Charlie Carman: Manager of Script Development at Film Victoria speaks to AWG
by: Mark Poole
Published in Screen Hub
Friday 27 November, 2009

Like the other agency development people around Australia, Charlie Carman at Film Victoria has been wrestling with a changing production landscape, enlivened by critical discussion of the support systems.

Charlie Carman announced upfront that as Manager of Script Development at Film Victoria, part of her role is to support and develop and even advocate for screenwriting and writers in Victoria. Which of course went down very well with the audience of screenwriters, both experienced and emerging, before her at the Wine House in Southbank.

In the applications, she has noticed a surprising lack of adaptations. “An analysis of Oscar winners and the highest box office grossing films around the world shows that 85% of them are adaptations,” she told the audience, “so I’m a little surprised that we don’t see many of them here, especially as Australian novelists are actually very successful locally.”

The other gap she pointed to was in the genre of comedy. “Clearly in Australia we have great comedy writing skills and as a country we’re very strong on comedy, so it’s a shame that I don’t see more comedy screenplays being submitted,” she said.

Early in her role, she saw lots of coming of age stories, so many that reputedly even the local distributors were thoroughly sick of them. Luckily there aren’t so many of them written now. Apparently Film Victoria does have one on their development slate, but it’s a coming of age film with a twist with a romance angle as well.

“I think we tend to swing a bit from one extreme to the other as an industry,” she explained. “In the past we have supported a lot of art house adult drama, perhaps a disproportionate amount, but we shouldn’t be throwing the baby out with the bathwater and moving exclusively to genre films. It’s about proportion, so that we develop great festival films and great commercial films across all genres – romcoms, thrillers, comedies, and dramas. It’s not about trying to be a poor relation of Hollywood but it is all about balance.”

Charlie said that there had been a feeling in the past that funding agencies weren’t all that receptive to genre films. She maintained that this really hadn’t been the case with her predecessors at Film Victoria. Among others, there was Everett de Roche, probably our most prominent genre writer with credits like Patrick and The Visitors to his name.

Now, Charlie sees genre screenplays as well as art house films. “Recently we’ve had scifi, romcom, an arthouse war movie, as well as low budget drama on our slate,” Charlie said.

She outlined the Catapault program for new writers, with up to one hour of produced work to their name. “We get around 80 applications and shortlist 16. Four go into our workshop lab as a group, where we talk about the scripts and finally allocate a script editor to develop them.” Charlie added that they also run a program with 37 South, part of the Melbourne International Film Festival, to facilitate the networking of writers and producers, which is a key part of the process.

Charlie is a firm supporter of the emerging emphasis on a cadre of good script developers, who can ensure that the screenplay is actually saying what the writer believes it is. “William Goldman, the highly successful American writers who wrote Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Princess Bride, said these critical readers, as he called them, ‘will save your arse.’

However Charlie added that even the famous Goldman discovered that many writers were impervious to his comments, and really sought uncritical praise rather than the truth. “The process of accepting and dealing with constructive criticism of your work is really hard, but it’s one that every writer needs to deal with,” she said.

In a rhetorical landscape full of support for producers and production companies, Ms Carman sees her role as supporting and nurturing writers and getting the very best out of their work. “I think that screenwriting is the hardest writing there is. I’ve been a publisher and I’ve worked with novelists and playwrights and to me the technical craft of screenwriting is the hardest. But like any writing it’s also often personal and involved ‘letting the blood drip onto the page,’ as Joe Eszterhas describes it.”

For Charlie, development is all about empowering the writer and uncovering the story that they’re trying to tell. “What is it that you really care about? And how can I help you facilitate that? For me script development is about asking questions to help the writer clarify things. And it’s a process worth going through to improve the screenplay. Because when it gets made and wins awards, it’ll be your name up there on the credits!”

Mark Poole

Mark Poole is the chairperson of the Victorian Branch of the AWG.