NEW TUBE, OLD TUBE

Here’s a movie idea. In a hundred different countries a cat gets stuck up a tree. Imagine the hundred little scenarios that unfold as a result. Ask yourself, which one of these cat-up-a-tree stories will catch the attention of the world’s media? Is it random? Is the cat with a PR company behind it more likely to catch your eye? Or does the cat that was rescued by a 6-year-old blind kid from a poor area make for the better story?

No, I’m not on drugs. This week YouTube announced it will now pay for content. Meanwhile old media, ie. The Scotsman - reports today on computer science student, James Provan, who has been “spotted and signed by the media giant Time Warner”. Good for James. His YouTube videos – short pieces of stop motion camcorder jinks backed with his own music – are apparently getting millions of hits. And the deal with Time Warner? Well, he’s getting a whole two grand for his efforts, so that TW can use his ‘Garden’ video as part of an ad campaign to launch one of their businesses, along with 19 other YouTuber’s clips, which in advertising budget terms is the equivalent of chucking a penny into a busker’s bunnet.

I’m sure James isn’t complaining. Neither would I. But it raises some interesting questions about the idea of filmmaking and the notion of what the Scotsman quotes as (yawn) the "democratisation of opportunity" for filmmakers, which if you ask me sounds a bit like the democratisation of Iraq, a meaningless bit of blah when over 65,000 clips are going up on YouTube every day. The odds of getting blown to bits in Baghdad are shorter than getting your movie seen.

I wonder, at what point do you become a filmmaker? Is it the moment you take the camcorder out of its box? Is it when you get your pals together and perform in front of the camera? Is it when you upload your video to YouTube? Or is it when some lazy-minded hack can’t come up with anything better to say?

In the world of YouTube, if all filmmakers are equal, then how come James got 1.5 million hits for his ‘Pancake’ video? And even that doesn’t top ‘Bride has Massive Hair Wig Out’ which so far has had 2,009,357 hits. Or the recent one featuring two rabbits staring dumbly at the camera, watched in offices worldwide by bored drones staring dumbly at the screen.

It’s random, that’s what. When the makers of say, The Blair Witch Project, got lucky, were they the only people with a cheapo horror film? I doubt it. Did people watch the rabbit clip because it was good filmmaking? Or did they watch because 3 million other people watched it? It’s the old tipping point syndrome, where for no reason, a three minute clip turns into a phenomenon.

If there’s something that has less value than entertainment, it’s amusement. It’s the puggy with the million quid jackpot. Human nature being what it is, we just keep pushing the button, hoping we’ll get a payout. So it goes with YouTube. We just keep clicking on clips, watch mutely, maybe get a laugh and move on. For the pundits to suggest that there’s a living to be made out of uploading daft wee movies is absurd. Nobody’s filling their boots with this rubbish. Maybe that’s why Google (who bought YouTube for a gazillion dollars) is drumming up headlines while they figure out how to cash in on it before the site turns into OldTube.

For James, getting a pittance for his old movies isn't democracy of opportunity - how can it be when he's been plucked out by an oligarchy like TW? And as for the 'deal' as reported in the Hootsmon, it's hardly likely to involve handing a few million to an emerging film talent to do the same thing. No, it's the usual old wishful thinking by a lazy-minded, poverty-stricken press.

If you look at James’ website - www.gir2007.com – you’ll see he’s got a donations page. Here he makes a refreshingly direct plea to punters – ‘it costs me money to amuse you, so please, cough up’. He’s had a single figure response so far – not enough to give up computer studies – and a wee bit disappointing considering he’s had millions of hits. I watched his ‘I can’t believe it’s Christmas’ clip and it’s nicely done - up to a point. I wonder what Sight and Sound would make of his effort?

Here the auteur, in his attempt to consolidate the metatextual resonance of his subject matter and to challenge our preconceptions of the ritualistic mores of Western society, ie. the season of Christmas, with a reference to primitive, even pagan symbolism, subverts his subject by the intervention of socio-realist imagery, placed to provoke in the viewer a disquieting response and a stark reminder of the unpalatable realities of late capitalism.

Du-uh… Maybe there’s mileage in the cat-up-a-tree idea. After all, it can’t be any worse than Babel, can it?

ROCKY ROAD TO RUIN

Here we go again. No films getting made - what's new? More jobs on offer at Scottish Screen - what's new?

Anybody reading the comments on my last blog – see below - would have spotted the anonymous posting about how SS is recruiting even more staff. If you take the comment at face value, presumably these new jobs are to make up for the seven staff Ken Hay saw fit to get rid of during what my disgruntled correspondent calls ‘the night of the long knives’ shortly after Hay’s appointment as CEO of the agency last April.

I can’t thank this person enough, because it’s the first I’d heard of the mass job cuts at West George Street. More intriguing is why - why is SS now advertising a post of Education Development Manager at a salary that’s £7000 a year below what their last Education Development Manager, Alison Butchart, earned before her job was axed? In other words, it's a total scandal and quite possibly illegal under current employment legislation.

Not to say that Education or Marketing or Audience Development's not important, but how can SS justify adding to their 53 staff, not including various committees and the board? When I checked their 'Our Team' list a few months back, there were around 35 staff. Now Ken Hay sees fit to include all the Archive staff he banished to a shed in Hillington, a department apparently now under the control of Scottish Museums and Galleries and not SS.

The plot thickens. Or does it?

It doesn’t take Strathclyde Police to work out what’s going on here. Not if Creative Scotland goes ahead – and whatever the rags are told to tell the Scottish public – CS is by no means a done deal. This is in spite of the fact a board's been appointed - before the non-event of the much-derided draft Culture Bill finagles its way through consultation.

No, what’s going on here is smoke and mirrors to make SS look like a bigger deal than it actually is. By claiming lots of staff and looking busy when he's not, Ken Hay's trying to look like a bigger banana than he really is, when the truth is he looks more like Ian Beale than a contender for the CEO gig at the proposed CS. That’s assuming they get to make their unholy alliance with the Scottish Arts Council at all. Because you can be sure when they get into the ring, it’ll be Rocky Balboa all over again, and the SAC have all the moves and heel-dragging experience needed to beat any hopeful upstart, especially with an £80 million annual pot at stake.

I reckon there’s probably ten worthwhile employees at Scottish Screen. That means they could lose about 40 and nobody would notice. If you read their website – especially the recent Best Actor Oscar nomination of Forest Whitaker for LKOS – it’s kind of pathetic of them to claim any credit. Strange the way only ‘good’ news makes it to their site. Like, for instance, where’s the Q&A from last October’s Open Events? Could it be that embarrassing? And why does the 2005-06 Annual Report fail to list development and production awards like it used to? Is it because most of the money’s disappearing to TV and London-based companies? Scottish taxpayers and Lottery players have a right to know.

As my anonymous poster says, Alison Butchart and six other talented staff were described by Ken Hay as having ‘chosen a new career path’. For all you SS employees who read my blog - and my stats tell me some of you do - I feel for you, I really do - it must be pretty insecure not knowing if you're about to get the boot only to see your old job advertised - at a lower rate. And even more insecure when you don't know if you'll be in a job next year anyway. Then again, that prospect can't be any worse than all the filmmakers I know - the ones pulling pints, driving taxis and selling SKY TV packages. On minimum wage. And it doesn't get much lower than that...

THE LYNX EFFECT

Slim pickings at the pictures or what? So off I went to see The Last King of Scotland, or rather, Forest Whittaker’s awards-minded Idi Amin and just as well. Without him there wouldn’t be much of a movie because his co-star, James McAvoy’s weirdly effeminate mug alone (see above) couldn’t entertain me for twenty minutes, let alone the whole two hours.

While critics rave about Forest's portrayal of Idi Amin as a party animal turned sadistic cannibal – no doubt jumping on his line about ‘no human flesh on the menu’ – what nobody else is talking about is the limp-dicked sexist colonialism that sabotages the film. It’s the same guff that still turns up in BBC dramas – an English public school boy fantasy where black women’s knickers fall off at the first sight of whitey.

McAvoy, who looks like he’s got about three inches to his name, gets his end away first with a cheery native girl on a bus. After a ten second chat, we catch them at it – and surprise, surprise, the gal’s on top, while McAvoy goes along with it, smirking like the guy out of the Lynx advert. You just want to smack him and we're only ten minutes in.

Next up, we see Gillian Anderson in a non-part as a bored doctor’s wife, gagging to get her end away with the only other white guy in town - odd when there’s plenty of well-hung black guys under her snooty nose. We can tell this by the way she gives McAvoy those longing looks. But being a white woman of virtue and conscience – ‘my husband’s a good man, but dull’ – she doesn’t give it away, not even as much as wee blowie round the back of a mud hut. Doesn’t take a genius to work out the moral meta-narrative there.

Then we have Kay, Amin’s third wife. From the minute they’re introduced, we know that Kay fancies McAvoy by the way she gives him the come on. How irresistible can this wee guy get? Never mind the fact that her husband’s a psychopathic murder-happy dictator. After a few scenes where Doctor McAvoy tends to her epileptic son, she throws herself at him and obviously, as a black woman, gets up the stick as soon as she parts her legs. I don’t want to be a spoiler but I think you can guess the outcome.

Who knows, maybe the producers assumed the audience would be too busy being overawed by Whittaker’s methody Amin to notice this double dose of racism/sexism. The audience I sat with laughed loudest at the deep fried monkey line – a cheap racist gag in itself, if you think about it. and not exactly accurate either when nobody commented on deep-fried anything in the 70s. But Peter Morgan’s script bypassed a lot of things – such as why did the British put Amin in power? And why did the filmmakers skip the 300,000 murdered civilians? I guess on a measly $6 million budget genocide was beyond their reach and the director's ability, being so fond of the close-up.

Not that they’re advertising the fact, but rumour has it that Scottish Screen pumped £500,000 into The LKOS, presumably minus the fee for the uncredited ‘producer’ based here who filled in the forms. The question is, what value for money did SS get for the three badly shot, badly lit and badly acted scenes that open the film? Somehow I doubt any profits will work their way back to West George Street. Still, it looks good on the website, if not the books, to claim it as their own. Solidarity with Uganda, I say, and good luck to the filmmakers for choosing to spend the budget there. After all, when it comes to filmmaking, we’re a third-world nation too.

DESPERATE MEASURES

Missed me?

I didn’t think so. While everybody else is blowing dust off their cross trainers and digging out that ab-sculptor they got in the Argos sale three years ago, I’m recovering from festive double shifts by munching cut-price Christmas choccies and getting hammered on cava. And I don’t plan on sobering up till February.

Still, January’s not all doom and gloom, not while Dougray Scott’s appearing in Desperate Housewives. Desperate Accents, more like. And just how crapola is the overhyped Ugly Betty? They ought to change the title to Insult-my-intelligence-why-don’t-you Betty and fire the eejit at Channel 4 who bought in this rubbish.

After my last post of 2006 on not-forthcoming attractions to look forward to, I was chuffed to see Brian Pendreigh’s piece in Scotland on Sunday -

scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/entertainment.cfm?id=33552007

It goes like this – a bunch of chancers are claiming they’re raring to go on a screen version of Embra’s favourite baldy, Irvine Welsh’s ‘Ecstasy’. Only they’re not. If you read the ‘lively’ comments on IMDB, then do a bit of digging on the people involved, you’ll find as I did that this movie, with a rumoured budget of £6.5 million, is about as likely to happen as Rangers winning anything this season. Apart from mass deportation orders.

The beef seems to be that some Scottish crew got hired. Then got fired. Judging by the mud-slinging on IMDB, they’re not taking it well. Do I have any sympathy? Not really. Because with thirteen Canadian producers – I know, a joke in search of a punchline – it ought to have been obvious to anybody that this was a total disaster from the off. Especially when none of said producers – or the director for that matter - have any previous credits. Seems they’re more interested in the soundtrack than actually turning up here with a camera.

Now I may be naïve about film finance, but even I know you can’t raise £6.5 million on the back of Greg Hemphill or Ford Kiernan. No offence guys, but for that kind of money I expect to see some starrier stars in my movie, not a pair of parochial telly tarts who think pishing in a lift rates as knee-slapping comedy.

As for Billy Boyd, cute as he was as a Hobbit, he’s not going to draw the punters, never mind the money men. Neither will Richard E. Grant, who ought be ashamed to show his face back here after his performance in The Match. Where’s Dougray when we need him? Still, it could be worse. I mean, they could have attached Bobby Carlyle…