I have just returned from the Shorts Film Festival in Adelaide where The Burnt Cork has had its first big win, picking up the Black Shorts Award for Best Indigenous Film, one of Australia’s richest short film prizes. A huge thankyou and congratulations to all the cast and crew and our supporters!
Because art is often a labour of love rather than a financially rewarding venture, many people offer their time and services for free or for minimal payment. This is often necessary to gain experience but at what point does it cross the line and become blatant exploitation? What follows is a meditation on navigating the murky world populated by shape shifters, gatekeepers and the occasional mentor, that is the entertainment industry.
Six weeks before I completed my arts degree at university I was offered a job in a country town with a local theatre company. I seized the opportunity and left uni to begin the job immediately. It was a general assistant position paid at around $200 a week. Some of my friends, who were completing commerce and law degrees, were putting in their applications for graduate positions and summer clerkships at that time and they were skeptical of my decision. But I assured them that this was a pragmatic choice and that it was what I needed to do to break into the theatre world. While working for the theatre company I performed a variety of duties from helping to paint the roof of the theatre, to riding in forty-degree heat to neighbouring towns to deliver posters and often worked fifteen-hour days. I also met some experienced theatre practitioners and learnt what is involved in putting on a show, which proved useful further down the track when I produced one of my own plays. Was I exploited or was this a fair exchange of time and energy in return for knowledge and experience? To be honest, I still don’t know.
Actors Equity was founded in 1913 in New York for this very reason. When people are passionate about what they do, they are more willing to do it for free or for minimal payment. They just want to work and this leaves them vulnerable to exploitation. To complicate matters, usually the exploiters are products of the same system. They take the attitude that ‘it’s just the way it is’ or they convince themselves that they are not exploiting but offering someone an opportunity. As one film producer says ‘everybody does it, you have to’. Perhaps this is true, if there was more money available surely people would be paid fairly for their work. Therefore does the blame rest squarely on the shoulders of the government and funding bodies?
Not necessarily. Let’s be honest, some films really aren’t worthy of taxpayer dollars. If their creators forge ahead without adequate funding and enlist the help of eager young people, desperate to learn their craft and make their mark any way they can, then who is to blame if those people aren’t paid? Perhaps the experience has taught them something and enabled them to climb another rung on the ladder, bringing them one step closer to the money. Of course on the other hand, this would be unacceptable in most other industries. Learning through experience and being allowed to make mistakes is essential to growth.
When I did find myself in paid work in the writing department on a feature film, there was even more pressure to move mountains. The very fact that the project was funded meant that people regularly worked up to and sometimes over 100 hours a week to meet deadlines over a period of several years. It was grueling. At the time one of my flat mates was working behind the counter of a local bakery and when we compared pay packets it was disheartening to discover that, when taking into account the number of hours I worked, he was earning substantially more per hour than I was. Having said this, in hindsight I know the experience was invaluable in terms of learning about storytelling and meeting people in the industry. In the balance of things I don’t regret doing it.
This conclusion was augmented when I experienced the other end of the spectrum, which is even bleaker. I was receiving some paid work as a script reader but it was intermittent and not enough to sustain life i.e. cover the basic needs of food, clothing and shelter. In addition to this paid work I was working on a script with another more experienced writer, who promised to pay me for my work when the project received funding. During this time I picked up some temping work. But we were in the midst of the GFC and many people were being retrenched, competition for temping jobs was fierce. In addition to this I was also under pressure from the writer to invest as much of my time as possible into finishing the script so we could receive funding. I decided to take the advice one university lecturer offered her final year film students and ‘join the dole queue’. I told myself it was just for a couple of months until the script was finished and the funding had come through. As I soon discovered, when you apply for the dole you are obliged to provide regular proof that you have been applying for jobs. And so I began applying for jobs that I had no intention of taking. My parents were horrified, not that I was on the dole but that I was the very definition of a ‘dole bludger’. While being exploited myself, I had resorted to exploiting the system. I argued that someone who works day and night on a script could hardly be described as a bludger. I think their reply was something along the lines of ‘if you are working that hard and not being paid then you’re a slave to your own ego.’
As an outsider it is very easy to recognise exploitation. But when it is happening to you, there is a tendency to justify or rationalise it by telling yourself ‘it’s just a means to an end’. The truth is that none of us wants to believe that we can be weak. In fact, it may be that the more determined a person is to make it, the more susceptible they are to exploitation. I have spoken to a number of people, each of them strong-minded, ambitious and talented. One of them described how she obtained an internship at a production company. She worked long unpaid hours on the understanding that if she proved herself she would be offered a paid job at the end of her internship. On one occasion she was called in on a Sunday to bring the boss a sandwich, which she did without complaint. Of course at the end of the internship she was told that there was no paid job available and she was let go. The company then immediately hired a new intern and the cycle began again. She said ‘it’s not necessarily the working for free which is the problem but the absolute ingratitude and the empty promises. I don’t mind working for free even now but I want to be able to get something out of it as well, something which often the employers know they are unable to give.’
Another told me how she played the lead role in a short film, which won a lot of awards at festivals. Although she had acted in the film for no money, the director didn’t share so much as a drop of champagne from all the prizes she received. If there is anything to be taken from these stories, it is that people don’t like to be taken advantage of. This may seem obvious but in an industry where people are driven by ego and passion, common courtesy sometimes goes out the window in pursuit of dreams.
Then again, some responsibility to stand up to oppression surely lies with the individual. We don’t live in times of slavery and no-one can exploit you without your allowing them to. When I chose to work for months unpaid on someone else’s feature film script I did so in full awareness that there was a possibility I wouldn’t get paid. I chose to ignore that possibility because the risk seemed worth it at the time and if somebody else took up the opportunity then benefited from it in the long run then I’d be kicking myself. These days I am more inclined to use my own judgment when choosing what projects to put my energy into but it seems that I have only acquired that judgment from making mistakes.
Recently I have become one of the exploiters. I received some funding to make a film but not quite enough. Now I find myself treading where many filmmakers have gone before, wanting and expecting people to move mountains for me but unable to pay them adequately. I tell myself it’s a good script, they’ll be working with some experienced people, at the very least they’ll get a chance to see some nice parts of rural New South Wales and the catering will be pretty good. Besides, I painted roofs to get here so I’m going to make a good film if it kills me! I guess the best I can do is attract as much funding as possible, pay people as well as I can, offer them other rewards like the opportunity to work with experienced practitioners or have their work viewed by people who can offer them opportunities in the future, have a wrap party at the end with lots of free alcohol and generally treat them with courtesy.
Basically as a rule, I would say if you know that you are getting more out of the situation than the person who is working for you then it becomes exploitation. We all have a responsibility to use our own judgment but if you are in a position of power treat the people working for you as you would want to be treated. Besides, you never know, you might be working for them one day.
Below is an extract from a speech I recently gave about our short film The Burnt Cork:
I usually get a lot of questions about the title of the film so I’m going to address this before I talk about making it. The term “Burnt Cork” has a few different meanings: In Australia it was a name given to babies of mixed parentage. It’s also a reference to a black powder used by Aboriginal mothers to darken their children’s skin so they wouldn’t be picked up by the authorities. And it also refers to a forgotten custom in Australia, where a white man would be given a burnt cork if it became publicly known that he had fathered a child by an Aboriginal woman. The burnt cork was intended as a symbol of the man’s charred character.
Not only did relationships between white men and Aboriginal women have social consequences, they also carried legal consequences. In the 1930’s, in response to the growing number of mixed-race children being born in Australia, it became illegal for a white man to procure an Aboriginal woman for what was referred to as “carnal knowledge”.
Recently I came across an exchange that occurred in the Queensland parliament in 1931, that sums up the attitude of the time:
The Home Secretary said: It has been found in the past that, unfortunately, there is a class of white men who are prepared to live in aboriginal style with black gins. I do not care whether that man be a prospector or whatever one may call him, he has not lived up to the principles of white manhood.
It was this attitude and the sense of shame associated with it, that I wanted to explore in my film.
To explain briefly the path I took to making the film. I actually wrote the first draft of the script for “The Burnt Cork” in 2006 while working as a researcher on Baz Luhrmann’s “Australia.” My work on that film involved talking to a number of people who were directly affected by the government removal of Aboriginal mixed-race children throughout Australia, which continued until the 1970’s. At the time I was unsure, as a non-Indigenous person, whether I really had a right to tell a story about what was generally perceived as an Indigenous issue. I wasn’t entirely comfortable with the idea so the script went into a drawer and I didn’t think about it for a few years.
Then in 2008, as part of my work on Australia, I was asked to interview a woman who, along with her brothers and sisters, had been taken from her family as a child, separated from her siblings and raised in an institution. She reconnected with her family about 30 years later.
Earlier that year Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, had offered the long awaited apology to the members of the Stolen Generations and like many other Australians I felt a sense of relief that this had finally been done and as a nation we could now move on. My conversation with this woman altered my view somewhat. She told me that despite the initial excitement and sense of hope the apology generated, for her and for many people she knew “the apology opened up a can of worms. She said “at this stage I can’t get the worms back in because nothing has happened since.”
She didn’t believe that enough was being done in a practical sense to improve the lives of Indigenous Australians following the apology and that there was a sense that what had happened was now in the past. She told me that in reality, this couldn’t be further from the truth. What happened is still having an enormous impact on their lives. She told me:
“Nobody will ever know what its like to have your childhood ripped from you, to not be able to sit down and have breakfast with your brothers and sisters as a child. To meet them all those years later and not know who they are because their personality was imposed on them. When I meet with my siblings now they are filled with anger. Their personalities are different because of the pain they have suffered…The most painful thing is not being able to connect with them. What gave other people the right to make decisions about my life?”
In our interview, she described a lot of divisiveness in Aboriginal communities and within families. Being taken as a child has all but destroyed her relationship with her family. Although she has reconnected with her brothers and sisters, her relationship with them is still fraught and there is a lot of jealousy and resentment – particularly directed at the older siblings by the younger ones, because the older siblings had more time with their mother and blood relatives before they were taken. She also said she really has to fight against holding on to her own children too tightly and resist her impulse to stop them from mixing in white society. She believes her experiences frequently threaten to destroy her own relationships with white people and this has made it particularly difficult for her in the workplace – throughout her life she has found it really difficult to trust.
It seems that the problems facing Indigenous Australians tend to get swept into the too hard basket – and there’s no doubt that the issues are complex. But often the best way to approach a complex issue is to deconstruct it. At the time of the apology it struck me that although there is growing acknowledgement that the removals occurred, there has been little explanation of the social circumstances, which lead to the government creating the policies that resulted in children being forcibly taken from their families.
Around this time I started to think about the script I had written several years before and what had attracted me to that story. I realised that I originally wrote it because I had discovered things in my research for ”Australia”. These were things that I had previously not known or fully understood about the relationship between white and Indigenous Australia and I wanted to share these discoveries with other people.
I had watched films like “Rabbit Proof Fence” which explored the effects of the government policy but I hadn’t seen any films that really explored from a white perspective, the isolation, insecurities, shame and fear, that existed in society at that time. The more I thought about it, I realised that the story should be told from the perspective of a white protagonist and be aimed at engaging and educating a white audience. And that rather than it being a subject that shouldn’t be broached by a non-Indigenous filmmaker, that perhaps it in fact needed to be.
These are some pics I took in Chinatown, Sydney, recently. While lots of parts of Sydney are feeling a bit lifeless these days, Chinatown still has a real vitality about it.
These photos were taken during a location scout for our short film Gavin. The film Snowtown was a big influence on our location search. This might be a bit baffling, given that Snowtown is a film about Australia’s most notorious serial killer and Gavin is a comedy about a mud crab with prophetic powers.
However, despite the obvious differences, scratch the surface and there are some similarities. Like Snowtown, I wanted the story of Gavin to unfold in a place where hope is diminished. Where faith is powerful because that is all that is left.
There is a bleakness about Dundoon, the town at the centre of Gavin. It is a place where hope is almost extinguished; but the arrival of Gavin breathes new life into the town. One of the biggest challenges in making this film was to capture this simultaneous sense of hopelessness in this town and the defiant hopefulness of its characters.
Every second Tuesday I volunteer at the Wayside Chapel in Kings Cross. I help people with writing – that can be anything from a short story to a resume. Most of the time I don’t do very much at all. They write while I drink cups of tea then I read what they have written. Often their stories are written in a way that my overly-analytical brain really doesn’t know what to make of them. By this, I mean their writing is often quite conceptual, unhindered by the structural rules we learn at school or university or through manuals on how to write a screenplay that sells. Secretly, I’m a bit jealous that they can write this way. That they can switch off their inner critic and just let the words pour onto the page. Sometimes what they write doesn’t make any sense to me at all. I read all sorts of things into their writing that aren’t there. Or at least they are only there for me, because I brought them there with my interpretation. Occasionally I ask them what a poem or a story means. When they explain it, I find all my assumptions are completely off the mark. That’s what’s great about it.
As explored in my post Digital Media and the Real World, at its best the web has the potential to open our eyes, to see things from a different perspective and in doing so deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us. However, in recent years it seems the web has evolved into something that does little more than re-affirm our already existing views. For example, Facebook connects me with my friends, many of whom have similar cultural and socio-economic backgrounds to me. They post things and although I tell myself that they are drawing my attention to opinions, photos, videos and articles that I might otherwise not have seen, the truth is that all these posts are being selected by people who are just like me. What’s more, Facebook will tailor the posts that appear in my news feed so that I mostly just see posts that were created by people who I interact with regularly on Facebook. This filtering process means that I am being exposed to views which likely reaffirm my existing world view.
If this trend was only limited to Facebook, it might be ok. But with changing privacy rules enabling Google to collect so much information from its users, the web is becoming more and more tailored to the individual’s personal tastes. In a recent TED talk, Eli Pariser talks about an experiment he conducted where he asked two friends to enter the word ‘Egypt” into their Google search engine and to send him a screen shot of the results. While one person’s top search results focused on the political situation in Egypt, the other person’s results focused on travel and tourism. In other words, Google tailored the information fed to each person, based on their previous searches. See Eli Pariser’s full presentation below – it is both fascinating and disturbing:
Of course, human beings are clannish by nature. We seek out like-minded individuals and generally we prefer to surround ourselves with people who share our views and reaffirm them. But the web promised more than that. For a short time, in its early days it was more random, more anarchic and as a result it brought us into contact with people and views different to our own. The web had the potential to challenge us and in doing so open our minds – but it doesn’t seem to be living up to that potential.
My bread and butter work is research, primarily for film and television, across both drama and documentary. I often wonder what my job would have entailed before the internet came along. I imagine it would have meant a lot of time spent in libraries and archives. I think it’s safe to assume that I never would have had access to the wealth of information that is available now. Digital technology and the internet has meant that today I can access most newspapers dating back over a century online at sites like the State Library of NSW. I can also access a range of archival documents and photographs through sites like the National Archives of Australia; and I can track down potential interviewees and talk face to face with them via Skype. I believe this access to information has enriched the projects I have worked on. In making my first short film The Burnt Cork, a portrayal of 1950′s rural Australia with strong Indigenous themes, it was necessary to speak to a range of people, whose input helped to shape the story. Many of the people who contributed to that research embraced the film when it was made and helped to market it through social media. In other words, their input in the research stages gave them a vested interest in the final product.
However, multi-platform still seems to be an afterthought for most film and television producers; and often it is only considered as a way of marketing an existing program. I wonder if it would be more effective to approach this the other way round? If multi-platform was embraced to formulate the seed of an idea. For example, a short online documentary that gives rise to a bigger discussion and eventually a longer format film or television program. The web is the perfect arena to test ideas and see which ones float, as well as generate new ideas through discussion. It also enables audience input, which helps to build an audience with an emotional investment in the project, as they have been involved in its creation. Ideas are often born and shaped and crystallised out of discussion and what better forum exists for discussion than the web. By only entering into a discussion with audiences after a film or television program has been made, I wonder whether we are missing a great opportunity. Are we not seeing the big picture?
I am not what you would call a technology junkie; not even close. I don’t spend hours tinkering with gadgets or camp outside the Apple store to be the first to get the new iPhone. So it seems strange, even to myself, that I am forging career in the world of digital media. If I ask myself why I am doing this, it comes down to only one reason: I am passionate about storytelling and digital media has the potential to bring stories to audiences in ways we have never experienced before. I want to be a part of that.
However, as a self-confessed technophobe, this makes me nervous. Recently someone told me that she and her partner had tried hard to keep their two year-old daughter away from iPads and iPhones because they wanted her to experience the world first hand for as long as possible before she came into contact with screens. They lost their battle recently when a well-meaning friend visited their house and introduced her to his iPad. I get their concern. Often when I’m on the web I feel a disconnection from the world; at worst it can be an isolating experience. However it would be simplistic to suggest that we should ditch all technology and return to the world of nature. After all science and nature are intrinsically linked. Science is about understanding nature and, as an extension of this, technology can enable us to better understand our world. For a highly entertaining in depth discussion about this and the nature of modernity in general check out this podcast from The Infinite Monkey Cage.
I believe that when used to best of its potential digital media affects change in the “real” world, informing and enhancing our experience of it. Digital media’s immense possibilities are realised when it enables us to learn new things about ourselves and the world around us, when it changes the way we interact with each other and the way we experience the physical world. It shouldn’t be a tool which enables people to avoid the world or disengage from it. When used to its greatest potential digital media connects us with other people and teaches us about ourselves. It does what storytelling has done since man first began telling stories around campfires or painting them on cave walls. It enables us to make sense of our world. This is the guiding principle of my work.