The Co-chairpersons of Working Title are Tim Bevan and Eric Fenller.
It has been an extraordinary British cinematic success story as the following comment notes:
They have been listed as the most powerful figures in the British industry and in 2002 Premiere magazine put them at 41st in the world-wide movie power list.(BBC News Story 2004.)
Without well positioned and highly effective producers film makers would have an even more difficult time. Firstly this article will look briefly at the role of the film producer, it will then look in more detail at Working Title as a case study of a success story. Without good producers in the last few years British Film culture would have been much poorer. Good producers are essential for the success of any national cinema especially given the outside pressures from the big guns. Film making is a high risk business and good producers know how / learn how to reduce risk.
However according the the Daily Telegraph NBC Universal already holds a majority stake in Working Title Films, and has been looking to create a European TV studio in London.
Several films I have watched which were produced by Working Title Films are;
Billy Elliot:
Trainspotting:
and
Shaun of the Dead:
Media distribution
04/05/09
In today’s society we consume more different forms of media in weeks than has been done in entire lifetimes in ages past, and with so many choices these days there is real competition between the media companies to make the general public want to use their form of media; in this case films, the key therefore is advertising and distribution of this advertising.
As little as twenty years ago methods of marketing were much simpler, there were three main ways of marketing films.
The first is the longest used in the history of man is word of mouth and this was also the best method that could be used to market your film because if people hear from other people that something is good they themselves will also go to see it. So a good method that could also be used was to try to get really good reviews in newspapers. The hitch here is an easy one the reviews simply wouldn’t reach everyone in the area of the cinema. Second problem is that not everyone could actually afford to go and see films, if we take Britain as an example, we were during/ coming out of the Thatcher era and there was a lot of poverty in the general public.
After the first steps were made by the Lumière-brothers and some other pioneers, the first industrial movies came out. These already had something like a concept of marketing. Posters was a commonly used method, reviews in newspapers were mainly local to the cinema, so word of mouth had to be relied upon. The production of these movies enabled the opportunity of distributing several copies of the same film to different cinemas in a single town. This increased the target market hugely through the use of simple methods. The thing the studios were benefiting of was the fact that moving pictures were a complete novelty and so people would watch what they were given, they did not care as much for what they were actually watching or the way the story was told. Mostly they went to the cinema just for the novelty of watching moving pictures, this of course is where the name Movies comes from when referring to the cinema because originally it was them going to watch moving pictures there was also the novelty of getting glimpse into another person’s life which they could do by reading books but films were faster.
However the Second World War changed everything. At that time the european film industry was the most advanced in the world much further ahead than the likes of Hollywood. British Studios and those from other countries were where all the films were made, there were filmmakers like the young Alfred Hitchcock making his name at the time in what were called the Dream Factories. They tried to sell their products on a global scale but however the translation of films into different languages was a long and strenuous process and there were many disappointments.
Due to the political conflicts of the time many films had political topics and they were also used to make propaganda in Britain and keep people from despairing at the war effort. The British studios were in their golden years as many parts of the industry were destroyed by war.
After 1945 the american film industry, based out in California, took off and it was able to overtake Britain in the production of films as well as in every other aspect due to our need to recover from the six years of war which we had bravely fought against the armies of Europe. This development of course had the advantage that america had vast amounts of money at its resources. This was the time in which true competitive film market came into being. Hollywood was making its films wanting to make a profit, not simply for the sake of making the film itself. Britain and the rest of Europe were not doing much because everyone was occupied with rebuilding Europe. Of course there were some productions from former “leading” countries, but they all had massive problems with raising the profits that America could get easily simply because it is so vast. The first pickup of that economic branch took place only in the middle of the 60ʼs.
The Americans started using modern radios rather than the old wireless ones and the home television had come into invention.
They broadcasted trailers, made even more advertising with poster campaigns and
continued branding their products with stars. The first real franchise film was James
Bond-Series, beginning with Dr No where the leading man was played by Sean Connery in 1958, such new films can get by these days with only the name James Bond due to the fact that they are all so good.
Of course British studios managed to catch up after rebuilding the rest of the countries and Europe, but we never regained our superiority to the american industry. We simply didn’t have as many good writers and directors and we couldn’t reach the bigger audiences in the USA simply because of its vastness. Even now languages remained a barrier in film production, films could be synchronized so that a woman who was speaking English would be heard to speak French, but such films were never as popular as films actually produced in that language originally.
Until the ʻ90s and the innovation we all know and love called the internet there was not much change but suddenly there came new methods of marketing distribution opened for the big companies. The technology of the internet was not advanced enough until the start of the 20th Century, but with the invention of broadband connections, better mobile devices the whole situation has changed. The original methods of marketing were: TV, Radio, Word of mouth, Print-media. However the introduction of streaming media through the internet made media items viewable from whenever and wherever the customers were. Other Channels on the internet are proper advertising sites where the producers can put lots of media online, like a producerʼs diary, screenshots or trailers.
This was the main way of marketing until ultra-portable devices like the iPhone came out. It was called a computer by the companies selling them and it revolutionized the whole market because the definition of On-Demand media became a must have for the sellers of media. Now everyone can watch or listen to whatever they choose pretty much everywhere where a fast data connection is available.
Now of course for former distributors of media like journalists or radio stations were losing out on customers who had been poached by the internet. Their market share of course shrank considerably as the years progressed because they couldn’t follow their target group in a way like the iPhones. They will not be able to change a lot at this situation because the biggest consumers of media are young adults from the ages of fifteen to thirty, but they are not staying in, watching the telly any more. They are active and live a modern life that includes a constant state of mobility.
