For a list of the current Friends of the Scottish Review, click here
Answers to citizenship questions:
An organisation can only be as effective as the people leading it. However those people can only be effective if the organisation is structured to evolve policies based on experienced hands-on production expertise.
Creative Scotland is a rigid system of little boxes – written applications where one online form fits all. This is fine for producing more of the same but often precludes original and innovative ideas, which may sit uncomfortably in a rigid and limiting questionnaire. Where are the opportunities for the Creative Scotland corporate functionaries to eyeball the actual creators, hear a concise reasoned presentation and clarify question areas that may seem unclear?
The key to artistic innovation is originality and creativity. This cannot be measured statistically by faceless box ticking. There is a need to bring back art-form specialists backed by peer-group panels and a CEO who has track record not just in arts admin or PR but also in practical creativity.
Film-making is perhaps a microcosm of the greater malaise. In the 1980s film-making was taken out of the old Scottish Arts Council because it was not compatible (a view generally shared in most small countries). Film is an art but it is also an industry and with the right support mechanisms and structures it should be largely self-sufficient.
Putting it back in Creative Scotland was an admission of its failure. The last 15 years are a sad story of the dead hand of bureaucratic ego trips – a depressing saga of lost opportunities and the decline rather than the development of a nascent film industry. This is reflected in the staffing of Scottish Screen, which has dropped from an original 43 when it started to a number that can now be counted on the fingers of one hand. The fault lies in its structure.
In the 80s and 90s, the Scottish film producers largely ran their own industry but lacked an administrative infrastructure to implement industry policy. A Scottish Development Agency working party consisting of senior representatives of the then three Scottish ITV companies, Channel 4, the Scottish Film Council, and the Scottish Independent producers published a report with detailed recommendations for incremental development.
We needed to develop international contacts to encourage outsiders to come and make films in Scotland. In creating work, we would create infrastructure and build a pool of talent and facilities. A unique annual coproduction forum called Sharing Stories attracted potential co-producers from Europe and North America every year to Scotland. Funding and planning permission for a National Film Studio were secured. Scottish Screen Locations, a ground-breaking initiative in Europe, was by its third year bringing £25m into the Scottish economy. The Scottish industry was on the brink of taking off.
The success of ‘Braveheart’ was a wake-up call to the potential value of major incoming film shoots. If you see Scotland, you buy Scotland. The government decided to immediately put in place Scottish Screen. The SDA report had placed strategy firmly in the hands of experienced practitioners, organised as a round table and representing a balance of interests across the industry. Scottish Screen, it insisted, had to be industry led.
The Scottish Screen takeover started apace. The production community was sidelined. The organising committee of Sharing Stories was asked to resign. Scottish Screen took the event over but, without the contacts and experience, failed to make it happen again. It still takes place, but now in Germany. The development of the National Film Studio was blocked because it was not sited in central Glasgow. No one, anywhere in the world, has ever built a film studio in a city.
Scottish Screen Locations continues to operate effectively but derives no benefit from its incorporation under a bigger umbrella. Recently the very able and industry-qualified director of Scottish Screen Locations lost her job for what, in the real world, would be considered delivering a minor criticism.
Surely the time has come to draw a line. There is no future for Creative Scotland in its present form and no place for Scottish Screen within it or, for that matter, to continue outside it without reforming its present disastrous structure. Will someone be brave enough to dust off the old SDA report and get the screen industry back on track, ie with policy formulated by experienced practitioners and then executed through the administrative infrastructure?
Practitioners live with commercial reality. They are only as good as their last project. They live by creative judgement, innovation and the recognition of originality. Within the civil service, there is an inbuilt terror of letting professional practitioners anywhere near determining the allocation of public funds. But it is perfectly easy to establish mechanisms that prevent cronyism or abuse. Cutting the creators out of the loop of creative policy-making and depending instead on an impersonal, box-ticking, one-questionnaire-fits-all, statistical assessment system is the recipe for dumbing down and cultural decline.
The present systems don’t work. The creators are sidelined from developing strategy and policy. Originality and innovation cannot flower under the dead hand of bureaucratic structures and functionaries. The result is, and can only, continue to be an Uncreative Scotland.
Robin Crichton is an independent producer
