ah, patronised again..
Jim Schembri, a Melbourne Age journalist, is used for a variety of feature/commentary/pet wordsmith roles. Some of his work is successful, but he can make a dill of himself in public.
After the Sydney Daily Telegraph came out with a particularly scungy and ill-informed assault on the film industry a few days ago, he popped a similar piece up on The Age. I presume they are both triggered by public discussion about the new tax support system, with a certain added bile from the Sydney Murdoch mob because the Iemma government is under pressure to provide more support.
Peter Vaughan, a good documentary maker living on an ex-cow farm near Orbost, wrote a letter to The Age, and received an email in reply which the paper had not intended for his eyes.
The original letter went like this:
A Tough Lesson for Jim Schembri
Jim Schembri is kindly described as a “film expert” in today’s Age. Poor old Jim may be a senior writer – but he is certainly no expert on film. If he were he wouldn’t be blaming Australian filmmakers for their failure to compete against foreign imports. It’s called globalisation Jim, when a Hollywood film is backed by a 10 million dollar global cross-promotion advertising budget, and a poor old Aussie “Art house” flick must compete to get some exposure on just one hundred thousand dollars or less. Marketing and access to cinemas are the problem, it is not a problem with creative talent as Jim claims. That is why in countries like France which still posses profitable film industries, quotas are imposed on TV and cinemas limiting the overwhelming competition of Hollywood imports and allowing local productions access to the viewer market.
Peter Vaughan
Documentary Director
Wait A While Films Pty Ltd.
Wombat Creek.
Rachel, from The Age letters department, then wrote to Jim (Schembri) like this:
Hi Jim,
I enjoyed your piece this morning and was hoping it would piss off a few film-makers enough to generate a good debate. I’d like to run this, just wanted to warn you. (I’ll tone down the insult at the start).
Cheers,
Rachel
——–
So now you know. What pissed us off? I can’t be bothered parsing the arguments; suffice to say that Schembri reckons we should make “genre”, as if we don’t, and that we can’t tell properly structured stories in cinema though we can in television (at a time when both Canal Road and East of Everything are trumpeted as new and wonderful, that is a dubious proposition), we have been corrupted by government funding (though the success rate for privately financed films is no better than the public, actually), we don’t do as well as the Americans (though our success rate is no worse than theirs, actually) and we don’t have any idea something is wrong.
In fact the industry is a fierce critic of itself. We recognise that public support should not be taken for granted, and success would help. We are obsessed with reaching audiences. We spend our lives working for low pay on projects that only provide a decent return if they succeed in the marketplace, so we have considerable incentives to do better.
Rather more, actually, that Schembri’s own parent organisation, the Fairfax Press. In the three years since I started editing Screen Hub, I have seen its coverage of the arts deteriorate significantly. The SMH runs far less film and television coverage, and much more is shared between the two papers. While serious coverage is shrinking, both papers keep up the celebrity drivel and publicist driven pap, based on those horrible 20 minute interviews in a hotel room with some bored star who can’t remember which country they are in.
Success in the film industry is about scale, of course. If you are a small player working on micro-budgets, you have to be much smarter than the big players. Sadly, we don’t manage that very often, and any handy talent who starts to do well at the centre bounce gets invited to play in the LA A League.
Just today, Animal Logic announced it is making Australia’s second digital animation film, after Happy Feet. The budget is expected to be north of $100m, financiers Warner Brothers are content to let Animal Logic do the creative stuff, and the project has a 40% tax offset, as passed by the Howard Government. (which probably adds up to $15-$20m of Government money in the project, recouped by the sideways trick of collecting PAYG tax on foreign money disbursed here.)
The film is called Guardians of Ga’hoole, from a series of kids’ books about giant owls written by New York writer Kathryn Lasky. The locale has moved from some post-human American West to Tasmania.
Hence the tawny frogmouth in the photo, though these crappy and populist attacks on the screen trade make me feel like a hungry owl who has just spotted a particularly plump rat.
April 17th, 2008 at 9:53 am
Go for it, Wol!
April 17th, 2008 at 7:45 pm
Update: Gideon Haigh in Crikey springs chivalrously to the aid of Rachel, to say that she was quite right to delete the offending phrases, on the grounds that “The first two sentences of Vaughan’s message are not just insulting and condescending but defamatory – and of a staff member at that. They can be deleted at no expense to Vaughan’s argument, being gratuitous and puerile in the first place.”
I am a bit stunned by this. Peter makes a hostile point in a jokey manner, since he is “pissed off” just as Rachel says she was hoping. He then goes on to explain why Schembri should not be named as an expert. Haigh surely knows that any legal case about this would be laughed out of court.
Schembri, who must be protected from this malice, is happy to spend eight hundred words of comment in which he, as an “expert” never once asks any of his targets whether his analysis is accurate, or at least relates to reality.
But, of course, this is not bad journalism, because it is an “opinion piece”.
Haigh goes on to say that “Vaughan, untroubled by the ethics of distributing for wide readership something sent him in error, shows an unhealthy malice; Crikey displays a lack of judgment in publishing an item that actually reveals nothing except someone doing her job properly.”
The email is actually a piece of news, no matter how trivial, and I always thought the function of journalism was to publish news, rather than self-censor.
Haigh also leaves out the bit in which Rachel is so happy that he has “pissed off” a large number of people who are just going about their business in the society.
But Schembri, you see, has to be protected.
April 17th, 2008 at 9:24 pm
In a fit of disbelieving pique i banged thig off the Crikey in response to Haigh’s nonsense. (By so doing Haigh does just a Rachel wants, the generation of a good (my adjective would be ‘confected’ debate.)
In all of this, four other adjectives come to mind. ‘tendentious’, ‘fatuous’, ‘incestuous’ and ‘disingenuous’.
“Crikey displays a lack of judgment in publishing an item that actually reveals nothing except someone doing her job properly. If only others at The Age performed their tasks so conscientiously.” So says Gideon Haigh.
Doing her job properly involves congratulating colleague Jim on his good work. “I enjoyed your piece this morning and was hoping it would piss off a few film-makers enough to generate a good debate.”
Yep, the mark of a good piece is its capacity to fulfill Rachel’s wish of pissing off people to generate letters debates. Rachel apparently loves the smell of burning confection in the morning.
Yep, the assassination of Franz Ferdinand Karl Giuermo Anikò Strezpek Belschwitz Mòric Pinche Bálint Szilveszter Gömpi Maurice Bzoch János Frajkor Ludwig van Haverbeke Josef von Habsburg-Lothringen by Gavilo Princip at Sarjevo pissed off quite a few people and generated a stirring debate between 1914 and 1918.
April 17th, 2008 at 9:27 pm
Typos courtesy of an aromatic jeroboam of Malborough sauvignon plonk.
I blame the kiwis!
April 18th, 2008 at 11:23 am
*Scurries back to read yesterday’s Crikey properly*
April 18th, 2008 at 11:47 am
Well, that’s all very unedifying, isn’t it.
The notion that it’s an editor’s job to get people sufficiently angry with each other to produce ‘debate’ is disturbingly widespread, actually. I’ve had arguments with literary editors (not current, and not in newspapers) (*covers arse, no mean feat*) in the past about giving books for review to completely inappropriate reviewers (people with no expertise in the topic, people with no experience as writers, people who don’t read much, and even, in one case, a known personal enemy of the writer) specifically so that fur will fly, all in the name of entertaining readers and selling copies. This was passed off by one (very inexperienced) editor as ‘professionalism’ in editing. As a big fan of Gideon Haigh’s writing I’m a bit shocked to see him backing this intellectually indefensible practice.
April 18th, 2008 at 4:33 pm
That intellectually indefensible practice is the bread and margarine of the Andrew Bolts of the meeja.
Sadly (but inevitably) it seems that the once venerable Graham Perkin broadsheet is fast slippery sloping down the tabloid greasy pole dancing route. (Homonymic pun fully and pathetically intended.)
Previous comment blamed the kiwis. This time it’s the Scots. (Well, one wee Scotty dog in particular.)
April 18th, 2008 at 9:56 pm
Yes, in the blogging/forum world we have a word for that – trolling!
April 18th, 2008 at 10:27 pm
Spot on, Smarts.
July 22nd, 2008 at 5:18 am
[...] David Tiley retorts to a blatant trolling by a major metropolitan newspaper (and Gideon Haigh cops a well deserved serve in the comment thread). [...]
July 22nd, 2008 at 5:21 am
[...] David Tiley provides an elegant riposte from documentary maker Peter Vaughan to senior Age writer Jim Schembri’s criticisms of the Australian film industry, asking why Schembri’s employer (Fairfax Media) has significantly reduced its artistic coverage in the last few years. [...]