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| Mark Dobson, director of the Tyneside Cinema |
Recently, the Newcastle City Council proposed to cut 100% of their funding to the “independent cultural organisations” in Newcastle by 2015/16. This plan is still in consultation and it remains to be confirmed.
If these cuts were
enforced, the Newcastle-based cinemas would be affected by them. On the 29th
of January 2013, I went to interview Mark Dobson from the Tyneside Cinema,
Graeme Rigby from the Side Cinema, and Ilana Mitchell from the Star &Shadow Cinema to ask them how they might be affected by the cuts (financially
and in terms of their programme).
This is the
transcription of the interview that I made with Mark Dobson, director of the
Tynesdie Cinema.
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Currently, the
Tyneside cinema is funded by various organisations, and receives £59,000 a year
from the City Council. The proposed cuts from the City Council come at a time
when all the other funding organisations are also having to reduce the amount
of money that they give away, and Mark Dobson told me about the porposed reductions
in funding from the Newcastle city council, but also from the Arts Council of
England, and the British Film Institute (or BFI):
Mark Dobson: “At the moment, we have some revenue funding
from the Arts Council for our digital media project, which we run at the
cinema, and which is additional to what we do in terms of the core film
programme. And we know that the Arts Council have just been asked to deal with
another 3% cut over the next 2 years, so we know that they are passing that on
directly to their clients, which is perfectly reasonable I think. So we’ll see
a cut in that money over the next 2 years.
The City Council is out with their consultation at the
moment, and they’re proposing that the funding for the Tyneside will reduce to
zero over the next 3 years.
For the British Film Institute at the moment we have no
confirmation, so we’re waiting to hear from them what their position will be in
terms of the grants-in-aid, revenue funding for the next financial year. We’ve
been told to expect to hear some time in February.”
I then asked Mark
Dobson if these general reductions in funding might endanger any particular
project at the Tyneside Cinema:
Mark Dobson: “The danger for us is that a lot of the activities that we
see as being vital to the entire energy of the place are at risk through the
erosion of those funds. So some of the more innovative programmes that we run,
around our digital arts programme for instance, or a lot of our work with young
people, would conceivably become at risk, because they’re not
economically-driven projects. There’s no way to really earn an economic return
on them, in the way that we can earn some kind of return through selling cinema
tickets for example. So that work becomes more challenging to support over
time.
Our strategy is absolutely to try and support this work
through our trading as we go forward into the future. The biggest risk to us is
that our revenue funding goes in a terrible hurry, because if it does that will
be destabilising. In the short term, it could be quite unnecessarily damaging
to us as an organisation.
In the longer-term, if the funding’s removed over a gradual
period of time, that’s kind of what we’ve been anticipating for a decade now.
So we’re kind of building ourselves up towards that point anyway.”
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| The Factory is part of the Young Tyneside programme exploring the Future of Cinema and screen based media. |
Mark Dobson: “Revenue funding is not a huge part of our turnover (about
7%), but it’s a very significant part of our finances.
With revenue funding from the City Council and the Arts Council,
they have tried to give funding for more than one year at a time. So typically
with the Arts Council you get a 3-year contract. Unfortunately for various
reasons, the Film Council, on the other hand, could only give its revenue
funding annually. The disadvantage of funding like that being annually renewed,
is that it doesn't give you much flexibility in terms of planning. You haven’t
got much certainty looking ahead. But also it doesn't give you the flexibility
of spending less one year, and more the next year to move the money around in a
slightly more creative fashion to reflect how the world is. And that’s one of
the beauties of revenue funding, in that it allows you to do that.
So I think that without doubt, nationally, there's intense
pressure on revenue funding. The treasury money that goes into revenue funding
right across the cultural sector, is under enormous pressure. Because, if you
like, that's the free money, it's the available money that’s being stretched to
do so many other things. So we have a strange situation in some parts of the cultural
sector where there is more money available from the lottery, so more project funding is becoming available,
but what there is much much less of in the system is revenue funding.
So I suppose if you wanted to paint what would be the end result
of that, if that journey was to carry on to perhaps its illogical conclusion,
would be that cultural organisations could access lots and lots of lottery
money to do things that are additional to what they are there to do, but that
there would be nobody left to do it, because the core resource would have
disappeared, because the revenue funding would have gone. That’s a crude way of
describing it, but crudely, that’s sort of what it looks like.”
Mark Dobson then talked to me about the strategy that the cinema has had since he was appointed director of the Tyneside in 2000, and how he was given the task of making the cinema an institution that would be more self-sustainable and less reliant on funding:
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| Pixel Palace, the digital arts project of the Tyneside Cinema, commissioned Kelly Richardson to make Mariner 9 which was shown at Whitley Bay’s historic Spanish City Dome in August 2012 |
Mark Dobson then talked to me about the strategy that the cinema has had since he was appointed director of the Tyneside in 2000, and how he was given the task of making the cinema an institution that would be more self-sustainable and less reliant on funding:
Mark Dobson: “When I started working here, about 12 years ago, the cinema
was in a great deal of trouble financially. But it had a very talented and
prescient board of trustees who, at that point, were very determined to plan
for the worst. And planning for the worst is planning for the end of revenue
funding. So what they tasked me to do was to try and create a new version of
the Tyneside Cinema so that, if the terrible day came around, the cinema would have
grown and grown as a business sufficiently so that revenue funding wouldn’t be entirely
critical to us anymore.”
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| The Classic screen at the Tyneside Cinema |
And indeed, Mark
Dobson explained to me that at the moment, 77% of the cinema’s turnover is earned – meaning through ticket sales,
the tyneside bar, the coffee rooms, the hires or the friends scheme. Also, part
of the strategy of the Tyneside Cinema over the last few years, has been to
diversify its programme, and to programme more accessible films. Mark Dobson
explained to me how that worked, and how that strategy has been incredibly
successful and made more people come into the building:
Mark Dobson: “So when we developed the building in 2008, we added an
additional screen, and we did lots of research into people who were going to
cinemas in Newcastle. We researched which cinemas they were going to and what
they were interested in seeing, and it became really obvious to us that a lot
of people who are fantastically keen cinema-goers weren’t really coming here.
And a lot of that was to do with the range of programme we had on offer. So we
altered the programme very slightly. In the jargon, we are a specialised cinema, but we’re 80%
specialised. So 20% of our programme is mainstream, and we choose that part of
the programme with, I would say, extreme prejudice – or a reasonable degree of
prejudice - in terms of trying to pick mainstream work of quality to put into
the building.
The real reason for doing that, is not to gain a financial
return on that work, because quite often, some of these bigger titles don’t
perform terribly well here compared to other cinemas - not compared to cinemas
who say put them on in 6 or 7 screens at a time for instance. But what they do do, is they give people a point of
entry into our building, and a point of entry into the rest of our programme.
And what we’ve seen over the last 4 years since we started
doing that, is that we sell nowadays almost double the amount of tickets that
we used to sell in the old building. So I think, in the old building, we sold
about £90,000 tickets in the last year that we were there. And we set ourselves
a target to sell £120,000 tickets per year in the new building.
In the end, I think that last year we sold £184,000 tickets,
and that’s really an absolute consequence of that shift of the 80%-20% balance
in the programme. Because we know that people are now finding a way into the
building through some of these easier entry points in the programme, and then
coming back to see the rest of what we have to offer, which is really the
reason why we’re here. So that’s been a great success story for us, and that’s
what’s driven the numbers through the building. And also it’s got us on that
track to hopefully one day being able to stand on our own 2 feet as an
organisation.”
