Freekstorm VFX Blog

The British film industry has been in terminal decline for years. This has not been helped by the recession and many of our finest filmmakers decided to desert the U.K. long ago for more favourable climes. But wait! Support has come from an exceedingly unlikely source: the supermarket giant Tesco.

Together with the media firm Amber Productions (which was created in 2009 by New Line Cinema veterans Ileen Maisel, Mark Ordestky and Jane Fleming), Tesco has struck a deal with several of Britain’s favourite authors to turn their books into films. Tesco’s are not interested in showing their movies at the cinema. Instead they want to develop films which will go straight to DVD and be sold exclusively in Tesco stores.

It’s a neat marketing idea and it’s a win-win for the authors too. Tesco will have no say in the films' content or artistic direction but the writers will. Tesco’s have decreed that writers will be equal partners and will have a huge say about how the film is made. In addition they will also receive a comfy income (the Holy Grail for a poor impoverished author nowadays.)

The first DVD film the joint venture will produce will be “Paris Connections” which is a thriller based on a book by Jackie Collins. I for one, won’t be exactly rushing out to buy it, although I’ll certainly be at the head of the queue for the results of the collaboration with Philip Pullman who is one of Britain’s finest writers. I’m a HUGE devotee of His Dark Materials trilogy.

I'm no fan of Tesco's but on the other hand I'm fully supportive of any marriage, however unlikely, which will help poor starving writers. Not that Jackie Collins and Philip Pullman are exactly starving, but this new filmmaking/writing business model gives the rest of us a faint glimmer of hope that there might just - one day maybe - be a remote chance that authors might actually get paid a decent wage for their craft....hey, just call me an optimist!