I do not know how successful they have been, but at least they have acknowledged that script editors are important. I would say that one of the problems in Britain is that script editors have a very low status and that impacts on writers.

  Mr Corbett: Can I just say a brief word about the moral rights issue? This is a very deep-seated issue in the Writers' Guild. We do deplore the fact that the British legislation allows the waiver of the moral rights and we very much wish that that was not the case. However, we are realistic people and we know that in virtually every film writer's contract, and indeed in more or less every television writer's contract as well, it is now standard practice that there is a waiver of moral rights. We seek to rebuild the moral rights in contractual terms in two ways. The right of paternity is replaced by contractual clauses stipulating credits and that is governed ultimately by the Screenwriting Credits Agreement which I have referred to in the submission. The protection from derogatory treatment, which itself is a very extreme definition and probably would be difficult to establish in most cases where there is a complaint anyway, is replaced in contractual terms where we can, and we try to do this in our union minimum terms, by clauses that do at least allow some consultation and a degree of control by the writer over certainly non-minor changes that are made to the scripts in the course of production.

  Chairman: I am really sorry, gentlemen, because we could have gone on for a long time more, but we have another valuable group of witnesses for whom we are little late already. Thank you.