I went to a Fringe Festival show last night, and I was late. This is not a surprising or newsworthy event by any means, but it did afford me the opportunity to catch up with the doorbitch while I waited for the "late entry" moment when they open the door and allow you to slink guiltily into your front row seats (man I hate it when pricks like me walk in late to shows).

Anyway, the doorbitch at this show was a chap who goes by the handle of Noack. Now, Noack is the kind of bloke who rigs his shitbox car up with an elaborate alarm system, so that when he approaches the car in the street and points a remote control at it, passers-by are befuddled to see a 1984 model Sigma going "bloopbloop". Several years after first meeting Noack, I discovered that he is a highly skilled (not to mention bestockinged) performer of traditional Estonian Dance. This is completely irrelevant but it is the kind of detail I wish I could think of for characters in the scripts I write.

But I digress! Noack and I had a conversation which got me thinking. Noack has clearly put some thought into this, and I doff my hat to him while completely stealing his premise and writing it here:

WANT TO MAKE A BILLION DOLLARS IN THE FILM INDUSTRY?

Can't be done, you say?

Not in Australia, you say?

No such thing as a film industry, you say?

Then think outside the box...

START YOUR OWN FILM FESTIVAL!

Seriously. Start your own film festival. Now. What are the overheads? Maybe you have to get a permit for something. Maybe you have to get some insurance. Maybe you have to do a teensy bit of publicity. But get this, you charge! You charge, say, thirty bucks to EACH SHORT FILM ENTERED. Imagine that! That's, like, three dollars per minute that most of these films will run for. Most festivals have twenty thousand submissions. The smaller ones only get hundreds.

Hack in to the desperate market of filmmakers who can't find a way into the film industry, and watch them come to you. You can even write it into the application form that you own various rights in relation to the films these people submit to you.

Then, and here's the really good bit, hold the "festival" somewhere big and cheap but with a huge screen and CHARGE FOR ENTRY. Better still, the prizes for best film and so on can be donations from companies who want their stuff advertised to young people . Also, get a website and try to get Americans to enter or something. That way you can call yourself an International Festival, which means people will be doing interviews with you in the EG all about how you started the idea in a garage one time because you "just knew there was this gap out there and all these voices weren't being heard". Preferably there will be a shot of you on a lounge chair that has been dragged into an urban street, which will afford you an excellent opportunity to be photographed in sunglasses. And possibly also to carrying a martini which you can rest on a copy of The Unbearable Lightness of Being or Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance.

If it seems that I have a chip on my shoulder in relation to any of the above, well that is because I do. I wish I had thought of it earlier, frankly.

My festival is going to be called Alternation Film Festival (because it's alternative and nation all merged into one). Bugger, though, it already exists in Taipei.

Of course it does.