Image: Baldy the camel in rehearsal for the Sydney Harbour production of Aida, broadcast by CinemaLive.
CinemaLive, owned by Peter Skillman and Janelle Mason announced an obscure but significant milestone in August. The André Rieu 2015 Maastricht concert was the highest grossing performance music event in Australian cinema history ever.
The term Event Cinema has been hijacked in Australia as a name for Greater Union’s Sydney venues. It has more general usage around the world as the one-off satellite driven cinema screenings of prestigious or funky performances in music and theatre with a side order of outdoor spectaculars and museums.
In Australia, the term alternate content can be used instead, not to be confused with either alternative or arthouse. There are only so many words to go round.
Here alternate content is dominated by just two companies. Natalie Miller’s Sharmill, closely allied with Palace, deals in the MET Opera and NT-Live productions and has a headlock on the high end experiences. CinemaLive has a lower profile in the screen sector and seems to observers to take a more populist approach. However, it claims to have a ‘consumer-facing identity’ with a VIP club with 1600 Australian members, while most of its content is defined as arts-related.
In 1993, Janelle Mason set up a production company called Shooting Star. ‘My history is advertising,’ she said. ‘For fifteen years I worked in agencies doing high end advertising. When I set up Shooting Star, it was to service the Japanese because we were doing a lot of Japanese production.’
Two years later, she teamed up with Peter Skillman. ‘My background was in television’. he said, ‘I worked for Nine for many years. Then I went into post-production, running the Sydney and Melbourne offices of Pro-Image for Digital Pictures. I went for a management buy-out which didn’t occur, so there was no point in hanging around.’
He brought the experience of a sector deep in the transfer to digital, and used to managing assets – now called files – which ultimately ended up on television, with everything from TVCs to corporates and satellite feeds for prime time television.
The Shooting Star Picture Company grew into Shooting Star Production, and to D-Star Digital which moved those files around from clients, production companies and broadcasters. But the most fateful move was the most modest.
Star Media Platinum provided pre-show advertising, in competition with Val Morgan. The material consisted of national filmed advertisements, and slides with audio cassettes doing local ads for real estate agents and chip shops. They were made by the production team and sales force of Star Media. Morgan retreated from this space, and Star kept growing.
By 2005, those cinema slides were looking pretty daggy. Cinemas were thinking about digital projectors, Star was making local ads which moved, talked and smiled, and slide projectors were ready for the local tip.
How to supply this new market? The Shooting Star group had a lot of experience managing small files by satellite delivery. It had a good relationship with Greater Union and its parent company Amalgamated Holdings, as the major companies developed their own solution to the digital exhibition problem.
But the independent cinemas were a different matter entirely. Skillman and Mason took a deep breath and supplied satellite dishes to up to one hundred independent cinemas at no cost, who then installed their own 1.3k video projectors. Along with local ads, this technology enabled Star to integrate cinemas into screenings of meetings and training sessions. And it enabled the operators to screen an acceptable image off DVD or Blu-Ray, a facility which was heavily promoted at the time by Peter Castaldi, who had run a test network for the Australian Film Commission to provide films to remote towns.
That was an attractive option for independent filmmakers, who could run Australian films in independent cinemas by sending the file in the mail. However, the operators, represented by ICAA, the Independent Cinemas Association of Australia, had a much larger problem.
The Hollywood studios were desperate to stop the nascent piracy problem. They created common standards, decided on much larger 2k projectors, and encoded their films. They ultimately agreed to provide a Virtual Print Fee to exhibitors to pay for the technology. But they were not going to send their films to the Nunjikompita Community Cinema in an envelope.
For some time, ICAA built an arrangement with Omnilab, which had many of the same corporate elements as Shooting Star but on a much larger scale. ICAA saw its potential partners become embroiled in a messy legal case about software IP, and ultimately built its own system with satellite delivery of encoded films into a 2k or 4k projection systems paid for by the virtual print fee. It is a major success.
It is fair to say there was tension about the use of 1.3k, as the supporters of the Hollywood deal feared it would divert exhibitors from the main game. However, Shooting Star now uses the same 2k and 4k systems, and the debate almost seems quaint. However, the coded system is probably the single biggest victory so far in the battle against piracy.
But the real payoff for Shooting Star was quite different, which Skillman calls a light-bulb moment, bringing several strands together. Event Cinema was just beginning in the US and the UK. Shooting Star had the delivery technology. But, the major exhibitors had their own systems and plans. However, regional communities had no access to operas, theatre and music concerts. Beside the silos and water towers, the highest thing in many of these towns was the Shooting Star satellite dish.
And Mason and Skillman realised they had one product, which no-one else had thought of. The Wiggles. They contracted to cover the annual Wiggles stadium Christmas event, providing the camera work and adding the presenter and the external footage to build a sense of excitement.
‘They believed in the concept,’ said Skillman. ‘It gave them the opportunity to go to regional hubs. They were very well known in the UK and US, and cinemas realised they could sell a lot of popcorn and fizzy drinks.’
So they were in at the birth of Alternate Cinema in Australia, had a very enticing product, and could distribute it through the international event market.
However, the exhibitors were difficult to convince, because the notion of a one-off event is so different from a season supported by an internationally crafted marketing campaign.
At that stage, picking content was a matter of instinct. As Mason explained, ‘In the early stages we were trying all kinds of content. We did some rock and roll, some opera with Opera Australia. We did a ballet, and we did some niche artists. And we soon worked out that to actually make money as a distributor in event cinema you have to have a production that is widely desirable.’
Effectively, Australia was a test-bed. Fat Boy Slim, bad. The Last Grateful Dead concert? Not in Australia. Opera – yes, if it is the Handa annual Opera Australia spectacular on Sydney Harbour. Elton John and Fleetwood Mac are fine. The Crucible did fine, along with four West End theatre productions.
The Twentieth Anniversary Nirvana Concert was an interesting ripper, since it was a never-before-seen concert from Seattle in 1991 , backed by the record company, and CinemaLive sold 10,000 CDs with the tickets.
But their major deal came out of the blue. Six years ago, Universal brought André Rieu to Australia with a huge stadium event. Pierre Rieu, the son and corporate genius behind this tidal wave of soft classics delirium, maintains careful control over the audio and video recording of the concerts, to exploit the CD and DVD market.
But, claim Skillman and Mason,, they had not thought of cinema. The annual Maastricht concert keeps on giving to all concerned, pushed on by two Australians responsible for all the external material to create a scintillating event. They were ultimately able to crack the UK market as well, once Rieu did a command performance.
However, the Australian adventure taught the pair one grim lesson. As Skillman explained, ‘To make money in this market is extremely hard because you can’t just do Australia as Australia, because you will go broke in a blink. But we certainly got every bug out of the system and we were then able to adapt it overseas.
‘To take CinemaLive to the UK was a phenomenal leap of faith. We were very much going into the unknown, and it cost us an enormous amount to set up because we had zero track record in the UK.’
The idea of Event Cinema has been driven by the formidable energy of the Met Opera in New York and the National Theatre in the UK, which saw an opportunity to build a wide loyalty base, confirm their prestige, and harvest extra cash.
CinemaLive is doing well with its focus on more popular content. In the UK, said Mason, ‘we are generally on sale two or three months before the event, and cinemas will book out so they add extra screens. Some sites open six screens, so that gives you an idea of the numbers available to us.’
Event Cinema is based on the notion that they are as close to live as possible, with conventions to remind the audiences of that fact. A presenter adds a sense of energy, we have the same interval as the actual performance, with interviews tucked into the gap, and quick recaps with the stars immediately afterwards.
CinemaLive is committed to this too. ‘We take questions from the cinemas, and the artists refer to the cinemas’, said Skillman. ‘I sit in the audiences spasmodically and if we mention that cinema, or a question is asked from that cinema, it goes absolutely mad.’
On one level, this is all about building an event, creating the sense of excitement which the movie industry now knows is central to defeating any other form of screen delivery. But it has a more practical goal too, which brings us back to the concept of the ultra-boutique release which is emerging in Australian art house exhibition. It simply drags out everyone who cares about it, hypes them up and crams them together, so they don’t dribble into cold cinemas over weeks, and often don’t get round to it at all.
The move to London is paying off, despite the dismaying cost. The company now has around 28 staff, and the head office is in the UK, with four staff. They are distributing to seventy countries, including Latin America. In the US they have a deal with Fathom, which is the key supplier to the major exhibition chains.
Skillman and Mason now refer to their company as a successful small to medium sized enterprise. They are one of the four major Event Cinema companies in the UK.
But, the company still covers a broad range of services. If you run a chip shop and want to advertise in your local cinema, they are only a phone call away.
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The exhibition sector in the UK has a clever set of awards which cover areas like brand partnerships, marketing campaigns, distribution companies and successful cinemas. CinemaLive is nominated for Event Cinema campaign of the year, while Babadook is up for best trailer.
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As Peter Castaldi pointed out, Alternate content is a broader category. It has grown to include the practice of releasing difficult films on short theatrical runs as a precursor to the home entertainment market. He also reminded me that Potential Films is in this space as well, with the franchise for the English National Opera.
