GOLDEN age ... Muriel's Wedding with Toni Collette and Rachel Griffiths. Source: The Courier Mail
AMERICAN hotshot producer Chris Adams is being tipped as the man who might just save Australia's floundering movie industry.
Adams is regarded as a major player, an internationally acknowledged new-media pioneer who's also been involved in multiple Oscar-winning movies. His film financing company Participant Media has delivered Syriana, Charlie Wilson's War, Good Night and Good Luck and An Inconvenient Truth to name a few.
More importantly, Adams is headed our way.
After a decade of commuting to this country for family reasons, the 41-year-old entertainment industry executive will relocate permanently to Queensland this year.
Along with baby-faced Adams, however, come some pretty harsh assessments of Australia's beleaguered movie-making scene.
Our scripts are no good – virtually unsellable, in his experience. We're too focused on small, dark, inward-looking films that not enough Australians want to see. Too much of our output is globally irrelevant. We don't know how to collaborate to get the best results.
Many Australian film-makers agree that their industry is in dire straits. Box office, production numbers and critical acclaim all are dwindling to unsustainably low levels, they say, despite new stimulus incentives such as the Federal Government's tax concessions for producers.
The golden era of the 1970s, '80s and '90s that spawned Mad Max, Babe, Crocodile Dundee and Muriel's Wedding sometimes seems a distant echo. Those were the days before contemporary realities such as the unstoppable Hollywood marketing juggernaut and narrow "windows" of time for release made it tough for a local film to enter public consciousness. Let alone translate to bums on seats.
The best most of our films can hope to realistically achieve at the domestic box office now has been estimated at $3 million to $5 million.
Eight weeks after its release, Lurhmann's Australia has rallied against its critics, becoming the third-biggest Australian film by pulling in $32.87 million. That hardly makes a dent in its $150 million outlay.
But if it was not for Australia, it has been reported, the local share of last year's box office would have been the worst since records were first kept in 1977. Take Baz's epic out of the equation and less than 1 per cent of cinema tickets sold last year were for an Australian film, compared with the 1980s when our films made up an average of 12.4 per cent of takings.
Former Film Finance Corporation chief Brian Rosen has been especially critical, talking recently about the small pool of "over-indulged talent", our allegiance to "small films that appeal to about 100,000 people . . . about lesbians, drugs and whatever else" and the tendency of our creative people to go after peer group recognition ahead of commercial success "because commercial is seen as crass".
What makes Chris Adams so different from many of his like-minded critics is that he's also putting his money firmly where his mouth is.
The executive producer has 12 projects in various stages of development, all with some form of Australian input. Twelve potential golden eggs, most of them with budgets from $9 million to more than $60 million.
The most ambitious, and four times as expensive, is a "Titanic in Space" epic thriller that he's costing at about $233 million.
If he has his way, it will be just the beginning.
"I don't know how to make little independent films. My training and experience is in movies large and small, but that are globally relevant. I feel there's a massive gap in Australia," he says.
The producer recently paired up with Australian actor/writer Steve Kearney (a founding member of comedy duo Los Trios Ringbarkus) to form Adams/Kearney, a venture aimed squarely at firing up our home-grown movie-making machine.
"The state of the Australian film industry is the crux of the reason Steve and I formed our company," Adams says. "I'm not interested in making 'Australian movies'. I'm interested in making movies that happen to have some origination in Australia or by Australians. I'm interested in opening up the playing field."
Adams/Kearney, he says, will specialise in transforming these Australian projects into viable scripts that can be sold in the global market.
"I want to get involved with stories and ideas as early as possible in order to create screenplays that are worthy of global financing and distribution." He had read Australian scripts for many years and rarely found anything he could use: "There's no other way to say it, the writing sucks. But rather than bitch and moan about it, I'm going to do something about it."
And there lies another significant difference in the Adams modus operandi. While a keen supporter of new mechanisms such as the producer tax breaks and our film "super-agency" Screen Australia (a merger of the Film Finance Corporation, Australian Film Commission and Film Australia), this entrepreneur is determined to do things his own way in our back yard, by sourcing finance mostly outside the taxpayer-funded grants system.
"Screen Australia and the rebate is a huge step in the right direction. It's invigorating people to make bigger movies and take bigger risks. But I'm not interested in making the typical Australian movie in which you get the $12,000 screenplay grant and then go to a financing company. I'm going to anyone who's interested in making a movie."
"Australia needs someone like me," he said the last time he was in Australia, attending the Screen Producers Association annual conference on the Gold Coast in November.
"I'm a 10-year veteran of Australia," Adams explained last week. "My wife is an Aussie and I've been coming to Brisbane three and four times a year. But now we have a three-year-old son and we want to raise him as an Australian. My boy starts school in Brisbane in February 2010 so we'll be moving down permanently this year. We have a house in Kenmore, but eventually we'll probably live on the Gold Coast."
To support his grim verdict on the viability of our scripts, Adams provides an anecdote:
"My partner and I got an Australian script that was very interesting – a cool, high-concept, crazy futuristic-world thing. We took it to one of the studios where I have very high-level contacts and got immediate traction to the point where they made an offer. So we went back to the writer with our notes and the studio's idea for a third act. The writer's immediate response was, 'Piss off, mate, we're not changing a goddamn thing'. I thought, 'Here I am handing you a development deal with a major studio and you're telling me you don't want to compromise your artistic integrity'.
"Well, that was the straw that broke the camel's back. I just thought, 'It ain't worth it'.
" So now I'm cherrypicking the best ideas – books, life rights – with the mind to finding the best writer, be they Australian, American or Brazilian."
Adams' words might read like textbook LA swagger and self-aggrandisement. But in person he is the opposite: a refreshingly grounded, modest realist, who simply knows his game. He also takes pains to point out that, with the right support, Australia's "amazing collective creative talent" can compete with anyone, anywhere in the world.
When we first speak on the phone from LA, Adams is supposed to be the at the Sundance Film Festival. Sheepishly, he admits he's just decided to bunk off from the annual showbiz networking bonanza because after years of toeing the line, he can no longer stomach the craziness. "Everybody just blows off meetings and goes to the bar. It's all agents behaving badly. I'd rather have them behaving well and actually paying attention."
He will be in Brisbane next month. Outside his company's ventures, Adams has his fingers in many other smaller River City pies, including Jucy, the new $500,000 feature film by Louise Alston, director of 2007's cult hit All My Friends Are Leaving Brisbane which is being shot around the city.
Queensland's Pacific Film and Television Commission predicted last week that Adams' experience and enthusiasm would "pay big dividends" for our film-makers.
"Chris is determined to help Australian producers develop high-quality content and to take their projects to the world stage," a commission official said. "His decision to base himself in Brisbane presents a raft of opportunities for our film-makers and industry. There is much they could hope to learn from working with him."
Adams himself insists: "Movies have to be internationally relevant.
"We have too small a population base here for it to be otherwise. I heard someone once say, 'If you're trying to make a film for an Australian audience, it had better be a hobby'.
"But I'm just looking for a movie that I think people will pay 10 bucks to go and see."
