SCOPE screen industry views AS RESTRICTIONS EASE, CINEMAS STRUGGLE ON ALONE ROCHELLE SIEMIENOWICZ
To say Australian cinemas have been on life support during COVID-19 would be to imply that someone was looking after them. While that may have been the case for the local production industry, cinema operators have been left to bleed – and bleed they have, especially in Victoria (long considered the jewel of the Australian theatrical sector), where cinemas were shut down between late March and early November, with only a week’s reprieve in June. In other states, cinemas have been limping along, with socially distanced limited seating capacity and a shortage of lucrative blockbusters to lure cautious viewers out from their living rooms. In 2019, the total box-office return for Australia’s 524 cinemas (2310 screens) was A$1.23 billion; at the time of writing, in mid November, the figure for 2020 looks likely to be less than A$300 million, falling well short of 25 per cent of last year's takings. So far, the exhibition sector has received no direct government assistance, though many employees have had access to JobKeeper, and operators have been privately renegotiating their rents. But those renegotiations leave them in piles of debt to be paid back sooner rather than later. If there’s no assistance forthcoming – and all exhibitors are calling for it, urgently – and if the end-of-year moviegoing period hasn’t delivered solid figures, then many Australia cinema operators, especially the little ones, will be shutting their red curtains for good. Independent Cinemas Australia (ICA) represents over 700 screens in Australia and New Zealand. These include large chains like Palace and Dendy, but 60 per cent of their members are small, with one to three screen sites, including those precious regional and country picture houses serving communities outside the big smoke. In a recent sustainability survey, the industry association found that 87 per cent of its members were struggling to cover operating expenses, and that 50 per cent expected to be permanently closed at the end of six months if pandemic-related closures continued.
124 • Metro Magazine 207 | © ATOM
Worldwide, 2020 was a disastrous year for exhibitors. Across the globe, shutdowns have kept audiences, who were already dwindling, locked at home, becoming ever more dependent on their home-entertainment systems. Where cinemas have been allowed to open, at much-reduced capacity, the films available for exhibition have been decidedly niche and lacking in mass appeal. Wanting to go out to a wide audience and earn back their massive production and marketing budgets, distributors have held back their vital tentpole titles. These are the drawcards that make cinemas viable by selling stacks of tickets and tons of popcorn (don’t forget that about 20 per cent of a cinema’s revenue comes from its candy bar). In some cases, those crowd-pleasing titles have gone straight to streaming services, as happened with Disney’s Mulan (Niki Caro, 2020) and Pixar’s Soul (Pete Docter, 2020), leaving cinema operators empty-handed and fretting about the growing trend. In early October, the world’s second-biggest exhibition chain, Cineworld, announced plans to temporarily close its movie theatres in the US and the UK. This was the result of a combination of a fresh wave of virus-related lockdowns and the devastating rescheduling of cinemas’ big hope for the year, James Bond film No Time to Die (Cary Joji Fukunaga), which was pushed back from November to April. Many cinema owners around the world would have been crying about that one, including AMC, which owns the largest theatre chain in the United States (and the world as a whole), and has been in serious financial trouble since the virus first hit. In October, the company announced its cash reserves could be depleted by the end of the year. When bankruptcy looms for such a behemoth, the rest of the world’s screens are definitely in trouble. Here in Australia, it seems at the time of writing that we may have the virus under control, and that we may even flock back to cinemas to escape the summer heat. Yet the perception remains that cinemas are highly dangerous and contagious places. In Victoria, they were among the last venues allowed to reopen, after restaurants, bars and gyms. ‘Basically, they are being lined up with brothels and nightclubs,’ lamented ICA CEO Adrianne Pecotic to screenhub in October.
SCOPE screen industry views AS RESTRICTIONS EASE, CINEMAS STRUGGLE ON ALONE ROCHELLE SIEMIENOWICZ
To say Australian cinemas have been on life support during COVID-19 would be to imply that someone was looking after them. While that may have been the case for the local production industry, cinema operators have been left to bleed – and bleed they have, especially in Victoria (long considered the jewel of the Australian theatrical sector), where cinemas were shut down between late March and early November, with only a week’s reprieve in June. In other states, cinemas have been limping along, with socially distanced limited seating capacity and a shortage of lucrative blockbusters to lure cautious viewers out from their living rooms. In 2019, the total box-office return for Australia’s 524 cinemas (2310 screens) was A$1.23 billion; at the time of writing, in mid November, the figure for 2020 looks likely to be less than A$300 million, falling well short of 25 per cent of last year's takings. So far, the exhibition sector has received no direct government assistance, though many employees have had access to JobKeeper, and operators have been privately renegotiating their rents. But those renegotiations leave them in piles of debt to be paid back sooner rather than later. If there’s no assistance forthcoming – and all exhibitors are calling for it, urgently – and if the end-of-year moviegoing period hasn’t delivered solid figures, then many Australia cinema operators, especially the little ones, will be shutting their red curtains for good. Independent Cinemas Australia (ICA) represents over 700 screens in Australia and New Zealand. These include large chains like Palace and Dendy, but 60 per cent of their members are small, with one to three screen sites, including those precious regional and country picture houses serving communities outside the big smoke. In a recent sustainability survey, the industry association found that 87 per cent of its members were struggling to cover operating expenses, and that 50 per cent expected to be permanently closed at the end of six months if pandemic-related closures continued.
124 • Metro Magazine 207 | © ATOM
Worldwide, 2020 was a disastrous year for exhibitors. Across the globe, shutdowns have kept audiences, who were already dwindling, locked at home, becoming ever more dependent on their home-entertainment systems. Where cinemas have been allowed to open, at much-reduced capacity, the films available for exhibition have been decidedly niche and lacking in mass appeal. Wanting to go out to a wide audience and earn back their massive production and marketing budgets, distributors have held back their vital tentpole titles. These are the drawcards that make cinemas viable by selling stacks of tickets and tons of popcorn (don’t forget that about 20 per cent of a cinema’s revenue comes from its candy bar). In some cases, those crowd-pleasing titles have gone straight to streaming services, as happened with Disney’s Mulan (Niki Caro, 2020) and Pixar’s Soul (Pete Docter, 2020), leaving cinema operators empty-handed and fretting about the growing trend. In early October, the world’s second-biggest exhibition chain, Cineworld, announced plans to temporarily close its movie theatres in the US and the UK. This was the result of a combination of a fresh wave of virus-related lockdowns and the devastating rescheduling of cinemas’ big hope for the year, James Bond film No Time to Die (Cary Joji Fukunaga), which was pushed back from November to April. Many cinema owners around the world would have been crying about that one, including AMC, which owns the largest theatre chain in the United States (and the world as a whole), and has been in serious financial trouble since the virus first hit. In October, the company announced its cash reserves could be depleted by the end of the year. When bankruptcy looms for such a behemoth, the rest of the world’s screens are definitely in trouble. Here in Australia, it seems at the time of writing that we may have the virus under control, and that we may even flock back to cinemas to escape the summer heat. Yet the perception remains that cinemas are highly dangerous and contagious places. In Victoria, they were among the last venues allowed to reopen, after restaurants, bars and gyms. ‘Basically, they are being lined up with brothels and nightclubs,’ lamented ICA CEO Adrianne Pecotic to screenhub in October.
This approach doesn’t make sense. Recent research published in open-source science journal Environment International (and cited often by the global cinema industry) suggests that, in terms of virus transmission, sitting quietly in a spaced-out cinema is one of the safest ways to gather with other people. A person is ninety times more likely to infect someone else while singing in a church, fourteen times more likely while talking in a restaurant and seven times more likely while exercising in a gym – all of which were previously permitted activities. Village Entertainment, owner of one of the largest cinema chains in Australia, put it this way in their press-release plea to the Victorian Government: Cinema provides an environment that allows for easy physical distancing, with easy contact tracing via online ticket purchasing. The passive and forward-facing nature of cinema allows for a safe environment that should be allowed to open. Here’s one bright note to end on. To cover the lack of product available to cinemas over the final months of 2020, Sydney Film Festival’s (SFF) Travelling Film Festival partnered with ICA to present two curated programs of eleven features and four short films, all designed to attract audiences back to local theatres. Known as My Cinema, My Film Festival, it was organised to run in nineteen cinemas in metropolitan and regional New South Wales, Queensland, Western Australia, South Australia and the ACT across November and December. This was a seriously exciting program for film-starved cinephiles: opening with Stephen Maxwell Johnson’s Australian feature High Ground (2020), it also included Cannes Film Festival prize winner The Climb (Michael Angelo Covino, 2019) and the recipient of the 2020 Documentary Australia Foundation Award for Best Australian Documentary at SFF, Descent (Nays Baghai, 2020). It’s possible too that the glitch in the blockbuster pipeline may have granted more space to a couple of other Australian feature films that were scheduled for release in January: The Dry (Robert Connolly, 2021) and Penguin Bloom (Glendyn Ivin, 2020)
•••
MOVING TARGETS: SNAPSHOTS OF REPRESENTATION ADOLFO ARANJUEZ
In September last year, the US Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced that, from the 2024 Oscars onwards, films vying for its Best Picture gong would be required to meet what president David Rubin and chief executive Dawn Hudson described as ‘inclusion standards’ that would herald in ‘longlasting, essential change in our industry’. The criteria span four umbrella areas – characters and narrative; behind-the-scenes staff; industry connections; and audience development – and include such metrics as having at least one lead or significant supporting character ‘from an underrepresented racial or ethnic group’, at least two key creatives belonging to an underrepresented community (women, people of colour, LGBTQIA+, disability), and at least 30 per cent of the wider cast and crew identifying
as minorities. To be eligible, films must fulfil at least two of the four areas. Despite the ribbing it receives from those of us in social-justice circles, ‘diversity’ does hold the honour of being one of today’s buzzwords. This isn’t without reason, of course. The impacts of representation on self-esteem, social cohesion and the ability to envisage success are widely recognised; this undergirds the attention given to ‘symbolic annihilation’ (as coined by communications theorist George Gerbner) and ‘symbolic violence’ (by sociologist Pierre Bourdieu) in media, politics and the arts since at least the 1970s. But, for the screen industries, extra impetus has been provided by confirmation that diversity also sells. As determined by numerous studies, including the University of California, Los Angeles’ Hollywood Diversity Report and the Creative Artists Agency’s Motion Picture Diversity Casting Index, films that feature diverse characters and storylines perform markedly better at the box office. If the top blockbusters of recent years – Black Panther (Ryan Coogler, 2018), Moonlight (Barry Jenkins, 2016), Crazy Rich Asians (Jon M Chu, 2018), the latest Star Wars films (2015–2019) – are anything to go by, we certainly appear to be making strides in this arena. Closer to home, our screen sector has witnessed comparable stirrings. Soon after the Oscars announcement, Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts CEO Damian Trewhella told Fairfax that a ‘codification of provisions’ around diversity would be ‘something [to] look at for next year’. Prior to this, Screen Australia had enacted a number of equity-targeting initiatives. 2019 saw the launch of The Next 25 Years, its Indigenous Department’s funding and production roadmap; this strategy, according to department head Penny Smallacombe, will allow the agency to ‘continue to deliver on [its] mission of identifying and nurturing talented Indigenous Australians’. Reformulated in 2018 (following its formation in 2016) was the Gender Matters Taskforce, which advocates for women’s representation both on screen and off across local productions. And, in 2016, Screen Australia released Seeing Ourselves, a study assessing TV characters and actors against the broader population in terms of cultural background, disability, gender and sexual orientation. Reverberations of these nationwide moves were felt in statespecific schemes: the South Australian Film Corporation’s Aboriginal Screen Strategy; Screen NSW’s Screenability (disability); Film Victoria’s Natalie Miller Fellowship (gender). And the vibrations emanated outwards to viewership as well. Several of Australia’s most-watched film and TV titles in recent years have been awash in diversity: Top End Wedding (Wayne Blair, 2019), Lion (Garth Davis, 2016), The Dressmaker (Jocelyn Moorhouse, 2015), Mystery Road’s 2018 TV incarnation, 2016 series Here Come the Habibs!. For Anna Barnes, lead writer and co-producer of Retrograde, these developments form part of a substantial shift towards authenticity. The 2020 ABC series follows a gaggle of thirty somethings as they grapple with the pandemic; one of them, Sophie (Esther Hannaford), lives with dysautonomia. ‘People with invisible illnesses can face a lot of barriers due to a lack of awareness,’ Barnes tells me. ‘The concept that someone is ill for the rest of their lives can be confusing to a lot of people.’ Barnes herself lives with a chronic illness – postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome – but, to deepen the resonance of her writing, she anchored it on the struggles of other members of the
OPPOSITE, L–R: NO TIME TO DIE; ROXY (SUZY WRONG) IN HUNGRY GHOSTS; RAY MARTIN IN AT HOME ALONE TOGETHER; AUSTRALIAN VIDEOGAME ARMELLO
metromagazine.com.au | © ATOM | Metro Magazine 207 • 125
disability community as well. Some of those insights came from Hannaford, who has Crohn’s disease and ‘brought a wealth of experience and knowledge to the role’. However, Barnes also gained ‘a lot of solidarity and support from online illness communities’: On the show, we refer to these online spaces as ‘sick internet’. These are the places we go to for questions, specialist recommendations and good chronic-illness memes. It was important to me that the sense of community and the information-sharing that exist within these online spaces was showcased. Ultimately, constructive visibility is paramount. On top of ensuring that ‘[Sophie’s] illness was just one aspect of her life and not her entire storyline’, which ‘people have really responded to’, Barnes emphasises the power of normalisation through exposure: The more we see people with chronic illnesses as members of our society, our workplaces, our friendship groups – and not just a tragic plot point – the more it can help to demystify the experience of chronic illness and what a ‘sick’ person looks like. Similar sentiments have been expressed by Suzy Wrong from the cast of Hungry Ghosts, a supernatural drama about Vietnamese-Australian families terrorised by vengeful spirits. The 2020 SBS series’ chops are already evidenced by its fidelity to cultural nuances – critic Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen has praised the way it ‘centres the experience of the Vietnamese diaspora and the ongoing trauma of the Vietnam war’. Bolstering this, Wrong plays transgender clairvoyant Roxy, a role that, as the actor explains in a Guardian op-ed, challenges the longstanding tendency to depict trans people ‘as an abomination’. That Roxy is a ‘fully formed adult woman, at peace with the world and loved by her community’, has far-reaching implications: Representation in pop culture offers a form of role modelling that can make or break a young person coming to terms with their identity […] What we think the world looks like is informed so much by what we see in media and the arts […] I am grateful for the opportunity to present what I believe to be a new benchmark in trans representation. Retrograde and Hungry Ghosts exemplify the types of screen storytelling that Australian audiences can hope to see more of, following greater involvement on the part of industry bodies. Of course, the journey towards equity is far from finished; last year alone, our sector was rocked by outcries around cultural appropriation, blackface, non-diverse newsrooms and inadequate localcontent quotas. For now, change in a lasting sense may seem elusive – but little steps do, in time, amount to forward movement when buzzword is turned into bona fide action.
•••
LAUGHTER IN LOCKDOWN: AT HOME ALONE TOGETHER LIZ GIUFFRE
Last year gave us a new genre of entertainment – the ‘lockdown comedy’. While there is little that was objectively funny about many of 2020’s events (from fire and floods to, of course, COVID-19), pockets of programs have sprung up in lots of places and media forms, leaning all the way into the experience of being physically restricted in a way that so many of us had never experienced
126 • Metro Magazine 207 | © ATOM
before. Some people reacted by just wanting to ignore the whole thing – including free-to-air programmers, who seem to have played musicals and 1980s action films more frequently than ever before to help audiences cope – but a number of artists and their fans chose instead to stare isolation down and laugh in its face. In Australia, the ABC’s At Home Alone Together led the charge for lockdown comedy. A weekly sketch program loosely organised like a mock lifestyle program, its tagline – ‘A lifestyle show for a world in which nobody has a life’ – made its intentions clear. Showrunner Dan Ilic (of comedy podcast A Rational Fear) and head writer Chris Taylor (of The Chaser) assembled a remarkable group of writers and performers to somehow work out the logistics of talking about the experience of being stuck indoors while also capturing it. Logistics like production meetings, camerawork, editing and post-production – all put together while the ABC itself was under extreme scrutiny and pressure to be all things to all people, but also with an ever-decreasing budget and resource pool – must have been a nightmare, but the results were hugely satisfying. Support from Screen Australia was invaluable, as were the talents of artists like Tony Award nominee Eddie Perfect, who composed, recorded and performed the show’s theme. The performers were also just outstanding in their own right – with characters like Anne Edmonds’ Helen Bidou an absurd delight. Over nine episodes, regular segments were offered to cover all bases, including lockdown parenting, cooking, gardening, DIY and general ‘life hacks’. Keeping it all ‘together’ was host Ray Martin – an icon of ‘respectable’ programming, who hilariously delivered increasingly deranged mock-egotistical monologues to camera as the series progressed. At the end of the show’s run, Ilic declared on Twitter that writing absurdities for Martin to say was the highlight of the exercise for him – as it was for this writer, too. Let’s just say the words on the page aren’t enough; they need Martin’s smoothness to make them pop. Other public figures also appeared in unusual but wonderful ways, such as Melbourne’s Father Bob Maguire, who offered spiritual guidance via Zoom, and ABC Science expert Norman Swan, hosting the wonderfully straightto-the-point segment ‘Unthreatening Facts’. Tonic for the soul. Given its topic and genre, however, it’s unsurprising that At Home Alone Together attracted some controversy. On 20 May, Senator Sarah Henderson took to Twitter to attack the show, describing it as ‘one of the worst, unfunniest TV shows ever produced with taxpayer dollars’ and asking, ‘As one of Australia’s finest and most iconic TV journalists, what was Ray Martin thinking?’ In response, Ilic made note of the show’s place as an employer as well as entertainer, explaining how the show had given work to around forty contributors ‘who mostly normally work in live entertainment’, and also added that it ‘beat most commercial networks on [its] debut. I’d say we’re doing pretty well.’ In an earlier interview with TV Tonight, Martin had seemingly pre-empted responses like Henderson’s, remarking, ‘If comedy doesn’t upset at least some people, you’re probably not doing it right.’ Internationally, similar types of shows emerged, including ‘Zoom’ specials like those put together for Saturday Night Live and US late-night talk shows. One of the most original (and successful) has been the BBC’s Staged, a lockdown sitcom starring David Tennant and Michael Sheen as versions of themselves. Filmed mostly in their houses in single-camera, dual-screen conversation mode, the series was also short and sweet, following a semifictional narrative about grounded actors starved of an audience and a purpose. While it ran the risk of becoming too self-indulgent at times, two incredible cameos saved the day (and the surprise of their appearance is what made them most fun, so no spoilers here). The end result was a bit like the Steve Coogan and Rob
Brydon–starring series The Trip; however, in this case, families – and especially wives – appeared less like sidekicks and more like pillars of relative sanity. While we can hope that the ‘lockdown comedy’ will be but a distant memory in 2021, these explorations were a blessed relief at the height of the pandemic. From the exaggerated to the very, very ordinary, these ‘shows about nothing’ have shown that even in the most straitened conditions, entertainers can still find an audience.
•••
UNEVEN PLAYING FIELD: HOW DIGITAL PLATFORMS HURT INDIE GAMES APRIL TYACK
With COVID-19 restrictions continuing to prevent in-person events through the second half of 2020 – like Brisbane’s Game On Festival, or the myriad opportunities of Melbourne International Games Week – the importance of online showcase events and digital storefronts has come into increasingly sharp focus. While a booth at the indie showcase at PAX, for example, has always been a substantial expense (albeit one subsidised by some state funding bodies), the opportunity it provides for real-time feedback from potential players can be invaluable. This year has instead seen a number of online storefronts run their own showcase events – the Steam Game Festival, for example, has featured developer live streams and game demos that aim to generate prospective players’ interest, written feedback and behavioural play data. Realistically, of course, Australian game makers have depended on platforms like Steam and the App Store for some time. Local developers’ access to shelf space in bricks-and-mortar stores has historically been limited to games that simulate cricket or football; movie tie-ins; and, more rarely, original intellectual properties like Ty the Tasmanian Tiger and Untitled Goose Game. In contrast (and with some caveats), digital storefronts generally permit the presence of indie games, although their success is contingent on visibility, which is inherently zero-sum. Although traditional and digital storefronts are in some ways comparable – both act as gatekeepers in some capacity, restricting access to shelf space or the front page – the consequences of game developers’ reliance on digital platforms are less self-evident. David Nieborg and Thomas Poell have articulated these consequences in terms of platformisation – in short, the ways that platforms’ extensible architecture is deployed to influence the economics, governance and infrastructure of cultural production. Facebook’s architecture, for example, has been deployed online as a number of unrelated ‘solutions’ – login authentication, newsmedia publishing, videogame hosting, content sharing and so on – each of which generates user data that can be sold to advertisers. Crucially, videogame platforms like Facebook, Steam, Epic Games Store and Google Play devalue individual games and disempower developers. The subscription-based Xbox Game Pass, for example, is marketed on the sheer quantity of games available across Xbox, PC and Android devices. As all first-party games are due for a day-one release on the platform, Game Pass seems primed to generate a large user base who will create large amounts of behavioural data and make in-game purchases. Live service games conveniently benefit from both: data are used to inform design changes, which in turn aim to maximise retention and monetisation. Although more enduring Australian games – Armello and Crossy Road, for example – are often based on a live service model of some kind, it’s neither reasonable nor desirable to force
a long-term content pipeline and in-game transactions into every game concept, particularly as many Australian studios lack the requisite staff, finances or interest in making such attempts. As Microsoft purchases games for the platform based on the company’s own appraisal – a process ripe for automation, along with all its biases – fair offers seem unlikely for games that prioritise cultural values over economic benefits, as Australian games often do. Still, a guaranteed payout (if offered) may yet be preferable to the algorithmic curation of platforms like Google Play, where the systems governing each game’s (in)visibility are themselves opaque. Even before the pandemic brought an abrupt halt to international travel, Australia’s geographical isolation and small domestic market made local studios unusually reliant on digital platforms – although state-funded support for travel to international events had improved prior to COVID, reducing the regional disadvantage. Put another way, developers everywhere are now forced to deal with typical Australian conditions – which goes some way to explaining why Steam, which is at best ambivalent toward indie games, would run inclusive seasonal game festivals at all. At the same time, this uncharacteristic support should not be construed as generosity: in the midst of a pandemic, a time when studios have fewer avenues to publish, advertise or cultivate an audience, platform operators are capitalising on every opportunity to extend their reach and consolidate their market dominance. In all this, it’s a welcome surprise to see the federal government recognise that platforms like Google and Facebook are inherently monopolising forces, and begin attempts to curb their influence, albeit only for news media. Less surprising is that similar policy, or budgetary support, for game development (among other creative industries) is not considered worthwhile – or, more likely, considered at all. While acknowledging that some aspects of the legislation would not readily apply to game development, the code’s proposal to require platforms to explain their content-ranking algorithms would be an immense benefit to Australian studios (assuming their AI-created systems are indeed interpretable at all). Platforms affect most, if not all, forms of cultural production in Australia; to act in service of just one is wasteful. Australian game makers are not powerless, but neither is their individual or collective endurance guaranteed in systems designed to serve multinational technology companies. To allow videogame platforms to exert the same powers that Google and Facebook now wield would be small-minded, to say the least.
••• Rochelle Siemienowicz is a writer and critic with a PhD in Australian cinema. She is a journalist for screenhub and was co-host of the longrunning film podcast Hell Is for Hyphenates. Adolfo Aranjuez is an editor, writer, speaker and dancer. He is currently the Melbourne International Film Festival’s publications and content manager, and Liminal’s publication editor; previously, he edited Metro and Archer. His essays, criticism and poetry have been widely published, including in Meanjin, Right Now, Screen Education, The Manila Review and Cordite. <http://adolfoaranjuez.com> Dr Liz Giuffre is a senior lecturer in communication at the University of Technology Sydney as well as a freelance arts commentator and journalist. April Tyack is a postdoctoral researcher in computer science at Aalto University, and served as vice-president of the Australian chapter of the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRAA) from 2018 to 2020. m
metromagazine.com.au | © ATOM | Metro Magazine 207 • 127
The Education Shop For thousands of articles and study guides on teaching media and film in the classroom