My name is Stephen, I am a chartered accountant by profession (you know a bean counter) but at the moment I am a group general manager of a fairly large Australian company. I am married with one son. I am not quite as old as Gandalf, but I been around. Being a bean counter I have an underlying interest in making money. I like the business of business.
I also have a fascination for film and television. I use to hang around the back of the Channel Seven studios in Sydney. They use to have tip out the back where they would dump all sorts of interesting things like old sets, off cuts from the editing room (no tape just film back then).
I made my first “film” on super 8 and then at uni I used to produce a TV show on the closed circuit system.
Once I left uni, I got sucked down the black hole of work ten years later after seeing bad Aussie film after bad Aussie film I decided to have a go myself.
I did a lot of research and found that a lot of bad films had been made because of the “hot” money chasing the big tax concessions under the original 10BA schemes. The side effect of all this was not only did the Government loose more than it planned but there was a lot of unhappy investors around who had lost money.
I also discovery that a great many film makers had the wrong attitude to their investors, see them as “donors” and not as investors. By that I mean, the film makers, didn’t put the interests of their investors first.
I also conducted some marketing research and found out that people interested in investing in film didn’t care about the tax concession etc, but they did care about getting their money back.
So all this research lead me to the conclusion that I could raise money for feature films on the basis that the films would be commercial and the investors would earn their money back plus a reasonable return.
I set up my own company, got the necessary licences from ASIC, did the prospectus. Although I had a battle with ASIC as they had missed the whole area of intellectual property when they revised the Corporations Law. So I had to educated them on the ins and outs of film financing.
And then came the tax office. Ever tried to get a public ruling for a film scheme? Ten months after lodging my application nothing, they lost it, they had it out with some other government department, they sat on it, then they asked a swag of questions and then it was too late.
I’ll tell you more later.