Money Behind the Screen

Money Behind the Screen Synopsis

Excerpt from Money Behind the Screen: A Report Prepared on Behalf of the Film Council

It is the more dangerous to muddle along in an industry in which the difference between showmanship and racketeering is often slight and may pass in the confusion unnoticed.

At the Film Council our concern is the concern of creative workers for the medium in which they must work. Though some of us would hardly pretend to be economists, this finance story is the most vital of stories to us. With, say, fifty thousand pounds to spend on a picture it is important to know that only twenty thousand pounds will be left, after the extravagances and the rake-offs, to go on to the screen. It is not unusual for producers and directors to be kicking their heels because the financiers are too busy manipulating their shares. The creative worker lives in such uncertainty from day to day and from picture to picture that, in final cynicism, he as often as not joins the throng and, with his financial masters, maintains the principle of getting his while the getting's good. This perhaps will explain the uncreative presence of so many creative men in the wilderness of films.

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