PAYROLL UP

I hear you, I hear you. Stop with the minimum effing wage, you say.

Then let’s look at the other end of the food chain. There I was, casting a jaded eye over the Guardian media jobs section the other day, and what do I see? A whole load of jobs, all linked to this vibrant film industry we keep hearing about, but nothing to do with the cut and thrust of actually making them.

Exhibit A – a First Year Tutor at the London Film School. Salary 32K.

Exhibit B – Two Media Grant Managers at First Light Movies. Salary 35K each.

Exhibit C – HR and Training Manager at the Film Council. Salary 47K.

Let’s leave the private sector out of the mix. They rule, so they can pay what they like. And working for the public sector shouldn’t automatically mean low pay, far from it. I say good luck to anybody who bags a well-paid gig. But the problem is these jobs make it look like there’s a lot of filmmaking going on. Not so. And not here.

Take the recent appointment of three development execs at Scottish Screen, mentioned in a previous blog. Even I underestimated the cost to the taxpayer, because if you add up three salaries at say, 27K a piece, pile on some benefits and expenses, it stacks up to roughly two-thirds of SS’s entire annual development budget of 150K. Which, put simply, would be okay if three times the number of new film or TV projects were being developed.

Not only is this nuts financially, but I can’t see how the workload justifies it, a workload that depends on writers and producers putting in unpaid slog before making an application. I mean, how many submissions do they get at West George Street? Especially given how hard it is these days for a Scottish producer to get their mitts on what are very expensive loans. Didn’t the BBC hand out a pile of cash to regional indie TV companies earlier this year to hire their own development people? Like I said about training, just how much more development do we need when the usual scenario, played over and over again, involves producers sheepishly begging writers for free scripts? It’s happened to me more than once and I’m just starting out.

I don’t know how many people work at the Film Council, but it must be a lot, otherwise why would they need a HR and Training (note the training bit) Manager? Which again strikes me as a bit surplus, because apart from giving their money to the BBC, Andrew Eaton and Michael Kuhn, they don’t back too many films. From what I’ve read, most British movies are made by mysterious tax dodging funds anyway, with titles like Tooth and Plots with a View, none of which has ever seen the light of a projector.

Likewise the jobs on offer at First Light. Can anybody tell me the point of encouraging kids to make films when grown-ups in this country can’t get them made? Looking at their annual report, where most of the space is taken up by big happy (but heavily posed) pictures of kids twiddling about with bits of video kit, I notice they’re funded by the Film Council to the tune of £1 million a year. I’m all for helping kids to appreciate cinema yadda yadda, but for the average family a night out at the local multiplex costs about 50 quid. And when most families these days have a camcorder collecting dust in a cupboard, why do we need First Light?

Just as you’d expect, the lowest salary on offer is for the teaching post. But First Year Tutor? Does it cost less to teach first years or what? Still, 32K a year is better than a poke in the eye and much higher than the average secondary school teacher’s wage. But what can you really teach at a film school that’s useful apart from elbow sharpening for when you get out?

What links all of these jobs is Lottery funding. Who would have predicted ten years ago that so many jobs would have been carved out of legalised gambling? But like the Lottery, people get their hopes up, forgetting that in any game of chance, some win, but for most of us the odds don’t look that great.