JAMAICAN FILM-MAKERS need new outlets

LIKE A recurring decimal, I am constantly asked why there are so few Jamaican movies and television shows being made. After the critical success of Perry Henzell’s Harder They Come, most Jamaican-made movies have struggled to get past Port Royal to international screens. If truth be told, The Harder They Come was a shooting star like Desmond Dekker’s Poor Me Israelite.

But shooting stars are not a result of any scientific reality. This begs the question as to why our feature films remain masterpieces only on Wikipedia or on Google.

So you have a great story and screenplay. You have a great set of actors and a competent crew – and you want to make a feature film in the Caribbean. If you are lucky, you get investors who believe in your project. You complete the post-production and then your trouble begins.

“What could be the trouble?” you ask. Where is the budget for marketing, which should approximate the same amount that was used for production? Where are the screens to show your work and for how much returns?

Movie houses in the Caribbean are owned and controlled by dinosaurs who maintain their screens as cash registers for foreign box-office movies, which are a dime-adozen. The foreign flicks come with brand-name stars and a track record that pique consumer interest and make audiences salivate long before the foreign movie opens across the Caribbean. This provides guaranteed profits for the local cinema owners as opposed to a ‘what-if’ with a local movie.

MAJOR INDUSTRY

Movie production and distribution is a major international industry that continues to leave Caribbean filmmakers by the wayside. Why is this so? Simply put, we do not have a big enough indigenous Caribbean market. Besides, there are not enough screens to exhibit

Caribbean movies for extended periods to build audience awareness. The cinema houses pay scant regard to local productions when they have the next James Bond or Tyler Perry movie in tow.

Unfortunately, Caribbean film-makers continue to ape Hollywood-style productions without the budget to achieve that standard. Therefore, our indigenous movies end up as poorly made imitations of international movies and do not satisfy our discriminating audiences.

Movie production and distribution is a major international industry that continues to leave Caribbean film-makers by the wayside.

In Jamaica, we have been complacent to pat ourselves on the back when foreigners use our locations for big-budget movies. We get an instant injection of foreign exchange spent on hotels, local crews, food, location and equipment rentals, and ground transportation in the main. But in the same way that we welcome oversize Spanish hotels, we need to encourage the survival of the indigenous small properties.

Knowing all this, why does a well-known government executive agency continue to bury its head in the sand and call what we now have a ‘film industry’? We are merely a convenient location for one-night stands for foreign productions.

In countries where a real film industry exists, there are exhibition opportunities for local fulllength productions to be screened long enough in their home markets to make a profit. Check India, Nigeria, and Australia.

No decent movie can be profitable if the local cinema owners barely allow a two- to five-week run for your movie to ‘fail’. Each cinema has large overheads that cannot be met with small houses, so a local movie with modest audiences cannot survive in a 200- or 300-seat cinema. Besides, with only 20 cents in the dollar return on gate receipts to the producer, it ‘cyaan work’ for local productions.

The closed-shop cinemas are not the only negative factors that are hindering the production of more indigenous film works. Jamaicans do not know that to get your independent productions on local television, you must pay the stations for broadcast time. The stations refuse to pay local producers for their original creative work. In a few rare cases, they will be offered profit-sharing from advertising or partial funding.

GOOD INTENTIONS

For me, this was very embarrassing when I was one of three lead investors who decided to launch a second television station - CVM TV. We promised good local shows as one cornerstone. The road to heaven is paved with good intentions, but undercapitalisation became a noose around CVM’s neck.

Without doubt, CVM’s greatest contribution to local broadcasts was Royal Palm Estate, which ran for 20 years with more than 800 episodes. This landmark series provided steady income for more than 500 actors and crew while demonstrating that we possess the creativity and skill sets to produce a world-class programme. Royal Palm Estate has been shown in several Caribbean countries and is now being broadcast on Verizon on the US East Coast and in Canada via CEEN.

With CVM TV and TVJ playing hardball with independent programme producers, we are now satiated with popular Indian and Chinese soap operas with very poorly overdubbed soundtracks. How do we bell the cat? We love to copy others, so we do not have to travel far to learn from Canada, which introduced laws to force Canadian broadcasters to have a prescribed portion of original, indigenous programming. So much for television – what about the cinemas?

It is unlikely that the present distributor – a publicly traded company - can be forced to be more sympathetic to local movies. The exhibition of sprocketed film is now a thing of the past. Movies are being distributed internationally via the Internet. The digital revolution has created an investment opportunity for new entrepreneurs to enter the distribution chain with small digital cinemas with much less overheads.

I was recently told that many of the original cinemas across Jamaica were built and commissioned by the Chinese generations ago. After all the highways and roadworks, the Chinese can be invited to create a small digital cinema network in urban and rural plazas. A prototype was established by Chris Blackwell at Island Village in Ocho Rios. We are already in bed with the Chinese on the One Belt, One Road Path, so if they can help the local movie industry to take off, “let’s run with it”.

Without doubt, CVM’s greatest contribution to local broadcasts was Royal Palm Estate, which ran for 20 years with more than 800 episodes.