At least four Australian films aimed squarely at teenagers are currently going through the system: Dance Academy, a film that follows the successful ABC television series; B Model, a comedy drama driven by actor Rachel Griffiths which mocks the world of fashion modelling; Emo: The Musical, a film about a star-crossed romance and turf war over a school music room; and Synchronicity, a synchronised swimming extravaganza set to the music of Kylie Minogue. All have development finance from Screen Australia, the usual first step for most Australian films that end up in cinemas.
Yet the government agency’s head of production Sally Caplan says “hardly any” films with serious teen aspirations are among the about 200 films on her development slate.
Eighty-six per cent of 14 to 24-year-olds visit the cinema each year, the highest rate of any demographic, so they’re worth targeting even if they’re not going as often as they used to.
Australian teens went in large numbers to see Red Dog, The Sapphires, and – looking back – Muriel's Wedding, Strictly Ballroom, and the Hollywood-backed Babe and Happy Feet films. But these films have broad appeal, why not make films specifically for teens?
Caplan blames the difficulty of competing with expensive Hollywood blockbusters and notes that many home-grown films are arthouse in nature and less attractive to your average Australian teenager.
Andrew Mason, one of the producers on invasion adventure Tomorrow, When the War Began, a rare Australian teen success, points to US cancer-ridden teen love story The Fault in Our Stars: “There is absolutely no reason that kind of movie couldn’t be made in Australia by Australians but it is difficult selling a film like that to teens because they are at a peak in their life in terms of ingesting media. The level of noise you have to cut through is gigantic.”
Ask five people why Hating Alison Ashley bombed and you’ll get five different answers.
Mason says large-scale advertising campaigns are needed to reach the teen audience, and this kind of global marketing grunt can only come from the well-resourced US studios. Independent productions, typically distributed by different companies in every territory, struggle to generate a co-ordinated release pattern which makes promotion difficult.
“The process of selling movies is no different to trying to make people buy any product, except it’s worse, because there’s a very limited window,” Mason says. “It’s not like putting a product on the supermarket shelves.”
He’s talking here about the ruthlessness of distributors; they quickly replace films if they fail to immediately grab audiences. From the outset, 20th Century Fox backed The Fault in Our Stars (besides Baz Luhrmann and George Miller, Australian-based directors struggle to get this kind of backing), but even with this marketing leg-up success can never be guaranteed, as indicated from the gratified reaction of producer Wyck Godfrey, calling the opening of the film "the most rewarding weekend of [his] career”. The film was adapted from John Green’s book and Godfrey says he’s “snatching up a lot of books” now for future projects.
Book adaptations play a huge role in creating hit films for teenagers in the US, providing readymade stories and inbuilt awareness that gets bums on seats. Think the fight-to-the-death Hunger Games films, the Twilight vampire films and sci-fi thriller Divergent, which is based on the Veronica Roth novel.
Greta Scacchi, Elena Cotta and Pia Miranda 'Looking for Alibrandi'. Source: Mary Evans Picture Library
Undoubtedly the popularity of John Marsden’s teen fiction series helped Tomorrow, When the War Began to entice teens – and older nostalgic audiences too, probably – to buy $13.5 million worth of cinema tickets in 2010. So did Melina Marchetta’s book of the coming-of-age tale Looking For Alibrandi, which grossed almost $8.3 million here a decade earlier. But ask five people why the 2005 film Hating Alison Ashley, from Robin Klein’s teen book, bombed and you’ll get five different answers. This is not just an Australian problem – the US films The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones (based on the book by Cassandra Clare) and The Golden Compass (based on the Philip Pullman series) didn’t live up to expectations either. Filmmaking is a risky business, but wise producers always look for saleable elements that mitigate the chance of failure.
Is the Australian young adult market the best place to start?
Once Australian books have made it big internationally, Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief for example, they quickly come to the notice of non-Australian producers who can pay more for rights and to make films. But it’s not just whether the books are bestsellers, other necessary considerations include whether they suit adaptation, are on the curriculum in schools, and suit the creation of multiple films.
The Australian YA authors whose names are most often tossed around – besides those already mentioned – include Margo Lanagan ('Tender Morsels'), Sonya Hartnett ('Thursday’s Child', 'Surrender'), Garth Nix ('The Old Kingdom' and other series) and Maureen McCarthy ('Queen Kat, Carmel and St Jude Get a Life', 'In Between', both of which have been made into miniseries). There’s also Isobelle Carmody ('The Obernewtyn Chronicles', which has an option pending for a series of films) who has been writing a film script adapted from her own book 'Greylands', which Australian actor Tara Morice is producing.
This local literature still has to compete with international titles, which is another factor likely to be limiting how many are being made into feature films.
“John Green’s 'The Fault in Our Stars' sold more than 300,000 in combined film tie-in and regular editions in Australia in 2014… by comparison, a successful local young adult (YA) title might sell 10,000.” says Brad Jefferies from the trade publication Books+Publishing.
Although Jeffries sees the entrance of small, independent publishers entering the YA market last year as a sign of its health: Sleepers with Eli Glasman’s 'The Boy’s Own Manual To Being a Proper Jew' and Black Inc. with 'Nona and Me'by Clare Atkin and Alice Pung’s 'Laurinda'. Let’s hope we’ll see these stories on our screens soon, but it doesn’t look promising.
Lisa Berryman, Children’s Publisher at HarperCollins, says HarperCollins doesn’t get many rights enquiries from filmmakers, and neither does Susie Gibson managing editor of Penguin Young Readers: “We receive more TV interest.”
Do Australian teens want to see Australian movies?
A lot of teenagers went to see Mad Max: Fury Road, directed by Australia’s George Miller. “It has what teens, male teens, expect: giant spectacle, giant stars, big action,” says Seph McKenna, Australian production head at Roadshow Films, the film’s distributor. McKenna is optimistic, and what he believes is music to the ears of anyone concerned with the ever growing tendency of US creative products swamping our own.
“We will get to a point where there is blockbuster fatigue and Australian teens will find their local voice and be into that… We hoped that’s what would happen with These Final Hours, that they’d decide it was awesome, but it was slaughtered by Guardians of the Galaxy and Lucy," he says.
“We are also entering a do-it-yourself era of making things. Groups of individuals can’t make a Harry Potter film, but they can make These Final Hours.”
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