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At the Film Council our concern is the concern of creatir© 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, fift}^ 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.
If, through the Film Commission proposed by the Moyne Committee, order can be brought to the finances of our work, mismanagement eliminated and this rush of promoters abated, it is the creative worker who will most have reason to bless a measure of government co-ordination. We shall have lost an Arabian night's entertainment and many of us, who have too much of the cinema in our blood to dislike even its insanities, may shed a sentimental tear for the old mad days. But we shall, no question, get on with the work we -want to do. Under the conditions attested in this story that is impossible.
JOHK GRIERSON. January, 1937.
The Film Council,
Oxford House, W.l.