Transcript: Lord Puttnam’s Q&A session

After the seminar, Creative Fuel for the Nation, Lord Puttnam took a series of questions from the audience. Here is the transcript of those questions and his answers, as given at the launch of the Creative Archive at 28 Portland Place, London, W1 on Wednesday 13th April, 2005.

Q: You say one nation shouldn’t advance at the expense of others, but isn’t that what capitalism is all about: getting rights and maximising profit from them?
Let me offer one simple example that I became familiar with a few years ago: in the 1950s, ‘60s and early ‘70s Cairo was the absolute epicentre of the Middle East media world, producing quite wonderful movies. The Egyptian film industry was a thriving, very, very important cultural ingredient for that part of the world. But in the end under the onslaught of cheap, principally American, product the Egyptian movie industry just collapsed.

Now, try and imagine a situation throughout the ‘80s when the industry was literally in eclipse, of a young kid growing up in a Cairo slum, living effectively two entirely disparate existences. His daily existence, his knowledge of the world that he lived in, and this other world of television and movies completely outside of his frame of reference - a violent world, a very colourful world, in some senses an enviable world, but nothing whatsoever to do with him, his existence, his potential, or his possibilities.

Interestingly enough, about five or six years ago, the Egyptians came to terms with this and put a ceiling on the number of American films that can be distributed in Egypt. The net result over the last few years has been an incredible resurgence of Egypt’s film and television business. What the United States failed to understand was that unless you’re able to deal with people in their terms and offer them dignity, and not get into what I’ve described here as a neo-colonial relationship, you may well pay an enormous price.

Is “fortress America” a price worth paying for ownership of an exclusive group of copyrights? I don’t know. It’s a much bigger issue than I could ever begin to address and it’s certainly not going to be solved in my lifetime, but I think the question lies out there constantly. What is the appropriate relationship between dominant powers and surrogate powers? I would suggest that America needs to find a way back to being viewed as relatively generous if it’s going to sustain and survive.

Q: Is there anything you could bring from your experience in the film business to offer us in terms of a business model?
A: Yes, a very great deal. The driver for my enthusiasm for all of this is what I’ve witnessed in the past. In 1981 I did an interview with Barry Norman where I was asked where the UK film industry was going. At that time it was not in great shape. It hadn’t quite reached its nadir, UK audiences (in tickets sold per year) were at 86 million. It was pretty confused, poorly led, poorly run, and obsessed with protecting the core business that it saw as sliding away underneath it. All the debates were about what we used to call ‘holdbacks’ and ‘length of the hold-back’ - the five year hold-back for films on television and the minimum three year hold-back when video turned up. It was all about protecting this dying business in a nation of wall-to-wall fleapits. (The first multiplex – people forget – didn’t open until 1985 in Milton Keynes.) Every single one of these attempted protections collapsed. But today, audiences in Britain are at 171 million. That’s almost exactly a 100% increase.

I could go back further to the 1950s when television threatened the film industry in Britain, its brilliant riposte was, "well what we’ll do, we won’t sell them any films. We’ll keep films off of television and then television will just die and go away and everything will be fine again."

You can go back and back and back. You can go back to radio – there’s a whole world of experience of incumbent technologies and incumbent corporations refusing to acknowledge where the next wave will come from, then attempting to kick it to death, eventually giving in to it and then surprise, surprise - the new technology ends up owning the old one. I’m not actually sure there’s any example of it not happening!

If the creative ownership industry thinks that it can see off the rest of the world by protecting itself and not engaging it will fan the flames of opportunism and inevitably lose out.

But now look at it in the macro sense. In 1981, I estimate that the total value of filmed entertainment, including movies at the box office, television sales, some merchandising activity and royalties, was just under six billion dollars. In 2006, the estimated total value is 100 billion dollars.

So, this plethora of threats has turned out to be a plethora of opportunities and probably the most important thing I can say today is if the creative ownership industry thinks that it can see off the rest of the world by protecting itself and not engaging and not utilising the opportunity, for example that exists in schools to open up its potential, it will inevitably further go the route of all those other businesses. Why? Because it’s fanning the flames of ‘piracy’. It’s fanning the flames of opportunism because it just won’t come to terms with its bigger objective.

We are talking about business models that have to be addressed to the long-term. Where will the industry be in 2020? Do EMI wish to be a major rights holder thriving in 2020, or a company that’s been sold four times between now and 2020 because it tried to hold back the flood? Interesting. It’s their decision, but every single experience I’ve had in the last thirty-five years in the film industry tells me the way to go is to look forward, to engage and to accept the fact there are limits to what you can control.

The incumbent seldom, if ever, is able to look past the threat. It’s why the newcomer who should have lots of problems ends up having all the advantages because they’re able to smash past all the defensive mechanisms, all the neuroses, all the protections and actually grab the opportunity.

Q: If you’re providing information for the purpose of education, do you agree that it must be authoritative, and not divorced from context or misattributed?
A: From my own experience as a film producer, and it’s true of every single other person making films, television and anything else – you’re always vulnerable no matter what subject area you’re dealing in. My mind immediately flies to The Killing Fields where every person that we were depicting was alive so I was dealing with ‘living history’. You’re always open to the criticism that you’ve got individual facts wrong, or in some cases the (mis)interpretation by an individual of what those facts might have been. So you’re constantly trying to argue with yourself about “What’s the point? Why am I doing this? What is this film/television programme/series about?” I would argue that at times you’ve got to go for the greater truth and if that means that one or two facts that a PhD student would pick up along the way are wrong, that’s a reasonable price to pay. I’m much more concerned that the work itself is compelling, instructive and hard-driving, that it’s essentially honest and able to attract and hold an audience.

I can think of a dozen movies that would have been destroyed in terms of their takeaway value had they become obsessively accurate. In Chariots of Fire, for example, Eric Liddle’s sister was entirely enthusiastic about him running in the hundred metres and so when I had to say to her, “Would you mind being in a scene in which you argue quite vehemently with Eric that he’s wasting his time?” she said, “But I never did”. I said, “I know, but the audience are going to be asking the question and I need to both ask the question and deliver an answer to it”. And, bless her, she agreed and there are two scenes in the film where she tells him he’s a waste of space. Only problem was that when the film came out the press managed to go and see her and, of course, she always said, “Well, of course, I didn’t say that and I would never of’” so you can get completely sliced up. The point the film needed to make was valid and we had to distort the view of a character within it in order to dramatise the dilemma.

Whenever I’ve attempted to engage with specialists on any subject, they will potentially destroy the central point you’re trying to make in attempting to cover every single thing. Whether I’m right or wrong doesn’t matter. Anyone engaged with making programming will tell you the same thing: we can only go so far. You need good faith, good research, a reasonable level of adaptability, but at the end of the day your principal responsibility is to the audience you’ve selected to try to get a point across. I read the other day that Thomas More went to his death cheerfully and wasn’t at all the person that A Man For of All Seasons told me he was. I don’t give a damn because I love the movie anyway.

Q: Teachers’ TV is an organisation trying to use a large amount of airtime in a public service and educational role. We’ve found that the rise of holdback - often a five-year holdback - is making it difficult for us to educate and raise issues that are to do with the ‘here and now’. What are the arguments to say that holdbacks don’t necessarily protect anything? Could releasing material on a whole range of different platforms within constrained areas of use actually enhance their value in the wider, moneymaking world?
A: I’ll try to answer this but again let me do it by way of illustrating what was happening thirty years ago when the cinema industry in Britain was controlled by two companies, EMI and Rank. Along comes video. Big threat. All EMI and Rank had to do – all they had to do – was buy the shop next door, put a sign up and go into the video business. They then could have controlled the length of holdback. They would have effectively controlled all of the retail outlets. They would have killed off piracy and even have addressed one of the things the Labour Party was proposing, a one penny per video tax on every video sold or rented.

Now why have a tax? Two advantages: one was because we needed resources for the then National Film Finance Corporation but more important than that, by having a one penny stamp on the video it became a legal video. Therefore anything that didn’t have the stamp was by definition an illegal video. Had Rank and EMI gone into this business of licensing premises selling videos, the video piracy business would never – I don’t believe – have got off the ground. The police could have walked into any store that set itself up, look at the videos that were on sale and they didn’t have a stamp on them, know that they were illegal. But, because of the over-riding neurosis about the damage, or the impact that videos themselves would have on their core business, they didn’t want any video business at all. And they regarded the notion of doing anything to actually encourage it as insane. So, it’s just another example of someone adopting the wrong business model in dealing with a threat.

Now, the other argument which has never changed is audience building. On this subject I go back well over thirty years to the mid-seventies when I was Chairman of my Union, ACTT. We knew we needed to build audiences and we decided that one way of doing this was to make sure that films and clips of films were available in schools. Having got an extremely generous agreement regarding the use of clips within schools from the Union we then came up against absolutely obdurate problems with the industry itself – from the rights owners. The kind of prices the studios were looking at to put them in the schools made the whole thing ridiculous, it was just blown out of the water. But, again, we couldn’t sell the concept of building an audience. Protecting was more important to them than building. If there’s any one theme I hope to get across to the Creative Rights Alliance, it’s that there’s a huge world out there to build on but you will not build it if you over-obsess over protecting the world you presently control.

Q: Your general approach, which is to err on the side of generosity, may not be at loggerheads with rights holders but isn’t it just a question of facilitation? Would you agree that it’s about creating the right relationship between the owners of the archive material and the users?
A: I spent ten very happy years as Chair of the National Museum for Photography, Film and Television and we would make photographs available from a vast collection but it always struck me that we were dealing with the absolute tip of the iceberg, our actual volume of sales was pathetic. And - I’ve never said this before – I never became fully convinced that the will existed deep down within the organisation to make the material available. There was a sense of “It’s ours and you’ve got to be a pretty special person for us to share it with you”.

Remember the lovely line from Bobby Kennedy’s funeral? His brother Ted quoted one of Bobby’s favourite phrases

“Some men see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were and say why not.”

All I am asking for is an environment in which rights owners, when faced with difficult, challenging questions, look at it from the perspective of “Why not?”’, not “I own it. Why should I?” Just that short, small shift will over time begin to make a vast difference.

Q: It seems the major issue with rights owners is that this is the beginning of a slippery slope to lack of control? Are they not finding it difficult to think outside that culture and outside that box?
A: Sadly, I’m afraid that’s true. And that is the answer that Rank and EMI offered in 1981 when they looked at the threat of video, and I suspect it was the answer that the newspapers took to “Why should they have broadcast listings?” and it’s the answer every other medium seems to have adopted. Yes, it can appear valid, but at the end of the day history would indicate that it’s fatuous.

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