Cinema Papers no. 56 March 1986 (2025)

OCR

I . d Schepisi
:;eMe.ry1.S“‘[...]

TEL: 03/875 02 22

No
In
T
R
n
V
E
3
m
G
A

FRONT LINES: A round—up of

the local films and people partici-
pating in the American Film
Market, a background to the
controversy about the Sydney
Fillmmakers' Co—Op, and a report
from the Film and History Confer-
ence. Plus festival reports from
London, Hyderabad, Havana
and the Film Nouveau season;
ourregularcolumnsfrom around
the world; and profiles on writer/
director Jackie McKimmie, actor
Colin Friels and actor/director

Jack Thompson . . . . . . . . . .[...].4

ANYONE CAN BE A
STUNTMAN ONCE: On loca-

tion in Sydney to execute a
record-breaking stunt for Dead-
End Drive-In, Guy Norris talks to
Nick Roddick about the stunt-
man as scientist and the highs of

jumping . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ..17

MAN OF PLENTY: Back in

Australia aftersixyears andthree
features in the US, writer/
producer/director Fred Schepisi
speaks to David Stratton about
collaboration with David Hare,
the magic of Meryl and the ones

that got away . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .[...]for pace, Brian
Trenchard-Smith has become
one of Australia's most success-
ful and sought—after directors. He
talks to Brian Jones[...]is O'Rourke seems poised
to explode two myths — the cir-
cumstances of nuclear testing in
the Pacific and the notion that
independent documentaries
should be confined to the art-
house circuit. He talks to Nick
Roddick about his early films.
Half Life and his work methods

CHANGES: Producer Jill Robb,
director Robyn Nevin and ac-
tress Judy Morris talk to Debi
Enker about The More Things
Changenq
drama aimed at a neglected
s[...]8 contemporary

. . . . , . ..3O

CAPTAIN OF THE CLOUDS:
One of Australia's most enduring

actors, John Hargreaves, dis-
cusses his career in theatre, film
and television with Gail McCrea

PRODUCTION: A comprehen-

sive round-up of what's in pro-
duction in Australia, with special
reports on Kangaroo and Tracy,
plus our new Barometer, record-

ing feature film and televi-
sion production in Australia in
1985 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .[...]o, an innova-
tor whose cranes, camera cars,
wind and smoke machines have
taken the film industry by storm

FILM REVIEWS: Fu|l—length re-

views of Alamo Bay, The Color
Purple, Half Life, Jenny Kissed
Me, Letter to Brezhnev, Marie,
The More Things Change...,
Out of Africa, Plenty, Sky
Pirates, Wrong World and Year
of the Dragon. Plus shorter
reviews of all the recent releases

Bernardo
Berto/ucci by Robert Phillip
Kolker; Goddess: The Secret
Lives of Marilyn Monroe by An-
thony Summers; The Australian
Film Book, 1930-Today by Simon[...]

6 *
CELEBRATING

gyé/0/I/.3

OF TELEVISION ACHIEVEMENT

The C ompany that introduced Australian Television to the

World with such major productions as.‘-

* PRISONER — CELL BLOCK H ‘A’ IMAGE OF DEATH

‘k SONS AND DA UGHTERS ISLAND TRADER

‘A’ THE YOUNG DOCTORS DEMOLITION

‘Ir NEIGHBOURS GONE T[...]UAD MAMA’S GONE A—HUNTING

‘k SECRET VALLEY THE NEWMAN SHAME

‘A’ RUNAWAY ISLAND PLUNGE INTO DARKNESS

‘A’ THE RESTLESS YEARS ROSES BLOOM TWICE

‘A’ BELLAMY THE SCALP MERCHANT

‘K’ PUNISHMENT CASE FOR THE DEFENCE

‘A’ WAT ERLOO STATION THE FAMILY WAY

‘k TAURUS RISING WITHOUT CONSENT

* ABBA — THE MOVIE THETHE
‘A’ THE DEATH TRAIN CONFESSIONS OF RONALD BIGGS
‘A’ THEAUSTRALIA. Tel. ( + 612) 428:0666 Telex 220 425
\ Te[...]

Founding publishers: Peter Beilby.
Scott Murra[...]McFar|ane, Tom Flyan.

Signed articles represent the views of their
author. and not necessarily those of the
editor. While every care is taken with
manuscripts and materials supplied to the
magazine, neither the editor nor the pub-
lishers can accept liability for any loss or[...]h may arise. This magazine
may; not be reproduced in whole or in part
wittgput the express permission of the
copyright owner. Cinema Papers is pub»

. Iished[...], 644 Victoria Street, North
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia 3051.
Telephone: (03) 329 5983. Telex:
AA30625 Re[...]by Ernie Althoft. Main
photograph: Dead-End Drive-In (photo:

Fiobbie Gribble). Inset." Meryl Streep in
Plenty.

_$/in Comniitrioru

cinema Papers is published
with financial assistance from the

AUSTRALIAN FILM
COMMISSION
and FILM VICTORIA.

AAA
A
A

Film Victoria

“Is[...]. . .?”

For no better reason than that this is the first issue of 1986 (the ‘January’ issue was actually published,
as th[...]as), here are a few anniversaries. It is 85 years and five
months since the first film to be made in Australia, Soldiers of the Cross, was shown by the Salvos at
the Melbourne Town Hall. It is just under 20 years si[...]re Australian than most ‘Australian’ films of the sixties, had its Sydney premiere. It is just
under fifteen years since Wake in Fright was shown at Cannes, and almost exactly seventeen since the
Melbourne premiere of Tim Burstall’s Two Thousand Weeks, the first film of what David Stratton
would later call ‘the last new wave’. Finally, at time of writing, it[...]ctor, Peter Weir, was nominated for Best Director in Hollywood.

On another tack, it is sixteen and a half years since the first broadsheet issue of Cinema Papers came
out of Carlton, and a little over twelve since the magazine began regular publication in October 1969.
Honesty forces me to record that it[...]Cinema Papers was forced to suspend
publication, and just under two since it started up again. It is also thirteen months, almost to the day,
since I took over the editorship.

This, as regular readers will have noticed (and as first-time readers may be interested to know), is the
first issue to appear in the new, reduced format, breaking with twelve years of tradition and probably
offending one or two people. We’ve done it for a number of reasons — people couldn’t fit the old
format on their bookshelves, newsagents didn’t like handling it. But the main one was so we could, at
last, afford to prin[...]There are a few other breaks with tradition, too. The magazine has been extensively redesigned, the
features I have introduced since I took over — the news from around the world, the regular location
reports, the policy of reviewing every film, however bad, that opens in Australia — have been revamped
and tightened up, and a few extra ones have been added, notably the Production Barometer on pages
62-63, which will b[...]h. 1985 was, by almost universal
consensus, a bad year for the Australian cinema. Leaving aside the third Mad Max, which did not make
the earth move as much as expected, the only local film to do proportionally decent business at the
Australian box office was Bliss, and that had to be four-walled by its producers. Certainly, none of the
big movies did more than skate across the surface of the Great Australian Public — not the SAFC’s
expensive Robbery Under Arms (which is out this month as a miniseries); not The Empty Beach (Bryan
Brown may be a star in Hollywood, but he doesn’t seem to pull ’em in back home); and certainly not
Burke & Wills, on which so many hop[...]pinned. One or two unkind
people have said that, in 1985, Cinema Papers backed nothing but losers with our cover pictures. It
wasn’t hard.

A mid-year audience survey, commissioned by the Australian Film Commission, revealed that
Austral[...]r went out at all — to see an Australian
movie, and that few of them (less than 5°70) could name any Australian film made the previous year. I
doubt things would be much better if the survey were done again this April. But April 1987 might give a
better result. We’re only into the second month of 1986 as I write this, but already two of the best
Australian films for quite some time — The More Things Change . . . and Half Life — are on the verge
of release. It is too soon to say how they will do. But they get a lot of coverage in this issue, and we are
proud to be associated with them.

All of[...]something of a dilemma for Australian filmmaking. The days of automatic
support for the sound of strine are long since gone, taking with them the quirky, low-budget films on
which the renaissance was built, and we are still a long way off the brave New World of films that aim
for — and squarely hit — their limited commercial targets. This is almost certainly a dilemma the
industry is going to have to sort out for itself, because there is every sign that the government no longer
believes in the notion of a tax-aided cultural and economic flagship. And the seductive options of
television may not prove to be a salvation either. The simple economics of the matter are that, in order
to make a miniseries that enough Australians will want to watch for the commercial channels to go on
putting up the money, you have to spend around twice as much as the channels can afford (or are
prepared) to pay. Which means overseas sales, overseas stars (and, quite possibly, overseas stories). All
of which mean, in turn, setting your sights on something other than Australian life and culture.

Cinema Papers supports the Australian film industry, and it supports Australian film culture: we
wouldn’t exist without either, nor should either exist without the other. But they are, increasingly, not
the same thing. That doesn’t mean we have to choose[...]makers, like anybody else, have to make a living,
and that commercial success is not some kind of cop-out. The film named most often in the AFC
survey was The Man From Snowy River. The fact that over 10% of the respondents thought it was
made last year indicates as much the film’s hold on their memories as it does their[...]new how to, we can’t just
make Snowy Rivers. As the experience of country after country has shown, a film industry built entirely
on the notion of horses for courses — films aimed at s[...]to grow, because that culture will feed back into the industry and
replenish it, as the European new wave fed into the American industry, and the American industry’s B
movies fed into the European new wave.

The collapse of the Sydney Filmmakers Co-op, whether from natural or unnatural causes, seems to
signal the end of an era. But something has to grow in its place. So, in addition to supporting the
industry (which we will do in issues like this one, partly aimed at the American Film Market in Los
Angeles, where two dozen Australian films are on sale), it is the job — the duty — of Cinema Papers to
agitate for that something, to support the sort of films that will last. And part of that agitation is going
to be to say to the government bodies that subsidize us, as they subsidize other areas of the industry,
that it is their duty, too, to encourage that kind of filmmaking, not just on the fringes, but at the very
centre of the industry. Increasingly, it seems, this nee[...]

Buoyant Australian presence at
the Los Angeles market
20-plus Australian films for the AFM’s “banner

year”

With the disappointing results of
last year fading away, the Australian
film industry looks as though it will be
approaching the American Film
Market in Los Angeles (20-28 Fe-
bruary) in a fairly buoyant mood. it
should be an important[...]Association
director Tim Kittelson, be a "banner
year", with around 150 features cur-
rently slotted in for screenings in
nineteen West Los Angeles theatres.
The market itself is located at the
Beverly Hilton hotel.

There will, at time of goi[...]n
films on offer, represented by a
series oflocal and international sales
agencies. And there can be little
doubt that the AFM has, by now,
almost totally replaced Berlin as Au-
stralia's second biggest interna-
tional market outlet, after Cannes
and somewhat ahead of MIFED
(Milan in November).

Providing access to the all-
important American independent
film and ancillary circuit and to a
large number of overseas markets,
the 1986 AFM should help Austra-
lian producers improve somewhat
on last year, when New Zealand
drew level on the American sales
market. Although Varietylists eleven
Australian films and only four Kiwi
ones as being released in the U. S. in
1985, the Australian total was swol-
len by Satori's ‘I Love Australian
Films’ festival in New York in Fe-
bruary, which included brief show-
ings of se[...]of them nearly ten years
old. Without thatboost, Australia and
NewZealand would have tied at four
films each.

Looked at from this side of the
Pacific, probably the major change
for this year's AFM — and one which
will have considerable significance
for overseas sales of Australian pic-
tures in general — comes as a result
of the announcement by New South
Wales Film Corporation Chairman,
Paul Riomfalvy, on 16 January, that
the NSWF C's West Coast represent-
ative, the Australian Films Office,
would henceforth be known as Au-
stralian Films international Inc.
Headed by the energetic Bob Lewis,
the renamed organization will act as
a worldwide sale[...]stralian producers, not just
those connected with the NS WFC.

The announcement itself, which
was turned into someth[...]b by its coincidence with
a journalists’ strike in Sydney, was
made in the presence of Australian
Film Commission Chief Exec[...]indi-
cate that NSW was not attempting to
muscle in on the AFC‘s marketing
territory. In fact, as Williams pointed
out, the AFC has, since 1984, been
backing out of direct involvement in
the marketing of product, and now
sees its role as providing "research,
information, advice and interna-
tional and domestic liaison

4 — March CINEMA PAPERS

What the change does cast into
some doubt, though, is the con-
tinued existence of the AFC‘s Los
Angeles office, headed by North
Ameri[...]ac-
credited American marketing repre-
sentative, the space left for Guardian
hardly seems worthy of his talents,
and there are rumours he may be on
the lookout for another position.

Of the new Australian films on
show atthe AFM, the two biggest (in
terms of budget) are the Hoyts Ed-
gley Burke 8- Wills, and the
YarramanlUAA production, The
Right-Hand Man, which will be
looked after in Los Angeles by
UAA’s Californian affiliate, UAA[...]ng Burke & Wills, which
performed disappointingly in Au-
stralia, but which is generally rec-
koned to have a better chance
overseas. According to one of the
film’s two stars, Nigel Havers, who
plays Wills, it has been extremely
well received at private screenings
in the UK. The reason? Unlike Au-
stralians, who were brought up on
the tale of the two luckless explorers,
overseas audiences don't know
what’s going to happen at the end!

The Right-Hand Man, on
which we carried a location report in
our Christmas issue, is one of the
most eagerly-awaited of the 1986
films. A feature debut for Di Drew,
with a strong cast headed by Rupert
Everett and Hugo Weaving, it is a
period drama that deals with the
decidedly modern issue of sexual
surrogacy.

The New South Wales Film Corpo-
ration’s crop includes Dead-End
Drive-In, ourcoverston/, of which a
promo reel will be on show; The
More Things change...featured
on pages 35-37 of this issue; Short
Changed, the Ross Matthewsl
George Ogilvie film about a young[...]ghting to be
united with his part-Aboriginal son;
and Going Sane, a comedy about
"a man ’s obsession with the passing
of time”, directed by Michael
Robertson, and starring John
Waters and Judy Morris. Lewis and
NSW marketing chief, Danny Col-
lins, will also be hoping to drum up
advance interest in The Bee-
Eater, another George Ogilvie film,
now shooting on the New South
Wales coast.

The Ross Dimsey/Tim Burstall
production of Kangaroo ([...]is another
major contender for world sales,
given the presence of Judy Davis in
the cast and the name of D. H. Lawr-
ence on the credits. It will be repre-
sented by Filmways' Lo[...]er
Collins), who will also be looking
after Devil in the Flesh, a version

of Raymond Radiguet‘s novel relo-‘

cated to World War II Australia,

Australian movies to the world : the New
South Wales Film Corporation’: Danny

Collins (left) and Australian Films
International’: Bob Lewis.

which is the feature debut of former
Cinema Papers editor, Sco[...]g a couple of
films.‘ Jenny Kissed Me, which he
produced and Brian Trenchard-
Smith directed (see the interview
with Trenchard-Smith on page 26);
and I Own the Racecourse, the
Barron Films feature abouta gullible
teenage boy conned into believing
he has bought the Harold Park race-
course in Sydney.

Cori Films International, headed
by the omnipresent Marie Hoy, will
be looking after this year's Yoram
Gross crop (there is a possibility that
Gross himself will be attending the
AFM), which include the completed
animation films, Dot and Keeto
and Dot and the Koala, and
promo reels of the two films which,
as part of Gross's regular annual
two-picture turnaround, are cur-
rently in production: Dot and the
Bunyip and Dot and the Whale.
Cori is also representing Malcolm
(discussed by Colin Friels in the int-
erview on page 14, where he also

A ‘L -4 - é.,, «u. =,
talks about his lead role in Kanga-
roo), the David ParkerlNadia Tass
film about an ingenuous t[...]amson, who have a new
Los Angeles general manager in the
shape of David Armstrong, will be
handling a couple of smaller films:
Barbara Boyd-Anderson's The
Still Point, about a deaf girl expe-
riencing the traumas of adolesc-
ence; and Bill Bennett’s A Street
to Die, which won Chris Haywood
the Best Actor prize at last Sep-
tember's AFI Awards for his playing
of a victim of Agent Orange. And
producer Don Catchlove will be tak-

Hugo Weaving in The Right-Hand
Man.

Judy Davis and Colin Friels in
Kangaroo.

ing his colourful Shakespeare adap-
tation, Twelfth Night.

Other Australian product on offer
at the AFM includes the economical
soft-core movie, Leonora, which is
being handled by Showcase Video;
the fantasy film, Frog Dreaming,
the third Trenchard-Smith movie in
the market, starring E.T.’s Henry
Thomas; Fair Game and, possibly,
Australian Dream, a profile of[...]

$12.50 for a full year!

If you are already a subscriber to CINEMA PAPERS, and
introduce a new subscriber, you’ll both be enti[...]*Or more (see over).

Place completed order form in a sealed envelope. Mail to:
CINEMA PAPERS[...]

Yes. I’d like to sub[...]RS for:
Tick whichever rate you would like -

E 1 year at $12.50

2 years at $22.50

Name ..............[...]...... .. (only if using a credit card)

D I work in the film industry
Cl I am a film enthusiast
HU[...]

Op dispute.

Arguments and resolutions follow Christmas Eve

liquidation.

On the afternoon of 31 January,
Mandy King of the Sydney Film-
makers‘ Co-Op Action Group rang
the liquidators of the Sydney Film-
makers‘ Co-Operative to find out
which of several bidders had suc-
ceeded in acquiring the 400—odd in-
dependent films distributed through
the Co-Op.

The liquidators, says King, de-
clined to advise the name of the new
distributor, suggesting that such an
announcement was up to that party,
it was another symbolic and singu-
larly useless action among many
that have accompanied the debate:
throughoutJanuary, the Filmmakers‘
Co-Op and the Australian Film Com-
mission have yelled at each other in
print across the breakfast tables of a
million homes in termsjust as empty.

From what has appeared in the
press, the public must assume that
there are two sidesto the conflict. But
careful reading of the stated objec-
tives of these two sides would reveal
that they share the same aspirations
as farasindependentfilmmakers are
concerned.

The arguments about why the Co-
Op has gotitselfintofinancial difficul-
ties[...]nt.

Thefirstindication ofpublictrouble
came with the protest at the AFC‘s
headquarters in North Sydney on 9
January. There is continuing ar[...]why this happened,
since it is acknowledged that the Co—
Op’s directors were forced to place
the organization in the hands of a
provisional liquidator in December.
When the AFC failed to bail them out
with an emergency grant, in the now
accepted manner of other arts orga-
nizations, the Co-Op was sud-
denlyfaced with the prospect of clos-
ing down for real.

On 10 January trading ceased.
That was the day after the staff went
to the AFC offices in a bitter mood.
Overthe next two weeks, statements
and letters, public meetings and the
formation of the Action Group gained
general press coverage.

But the first shot in the paper war
was fired by AFC Chief Executive
Kim Wi[...]ement began: “A
number of damaging, mischievous
and inaccurate media reports have
been circulated in recentdays in rela-
tion to the insolvency of the Sydney
Filmmakers’ Co-Operative."

Williams went on to “summarize
the current position", saying the AFC
had approved a grant of $221,500 in
the 85/86 financial year, and that all
monies due to the Co-Operative up
until 31 December 1985 had been
paid.

He also stated that, back in July,
the AFC had advised the Co-Op that
it would notprovide any turtheremer/
g[...]-
vided extra cashflow assistance of
over $52,000~and pointing out that it
was at an Extraordinary General
Meeting of members on 18 De-
cember that the Co-Op voted to go
into receivership.

The AFC met with the liquidator on

9 January and agreed to provide
funds to cover one month‘s rental
and wages for several staff in orderto
allow an orderly wind-down, Wil-
liams said. He went on to say that
when Sue Kaufman, the administra-
tive co-ordinator, arrived for a meet-
ing on 9 January, requested by the
AFC, “she was accompanied by
several interested members and
staff of the Co-Operative, who
staged a minor demonstration".

On Monday, 13 January, the Co-
Op issued its rejoinder Media
Release, claiming that the AFC was
kept fully aware of its financial situa-
tion and that some AFC recommen-
dations, like an earlier move to
shopfront premises, had in fact ac-
celerated their problems. In the 17
January edition of The National
Times, a full-page advertisement
appeared, headed ‘Crisis for Inde-
pendent Film‘.

Most importantly, the ad promoted
a public meeting on Sunday 19
January at Paddington Town Hall.
The Action Group was formed at this
meeting, and it passed several reso-
lutions, including resolution Number
4, which “urges the Federal Govern-
ment to increase the level of funding
to the AFC, and urges the AFC to
increase its allocation to the inde-
pendent film and video sector”.

The thrust of these resolutions
could well be summed up by none
other than Kim Williams, writing in
The Sydney Morning Herald on 21
January, when he stated three objec-
tives the AFC believed must be
achieved: "1. The maximum expo-
sure of independent film and video
product to Australian audiences. 2.
The achievement of the maximum
possible financial return to indepen-
dent producers. 3. The provision of
an effective voice for the indepen-
dent film community."

The Action Group used a larger
numberof resolutions, but effectively
said much the same thing. And,in
another letter to the Editor of The
Sydney Morning Herald, Joy Toma
of the Action Group agreed that Wil-
|iams'out|ine of the future objectives
were “quite compatible with the ob-
jectives of the Co— Operative".

By 24 January, events had taken a
step forward: in the time-honoured
tradition of bureaucracies the world
over, a working party was set up to
look into the state of subsidized film
distribution. A telex announced that
the Action Group would be ‘‘closely
monitoring the deliberations of this
working party, to ensure that it sup-
ports the ongoing national distribu-
tion and exhibition of these films in
the spirit of the old Co-Op”.

The spirit is obviously willing, but

/the flesh has been weak: everyone it

seems, is keen to see the continua-
tion of efficient distribution of inde-
pendent films. The films are, by
consensus, a vital artistic and socio-
logical resource. Somehow,
however, renting them out has been
financially unprofitable. The bill, in all
senses, has now arrived.

Andrew L. Urban

Gone west
and Film conference turns into a

History
mellow get-together

By the end of the first day of the
Third History and Film Conference,
held from 2-6 December in Perth,
almost no one was wearing an
identity badge. This was because
almost no one needed an intro-[...], to hear
what they had to say, to deliver
papers and to chat between
sessions.

An uneventful conference, then.
No jejeune polemics to stir the
blood, no raging confrontations. with
academics h[...]eakthroughs,
not even any delectable scandal.

By the same token, there was not
much to complain about, either.
Most of the papers were interesting
(to other academics, at any rate), the
amblence was great (the University
of Western Australia does have the
most beautiful campus in the
country), Steve’s had Guinness on
tap, the Conference dinner was held
at the Yacht Club, and the wine tour
was generously primed.

Am I saying that the film-academic
establishment has grown fat and
lazy’? I don‘t really think so. It's just
tha[...]t so passionately
held as once they were. Many of the
certainties of just a few years ago
now seem questionable, and
academics (like the rest of us) are
casting about for other approaches,
are willing to listen, and are waiting
for something worth listening to.

The most exciting things worth
listening to in Perth came, not from
an academic paper, but from[...]is not an easy movie to
describe. It is about how the Austra-
lian landscape has been imaged
over the years, and it is an object
lesson in history-on-film, which uses
movies from the past as part of its
data.

What sets it apart from many other
efforts in the same genre is its
suspicion that there is no single
explanation for events, no ‘true
history‘ — in this case, no ‘true Aus-
tralian landscape‘. The result is a
densely-packed, ‘avant-garde‘,
talky, didactic and imperfect work —
definitely a must-see item.

The original idea for these Confer-
ences was to get historians and film
academics together, presuming that
the meeting could have some effect
on those respective worlds. That aim
was not fully realized this year,
because Australian historians stayed
away in droves. it seems that estab-
lished cultural areas — like history ~
don't like the idea that there may be
something to learn from upstart
phenomena, like the movies.

Thus, the visiting history types
were fish doubly out of water, and
the experience can't have been
much fun — particula[...]harles Geshekter of California
State. whose film, The Parching
Winds of Somalia, provoked the
nastiest attacks of the week. Here, a
lack of film background meant that
Geshekter had almost no idea of
what he wanted on the screen —

and what he got from his crew was
simply a series of[...],
neatly nullifying what sophistication
there was in the ideas behind the
film. The film people were not
tolerant, but Geshekter, int[...]imulated rather than wounded by
their vehemence.

The conference had a theme: the
thirties. You can see how the new
German Nazi films might be
squeezed into that theme, but it is
harder to figure out how Camera
Natura and The Parching Winds
of Somalia fitted. Nobody came in
period costume (more‘s the pity)
and. as it turned out. very little was
done with the thirties idea.

Take the sessions dealing in detail
with certain films. These were all
Hollywood thirties product, which
the paper-givers apparently‘
reckoned were a bit strange. But,
although the strangeness was
remarked on, it was mostly not ex-
plained, or it was explained in some
off-hand way — that the early thirties
pre-dated the ‘classic’ period in
Hollywood was one of the ideas
advanced.

One of these papers was given by[...]for provocative attacks
on film theory, academics and other
worthy targets; but, this time, he
seemed to be demythologizing him-
self in a long, obsessive analysis of
Peter lbbetson that contained not
one word of vituperation. At the end
of the session, you could have cut
the disappointment with a knife.

More fun than Marti[...](unspoken) movie words, "Me Jane,
you Tarzan“, in which the La Trobe
film academic set out to demon-
strate, with high good humour and
erudition, that Jane was more of a
partner to the ape-man than a sub-
ordinate.

On the other hand, Kristen (The
Classic Hollywood Cinema) Thomp-
son's analysis of The Black Cat did_
not match up either to the film or to
what she has done in print. It
seemed designed to smooth out the
peculiarities of this decidedly
peculiar horror flick which, to this
observer, was the wrong tack to
take.

Another chunk of the programme
was devoted to John Grierson, the
‘father’ of the documentary. in these
sessions, it was open season on
dad. Canadian Peter Morris
(Queen's University) got off the first
round with an elegant, sophistical
argument[...]blicly admitted
his Oedipal relation to Grierson, and.
showed a fine Humphrey Jennings
film, Spare Time, made under the
old man's (disapproving) gaze. At
this poi[...]

Bill Rout!

Briefly . . .

I Vicki Molloy has been appointed
as the new executive director of the
Australian Film Institute. Molloy joins
the AFI after six years at the Aus-
tralian Film Commission, which she
joined as manager of the Women's
Film Fund.

For the past two years, Molloy has
been the director of the Creative
Development Branch, responsible
for programmes of assistance to
new and innovative filmmakers,
cultural activities, funding to film and
video organisations, festivals,
special events and publications.

A graduate of Swinburne, who

has spent time working at the ABC,
the BBC and on numerous short
films, Molloy takes up her new
position on 17 March.
I The Australian Film Commission,
in association with the ABC, has
announced the awarding of the
1986 National Documentary Fellow-
ships to David Bradbury (Frontline,
Nicaragua No Pasaran) and John
Hughes (Traps). 64 candidates
applied for the Fellowships, valued
at $125,000.

The AFC also announced that Pat
Fiske would be the recipient of a
study fellowship.

Recent AFC appo[...]Office
consultant for three months, com-
mencing in mid—January. And, in the
Melbourne office, Claire Dobbin has
been selected as the new senior
project officer for the Creative
Development Fund.
FESTIVALS: the annual St Kilda
Film Festival will be held in Mel-
bourne from 17-20 April at the
National Theatre. Presented by the
St Kilda City Council, the festival
aims to showcase Australian shorts,
documentaries and features that
might not be picked up for a wide
c[...]l Buesst has been appointed
part-time director of the festival and
co-ordinator Lee Holmes has
confirmed that the prizes of $300,
$200 and $100 will again be
awarded by a panel of judges.

Filmmakers interested in submit-
ting works, for consideration can
send th[...]r 16mm film.

Planning is also well under way for
the Melbourne" and Sydney Film
Festivals, both to be held in June.
The Melbourne Festival recently
appointed a new director, Santina
Musumeci, who takes up the
position after eleven years at

6 — March CINEMA PAPERS

Michael Edgley International as an
administrator and publicist.

The Melbourne Festival will run
from 19-29 June at the Forum
Cinema Complex (which proved to
be a popular venue in 1985), the
State Film Centre and the Glass-
house Cinema. At the time of going
to press, negotiations were under
w[...]ogramme of new wave
Super-8 shorts from New York, and
confirmation was pending on Lizzie
Borden’s Working Girls.

The Sydney Festival will run from
6-20 June at the State and Dendy
theatres. Although it is too early to
confi[...]h filmmaker Ken
McMullen will be attending Sydney
and presenting his film, Zina. Two
recent films by Jean-Luc Godard —
Je vous salue, Marie (Hail, Mary)
and Detective — have also been
confirmed and there are hopes that
the French director will attend.

I Scripts for the Australian Child-
ren's Television Foundations follow-
up to the Winners series have been
developed and the ACTF is once
again assembling a diverse group of
writers, producers and directors for
the project. The nine-part series of
hour-long fantasy programmes has
been announced, a prospectus
should be issued in May, and the
ACTF hopes to go into production
towards the end of the year.

The Journey Writers: Ken Cameron

and Jane Oehr. Director: Ken
Cameron. Producer: Richard
Mason.

The Secret Life of Trees Writer:
Paul Cox. Director:[...]el Cove.

Director: TBA. Producer: Sue
Milliken.

The Clip Writer: Mac Gudgeon.
Director: Bob Weis. Pro[...]ee deputy members have
recently been appointed to the
board of Film Victoria. Actress Sigrid
Thornton, producer Jane Ballantyne
and broadcasting consultant Dion
Weston took up their two-year
positions from 20 December. The
new members join three other part-
time members Graeme Hodges,
Roger Le Mesurier and Ian
Crawford. The members of the
board are John Harrison (Chair-
man), Gavin Ander[...]Rado, Jill Robb,
Brian Robinson, Charles Tingwell
and Bob Weis.

I Good news and not-so-good
news on the international front. In the
list of Top Foreign Rentals on video
for 1985 published in Variety in early
January, Careful, He Might Hear

You ranged among the top ten, with
Pauline a la Plage, Entre Nous,
Local Hero, Diva and Carmen.

On the other side of the Pacific,

however, in a list of the most popular
foreign features screened in Tokyo
in 1985, Mad Max: Beyond
Thunderdome finished a dis-
appointing eighteenth. In a market
that has been a stronghold for the
Mad Max films, it is surprising to see
the title coming in behind Police
Academy 2, 2010, Lifeforce and
The Karate Kid.
I Following the negotiation of inter-
national distribution deals for Bliss
— with New World Pictures in the US
and the Recorded Picture Company
in the UK — international rights to
Rebel have also recently been
secured.

Vestron Pictures have acquired
the US and Canadian theatrical and
home video rights to the film for a
reported $USl.5-2 million. Vestron
plan to release Rebel before the
summer, as the first film in a new
package of half a dozen titles to be
screened over the next twelve
months.

I Tribe, a feature to be dir[...]ence, will have a
one-week workshop with Lawrence
and the actors in March, to enable
alterations to be made to the script.
Production is scheduled for Sep-

I

Naoko Abe and Georgina Pope
head the Tokyo-based sales
agency, production and distribution
company, Goanna Films.

John Baxter is a film reviewer for
The Australian and author of
numerous books on the cinema.

Rod Bishop teaches film at the
Phillip Institute of Technology.

Pat H. Broeske writes regularly
about film for the Los Angeles Times
and is Hollywood correspondent for
the Washington Post and other
publications.

Rarfaele Caputo is a freelan[...]Lorenzo Codelli is a freelance
ijurnalist based in Trieste, a contri-
butor to Postif and Italian corre-
spondent for the International Film
Guide. ~

Mary Golbert is a freelance writer
on film.

Ray Comiskey is film critic for The
Irish Times.

Christine Gremen is a freelance
writer on film.

Patricia King Hanson is editor of
the American Film Catalogue and a
contributor to the Los Angeles
Times, American Film and Stills.
fired Harden is a film and television
producer and has a regular column
on technical information in The
Video Age.

Paul Harris is co-host of Film Buffs
Forecast on SRRR and a regular
contributor to The Age.

Sheila tlohnston is a London-
based writer and film critic for

' magazine.

Brian Jones is an independent pro-
ducer, director, sorigtwriter and
journalist.

tember. The film will be produced by
Peter lmaru and the script has been
written by Barry Klemm. It is about a
family gathering over a weekend for
a funeral in a small country town.
I The Australian Film and Tele-
vision School's Melbourne office has
introduced a small pilot scheme
called the Tryout Program aimed at
assisting makers of film, television
and radio programmes in exploring
their craft.

According to Victorian manager,

Jenny Sabine, the scheme aims to
encourage people to test new ideas
in a working situation without the
high costs normally involved.
Facilities available include rehearsal
space, actors, equipment and
access to technical advice.
I Despite reservations about the
Australian Film Commissions Co-
production scheme (see Cinema
Papers No. 55), producer Brian
Rosen was the successful applicant
in the first batch of contenders

His $2.4-million, four[...]Gold is a co-production with
Canada’s Telefilm and may begin
shooting in May. Underwritten prior
to the 19 September modifications to
10BA, the miniseries is co-produced
and written by David Williamson and
chronicles the quest for the four-
minute mile. #-

Paul Kalina teaches meia studies
and photograghy at St. Eloseph
College and is a freelance writer Q

is

Peter Krien is film ggritiefor

Sunday Press.

Geoff Mayer is a lecturer in
studies at the Phillie Institute of "tie . .
nology.

Gail Mccre[...]a Trobe University.
Brian McFarlane is a lecturer in
English at the Chisholm Institute and
author of Words and Images.
Belinda Meares is a New Zea|an‘c?l-
bor[...]aris.

Tony Mitchell teaches film arid
theatre at the University of New
South Wales.

Mike Nicolaifii is a freelance writer
and contributor to Variety.

Dieter Osswald is a jour[...]o.

Dasha Ross is a r
Close-Up, series on SB
Bill and iane Routt are a eouple
of Melbourne academics.

Tom Ryan lectures in media studies
at Swinburne, oontriutes to The
Video Age and reviews films for the;
3l;O Sunday show. I
dim Sohembri is a journalist at The
Age.

: for the

.:

i.
it

Mark Spratt is a freelance writer on _

film.

David Stratton is host of Movie of ii?

the Week on SBS and reviews
films for Variety.

R.tJ. Thmpson is a freelance writer
on film.

Andrew Urban is Australian corre-

and a regula
pages of T straiian

Michael Visontay is a journalist at?
the Sydney Morning Herald

kc

spondent for Screen International
ributor to the arts *

Unless of course you're talking about the
quality release prints produced by Colorfilm
Laboratories of Australia for the Warner Bros

movie, “Gremlins.”

We were sent the negative and produced a
quantity of prints Whose quality matched the
finest in the world.

We have also produced prints of films for
U.I.P., Fox, Columbia, Disney and Thorn EMI.

Colorf'1lm’s rates are very
competitive too.

So contact Murray Forrest now
and get the Gremlins out of

your system.

Colorfilm[...]

for two problem pictures

Moviegoers in and around San
Diego, California v a seaside resort
community with plenty of palm trees;
a famous zoo and an aquarium —
will decide the eventual fate of
Where Are the Children? Based
on a bestselling suspense novel by
Mary Higgins Clark, the Columbia
Pictures release will have four weeks
of[...]release — if any — will follow.
Problems with the film, which
deals with a possible child murderer[...]is implied, be a

child molester, could stem from the
fact that Coca—Cola, which owns

Columbia, does[...]h unsavoury
subject matter. That, at any rate, is
the claim of some of those involved
with the production, including
director Bruce Malmuth, who did
Nighthawks, and who had to re-edit
his present film, delivering w[...]version
had too many allusions to child
abuse by the Frederic Forrest
character, who taunts Jill Clayburgh
and her children. So Columbia did
its version — “which wasn't the film
we set out to do: it was diluted of all
its impact," says Malmuth. He then
did the tamer version (the one that
will be test screened).

Gone is a bathtub sequence in
which a little girl bathes while
Forrest, seated, plays with a rubber
duck. The scene ends with a strong
implication that Forrest gets in with
her, after first holding out the duck
and saying: “You're going to like
Oscar." Also removed is a scene in
which Forrest administers sleeping
potions to the children with a hypo-
dermic — “tastefully done,"
according to Malmuth.

The director is still hoping for a
national release:[...]rch CINEMA PAPERS

her film find an audience." By the
looks of it, Big Trouble, also from
Columbia, won't be doing that. The
film re-unites the In-Laws team:
Peter Falk, Alan Arkin and
producers Michael Lobell and
Andrew Bergman.

This time, Arkin plays a mild-
m[...]urance salesman who
turns to a life of crime with the help of
a swindler (Falk), so as to be able to
send his three kids to Yale.

Directed by John Cassavetes in
the summer of 1984, Big Trouble
was to be released in the spring of

Jill Clayburgh as the frantic mother
in Where are the Children?, which
has still to clear the hurdle of San
Diego.

1985. Then it was the summer.
When the film finally failed to show
up on the fall schedule, the studio
spokesman remained reassuring:
“lt’s g[...]ust
that we're not sure when. But
probably before the end of the
year.”

But, aside from a disastrous test
screening. marked by numerous
walk-outs, in — you've guessed it —
San Diego, Big Trouble never
made it to the big screen in 1985.
According to Columbia marketing
vice-president Bob Dingilian, it has
since vanished from the studio's
roster. "All the elements seemed so
right," said Dingilian diploma[...]an be such
a delicate matter . .

Hopefully, all the elements will be
right — that is, releasable ~ in the
major productions now before the
cameras. Miami Vice’s Michael
Mann is directing[...]rson stars as a
famed forensic pathologist called in
by the FBI to track down a serial
killer who murders entire families
beneath the full moon's light, and
who calls himself ‘the Red Dragon‘.

Mann is also producing Band of

before the shelf: San Diego try-outs

the Hand, now shooting for Tri-Star
in Miami. Directed by Paul Michael
Glaser, who helmed some
invigorating episodes of TV’s
Starsky and Hutch (in which he
also starred), and has since done a
couple of Miami Vices, the film is
about a group of hard-core juvenile
delinquents who are put through a
life-or-death survival course in the
Everglades, before being dis-
patched onto the mean, drug-ridden
streets of Miami.

Now filming in San Francisco, Big
Trouble in Little China reunites
director John Carpenter and star
Kurt Russell, previously teamed in
Elvis, Escape from New York and
The Thing. Fox tabs it "a mystical
action-adventure—comedy-kung fu-
monster-ghost story", about the
imaginary world beneath Chinatown
that is inhabited by ghosts. W.D.
Richter scripted.

Meanwhile, out in Splcewood,
Texas, Willie Nelson is being
directed by William Witliff (co-writer
and producer of Country, and of
Fred Schepisi's Barbarosa) in Red-
Headed Stranger. Nelson co-
produces — appropriately, since the
film is based on his 1975 concept
album about fic[...]Julian Shay, who moved to Montana
with his family in the eighteen-
seventies. The tale of love, loss,
revenge and salvation co-stars
Morgan Fairchild and Katharine
Ross. The film is being
independently financed, largely
through Nelson and his chums.

Closer to Hollywood, writers keep
coming — and coming — aboard
Jumpin’ Jack Flash, the Fox film
starring Whoopi Goldberg, which is
currently shooting in LA. Looking
through the names — ten to date 4
who've been through the project,
one local scribe has called the film
“the greatest boon to writers since
the residual”. Among them: Charles
Shyer and Nancy Myers (the
originals), David Franzoni, Diane
Hammond, M.J. Milworth, Richard
Price and Steven De Souza. Penny
Marshall is directing (she took over
from Howard Zieff, who left in
November because of “creative
differences”). The story is about a
secretary (Goldberg), who gets
caught up in international intrigue.

The seasonal story at the box
office is about the near neck-to-neck
battle between the prestigious and-
of—year entries, Sydney Pol|ack’s
Out of Africa and Steven
Spielberg's The Color Purple, both
reviewed in this issue. Pollack's film
claimed grosses, as of the first
weekend in January, of more than
$26 million. Spielberg's fi[...]tably Spies Like Us,
which grossed $43.7 million, and
Jewel of the Nile, with $39.7
million. And there appears to be no
stopping the Italian stallion: grosses
for Rocky IV, as of the same date,
were a bell-ringing $101.5 millionnk

by Belinda Meares

Uproar as private TV
falls to the Italians,
while Cannon moves
in almost unnoticed.

Readers may have heard that
France is at last taking the plunge
and going in for private television.
Committed to Iiberalizing the air
waves since its election in 1981, the
socialist government has, in doing
so, stirred up a hornet’s nest of
political and technical problems.

An optimistic report, com-
missioned early last year,
proposed two nationwide

independent channels and 40 local
ones, to be transmitted uncoded,
and to be financed solely by
advertising and sponsorship. This
long-awaited announcement sent
the French and European audio-
visual communities into a flurry of
activity. Prototype programme grids
were designed, and financial
backers solicited. The race was on
to get the new channels on the air by
Christmas, a comfortable few
months before the 17 March legis-
lative elections (which the socialists
are likely to lose).

Prime candidates for the two
national channels were Europe 1, a
partially state-owned radiolstation,
and CTL (Compagnie de Television
Luxembourgeoise), a peripheral TV
station which is received in north-
eastern France. As the autumn
advanced, however, it became
obvious that the dual-channel
scheme was impractical.

The frequency distribution envis-
agedbyTDF(TelediffusiondeFrance)
— 17,000,000 and 19,000,000
households for the respective
channels — was obviously too

One man is now clearly emerging as
Germany's most successful fil[...]Eichinger of Neue
Constantin. He was producer of the
box-office hit, Christiane F. — wir
Kinder vorn Bahnhof Zoo
(Christiane F) and Das Boot (The
Boat), both released in 1981, not to
mention the most expensive
German film ever, The Never-
ending Story (1984).

Eichinger’s latest project, a co-
production with France and Italy,
also has an enormous price tag: 46
million marks ($27 million) has been
earmarked for the filming of
Umberto Eco‘s bestseller, The
Name of the Rose. And there are
stars in abundance: Sean Connery
is playing the lead role of Brother
William, with F. Murray Abraham as
his adversary.

Filming, under the direction of
Jean-Jacques Annaud, has been
under way since November in the
monasteries at Eberbach and
Maulbronn. Exteriors were filmed in
Italy in January, and the world
premiere is scheduled for October
1986.

Ei[...]collaborator,
Wolfgang Petersen, was on hand for
the massive media spectacle of the
December premiere of his Enemy

The rumour was confirmed
towards the end of October, sending
shudders through the French
cinema fraternity. Silvio Berlusconi,
king of spaghetti television and the
so-called ‘assassin’ of the Italian
cinema, was girding his loins to
cross the Alps like his forebear,
Hannibal.

Associated with two of the
wealthiest men in France, Jerome
Seydoux (whose company controls
the airline, UTA) and Christophe
Riboud (younger member of the
Schlumberger-Riboud dynasty),
Berlusconi swept the pool: the
concession for France's fifth tele-
vision channe[...]uture television
satellite, TDF1, which he leased in
the same week as British media
magnate Robert Maxwell.

An immediate outcry against the
decision condemned the govern-
ment for its “gross favouritism". The
film fraternity was up in arms about
the lenient ‘cahier de charges’
(programme condit[...]allow an inordinate number of
foreign programmes and the inter-
ruption of films by commercials.

The prominent opposition leader,
Jacques Chirac, is also out to
suppress the decision if he comes to
power in March.

TV baron or media bogeyman?
Silvio Berlusconi, grabbing the
French TV franchises.

He will do this either by imposing
prohibitive revised conditions on the
“socialists' channel", or by
privatizing one or more of the public
channels to create direct
competition. CTL, for its part, has
lodged an appeal with the Conseil
d’Etat against the arbitrary manner
in which the concession was
granted.

Mitterand himself has wisely
agreed to review the controversial
‘cahier de charges’. As for the
alleged villain of the piece, Silvio
Berlusconi has just completed a
pub[...]is, during
which he gallantly promised to
respect the high (7) standards of
French television.

With all these upheavals in the
television world, developments on
the French cinema scene have
attracted less of the limelight than
usual. The arrival in France of
Cannon Films, for instance, has
passed[...]l of $US65 million, some of
which will go towards the production
of Godard's grandiose King Lear,
starring, it is hoped, Woody Allen
and Lee Marvin (the latter replacing
the originally touted Marlon Brando).

Parafrance, the ailing fourth
French cinema circuit (after
Gaumont, UGC and Pathe), has
been taken over by British real
estate agents Michael and Anthony
Stevens. Minister of Culture Jack
Lang's efforts on behalf of the
production/distribution business
could not save the company, after a
100-million-franc loan had already
been extended to Gaumont.

The SOFlCAs (investment
companies for cinema and audio-
visual production —— see my column
in the January issue) are looking

Germany by Dieter Osswald

Eichinger continues his big-budget run;
Petersen in excelsis.

Mine. With The Boat and The
Neverending Story to his credit,
Petersen is alre[...]essful director. With Enemy
Mine, he has directed the first wholly
Hollywood production to be made at
Munich's Bavaria Studios. To mark
the occasion, 20th Century-Fo><’s
Jean-Louis Rubin and vice president
Joel Coler flew in for the premiere.
in the meantime, another German
director was making his mark
abroad: Stefan Paul and his film,
Sera possible el sur, about the
South American singer, Mercedes
Sosa, were invited to the Rio de
Janeiro and Havana festivals, and
received a personal greeting from
from Fidel Castro at the latter.
While Otto — der Film, a staple
of this[...]over eight million admissions, to
become not only the most success-
ful film of 1985, but also the most
successful German film ever, the
same kinds of superlatives have
been garnered by the book, Ganz

unten, by Gunter Wallraff, a piece of
investigative reporting about
immigrant labour. A film of the same
name will be seen for the first time at
the Berlin Film Festival.

As Germany awaits its firs[...]r Max Schmeling.

Another famous native son is at
the centre of Wurlitzer, oder die
Erfindung der Gegenwart, which
is about Rudolf Wurlitzer, inventor of
the eponymous music machine —
and about the Bavarian village of the
same name.

Thanks to the box-office
phenomena of Otto, Rambo and
Back to the Future, film business
was no worse in Germany than last
year. But the smaller distributors and
the smaller cinemas have had to
struggle to survive, and a few
mergers have resulted: Neue

good, however.[...]ancs for 1986
production.

Cinema attendances. on the other
hand, are still depressed — about
12% down on this time last year,
and 5% lower over the whole of
1985. Especially disturbing news for
French producers is the fact that
3.3% of 1985’s releases scooped
32% of the audiences. It comes as
welcome but slim comfort that the
years top-grossing film was a local
production, C[...]ommes et un coutfin, which has
outdistanced Rambo and is still
going strong.

Foreign successes have been
predictable, including Year of the
Dragon. Silverado and The
Goonies. On the art-house circuit,
mention must be made of an
eng[...]ons); an
excellent Quebec film, Le bon
débarras, and Wim Wenders's
Tokyo-Ga. Tim Burstall’s The
Naked Country —— known here as
Le chatiment de la pierre
magique (The Curse of the Magic
Stone) has come and gone without
a ripple.

Production distractions: Marco
Ferreri is to direct Christophe
Lambert in his next film, while
Sandrine Bonnaire will next appear
in a film by Jacques Doillon, with
Michel Piccoli fo[...]Zone
rouge, a social drama starring
Sabine Azima and Richard
Anconina, who plays a boxer (a
startlingly original idea!) But the
most interesting prospect on the
horizon is Passage du sauvage, by
Danish director Henning Carlsen.
The film, depicting the life of Paul
Gauguin, will star Donald Suther-
land, Francis Yanne and Fanny
Bastien, and will be shot in Copen-
hagen and Tahiti. #-

Constantin with Tobis in February;
then the Filmverlag and Futura (see
my January column); and, finally, in
November, Atlas and Prokino. There
will almost certainly be more names
to add to the list.

Box-office leaders are the three
films mentioned above: Otto — der
Film, closely followed by Back to
the Future and Rambo. In fourth
place comes the German action

Britain
by Sheila Johnston

Bond (the real one)
to the rescue on the
British movie scene

Following my last column's cliff-
hanger conclusions as to the fate of
Goldcrest (still too soon to tell,
though Revolution has opened in
the US to uniformly bad reviews).
British Film Year now proudly
presents: the Travails of TESE, a
further instalment in the thrill-packed
adventure that is the British film
industry.

TESE (Thorn EMI Screen Enter-
tainment) is one of the country's —
indeed, the worlds — largest film
companies, with assets including
106 cinemas (the ABC chain), a
library of 2,000 films, a studio
(Elstree), together with Thorn
financing, production and distribu-
tion operations.

The company has been on the
skids for some years now, in the
wake of a series of box-office
disasters, headed[...]Chief
executive Gary Dartnall had
managed to turn the tide, since his
arrival three years ago, from a
£10-million loss in 1982 to a modest
E12-million profit last year.

But earnings have still not been
enough to satisfy investors. The
acquisitions department put up a
feeble performance last year, with
purchases like Wild Geese II and
The Holcroft Covenant. And the
in—house production record has
been disappointing, too, with one
winner — A Passage to India —
and three box-office drongos:
Morons from Outer Space, Rest-
less Natives and Comfort and Joy

Verity Lambert’s contract as head. F

Connery, Eichinger (centre) and
Annaud announcing The Name of
the Rose.

thriller, Schimanski — der Film,
with Go[...]hit. But Cocoon, Legend, Roland
Emmerich’s Joey and the first three
AlDS movies have all flopped.[...]

But the two front-runners, the
Rank Organization and the omni-
vorous Cannon Group, each of
which already owns substantial
cinema circuits in Britain, were
greeted with a storm of protest from
the film industry. Faced with the un-
welcome attentions of the Mono-
polies Commission Golan and
Globus withdrew.

Thethe eleventh hour, a knight in
shining armour arrived from down
under in the form of Australian
tycoon Alan Bond.

Bond, who p[...]other
Fellini films, Ginger e Fred has
been seen and openly discussed
by, it seems, almost everyone, even
if it has still not opened commer-
cially. Abandoning the doomsday
tone of E la nave va (And the Ship
Sails On), the director this time goes
for broad comedy, telling the story of
the reunion of two once-popular
dancing partners called Ginger and
Fred, during a stormy TV show
peopled by other star lookalikes,
from Marcel Proust to Bette Davis
and the inevitable Marilyn Monroe.
But exposing the networks’ vulgar
taste and absurd programming (with
echoes of Paddy Chayefsky's Net-
work) is just one of the aims of
Ginger e Fred. Fellini also manages
to find several more serious things to
say via the paradoxical hotch-potch
of gargantuan commercials and live
speeches by political and religious
leaders. The deafening chaos that
surrounds them does not stop
Ginger and Fred from reviving their
old steps for a magic mo[...]10 — March CINEMA PAPERS

tion, with interests in radio and TV.
He said he was interested in TESE’s
film and video library to feed these
outlets, and also hopes for a tie-up
between Australian productions and
Britain's ABC cinema chain.

But one of Dartnal|’s first moves
after the buy-out was to sell off a
cinema. Some say that, with Cannon
and Rank upping the ante, Dartnall
had paid an excessive price — £110
million ($231 million) — for TESE,
and may well be forced to sell off
further assets to repay his loans.

Meanwhile, however, the British
production boom continues, with no
signs yet of the prophesied crisis in
film investment. Dance with a
Stranger is a hard[...]ow, but
director Mike Newell is having a try
with The Good Father, a black
comedy starring Anthony Hopkins.

More comedy of the post-holo-
caust kind mushrooms in the shape
of Whoops, Apocalypsel, blown
up from the TV show, and When the
Wind Blows, an animated feature
based on Raymond[...]wo nice pensioners trying
cluelessly to cope with the fall-out,
armed only with the British govern-
ment manual, Protect and Survive.

Produced by Morris West’s
Sydney-based Melaleuka, and
funded by investments from Austra-
lian banks and insurance com-
panies, The Second Victory is a
romantic drama set in England and
Austria in 1945. Scripted by West
from his own novel, it boa[...]ast (Anthony
Andrews, Helmut Griem, Max von
Sydow and Renee Soutendijk) and
an unlikely producer-director,
Gerald Thomas, father of the Carry
On comedies.

One of the most intriguing of this

perfectly displays her diminutive
timidity, guided by the superlative
Marcello Mastroianni as the anarchic
Fred.

The issues raised by the film obvi-
ously concern the limitations that
should be imposed, by a much-
awaited law, on the current uncon-
trolled state of television. But the film
is not simply about the private net-
works: Fellini makes no distinction
between them and RAI: the arro-
gance remains the same on both
sides. And the political parties now
in government are still procrastina-
ting over their decision, thanks to
any number of behind-the-scenes
deals. They have even left their
beloved RAI without a managing
board.

On the movie front, Cinecitta
blooms again, thanks to in[...]de’s fantasy novel,
directed by Johannes Schaaf and
starring John Huston as the Time-
keeper. There is also Jean-Jacques
Annaud’s The Name of the Rose
(see Dieter Osswa|d’s German
column on page 9), produced at the
Italian end by Franco Cristaldi,
together with Neue Constantin of
Munich and Les Films Ariane of
Paris. For it, Fellini's art[...]Ferretti, has built a giant
octagonal abbey near the Tiberina
road.

Elsewhere. two long-awaited pro-

autumn’s crop could be The
Whistle Blower, a conspiracy
thriller set in the British government
spy centre at Cheltenham, which
has recently been the location for
several controversial real-life
scenarios. Based on a novel by
John Hale and directed by Simon
Langton (late of TV's Le Carre
adaptation, Smiley’s People), it
stars the indefatigable Michael
Caine and Nigel Havers, as his son
who works at the centre and is killed
under mysterious circumstances.
Box-office receipts are still
buoyant, with new records set in
London's West End at the beginning
of November. Prizzi’s Honor and
The Emerald Forest continue to
make it a great year for Rank, in the
wake of such other hits as Crimes
of Passion and Desperately
Seeking Susan. Three low-to-
medium-budget British films, Letter
to Brezhnev, Supergrass and My
Beautiful Laundrette, scored suc-
cesses, and Plenty took plenty, too.

Of the Christmas releases, Santa
Claus, The Movie got slammed by
reviewers across the board, but the
Salkinds’ latest caped crusader,
blanket-released for the Yuletide
trade, has been sleighing them in
the aisles up and down the country.

TESE's Gary Dartnall.

jects are finally starting. Francesco
Rosi is looking for locations in
various South American countries
for his adaptati[...]S10
million raised by several European
producers. And Paolo and Vittorio
Taviani are scouting locations in the
United States for their as yet untitled
film (fro[...]uerra)
about two Italian church restorers
working in Hollywood in 1915 build-
ing film palaces. Meanwhile, a
sudden[...]nted
Franco Zeffirelli from completing his
Otello in time for Cannes.

Still eligible for competition[...]s erotic remake of
Le diable au corps, II diavolo in
corpo, Nanni Moretti’s La messa e
finita (see my last column) and
Carlo Lizzani’s ambitious L’isola, a
large-sc[...]of communist
leader Giorgio Amendola, con-
ceived in two parallel versions (one
for cinema, one for TV), and starring
newcomer Massimo Ghini.

The Christmas season did not
bring much cheer to local movies,
with Rambo, Goonies and Back to
the Future easily annihilating our
customary run of feeble comedies.
Perhaps it is time the panic-stricken
industry reacted more intelligently to
the problems: rather than call for
state protection, it might consider
deflating a few star salaries and risk
some more controversial topics.

Japan
by Naoko Abe and
Georgina Pope

More foreign films,

less cinemas and a

mixed crop of New
Year movies

During the past twelve months,
Japan has seen a 10°/o increase in
its cinemagoers. The increase took
place mainly in the first few months
of the year, with blockbuster New
Year titles like Ghostbusters (which
took $US20 million), followed by
Gremlins (US$16 million). This
year's answer to the above, Back to
the Future, Goonies and Cocoon,
are doing similar business.

The Kadokawa production house
has been knocked from its top posi-
tion by Fuji Television, one of the
largest national networks. Fuji's
biggest production success story
last year was Biruma no tategoto
(The Burmese Harp), Kon lchi-
kawa’s remake, shot with exactly the
same script as his 1956 version. The
film has grossed $US15 million.

Unfazed by poor box-office reaction
in the US and Britain to his Kiwi
comedy, Came a Hot Friday (which
proved a boomer on the home
market last August), producer Larry
Parr has a full kit of product for his
second appearance at the American
Film Market.

Foreign sales of four features from
Parr’s Mirage Films will be handled
by the New York-based Challenge
Film Corporation, of which Parr is
president and New York entertain-
ment industry investor, Henry
Fownes, chairman.

Fownes was executive producer
on the action movie, Shaker Run,
shot entirely in New. Zealand and
starring Cliff Robertson, Leif Garrett
and Lisa Harrow. It proved a big
seller for Parr at Cannes last year,
and begins an eleven-print release
throughout New Zealand on 24
January.

The AFM will see the first market
screenings of the Mirage youth film,
Bridge to Nowhere, directed by
Ian Mune, and pre-sale activity on
Queen City Rocker, which com-
pleted lensing on Auckland city loca-
tions in early December. Rocker is
directed by Bruce Morri[...]rector, Paul
Davis, who will be with Parr, Fownes
and (from London) Bill Gavin in Los
Angeles, says the team will be
"mopping up" Shaker Run sales,
and continuing to plug Friday.
Davis praises the profile achieved
for the latter film by its British distri-
butor, Miracle Films, in December,
and reports that the great majority of
reviews were “outstandingly g[...]no box was achieved,"
laments Davis, “which is the same
story for all other New Zealand
feature films released to date in
Britain. So, no breakthrough."

Upbeat newsjor the industry here
is that director Geoff Murph[...]

One hundred cinemas closed
their doors up and down the country
during the year, leaving a national
total of 2,000, compared with over
8,000 operating during the fifties.
The closures, however, were pre-
dominantly in the rural areas, with
the larger cities seeing an increase
in fancy cinema complexes and
small independent houses,

The biggest event during 1985
was the first Tokyo International Film
"Festival, with attendances during the
week-long event hitting the 150,000
mark. And an Australian Cinema
Week. held in September, financed
by the Australian Pavilion at the
Tsukuba Expo, and organized by
Tokyo-based Goanna Films,
attracted capacity houses; it resulted
in a major distributor, Shochiku-Fuji.
purchasing Peter Weir's ten-year-old
Picnic at Hanging Rock The
release is scheduled for July.

Local product pla[...]as many
potential cinemagoers as possible
during the peak New Year season.

Yari no Gonza (Gonza the
Beautiful), directed by Mashiro
Shinoda, who gave[...]Suicide)
sixteen years ago, is definitely one of
the best. Once again, Shinoda
bases his story on the work of famed
playwright Chikamatsu. This time,
the film is set in Osaka in 1717,
during the Genroku Era, when the
culture of the common people was
flourishing, but the lives of the privil-
eged samurai were ruled by a num-
ber of taboos, including the strict
condemnation of illicit love affairs.

The film's two main characters,
Osai, the wife of an official tea cere-
mony administrator, and Gonza, a
handsome young student of the
ceremony, are mistakenly accused
of having an affair. Left with the
choice of flight or ‘magataki-uchi', a
custom whereby the husband kills
both his wife and her supposed
lover, they settle for the latter. But
Osai figures that, now she has
nothing to lose, she'll make the most
of Gonza’s company.

From two relatively new directors
— Juzo ltami, who last year gave us
Ososhiki (The Funeral: see

New Zealand by Mike Nicolaidi

Parr comes on strong at the American Film
Market; Murphy returns, announces
p[...]er
many months working on a project
for Fox, with the tentative title of
Hunter, Murphy is back. He
recently received development
finance from the New Zealand Film
Commission for a new feature, with
Angel of Death as its working title.
And, with Maori woman director
Merata Mita (Patul), Murphy has set
up Tikanga Productions, with the
duo proposing two features: the
aforementioned Angel of Death
and (another working title) Mauri,
which Mita will direct.

In keeping with earlier films by
both directors, the projects deal with
the evolution of New Zealand, and

the conflict between its colonial
origins and the struggle to rise
above them. Mauri is set in the
sixties, and will be “intensely Maori"
in conception and perspective.
Angel, set in the eighteen-eighties,
while predominantly Maori in con-
tent, will be more pakeha (Euro-
pean) in perspective. Dealing with a
story of land-grabbing, it will show
how justice in legal terms can
become injustice in human terms.

If the first Tikanga production
goes in front of the cameras later this
year, it will deepen the proven com-
mitment of many of New Zealand’s
be[...]rtaining) themes. On 20

Cinema Papers No. 53) and Yoshi-
mitsu Morita of Family Game fame
—— co[...]efforts, both with comparatively
swollen budgets and well-known

actors. ltami’s Tampopo
(Dandelion) opened in eight Tokyo
cinemas to very mixed notices.
Morita’s Sorekara (And then . . .),
based on a book by award-winning
novelist Soseki Natsume and set in
the Meiji Era, when the west was
beginning to take a firm hold on the
life of the east, is a romance that falls
rather flat, and is well short of the
expectations it had generated,
despite an excelle[...]Kawashima, who
recently had successes with Ryuji
and Chinpila (Street Gang), has a
new picture out on[...]Alone again: Quiet Earth stars
Alison Routledge and Bruno Law-
rence in the Larry Parr/Ian Mune
production, Bridge to Nowhere.

January, Pacific Films, in association
with the NZFC, started shooting
Ngati on east-coast North Island
locations.

Set in the late forties, it tells of the
friendship between two Maori boys
and three families, two of them
Maori, one pakeha, in a rural com-
munity. The personal discoveries
made by the central characters. will
show the strength of the traditional
lifestyles reinforced by the threaten-
ing social events of the time.

Ngati is the fourth in a line of new
features that have begun shooting
since last October. Queen City
Rocker and two films produced by
Don Reynolds’s Auckland-based
Cinepro make up the total: Monica,
directed by Richard Riddiford; and
Dangerous Orphans, directed by
John Laing.

Other[...]llar New Zealand-Canadian co-
production based on the sinking of
the Greenpeace ship, ‘Rainbow
Warrior’, in Auckland harbour. The
partners, Phillips Whitehouse Pro-
ductions and Filmline International of
Montreal, are confident that on-
location shooting will begin in Auck-
land in April or May.

Vincent (Vigil) Ward expects to
start work on his new feature, work-
ing title The Navigator, on South
Island mountain locations in mid-
year. March-April is the possible
start date for another Reynolds
producti[...]Energy,
directed by Leon Narbey.
by Leon Narbey.

The animated feature film, Foot-
rot Flats, based on the Murray Bell
cartoon strip, is due for completion
and release at Christmas. A cool
$NZ5 million—worth of investment

A Meiji Era romance: Miwako
Fujiya and Yusaku Matsua in
Sorekara (And then . . .).

meets and, for some inexplicable
reason, is pursued by big,[...]gangsters. An absurd plot.
dreadful performances and Kawa-
shima's confusion between reality
and fantasy make this grim viewing.

The bag of foreign product is
equally mixed and, as with the local
fare, it is just a matter of time before
the usual post-New Year splatter
and bash is with us again. Richard
Attenboroughs A Ch[...]very good business, as is
Dance with a Stranger. And two
Australian directors have overseas-
made product opening in January:
Bruce Berestord, with King David,
and Graeme Clifford's long-awaited
Frances. 4

was snapped up in ten days, when
the producers sought financial input
from the public last year.

Christmas and New Year summer
holiday box-office winners this side
of the Tasman have been Rocky IV,
A View to a Kill, The Goonies,
Cocoon and the Australian-made
real-life adventure, World Safari[...]cation also had a strong impact,
but Santa Claus, The Movie fell off
sharply after opening well, Shaker
Run and Murphy's The Quiet
Earth, which has a big (for New
Zealand) sixteen-print release in
mid-February, are expected to pick
up the slick pace set for locally-made
features by Came a Hot Friday.

The most significant event in
broadcasting pre-Christmas (apart
from the long-running Royal Com-
mission, and the third television
channel warrant hearings) was the
appointment of ‘foreigners’ to two of
the industry’s most powerful
positions.

Nigel Dick[...]ecutive chairman of
Southern Cross Communications in
Victoria, succeeds Ian Cross as chief
executive of the Broadcasting Cor-
poration of New Zealand. As
dir[...]laces Allan Martin.
Mounter has a wide background in
television in Britain, and most
recently headed a new satellite-
operated th[...]ounced
a strong package of drama produc-
tion for the new year, which includes
a miniseries based on the crash of
Air New Zealand Flight 901 into Mt
Erebus in Antarctica in 1979. Also to
be made is a series entitled Fire
Raiser, to be produced by Welling-
ton actress and producer Ginette
McDonald, 4

CINEMA PAPER[...]

His successor is Sheila Whitaker,
formerly of the Tyneside Film
Theatre. who was told she would be
in charge of LFF programming
for 1985. Meanwhile, Derek
Malcolm, film critic of The Guardian,
was brought in to programme the
1984 festival, and did so to such
good effect that he was invited to do
it again in 1985.

His broad-ranging approach,
mixing the esoteric and the
commercial, Third World cinema
with production from east and west,
and the policy of extending to other
London venues, away from the
South Bank, produced immediate
results. Attendances have doubled,
and the LFF‘s prestige has grown
considerably in his two years in
charge.

With Whitaker being given a
further promise that she would take
over the festival in 1986, the BFI
board was in a quandary.
Audiences during the year at the
NFT had slipped below the 51%
break-even point, and the building
of the new Museum of the Moving
Image nearby was taking up time
and staff resources. Should she be

Squabbles at
the top, but a
bum on
(almost)
every seat

London Fil[...]ice proves
successful again

After much behind-the-scenes
tension, the Chairman of the BFI, Sir
Richard Attenborough, arranged a
comprom[...]: Malcolm has been
reappointed festival director, and
Whitaker has been given the title of
‘Executive Director‘. Malcolm has
al[...]e
agreed to continue) that she will not
interfere in programming.

The festival itself provided more
orthodox excitement on the screen,
opening with Kurosawa‘s epic, Ran,
and closing with Michael Cimino’s
Year of the Dragon. in between
came such American-produced
blockbusters as Spielberg's
Goonies and Back to the Future,
directed by Richard Donner and
Robert Zemeckis respectively, and
the adaptation of David Hare’s stage
play, Plenty, directed by Fred

Fireworks and films in
Andra Pradesh

Filmotsav, the alternating, non-com-
petitive twin of the New Delhi Inter-
national Film Festival (see Cine[...]6 location. it was an approp-
riate choice, since the capital of
Andra Pradesh is the most prolific
regional producer of films (170
features last year) and the city with
the largest number of cinemas in the
Country.

The festival literally took off with a
bang at a glit[...]al
ceremony on 10 January, featuring
local dances and a spectacular
display of fireworks in the newly-
constructed open-air auditorium.

The only dampener on the
evening was the choice of opening
film, a small-scale Canadian pr[...]selected
because that's how long it took to
build the auditorium complex.

Of the six sections on the pro-
gramme, the Main international
Section, though a highlight for local
delegates and the public because of
its glut of foreign films, offe[...]repertoire. A
numerical domination of films from
the UK and the US was evident,
though Australia’s entry, My First
Wife, generated considerable
interest, accentuated by the
presence of Paul Cox, one of the few
foreign feature directors to attend.

The Indian Panorama, a
showcase of the 21 best Indian films
of the previous year, is always a key

12 — March CINEMA PAPERS

event for foreign delegates. For the
local industry, too, since selection
means wide exposure, the oppor-
tunity to get invited to foreign
festivals, distribution, and free sub-
titling provided by the National Film
Development Corporation.

It opened with a Telugu film from
Andra Pradesh, Mayuri, the true
story of a dancer who overcomes
family objections and a physical
handicap to pursue her chosen
career. Though the year generally
produced a mediocre crop, a few
films stood out, varying widely in
subject and genre, but with certain

recurring themes: Chatterjee’s
Chopper, about unemployment and
political exploitation; Nihalani’s
Aghaat, about trade unionism; and
political manipulation of the media,
in Accident and New Delhi Times.

Exploration of relationships,
especially those outside the
traditionally prescribed patterns,
forms the thematic context for
several other fine films: Benega|'s
Trikal, set amidst the political
upheavals in Portuguese Goa,
Aravindan‘s Chidambaram and
Aparna Sen’s Parama, which
recently opened to much con-
troversy in Calcutta.

Filmotsav includes foreign showcase, Indian
panorama and women’s programme

tr E: s T I V, :A‘ I s I A N n: in

Schepisi.

in the large selection of American
productions, there were some fine
surprises on the independent side.
Among them was Volker Schlon-
dorff's translation of the superb
Broadway production of Death of a
Salesman[...]Hoffman,
Kate Reid, John Malkovich, Stephen
Lang and Charles Durning. In terms
of turning theatre into film, it was
neither as imaginative as A|tman’s
Come Back to the 5 and Dime,
Jimmie Dean, Jimmie Dean, nor
as stodgy as a filmed play, but the
acting was magnificent.

Another surprise was Henry
Jaglom‘s Always, a comedy based
on the break-up of his own marriage,
with the director and his former wife,
Patrice Townsend, taking the main
roles as a couple who arrange a
special divorce dinner. Wise, witty,
sad and funny, it is Jaglom‘s best
film yet.

Elsewhere, four Australian movies
featured in the programme, Ray
Lawrence's Bliss looked better for
the re-editing and shortening it got
since it was shown in Cannes, and
was the pick of the down-under
presentation, which also included
Stephen Wallace's decorative, over-
wrought The Boy Who Had Every-
thing, Bob Ellis's undoubtedly
funny but rough-edged Unfinished
Business, and Dennis O'Rourke‘s
Half Life.

There was even more variety in
the New Zealand selection, though,
starting with Bruc[...]Run (with a too-seldom-
seen Cliff Robertson back in

in the glow of attention accorded
the above sections, the Documedia
programme suffered from some
neglect. This was a pity, since the
organizers — the Film Societies of
India — had gone to a lot of trouble
to assemble a very interesting pro-
gramme.

The Third World Women’s Pro-
gramme, introduced for the first time
this year, had no trouble attracting
media interest and controversy, par-
ticularly regarding the choice of
films. Aimed at continuing the
dialogue established at the Nairobi
Women’s Conference, which
marked the end of the Decade of
Women, its focus was on the role of
film for the’women of Asia, Africa,
Latin America and other emerging
countries, where women’s struggl[...], especially as
regards breaking down stereotypes
and changing traditions.

There was also a Film Market,
seminars on Film and Technology,
and a great deal more. The
hospitality in Hyderabad was very
impressive: a city that is, by[...]ite drab turned on an
amazing display of welcome, the
organization was generally efficient,
and the lack of affectation of the
Indian filmmakers striking. Although
Filmotsav '86 may not rate high in
the hierarchy of world festivals, it is

certainly a[...]Mary Colbert

business), Geoff Murphy's The
Quiet Earth, Barry Barclay’s
absorbing documentary on world
plant resources, The Neglected
Miracle, and John Reid's study of
Katherine Mansfield and John

Middleton Murry, Leave All Fair.
The sizeable British collection

ranged over film and television, with
most interest focussing on Defence
of the Realm, an exceptionally
good political thriller. Directed by
David Drury and beautifully shot by
Roger Deakins, it seems certain to
thrust Irish actor Gabriel Byrne into
the big time. He and the always
reliable Denholm Elliott are marvel-
lousl[...]who become involved with a
Profumo-like scandal.

And Peter Greenaway, who made
The Draughtsman’s Contract,
came up with another audience-
puzzler in A Zed and Two
Noughts, in which he had some
serious fun with Darwinism and
evolution in the setting of a modern
zoo.

All that is just the surface,
however: the festival contained over
160 films, and aimed at both general
and specialized audiences. The
festival director, Derek Malcolm,
conceded that the event might have
been too large by, perhaps, a do[...]few would argue with its
success. Thus, provided the Atten-
borough truce holds up, the next
festival should be programmed
along very much the same lines as
this one.

Ray Comiskey

From

Lambert Wilson and Christophe
Lambert

top: Juliette Binoclz e,

The opening of the Seventh Festival
of Latin American Cinema in Havana
erupted with a shower of multi-
coloured fireworks, while conga
lines of musicians and dancers
throbbed through the crowds
gathered on the rolling lawns of the
gloriously faded Nacional Hotel.

Fifteen days later, Fidel Castro
brought down the final curtain on the
festival with a rousing discourse that
exhalted the establishment of a new
Latin American cinema in the face of
US cultural dominance. The role of
video was given particular promin-
ence when Castro announced that,
in future, the festival would be called
the international Festival of New
Latin American Cinema, Television
and Video.

The intervening two weeks, from
2-16 December, saw over 400 films
and videos screened in simultane-
ous sessions in eight cinemas
scattered through the city. Over
1000 participants from 40 countries
took part in the festival, twice as
many as last year and extended —
at Castro's insistence — to double
the length of time, thereby sharpen-
ing Cuba's profile as the rising
centre of Latin American culture.

Sealing the festival with the Holly-
wood imprimatur were a gaggle of
celluloid[...]ristopher Walken, Treat Williams,
Harry Belafonte and Jack Lemmon,
presenting his 1982 feature,
Missing.

Speaking to the press at a meet-
ing with young Cuban artists, de
Niro confirmed his interest in starring
in a Cuban Film institute production,

For the second successive year, the
‘Film nouveau’ festival was held in
five Australian cities during Novem-
ber and December, at a time usually
dominated by the summer block-
buster and the general Christmas
wind-down. Drawing large audi-
ences, it offered, according to the
programme, "a selection of high
quality features from the best that
contemporary French cinema has to
offer[...]d at finding local distri-
butors for its films.

The widespread disappointment
felt at the films screened this year is
probably a reflection both of the cur-
rent state of French cinema and of
the conflict of interests inherent in
the festlva|’s own purpose. Last
year, France produced 160
features. And, plainly stated, the
twelve films screened presented a
clearer picture of a certain midd|e-of-
the-road filmgoing audience than
they did of a prodigious film culture.

The range was broad, but most of
the films, though technically com-
petent, were bland and ordinary
exercises in filmmaking.

The festival opened with Rouge
baiser, directed by Ve[...]at started off as a potentially
worthwhile story (the daughter of
poor Jewish emigrants growing up
in the fifties under the influence of
communism, American movies and
the poet Apollinaire) evaporated into
a fluffy, Dynasty-like love story — a
role for which the lead actress,
supposedly a fifteen-year-old, began
to look naturally suited, and in which
several semi-nude scenes smacked
of exploitation.

Stars rush in
Castro — and Hollywood — give a major

boost to the Havana Festival’s profile

and word has it that_ noted Cuban
director Tomas Gutierrez Alea has
discussed a production of The
Tempest with him. So, while the
Reagan administration continues the
blockade of Cuba, the boys from
Tinsel Town are building the cultural
bridges.

While the Hollywood stars were a
prize catch, none of the prominent
features were making their
premieres. The joint winners of the
Grand Coral First Prize for Fiction
have both been acclaimed at recent
European festivals. They were the
sumptuous Frida: Naturaleza Vita
directed by the Mexican, Paul
Leduc, and the mysterious Tangos
— L’Exil De Gardel (Tangos[...]rgentinian
Fernando Solanas.

More impressive was the pre-
dominance of over 200 film and
video documentaries covering a
gamut of issues pressuring Latin
America and the Caribbean. Mostly
stark and brutal in their messages,
they covered the foreign debt crisis,
the repression in Chile, and new
democratic openings in Argentina,
Brazil and Uruguay.

The dominant thread through
several documentaries was[...]Libertacao

(Church of Liberation), examining
the way in which the Catholic church
has been one of the rare spaces in
which opposition movements have
found shelter during the 20 years of
military dictatorship in Brazil. As the
country reverts to democracy, the
church must redefine its role in
Brazilian society amid pressures
from the community and con-
demnation from the Vatican.
Particularly poignant was
Mothers of the Plaza De Mayo,
made by two women from the
United States calling themselves
Cine Chicano (Susann Munoz and
Lourdes Porfillo). Beautifully crafted,
the film built a quiet sense of outrage
as mother after mother detailed the
impotent rage they suffered at
having their children ‘disappeared’

The real face of
French cinema

Film nouveau steers firmly down the middle

of the road

Lambert Wilson, supposedly
French cinema’s latest hean-throb,
was seen both in this and in
Rende/z-vous, for which Andre
Techine won the award for Best
Director at Cannes last year. The
film's real prize, though, should
belong to lead actress Juliette
Binoche in the role of Nina, a young
girl who is both lauded and tor-
mented by three men who mark her
path to independence and a career
in the theatre.

Though it was pervaded by a
haunting atmosphere, the fi|m’s
handling of its narrative material was
less assured, ranging from the inept
— in the case of the dead actor,
Quentin (Wilson), who literally haunts
Nina — to the unconvincing (the
appearance of Scrutzler [Jean-Louis
Trintignant] more than half-way
through the film). It was as if wewere
expected to believe more than the
filmmaker was actually willing to
show or tell.

Jacques Doi|lon’s La tentation
d'lsabe|le,, produced by Marin
Karmitz, was something of a trial.
Taking place mainly in claustro-
phobic hotel rooms and bedrooms,
it was a film about a wickedly impas-
sioned man who, at times, seemed

willing to destroy his wife, her ex-

lover and present girlfriend, so as to
test her love for him. Acted with fist-
clenching hysteria, stylish and
theatrical, it was reminiscent of early
Fassbinder. it was also very wordy,
for which the subtitles were in-
adequate. But, if for no other reason,
it was worth seeing through for the
editing and jump cuts in the final
scenes.

The other Karmitz-produced film
was No Man’s Land. Written and
directed by Alain Tanner, it was the
official Swiss entry at the 1985
Venice festival, and its title refers to
the physical and psychological situa-
tion of four smugglers on the French
border, each of whom dreams of
being somewhere else.

That much the film made clear
early; for the rest, it plodded to its in-
evitable conclusion. Though
immediately watchable — Bernard
Zitzerman’s photography is superb
— the film should have been more
than it was. Tanner’s ability physic-
ally to describe human behaviour
and interaction and to delineate
complex political and ethical per-
spectives, though present in his
choice of subject matter, was sadly
missing from its execution. Finally,
the image and metaphor of the title
was too slight to bear, andtperhaps

under the former junta in Argentina.
Another highlight of the festival
was the week of Cuban film screen-
ings and the film market, MECLA.
Cuba turns out up to ten features a
year and dozens of documentaries
and shorts. A slick and funny
75-minute animation called
Vampiros en La Habana
(Vampires in Havana) attracted a
lot of foreign buyers‘ interest. The
Cubans claimed to have secured up
to $US200,000 in sales and numer-
ous international co—production
deals. While insiders claimed that
market business was in the
$US1-million range — with brisk
trading on stan[...], Argentina, Brazil, Colombia,
Venezuela, Britain and Africa — it is
predicted that MECLA will become

the Latin American market.
Dasha Ross

The church looks to the future:
Leonardo Boff in Silvio Da-Rin’s
lgreja da libertacao (Church of
Liberation).

.- /H‘/‘I’

the most lasting and poignant image
was that of Jean (Jean-Philippe
Ecoffey), the young, cow-herd,
scurrying away on his bicycle.

In a similar vein — a film of which
one expected m[...]was neverthe-
less made enjoyable by its quirkish
and satiric humour, and by Jean
Poiret’s playing of the cop. The
‘poulet’ of the film's title is both a
chicken dish and slang for police-
man.

For the rest, the films ranged from
the noteworthy to the awful.
L’amour en douce (Edouard Molin-
arc) and Quilombo (Carlos
Diegues) — which, in any case, was
from Brazil — were not seen, so
c[...]ked every frame a last-
minute substitute, though the very
act of screening a film as cheap and
inept as this in a festival was
audacious. Tristesse et beauté
(J[...]Kawabata, will probably disappear
into oblivion. And I would personally
wish a similar fate on Escalie[...]sines Jean-
Charles Tacchellaz a thoroughly
nasty and offensive film.

Finally, there was Paroles et
musique (Elie Chour_aqui), in which
the talents of Catherine Deneuve
were entirely wasted in an innocu-
ous story about a middle-aged
woman’[...]h a rock
singer whose music would bring a
tear to the eye of even the most
hardened Lionel Flitchie fan.

Paul K[...]

Jackie McKimmie was in exuberant
form: she had got her first feature,
Australian Dream, in the can — or
rather, had just watched its “birth
and delivery" at a screening of the
final mix.

It may be her first feature, but Mc-
Kimmie is no stranger to writing
drama. She wrote plays in her early
days at Sydney University, and later
specialized in drama at the West
Australian Institute of Technology.
She was already interested in film,
but "just missed the boat": the
course was introduced during her
final year of study there.

But the encounter was inevitable;
and, when she began teaching, she
found opportunities[...]uper-8 with her students.
Enthusiasm ran high: at the alter-
native school in Queensland where
she taught, she and her charges
even held dances to raise funds for
their activities.

Her real screen debut came in
1982, however, when a play she
had written was converted into a
telemovie, Madness for Two, and
shown on SBS. From that experi-
ence, McKimmie learned a valuable
lesson: in future, she would exert
more creative control.

In Stations, starring Noni Hazle-
hurst, which won the Greater Union
Award for Best Short Film in 1983,
she did just that: she wrote, pro-
duced and directed. Set in the fifties,
the film is based on a short story she
had written ab[...]less
wrote itself, because I stayed very
close to the original.” She admits
that the film was a turning point.
And, through it, she was introduced
to Hazlehurst (who also stars in Aus-
tralian Dream), with whom she
struck up an i[...]awards (Best Short Film at
Tyneside; equal first in Florence);
locally, it received the rare privilege
(for a short) of a commercial release,
backing up Careful, He Might Hear
You.

Buoyed up by the success, Mc-
Kimmie aspired to write a longer
pie[...]Dream was first
submitted as a 50-minute drama to
the Australian Film Commission's
Creative Development[...]uable assistance from
script assessors Flon Blair and
James Ricketson (who appears in
the film as an Orangeperson).

She began the script in March
1983 and took it through seven
drafts, to be completed in August
1985, just prior to shooting. The
$600,000 budget was provided
under 10BA by the Queensland Film
Corporation, with an AFC distribu-
tion guarantee and a Channel Seven
presale. “There are advantages to
living in Queensland,“ quips Mc-
Kimmie. “And I have learned to
work on the phone a lot!

“The film is actually a bit of a
family affair," she continues. “I
wrote the script, co-produced it with
Sue Wild, did all the casting, and
directed. I needed to control the
vision: talk about the auteur theory!"
She laughs.

"The title evolved from a song
written by my husband, Chris, who
wrote many of the lyrics and per-
formed them with his band, The
Lamingtons (now no longer
together). He's an art teacher, so he
also doubled as art director, produc-
tion designer and clapper-loader.
No wonder we could manage on the
budget . . .!

“Australian Dream integrates
the reality and fantasy of suburban
life in middle-class Brisbane,” ex-
plains McKimmie. “Nonl plays
Dorothy Stubbs, the unfulfilled but
highly imaginative wife of Geoffrey
(Graeme Blundell), who is Butcher of
the Year. He is a man of consider-
able political aspirati[...]— he's actually an oppor-
tunistic con-man — and, from a very

slender seed, builds a web of
romantic and erotic fantasy around
their relationship. The film is very
much about realizing one’s fan-
tasies, with the characters’ expecta-
tions reversed. It particularly focuses
on what can happen to a woman in
this situation.

"Much of the comedy is created
by the fantasies, especially
Dorothy’s erotic and romantic illu-
sions, which reach a point bordering
on delusion. These were wonderful
to create and shoot. We really had
great fun with them, because[...]d us to be creatively excessive
— sort of Mills and Boonish. Noni
and I really indulged.

“The part was written with her in
mind from the second draft on and,
along the way, included numerous
exchanges with her. She re[...]tremendous energy to a movie.
Graeme’s terrific in this role as well.
And DOP Andrew Lesnie’s experi-
ence with experimen[...]lems,
working on her first feature? “Prob-
ably the main challenge was the time
factor: directing the four-week shoot
and bringing it in on time. My only
regret is that we didn't have another
week. It was a matter of thinking on
your feet all the time. Apart from the
leads, for instance, there was no
rehearsal time for the other actors.
Two weeks of the shoot were nights,
and we were working fourteen to six-
teen hours. We shot fast — on a ratio
of about 10:1 — and sometimes we
were getting seven minutes a day,
wh[...]out future projects. “Yes.
there are several on the boil; but
nothing definite yet." And what
about similarities between Austra-
lian Dream and Emoh Fluo, with
which parallels have been drawn?[...]type of
film. You'll see!”

Mary Colbert

L ap year

Colin Friels, actor

If an actor's enthusiasm for a script
and enjoyment of a shoot is an
accurate measure of the quality of
the finished product, Colin Frie|s‘s
two recent fil[...]e has
been appearing on screen since a
1981 debut in Hoodwink, Friels
asserts that only the work on Mal-
colm and Kangaroo have shown
him that making movies can be[...]cause I didn't care: it's
just that I didn't have the ability at the
time, or I didn't understand what
was actually required."

For admirers of his performances
in Monkey Grip (1982) and the
spirited Buddies (1984), and for
those who discerned that he, alone,
may have emerged from the mire of
Coolangatta Gold (1984) with

some dignit[...]iels sets himself exacting personal

standards and respects the rigours
and responsibilities that his craft
demands. Believing that acting
requires commitment, sustained
concentration and a passion for the
present project, he talks with
animation about the comedy
Malcolm and appears totally im-
mersed in the pleasures of making
Kangaroo (which is, at the time, in
its final days of shooting in Mel-
bourne).

The adaptation of D.H. Law-
rence's Australia-based novel by
Evan Jones has, according to Friels,
produced a fine screenplay. "|t's
very wordy, but there's[...]t drama — what interests any-
one, I guess Y is the interaction of
the characters. And, in Kangaroo,
the characters are fantastic. It's
great for an actor[...]et their
teeth into.” Frie|s’s admiration for
the script is apparent when he dis-
cusses the difficulty of adapting the
425-page novel, written in a six-
week burst when Lawrence visited
Australia in the early twenties. “For
Lawrence, a novel was an adven-
ture of the unconscious. He wrote
like spurts of lightning and there is
nothing ordered about it. His mind
was like a sponge."

Among the other actors enjoying
what appears to have been a[...]avis, who is playing
Somers‘s wife,‘ Harriet. The couple
have workedtogether in the theatre
and, though they had not actively

Given his previous screen roles —
as the less-than-magnificent but
highly charismatic obsession in
Monkey Grip, the rumbustious
miner in Buddies and the aspiring
Iron Man in Coolangatta Gold —
Friels has established a persona that
has its foundations in physical,
athletic, even macho characteristics.
Javo, Mike and Adam are doers not
thinkers, characters who exude a
restlessness and volatility that has
been the foundation of Friels's con-
siderable screen presence. By con-
trast, Somers is described in the
novel as “a queer little man” and
could be seen as a significant depar-
ture from the established mould for
the actor.

It is a variation that is consolidated
by the title role in Malcolm. "Mal-
colm is not remotely physical.”[...]very simple guy who hasn't grown
up. He works for the tramways,
builds his own tram and gets the
sack. So he takes in two boarders —
played by John Hargreaves and
Lindy Davies — who are small-time
crims. Indivi[...]useless, but they work well as a
team.”

Though the two films differ con-
siderably in period, style and sub-
ject, Friels regards both as valuable,
and is equally admiring of the two
directors — Nadia Tass, making her
debut with Malcolm and veteran
Tim Burstall. “There's no ‘This is my[...]are.‘

Friels began his formal training at
NIDA and, following graduation in
1976, spent three years with the
State Theatre Company of South
Australia. In 1979, he moved to
Sydney and worked with the Nimrod
and the Sydney Theatre Company.
And he is returning to the stage early
in 1986, to co—star with Lauren
Bacall in Sweet Bird of Youth.

"Film is totally different to
theatre," he explains. "You work in
bursts. You do close-ups, you do
wide-shots, you do it arse-about. In
theatre, you work up gradually over
five or six weeks — or whatever the
rehearsal period is — and you work
through a performance. It's a totally
di[...]your job to take an
audience through a story, but the
process is completely different.”

Friels repeatedly stresses that act-
ing is a job, and one that requires a
measure of perspective. “People
put shit on me for doing Coolan-
gatta Gold and that's fine: they're
allowed to. But I'm no monk: I'm an
actor and I've got to work. I don't
feel ashamed of anythin[...]work-
ing since I left NIDA because, poss-
ibly, the more you work, the better
you get. You develop your taste, but
you need to keep your work in per-
spective. I mean, the world will keep
going if I don't do Kangaroo or
S[...]e
going to do something, you’ve got to
see some value in it. There's no
point in doing a film or a play that
you're not passionate[...]Dick to Joe

v ':' ’ _ ..

Jack Thompson, actor and director

Jack Thompson and the Aussie film
boom go almost hand in hand. That
distinctive stride, that fierce gaze
and the surprising gentleness which
is often just beneath the surface
have become a kind of Australian
emblem. So, too, has the man. Born
in 1940, Thompson first hit the big
time in the 1971-72 TV season, with
Spyforce. But 1972 was also the
year of the Cleo centrefold, and his
private life was rarely just that.
Though he had been in movies for
a couple of years by the time of Spy-
force (as, for instance, that memor-
ably unpleasant inhabitant of the
Yabba, Dick, in Wake in Fright in
1971), it was Petersen (1974),
Sunday Too Far Away (1975) and
Caddie (1976) that established
Thompson as a star — and pretty
much on a world scale, too, since all
three films did well overseas. The
Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith

(1978), Breaker Morant (1980) and
The Man from Snowy River (1982)
consolidated the position.

As his face has become better
known, however, the other bits of his
anatomy have been less on show,
and the public profile has become
more a matter of reputa[...]d that difficult transi-
tion from star to actor, and the
eighties have seen him go truly inter-
national.[...]a
Oshima’s Merry Christmas, Mr
Lawrence (1983), in which he plays
the manic army officer, Hicksley;
and Paul Verhoeven’s Flesh and
Blood (1985), in which he is the
equally strange Sir John Hawk-
wood, an actual sixteenth-century
soldier of fortune who, in the film,
retires from the battlefield to cultivate
his veges and look after a brain-
damaged woman who has been a[...]profile outing of late —
as Robert O'Hara Burke in Burke &
Wills — and you have a trio of
manic individuals with whom it is
initially hard to associate the affable,
disgustingly tanned persona of the
actor himself. Nevertheless, it has
been that manic quality — the

"crazy bugger" aspect, as he puts it
— that has attracted him to the parts.

“Those are the sorts of roles I find
fascinating — difficult, but fascina-
ting, in the same way I found the
character of Stan Graham in Bad
Blood fascinating. They are all real-
life human beings, and real-life
human beings do have these contra-
dictory qualities in them. Burke's
craziness, for instance, is the sort
that Sir Edmund Hillary must have
had — Cortez and Columbus, too,
and perhaps Cook: any of those
people who willingly p[...]ace at a time when no
one knew anything about it. The
parallel I make with Burke is: What if
those men who went to the other
side of the moon came back and
discovered the shuttle wasn't
there?”

The approach to Hicksley in Mr
Lawrence — Thompson plays him

as a mixture of hero and buffoon,
ram-rod stiff in baggy shorts and
dilapidated tennis shoes — was very
much the actor's decision. Oshima,
renowned for setting up the camera
and letting things happen, would
only comment: "Thompson san
decided to play it like that."

“I think the script demanded it,"
says Thompson. “What the man did,
what he said, how he behaved,
seemed to me, in my experience of
human beings and my experience of
the army" (in which he spent six
years) “to be only explicable in that
way. He's a man on the edge, and
he's holding on to his human dignity
as hard as he damn well can. Those
are the characters that are interest-
ing to play. They'r[...]sionalz people are not simply crazy."

But it is the dignity that has re-
curred most often, particularly dig-
nity in the context of failure. ‘'I think
that is something we share with
other new-world and frontier
societies. There’s bound to be a lot
of failure, but the real quality that's
admired is the ability, under the most
awful circumstances, to maintain
human dignity — not to write off as
failures all those who set out and
don't come back. Because, if you

do, the entire society collapses."

Interviewed in Cinema Papers No.
54, director Graeme Clifford said he
had never considered anyone else
but Thompson for the role of Burke,
presumably because of his ability[...]lifford didn't say was how he got
him. '‘It was the year before last,"
says Thompson, “and I'd just been
in Los Angeles to talk to William
Friedkin about doing a film that
never happened. I was in the lounge
at LA airport, and Graeme came up
to me and said, ‘You don't know me,
but I know you're Jack Thompson,
and I'm Graeme Clifford’. l’d seen
Frances, and I thought it was just,
you know, one Australian f[...]another. Then he
said, ‘Actually, I'm going to Australia
very largely to see you: I have a
script for you’. I read the script on
the plane and said almost immedi-
ately I wanted to do it.

“Graeme made the making of the
film an absolute delight: I have never
enjoyed making a film more. It was
just celebratory: every member of
the crew seemed aware that we
were involved in something more
than just a movie. It became a very
personal experience."

Thompson doesn't feel the same
way about Flesh and Blood. “I
found that probably the worst film-
making experience of my life," he
says. “It was a polyglot crew, the
weather was awful, and there isn't
one scene in the film where anybody
is having fun! In Burke & Wills, for
all the story of the trail across the
desert, there is also Burke's
delicious love affair, and the sense of
fun at Coopers Creek when they
play cricket. Right up to the last
minute, at least they think they're
going to[...]$2.5-million mini-
series, Joe Wilson, for Filmat and
Channel Seven, which will mark his
debut as a dir[...]e way to put it!
I've been very busy as an actor.
And, in a sense, I think it's easier to
get your first job as a director if
you've come out of the Film and
Television School. People in the
business are inclined to think that
every actor wants to direct, and
every actor, when he's been around
for a while, t[...]ome
stage before I came Into films, so I
leapt at the offer when Ray Beattie
asked me." Is he apprehens[...]Wilson —- which will star Matthew
Fargher (King in Burke & Wills) and
Kim Krejus, with a script by Keith
Dewhurst — in mid-January, and
shooting is scheduled to start in and
around Mudgee and Gulgong
(where Henry Lawson set his
original stories) in March. “lt’s a
twelve-week shoot," says Thomp-
son, “then there's all the post-pro-
duction, so I'm tied up from now
until July-August. I'm beginning to
discover how demanding and totally
pre-occupying directing is . . . and
just how much less money you get
paid than[...]

1986 CURRENT PROJECTS

6 FEATURE FI[...]FLOOR, 307 BOURKE ST.,
DARLINGHURST, N.S.W. 2011 AUSTRALIA

O

This is the story of a stunt: It was done
, at dusk in a Sydney suburb last Octo-
~ her. At around $75,000,\it cost more
than any single stunt so far executed in
Australia, it set a world record for a
jump by a truck (162 feet), and it ended
' well. That last bit is important-. Thi[...]vil who, halfway down
page two, hits a brick wall and endsup’
spending the rest of his life in ‘a wheel-
chair. Indeed, the fact that this story
does end well makes its about more
than just this stunt: it is about the
coming-of-age of ‘ the Australian stunt‘
industry, which is by now the equal of
any in the world, not just in truck'-
jumping, but in fire-gels and, thanks to‘
this same stunt, in car stunt safety
harnesses. Gone are the days of per-
suading drunken hoons to fall off a
O _ horse, a building or a train for ten
""’ bucks and; case of Four X. In the
mid-eighties,stunts are an integral rt
of the movie business. They have t ir
own science and their own dedicated
professionals. One of them, 25-year-
old Guy Norris, did the stunt in this
I’ - story. Norris is very successful: you
can tell that by the BMW he drives (not
new BMW,/it is true, but a BMW all
the same). He also works a lot — his
credits include Mad Max 2 (in which he
doubled for Mel Gibson), BMX
Bandits, Bliss and War Story — and,
watching the stunt in this story, you
can see why.

The stunt was f,9_i;Dead;End Drive-
.. In, it was planned with a slide-rule,
working drawings and speed tests, and
almost everything in it was custom-
built. It is the climax of the picture, in
which the hero, played by Ned Lander, '

crashes out to freedom from a drive-in

converted into a prison compound,
where he, alon[...]oup of other
unemployed youths, has spent most of
the film. Lander comandeers a police
truck and, thanks to _a low-loader
which the authorities have been using
to unload cars, leaps over the box
office, through the neon sign that says

‘Star Drive-In’, lands outside the com-
. a pound and heads for the ‘hills. This, in

-. .ei ce, is exactly what Guy Norris
es 00. But he doesn’t head for the
t the end: the specially built,
‘ reinforced Ford truck has
.0, like a toy someone has
’ tie, and hits of it are”
rmafc from the boxfi
“as finally come to;[...]. with \
‘ yruclé, running at -
‘ nd (four .times the i
‘ ‘,a'"s'lo?w,-.nio_tion:§% -
<one., running at 36 g"-
» which pans with the
is ._t.'goes up the ramp; one on b

no

o.

clueivik PA-ba[...]

Originally, though, the break-out at
the end of the film was to have been
rather less dramatic. “Ned was just
going to burst through the gates,” says
Norris. “It was Larry Eastwood, the
production designer, who actually
came up with the idea of him bursting
out over the top. He’d built this incred-
ible box office and this fabulous sign,
and they were just sitting there. We dis-
cussed the jump one morning and he
said, ‘Is it possible?’ I said, ‘Give me a
week and I’ll tell you’.”

The first thing Norris did was ring
the States and talk to two American
stuntman friends, Kerry Rossal and
Mickey Gilberts, who is second-unit
director on The Fall Guy. “What’s the
go?” he asked. “What do you
suggest?” Gilberts phoned him back
with some suggestions for the ramp
he’d need, and the one they finally
built was to Gilberts’s precis[...]curve,” explains Norris,
‘‘which gives you the maximum

amount of speed with the shortest
distance of ramp, and without any
chance of bottoming out. With an

18[...]NEMA PAPERS

ordinary ramp, you’d lose a lot of the
impact as you hit the bottom, and
you’d dig in: you’d slow right down, it
would kick you down, your front
suspension would try to bounce off,
and you’d probably be off the ramp
before you got to the top of it. The
reason why people haven’t done these
jumps in the past is that you’d need a
ramp about 20 feet high and 50-100
feet long. You’d drive up it, then start
to fall. Mickey had done jumps off
earth mounds, and he worked it out
from that.

‘‘If you look at the rushes, you’ll
notice the truck squeezes up
and, as soon as you go off the
ramp, the wheels pop out. It
actually brings it off the ramp
and makes it jump!”

“The advantage with the sine curve
is that you can get so much speed on
such a short ramp. This one is only 25
feet long and seven feet high and, by
putting the curve on it, you can hit it
really fast, and it’s actually forcing you
onto the ramp all the way. If you look
at the rushes, you notice the truck
squeezes up and, as soon as you go off
the ramp, the wheels pop out. It
actually brings it off the ramp and
makes it jump!”

Tests had told Norris what sort of

speed he could get the truck up to in

the fairly limited space available,
which was complicated by the fact that
he had to follow the curve of the drive-
in’s outer fence. By the end of the tests,
Norris had worked out that he would
hit the bottom of the ramp at between
55 and 60 mph. The ramp itself gave
him three or four inches tolerance on
either side of the truck’s front wheels.
But that wasn’t really a problem: he

had to be in exactly the right place any-
way so, although more ramp might
have been nice to see, it wouldn’t have
affected the stunt one way or the other.
“The main thing,” says Norris,
“was getting through the sign in the
right place. I said: ‘My left wheel will
go through the ‘S’ of ‘Star’, and my
right wheel will be above the ‘n’ of
‘Drive-in’.” The photographs show he
hit it exactly. “It’s jus[...]-
tenuse triangle: you take your angles
up higher and work it out on the slide-
rule until you get it. The advantage of
the sine curve is that you know exactly
where you’re going to start flying.”
The ramp itself was constructed out
of six-millimetre, machine-stretched
gridding, which gave the maximum
traction at the base. Wood or sheet
metal would have been no good,
because the stunt was done at dusk (in
the film, it’s supposed to be dawn),
and the early-evening dew would have
made it slippery. In actual fact,
though, Norris reckons he hit the ramp
at something over 60 mph. The result

So good, in fact, that once he came
down (and came down off the high),
Norris immediately put a call through
to Kerry Rossal. “It was 3.30 in the
morning there,” he says, “and he was
all” — Norris makes grumbling,
sleeping noises. “I said, ‘G’day, g’day,
I’ve just done the jump!’ And he says,
‘What did you do?’ I said ‘I62 feet’
and he said: ‘You bastard!’ ”

The first time during the whole stunt
that Norris had the chance to think was
as he started up the ramp. Prior to
that, all his attention had been taken
up with hitting it at the right speed.
“That all went superquick,” he
remembers. “But, as soon as I hit the
ramp, it was just as slow as that” — he
makes a floating movement with his
hands. “I remember all the bits of the
sign going really vividly, and I remem-
ber seeing sky and more sky. The thing
the other guys said is: ‘Whenever you
do the big one, remember the view!’ I
remember looking over and seeing the
lighting tower, and it was, like, ‘Wow!’
— actually, it was more like ‘Fuck!’ —

and then I was going down and I saw
the ground coming up.”

This, in fact, was the dangerous bit
of the stunt. Anybody can jump off a
building: it’s the landing that’s diffi-
cult. In this case, the success of the
stunt relied on two things: the angle of
the ramp, and what happened to
Norris when he landed. The truck itself
had been specially modified, with a 500
lb weight to prevent it skewing in mid-
air, because of the greater weight on
the driver’s side. And it was specially
reinforced. “The engine and trans-
mission moved back a foot as I landed,

“You’re an egg between two
rubber bands, suspended in the
car: it’s like having two great big
hands aroun[...]rther,
because I had my own little cocoon
inside, and they were pushed under-
neath. It was very much like a racing-
car pod: the whole car could have come
totally apart, and I’d still have been
self-contained.If I hadn’t had that, I
would have had the engine on my lap.”

But the real problem was to protect
Norris from the impact. “The main
injury you have with a jump is spinal
compression,” he says. “They lost a
couple of guys in the early days, and a
lot of people got badly hurt. So, they

Do you believe a truck can fly? The various
stages of Norris ’s Dead-End Drive-In stunt, cap-
tured by motor racing photographer Bi[...]out this really ingenious system
of having a vest and a bunjie cord.
You’re an egg between two rubber
bands, suspended in the car: it’s like
having two great big hands aroun[...]sion harness is a
really uncomfortable thing.

“The biggest jump they’d ever done
in The Fall Guy was around 150 feet,
but the Stuntman fractured three ribs
and wasn’t very well at the end of it.
And the biggest jump anyone’s ever
done was 186 feet, in the Dukes of
Hazard Charger: a guy went over a
train. But he was just wiped out. You
get a lot of rib and internal damage
with jumps. A friend of mine who does
a lot of thein and walks round the house
with for about a week, until he’s
better.”

Norris, who is reckoned to be one of
Australia’s most innovative stuntmen
(he has developed his own fire gel ——
illustrated on the title page of this
article — which enables him[...]ned there had to be a better
way. His solution to the problem was

to suspend the whole seat, fitting it p

CINEMA PAPERS[...]

“The best thing for me about the
whole jump,” he says, “apart from it
working so well visually, was the fact
that the seat worked.” The next day,
he had a slightly stiff neck, and that
was all. “As I started coming down, I
braced myself and was squeezing down
in the seat: I actually bent the steering
wheel! And then, bang, my head came

Another record: Norris doing the ‘Cannonball’
stunt — riding a motor bike into a car and
cannonballing off — in Mad Max 2. Norris flew
62 feet.

up and I hit the roof. I kept waiting for
more, but that was it. All I could hear
was the churning of the camera: it
sounded like a mincer, because it was
going at 96 f.p.s. I thought: I’d better
turn it off; but the control had broken
when the film snapped as I landed.
Then I was back to normal again: all
the guys were running up, and I was
trying to get out really quickly because
it was so good.”

Watching Norris do the stunt from
the roof of a near-by building, it
seemed as if it broke down into three
stages: the roar of the truck accelera-
ting towards the ramp, culminating in
a hideous clang as the front end hit the
ribbing; then silence (neon exploding is
a very s[...]ort of
‘Pouffl’, like a flash bulb bursting);
and finally, a massive rending sound,
as the truck came down and started to
disintegrate. Then there was another
five seconds, until the stunt team
reached the truck and helped Norris
out. Against everybody’s expectat[...]own or lean on some-
body’s shoulder: he jumped in the air,
waved his arms about and shouted.

All of which reinforces his point,
really: what he had done had been
worked out in advance, and had gone
almost exactly according to plan. The
only problem was that, coming down
20 feet further on than anticipated, the
truck had missed the Ned Kelly. Not
surprisingly, Norris was happy about

20 — March CINEMA PAPERS

the stunt. “I’m pretty hard on myself,
and everything I’ve done is in competi-
tion with myself. But, this time, I have
to be honest and say, ‘I don’t think it
could have gone much better’. Now we
know we can jumpathree—ton vehicle
that sort of distance, walk away and
get those sorts of shots. So, I can say
next time[...], Norris will certainly plan it just
as carefully and for just as long — not
just to prevent himself from getting
banged up and having to walk around
in an electric blanket, but because he,
like most modern stuntmen, needs the
profession to be respected for what it
is. “The main thing now,” he says, “is
to get people to see that we aren’t
yahoos. In the old days it used to be,
like: ‘We’ll do it and, whatever
happens, happens’. Now, for a shot
that’s taken $100,000, it’s got t[...]razy!’

A stuntman prepares: Norris works on the truck.

Well, there’s obviously a degree of[...]do it. But,
mainly, it’s all worked out first. The
whole trick is picking up your cheque,
having a good time spending it, and
being able to do it again the next day.
Anybody can do a stunt once.”[...]

...,,I_
« , 5- '
."[...]west: Schepisi with Willie Nelson during
a break in the shooting of Barbarosa.

Theatre on film: Schepisi on the Iceman set with
Lindsay Crouse and (on the table) John Lone.
Left, Schepision the Plenty set with Tracey
Ullman and Meryl Streep.

Top left, Schepisi during the shooting of The
Devil's Playground.

David Stratton catches up with Fred Schepisi, back in Australia with
his much-praised new film, Plenty.

Fred Schepisi has been away for six years.
The last time I interviewed him was in
mid-1979; still depressed at the commercial
failure of The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith
the previous year, he had signed with 20th
Century-Fox to direct, in America, his own
original screenplay, Bittersweet Love.

Soon after our meeting, he sold his
Melbourne house and left for Los Angeles
with his family. I met up with him a few
times during the intervening years. I had
dinner at his home one e[...]an)
had finally fallen through, mainly because
of the alarming changes of direction at the
top of the studio. We had dinner at a
Beverly Hills restaurant soon after Iceman
opened. And there’d been the odd meeting
in between. But now, with his most success-
ful film, Plenty, receiving good notices in
Britain and the US and about to open in
Australia, Schepisi was back at the
Melbourne office of Film House, working
on a TV c[...]ith Freddie
Fields, then head of MGM,
underlining the funny hits in
the script to show him it
was a comedy!”

He’s made three features in those six
years, and there have been more than twice
that many project[...]re was
Partners, a tap-dancing movie for Lorimar,
and The Mandolin Man, scripted by
Herman Raucher (Summer of ’42), to have
been'set in Sydney and to have starred
Olivia Newton-John. There was Double
Standards, also known as The Other Man,
a screenplay by Judith Ross which, Schepisi
says, “would have had an impact on this
age like The Moon is Blue had in the
fifties”. Even with three big names
committed to the project (Gene Hackman,
Roy Scheider, Ann-Margret), the film, a
sophisticated sex comedy,was rejected by
the majors as “too old”, and still didn’t get
off the ground when re—cast with William
Hurt and Karen Allen. “I had them,”
Schepisi says, bar[...]is
frustration, “but they still wouldn’t make
the bloody thing. I stood there with Freddie
Fields, then head of MGM, underlining the
funny bits in the script with a yellow pencil
to show him it was a[...]it might have
been.”

There was also Meet Me at the Melba, an
original screenplay by Schepisi set in
Atlanta in the thirties, about a repressed
man and a free-spirited woman. “Too
soft,” said the people at Warners. “I don’t

think they even read the bloody thing,” >

CINEMA PAPERS March -- 23

“In Plenty, what is being
said is greatly affected by
where it’s being said. The
‘where’ is sometimes a
comment, sometimes a
counterpoint, but always an
essential character in its
own right”

The only one of these films that
eventually did get m[...]hen
she sees him cheating her with another
woman, and tries living alone in a small
Texas town; the year is 1940. Wittliff had
seen Jimmie Blacksmith and, soon after
Bittersweet Love fell through, approached
Schepisi to work with him on the project.
Sally Field had been cast in the lead, but
she had director approval, too, and it took
an agonizingly long time for her to approve
Schepisi. Eventually, she bowed out, and
Sissy Spacek entered the picture, also with
director approval. By this time, Schepisi
had worked for months with Witliff, re-
shaping the screenplay. In the end,
however, the studio, Universal, bowed to
Spacek’s wishes: he[...]ith no previous directorial
experience, took over the film. Schepisi’s
revisions were rejected.

Iron[...]rbarosa
(1982), also scripted by wjtliff (who co-
produced). This western saga, about the
friendship of a Texas farmboy and a
famous outlaw, had been offered to various
stud[...]Film Distributors, a
company set up to handle ITC and EMI
releases in the US. The leads were already
cast. “They interviewed me, I interviewed
them," says Schepisi. He’d seen Gary
Busey in The Buddy Holly Story, and was
very excited about him. “I’d heard he was[...]th Willie Nelson.
Schepisi worked (uncredited) on the script,
and shot the film “with a great crew” on
locations in Texas. That ‘great crew’
included Australian[...]features. Union
problems were avoided because of the
Texas location, and Schepisi was relieved to
be working with his old friend and
collaborator. Baker would later shoot both
Iceman and Plenty and, says Schepisi, is
unequalled for balancing the quality of his
work with the demands of the budget.
Sneak previews of Barbarosa revealed a
few problems, exacerbated by the fact that
the distributor, AFD (“Another Friggin’
Disaster”, says Schepisi) was collapsing at
the time. Eventually, distribution of the
film passed to Universal (where it had
already been rejected at script stage) and,
despite positive reviews, it was virtually
dumped. One of the elements in the film
Schepisi looks back on with most pride was
h[...]Don Braulio. “He was fantastic:

72 years old, and a consummate
professional.”
Despite the commercial failure of

Barbarosa, Schepisi was offered other
scripts. “In Hollywood, if you make an
interesting film, wheth[...]ve done. If you
set out to make a commercial film and it
fails, then they jump all over you.” One of
the scripts was Iceman, written by Chip
Proser and John Drimmer, and picked up
by producer—director Norman Jewison, a
Canadian with many commercial successes
behind him, from In the Heat of the Night
to Fiddler on the Roof.

The intriguing story deals with the
discovery of a prehistoric man frozen in the
Arctic ice, then thawed out into the 20th
century, and one of Schepisi’s first
problems was to discove[...]to produce. Overall,
there was agreement between the two men,
though they did clash over the final cut.
Chief problem, though, was to cast an
actor for the central role. A French-
Tunisian boxer was consid[...]e champ, then a French-Canadian
from way up north in the Arctic. Finally,
Schepisi settled on John Lone, whose
training and experience had been
remarkably varied (the Peking opera,
method acting in New York). He was too
slight for the part; but, after special
training, he added weight and muscle, and
his extraordinary grace and agility made
him a memorable figure.

Critics wer[...]Ken Russel1’s Altered States), but its
release, in mid-1984, through Universal,
was not very successful, and it has,
so far, not played in Britain. Almost
immediately, however, Schepisi was
offered the opportunity to direct his next
film, an adaptation of the very successful
David Hare play, Plenty. The circum-

“Meryl is clearly the premier
actress of hfelr generation on
I in”

stances are unusually interesting. Hare
himself had directed the original London
and Broadway productions, which starred
Kate Nelligan, and was actively preparing
to direct his own first fe[...]rd R.
Pressman, wanted a British director to
make the film. “They wanted someone not
restricted by the very inhibitions the story
was examining,” says Schepisi. The first
idea was to have an American, then Hare
sug[...]tralian (“They’re sort of
like Americans”), and several were
considered. A screening for Hare of The
Devil’s Playground led to a meeting, and
Schepisi, who had seen the Broadway
production of the play and much admired
it, got the job (the final choice, he says, was
between him and George Roy Hill).

Kate Nelligan was seriously considered
for the leading role of Susan Traherne,
through whose eyes we see a Britain
declining from the end of World War 11
until the Suez Crisis. The trouble, says
Schepisi, was the budget: Hare and
Pressman wanted to open out the play, to
give it greater scope and scale. “There was
great scale which was only hinted at on
stage; but it pervades the atmosphere.
What is being said is greatly affected by
where it’s being said. The ‘where’ is some-
times a comment, sometimes a counter-
point, but always an essential character in
its own right. If we did it with Kate, we’d
have been limited to a $6—7 million budget,
if the budget could have been raised. Even
with Meryl Streep, it was still terribly
difficult to get the money. Also, Kate’s
particular approach to the character could
have been tempered and changed, but
Meryl brings different qualities to the part.
She’s clearly the premier actress of her
generation on film, while Kate is becoming
the premier actress of her generation on
stage.”

A[...]play. “I shocked
David by insisting he put more and more
dialogue back in the film. He kept saying,
‘Are you mad‘? Every director in the world
wants to take the dialogue out!’ But I said,
‘Believe me, it’[...]express it all
visually, we should concentrate on the
language’. lt’s a beautiful language piece.
But it doesn’t seem talky if you give it the
kind of scale we did.” Nor was he worried,
finally, at the casting of an American
actress in such a very English role. It
certainly helped that Streep had earlier been
accepted in an English role in The French
Lieutenant’s Woman. During the scripting,
Tracey Ullman’s role of Alice[...]

Ullman is known in America as a pop
star, in Britain as a regular on TV variety
shows; Sting,[...]as a singer than an actor. Put
them together with the 81-year-old John
Gielgud, and you have some interesting
interreactions. “Giel[...]“He gets angry
with himself when he gets tired and can’t
remember lines, but he didn’t hold us u[...]as amused when one US critic
wrote that, although the film was “exactly
the same as the play” and “nothing major
had been changed”, yet “somehow it all
seems new”. In fact, about a third of the
material in the film is new, and the play has
also been restructured. “The whole play
was out of chronology,” says Schepisi. “It
was a set of ideas in random time place-
ments, so you accepted the time-jumps
backwards and forwards. In the film, we
always went forward, though sometimes
with long time-jumps, until the very end,
when we go back to the beginning again.”

The fact that Hare had completed
shooting Wetherby be[...]ore helpful as a writer. He never
interfered with the direction; we had an
extraordinary collaboration — very happy
indeed. We had excellent communication,
and we talked out our differences.
Sometimes he changed my ideas, sometimes
I changed his.”

“David and I had excellent
communication, and we
talked out our differences.
Sometimes he chang[...]chepisi has always been a bit cynical of
critics. and Plenty hasn’t changed that.
Molly Haskell, in her review, listed all the
things she liked about the film, and then
said the only thing she really disliked was
the blunt, overly physical direction. “But
almost e[...]He’s also amused when a reviewer, like
Pam Cook in the Monthly Film Bulletin,
reviews the film without even mentioning
the director. “It’s a compliment in a way.”

And next? He plans to film a
“wonderful” Steve Te[...]about rich but emotionally under-privileged
kids in Boston, and would also like to make
another film in Australia. He might
produce in Australia too, but his plans
aren’t fully formed as yet.[...]y

changed his life. He has a new, American
wife, and a young family. He has survived
and even prospered in a very tough world.
He’s as cynical as ever, bu[...]ote once that his films were
about people trapped in a situation from
which it’s hard to escape. That was true of
his Australian films, and turns out to have
been true of his three American films too:
Barbarosa, trapped in a pointless family
feud; the Iceman, trapped in a strange and
hostile world; Susan Traherne, trapped in a
stifling postwar Britain that offers little of
the ‘plenty’ she craves. But one feels that
Fred[...]oken free of his
traps: he seems to be looking to the future
with cheerful confidence. at

The films of Fred Schepisi

Camera Corner (I964-66) Series of
shorts.

Breaking the Language Barrier
([965) Short.

The Shape of Quality (1965) Short.

People Make Papers (1965) Docu-
menlary.

And One Was Gold (I965) Docu-

mentary.

Up and Over Down Under (1966)
Documentary.

Switch On (I967) Documentary.

The Plus Factor (1970) Docu-
mentary.

T0morrow’s Canberra
Documentary.

(1972)

Libido (Episode ‘The Priest‘ 1973)
Production company: Producers and
Directors Guild of Australia/Prm
ducers: Christopher Muir and John B.
Murray/Scriptwriter: Thomas
Keneally/Cast: Robyn Nevin, Arthur
Dignam, Vivc-an Gray.

The Devil's Playground (1976)

Production company: The Feature
Film House/Producer: Fred
Schepisi/Script[...]thur Dignam, Nick Tate. Simon
Burke/107 minutes.

The Chant of Jimmie Black-
smith (1978) Production company:
The Film House/Producer: Fred
Schepisi/Scriptwriter: Schepisi, from
the novel by Thomas Kencally/Cast:
Tommy Lewis, Fredd[...]trick
Palmer Production/Producers:
Norman Jewison and Patrick
Palmer/Scriptwriters: Chip Proser and
John Drimmer/Cast: Timothy Hutton,
Lindsay Crouse[...]oduc-
tions for RKO/Producers: Edward R.
Pressman and Joseph Papp/Script-
writer: David Hare/Cost: Mery[...]arles Dance/124
minutes.

A woman not under the influence: Meryl Streep
in Plenty with (left to right) Nicholas Frankau,
Charles Dance and John Gielgud.

Q
Sam Neil as Lazar, with whom a wartime
encounter dominates Susan’s postwar life.

The war is over: Streep as Susan Traherne,

finding none of the plenty she craves in postwar

Britain.

Sting as Mick and Tracey Ullman as Alice: in the
play, Ullman’s part was “smaller and spottier",
says Schepisi.

CINEMA PAPERS M[...]

He is a devout coward who has always
wanted to be Errol Flynn. He has been set
on fire eight times, knocked down by a car
three times, gone through a windscreen
once, has climbed down the lift-shaft of the
Greater Union Building and (scared shit-
less) has climbed the Sydney Heads without
a rope. Though he is considered a ‘hired
gun’ both here and in Hollywood — the
Red Adair of the Australian film industry
—— he still believes[...]: since 1972, he has made ten
theatrical features and seven telemovies. He
is probably the only director in the world to
be represented at February’s American
Film Market in Los Angeles by no less than
three films, all completed in the past year:
Frog Dreaming, Jenny Kissed Me and
Dead-End Drive-In. The other remarkable
thing about the director (in the context of
Australian cinema) is that his films n[...]But, at 39, after
working for more than 20 years in films,
Brian Trenchard-Smith believes he is only[...]There is,” he says, “something you
always get in a Trenchard-Smith movie:
pace, a strong visual sense, and what the
movie is actually about told to you very
persuasi[...]be
applying a sense of pace: trying to find
where the joke is, and trying to make the
film look a lot bigger than it cost.” In theand one of our
most commercially successful.

industr[...]also,
however, have something to do with his
long and extremely varied career

Although his ancestors are Australian,
Trenchard-Smith was brought up in Eng-
land, and made his first film while at school
there. “I was a leading light in the school
Arts Society,” he says. “And, somehow, I
was given the job of making a film, on
8mm, about a year in the life of the school.
When I left, I put the film under my arm
and showed it around until at last someone
said: ‘We’ve got a job for you’.” That
someone was the Central Electricity
Generating Board, and they wanted a film
about pylons. From there, Trenchard-
Smith became a cameraman with a French
news company in London, then moved to
Australia.

“Ten days after arriving,” he says, “I

got a job with Channel Ten. I happened to
walk in at the right time. They said: ‘Can

you do news?’ I said: ‘Is the Pope
catholic?’ and started straight away.
Eventually, I got into cutting station

promos, and that led into doing trailers for
features." He did something like 80 of
those and, in the meantime, worked up the
nerve to ask the channel to give him a pro-
ject to produce and direct. For them, he did
several films, including For Valor and The
Stuntman — his first real encounter with a
prof[...]scinate
him, as well as to play an important role in
his films.

Leaving TV, Trenchard-Smith was
writer, producer, director and even actor in
his early films — highly successful, highly
commercial pictures like The Kung Fu
Killers (1974), The Love Epidemic (1975),
The Man from Hong Kong (also 1975) and
Deathcheaters (1976). There was also a fire
safety film for Film Australia, Hospitals
Don’! Burn Down (1977) — the title is, of
course, ironic — to which he applied his
usual principles. The result was a highly
effective safety film that al[...]uped its costs out of commercial sales
overseas.

In 1978, Trenchard-Smith went to the
US, where he spent some time at the Disney
studios. “They gave me an office on the
corner of Mickey Avenue and Dopey Drive,
and I was instructed to write in the morn-

ing, then go and look at a few shots of The D

CINEMA PAPERS March — 27

Back in Australia, he worked with pro-
ducer Tom Broadbridge on one[...]ommercially successful films, BMX
Bandits (1983), and became interested in a
project Broadbridge was unsuccessfully
trying t[...]“a tearjerker for
men”. “I identified with the human
tragedy,” he says: “a father could come
home one day and find his partner and the
girl who had called him daddy for the past
six years suddenly gone.

“One important element in the film is
commitment to family and children, as
opposed to individual selfishness and the
fear of the loss of freedom. I was trying to
show that the narcissism of the seventies
can put a family into a private hell. The
seventies had a trade-it-inin-
volved: you can irrevocably damage their
lives. And I’m suggesting that, in Australia,
where there has been a 40% failure rate in
marriages, there has been a fairly flippant

“The seventies had a trade-it-in,
throw-it-away attitude towards
relationships: if[...]de that hasn’t really been thought
through.”

The original screenplay for Jenny was by
Judith Colquhoun, but there was difficulty
in getting it funded. “I wanted to give the
story more style,” says Trenchard—Smith,
“make the characters more sophisticated
and the feeling more upmarket, more
accessible to a wider[...]tly respect as a writer, was not
prepared to make the changes, so I got
Warwick Hind to do it to my spe[...]I cut about six pages, rewrote a couple
of scenes in a very minor way, wrote two
new scenes of my own, and made the neces-
sary adjustments during shooting, when an
actor was uncomfortable with this or that
line.”

The result, in other words, is very much a
Brian Trenchard—Smith film. But the other
two of his current crop have had rather les[...]l preparation periods for him —
less than a day in the case of Frog
Dreaming. “Everett De Roche, the writer,

28 — March CINEMA PAPERS

Trenchard[...]e for him. He calls
it a "male tearjerker’f

and Barbi Taylor, the producer, tracked me
down to a Japanese restauran[...]Mile Creek for television. They gave me a
script and said, ‘Can you start tomorrow?’

“Frog Dreaming is about a ten-year-old
kid who suspects there’s something at the
bottom of a nearby pond. Everybody is
afraid of it, including the local Aborigines.
It’s a charming mystery adven[...]picture like BMX Bandits. Also, I was
interested in working with Henry Thomas,
of E.T. fame. As well as being a very intelli-
gent kid, he had the experience of four
features behind him, so I treated him as an
equal partner, not, like, ‘I'm 39 and you’re
fourteen’. I asked him how he’d react in
each situation, because I don’t think
through the mind of a fourteen-year-old.
You can’t treat kids like robots and just tell
them what to do: it’s far better to create a
situation in their minds so they’re not
acting it, they’re[...]an operate on
that level more easily than adults. And it’s
rather fun watching it happen.”

Trencha[...]h a
child — Tamsin West, who plays Jenny —
on the other feature, and ascribes his new
interest in kids’ movies to having some of
his own. “Children are the future of the
planet,” he says, “and, unless we look
after the future of the planet, we’re
doomed. Even as filmmakers, we ha[...]olesome
point of view or do people damage.” For
the record, he sees the violence and splatter
of Turkey Shoot (1982) in terms of
grotesque hilarity. “It’s over the top, a
spoof. When one of the villains accidentally
chops his henchman in half with a bull-
dozer while trying to kill someone else with
it, he just clutches his head and says, ‘Oh,
shit! ’. There is a huge roar of laughter from
the audience.”

Dead-End Drive-In is a little over the
top, too: based on a short story by Peter
Carey called ‘Crabs’ (which is the central
character’s name), it is a piece of future
shock about a world rife with youth un-
employment, in which the drive-ins have
been turned into benevolent concentration
camps. “It’s a situation that is within the
bounds of possibility,” says Trenchard-
Smith: “not as extreme as the Mad Max 2,
post-holocaust situation — sort of Mad
Max 1/2 to 3/4. To contain the unwanted
elements of society, some bright spark says,
‘We won’t go with the guard dogs and the
barbed wire and the machine guns: let’s be
clever, let’s make it benevolent, let’s give
the little bastards what they really want.
You know:[...]ll, junk food, dusk-to-dawn movies, rock
clips on the video machines in the cafeteria;

then they’ll be happy, and they’ll do it all
inside the fence. They won’t do it in the
streets or steal our video machines.’

“The Drive—In is, of course, an allegory
for the junk values of the eighties, which
our hero sees as a prison. The last 20
minutes of the film — the escape — is the
desperate, blazing climax, but the whole
film has a feeling of high style, of height-
ened or enhanced reality — a little bit over
the top, but retaining a reality that the
public will accept. This feeling of high
style I[...]enerally achieve it
by using a very mobile camera and a
number of low wide—angles, and I always
cut fairly fast and tight. In the last couple
of films, I’ve structured my style to have
the camera movement of cinema and the
coverage of television.

“I don’t think a cin[...]for a TV or video audience, after seven
seconds, the brain will be saying: ‘I want to
see that closer’. Unless you’re in a darkened
theatre with a big screen and stereo, some
of the subtleties will be lost: put it on tele-
vision, and it often looks like two bean-
poles on either side of the screen. I don’t
see this as a compromise, rather a conscious
decision to please the maximum audience.”

Given its ambitions, Dead-End Drive-In
is a modestly budgeted film; andthe future of the
planet and, unless we look after
the future of the planet, we’re
doomed”

bility and people were a little more hungry,
like in theAnd I don’t see why films of that
kind can’t be made in Australia. Razorback
had a distinctly Australian flavour, y[...]ppeal to lovers of Giant
Animal pictures all over the world. Why
can’t we make a Giant Comedy picture[...]hers. No reason why
we couldn’t put David Argue and Wilbur
Wilde together in a car, and let them wreck
Melbourne: audiences would respond to it
all over the world.

“As for me, I’d like to keep on making
films for ever. I’d love to be, at the age of
98, lining up the last shot of the movie, on
my 70 mm camera, then keel over[...]

You can’t go past the Australian Film and Television School’s
Open Program for courses and training material prepared
and delivered by top professionals actively working in film
and television production.

Think about it and do yourself a favour. Contact us
immediately for details on our resources and upcoming
activities all around Australia:

Carmen Coutts Jenny Sabine
Sydney (02) 887 1666 OR Melbourne (03) 328 2683

6 Australian Film and Television School
_ Open Program

The Race is on to
Tasmama...

A trifling two hours[...]om Melbourne: a first class studio facility; film and
video editing suites; multi-track recording studio;
preview theatres (16 and 35mm); and a staff of
experienced professional camera and sound operators,
editors, script writers, directors and production crews.
What we don’t have are Sydney’s prices or
waiting lists.

Call us and compare our prices.’

TASMANIAN FILM CORPORATIO[...]02) 286263 TELEX: AA57148

mm: was aycamssa

THE NEW NAME IN IMPORTED AND AUSTRALIAN MADE MOTION PICTURE PRODUCT/ON[...]

1
A

a-
:4

carryi

4

+

it[...]bout Half Life,
his widely-acclaimed study of
how the us military used the

inhabitants of a tiny Pacific atoll
as nuclear guinea pigs.

For most filmmakers, surviving in Aus-
tralia has meant learning to play a certain[...]d
word, ‘compromise’ would be a good name
for the game: one person’s aspirations have
had to be m[...]h CINEMA PAPERS

s been conveniently omitted from the map.

W0 7 ; :3 §)

l

commercial realities, am[...]s who are willing — or
have learned — to play the game, Australia
remains a pretty good place in which to
make films. Thanks to a tax system which[...]l compares
favourably with anything anywhere else in
the world, there are filmmaking oppor-
tunities out of (most) proportion to what
the ‘market’ — not to mention the popula-
tion — could be expected to bear. Provided
you make a certain kind of film. And
provided you play the game.

In this respect — in others, too — Dennis
O’Rourke is something of[...]tors, he is

.3»

better known abroad than he is in Aus-
tralia: his films have been seen and won
prizes at a whole slew of European and
American festivals, and they have been
commissioned by and broadcast (albeit
sometimes in adapted versions which
O’Rourke loathes) on the BBC and other
overseas television stations. What is more,[...]out of
directing documentaries, has not ‘played
the game’, and has produced some of the
most distinctive film work to come out of
Australia in the past decade. Finally, in a
genre dominated by an almost puritanical
belief in theory, O’Rourke has made
aggressively untheoretical films about the
South Pacific and its inhabitants — films

92;! on TF1
RE[...]

Guest worker: Dennis O’Rourke in the Marshall:
with Rongelap magistrate, John Anjain.

which show an overwhelming commitment
to the lives and problems of the people they
are about, yet bear the unmistakable stamp
of their maker’s personality[...]egorize. But, while
integrity is a dangerous word in the field of
documentary -— it has been used too often
to justify distortions of reality which are
true to the ‘spirit’ of a subject, or flights of
self-serving fancy which are supposed to
have the'integrity of art’—it applies well to
O’Rourke’s work, which has integrity in
the sense of wholeness as well as that of

3

BIKINI[...]honesty. Indeed, his films are a rare
mixture of the two things: they treat their
subjects with affection and respect, but not
reverence; and they do not shy away from
the resources of cinema. Fellow documen-
tarist and frequent colleague Gary Kildea
has called O’Rourke’s films ‘essays’. The
word is a little misleading, implying the
free-flowing editorializing of, say, Chris
Marke[...]good word for what O’Rourke
does: with a camera and a Nagra rather
than a pen, he discourses on a subject,
using the images and sounds of that subject
to tell its story.

O’Rourke’s subjects have, to date,
always been the natives of the Pacific basin

:T

and their rearguard action against the
colonizers — economic, religious, military
— who have moved in on their homelands,

ioiizjqg. [htf,@))'§ gfO‘paradise’ with one

han iamin . adap mg or (in the case of
' ,' i it with the other. A

' LsM>tUéi$ch appears in at least two of his

films has a transistor radio in the fore-
round broadcasting commercials for

6‘ mp[...]ith a circle of island

huts orl Micqnesian beach in the back-
grpunci. e s ot is almost a cipher to
B'l€ourke’s work: he certainly placed the
transistor in the shot, but he didn’t put it on

C%enii§l§d.in the first place; and his visual

{ion is designed to create a small
irony which, however, testifies to a larger
tragedy.

In Yumi Yet (1976) and Ileksen (1978),
O’Rourke chronicled the process whereby
Papua New Guinea got its independence. In
Yap . . . How Did They Know We’d Like
TV? (1980[...]a, part tragedy, which
introduced television onto the tiny Micro-
nesian island of Yap by means of tapes
flown in once a month from Southern Cali-
fornia; they tur[...]n Fernando valley TV
station, still complete with the commercials
for junk food and J.C. Penney. In The
Sharkcallers of Kontu (1982), O’Rourke’s
most ambitious film before Half Life, he
examined the ancient ritual of sharkcalling
— basically, going out in a boat and luring
the sharks (thought to contain the spirits of
dead ancestors) into a fishing noose with a
combination of magic, cunning and
coconut shells banged together — and
looked at how white newcomers were grad-
ually destroying it.

In “. . . C0uIdn’t Be Fairer” -— the title
is a quote from Sir Joh Bjelke—Petersen —
O’Rourke moved ‘onshore’ to the northern
part of his native Queensland, to look at
Aboriginal land rights. The film (made in

CINEMA PAPERS March — 31

V

The love affair with New Guinea has had
one problematic side—effect, however: in a
genre more beset with pigeon-holing than
any ot[...]phic documentarist.
Norman Douglas, for instance, in a percep-
tive and enthusiastic account of The Shark-
callers of Kontu for the Pacific History
Association, had no doubt: “The new
concern with visual ethnography in the
Pacific,” he wrote, “has produced at least
one outstanding talent. The Sharkcallers of
Kontu is not only O’Rourke’s most
compelling and mature work, but a film of
considerable significance in the canon of
Melanesian ethnography.”

O’Rourke, who has kept the PHA’s
newsletter, “presumably because I like it,”
is not so sure about the categorization.
“Because I went to Papua New Guinea,
liked the place, and my films were about
brown people, I was supposedly in that
school of filmmaking which some people
call[...]PERS

d r

graphic/verite ethic was a forced one, and
a blind alley: there is storytelling, and how
you choose to do it should in no way be
confined by somebody’s theoretical
writings or interpretations.

“I think you’ve got to make the distinc-
tion, in a film, between the moments and
the total statement — the construct of the
film. You can have moments, and they are
accidental. But they’re accidental like you
don’t have a car accident unless you hop in
a car and drive on the road. The film — the
intention to make it — is not accidental.
Yumi[...]— a mixed
bag of all sorts of cinematic tricks and
ideas. But, from Ileksen onwards, all my
films ha[...]d out some-
thing. You have two protagonists: all the
people who represent the subject of the
film; and me, the filmmaker. That energy is
there in all the films, and the films work,not
because they are about people who go out
and catch sharks, but because, in the end,
they’re cinema, and because of the way in
which cinema can affect people.”

The notion of the two protagonists is
clearly crucial to O’Rourke’s films (and it
may well be why . . Couldn’t Be
Fairer”, which has a third protagonist in
the shape of Mick Miller, is the least
successful). Their power comes, from the
sense of a dynamic (as opposed to a one-
way) relationship between the maker and
the made. As O’Rourke puts it, “the nature
ofthe film is: you go and stay in an isolated
community. You are a guest.”