The UK Government today announced that UK Film Council will be replaced by a new organisation, headed by a robot: The Bullshitter 1000. In charge of it’s operation is a Senor Spielbergo who assures us that the entire British film industry is now in a very safe place: Bulgaria. The new organisation will be called: Who Wants to Make A British Film?
The Bullshitter 1000 robot is intended to replace all of the highly paid mandarins at the UKFC with a single, mega-expensive system whose artificial intelligence unit will decide who is worthy of the money. Already, the BS 1000 has come up with a plan to issue a series of £200,000 film lottery tickets for anybody seeking finance. The lucky winner will receive the pot of money. The losers will be forced to finish financing the winner – or face bankruptcy. Funds currently allocated to the National Lottery film fund will just about cover the cost of running the Bullshitter (which is run by new biotech IT company, Semens – their motto: “We’ve got spunk!”). In addition to this, the new organisation will partly fund TV game shows in which filmmakers compete to win their budget for their film. This will involve lots of gunging and ritual humiliation as a team of 12 film directors, producers and writers take on tricky obstacle courses all the while pitching their ideas to the Bullshitter 1000. Those still alive at the end may win the grand prize of having their film made. In Canada.
As well as the lottery co-ordinator, the Bullshitter has the additional feature of being able to to write it’s own screenplays (and thus becomes the first machine and perhaps most importantly, the first ever board member of the new Government organisation to become a member of the Writer’s Guild of Great Britain) and allocate crew based on audience figures from popular US films taken from leading cinema chains. It’s already formulated a plot which features Russell Brand as a singing poodle at a US high school supported by Michael Cain as vigilante dressed as Batman while attempting to win the top prize of Who Wants to Get in Debt with A Streedancer?. It’s allocated Mike Leigh to direct the film. Due to a floating point calculation error, and having allocated the entire UK’s broadband bandwidth to organisation’s accountants, the budget of this film will be precisely 2p.
Or we can just go and privately finance our own films. Seems simpler.
