Movie Industry England

Britain's Pinewood Studios, famous for James Bond movies, is buying rival Shepperton Studios for $50.55 million, creating a company capable of taking on Hollywood, British newspapers reported today. The merger of Europe's two biggest studios will enable the joint company to attract major filmmakers with the biggest budgets. Already, two-thirds of the work undertaken at Pinewood and Shepperton comes from Hollywood.

Britain has long been a magnet for Hollywood filmmakers, both because its special-effects technicians are regarded as being among the world's best, and because it is usually cheaper to work here than in the United States. But Britain's home-grown movie industry never has taken full wing, despite a string of box-office successes like the latest, "Billy Elliot," and a slew of Oscars over the years.

Maybe it has something to do with the accent. Maybe it's because they are deemed bettertrained and more versatile, but whatever the reason, British actors have always been a dominant force at the Academy Awards. This year is no different, with veteran British performers Albert Finney ("Erin Brockovich"), Dame Judi Dench ("Chocolat") and Julie Walters ("Billy Elliot") nominated for supporting roles. And one of the year's nominated directors, Ridley Scott ("Gladiator"), hails from England.

In the late '50s and early '60s the British movie industry was hit by a New Wave of filmsfrom directors such as Tony Richardson, John Schlesinger and Lindsay Anderson. They presented an England vastly different from the prim and proper Britain that had been depicted before in films. Described as "kitchen sink" dramas, these films depicted the post-World War II working-class Britain inhabited by angry young men and women trapped in joyless jobs and relationships.

It's been nearly two decades since the British screenwriter Colin Welland screamed "The British are coming!" after having won the Oscar for "Chariots of Fire." That proclamation, made at the Academy Awards ceremony in 1982, was to prove embarrassingly premature in the following years. But it also went to show how the British, albeit reluctantly, seem to measure much of the success of their own film industry in terms of how well "we" are doing "over there."

Mike Hodges says he's not a gambling man--at least not the sort to hang out in casinos--but the veteran director of highly praised films such as "Get Carter" and "Terminal Man" knows a thing or two about the roll of the dice. He gambles every time he makes a movie. And in an up-and-down 30-year career, luck has not always been on his side. On the strength of his first film, "Get Carter," he was assured a seat in the pantheon of British cinema.

Given the situation, it's surprising Nick Park and Peter Lord aren't showing signs of panic. In a hospitality area outside their offices at Aardman Animations Ltd. they're chatting calmly, pausing to punctuate the conversation with cheerful quips. Meanwhile, one floor below, a small army of animators is working feverishly on more than two dozen small sound stages to complete "Chicken Run," Aardman's first full-length feature film, which the two men are co-directing.

"Chicken Run," which opened to surprisingly strong box office (in 10 days, it has taken in about $41 million, which is almost what the film cost) and critical raves (it's currently the best-reviewed movie in the country, according to a popular movie Web site), marks the feature debut of Aardman Animations, the British creator of the Oscar-winning "Wallace & Gromit" shorts. It's also the first real feature made in clay animation.

More sex for adults, less violence for children. That is what British cinema buffs might expect to see in their films and videos under new guidelines issued Thursday by the British Board of Film Classification, the independent body charged with rating--and in many cases cutting--films here. The country's film censors say they will take more of a hands-off approach to movies and videos for viewers age 18 and older, but will be even stricter about violence and drugs in films for minors.

A play about a Hollywood film crew's invasion of small-town Ireland has become a Hollywood-style success for the two Irish actors starring in the surprise hit "Stones in His Pockets." Conleth Hill and Sean Campion, who play down-on-their-luck film extras and 11 other characters in "Stones," can hardly believe their own luck. They've taken the show from Belfast to Dublin and from one West End theater to another, where a parade of Hollywood stars has made its way from the audience backstage.