Peter Mullan is to be congratulated on his success at the Venice Film
Festival with The Magdalene Sisters, but to argue from that to support the creation of a Scottish film studio, as you do in your editorial of September 9, is specious.
A film studio is fundamentally a shed, albeit with specialised equipment. If you build and run one you are in the shed-renting business, competing with shed-renters all over Europe and beyond. There has never, as far as I know, been a serious study which has indicated that this could be done on a commercial basis in Scotland,
although there was a hilarious
report some years ago which
suggested that it would be viable if the turnover of the Scottish industry as a whole could be miraculously increased by 40%, an increase which simply building the studio would come nowhere near to providing.
The problem about blithely ignoring people like Lord Puttnam, who know whereof they speak, and turning the film studio into a national virility symbol, is that it encourages all sorts of peculiar project proposals to be developed, particularly where, as we have seen, it is attached to other property developments. One should particularly beware of proposals which wax lyrical about the secondary benefits to things like tourism that the studio will bring. This is code for '' . . . and we will expect ongoing revenue support from the public sector''.
If a studio can be developed on a truly commercial basis, fine. Scottish Enterprise has invited would-be developers to put up or shut up, and will presumably reveal all in the fullness of time. But a studio sends absolutely no message to anybody about Scotland's commitment to encouraging talent, which is best done by other means. What could do serious damage to the public perception of Scotland's film producers would be for the focal point of their industry to be a white elephant in a black hole.
Iwan Williams,
76 Dixon Avenue, Glasgow.
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