The bigger the role, the higher the fee when `you pay as you play' in film venture

PAYING to appear in' a movie is the latest trend in the growing corporate entertainment scene.

Tired, stressed out executives, looking for something more exotic than the traditional fare of exclusive golf club memberships, helicopter lessons and falconry weekends, are queuing up to pay fees of up to £1,800 for the ultimate experience of starring in a film.

Hotel accommodation and meals are included. The novel "pay as you play" fund raising scheme which could help to finance many low budget film productions combines the world of corporate entertainment with more mainstream film financing.

It is the brainchild of Jimmy Sweeney, a Kerry born film producer who financed his latest film "Atlantic Conspiracy" by advertising for actors willing to pay for a part. The bigger the role, the higher the fee.

The enterprising director, who was unsuccessful in raising any money through the Section 35 finance scheme, or film board grants, courageously re mortgaged his home and invested the proceeds into marketing the film project as a corporate entertainment package. The scheme was so successful he managed to raise over 45 per cent of the film's £170,000 budget through the corporate sector alone.

Jimmy Sweeney's company, Movie Horizons, is now putting together two new "pay as you play" film finance packages to fund a series of low budget feature film projects he intends to embark upon later this summer.

Significantly, he has already secured enough advance bookings that the demand for available film roles may be in danger of outstripping the supply. The idea has generated a lot of interest in Britain after it was featured as a television news item last November.

This resulted in a major British' corporate hospitality firm sending over two executives on a fact finding mission to check out the facilities Movie Horizons had to offer.

The London based firm is now planning to include the scheme on its list of corporate weekends which includes Rambo weekends in the Scottish highlands, Zen Buddhist retreats, and sailing the North Sea on board a replica 7th century pirate clipper ship.

Jimmy Sweeney is optimistic about the long term funding prospects of his film projects and believes that the corporate entertainment/hospitality market in Ireland is a potentially huge cash rich source of revenue that has never been tapped, let alone recognised.

Market research he carried out revealed that in the UK alone there are over 300 specialist firms servicing the corporate entertainment/hospitality sector. The market is estimated to be worth over of £460 million sterling a year.

In comparison, he discovered that there were few, if any, corporate entertainment/hospitality firms in Ireland despite the existence of an enormous client base of hundreds of resident multinational firms employing tens of thousands of high salary earning staff.

Most of the bigger companies in Ireland, he maintains, end up trying to organise corporate entertainment and hospitality on an ad hoc basis with management having very little variety in the way of corporate perks and incentives to choose from to offer valued staff and clients.

According to his research, there are over 52,000 skilled professionals and executive grade managerial staff in Ireland who earn in excess of £30,000 per annum. That figure represents over 5/2 per cent of the workforce (including self employed) and it is the target customer profile at which Jimmy,

Sweeney's firm is aiming.

His research also indicated that the corporate entertainment and hospitality market in Ireland could be worth as much a £35 million a year. This fact was not lost on far sighted GAA planners who were able to successfully underwrite a huge percentage of the construction costs on the new Croke Park Super stadium via the sale of executive hospitality boxes and seats alone.

Corporate funding, Jimmy Sweeney feels, is the answer to the needs of small film production companies like his own that are in need of hard cash. Section 35 fund managers and the film board, he maintains, tend to completely ignore firms that are endeavouring to make modestly budgeted films for the global television market.

They favour big screen multi million pound epics instead, he argues, pointing out that the market for these films is quite small in comparison to the world of television, video and satellite broadcasting.

Critics initially scorned at Jimmy Sweeney's novel fund raising idea as the height of folly, citing the fact that only trained thespians could convincingly act a role and that any film full of amateurs would be an impossible proposition to sell.

The opposite, however, has been the case. Currently he's finalising a television distribution deal with an American network, Atlanta Home Box Office and planning to open a small film studio in Dublin later this year.