'Nanny' knows best for WT
During that time, while the folks at Working Title, Universal and UIP were buzzing about the prospects for "Pride and Prejudice," they were conspicuously quiet about "Nanny McPhee."
A nice enough movie, went the common wisdom, but too old-fashioned, too middle-class, too young, too girly and too lacking in any brand awareness (whoever heard of the "Nurse Matilda" books?) to make much headway in the ruthlessly competitive kids market.
Which makes its stellar opening the British success story of the year. This charming Emma Thompson vehicle has overcome mixed reviews and the rival appeal of "Wallace and Gromit," "The Corpse Bride," "Sky High" and "The Legend of Zorro" to take $17.5 million in 13 days. It's well on course to double UIP's original estimate of $14 million.
It clearly helped that the marketing team had a year to craft their brilliantly executed campaign while the director and producers slaved over cut after cut and endless rounds of test screenings. The highlight of the campaign was the decking out of several London buses with fairy lights, giving an early Christmas feel.
So Working Title has at last made the breakthrough into the kids market that Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner have been craving since "The Borrowers," and which the much more calculated "Thunderbirds" failed to achieve.
Earlier this year, discussing films such as "The Incredibles" and "Shrek 2," Bevan remarked, "While being unbelievably impressed by the technical prowess of those films and the rest, I don't half find them cynical. You just feel that a 40-year-old jaded screenwriting motherfucker is behind them. I can't help feeling that if you came up with something really pure for a family audience, it would be a hit."
Turns out he was right -- even if, at the time, no one expected "Nanny McPhee" to be the film that would prove him so.
Irish eyes smile on Perry
There's an honorable tradition of Brits spearheading the Irish Film Board, from John Boorman to Rod Stoneman. So the appointment of former British Screen topper Simon Perry to become the IFB's new CEO should come as little surprise.
The Irish film community is symbiotically linked to the British industry. Just about every Irish movie is made as a U.K. co-production -- which is why the Irish are panicking about next year's changes in British tax rules that will drastically reduce the benefit of such deals.
That will be one of many challenges Perry has to face when he takes up office in Galway in January. But it wasn't so much his insight into the British system that won him the job, more his European outlook and connections. Perry is seen as someone to forge stronger links with the rest of Europe, and perhaps help Irish cinema to emerge from the shadow of Blighty. After all, unlike the U.K., Ireland uses the Euro and is a member of the Eurimages co-production fund.
Perry is an unashamed Francophile (an unfashionable proclivity in perfidious Albion) whose British Screen regime was distinguished by his enthusiasm for getting U.K. producers into bed (professionally speaking) with their counterparts in other European countries.
Since British Screen was swallowed in 2000 by the more Anglocentric U.K. Film Council, he has cut something of a dissident figure in Blighty, serving as president of the Paris-based producers club ACE, an advisor to the Cannes Film Festival, and a tutor at the Cologne Film School.
"My loyalty for many years has been to Europe," Perry comments. "I don't think I've been very identified with Britain for some time."
