Oz pic commission to close London doors

Budget review leads to cuts, savings, less travel

By MARK WOODS

SYDNEY -- Voting instead to close its London office, the Australian Film Commission has scrapped its original strategy to double the funding for script development to A$2.4 million ($1.6 million) by hacking into documentary and short-film production coin.

AFC chairwoman Maureen Barron told Daily Variety there would also be trims to marketing, administration savings and less travel by AFC staffers in favor of travel grants for filmmakers after further reviews by incoming chief exec Kim Dalton, who will also investigate a commercialization of the AFC's research services.

Confounding most pundits by emerging relatively unscathed is the AFC's $1.5 million screen culture program, which sponsors fests and funds production-resource centers.

The turnabout is the culmination of a tumultuous six-month budget review at the AFC, which acknowledged that despite years of declining funding to its present level of about $11 million, extra coin for script development was needed. Development is seen as the biggest problem confronting Oz's film industry, given that only about 4% of an Oz film's budget goes to development (compared with about 12% overseas).

"It is a very welcome about-face," said Australian Screen Directors Assn. topper Richard Harris. "The industry understands that the AFC doesn't have money (for) everything we'd like it do."

But Miramax Oz scout Victoria Treole, a former AFC marketing and creative affairs exec, lamented the closure of the 20-year-old London office as losing "an important intelligence resource on avenues of financing in the U.K. and Europe for both AFC and non-AFC supported projects."