The Australian Director's Guild's response to the banning of a fellow filmmaker!

Dear Members of the Australian Director’s Guild Board

Perhaps you are skeptical:

“James must be guilty of something, surely! Screen Australia would not ban him for a third time for no reason, right?”

You should be skeptical.

You should keep in mind the following possibility, however:

There is no evidence that I am guilty as charged.

Ask yourself the question:

“If James intimidated anyone at Screen Australia in his correspondence, if he placed any member of staff at risk, why, for four years now, hasn’t Screen Australia simply made the offensive correspondence public?”

Is there is a logical reason?

Is my ‘placing at risk’ crime so dastardly that Screen Australia dare not speak its name? An offence so beyond the pale that the board feels it must keep secret at all costs!

Has it occurred to you that:

Screen Australia could so easily demolish my credibility with my own words, gleaned from my correspondence? Graeme Mason could, in May 2016, reveal me to be a liar and a fool for having spent four years insisting that I am innocent. Screen Australia could claim the high moral ground”

“These extracts from Mr Ricketson’s correspondence, prior to May 2012, make clear  that he presented a clear and present danger to members of Screen Australia staff. He was placing them at risk. We had a duty of care to protect our staff. In short, to ban him.”

Why does Screen Australia not go down this path?

And why, for four years now,  has the Screen Director’s Guild decided that the banning of a fellow film director is not of sufficient significance to ADG members to warrant a mention in the ADG newsletter? Is it because the ADG board has decided that it does not want to bite one of the hands that feeds it?

If the ADG is not practicing self-censorship why not report my banning? I mean, how many Australian filmmakers have been banned this past 40 years? I think that I am the only one. And since the days of Joe McCarthy (half a century now) has there ever been a filmmaker banned in a Western style democracy other than myself?

Even if you think that I deserve to be banned (perhaps the ADG board has been appraised the ADG board of evidence of which I am unaware!), surely the fact that one of the founders of what is now the ADG has been banned, for a third time, warrants at least one sentence in the ADG newsletter!

cheers

James

PS have you ever wondered what ‘placed at risk’ means, when applied to correspondence?