News Plus — Around the world
London, and The Purple Rose of Cairo has garnered box-office bouquets. With all the recent sea changes at some of Britain's leading production houses (more of which next time), the immediate future sees mostly smallish stuff on the horizon. Bob Swaim, the Paris-based American who made the popular policier, La Balance, is shooting a new movie called Half Moon Street on location in London and at Elstree studios. Michael Caine and Sigourney Weaver star. Christopher Morahan, who produced and co-directea Granada Television’s Raj epic, The Jewel in the Crown, takes a sharp change of tack with Clockwise, in which John Cleese plays a headmaster caught up in a knock-on effect of tight schedules and missed trains. Car Trouble is another British comedy which reunites Julie Walters and ian Charleston, recently partnered in a longrun ning stage p ro o u c tio n of Sam
Shepard’s Fool for Love. David Green makes his directorial debut, while the pro ducer is Howard Malin, who worked with D e re k J a rm a n on J u b i l e e a n d
Sebastiane Meanwhile, Jarman’s own long-delayed
Top director given the push, while TV comic Otto boosts the local box office
Caravaggio has finally gone into produc tion with the British Film Institute, and several of our other more interesting and innovative independent directors have new projects in the pipeline. Peter Greenaway has been editing his first feature since The Draughtsman’s Contract, A Zed and Two Noughts, an Anglo-Dutch co-production shot entirely on location at Rotterdam zoo. Terence Davies is preparing Distant Voices, a follow-up to his highly acclaimed trilogy; and Bill Douglas, author of another fine autobio graphical triptych, is working on Com rades, a film about the Tolpuddle Martyrs, which should commence shooting later this year in Australia and the UK.
New Zealand by Mike Nicolaidi Kiwi film has a record opening The August school-holiday release of Mirage Films’ Came a Hot Friday, mentioned in the last issue of Cinema Papers, turned out to be the fillip the New Zealand film industry had been looking for for some time. After suffering at the hands of successive National and Labour party governments, the packaging of new feature-film projects has been, at best, sluggish, and the public image of the industry has not been enhanced by the release of several belowpar films from the ‘tax rip-off years’. Faced with amateurish indigenous product in the home cinemas, moviegoers have not been of a mind to provoke any ground-swell of opinion that might have helped persuade the year-old David Lange administration to act in the tax incentive area. Came a Hot Friday, directed by Ian Mune and produced by Larry Parr, should change all that. With a theme which, given the 1982-84 film industry spree, seems som ehow appropriate — two cons operating a race-track scam in Kiwiland circa 1949 — it has proved a boomer. O pening th ro u g h K erridg e-O deo n cinemas on sixteen screens nationwide from 23 August, it grossed $NZ650,000 ($A516,000) by the end of its third week. Although local distributors are notoriously secretive about box-office figures, Hot Friday reportedly out-punted Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome and Spielberg’s Back to the Future in Auckland, and alm ost d o u b le d — to $ N Z 5 0 ,0 0 0 ($A40,000) — the weekly record for a local feature, which was set by Geoff Murphy's Goodbye Pork Pie in 1981 Parr, 33, has a new feature, Bridge to Nowhere (with Mune again directing) in post-production, and begins shooting another youth pic, Queen City Rocker, in late September. At the moment, this is the only firm start date for a new Kiwi feature. With the budgets of both Bridge and Rocker covered by North American pre sales, Parr’s skill at putting productions together has made him the toast — and the envy — of many in the industry. Meanwhile, local release over the next few months of two other 1984 productions — Gaylene Preston’s Mr Wrong and Geoff Murphy’s The Quiet Earth (highly praised at the Melbourne Film Festival) — should augment Friday’s bold breakthrough with audiences. With signs of a new era beginning, it seems entirely appropriate that Arts Minister Peter Tapsell should take the opportunity to make significant changes in the membership of the New Zealand Film Commission, where several appointments have been languishing for some months.
Germany by Dieter Osswald
Bruno Lawrence as Mac in the Larry Parrproduced, Ian Mune-directed Bridge to Nowhere, the only N Z feature to be com pleted so fa r this year. These changes, announced on 3 Sep tember, involve the replacement of the NZFC’s retiring founder chairman, the doughty, pioneering Bill Sheat, by fellow lawyer David Gascoigne, 45. Other new appointments are Larry Parr and Aucklandbased producer/director Sam Pillsbury. Gascoigne, whose involvement with film began when he became chairman ofthe New Zealand Federation of Film Societies in 1973, has been a member of the manage ment committee of the Commission since its inception in 1977. He was also involved in drafting legislation that reformed the country’s film censorship laws. An optimist, Gascoigne points to the rapid growth of the industry over the last seven years, which have seen the produc tion of around 40 feature films and a wide variety of other material. He believes that the industry is currently going through a process of re-appraisal, but that the “ vigour and inventiveness’’ of filmmakers will ensure that new films continue to be made. The Film Commis sion, says Gascoigne, will assist in that process.
The German film industry has been in the headlines recently. At the centre of the storm has been director Robert van Ackeren, who had a hit, both locally and internationally, with Die flambierte Frau (Woman in Flames, 1983). He has, however, just been taken off his latest project, Die Tigerin, by the film’s pro ducer, reportedly because he wanted 12 million Deutschmarks, as against the original budget of 10 million. What has caused all the excitement is the fact that preparations for the film have been under way for several years, with the project due for a measure of public funding. This was, however, conditional on van Ackeren as director and now seems likely to be withdrawn, so that the future of Die Tigerin looks dicey. Another German production which has been hitting the headlines in a rather differ ent way is Otto — Der Film, the first movie
to feature the well-known German TV nonsense satirist of that name. In just two weeks, the film has been seen by three million people — the sort of figures which have previously been recorded only at Hollywood superproductions like E.T. The Extraterrestrial. For its surprise success, Otto has been given the ‘Goldene Lein wand’ (Golden Screen) award by the exhib itors’ association. Gotz George, another of German TV’s most popular stars (he appears in the series Tatort — ‘Scene of the Crime’), is also heading for the big screen in a film called Zahn um Zahn, in which he plays his Tatort character, a lone-wolf detective called Schimanski. The other novelty on the German film scene has been the new cinema change over day. Friday has always been the trad itional day, but cinemas have recently taken to showing the week’s new film on Thurs day, in the hope of better publicity: the new programme is expected to get pre weekend word-of-mouth in schools and workplaces. While Werner Herzog seems to be sticking to operas for the time being, his col league Reinhard Hauff is working on a new film about the Bader-Meinhof terrorist group, under the title of Stammheim —
Szenen aus einem deutschen Prozess,
taking its name from the well-known prison at Stammheim, which is where, over a decade ago, Andreas Bader and Ulrike Meinhof committed their spectacular double suicide. The former film critic of Die Zeit, HansChristoph Blumenberg, is following up his debut feature, Tausend Augen, with a new film, Der Sommer des Samurai. It has some weird goings-on in Hamburg, where an invisible Japanese phantom is stalking the power elite. The cast is bol stered by a number of stars from the fifties, including Cornelia Froboess, Peter Kraus, Volker Lectenbrink and Nadja Tiller (the latter memorable from some risque Englishlanguage films of the period). And, in the footsteps of the continuing success of Amadeus, comes a sort of
TV star Otto does his Bogart number fo r Jessika Cardinahl in Otto — Der Film.
German sequel, Miroslav Luther’s Ver gesst Mozart (Forget Mozart), starring this year’s hottest prospect, Uwe Ochsen knecht. Frank Ripploh, internationally known for his gay comedy-drama, Taxi zum Klo (1981), has also completed a new film, Aus der Gosse zu den Sternen Among the box-office hits, the sensa tional success of Otto — Der Film has already been mentioned. Hard on its heels comes A View to a Kill, with Police Academy 2 in third place, and Amadeus still up among the leaders. Recent flops have included the locally-made hit songand-video compilation, Formel Eins Film (mentioned in my last column), Godzilla, Gotcha and King David For the first half of 1985, the German top ten looks like this: Beverly Hills Cop,
Ghostbusters, Police Academy 2, Amadeus, Otto — Der Film, Romancing the Stone, Dune, Paris, Texas, a German production, Didi und die Rache der Enterbten and Disney’s The Rescuers. Finally, after the early-summer success of
One, Two, Three, another American re release has made it onto the German screens: The Boys from Brazil (1978), whose reappearance has clearly been prompted by all the recent headlines about the discovery of Josef Mengele’s body in South America.
CINEMA PAPERS November — 15