Cinema Papers no. 31 March-April 1981 (2025)

OCR

~ “My prime interest is in producing

quality short run television series[...]have good sales potential
9 . ¢ ’ ’ outside of Australia.
We simply must have
Q these sales in order to
raise the sort of budgets
we now need to film in this country.

To achieve this we have to have
quality. The sort of quality one can only
have with an image recorded on film.

With the power of television, we
have a vast audience at our finger[...]I feel an enormous
responsibility. Film provides the quality
that lives up to that responsibility.

Not only in areas of lighting and
locations, but at the post production
and the assembling of sound track
stages.

I would like to think that w[...]t will
be a quality programme. Eastman color
film is the first step to realising that
quality.”[...]

Swedish TV
Belgian TV
German TV
Australian TV

THE AATON HAS NOW BEEN ACCEPTED IN EUROPE AS THE MOST

VERSATILE PRODUCTION / DOCUMEN TARY CAMERA AVAILABLE.

WE NOW HAVE STOCKS OF THIS FINE CAMERA FOR IMMEDIATE
DELIVERY IN AUSTRALIA.

Tasmanian -
Fil[...]HSES, VIDEO TAPES,
FILMS and BOOKS,

on all areas of production.
Course Guides and Catalogues Free from:

Australian Film and Television School
Op[...]

New Gevacolor 682
negative camera film.
This film passes even the

toughest of tests with flying colours
(if you’1l forgive the pun),

reproducing skin tones to perfection.

And it doesn’t just offer a
wide latitude that compensates for
even the most severe exposure
variations, but delivers suc[...]ain that every frame can be
appreciated as a work of art in itself.

Better still, this new film
can be processed without any of the
problems created by climatic
conditions. And its compatible with
the process employed by most major

41

Australian laboratories.

So in summary, all we can
say is that if you’ve got the creative
know—how, and the will, we’ve got
the way. New Gevacolor Type 682.

AG FA-G EVAERT LIMITED
Head Office, P. O. Box 48,
Nunawading, VIC. 3131.[...]

THE UNIVERSAL AUDI VISUAL I

A «JED

\\

For group viewing of a
television picture, whether it be
a few people in a room, or a
theatre—size audience of as
many as 3000, the IMI-3000
color video projector is the
logical choice for a professional
quality visual medium. The
lMl—3000 produces clear, bright
pictures ranging in size from

6' X 8’ on up to 15’ X 20’. It is
now in wide use in the U.S.
and abroad in a large variety of
applications including:
Classroom and lecture hall
presentations of scientific,

'* FEATLJRES

0 Automatic turn-on se[...]verload protection.

0 Eliminates inconsistencies of multiple
monitor viewing

0 Front or rear-screen projection either
with mi[...]video tape size or video disc.

0 No hook or loss of sync from 1/2", 3/4",
1" or 2" video tape inputs.

0 Remote[...]or it will project onto any flat
surface, without the limited
viewing angle associated with
other projectors that need
special high reflective screens;
thus the IMI offers the
advantage of full flexibility in
the seating pattern.

technical, medical and many
oth[...]rs;
Computer programming
display (eliminates need for
multi small screen display);
Training sessions in schools
and the military services;
Corporate boardroom activities[...]8, 20
foot wide.

0 Uses optics, tubes, and power of the
Magna Image III.

0 160° viewing angle.

* IDEAL FOR STANDARD
VIDEO, COMPUTER
GRAPHICS, OR CHAR[...]

[}[]il1l1lJIHlflF“[}H

. . . engages the latest computer science to facilitate the conforming of ori inal camera
negative with your edited work print to enable high speed hard copy prin out on the
teletypewriter console ready to commence matching.

[BDWIFIJIHWIHTGH

. . . enhances your production with the fastest, most professional and economical service[...]with an amazing hand held data entry terminal on the matching bench and finishes
as the world's most advanced negative matching se[...]

Eor furfiier iaflzmartioan ea closing,
dates for Cemmission meetings,
festivals or markefi[...]

/]C‘y'.£9/7/

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reports lroni the sets oi ltical
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I'Z§IVII'Ul.f’ZZ II

In this first major work on the Australian film industry’s
dramatic rebirth, 1[...]265 stills, including 55 in full color, this book is an
invaluable record for all those interested in the

New Australian Cinema.

208 pps, 28cm x 205cm (II" x 8”)

The chapters: The Past (Andrew Pike), Social Realism (Keith
Connoll[...]ie).

Order Form

An indispensable reference book
for anyone working in, or
dealing witli, the Australian
film industry

Edited by Peter Beilby

For the first time, a comprehensive guide to every major
aspect of the Australian film industry.

Contents include * National listings of Producers,
Directors, Production Companies, Organ[...]ng and George Miller

‘Jr A detailed round—up of recent developments in the
Australian film industry.

320 pages, illustrated[...]shed by Cinema Papers Pty Ltd
in association with The New South Wales Film Corporation

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Seminar Papers

In November the Film and Television Production Association of
Australia and the New South Wales Film Corporation brought together[...]scuss film financing, marketing, and
distribution of Australian films in the 19805 with producers involved in
the film and television industry.

The symposium was a resounding success.

Tape recordings made of the proceedings have been transcribed and
edited by Cinema Papers, and will soon be published as the
Film Expo ’8O Seminar Papers.

Copies can be ordered now for $25 each.

Contributors

Arthur Abeles
Chairman,[...]in, Berkowitz
and Selvin

Harry Ufland
President. The Ufland Agency (U S.)

Please send copies of the Film Expo '80 Seminar Papers
For orders placed within Australia, Aust.$25 each.

O[...].

Address .. .

Contents

Theatrical Production
The Package: Two Perspectives

Perspective I. As Seen by the Buyer

(i) Partial versus complete packaging or
Starting from scratch with an idea

(ii) Evaluating for different markets different
costs (budgeting)

Sp[...]pikings. Mike Medavoy

Perspective ll: As Seen by the Seller
The role of the agent in packaging
Speaker Harry Ufland

Theatrical Production
Business and Legal Aspects

(i) Sources of materials (published. original
screenpiays, etc)

(ii) Forms of acquisition agreements and/or
writer's agreements[...]sing etc

Speaker Eric Weissmann

Distribution in the United States

(i) Mapping the distribution sales campaign
When and where to open. How to allocate
advertising budgets Number of theatres
70mm and stereo Reissues. Ancillary
markets ~ hold back for pay and free
television

(ii) Exhibition terms Advances and guaran-
tees. split of box—office (90-10 with "floor
‘house-nut etc[...]Boyle

Enclosed. Aust S

Distribution Outside the United States

Distribution terms Relationship and terms uith
sub—distributors and exhibitors Fiecoupment of
expenses Crosscollateralizing territories
Dubbing[...]elevision Production and Distribution

Production for network or syndication Deficit
financing Tape ver[...]ublic broadcasting

Speaker Lois Luger

Financing of Theatrical Films
Major Studios

Control. approval[...]tive pick-up

Speaker Ftudy Petersdort

Financing of Theatrical Films
Independent Studios

Rise of independent financing Tax motivated
and otherwise Completion financing

Speaker Sam Gelfman

Presale of Rights

Separating rights by media Pay television[...]problems interim and comple-
tion financing Term of distribution rights

Speaker: Mark Damon

Mufti-National and
Other Co-Productions

Availability of subsidies Treaties Tax incentives
Government investments

Speaker Simon Ols.-vang

Please make cheques money orders out to Cinema Papers Pl[...]a 305‘ Tel iO3i 329 5383

Note Bank dralis only for overseas orders
Please allow up to E weeks for processing

Number 12
April 1977

Ken[...]Bert Deling Piero
Tosi John Scott John
Dankworth The Getting
oi Wisdom Journey
Among Women

Number[...]ored
Documentaries.

Number 26
April-May 1980

The Films of Peter Weir.
Charles Jolie. Harlequin.
Nationalism in Australian
Cinema The Little Con-
vict

Index: Volume 6

No of copies ordered

BACK ISSUES SALE

Take advantage of our speczal ofler and catch up on your missing issues. Multiple copies less than lzalf-price.’

Number 2
April 1974

Violence in the Cinema.
Alvin Purple Frank Moor-
house Sandy Harb[...]Sherman
My Brilliant Career Film
Study Resources The
Night the Prowler

D“Ji‘_l.E",),‘IJ.} 1

4

Number 27
June-July 1980

The New Zealand Film
industry The 2 Men
Peter Yeldharn Maybe
This Time Donald Richi[...]enclosed $.

(Note numbers 4. 6. 7 and 8 are out of printl

Number 3
July 1974

John Papadopolous
Willis O'Brien. The Mc—
Donagh Sisters Richard
Brennan Luis Bunuel
The True Story 01 Eskimo
Nell

Number 14
October 1[...]Film Grendel. Grendel.
Grendel David Hem—
mings The Odd Angry
Shot Box—Oltice Grosses
Snapshot

Num[...]Tom Cowan. Francois
Tru‘laul Delphine Seyrig.
The Irishman The Chant
oi Jimmie Blacksmith Sri
Lanl<an Cinema The Last
Wave

Number 22
July-August 1979

Bruce P[...]ewsiront Film Study
Resources Koataa
Money Movers The Aus—
tralian Flm and Tele-
vision School

Index[...]ember-October
1979

Australian Television
Last 01 the Knucklemen
Women Filmmakers
Japanese Cinema. My
B[...]copies $1.80 each
(save $2.20 per copy)

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multiple copies of any one issue. indicate the number you require
in the appropriate box

DEN]
123

5

l:ll:iC]ElEiElCiCiC[...]978

Bill Bain Isabelle Hup—
pert Polish Cinema The
Night the Prowler Pierre
Rissienl Newsiront. Film
Study Res[...]ralian Film Censorship
Sam Arkotl Roman
Polanski. The Picture

Show Man Don’s Party
Storm Boy

Num[...]n Cinema Sonia
Borg Alain Tanner.
Cathy’: Child The Last
Tasmanian

Number 25
February-March 1980[...]and
Politics

Number 28
August-September
1980

The Films ol Bruce Beres-
tord. stir Melbourne and
Sy[...]Bob Ellis Actors Equity
Debate Uri Windl
Cruising The Last
Outlaw Philippine Cin~
erna.The Club

Please make your cheque or money order payable to Cinema Pa[...]

‘Recommended price only.

Cinema Papers is produced with financial assistance from the Australian Film Commission.
Articles represent the views of their authors and not necessarily those of the editors. While every
care is taken with manuscripts and materials supplied for this magazine, neither the Editors nor
the Publishers accept any liability for loss or damage which may arise. This magazine may not be
reproduced in whole or in part without the permission of the copyright owner. Cinema Papers is
published every two months by Cinema Paper[...]

THE "WE NEED THE MONEY"
DEPARTMENT

At the annual general meeting of the
Sydney Filmmakers Co-operative late
last year, members voted for several
changes of policy. One of these is a
startling reversal of philosophy, but,
surprisingly, has attracted little com-
ment. Scott Murray reports:

Covering the AGM in Filmnews (Vol.
10, No. 8), Susan Lambert,[...]Strachan wrote:

“A strong argument was put to the
meeting that, given the limited nature
of the Co-op's resources, a more
effective relationship[...]n and distribution needed to
be established . . . The meeting,
therefore, resolved that, ‘If the film-
makers wish their films to be eligible
for major exhibition by the Co-op,
then they must lodge the film for
exclusive non-theatrical distribution,
except that the filmmakers are not
excluded from arranging non-
theatrical screenings themselves
and except that a monthly meeting of
members and staff may allow non-
theatrical rentals on a non-exclusive
basis'."

In effect, the Co-op will only exhibit
films it distributes. As there are only
two major distributors of short films in
Australia (the Co-op and the Austra-
lian Film Institute), the decision at the
annual general meeting has set up a
no-win situation for filmmakers. The
choices basically are:

1. Going with the Co-op. This means

a Sydney Co-op cinema release,[...]W distribution and little
action in other states (the Co-op
having no other cinemas and little
effectiv[...]alone throughout Aus-

tralia; or

3. Going with the AFl’s Vincent

Library and an AFI release. This[...]sewhere, with a
possible release in Melbourne (at
the Longford), Sydney (Opera
House) and Hobart (State).

One filmmaker recently faced with
this dilemma is David Bradbury. Either
he gave the Co-op Public Enemy No.
One and went for a basically Sydney
exhibition and distribution, o[...]stribution and Melbourne/
Sydney exhibition (with the AFI).

Neither, obviously, is ideal, because
what you gain in one territory you lose
in another. Given the difficulties facing
independent filmmakers, it is an in-
vidious choice.

The AFI in particular is upset by the
AGM resolution as it was made without
consultation with the AFI. The Co-op
has long had an agreement with the AFI
whereby each organization consults the
other before undertaking radical
changes in distribution or exhibition.

John Foster, the AFl’s executive
director, raised his concern over this
lack of consultation at a poorly-
attended AFI public meeting in Sydney,
but those members of the Co-op
present felt circumstances were so
pressing that the Co-op had no choice
but to act.

All these considerations aside,
however, a more fundamental issue is
at stake: namely, the adoption by a
body of a practice it has vocally at-
tacked for manyyears. That practice. of
course, is “vertical integration". In this
case, it means the linking of exhibition
and distribution on an exclusive basis.

“Vertical integration" of the
American exhibitors/distributors’ in-
terests has been the most attacked
practice in the Australian film industry
for decades. Many see it as the prin-
cipal reason for Australia's lack of a
feature film industry in the 1950s and
1960s. In fact, most industry people
saw Australia’s only hope for develop-
ing a local industry lay in the breaking
down of this vertical integration. Many,

including the Australian Labor Party
and Actors Equity, still believe this.

Vertical integration came under
severe attack during the 1972 Tariff
Board Inquiry into the film and tele-
vision industry. Various submissions
demanded the divorcing of distribution
and exhibition in Australia, Dr
Coombs suggesting that the then
Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam, read
the riot act to the major exhibitorl
distributors.

Attacks continued during the 1970s,
several film historians seeing parallels
between the incursion of the American
majors in the 1930s and 1940s, and the
subsequent decline in production, with
the problems of getting an industry
going in the 19703.

Not all commentators have remained
consistent on the issue, though. in
1973, Antony I. Ginnane was the most
vocal critic of vertical integration. In
1979, he had reversed hi[...]Ginnane‘s reversal, no one
could have predicted the Sydney Co-
op's abrupt turnabout. The Co-op has
always seen itself as a radical organiza-
tion supporting those disadvantaged
by the “system". It has taken a highly
"moral” line on many issues, and has
spared the distributor/exhibitor in-
terests little. To adopt a tactic of the
“system" comes, therefore, as a sur-
prise.

One should also remember that
several forms of “vertical integration"
are not allowed in the U.S., where legal
action was taken under the Sherman
anti-trust laws. This led to a partial
divorcement of exhibition, distribution
and production interests, in a famous
case involving Paramount. Calls for
similar action, including those by many
Co-op members, have gone unheeded
in Australia.

So, what is the reason for the turn-
about? When challenged at the AFI
public meeting in Sydney, one Co-op
member admitted to the possibility of a
philosophical contradiction, but added,
“We need the money." “That”, came
the obvious reply, “is what Paramount
no doubt said.”

CINECON

A Science-f[...]will be held on April 22,
1981, in Melbourne. It is being
organized by the Fantasy Film Society
of Australia.

Those interested in further details
s[...]3000.

U.S. CRITICS ACKNOWLEDGE
AUSTRALIAN FILMS

For the first time, Australian films
were featured prominently in the an-
nual U.S. critics’ “Top Tens". Charles
Champlin of The Los Angeles Times
selected Breaker Moran! and My
Brilliant Career, as did Rex Reed of
The New York Evening News.

The critics for Time and The New
York Times listed neither, but the high
circulation People chose My Brilliant
Career, which also made Jeffrey Lyons’
list. Lyons is a radio and television critic
in New York.

NEW 1[...]poration (Australia) Pty Ltd recently an-
nounced the formation of a national
16mm film division which became ef-
fective from January 5, 1981.

This new division will be known[...]distribute on 16mm through-
out Australia product from Twentieth
Century-Fox, Columbia, United Artists,[...]nch Film Distributors, Filmways and
many others.

The management structure of the
new division will be David Chard as
general manag[...]and Cooper will be Ken
Jackson and Brian Duffy.

The head office of Amalgamated
(16mm) film distributors will be located
on the 6th level of the Hoyts Entertain-
ment Centre, 505 George St, Sydn[...]FILM CONFERENCE

A conference on History and Film is
to be held at the Australian National
University, Canberra, from November
23 to 27, 1981. The conference will
provide an opportunity for film
educators and researchers, historians
and history teachers, producers and
writers of historical television and films
to get together to consider the
theoretical and practical implications of
their work.

in part, it will reflect an increasing in-
terest by film scholars in the processes
of the recording and/or transmission of
history by the means of film.

AFI ELECTIONS

In accordance with the articles of as-
sociation of the Australian Film in-
stitute, three positions have been made
vacant on the board of directors. The
three retiring directors, who are eligible
for re-appointment, are John Flaus,
Scott Murray and David Roe. The
remaining four directors (Senator
David Hamer, Pa[...]ie Thoms) retire in a year’s time.
This pattern of three vacant positions
one year, four the next, is continuous.

Nominations for the 1981 board
closed on February 20, and the an-
nouncement of those elected will be
made at the annual general meeting on
March 28, at the Longford Cinema,
Melbourne.

ALL-TIME CHAMPS

in[...]s with a com-
bined U.S. and Canadian film rental of
more than $4 million. The 10 highest
earners are:

1. Star Wars $175,685,000
2. Jaws $133,435,000
3. The Empire

Strikes Back $120,000,000
4. Grease $96,300,000
5. The Exorcist $88,500,000
6. The Godfather $86,275,000
7. Superman $82,500,000
8. The Sound of

Music $79,748,000
3. The Sting $78,963,000

_A

Close Encounters
of the Third Kind $77,000,000

Steven Spielberg has two films in
the Top Ten (Jaws and Close En-
counters), but George[...]and Empire,
which he co-produced. Lucas also has
American Graffiti at No. 18.

Only one film in this list was released
in 1980, the 10 highest rental earners
being:

Private Benjamin $33,500,000
Blues Brothers

1. The Empire

Strikes Back $120,000,000
2. Kramer vs Kramer $60,528,000
3. The Jerk $43,000,000
4. Airplane (Flying

High in Australia) $38,000,000
5. smokey and the

Bandit ll $37,600,000
6. Coal Miner’s
7[...]

10. The Shining $30,200,000

Another film of interest is The Blue
Lagoon, co-produced by Australian
Richard Franklin, which is at No. 11
with $28,456,000. But the most
dramatic feature is the fact The Empire
Strikes Back earned almost double the
rental of Kramer vs Kramer, the No. 2
film. This reflects a relatively poor year.

The only Australian films to make the
1980 list were Mad Max at No. 82 with
$3,500,000,[...]which appears at
No. 122 with $1,281,987.

Films of particular interest are 1941
which, despite a critical drubbing,
earned a domestic rental of
$23,400,000, Ordinary People, Robert
Redford’s[...]$13
million and Paul Schroeder’s master-
piece, American Gigolo, with $11.5
million.

Caligula, which stru[...]hip problems, has earned
a respectable $4,800,000 from a very
limited release.

Major financial disappoi[...]Alan
Rudolf’s Roadie ($2,480,646), Sam
Fuller's The Big Red One ($2,328,675)
and Tom Horn ($4,300,000), which
fared poorly for a Steve McQueen
vehicle.

Xanadu, for one, didn’t set the world
alight with $10 million, nor did The
Island with $9.6 million.

the Library Association of Australia.
She is a Commonwealth Literary
Fellowship winner and the author of the
book The Winter Sparrows.

Senator Durack said Eve Clifford,
who had been a member of the Board
since 1972, had also been reappointed.
Another appointment is still to be made
to the Board and applications for this
position are being considered.

GETTING INTO THE ACT

A'ustralia’s isn't the only film industry
where sections of the community are
taking union action to gain conces-
sions. Last year, the U.S. was hit by a
14-week actors’ strike, and a[...]and
directors are considering similar
action.

in the past, agreements between the
Writers Guild of America and the As-
sociation of Motion Picture Producers
have been routinely processed.
Disputes have been minor and the
relationship stable. The increased
profits in home video and pay-
television, however, have set the writers
after what they see as a fairer share of
the take. The studios. which have had a
fairly lean decade, rea[...]ts were only
now allowing them to hold their own.
The writers were unimpressed.

Another point of disagreement was

Lauren Hutton and Richard Gere[...]olo. which was 0 moderate C0mmEf-
cial success in the U.S.

FILM CENSORSHIP
APPOINTMENTS

The Attorney-General, Senator Peter
Durack, recently announced the ap-
pointment of a new Deputy Chief Cen-
sor and two new members of the Film
Censorship Board. The new Deputy
Chief Censor is Ken Barton, a member
of the Film Censorship Board since
1971. Barton replaces Joan Pilone, who
resigned as Deputy Chief Censor near
the completion of her term late last
year.

The two new members of the Film
Censorship Board are Sue Pickering
and Mary Rose Liverani.

Pickering, 28, is a former regional
inspector of the Censorship section of
the Attorney-General’s Department in
Melbourne, and an associate of the
Library Association of Australia. She
has been engaged in censorship work
for six years in Melbourne, including
three years as Deputy Film Censor.

Liverani, 41, of Wollongong, is a
librarian who is also a freelance writer
and reviewer. Liverani holds a Bachelor
of Arts degree and is an Associate of

over the refusal of WGA (West) to
negotiate with one employer bargain-
ing unit, preferring to enter into
separate negotiations. The AMPTP and
several studios then lodged action
against the WGAW with the National
Labor‘ Relations Board, charging the
WGAW has failed to bargain in good
faith. This led to a stalemate in talks be-
tween the WGAW and the AMPTP; the
talks have only just resumed.

The latest development was a call by
the WGA for a February 3 meeting to
ask members for authorization to
strike. Also requested was an increase
in guild dues.

So, until the studios and the writers
agree on whether writers should
receive a cut: of the gross on pay-
television, strike action looks likely.
And the directors, who have pre-
viously had cordial rela[...]anagement, are looking to see if they
should join the fray: if they do, the U.S.
again faces a product shortage. For
outside film industries like Australia's,
this co[...]tors and musicians look likely in

Britain. Again the central issue is a
percentage of ancillary market ex-
ploitation, such as video cassettes.

What has brought about such poss-
ible action is the expiry, on March 9, of
the pay agreement between the British
Film Producers Association, Actors
Equity and the Musicians’ Union. Talks
are being held, but mos[...]kely.

NATIONAL GUILD
CONFERENCE IN
MELBOURNE

The first national conference of the
Australian Writers Guild is to be held in
Melbourne next year. Commencing on
the evening of June 22, it will proceed
throughout that week, culminating in
tztge 1981 Awgies Award Dinner on June

The principal purpose of the con-
ference will be the debate and
proclamation of a new AWG constitu-
tion. Within this will be considered the
rules of the organization, its national
and state structures,[...]sues.

COST VS YIELD

Another interesting feature of the
January 14 Variety is an analysis of
Cost vs U.S. Yield for big-budget films.
Examples include the infamous $44
million Cleopatra, which earned $26
million in the US. domestic market.

lian film and television community.

The Association is open to teachers
or students of media study and produc-
tion, at all levels of education; writers
and critics; filmmakers and makers of
television programs; filmgoers or tele-
vision viewers -— in fact, anyone who is
interested in offering or receiving
ideas.

A major conference is planned for
1982 in Melbourne, and in the interim
severa|,,workshops and seminars will
take place.

Those who wish to offer suggestions
concerning the structure and content of
these activities should send them to:
Rob Jordan, Treasurer, ASSA, C/-
Royal Melbourne lnstitute of Tech-
nology, 124 Latrobe St, Melbourne.
Victoria, 3000. Membership is $2 for
students and $10 for everyone else.

PACT GOES PUBLIC

Pact Product[...]vestment in film and television produc-
tion, and the development of film and
television material.

During its short existence, Pact has

been involved with features,
representing a total of more than $10
million of Australian filmmaking. It was
the first independent film investment
company to surface after years of
government money having been
pumped into the industry.

Now, in February 1981, a new com-
pany[...]Sorcerer $22,000,000 $5,900,000
Close Encounters of the Third Kind $21,000,000 $82,700,000
APOCBIYPSG NOW[...]23,400,000
Blues Brothers $31,000,000 $30,000,000
The Empire Strikes Back $22,000,000 $120,000,000

The yield figures are not as up-to-
date as in the “all-time champs" list,
Apocalypse Now now havi[...]is Coppola's ex-
pensive experiment made a profit after
all, confounding all but Coppola's
closest supporters.

One lesson of the analysis is that big-
budgets don't guarantee success. Lord
Grade's $36 million Raise the Titanic,
for example, sank with a dismal $6.8
million.

But the worst returns are for the $10
million Red Tent, which secured only
$900,000, and Dino De Laurentiis’
production of Waterloo. Costing $25
million, it earned an insig[...]on.

NEWHART DIFFUSION

Following her resignation from the
Adelaide International Film Festival,
along with five other board members,
after the banning of Sweet Sweet-
back’s Baadasss Song, former artis[...]’s Sauve que peut la vie
(Slow Motion/Every Man for Himself).

AUSTRALIAN SCREEN
STUDIES ASSOCIATION

The newly-formed Australian Screen
Studies Association is a body whose
concern it is to provide a focal point for
the stimulation of an Australian media
culture. Its ambition is to draw together
members who are active in the Austra-

be issued, to find a working capital of
$7 million, to provide the purchase
price for the acquisition of Pact
Productions Pty Ltd by Filmco Ltd and
qualify the new company for listing on
member exchanges of the Australian
Associated Stock Exchange. Shares
have[...]ten by Jackson,
Graham Moore and Partners, member
of the Sydney Stock Exchange.

The directors of Filmco will be Peter
Fox, Robert Sanders, Richard[...]a long career in radio
and television journalism. For the past
two years, he has been running Pact
Producti[...]n
Freehill Hollingdale and Page,
solicitors, has, for the past five years,
been the head of legal and business af-
fairs at the South Australian Film Cor-
poration. The SAFC has agreed to act
as a consultant to the new company.

With local budgets increasing, the
directors of Filmco believe that Aus-
tralian producers are going to have
need of a specialist film pre-sales dis-
counter; none exists in Australia at
present. It is proposed that the com-
pany service this area which it regards
as having great potential for expansion.

The directors believe there is also
considerable scope for the establish-
ment and operation of a sales
agency/marketing organization to han-
dle the worldwide exploitation of
Australian and selected overseas films
and television product. The proposed
activities of Filmco are:

0 providing loans to assist i[...]

They made remarks about many
people[...]nd Don Crombie (assessor).
They also commented on the Creative
Development Branch's refusal to fund
Hard Knocks beyond “double-head”.

As managing editor of Cinema
Papers. Scott Murray sought replies
from Lachie Shaw and Don Crombie to
accompany the interview. Their com-
ments provided more evidence of the
problems encountered.

Shaw supports the assessors and
their decision to refuse funding. H[...]apers should
have censored McLennan and
Friedrich is not worthy of comment.

Crombie stands by his decision to
refus[...]o be a “flawed” film. He accuses Don
McLennan of lacking in “professional
morality“ and seems affronted that he
should ask for finance to complete the
film, calling his expectation “the divine
right to continuing support".

Shaw and Crombie set very high
standards of professionalism -- in the
“morality" of applicants‘ behavior and
the cinematic standard of their work.
One hopes they may provide the
example themselves, but the standard
they ask for seems a trifle extreme. I
haven't noticed Crombie refusing any
“continuing support" for his own career
(divine or not), and thought it co[...]t Crombie to understand another
director applying for finance to com-
plete his feature, especially consider-
ing the funds requested by McLennan
may not pay for the hotel accommoda-
tion on a Crombie film.

Most of the industry would disagree
with the Shaw/Cr.ombie opinion that
Hard Knocks is a "flawed" or “failed"
film. It would be very difficult to find
anyone who thinks the film should not
have been completed. But this,
however, was the decision of the
Creative Development Branch. Hard
Knocks was eventually completed with
money from the private sector; the in-
itial Creative Development Branch
finance was recouped ($33,000); the

The Editor reserves the right to cor-
rect for style, abbreviate and invite
comment on all letters selected for
publication in Cinema Papers.

film has won more major awards than
any low-budget feature in the past 10
years; and, on a cost-to-return basis. is
now enjoying commercial success.

It is doubtful that any project re-
jected by the Creative Development
Branch has achieved the same level of
commercial and critical success. In
fact, it is doubtful that any project sup-
ported by the Branch has achieved the
same standard. Under the circum-
stances, and considering the Branch's
brief to encourage low-budget film-
maki[...].

Instead, McLennan and Friedrich are
treated to the same paternalism and
schoolmasterly homilies that
obstructed the production of Hard
Knocks from the beginning.

Rod Bishop

Dear Sir,

I read with in[...]p’s
interview with Don McLennan, particu-
larly the section dealing with an anony-
mous assessor on Don's project, King
Island. I was one of the assessors, the
others being Henry Crawford and Don
Crombie.

Now[...]given his power to charm John
Waters into working for $140 a week.

Don remembers the interview better
than I do. My diary refers to the project
as slow-paced and naive, with an ab-
surdly low budget, plus the fact that he
became very red-faced and screamed
at his putative producer doing the inter-
view to shut up.

I am surprised Don Cromb[...]annot assert he did not,
they had interviews, one after the other,
and it seems unlikely to me.

I certainly was the assessor who kept
hammering about the low budget, butl
do not remember slipping outside and
offering to get Don the money if I could
produce the film for him. At the time.
February 1977, I was involved with
Love Letters from Teralba Road, Long
Weekend and Newsfront, and Don
Crombie was immersed in The
Irishman. Perhaps it was Henry — you
never can tell with these quiet ones.

PS: I also enjoyed the story about
the crew being tricked into finishing the
film, believing there was sufficient
funds to pay them, especially the part
about how they all got paid later. As far
as[...]-budget films go, we all
could take a few lessons from Don.

Richard Brennan

MORE ADO ABOUT ELLIS

Dear Sir,

May I take the opportunity to correct
a number of inaccuracies quoted by
Bob Ellis regarding Maybe This Time
(Cinema Papers, No. 29, pp 314-31[...]simply because they are
in print.
1. As producer of the film, I was not
imposed upon the writers by the
New South Wales Film Corpora-
tion. Anne Brooksba[...]telephoned me and asked me to
consider producing the film. Pre-
viously, I had been asked by Bob
Ellis to edit the film.

2. It was at my suggestion that Judy
Morris was offered the lead role.

Roadshow later agreed to the
proposed casting.

3. The change of line from "Luna
Park" to “Sydney Harbour" was
not changed on the day. The
original line was used in filming
and Ellis had plenty of time during
editing to propose a new line, and
was requested to do so. The line
was changed in a post-sync ses-
sion, at my suggestion, when Ellis
failed to deliver. Fran's reply line
is: “I know. I've been up from the
country for some time", which
does make some difference to the
meaning of the new line.

4. At no time did the New South
Wales Film Corporation instruct
us to r[...]I as producer
did agree with them that we
remove the physical presence of
Whitlam. Further reference to
Whitlam was removed[...]iously agreed
with us, as he refused Ellis‘ re-
quest to appear in the film.

Incidentally, I was intrigued by the

photograph of atriptych Bob, posed by
the exit sign. Are you suggesting that
he is on the way out? Surely not. Upon
reflection, I imagine that the simple ex-
planation is he came in the wrong way.

Brian Kavanagh

Dear Sir,

Much as I enjoyed reading the inter-
view with Bob Ellis, I was puzzled by
one point that he made.

Bob claims to have sent me the
script of Maybe This Time, and that I
“hated it". This is simply not true. I have
never read Maybe This Tim[...].

David Stevens

RIGHTING REVIEWS

Dear Sir,

The Blue Lagoon is described In
Scott Murray's review as “openly
explicit". The example given is that
when “Emme|ine (Brooke Shields)
experiences her first period, the pool in
which she is bathing turns a dark red."

No, please! That’s not explicit. lt’s
surrealist, it's a[...]t’s
Carrie all over again — its not explicit.
The amount of blood lost during an
entire menstrual period is around three
ounces —— three tablespoons, barely
enough to perceptibly tint a bucket of
water.

And yet "when Emmeline sees the
pool water darken. she calls out in
terror for Richard." In the whole “fan-
tasy paradise” the only part of human
sensuality/sexuality presented with
extreme bloodiness and shock is men-
struation.

unclean, unclean! Women are Iepers
once a month, and so on. Male fear of
the bloody woman isn't new. It should
be recognized for what it is, not falsely
and flatteringly called “ex[...]

, The point of the pool scene is to
convey that girls have periods (in a
general audience film that is “out-
spoken”), and that Emmeline feels the
experience to be private — once her
fear has re[...]dal
Kleiser undermines Emmeline’s
response with the clear implication that

menstruation is natural and shouIdn’t
be hidden. (He makes the same point,

incidentally. about masturbation.)

As for Ellis’ exclamation of "Unclean.
uncleani", it says nothing about The
Blue Lagoon.

Dear Sir,

Nowhere surely could one read pre-
tentions separated from justifying fact
by a wider gap than in Ken Mogg‘s film
review of The Shining (Cinema Papers,
No. 30, pp 478, 479).

A vapid text of hoary divagations
into potted Jungian psychology.

It is just possible that Mogg has a
friend; if so perhaps this friend could
lend Mogg a copy of Ad/er for Begin-
ners, to equip him for his next foray into
fatulty in the guise of a film review.

Though to be fair, one must admit he
did show great style in his use of
parentheses.

Anne Kersey

Dear Sir,

Australian sound recordists often
receive an unfair proportion of the
credit for the quality of a film's sound.

In Jim McCullogh’s review of The
Earthling, he refers to Don Connolly's
crisp sound recording as one of the
admirable contributions by a local
technician. This crisp sound recording
was in fact the subtle sound editing of
Bob Cogger who quite literally trans-
formed that element of the film.

To be fair to the sound recording
fraternity, they often work under[...]itions, at locations where
recording usable sound is almost
impossible, due to background inter-
ference, and where in a lot of instances
they are not given enough time or con-
sideration by other members of the
crew to do their job properly.

This is where the sound editor comes
into the picture. He may, if the film has
been shot under noisy conditions, have
to re-record or post-sync much of the
dialogue, replace background at-
mospheres and sound effects, and
manufacture many others in the studio
for greater control when mixing. He
can, and generally does, transform the
sound of the film, bringing it alive and
adding depth and dime[...]tors are rather like arrangers: they
orally score the film in all its complexity
and then pass it over to the sound
mixer who very skilfully blends it all
together.

As is the case with many locally-
made features, the bulk of the creditfor
the quality of the sound should go to
the sound editor and not the sound
recordist. The Earthling is one such
film.

Most of the dialogue was post-
synced, much of the flora and fauna
footage was shot mute, and Peter
Collinson talked Ricky Schroder
through a majority of his scenes on the
film further complicating matters.

Nick Beauman,[...]No. 30, pp
420, 421) leads me to believe that he is
either a fool or, in tardy imitation of
myself, a young publicist on the way up
to such earthly glory as remains in Mur-[...]chosen arguments merit not
only our contempt but of whatever
fleeting Melbourne mistress he seeks
thus to palliate back into his lonely bed
of pain. She will see through him, I'm
sure. I am sure we all do.

His complaint, for instance, that
Breaker Morant, a film about an ar[...]es women because no
women appear in it, except as the
fleeting midnight fantasies of men on
trial for their very lives, was not made
by him, as I recall, or by anyone else in
the similar cases of King and Country
and Paths of Glory. There were no
women in King and Country; and in
Paths of Glory only one, a pretty
German girl who sang, through tears, a
song poignant enough to bring to tears
the young French fantaslzing soldiers
en route to their certain slaughter on
the western front.

As in Breaker Morant, women playe[...]-
tions conducted within an all-male
army in time of war. Are these films
sexist as well’? If not, why not? And if so,
why did he not include them in the out-
raged condemnation he accorded
Breaker Morant?

Is he suffering perhaps from colonial
cringe? Does he believe it is all right If
the English or the Americans do
something — they have poetic licence
to do it — but if the Australians do it,
there should be a Royal Commis[...]dacity? I think there
can be no other explanation for this ob-
vious omission from his article. If there
is, I would like to know what it is.

I have not yet heard sexism as a
charge levelle[...]kin. Perhaps Stephen Crofts will
now level it, in the letters page. If not, I
cannot help but wonder wh[...]be a hypocrite, as well as a
fool? No, I think he is a fool.

Evidence for this belief is gained by a
study of his lacerating assertion that
the Boers are "marginalized“, and
therefore "repressed”, because they do
not appear as major characters in the
film, in spite of their similarity, as pea-
sant farmers smarting under British
colonialism, to the Australians they are
fighting.

Would he also say that in such war
films as Paths of Glory, King and
Country, Dunkirk, The Dam Busters,
Reach for the Sky, The Battle of Bri-
tain, Alexander Nevsky, Destiny of a
Man, Ballad of a Soldier and A Walk in
the Sun the Germans are repressed
because they do not appear as major
characters, and that in All Quiet on the
Western Front the English and the
French are repressed because they do
not appear i[...]characters? If
so, why did he not condemn, under the
blanket category “repression“, all war
films that see a battle only from one
point of view?

is there a reason for his assertions?
Does he believe that foreigners c[...]stralians can't? If so, why does
he believe this? Is he a hypocrite as well
as a fool? Is he a closet cultural
colonialist as well as a tool’? or is he
only a fool?

Well, at any rate, he certainly raises a
number of questions. Is The Women
sexist because no men appear in it? It
must be. Is Bambi anti-human because
no humans appear in it? It has to be. Is
White Christmas bigoted because no
Muslims appear in it? What a total fool
he is.

Crofts quotes me at length, probably
because I used the word "man|iness” in
my review. I used it because it ac-
curately expresses one of the many
Australian qualities — qualities very
much of the chosen era - that Edward
Woodward, Jack Thompson[...]use it.

If I had, by contrast, used in a review
of, say, My Brilliant Career theis a shadow sexist, and
a cultural colonialist, and a repressor of
language and humanist understanding
through and through.

Crofts says as well that it is
hypocritical of me to say the English,
the Greeks, the Italians and the
Chinese have a right to be in Aus-
tralian films because they are a part of
our history, whereas Americans do not
have that right because (except for two
years in World War 2) they are not a
part of our history. I meant by that: if
there were whole suburbs of Sydney
and Melbourne inhabited by
Americans, as t[...]cupied by Americans, as there are by
Germans and the descendants of
Scots, there would be every reason to
make films about them.

As it stands, with the exception of the
American soldiers in Sydney and
Brisbane in World War 2, and the Viet-
nam dogfaces on leave in Kings Cross
in the late 1960s, there is no reason to
make films about them. This is why
American actors with American ac-
cents ln Australian films annoy Aus-
tralian audiences, in much the same
way as, say, Turkish actors with thick
Turkish accents playing Tennessee
Williams in American films would an-
noy American audiences.

The simplest reason why American
actors should not be used in Aus-
tralian films is Australian audiences
don't go to them, and if they don't go to
films you are making with American ac-
tors in them, and American audiences
do, you are not making Australian films,
but American films, and the Australian
Government funding bodies, which by
de[...]diences, should cut you off without a
cent.

Much of Crofts’ article seems to me
like a loud complaint that Shake-
speare's Hamlet does not adequately
explore the diplomatic tensions be-
tween Denmark and Poland in the early
11th Century; the total failure of Shake-
speare's. King Lear to recreate Druidic
ritual; the total failure of Superman II to
expose the penal system of the planet
Krypton for what it really was; or the
failure of Scrooge McDuck comics to
expound the Marxist point of view.

His complaint that Breaker Morant
does not[...]r
cultural repression in colonial Aus-
tralia, or the best way of preventing the
next My Lai (if he knows how to do this,
perhaps he should share his wisdom,
and quickly) is to miss the point of the
film. This, unless I am mistaken, is how

certain human beings from two related
cultures reacted in a certain trying
situation: how the English, to prevent
war with Germany, decided to kill a few
Australians to palliate the Kaiser, and
how the Australian soldiers and their
Australian lawyer b[...]air, aggression,
cunning and finally grace.

That the film does not explore as well
the place of the horse in the South
African war is perhaps a pity, as is the
omission of a long soliloquy on the
miraculous change wrought in modern
warfare by the invention of the machine
gun, or indeed the price of fish, without
which England, a maritime nation,
c[...]inanced its dreaded
colonial adventures.

Perhaps the best way to show what a
fool Crofts is would be to dramatize
what he thinks Breaker Morant should
be. Let us take up the story at the point
where Sharp (Chris Haywood) has
stood down from the dock.
HANDCOCK: Just you and me, mate.
SHARP: Ah, git stuffed. (Exit.)
JUDGE: The prisoner will control

himself, or be restrained.
(Enter Rumpole.)
RUMPOLE: My lord, I crave the
court's indulgence. I call
to the witness box a sim-
ple Boer. I propose to
show the court the
similarities between the
two colonial nations Aus-
tralia and South Africa.
(Sensation.)
HANDCOCK: Who is this fucker? He’ll
go. He'll bloody go. (The
simple Boer takes the
stand, chewing a straw.)
What is the purpose of
this testimony, Mr Rum-
pole?
To show, m’Iud, t[...]alians in South Africa
are killing . . . a mirror of
themselves.
(Dropping files) I protest,
your Honor. This has no
bearing on the case.
Indeed, it is sympto-
matic of the prosecu-
tion’s repeated desire to
twist the facts.
I myself fail to see what
bearing it has, Mr Arse-
hole, on a question of ul-
timate responsibility for
an admitted killing ,of
civilians in time of war.
Rumpole, m’|ud. The
point is to establish the
effect that colonialism
has on any people.
Well surely it depends on
the people, Mr Rumpole.

JUDGE:

RUMPOLE:

THO[...]

Down Under can afford to be without. "

mustfor anyone interested
in the localfilm industry. ”
Australian Playboy

Scree[...]MOTION PICTURE
YEA RBO OK
I981/82

Cinema Papers is pleased to announce that the 1981/82 edition of the
Australian Motion Picture Yearbook is now in preparation.
The enlarged, updated 1981/82 edition will contain many new features, including:
0 Comprehensive listings of feature film scriptwriters, directors of photography, composers,
designers, editors and sound recordists
0 Monographs on the work of director Bruce Beresford, producer Matt Carroll and scriptwriter

David Williamson

0 A round-up of films in production in 1981

0 Listings of Actors and Technicians Agencies

0 An expanded list of services and facilities

0 A listing of Australian capital city cinemas and drive-ins
0 A special feature on technology and the film industry

Specifications

B5 (240 x 180mm[...]Detailed section
identification on tops and
sides of pages.

10,000

$19.50

Size
Extent
Printing

Pri[...]mail order, and
through T.B. Clark (Overseas) in the
U.S., Canada and Britain.

Contents‘

'
____j_[...]5: Producers, Directors,
Screenwriters, Directors of
Photography, Editors,
Designers, Composers
Organi[...]7:
Chapter 8:
Chapter 9:

March 13: Copy deadline for ads to be
made up by Cinema Papers.
March 27: Deadline for camera-ready
advertisements.
May 14: Previ[...]

HANDCOCK:

THOMAS:

RUMPOLE:

THOMAS:

What a shallow response
from an acknowledged
poet.

This fuckerfs really gonna
go. (Attempts to climb
out of the dock but is
restrained.)

I don't think it is. It leads
Lieutenant Handcock to
violence, womani[...]t then.

Mr Rumpole, we are try-
ing to prevent a war with
Germany.

I on the other hand, your
Honor, am trying to pre-
vent the next My Lai.
(Pause.)

I didn't fully understand
the reference, Mr Rum-
pole.

As well you might not.
Your Honor, what leads
men to such atrocities?
(His tone grows con-
fidential.) ls it merely
orders from higher up? Is
it army cooking? is it lack
of women? is it the kind
of women colonialism
produces: repressed,
resentful,[...]ing, hard faced, and
prone to pumpkin
scones’? Is it belief in
God? For surely, your
Honor, killing someone is’
not so serious when you
believe his soul goes to
heaven immediately, is
it?

This is . . . deep stuff, Mr
Rumpole.

Your Honor, I have long
yearned, ah you cannot
believe how I have

yearned, to uplift the con-

versational quality of
military court martials. I
mean one can scarce get
in a quote from even
Kipling, let alone discuss
important issues like sex-
ism as it is practised in
Coonabarabran.
(remembering) Bloody[...]ce in one night.
(Thomas rises.)

My lord, I find the
prosecution’s arguments
totally fallacious. In the
first place Boers and
Australians are not very
al[...]believing in pre-
destination. Australians
are in the main practising
agnostics, and drink like
fish. B[...]ther former
prisoners and their
children refugees from
English oppression or,
like my client, remittance
men with rhyming dic-
tionaries. But the variety
of character in any
colony makes it almost
impossibl[...]ck, a
perfect poke

And I thought fuck that
. . . for a joke.

(His eyes mist over.) Ah
yes, the dear dead days
flower of Malaya I
cannot say . . .

I protest, your Honor. The
prosecution is singing
during my summing up.

RUMPOLE: It has long been my am-

bition, your Honor, to in-
troduce a little music into
court proceedings, to
alleviate the tension of
men in peril of their lives.
You seem to have
revolutionary ideas, Mr
Rumpole, on the ultimate
purpose of military court
martials.

Well, if you can't say what
you think, what's the pur-
pose of anything? If a
man with music in his
heart cannot[...]usic burst forth .. .
(sings) My Bonnie lies
over the ocean

My Bonnie lies over the
sea

My Bonnie lies over the
ocean . . .

(moved, joins in) Oh
bring back my B[...]ck, bring back
my Bonnie to me, to me.
I protest, your Honor. The
purpose of this trial is to
ascertain certain facts. . .
Oh what a bore you are,
Mr Thomas. Who needs
facts, when we've got
opinions, and the singing
voice of Breaker Morant.
Eat, drink and be merry,
Mr Thomas, for tomor-
row you die.

RUMPOLE:

MORANT:

ALL:

THO[...]in
abbreviated form:

1. Breaker Morant exploits the con-
ventions of realist film: its con-
tinuous editing constructs[...]we always
know where we are spatially relative
to the action); it invites us to engage
in the cause-effect sequence of a
closed narrative structure; and it
seeks to ide[...]n these ways it “authen-
ticates” as “real" the world which it
fabricates, while concealing the
processes by which it does so. It
thus reduces the possibility of our
thinking of alternative representa-
tions of women, war, imperialism, or
the rights of prisoners, or indeed of
Ellis’ chosen values of manliness
and mateship, or, more importantly,
of what these issues may mean to us
NOW.

. In conjunction with the film's struc-
ture of sympathies, these conven-
tions call upon us to identify with the
films represented attitudes (among
others) of cultural cringe and sex-
ism.

. The films morality structure and
identification of its spectator with
some uncritical agents of British im-
perialism short-changes us on any
description of that system, let alone
any analysis of it. While allowing us
the luxury of a laugh at the Poms,
the film effectively endorses British
imperialism, wh[...]Realpolitik in
which a few wild colonial boys get
the chop.

. This failure to analyse or even
describe imperialism is curious in a
country which is itself post-colonial.
It argues a reluctance to conduct
any of that crucial cultural analysis
of how we, as Australians, have
come to be where we[...]r Morant’s popularity here
suggests pleasure in the laughter
mentioned above, but relief that the
criticism implied in that laughter is
not followed through to its logical
conclusion.[...]inment, fiction or documentary, af-
fect our ways of understanding the

world. The narrative, characteriza-

tion and structure of sympathies of

Breaker Moran! vindicate the likes

of Lt William Calley.

Like a child with a new toy g[...]e at least hits arguments 4 and 5,
if only around the edges. But he com-
pletely misses 1, 2 and 3. Not only does
this failure prevent him from under-
standing how 1, 2 and 3 underpin 4 and
5, but also from understanding the as-
sumptions underpinning his own asser-
tions. I will do his objections the
courtesy of logical refutation:

1. Ellis travesties argument[...]plaining that "Hamlet
does not adequately explore the
diplomatic tensions between Den-
mark and Poland in the early 11th
Century”, etc. Nor am I trying to
rewrite great literary classics — Ellis’
choice of two plays by our culture's
most hallowed artist is at best dis-
ingenuous — but I am arguing that
all art is political in the sense that it
either opposes or endorses its ex-[...]ver
wrote about any film, artistic
product, piece of legislation or even
Ronald Reagan having the power to
stop the next My Lai. I wrote, more
modestly, about generating under-
standing of how it might be stopped.
Many films represent the killing of
civilians in such a way as to dis-
courage thought about the forces
which bring about such situations.
Breaker Morant is a film of this type.
Ellis claims to share my concern
about My Lai. I believe that such a
concern is reason for attacking
Breaker Morant.

. Ellis at least broac[...]t 4.
But his Demography Rules assertion
about who is legitimately Australian
naively assumes that we a[...]ate our own
culture. This sounds like an apologia
for multi-cultural television. Ellis, it
appears, refuses to consider my
point about the cultural continuity
between British colonialism and
American cultural imperialism (in
this respect Australia is closer to
Canada than it is to South Africa, but
given the lacunae of our cultural
history, any comparison of
Australians with Boers, even one
such as Ellis offers, is of some
value). And by merely bleating
about the nasty Yanks and making
pious remonstrations about what
our film funding bodies should be
doing, Ellis is rather burying his
head in cultural quicksand. Breaker
Morant, similarly, makes it the more
difficult to begin to analyse how
American cultural imperialism af-
fects us now. Ellis cobbles together
three further objections, which are
of the order of straw-clutching:

. Ellis asks why I omit any reference to
war films other than Breaker Morant
being sexist. Perhaps he would care
to read the second sentence of the
third paragraph of my article. And if
he hasn't encountered sexism a[...]Battleship Potemkin -— to
cull but three films from his
catalogue — perhaps he should
read and listen more widely.

. “Why did he not condemn under the
blanket category ‘repression’ all war
films that see battle from one point
of view?” Simply, I was con-
centrating on one fil[...]ing a
book.

. “If I had used . . . in a review of...
My Brilliant career theof the
swappability of genders but of the
differential constitution of gender
stereotypes. Most grossly in his
rewrite of Breaker Morant, Ellis ex-
ploits the most exploitative of such
stereotypes.

The root cause of Ellis’ difficulties is
his monolithic notion of the individual.
This informs both the conceptual and
rhetorical dimensions of his letter.

LETTERS

First, for the sake of getting it out of
the way, there is his rhetoric. Quite
apart from the cheap laughs, the non-
sequiturs and the trivializations, Ellis
apparently needs to resort to the Grub
Street tactic of ad hominem remarks in
some attempt to camouflage his grave
lack of substantive argument. I look
forward to first meeting the man whose
calumny, ridicule and innuendo
suggest[...]“argu-
ments merit contempt" neatly
epitomizes the ease with which he
trades rationality for emotional reac-
tion. And the Melbourne mistress he
uses, rhetorically, to shore up this claim
is his own deeply-sexist fiction.

Individualism is the conceptual
stumbling block which seems to pre-
vent Ellis from grasping most of my
arguments. He appears incapable of
thinking beyond the individualist terms
of conventional forms of characteriza-
tion in film: characters as psy-
chologically realistic, making sense for
the spectator and thus offering
themselves as objects for our iden-
tification, If anyone deals with any is-
sues in such a film it is not us, but the
characters, and then in accordance
with their deployment within the
narrative structure. Any issues are a
mere adjunct to the character. The
world is represented as if individuals
(the characters) control it, but this
representation s[...]c-
tators that we can make no contribution
to it. From outside the fictional world,
we just watch the characters do their
thing. The conventions at work here
block any sustained analysis of issues.
They replace a conceptual logic with
the paired logics of narrative develop-
ment and the psychological realism of
characters. A critical approach to is-
sues is supplanted by emotional reac-
tion: either we like character X or we
don't; either we agree with what he/she
does or we don’t. But although we are

sometimes in circumstances similar to
some of Hamlet's, we are not him. it is
of no use to us to fantasize for two
hours that we are Hamlet — or Morant,
Handcock or Thomas. Such iden-
tification flattens out the historical and
cultural differences between us an[...]em: either we identify (and
follow slavishly into the thought realms
of Lt William Calley) or we don’t identify
(in which case we probablyjust say that
the film is a failure for us). Heads I win,
tails you lose: character retai[...]onventions as ax-
iomatic, as witness his rewrite of
Breaker Morant, which he quaintly
presumes to represent what I “think . . .
Breaker Morant should be". Films[...]how we lead our
lives in our given society. This is far
more useful than the profoundly anti-
human prescription that the answer to
leading the good life is being a good
bloke, which is Ellis’ way of reading
Breaker Morant, whether in his review
or in his rewrite. it he is genuinely in-
terested in seeing the kind offilm I have
in mind, he might consider Numero
Deux or Song Of The Shirt.

This prompts some concluding
remarks about the widespread kind of
criticism which Ellis exemplifies. The
similarity of values which emerge, in
both Breaker Morant and E[...]about it, gives some clue as to
why he might like the film. If criticism
is to be any more than a rationaliza-
tion/projection of the critic’s own views,
it must make its assumptions and
criteria available for public discussion.
We are otherwise left with no guarantee
of social responsibility beyond the fact
that someone has the contract for the
job. It is of major importance to
demystify the critic’s practice of in-
dividualist taste-broking — and often
phrase-making as well — to analyse
what it really peddles. B

Stephen Crofts

Cine[...]

Brown ’s background is now almost as well
known as his name, partly because it is distinc-
tive and partly because he promotes it.[...]working-class area in
Sydney’s western suburbs. After school, he
turned down a university scholarship and went
into the insurance business, where an oflice
revue introduced him to amateur theatre.
Unlike so many of his colleagues, Brown didn ’t
go to the National Institute of the Dramatic
Arts. Instead, he joined Sydney’s Gene[...]ory company and finally a year’s contract
with the National Theatre Company.

Brown then returned to[...]e
staged revues in pubs, and appeared on stage at
the Nimrod and the Black Theatre. It was at
this latter venue that W[...]e included a part in a play, “Back-
yard”, at the Nimrod.

Barbara Alysen interviewed Brown just as he
was starting work on yet another film, John
Duigan’s The Winter of our Dreams. Brown
begins by explaining how[...]

The year before last, I heard that
two mini-series were about to be
made: The Last Outlaw and A
Town Like Alice. I hadn’t done any
television before, except for a part
in Against the Wind, but I felt both
were good stories. I knew the
people behind them, having worked
with Henry Crawford [Alice] and
Ian Jones [Outlaw] on Against the
Wind. I knew they weren’t merely
playing a game[...]round.

But, having decided I wanted to
be in one of the series, I still didn’t
know how I would achieve[...]Crawford rang me.
.Luckily, he had me in mind all the
time; this made things pretty easy.

The fact that Henry was doing
Alice also swayed me into taking
the role, because he doesn’t want to
fail. He is a chancy guy and good
for something good. He is an
intelligent bloke and has a good
idea of what the public would like.
At the same time, he isn’t inter-
ested in making some[...]enter-
taining stories.

Did you pursue a part in “The Last
Outlaw”?

No. In fact, I was pleased that
John Jarratt got the role because
we are very close mates. I also
didn[...]t because I had A Town Like
Alice.

Have you seen the original film of
“A Town Like Alice” [1956, with
Peter Finch a[...]s a good film but not
anything wonderful; I think the
book is terrific. The film only went
half way and stopped when Jean
and Joe met again. That’s crazy
because there is a fantastic other
side to the book, which is the time
spent in the outback. I felt it was an
opportunity to play the definitive
Australian.

Joe Harmon is a role that has al-
ready been played, and by som[...]feel about Peter Finch’s
portrayal?

I think it is a shame he didn’t get
the opportunity to do the whole
book. But Peter Finch and Bryan
Brown are v[...]o are our Joe
Harmons.

Will people who have seen the origi-

nal version bring certain expecta-
tions to your portrayal?

16 —— Cinema Papers, March—April

The only expectation they will
have is an idea of what the story is
about. But you can explore things a
lot further in six hours than you can
in one-and—a-half. There is a lot
more about the women and their
trek, and greater time spent on Jean
coming across to meet me. There is
also a lot more on me in England
looking for her.

What kind of preparation did you do
for the role? Did you talk to people
who were around at the time?

No.

Do you ever do that?

Sometimes, but often it can be
totally useless. What I have to
come to terms with is the psyche of
the person, not necessarily what it
iswhat I do. I
just start to let the story overtake
me. I tend to take on attitudes in
the character. But then, I don’t
know if, saying that, I am not bull-
shitting, either. All I do is I devote
myself to the thing. I see the pro-

ducer all the time. I talk to the
director. I want to know how it’s
going, who is doing this and that. I
immerse myself in the project.

I let all that soak through. Then I
read the script and try to get an
understanding of the person: why
he would be in a place, what he is
attempting in life, where his
responsibility lies. I take time
trying to understand his psyche so
that by the time filming starts I
have a personality I can then play.

You have done very little television
work. Why is that?

Before I got into films, I had
auditioned for a few television
shows and not been used. And when
the films started happening I found
the scripts were more stimulating
than those I’d seen on television.

I am not stimulated by The
Young Doctors. I am sure a lot of
people enjoy watching it, and I
suppose I can watch it for a week.
It’s a bit trivial, but it can be enter[...], I could be.

I have been approached to do lots

ofthe success or
failure of “A Town Like Alice”?
When “Water Under the Bridge”
failed to find an audience, people

were casting doubts on the future of
mini-series . . .

People have been saying “the
industry rides on this film” about
every film made in the past five
years. Right now, the industry is
the healthiest it has been, but three
or four months[...]ng it was fucked, over and
buried. I wasn’t one of those
people, by the way.

So, I don’t think alot rides on A
Town Like Alice. But if it is very
successful, as I think it will be, that
will mean lots more mini-series.

Apart from a good time, is there
anything you hope people will get
from the series?

Yes, the characters have a lot to
say. They aren’t whing[...]t into a situation which
doesn’t resolve itself the way they

No.

Of the roles you have played, what
are your favorites?

I have lots of favorites. Love
Letters from Teralba Road is an
incredible favorite of mine, but
that’s understandable —— it was my
first film. It is a very good film and
it brought me to the notice of a lot
of people. I also enjoyed the
character I played in Third Person
Plural, for James Ricketson. I
found that a real buzz, and it is
close to being a favorite role.

Are there any th[...]am not saying. I liked them all
I liked Rogers in The Odd Angry
Shot. I liked the guy in Cathy’s
Child, not that he was particularly
pertinent to the story. I liked Hand-
cock in Breaker Morant a lot, and I
know the public does as well. I
think he comes closest to defining

the Australian we know today. I
liked him for that.

Who is the director with whom you
have most enjoyed working?[...]pretty loaded question.
If I answered that, a lot of direc-
tors might be sensitive because they
weren’t mentioned. But it is fairly
obvious that I enjoy working with
Stephen[...]im a great deal. I
would work again with Steve at the
drop of a hat.

I also work very well with Bruce
Beresford. Bruce is a very aware
director, in that his first priority is
his actors, and that’s great. He
moves towards[...]here an actor needs to be ap-
proached with a bit of flippancy,
and where that person might need
to be treated seriously. You get a
lot of give from Bruce.

I have worked with a number of
directors twice, so it is obvious that
I quite liked them. Don Crombie
and Tom Jeffrey, for example, have
given me plenty of room to come to
a character and they have always[...]o on

I-'

Bryan Brown in his first /ilm role, as the husband Len. in Stephen

A Town Like Alice made it excit-
ing getting up in the morning to
start work -— and that was for the
whole l6 weeks.

I don’t think I’d do a film if I
didn’t like or respect the director,
no matter what the film was. I
couldn’t go through six or seven
weeks of being around someone I
thought was an arse-hole.

Who is the actor you most admire?

I am a great fan of Al Pacino’s.
He has immense integrity in the
playing of his characters, and he
seems a pretty fine man as[...]much,
and John Travolta. I have also liked
a lot of Harvey Keitel’s stuff,
Dustin Hoffman at times,[...]l those cats. If you
go back a bit, Marlon Brando is the
best actor I think I’ve seen.

What about actresses?

That’s harder. I am not a great
fan of too many American ac-
tresses but I like a lot of Aus-
tralian actresses, such as Wendy
Hughes, Ang[...]lm, but I thought
she was terrific in Water Under the
Bridge.

Among the Americans I like,
there is Tuesday Weld, who is ter-
rific, and Jane Fonda sometimes. I
am not a fan of Diane Keaton’s at
all.

What about your taste in films?
I like American films, and that

covers quite a lot. I was brough[...]d I like going to them

Wallace 3‘ Love Letters from T eralba Road.

BRYAN BROWN

now. I understand the language and
the society is the closest to the one I
know; the people seem to have the
same problems.

Among modern-day directors, I
lik[...]ola interests me more than
anyone. Michael Cimino is an
absolute arse-hole and The Deer
Hunter is probably the biggest load
of shit I have seen. I don’t like
Woody Allen; nev[...]like to move in direc-
tions other than acting?

The great thing about the Aus-
tralian film industry is that it is new
— at least to a lot of us. I have seen
people doing new things, and I as[...]one project float-
ing with Gerry Bostock . . .

The project with Gerry is the first
concrete movement I have made
into another area. We worked to-
gether on a screenplay from Gerry’s
play, Here Comes the Nigger,
which I want to shoot. I haven’t
yet had the opportunity to shoot it,
and I am still working o[...]nterests us, and we have thought
that maybe there is a film there.

In Tom ./effre_v's The Odd Angry Shot, Brown played the soldier,

Rogers.

Cinema Papers, March-April — l7

Have you a timetable for complet-
ing the film with Bostock?

No, but as soon as I finish the
film with John Duigan, I’d like to
get started on it. However, I have
just heard that the Creative De-
velopment Branch of the Aus-
tralian Film Commission hasn’t
any money at the moment. This
makes it a bit difficult.

What sort of budget are you look-
ing at?

I want to make it a[...]100,000
to make, so I’d like to try and make
it for about $40,000.

What are the best and worst things
you have seen written about you?

The worst thing was in The
Women's Weekly. It quoted me as
saying that there[...]Helen
Morse and myself in A Town Like
Alice. That is something I would
never dare to say. If there is any-
thing that works on screen, and I
hope there is, then let other people
say it.

The Womerfs Weekly doing that
really gave me a pain in the arse,
and I don’t think I will ever do any-
thing for it again. They made me
feel like a big head, and I really felt
shithouse about that.

The best thing that’s been said
about me was that I[...]ink I’ve read it
somewhere. [Laughs.]

How much of a draw is the name
“Bryan Brown” on the marquee?

I wouldn’t have a clue. But I do
know that a lot of kids from the
suburbs really like me. I have been
in a situatio[...]d he
said, “Look, I live at Riverwood;
you came from Panania. Ijust want
to say I feel really good knowing
you came from the same area. So,
just keep saying the things you
say.” We then went home and
talked for ages.

I’ve had guys and young kids in
the street come up and say they like
me. So, I would think they go and
see me in film.

Is that partly because it is well
known that you didn’t come through
the NIDA system?

They probably do know that,
because[...]e are certain things I say
which they agree with. The fact that
I like playing Australians makes a
lot of young Australian kids feel
good.

Do you think your desire to become
an actor was out of character for
someone of your background?

When I was 21 and going into
acting, I did feel a little inade-
quate. I didn’t understand what
theatre, or acting, or any of those
things were about. All I knew was
that doing it gave me quite a buzz.
But the academic side, the theor-
izing, left me a little bit bewil-
dered.[...]s to
characters.

I am still totally intuitive in what
I do, but now I know what it’s
based on. I now understand what
looking into the theory of some-
thing is all about. It doesn’t take
me over, though. I am not a great
fan of theory; I am a fan of prac-
tice. That’s all that really counts.

You[...]ed much
professional jealousy?

I have had a load of silly people
say things like, “God, ifl see your
face again ...”

I really don’t care about atti-
tudes within the industry; I care
about theof them. And when people do start
going to every Australian film, and
they sell very well, the producers
will be able to pay us well and we
w0n’t have to do lots of films.

One year, I did five films and I
forgot that all of them would be
shown together at the Australian
Film Awards. It showed up some
professional jealousy, as a couple of
actors made some stupid remarks.
They werejust pl[...]them.

Has Australia developed a star sys-
tem to the point where the go-ahead
of a production can hinge on having
a name actor?

I think this is happening. There
are a few actors that distributo[...]Bruce Beresjbrd (right) with Bryan Brown (centre) during the filming 0/ Breaker Mar-ant.

18 — Cinema Pa[...]united inA
Town Like Alice.

would like to see in the films. It
does not mean that we drag people
into the cinema, but that we have
been connected with succ[...]people have re-

sponded. On a smaller scale, it is
like what happens in the U.S.

Is that a good thing?

I don’t know. I find it qui[...]in
film industry politics?

Name an issue.

Say, the present feud between Actors’
Equity and some producers?

There isn’t a feud; it is just
media-manufactured. What hap-
pened was obviously a backlash
against Tony Ginnane, which a lot
of producers had to wear.

Tony Ginnane was after four im-
ported actors, I think, and Equity
thoug[...]actors. That policy has since been
rescinded and is back to what it
always was: each film will be

How do you feel about the importa-
tion of overseas actors? There are
some people who are co[...]like it when some-
one plays an Australian in an
American film and does it badly. It
would be much better for one of us
to be playing the part. Similarly, if
there is a Yank, an Englishman or
whatever in an Australia[...]ave no interest in
playing Englishmen, or Yanks.

What about the argument that im-
ported actors will want more mo[...]y difficult question; it
isn’t clear-cut. A lot of films can get
assured distribution if they have[...]producers want to get their
films distributed in the U.S. But
even with all this talk around, you
look at the films being made this
year and there aren’t a lot of over-
seas artists going to be in them.

These are films being made on
millions of dollars. We are getting
chancier and what’s happening? —
our producers and directors are still
asking for Australians to be in their
films.

Also, I think there are a lot of
jealous people talking; jealous
actors thinking maybe they won’t
get the jobs. But the facts never
pointed to us losing jobs.

Uri Windt is a good, tough nego-
tiator for us. With Breaker Morant,
I think Matt Carroll tri[...]imports in. I know he defin-
itely wanted two. In the end, he got
one: Edward Woodward. And that
film is probably our most success-
ful.

When we were rea[...]ied with
whom he’d got; Uri was satisfied
with what he had won; and we
ended up with a good film. That’s
part of the whole system: each side
has ajob to do and each has to fight
hard for it.

Do you think the media have shown
Equity to be a lot less flexible than it

really is?

TheThe media have
told absolute lies. The media
haven’t even bothered to find out
the facts. The media, given the
chance, will union bash. We all
know that.

Some people feel the introduction of
the tax concessions for films will
lead to over-production. Does this
worry you?

That’s whatof a sudden the
money is here. At the same time,
the rest of the world is all ears.

I have been away for three
months and I am absolutely aston-
ished at how the rest of the world is
looking at Australia and Aus-
tralian films.

I was sitting in Sardi’s in New
York with Judith Crist, one of the
top New York film critics, Bruce
Williamson, the critic for Playboy,
and several distributors. They were
all singing, “Tap, tap on my
window”, from The Picture Show
Man. They all knew the film.

One distributor was saying, “I
nearly got that film.” And why is
that? Because Joan Long had got
out there and shown it to all of
them. It was different from any-
thing they’d seen, and a lot of them
talk very highly of it.

BRYAN BROWN

‘Those people are ready to see any
product coming from Australia. In
fact, I wish to Christ I had a fil[...]ould have sold a film there.

I don’t know who is selling our
films in New York, but they are cer-
tainly not showing them to the right
people, and they are certainly not
showing[...]ompared to foreign
films?

We get more publicity for our
films than do other films.

But are they ge[...]I think you would find we prob-
ably get as much of an audience as
other films do, except for the block-
busters like Superman and Star
Wars.

There are loads of American,
Italian or French films I go to
where there are only three or four
people in the cinema. The point is
that an Australian audience, no
matter how large,[...]r own.

So, we will always have to keep an
eye on the foreign market . . .

Yes, if you are making things on
a lot of money, and if you want to
get your money back. If you don’t
have to get your money back, you
don’t have to worry about the audi-
ence. But there are not too many
benevolent[...]ck Thompson has already lent his
name to a number of causes. He has
backed the Wandjina Aboriginal
land rights appeal, and has n[...]Creek
[“Give Trees a Chance”]. Would
you put your name to a cause in that
way?

Yes.
Any in particu[...]vote Labor.

[Laughs]

Actually, I do have a sort of beef
—— and I talk about it when I am on
television or being interviewed —
and that is I don’t go along with the
idea that you are only a success if
you are famous or have made mil-
lions of dollars. I was a success the
moment I was born. I am in awe of
nobody. A kid growing up doesn’t
have to respect someone because of
their name; he can respect people
because they deserve it. That’s the
only thing he should go on. That’s
the message I’d like to put my
name to. in[...]

Liz (Nancy A /len), the /z0oker«heroine of Dressed To Kill, “dressed to kill" as she anemprs to uncover the idemiry of Dr Elliott’: mysterious parient.

LOOKIN[...]

“The best horror films, like the best fairy-tales, manage to be reactionary, anarchistic
and revolutionary all at the same time. ”

Tom Ryan

ccasionally, published[...]en. Most articles about horror films, or
reviews of particular examples of the genre’,
take the form of expressions of dismay directed
at what is seen as a malicious sexism in the films
and at the ways in which they exploit their audi-
ences’ everyday fears about death, mutilation
and violation.

However, beneath the rhetoric, one rarely
finds anything beyond an impression of the film,
an impression often cast in enviably glittering
prose, but seld[...]their cultural func-
tion. Its inevitable product is a vagueness, which
induces reader frustration because of its lack of
attention to detail and reflects authorial con-
fusion because of its capriciousness.

Its approach to the objects of its scorn usually
aspires to a defence of the downtrodden (women
within a patriarchal order, or anyone whose sex-
ual behaviour transgresses the model provided
by the monogamous, heterosexual norm), a
proper concern for criticism which is to be
socially responsible.

But when its treatment of the films them-
selves is analytically incompetent, when its argu-
ment displays an ignorance of the ways in which
its targets are working as films,[...]a-
tion it has to give specific films or groups of
films a cultural place is doomed to failure of a
kind that can only be counter-productive to the
chosen cause. If it is constantly avoiding funda-
mental questions about the films it is dealing

1. Stephen King, “Why- We Crave Horror[...]n), January 1981, p. 246.

2. Readers might find of particular interest four articles by
Robin Wood: “Return of the Repressed” in Film Com-
ment, July-August 1978;[...]sters” in Film
Comment, September-October I978; “The American
Family Comedy: from Meet Me In St Louis to The
Texas Chainsaw Massacre” in Wide Angle, Vol. 3,[...]0. In addition, Raymond
Bel|our’s consideration of Psycho, “Psychosis, Neurosis,
Perversion” in[...]3/4, offers a
provocative psychoanalytic reading of the sexual
ideology imbedded in that film’s formal structure, while
Adrian Martin's brief sketch of Friday the 13th in Buff,
No. I. is encouraging evidence that Australian critical
response to horror films is not entirely the product of
antipodean hysteria.

3. A very loosely structured collection which can include
everything from films about Dracula and other species
of “living dead” to those about psychopaths on the ram-
page in the streets of New York or Los Angeles or in the
comfortable suburbia of small-town America.

with; then its energy would[...]ian Martin and
I attempted to initiate discussion of the much-
maligned Cruising in terms which would deny[...]film nor its identity as
a cultural artefact‘. The two aspects, of course,
are indistinguishable, though for the purposes of
discussion they need to be isolated to focus at-
tention firstly upon that which is represented
and secondly upon the system of representation
itself. My concern here is to continue this project
in relation to Dressed To Kill, a very different
film from Cruising, though one which shares its
loose class[...]any attention to its formal
arrangementsfl with the result that ef-
forts to ascribe social meanings[...]cular films directed by
Alfred Hitchcock, though the view that De
Palma is simply imitating his predecessor needs
further discussion. More important, however,
are the terms in which characters and their func-
tions in the film are described, and much of the

4. Cinema Papers, No. 29, pp. 322-324, 392.
5. The most stimulating exception to this is Pauline I(ael’s
piece on the film in The New Yorker, August 4, 1980.

Stephen King‘

initial misreading of the way in which it is work-
ing begins here.

For example, Colin Bennett’s review of Dres-
sed To Kill‘ attacks what he sees as the way in
which Kate Miller (Angie Dickinson) is
punished for her sexual misdemeanours:

. . the Angie Dickinson character, being a
libidinous soul, must suffer for her sins. And
so we come to the first piece of butchery: a cut-
throat job with a razor in a lift, which lingers
forever on the sight of the blood-boltered [sic]
woman pleading vainly for help.”

The attitude expressed here does seem to run
with the mainstream of thought about the film,
finding echoes in Keith Connolly’s comments in
The Herald’ and in Liz Gi1I’s in The Sung. The
latter locates Dressed To Kill in relation to films
like The Shining and When A Stranger Calls,
observing, after an unnamed American “critic”,
that “ ‘the underlying message of these films is
that today’s liberated woman should and will be
punished’ ”, and asserting that “it is a sad and
sinister comment on a society that, while out-
raged about the Ripper’s reign of terror, still
considers the violation of women suitable
material for a good night’s entertainment”.

While it can be safely argued that the narra-
tives of these films do produce analogies with the
intrusion of horror into the everyday world, and
do thematically reflect the labyrinths of danger
that can be seen to constitute modern life, the
Charge that they are conveying a repressive
ideol[...]treated with considerable suspicion°.
Certainly the terms in which the preceding
objections to Dressed To Kill have been expres-
sed ought to be challenged.

Firstly, the notion of Kate Miller as a repre-
sentation of “today’s liberated woman” is well
wide of the mark. A more accurate description
would see her as one imprisoned within the most
conservative cultural expectations of women;
sexually frustrated as a wife, yet feeling obliged
to feign pleasure, she is shown seeking respite in

6. Colin Bennett. “An Unhealthy Variation on Hitch-
cock". The Age (Melbourne).

7. Keith Connolly, “When the Movies Turned Really
Nasty“. The Herald (Melbourne), January 1. 1981, p.
l3.

8. Liz Gill, “Are Horror Films Out To Punish Women'?",
The Sun (Melbourne), December 2, 1980, p. 41
(originally published in the London Daily Express).

9. A broader question —— that the system of representation
in traditional narrative cinema it[...]hal order — deserves separate consideration
and is beyond the immediate scope of this article.
However. I refer readers to[...]

a fantasy of violation, and then advice from her
male psychiatrist, before rendering herself an
object to be desired (in the art gallery sequence)
and discovering a momentary escape through
anonymous afternoon sex. Hers is a condition a
long way from liberation, lacking the sense of
identity and direction which would seem central
to any discovery of self.

Similarly, the female protagonists of The
Shining and When A Stranger Calls, who are
threatened by, but manage to escape, the
violence of a husband and a stranger respec-
tively, are as trapped by traditional notions of
what it is to be a woman as their mortal enemies
are by the madness that has taken hold of them.

Secondly, the view that Kate Miller is being
somehow punished for seeking fulfilment of her
sexual desire is one quite arbitrarily imposed on
the film. Certainly, her murder does immediate-
ly. follow her “brief encounter” in the film’s
narrative chronology, but to isolate these two
events from the film and to simply assert a
causal connection between them is absurdly
reductive.

What initially seems at stake here is the atti-
tude which the viewer is being invited to take on
the events and characters on the screen. And in
its presentation of the events leading up to the
murder, this structural operation is designed to
produce a sympathy for Kate’s plight. There is
nothing in the film which invites us to judge
Kate’s actions as anything but reasonable. The
suggestion is more that what happens to Kate is,
in fact, unreasonable, essentially unfair.

If there is culpability, then it is more appro-
priately placed in the realm of the three men she
has encountered in the film up to this point: the
husband (Fred Weber) preoccupied with his sex-
ual appetite; the handsome stranger (Ken Baker)
who fails to inform Kate of his VD; the psy-
chiatrist (Michael Caine) whose madness (we
learn retrospectively) is a perverse product ofhis
sexual desire as he beco[...]rk glas-
ses and raincoat.

In this context, Kate is clearly located as a vic-
tim of the male, specifically of male sexuality, a
point which identifies the source of her entrap-
ment as well as of her murder. There is no more
justification for seeing the film’s perspective as
unsympathetic to Kate’s condition of dissatis-
faction than there is for seeing that of another
film directed by De Palma, Carrie, as un-
sympathetic to its victim of the elaborate, vin-
dictive plot of her high school peers.

However, there is a particular issue here
which is much broader than these examples
might seem to su[...]any
horror film which portrays women as victims of
male violence immediately becomes guilty of
sexism, of exploiting its representations of
women either to assert male dominance or to
reap commercial rewards. Such a view is absurd
for it ignores the basic question which I have
raised here, and that is the attitude the film in-
vites the viewer to take to the particular acts of
violence: Endorsement? Outrage?

22 —— Cinema Papers, March-April

Liz in an image whose details assert the film's system of

"binary numbers”: the white phone is a contact with her

source of income, the black phone with her investment
adviser. Dressed To Kill.

There is, it seems necessary to say. a differ-
ence between those two responses, and the points
I have made so far in relation to Dressed[...]lms, such as Hallowe’en, When A Stranger
Calls, The Shining and The Texas Chainsaw
Massacre. In none of these films is the viewer in-
vited to endorse the violence infiicted on victims.
The ways in which protests have been mounted
against the films would seem to denote a per-
versity'° that has nothing to do with the films
and whose main characteristic is its blindness to
the facts of the targets of its campaign.

The interlocking network of patterns which
binds together characters and sequ[...]on relation-
ships and incidents which draws upon fears we
may have about our own sexuality and that of
others. But in no way does it offer a simplistic
moral order that damns women for their desire,
or depicts their sexual exchanges w[...]ty. If one has
to draw an abstract ofthe film on the basis ofits
elements of horror, then that sketch would need
to deal primarily with the ways in which sex
itself is shown to be fraught with danger.

Along with Cruising, Dressed To Kill pivots
on an awareness of the dark side of sexuality,
evoking the monster which is set loose once the

IO. See, for example, the “Dressed To Kill Protested” page
in Jump Cut, No. 23, p. 32, which, when it actually men-
tions the film (rather than promotional campaigns for it
or approving journalistic comment about it), is full of
wilful misrepresentations. It makes mention, for ex-
ample, in block capitals, of “scene after scene ofwomen
raped, killed or nearly killed”, a description which is
patently dishonest and likely to win support only from
those who have not seen the film.

certainty of sexual identity is undermined within
a social order that refuses such a possibility,
once complacency becomes aware of the danger
which lies beyond its protective shield.

owever, to limit analysis of Dressed

To Kill to comment about its

manipulation of audience sym-

pathies and its overt thematics is to

ignore another crucial, though con-
nected, issue: that of the shot-by-shot relation-
ship between film and viewer, discussion of
which is essential ifthere is to be any real appre-
ciation of the way in which this film is working.
Here the point is the play with “point-of-view”
in Dressed To Kill, the way in which the film is
constantly subverting its viewers’ understanding
of what they are seeing and producing a reflec-
tion upon[...]s (and, im-
plicitly, upon all narrative work) at the same
time.

The film’s opening images, accompanied by
Pino Donaggio’s lush romantic score (in a
musical passage which is to recur throughout the
film"), echo a soft-porn style, encouraging the
viewer to become voyeur by fixing the camera's
gaze upon woman as spectacle.

The first shot is a slow, smooth track forward
across a bedroom towards an open door through
which little can be seen apart from steam, ap-
parently emanating from a shower. The
camera’s angle of movement through the door
deliberately withholds from sight until the last

possible moment the presence of a naked Kate
Miller in the shower.

The effect on the viewer (at least, on this
viewer) is not unlike that comically referred to in
Jean-Luc Godard’s Les Carabiniers (1963), in
the sequence where Michel Ange (Albert Juross)
visits a cinema. There, he moves from place to
place, to try to see that which is out of frame on
the screen in the titillating shots of the naked girl
in the bathroom.

The camera tracks forward into the bathroom
and a lingering close—up of Kate’s gaze at her
husband, who is shaving with a straight razor at
a mirror. Her ga[...]n active sex-
ual desire and functions to produce the woman
as a figure of male fantasy, desirable and desir-
mg.

A cut shifts us to Kate’s point-of-view of her
husband, who seemingly remains unaware of her
presence. The next cut returns us to our previous
perspective of Kate who turns her full attention
to her own body and to her pleasure as she cares-
ses it. The camera position is then transferred
from outside the shower, looking in through the
clear shower screen, to a series of close-ups in-

side the shower recess of hands stroking breasts
and genitals”.

ll. And[...]tin pointed out to me, echoes
Nino Rota‘s score for Juliet of the Spirits.

12. These shots have drawn much media attention, primari-
ly reporting to us in mocking tones the sensational news
that Angie Dickinson was[...]

The disturbance appears as a male figure
looms behind[...]crotch, and rendering her power-
less. Her cries for assistance from her husband,
only a few yards away, curiously seem to fall on
deaf ears, as a cut to him from a position inside
the shower recess shows him continuing his shav-
ing without distraction. The steam from the
shower almost obliterates our sight of him as
Kate’s scream takes over the soundtrack (pre-
figuring her later scream, apparently at the mo-
ment of orgasm, in the sequence with the
stranger in the taxi). The lack of response by the
husband is initially disorienting, placing this ins-
tant of terror into the realm of nightmare as the
film’s carefully-constructed spatial logic is
shattered.

A subsequent cut to an overhead shot of
Kate’s pretence of pleasure at her husband’s sex-
ual spasms, an early morning radio show sub-
stituting for the earlier romantic music (and, in-
cidentally, introducing the idea of transexuality
into the film with the mention of a “Lady
Stevie”), further disorients with its introduction
of a harsh, everyday quality which produces a
sharp contrast with the scenes that have pre-
ceded it.

The two points of disturbance here subvert the
viewer’s initially secure perspective on the ac-
tion, first by breaking into the realistic mise-en-
scene and then by indicating that the entire bath-
room sequence was Kate’s masturbatory fan-
tasy, and that the detached camera position,
while appearing to simp[...]s object, was,
in fact, offering a representation of the point—of-
view of the apparent object of its gaze.

The function of this disturbance, then, can be
seen to be twofold, alerting us to the fact that
this film is going to play with the processes by
which we see, or, more precisely, by which we
read images on the screen, and introducing the
f1lm’s formal arrangement around the idea of
the voyeur.

for them. However, the function ofthe substitutionhere,
as Pauline Kael has noted, needs to be seen within the
context of the sequence as Kate’s fantasy aboutherself.
There it becomes clear that “she has been‘ given the
dream body an ageing woman might have in her fan-[...]e setting, Kate's sexual fantasy comes alive with the appearance beside her of the “handsome
stranger" (Ken Baker). Dressed To Kil[...]tantly watching or spying on

each other. Nowhere is this better il-

lustrated than in the sequence at the

Metropolitan Art Museum. As Kate
sits on a bench in front of two portraits, whose
figures seem to be looking down on her, she
observes the activities going on around her: the
ritual of the teenage couple with their arms
around each other, the attempted pick-up, the
man passing and looking at the teenagers, the
Asian parents in pursuit of their wandering
child.

Suddenly, the handsome stranger is sitting
beside her, her sexual fantasy come alive. But to
fulfil her desire, she must first know that she is
desired and, in an appropriate setting, a painting
of a naked couple behind her, she produces an
image of herself (“dressed to kill”) for the
stranger to capture.

The romantic music, established as a signifier
of her desire in the opening sequence, replaces
the echoing sounds of the gallery (reversing the
contrast established on the soundtrack at the
beginning of the film). And a remarkable se-
quence of40 or more shots covers their courting
game, the camera in constant motion as the im-
ages alternate between shots of Kate’s move-
ments and shots from her point-of-view. Her
pursuit becomes flight as the stranger taps her
on the shoulder, apparently attempting to return
to her the glove she does not yet know she has
lost. Then his disappearance makes her the pur-
suer once more, desperate to make herself the
prey.

Outside the museum, the camera cranes in on
her as she tosses away her remaining glove,
believing the game to have been lost. But then a
look of recognition from her belies this, and the
camera begins a panning movement controlled

The Shower Sequence:

Kate ’s point-of-view of her husband.
Desire.

Desire denied and turned to[...].\l.°*I~"."*~.“-*!\’f“‘

and clear sight is shattered.

>\.
5‘-’

The camera ’s forward tracking movement into the bathroom.
The track continued; the razor; Kate ’s look of desire.

. “Mise-en-scene Interrupted as Kate ’s screams go unheard and the audience ’s position of security

Fantasy and desire have passed into submission. The everyday is restored.

Cinema Papers, March-April — 23

by the line of her look. Half-way through its
movement to the hand holding her other glove
from the window of a cab, it passes in close-up
across Dr Elliott, “dressed to kill” as Bobbi and
watching as she moves to the cab before (in a
subsequent shot) moving across b[...]glove.

Virtually every character who appears in the
film contributes to this sense of everybody
watching everybody else: Kate’s son,[...]der, a camera,
and his eyes and ears to penetrate the mysteries
of the world around him; the cab driver adjusts
his mirror to get a better view of Kate and the
stranger in their back-seat embraces; the little
girl in the lift that Kate will never leave alive
continues to stare at Kate despite her mother’s
rebuke; the black cop in the subway train
watches Liz (Nancy Allen), Peter’s ally in the
discovery of his mother’s killer, in a camera
movement which echoes the one outside the
museum as it moves from the cop’s look to Liz’s
reaction, passing across Bobbi who is watching
from behind the door in the next compartment;
and, near the end of the film, a woman in a
restaurant eavesdrops on Liz’s description to
Peter of the mechanics of a sex-change opera-
tion, the dismay on her face registering her dis-
approval of what she is listening to at the same
time as her desire to know keeps her listening.

An analogy with the viewer of the horror film
is suggested by this last example, and extended
during the subsequent sequence, Liz’s night-
mare, which brings the film towards its resolu-
tion. One particular camera movement assumes
a point-of-view which locates the viewer among
an audience of asylum inmates who watch cheer-
ing as Dr Elliott[...]clothes with a nurse who has
been tending to him. The camera position here,
and its voyeuristic connotations, also echoes the
earlier shot of Kate and her husband in coition.

And rhyming with the fantasy sequence that
opens the film, this nightmare sequence also
plays with the viewer’s relationship to the per-
ceived spectacle. Even its outrageous repre-
sentation of the asylum conditions, its spatial
disruptions and its stylistic difference from the
rest of the film fail to disturb the viewer’s
commitment to the “point-of—view” teasingly of-
fered. Only with the film’s final shot, which
shows Liz waking from the nightmare into
Peter’s comforting arms (a shot which is virtual-
ly identical to the last shot of Carrie where Sue
(Amy Irving) wakes from her nightmare into the
comforting arms of her mother), is the viewer
jolted into an awareness of the deception that
has been practised.

Order is tenuously restored, yet disturbances
have been constructed which challenge the pro-
cesses by which we customarily read narrative
images and produce an underlying chaos in the
relationship between viewer and spectacle.

This self—consciousness does not prevent the
film scaring the hell out ofits audiences and thus
fulfilling the conventional contract of the horror

24 — Cinema Papers, March-April

Peter ( K €I(/I Gordon) instructs Kate on the workings ofhis invention based on a systcnz of "binary numbers". a formal
pattern around which Dressed To Kill is L'0Il$lrlI(‘I('l/.

film. In fact, it extends t[...]turbances at a deeper level, by refusing to allow
the viewer a stable, fixed position from which to
see the unfolding of its fiction.

e Palma’s work to date indicates a

growing preoccupation with the

relationship between viewer and

film, constantl[...]g its

narrative unity to breaking point,
leaving the viewer floundering amid betrayed ex-
pectations. Dressed To Kill is his boldest work in
this direction, and it moves[...]eak-
ing point in a single frame. As Kate arrives for
her appointment with Dr Elliott, the wide screen
image has him to left of frame, speaking on the
telephone, as Kate enters to the right and
another patient passes her on the way out. That
patient is Bobbi, who, we learn later in the film,
is Dr Elliott’s other self.

In the terms of narrative coherence, such an
image is “impossible”, and while Dressed To
Kill on the one hand does assume the form of a
narrative, on another it is bent upon assaulting
that”.

13. A comparison here with The Shining is fruitful, for in it
Kubrick persistently seems to be working ag[...]produce stories, but they are
also reflections on the ways in which stories are
constructed and seen. H[...]ssed
To Kill; Vertigo, Rebecca, Marnie and Dial M
For Murder in Obsession; Marnie in Carrie;
North By Northwest in The Fury) but also
beyond (sharing Paul Schrader’s addiction to
The Searchers in Obsession; and playing with
Secret Beyond the Door in the same film). But to
reduce his films to a simple accumulation of
borrowed film experiences is to miss the point:
the way in which these references have a double
edge. They produce a sense of the past, and a
love for it, but they also work as distractions,
contributing to the kind of detachment from
their present contexts which is necessary ifone is
to grasp the strain of self-parody, which is at the
heart of the way in which they use their images
and their stories to play with the narrative form
they seem to occupy.

narrative order at the same time as it is being con-
structed. As Richard T. Jameson points[...]ck’s
Shining", Film Comment, July-August 1980), The Shin-
ing strategically subverts both narrative space and logic
on its way to a betrayal of filmic fiction far more dis-

turbing th[...]

Liz and Peter, whose investigation of the murder of Kate is under the watchful eye of the police, whose detective work largely occurs off-screen. Dressed To Kill.

The exhilarating circular tracking movement
which celebrates the reunion of father and
daughter in the air terminal sequence at the end
of Obsession provides an audience with an
appropriately moving resolution to the prob-
lems built through the course of its narrative.
Yet against this, one needs to set the opening of
the film which draws attention to the fairy-tale
nature of such an ending and the wish-fulfilment
that it implies.

After the credits, the first shot is of an audi-
ence. in a darkened room watching a screen on
which appears the words, “And they lived happi-
ly ever after.” So, while the film asserts itself as
a straightforward narrativ[...]it also draws attention to itself as just that.

The opening of Sisters, a film which an-

ticipates Dressed To K[...]and
thematic play around voyeurism, works to mark
the viewer as viewer, to underline the way in
which the process of viewing is controlled by ex-
pectations about the way in which an image will
immediately construct a “point—of-view” for the
viewer.

A young black male watches, apparently un-
noticed by the object of his look, as a blind girl
begins to undress in a changing room. As she un-
buttons her blouse, the camera frustrates the
salacious viewer’s desire to see more and zooms
into a close—up ofthe face of the voyeur. Sudden-
ly a key—hole is superimposed on this image, the
frame size is reduced, and we are watching a
mock-up variation of television’s Candid
Camera, here entitled Peepi[...]rk’s newest and grooviest game” and
presented for the entertainment “ofthose ofyou
peeking in at home”.

Clearly then, the disturbances in the films of
Brian De Palma go much further than the simple
undercutting of lyricism for the ends of the
horror film, and are pitched in the tones of
parody at the conglomerations of images that
are known as narratives. Films such a[...]g
themselves as innocent purveyors ofhorror, and,
for those who want to see, they offer an insight
into the deception that is practised in the name
of fiction. They do not damn that deception;
they simply invite us to recognize it for what it
is.

Cinema Papers, March-April — 25

B b
saniers

Bob Sanders, of Pact Productions, talks to Peter Beilby about private investment in the
film industry, detailing the roles of Pact and the up-coming investment company,
Filmco.

After my days in television, I
tried writing The Novel. I also
became involved in mining
companies, and the vineyard
business, with Len Evans, in the
Hunter Valley [The Rothbury
Estate].

Then, about five years ago, it
seemed that the time was right to
establish a proper financial basis
for investment in a spread of films
—— say, three or four. I went around
“the city” in Sydney, among stock-
brokers I knew from mining days,
trying to sell them on the idea.
There was some interest, but, after
three months of fairly constant
talking, I still couldn’t get it off the
ground. Basically I was saying,
“Put a financial package together,
spread your risk, and make sure
there is a selling agency and a
foreign input. That way, you might
see some money back. In the mean-
time, there is bound to be some tax
benefits in the losses.”

The average reaction of any
serious banker, stockbroker or
merchant banker was that the film
industry was full of madmen. They
wanted to know why they should go
in[...]ere going to deal
with people who wouldn’t know
what the hell they were talking
about. I must say, that attitude
hasn’t changed all that much.

Were your proposals tax-oriented?

No, and I think the reason they

didn’t get off the ground was that
they weren’t tax-oriented enough.
I knew the people involved from
speculative mining situations and,
being aware of their attitude
towards high risk and high return, I
tried to tap that.

Then, Peter Foxjoined the board
of The Rothbury Estate. Peter’s a
tax specialist, and one day I
discussed the film situation with
him. He immediately saw several
opportunities from a tax point of
view. On that basis, we formed Pact
Productions,[...]d 65 per
cent, and my company, Enton
Investments, the other 35 per cent.

What was Pact’s first project?

The first project made was
Thirst, with Tony Ginnane.[...]erious track record, and would be
able to produce the films. That led
us to Tony Ginnane and the South
Australian Film Corporation.
There were other people around, of
course, but as it turned out our
timing was right, in that Tony and
the SAFC were developing some
good properties.

So yo[...]Ginnane . . .

Yes. I can remember Tony’s look

of mild astonishment to this day.
He didn’t know what to make of

1116.

Was “Thirst” 100 per cent financed
by Pact?

No. It was financed by the New
South Wales Film Corporation,
some of Tony’s private money and
ours.

Did Pact have a plan about the
amount of finance it would
contribute to a project?

We felt we had to spread our
money around and go into a
number of ventures. In our first
year we had about $1 million. But,
because of the non—recourse loan
element, we invested something like
$3 million.

What sort of tax benefits were you
offering?

About the same as the law
allowed in mining, which was
roughly three-to[...]ich it had to be
if tax money was to be attracted
from other areas, like oil
exploration.

What followed “Thirst”?

We went to the SAFC and
became involved in Blue Fin and
Money Movers. They were complex
investments. In the end, we owned
the Australian rights, but not the
foreign. This is a shame as both

films are beginning to look good in
the foreign market. They didri’t do
terribly well h[...]Blue Fin was run as a double with
Storm Boy along the Queensland
coast it began to look quite healthy.[...]any
guidelines or philosophy toward
investment?

The general philosophy was not
to tie ourselves down to any form or
style of film, because we could be
wrong. We went for a spread, in the
hope that, say, two out of eight
might succeed, and cover the cost of
the other six. I think that proved to
be right.

It is pretty much the same today.
We are looking for comedies, low-
budget films, big-budget films and
so on. We have also done documen-
taries.

Another of Pact’s philosophies is
to not only finance films, but get
them made. This is important with
the new tax law, where you have to
be sure that the film is going to be
made, and is marketable, because it
will be assessed on that.

Is that a comment about Australian
producers and per[...]hemselves as producers as “pro-
ducers”. Some of them are line
producers, and marvellous at[...]

What do you think are the qualities
which made a good deal-making
producer?

I think Ginnane represents them
very well. He is energetic, pursues
every point, has a legal back-
ground and can argue with lawyers.
He is now experienced domestic-
ally and in foreign markets. He
also wins arguments, which is great
if you are on his side.

What was Pact’s involvement in
those early productions, apart from
financial?

Nothing much above the normal
investor situation. We werejust too
busy negotiating the deals, and
handling the number of people who
came to us with projects. This
helped[...]don’t want to be rushed into
properties because of time
problems; this is one way ofmaking
sure a property is developed
sufficiently before production.

How did you assess projects in those
early days?

Carlie Deans helped a lot in the
sifting and assessment of scripts.
Many just had to be put away, but
those[...]as did his wife Jenny,
and sometimes Dick Toltz, the
lawyer. But if a producer we
respected brought us a script we
liked, that was it.

How do you feel about the assessor
system?

My experience in the ABC gave
me a deep revulsion of the

28 — Cinema Papers, March-April

Curl Sliuii:[...]committee system. And, as far as I
am concerned, the assessor system
is a committee system. It is
hopeless. So you have to go on your
own judgment, and that of some
good friends —— people who are
qualified[...]n and interest
and who will perhaps be working on
the film.

Did you ever seek assistance from
professional readers?

No. We are in the business of
backing our own judgment.

Your approach is probably closer to
a showbusiness, entrepreneurial
approach, than the processes of
government bodies . . .

Yes. But the government assess-
ment system is necessary for them
because they use public money.
They have to be able to justify the
risk situations they put money into.
But for private money to go
through that system would be a
farce. We wouldn’t be in the
business if we didn’t know what
spread of films we wanted to make.

Have there been many pr[...]k by government cor-
porations?

Yes. Double Deal is a perfect
example. We got all sorts of cooing
noises from the Victorian Film
Corporation about their investing
into it; lots of “Yes, yes” in the
corridors. But when it came to the
crunch, producer Brian Kavanagh
got a two—line letter, which said,
“Dear Mr Kavanagh, at the last
meeting we decided not to invest in
your film. Yours sincerely.”

Is that a typical response from
government?

I don’t know. But We never seen
anything more brutal. It is not as
though Brian Kavanagh had just
come off the street. He is well-
known and well—respected in the
film industry in Victoria. And to be
treated like[...]ii.

shows a bureaucratic

callousness.

typical

What is your attitude to the way the
Government is involved in financing
films?

Well, the Australian Film
Commission is going the right way
by putting up good seed money. I
am not suggesting that their
assessment system is good, but to
have moved into project develop-
ment is tremendous.

The SAFC was quite progressive in
establishing an early presence at
Cannes. Is that when you were
starting to move into the inter-
national marketplace?

No, we went independently to
Cannes and to Hollywood. But it
was good that the SAFC was there,
for while we were quite indepen-
dent ofeach other, we were going in
thethe advances
system. We would rather have the
money come in cold and clean, and
anything the film earned go straight
back to the investors, rather than
see sales revenue mopped into the
production.

However, we were keen to get
other investors in with us. That is
why we looked for co-productions,
and we had several close shaves.[...]etty deep
water with these fellows, and they
know what they are doing. But each
country, according to its state of
development, is trying to achieve
different things and this makes[...]omplex
business.

Are there any co-productions in the
pipeline?

Saddlesore and Blue could be
happening with Hemdale, and the
Americans are interested in The
Bones of Peking Man.

When arranging international sales,
has it been your strategy to do the
Australian deal first, and then move
into the international arena, or vice-
versa?

Whichever way is appropriate for
the film. In some cases, we are
going vice—versa. We will try to
make the films work inter-
nationally and then brin[...]

I belong to both camps. If the
industry is at risk, it is because
there is too much money chasing
too few good properties. And, if
people are proposing that they
should get the money to develop
properties which are rotten, and
then to turn around and blame the
financiers, then that’s ridiculous.

How do you see the attitude of the
government bodies?

I don’t want to get involved in a
verbal war with Joe Skrzynski, but
be publicly accused Pact of not
being good for the film industry
because “this year films, the next
year coal or cattle”, or whatever he
said. But I resigned from two public
company mining boards to
concentrate on the film company.
We are serious about films, so it[...]s in and makes such a
broad statement. I can show the lie

1. Financial Review, January 9, I981, p.23.

of it by the way I worded those
resignations.

What other projects has Pact been
involved in?

Working backwards, there is
Double Deal, which we are shooting
at the moment, and Yankee Zephyr
— we still have to do 2nd unit

shooting on that. Survivor is
finished and looks to have real
potential. We are also in the

SAFC’s Sara Dane, which is about
to go into production.

BOB SANDERS

I

“If [Yankee Zephyr] makes it [in the U.S. market], it will be a breakthrough on a
magnificent scale. "

Left: David Hemmirzgs’Race to the Yankee Zephyr. which was filmed in New Zealand.

There was Breaker Morant,
which is doing well, and Harlequin,
which is doing marvellously — in
fact, it is getting rave reviews in
Paris and doing better there than
any other Australian film. And in
the U.S. it was sold for the same
up—front guarantee as Breaker
Morant.

How have the Pact films fared
financially?

Thirst hasn’t done well, though it
is ticking along. We will see some
of our money back, but not all.

Because of the deal we did on
Blue Fin, for only Australian rights,
I don’t know how we wil[...]Deal.

so, I can see a real return; Money
Movers, the same.

Harlequin is looking great, and
only this week Tony told me he[...]an a total return on our
investment. So we are in the black
with that.

As for Breaker Morant, we have
just got our money back.[...]had grossed roughly
$3.4 million.

Yankee Zephyr is a bit
contentious, as we made it in New
Zealand because of Equity
problems. But it is the first
opportunity to make the real break-
through in the U.S. We keep
hearing about how marvellous it is
that some of our films are doing
well in the U.S. — and it is
marvellous — but they are doing
well in 10, or at best 30, theatres.

The number of theatres in the
U.S. is 38,000 and films like Star
Wars are in 32,000, at some time or
another.

Now, why should we settle for
less? We speak the same language,
have the same cultural cringes and
strengths as the Americans, and we
should surely go for the big one.
Zephyr offers that opportunity. Ifit
makes it, it will be a breakthrough
on a magnificent scale.

What is it about this film that makes
you confident?

It is a big-budget, escapist chase-
thriller, with a cast which we think
is timed superbly for the U.S.
market. It is also well made.

Do you think any of our films have
suffered from lack of expertise by
the local distributors here, or by the
way distribution and exhibition is
structured?

I don’t think that counts.[...]

D

Barbara Alysen

One of the people filmmaker David Bradbury
interviewed while making the film that even-
tually became Frontline is Tony Ferguson. A
former seniorjournalist with the ABC, Ferguson
is now an ALP staffer in Canberra. He
remembers the encounter clearly: Bradbury rang
him at the CAB in Bathurst, where Ferguson
was lecturing, wa[...]to know how to

use properly, and about 400 feet of film.”

In the course of the interview, Ferguson
recalls steering the young filmmaker towards the
eventual subject of his film: Neil Davis, a
combat cameraman working in Asia.

A few more encounters like the one with Tony
Ferguson convinced Bradbury to narrow the
scope of the project. It had started as a study of
journalists who covered the Vietnam confiict,
and was backed by a $4500 grant from the Aust-
ralian War Memorial. “But everyone I spoke

30 —[...]”

Tasmanian-born Davis spent 11 years
covering the Vietnam war, mostly for the

, British-based news syndicate, Viznews. He was[...]cing his
own footage, and had pulled off a string of
journalistic coups during the war, including
being the only allied cameraman to film the fall
of Saigon.

By 1978, Davis was in Thailand and Brad-[...]formal tuition in film
production. But he talked the Creative Develop-
ment Branch of the Australian Film Commis-
sion into advancing him the maximum amount
available from its fund, hired a cameraman and
flew to Thailand for yet another interview.

Completed last year, Frontline collected the
blue ribbon award for the best documentary at
the New York Film Festival, plus the John
Grierson award for new and outstanding talent
in documentary film and the Greater Union
Award for Documentary Films at the Sydney
Film Festival.

The film sold widely to foreign television net-

RAD[...]or its interest in issues
artistic.

Now Bradbury is pushing his second film:
Public Enemy Number One,[...]I was overseas selling

Frontline. I was at a bit of a loose end, having

finished the film, and worried that I would be

left_twiddlin[...]look up Burchett in Paris and, since

I had paid the airfares over there anyway, it

made economic sen[...]ed former DLP
Senator Jack_ Kane over a report in the right-
wing ‘publication Focus. The suit claimed that a
description of Burchett as a “traitor” was
defamatory, but the case and costs went against
Burchett because the material in question was
held to be a fair report of things said in Parlia-

Burchett’s exclusion in the 1950s and ’60s is
perhaps better known. Also, from 1955 to 1972,
the Government refused to issue him a passport
after his first one had been stolen.

Because he reported the Korean and Vietnam
wars, in which Australia was involved, from the
“enemy” side, Burchett was and is seen by many
as a traitor. But Bradbury concedes that Wil-
fred Burchett was something of a hero to him,
and a continuation of his fascination with

journalists who cover war zones. He says a film

about him was a logical progression from Front-
line. Says Bradbury:
“It figures that if someone could bring the
wrath of the Government and the establish-
ment down on them to the point of having
their passport denied by successive govern-
ments for 17 years, they had to have an inter-
esting story to tell.”
Bradbury suggested the idea of a film cover-
ing Burchett’s life and work to B[...]a deferred wage and
did some more filming there.

From New York Bradbury returned to Paris.
Bradbury recalls that,

“I got money sent over from Australia to buy

film stock, because Kodak in the U.S. is

obviously the cheapest place to buy it. I

lugged it on my back over to Paris and got a

final-year camera student from the Dutch

Film Academy and a sound recordist from the

same place, again on deferred wages. We lived

in Burchett’s house, sleeping on the floor, and
in youth hostels.”

After two weeks of filming, it was back to
New York to take advantage of the cheap
processing there, and then to Australia where he
set about arranging the funds to shoot the film.

Bradbury approached the Project Develop-
ment Branch of the AFC where he was knocked
back on the grounds that he didn’t have any
advance sales for the project. By contrast, the
Creative Development Branch, which had put
money[...]d has since received it
back), invested $27,000.

The South Australian Film Corporation
suggested that politics and investment didn’t
always mix, and the commercial television
stations, which had presumably always believed
that, also found no reason to invest in the pro-
ject. A private investor, Robert Crouch,
responded to press advertisements and advanced
$10,000 and the remainder of the $115,000
budget came from Bradbury’s family and
friends. Curiously, in view ofits subject, no trade
union invested in the film.

With finance arranged, Bradbury and camera-
man Peter Levy took off for Bangkok. Says
Bradbury:

“We waited in this seedy hotel for word to

come through from Burchett that our visas

were okay, and then we went straight to Ho

Chi Minh City.”

The crew spent six weeks in Vietnam, another
10 days in Kampuchea and a short time in Japan
— all scenes of some of Burchett’s most famous
work.

It was in Kampuchea that Bradbury got his
first taste of the danger under which his two
films’ subjects had worked. The film team,
including Bradbury, Peter Levy,[...]

The two films come complete with a virtual
“mythology” that feeds into them: the image
and exploits of the performing group The Whit-
tle Family. This is the first exciting aspect of
these films: they come across as part of some-
thing bigger, a creative momentum infinitely
more interesting than anything the film industry
can spark within its own confines.

The films have been gestured towards in many
places, and usually glowingly. Nonetheless, I
think the surprise at their appearance has been
accompanied by a kind of critical blockage.
What does one say about these films once one
has declared they are very funny?

The commentaries pick up on the easiest,
simplest response: let’s all slum with these
masterpieces of kitsch, revel in B—grade glories,
indulge in some guilty pleasures with this cheap
and nasty stuff. The films, so this line goes,
make a virtue out of low—budget economic neces-
sity; they deliberately make themselves so bad as
to be good.

I think the concept behind the films is a great
deal more intelligent and productive than[...]t, they are preceded by selected newsreels
and an early Eric Porter animation. This in ef-
fect constitutes a history of Australian filmic
“badness”, where sloppy technique is accom-
panied by an equally sticky set of social and
ideological values.

It is precisely that conjunction — the associa-
tion of a technique with a “message” — that
Buckeye[...]al
history to criticise and dislodge it. In fact, for all
of the Australian cinema’s “historical” films in
terms of subject matter, these are two of the very
few that have a historical insight into the
medium itself.

Although generally considered to be the fun-

32 — Cinema Papers, March-April

nier film, Buckeye and Pinto is the less success-
ful. Its parody of Western generic mannerisms is
furious, but occasionally pointless. Lurking
somewhere is the rather simplistic notion that
the popularity of the Western is indicative ofthe
evils of U.S. cultural imperialism, and reduces
all political argument to an assertive level of
“us” and “them”.

However, when the film is not imposing an
interpretation upon the Western, but working
from within it, the gags and the intentions are
spot-on. The narrative code of the two cowboy
buddies dissolves in the face of homosexual
desire once the heroine is dead; an Aboriginal
stands in for the savage Indian.

Top: Buckeye (Mitcliell Faircioth[...]ve.‘ Capt.

Kirk Rogers (Mitchell Faircloth and theis how Adrian
Martin describes the combined
program of Buckeye and Pinto
and Terror Lostralis.

There is not a dead second in Buckeye and
Pinto, or a wasted inch of screen space.
Graphics, intertitles, songs (“guns of pride/one
by one they shot and then they died”) —- the
range of the film’s expressive materials is ad-
mirable, even when the humor is scattershot.

While Andy Warhol’s Lonesome Cowboys
might seem the predominant influence on the
film, given the slightly delirious edge to the
acting and the critics’ eagerness to see it as a
camped-up Wes[...]ons.

Buckeye and Terror are constituted entirely
from stereotypes on all levels, from character to
sound effects. This is again in line with the
general aim of the films — to find those ele-
ments of culture where a certain ideological con-
tent has congealed — and thus where it is more
obvious and able to be attacked. Although the
films have been accused (by Pat Longmore in
Buff, No. 2) of “making women, especially
feminists, the butt of some of the attempts at
humor”, I think rather it is the stereotypes
which construct women (and men) in a certain
way which are the true object of the films’
comedy. And these stereotypes are collec[...]r Lostralis plays it much cooler than
Buckeye: it IS at once more coherent, more
logical, more acceptable by conventional stan-
dards. This is the beauty of the film: it mimics
the dominant system too well, and in the process
exposes its ideological messages. When the
“militant feminist” Diane (Wendy Allen) is pos-
sessed by the spirit of the ancient tribe of Ood-
nagalabies, takes off her glasses and lets down
her half. the voice of patriarchal narrative is

heard loud and clear: “You really are beautiful

_ Terror, like Buckeye, is certainly not a didac-
tic leftist sermon, and it[...]not to be taken like that. But at whichever
level the films are read, their value arises from
their total familiarity with generic models and
c[...]e. set forms. Within Australian short films,
that is a rare and precious adventure.

films.

Phil: The substance of Buckeye
and Pinto is that of familiar West-
ern hero and the grand perception
he has of himself. We tried to evoke
the static, photographic quality of
early Westerns, like Hopalong Cas-
sidy. This, combined with the docu-
mentary-style climax, created a
photo revue[...]19th Century, cowboy
camera feel.

Superimposing the cliches of
Hollywood onto Australia made
obvious the relationship we have
with the American cultural empire.
Within this concept, the relation-
ships Australians have towards
each other were satirized so that
when the audience laughs, it is act-
ually deeply analyzing the dial-
ectics.

David: We approached Terror
Lostralis from a different direc-
tion. The basis of the film was to
explore the distinctive identities
familiar to the B-grade, adventure,
survival, jungle genre. We took the
righteous, arrogant, self-appointed,
Hollywood hero and exposed him
as a myth by using the submissive
but deeply sceptical Australian sus-
picion of leaders. The characters
are entangled in a labyrinth of
ideals, prejudices, idiosyncrasies
and stupidity.[...]edy.

Phil: We made a bubbly comedy;
I ran around the edges of the action
pushing the humor down the
camera lens. We gave each indivi-
dual access to the film structure and
script. Each actor wrote their own
relationship with the lead actors,
Mitchell Faircloth and Simon
Thorpe, within the directed con-
ception of their roles. It’s a film
about men and their pr[...]ignificant major discoveries
about men's problems during the
shoot.

David: In Terror, we create a
microcosm of the whole world.
After the plane crash, the survivors
trek though jungle, rain forests,
mount[...]but never really do anything about
their dilemma. The power, lust and
greed of the B-epic is what keeps

them going. This is the true
meaning of art: CONFLICT.

Phil: You havejust spouted three
conflicting ideas in one sentence.

David: No. The real conflict is in
the attempt to combine two-dimen-
sional images with a ridiculous plot
and come out with a believable
epic.

The witch-doctor (Boris Branwhite, left) urges on Ung[...]arzipan (Jack Charles). Terror Lostralis.

/17 the 7‘
amworr/7 Saloon. I

Buc.l.'e,ve and Pinto

Phil: You mean an epic of un-
believability.

Could you tell us about some of the
locations used in “Terror Los-
trails”?

Davi[...]nd scenery that
looked like Hollywood sets to get
the 3-dimensional, backdrop feel.
There is the Melbourne Shrine of
Remembrance, which looks some-
thing straight out of Intolerance,
and the old clay quarry at Bacchus
Marsh that we used for the crash-
site. It was real, papier-mache, rock
form[...]old Jungle Jim set. Jungle
Jim was a great source of inspira-
tion.

Phil: But he never made a
Western! I tried to capture the
mind-boggling monotony of the
Australian content — I mean con-
tinent — and found it only a few
kilometres out of Melbourne.

Who was responsible for the songs

and the music in “Buckeye and
Pinto”?

Phil: We had the musical talents
of Peaches La Creme from the
Busby Berkleys, plus The Whittle
Family. We had the most drama-
tically simplistic musical theme one
could write — “Guns of Pride”. I
wrote it.

David: Yes, it is very simple.

What about the score for “Terror”?
David: Tim Isaacson, the pro-
ducer, introduced Mitchell and I to

this maniac, John White, locked
away in a room full of tapes and

Concluded on p. 97

Cinema Pape[...]

As part of the 1981 Festival of Sydney, a season of new Australian films was
shown under the title: “Australian Cinema, The New Generation”.
John Fox visited the screenings and reviews some of the highlights}

Much has appeared already in print about
Against the Grain. The director, Tim Burns,
speaks about the making of the film in Cinema
Papers (No. 28) and in Cantrills F[...]January I981). This leaves me free to
write about what impressed me most in this
exciting and challenging work — its exploration
of imagery. It creates images of an unusual
intensity and it considers how images are made
and used.

Tim Burns is able to invest the most ordinary
and “natural” things with an implied violence.
The slicing of a tomato seems like a sadistic
assault upon skin and flesh. The eating ofa plum
or a cake seems like an act ofdestruction. This is
perfectly in keeping with the quotation from
Jean Genet’s In Defence of the Red Army
Fraction. which opens and activates the film:

“Violence and life are more-or-less synony-
mous. The grain of wheat which germinates
and breaks through the frozen soil, the beak of
the chick which cracks the egg—shell, the
fertilization ofthe female, and the birth of the
young can all be accused of being violent. Yet
no one would put on trial the child, the
woman. the chick, the bud, or the grain of
wheat.”

Images of wheat recur. It is referred to several
times in radio reports on agriculture in West
Germany and is illustrated by shots of wheat-
fields, silos and streams of grain in Western
Australia. where Ray Unit, the would-be
terrorist (played by Michael Callaghan),[...]rkable sequence, his mother
(played by Joy Burns, the filmmaker’s mother)
makes bread. She mixes flour, compressed
yeast, honey and water in what she describes as
“a revolutionary way of making bread. It takes
only a short time and anybody can do it.” In the
context ofthe making of a terrorist, that descrip-
tion is apt and resonant (and not without
humor).

Grains of wheat connect (in no formal way,

l. Other films shown. but reviewed elsewhere in Cinema
Papers. include Frontline, Public Enemy Number One,
Terror Lostra[...]nce and No Such Place will be covered in a future is-
sue.

34 — Cinema Papers, March-April

but rather as in the associations of dream) with
crystals of sugar. In another sequence, which
shows the same fascination with processes, Ray
is making his first bomb. He places it in a bed of
sugar and his hands work the sugar in much the
same way as his mother mixes the flour. The
food of life enfolds the instrument of violence.
(In its close-up attention to details, by the way,
and in its build ofsuspense, the sequence has the
flair of a mainstream Pakula, though I am not
sure that Tim Burns would welcome the com-

parison.)
Crystals . .. sand .. . grain .. . growth . . .
bud flowers: the bomb is placed among

flowers at the Cenotaph on Anzac Day, and its
smoke curls around pink and white carnations.
Smoke becomes a motif: the smoke from
stricken planes, the smoke from Vietnamese
bombing raids, and the smoke from Ray’s dyna-
mite experiments at Hutt River, even the smoke
from a cigarette, cloud the frame with an image
of death. (After one smoke-filled passage Ray is
seen beside a hoarding: “Come to life with The
Mirror.”) This line of imagery climaxes with the
smoke billowing from an exploding nuclear
plant during terrorist attacks on industry.

A street fire in Tim Burn5'Again5t the Grain.

The protagonist is as image-conscious as the
filmmaker. Ray is unsure of his terrorist image.
After some mirror-gazing and wondering if what
he sees is what he wants to see, he tries out
several images for size and impact. He adopts a
stocking and an animal mask over his head.

Elsewhere, while the soundtrack talks about le
Brigate rosse and their instructions to “shoot at
the knees, not to kill but to cripple”, Ray, ever
s[...]paper headlines in such a way as to
read “Dream of Terror”, in a take-your-own
photo-booth and assesses his photo image.

It is fitting and inevitable that the film should
concern itself with photographed imag[...]y about photography in one
way or another. and it is highly suggestive when
it is being oblique. Its central passage about
photography is less satisfying because it is overt.
It is presented largely as a somewhat stilted
debate wi[...]Paula Oid (Polaroid?),
who rather belts one about the ear with Susan
Sontag and leads into some not irr[...]heavy—handed sex role reversal.

Nevertheless, the sequence does lodge power-
fully the image of a camera as a gun, and
thus the ideas that to photograph people is to fire
at them. and that photography is an act of
violence because it shows people as they have
never seen themselves.

This is important because it reflects upon the
act of making a film and refers to Ray’s own
ironic situation: he is being constantly moni-
toredby hidden cameras and his image potential
is being assessed by an unspecified Establish-
ment[...]ill fashion him into a terror-
ist image suitable for its repressive purposes.
Ray 1S unaware of this, so is unable to see a
further irony that is accessible to the audience:
he houses his second bomb in a video cassette.
_ The search for self—images and the re-fashion-
ing of them by others is part of the fibre of
Against the Grain. The filmmaker is question-
ing his images and his image ofhimself,[...]rceived and re-fashioned by an
audience. His film is a portrait of the artist as a
young filmmaker, as much as it is a portrait of
the artist as a young terrorist. Each of them is
committed to acts of violence against the world

The film moves effortlessly through stills,
interviews and dramatized reconstructions to
express the experiences of the unemployed and
homeless in Port Melbourne during the Depres-
sion. These people squatted in derelict houses
until the police arrived, sometimes in the early
hours of the morning, to boot out the families,
dump their possessions in a back lane, and pull
down the houses.

It is a grim subject, grasped and realized with
force,[...]iderable beauty. There
are moments, in fact, when the images are
almost too attractive for their own good, when
framing and lighting in the manner of Ken
Loach in Days of Hope and a painterly response
to deserted rooms a[...]can be as picturesque as poverty.

But generally the film serves its own best
interests well, especially in such strong
sequences as the long track through the dispos-
sessed men sleeping in a train, the well-conceived
use of levels, as silent men hide on a corrugated
iron roof above the police who wait below, and a
strikingly-staged demolition, this time carried

The unemployed and homeless in Richard Lowensteins
Evictions.

out by squatters in an outburst of rage and
frustration and revenge.

Evictions is a deeply-felt and firmly-con-
trolled work, tech[...]itlam out — Fraser
in. Where were you?”, asks the blurb for Exits,
made by Paul Davies, Pat Laughren and Caro-
line Howard. It is a question that most of us can
answer, and with precise recollection of what we
were doing and how we coped, or didn’t, at the
time.

Apart from November 22, 1963, it is hard to
think of a day with comparable shock-waves,
with anything like the same degree of personal
and political consciousness. On Remembrance
Day, 1975, some froze, some fought and some
fled. The possibilities of the subject for film are
limitless.

Exits chooses to look at the effect of the
Whitlam sacking on five people: a down-and-out
writer, a derelict war veteran, a cinema
usherette, a cinema mana[...]. On that day, against a docu-
mentary background of television and radio
reports, and demonstration footage, they
wander in and out of the cinema and the pub,
drifting and defeated, worried about the future
and wondering what went wrong. Or, at least,
the writer wonders, and asks, “Why isn’t there
blood in the streets?”

The others seem unaware that life has become
politics[...]ir
behaviour might be more or less representative
of what people do when the carpet is pulled so
suddenly from underfoot, but their dialogue,
although credibly incoherent, rarely strikes a
spark of genuine evocation. It is a pity that they
emerge as the five least interesting people in the

country.
It could be argued that the technical crudities

of the film — its aimless camerawork, fractured
sound, ragged formlessness and lifeboat editing
—— are a kind of metaphor for the dislocation
and sense of futility induced by the event. It is
possible to read the film in this way, but only up
to a point. Beyond that, such a reading becomes
a rationalization of a low budget.

At any rate, why try to tie it all together at the
end, as ifthere has been some unifying undertow
of anger, by repeating the shot of Fraser that
shows that one may smile and say “You’ll get
used to the change”? This comes across as too
easy, petulant and desperate.

It seems that one must still wait for a film
experience that is illuminating about where we
were when the lights went out.

06
III!

Brian McKenzie’s Raccolta d’inverno
(Winter’s Harvest) is a documentary about the
slaughter and processing of a pig into sausages
and meat for the winter. With a steady gaze and
a matter-of-fact manner, it observes several
Italian families[...]this Calabrian
practice in Dandenong, Victoria.

The pig-killing sequence is recorded calmly,
even discreetly. Ermanno Olmi’s treatment of a
similar scene in L’albero degli zoccoli (The Tree
of Wooden Clogs) was different. There, one
could not but be involved in the Brueghelian
busy-ness and the flurry and excitement. There,
one was aware of the importance of the occasion
for survival. And there, the activity was colored
with sensuous and theatrical sound effects, like
the pouring rain, the hissing steam, the dripping
blood and the cries and audible relish of the
families. But, here, one is kept at a little
distance, the camera is at eye-level, and the
observation is fairly cool.

To point the contrast is not to disfavor
Winter’s Harvest, but rather to indicate its
characteristic stance of quiet appreciation and
interest. It notes, but does not seize upon, the
Italian male sexism which puts the women very
firmly in their place in the kitchen.

It includes some of the jokes and play which
punctuate the serious yet not solemn work of
sawing, slicing and separating, but does not seek

to individualize the men or to make them par-
ticularly winning[...]

I saw a few years ago that a lot of
films which should have got a
release weren’t getting one because
the majors weren’t geared to handle
them. It takes so many dollars for a
major to launch a film, and some
films just don’t generate that sort of
money. Consequently, an Austra-
lian film that costs $110,000,
unless it is ultra-exploitation, isn’t
going to get a berth.[...]se films
and play them profitably in
cinemas like the Silver Screen,
which have much lower house costs.[...]e $9000, you
need films that will gross in excess
of that, week after week. And some
films just don’t have that potential.

Once you left United Artists to work
on your own, what were the films
you picked up?

The first was Mouth to Mouth,
which I was very glad to get. I think

The Middle Ground

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5,0

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5*“
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7[...]John Arnold in Don McLennan's Hard Knocks, which is being handled by
Greg Lynch Film Distributors.

doesn’t win the special effects
award this year, I will be very
surprised. It shows what you can do
with little money, a bit of
imagination and the right people.

A few years ago people were saying
that there was a need for a fund for
films budgeted up to $200,000. Now
people are saying up to $400,000.
What do you see as the upper limit?

It depends on what you are
making. While you can make an
acceptable film for $120,000, you
can also make a film on the same
subject for $500,000 or $600,000 -
or even more. Hard Knocks is an
example of a film that was made
cheaply, yet looks pretty good on
the screen. Blood Money is an
example of what you can do with
nothing.

Actually, I think Centrespread is
going to be the leading example of
good quality, low-budget film-
making. It is the first full—length
feature in this country to be[...]production values.

Doing a lot with little money is
what Australian Film Productions
is all about. It employs the same
principles as Roger Corman,
American International and
Hammer Films, and is the brain-

Greg Lynch, independent film distributor, talks to Scott Murray.

it is a great film and, by handling it,
I established a very good
relationship with the Victorian
Film Corporation. I have now been
given other films, like Kostas, the
award-winning Do Not Pass Go and
Solo. Then, ofco[...]one.

As an independent film dis-
tributor, I had the problem of being
approached only after a film had
been made and titled. Take, for
example, David Hannay’s Solo: a
good product but a lousy title. The
same is true of Kostas: good film,
but a very hard title to sell to the
public. So you have to come up
with new campaigns, and we have,
for example, done much better with
Kostas after changing the original
campaign used in Melbourne.

Ideally, a producer should come
to the distributor before prod-
uction and say, “Look[...]Opposite top and bottom: Greg Lynch (centre)
at the party announcing production ofCentre-
spread.

do[...]Knocks
and had a product that was
marketable. It is now in its eighth
week in Melbourne and it is booked
right through to the end of
February. There is no sign of it
coming off, and it will outgross
Mouth to Mouth.
So, the point is to get in early.

As you know, there was some
dispute with the Creative
Development Branch over the length
of “Hard Knocks”.‘ How
marketable would “Hard Knocks”
have been if the CDB had insisted on
it remaining 50 minutes?

Wel[...]d have had a
16mm, 50-minute featurette, and
that is really only suited to tele-
vision. Who in the hell is going to
blow up a 50-minute short feature,
unless it is absolutely outstanding?
There is no way you could justify

the cost.
I believe that the AFC should

have supported Don [McLennan] a

litt[...]pers, No. 30,
pp 412-416, 505, 507.

he did break the rules, the AFC is
responsible for the taxpayer’s
money it is using. I don’t believe it
should say, “Oh, Do[...]are not going to
give you any more. Go put it in
the garage.”

I believe the AFC people should
have asked themselves, “Has it any
potential and should we invest
more?” Obviously, the film did
have potential because, damn it all,
it won the Jury Prize and the Best
Actress Award at the Australian
Film Awards.

The area of low-budget features is
much discussed. If a film, because of
its style and content, is only likely to
recover money in Australia — films
like “Hard Knocks” and “Mouth to
Mouth” — what sort of budget do
you think is realistic?

Do you mean, what can I market
it for?

Yes...

That’s a better way of putting it.
I think a film can be brought in and
blown-up to 35mm for $125,000 to
$150,000. I know it can, because we
h[...]a film in that
category called Centrespread. It is
a very glossy product and if it

child of Wayne Groom, who is in
South Australia.

Why did you move into produc[...]gical progression. I
had become very irritated by the
amount of money being thrown
down the drain on projects that
were obviously indulgent. A lot of
films were made without any sound
economic judgment, probably
because the producer or the
director thought he had a good
script. That’s not a good enough
reason. You must make films for a
market.

Centrespread, for example, has
created tremendous interest over-
seas. EuroLondon will handle the
film there and have already started
the campaign. The film will be
presented at Cannes and at the Los
Angeles Film Festival. It has a
ready-made market.

But the only films that are sure of
“ready-made” markets are genre
films. Should the Australian film

industry only be making genre
films?

As see it, one has a
responsibility to the investors to
produce something that is viable. If

Cinema Papers, March-April — 37

you are going to do your thing, then
do it with your own money.

But provided a producer hasn’t
misrepresented his intentions to the
investors, don’t his responsibilities
end once the investors are
committed?

If the investors are aware of, and
have an equal interest in, what is
happening, then by all means. But
how many invest[...]o want to invest in a self-
indulgent wank?