Screen Producers Australia (SPA) believes the screen industry’s new entrants and smaller operations are at risk of being squeezed out by unsustainable financial pressures, following a member survey showing producers are increasingly being asked to bear the monetary and creative burden of project development.
Of the respondents’ film and television projects, only 10 per cent that proceeded to production received sufficient external funding to cover the development costs. At the same time, producers fully or almost fully (80-100 per cent) funded the development costs of 26 per cent of projects that proceeded to production.
The survey found that producers received $14.5 million in development funding over the last three years, and spent an additional $18.5 million of their own money on development over the same period. The main individual provider of development funding was Screen Australia (61 per cent) followed by Screen NSW (30 per cent) and local platforms and broadcasters (26 per cent).
Further, 62 per cent of respondents said that when development funding was provided, it was not sufficient to cover producer costs nor the rising third-party costs of development, including writers’ fees, script editors, note takers, legal fees, office hire, option fees, catering costs; and 57 per cent said they had not received any amount to cover their fees (producer fee) or to cover corporate overheads in the last three years.
Within the survey, one respondent noted a “serious misunderstanding and under-appreciation of what producers do during development” and another believed that producers were the “forgotten profession in development”.
SPA CEO Matthew Deaner said the Australian screen industry was rapidly approaching a “development crisis point”, calling for action to address the issues raised in the survey.
“When producers play such a crucial role in the development phase of a screen project, there is currently a clear imbalance between producers and other creative professionals engaged in a project that needs to be addressed,” he said.
“The reality is that producers are usually at the end of the queue for receiving any financial recompense.”
Deaner cited “extremely difficult business conditions” as a key contributor to the financial pressures outlined in the survey.
“Unregulated streaming platforms have been writing their own commissioning rules for a long time now, changing the nature of commissioning for everyone,” he said.
“The lack of a ‘rights reversion’ framework, which exists in other countries, exacerbates this problem for producers. Unfortunately, this phenomenon has also coincided with other important commissioners such as the ABC, SBS, and different screen agencies operating within restricted budgets for this work which has inevitably flowed on to producers and their screen businesses.
“It is untenable for screen producers to not be paid something reasonable for their work.”
SPA has not released how many respondents took part in the survey.