Members
of the Screen Australia Board
Level
4, 150 William St
Woolloomooloo 2011
24th July 2013
Dear Board Members
It is now 14 months since you
ratified Ruth Harley’s ban on me, during which time I have asked you,
repeatedly, to provide me with evidence that I have intimidated or placed at
risk members of Screen Australia’s staff. You have declined to do so.
The ban’s clear aim was to punish
me, to make it as difficult as possible for me to pursue my career as a
filmmaker. In this Ruth and yourselves, as members of the Board, have been
successful on one level. No right
thinking person within the industry wants to collaborate with a filmmaker who
has been banned by Screen Australia and most particularly not with one who,
according to the Board, intimidates staff and places them at risk with his
correspondence.
On the creative front, however,
you have failed in your objective. I have continued to write screenplays and,
when I have a little money, to add to my now 18 year record on the life of
Chanti, the star of CHANTI’S WORLD – a documentary project that has not
received one cent of funding from any source this past 18 years.
I have, this past couple of
months, completed drafts of four of the screenplays I have been working on this
past year – three of which I have provided links to below. All four have been
developed to the point where, were I not a banned filmmaker, I would be
applying to Screen Australia for a letter of interest and for money to employ a
script editor. I can do neither of these things and will not be able to do so
until May 2014. What will change next May is that my sentence will be completed
– two years in filmmaker’s purgatory for a crime I did not commit and for which
no evidence has ever been provided to prove my guilt.
The clear aim of the ban is to
silence a critic and, since I am not going to cease being a critic it may be
that the ban will need to be extended – though Screen Australia’s new Chief
Executive might (hopefully will) be someone who does not believe in banning
filmmakers without providing them with evidence of their crimes and giving them
an opportunity to defend themselves on the basis of evidence and facts.
Whether or not any of my four
screenplays is any good is not for me to decide. Each of them has, however,
been developed by me this past year in my role as producer – a role that Martha
Coleman, Fiona Cameron and Elizabeth Grinston claimed, in 2009, I could not play in script development beyond
first draft as a result of my not being a ‘proven producer’. (Nor could I act
as a mentor/producer to young filmmakers!) Having been producing films for more
than 40 years this proposition was, of course, nonsense, as Martha, Fiona and
Elizabeth knew to be the case.
Even if I had not been producing
films since the early 70s, the notion that a screenwriter cannot develop a
screenplay beyond first draft without a producer to hold his or her hand makes
no sense. One only has to look at the poor quality of so many films produced
from Australian screenplays with ‘proven producers’ at the helm to see that
this is so. And, conversely, many fine films produced by first up producers. It
should be the quality of the project that matters, not whether or not ticks can
be placed in all the appropriate boxes.
The fact is that Screen
Australia’s policy vis a vis ‘proven producers’ (along with many another
policy) is applied selectively on the basis of subjective decisions made by
senior members of Screen Australia management. And this is as it should be, as
long as the playing field is level and these subjective decisions are made on
the basis of the quality of the project and not for personal reasons - ie, not
because the filmmaker applicant is either a friend or an enemy of members of
senior management.
Clearly I fall into the ‘enemy’
camp and none of my screenplays will be
read by anyone at Screen Australia, regardless of their quality, for as long as
I am a banned filmmaker. In a country that struggles to produce very many high
quality screenplays this would be bad policy at the best of times. To apply it
to a filmmaker on the basis of trumped up charges is petty, vindictive and just
plain stupid.
Three screenplays that cannot be
read by anyone at Screen Australia because the reading of them would place the
reader at risk!
BILL CLINTON’S LOVE CHILD
SHIPS IN THE NIGHT
HONEY
If any one of these four projects
were to be provided with a letter of interest
and funds to employ a script editor I would then seek an appropriate
co-producer to work with me on that project. And then, with a co-producer in
place, seek the best possible director for it. That this sequence of events,
regardless of the quality or potential of the projects, is impossible, is just
plain stupid policy.
Please, either lift this
pointless, vindictive and counter-productive ban or make public evidence in
support of it.
best wishes
James Ricketson
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