Cinema Papers May 1986

Special Cannes issue

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EDITORIAL LETTERS FRONTLINES: What’s news in Australian films and TV....................

OVERSEAS REPORTS FESTIVALS AND MARKETS: Reports from Berlin, Budapest, Rotterdam, the American Film Market, Perth and Adelaide............

PROFILES:

What makes Vicki Molloy, Wolfgang Petersen and Bob Merritt tic k ..............................

PRODUCTION:

On the set of

Petrov, Just Us and Dogs in Space,

plus the usual comprehensive production survey...........................

TECHNICALITIES:

The truth about colour bars uncovered at the first Cinema Papers film industry seminar............................................

FILM

AND TV

REVIEWS:

Reviews of Chile, Cool Change, Dancing Daze, Down and Out in Beverly Hills, For Love Alone, A For­ tunate Life, Handle With Care, King David, Mixed Blood, Robbery, Robbery Under Arms, Runaway Train, Traps, Tukana and m ore......

BOOKS: Reviews of Steven Bach’s Final Cut, One M an’s Way by Cecil

Holmes and a competition Bruce Springsteen fans can’t m iss................... 93

COVER STORY Paul Hogan Drinkin Silver ...

26

FEATURES Miami Vice The Boys in Mauve................................................................................................... 30

A sixteen -p ag e Cannes supplement including an exclusive interview with Isabelle Huppert, a photo­ fe a tu re on The Fringe Dwellers, a who’s who/who’s where of Australians at Cannes and the films they’ll be showing..............................

CINEMA PAPERS May — 1

OUTCASTS IN THEIR OWN LAND

Adapted from the novel by

N EN EGA RE Screenplay by

BRUCE BERESFORD Director of Photography

DON McALPINE A.S.C. Executive Producer

Directed by

BRUCE BERESFORD

IN ASSO CIATIO N W IT H

h ^É fiS

You too can be part of the action in TASMANIA Have you been searching for that certain freshness of approach to shoot your film or commercial?

How would you like a choice of locations from hillbilly to serene English countryside, from last century to space age technology, from rugged mountains to lush green rolling fields, and what’s more, we back it up with current state-of-the-art picture gathering and post-production facilities.

Tasmania offers the widest range of diverse locations for any film or video needs outside of Hollywood.

If you come down for a week’s work we’ll shout you the weekend to enjoy a “ bite” of the Holiday Isle.

We’ll even supply a few chips to try your luck at the Casino as well. Tempted?

The drama feature “ Departure” previewed at Cannes Film Festival was produced in Association with the Tasmanian Film Corporation Pty. Ltd., Australia.

TASMANIAN FILM CORPORATION PTY. LTD. 1-3 BOWEN ROAD, MOONAH, HOBART, TASMANIA 7009 AUSTRALIA TELEPHONE: (002) 286263 TELEX: AA57148

W rong and proper Editor: Nick Roddick. Publisher: Patricia Amad. Assistant editor: Kathy Bail.

Art director: Debra Symons. Editorial assistant/subscriptions: Linda Mal­ colm. Proofreading: Arthur Salton.

Ian Pringle and Paul Hogan are unlikely bedfellows — Pringle a maker of Australian ‘art movies’, Hogan the archetypal but articulate fair dinkum Aussie whose first feature, whatever else it may be, is certainly Typesetting by B-P Typesetting Pty. Ltd. not an art movie.

Colour separations by Colourscan Pte Ltd. Negative-making and printing by Yet, in different parts of this issue of Cinema Papers, both of them York Press Ltd. Distribution by Network Distribution Company, 54 Park Street, have harsh words to say about 10BA, the government’s ‘now you see it, Sydney 2000 (Australia). now you don’t ’ tax concession to filmmakers. Not that they dislike it for Founding publishers: Peter Beilby, the same reasons. For Pringle, 10BA has encouraged a situation where Scott Murray. the deal is more important than the movie, where time and energy are Signed articles represent the views of their spent getting the film up, not getting it made. For Hogan, on the other author, and not necessarily those of the editor. While every care is taken with hand, 10BA encourages the wankers — the filmmakers who make manuscripts and materials supplied to the magazine, neither the editor nor the pub­ movies for critics and a few of their friends. Neither Pringle nor Hogan lishers can accept liability for any loss or damage which may arise. This magazine is wild about the present situation, however. may not be reproduced in whole or in part without the express permission of the Hogan’s side of the argument is the one that gets the gut response, copyright owner. Cinema Papers is published every two months by MTV because it embraces the ever-popular subject of what happens to our tax Publishing Limited, 644 Victoria Street, dollar. Film, the argument goes, is a mass-audience art. If the art can’t North Melbourne, Victoria, Australia 3051. Telephone: (03) 329 5983. Telex: hack it with an audience, it isn’t proper art. Government money, AA30625 Reference ME 230. through the direct channels of script development grants and top-up © Copyright MTV Publishing Limited, No 57, May 1986. investment in the non-deductibles, and the indirect ones of tax ’ Recommended price only. concessions, lets loose the loonies — the ones who can’t or won’t make Cover: Paul Hogan in Crocodile Dundee ‘proper’ movies. (photo: Jim Sheldon), and Isabelle Huppert in Cactus (photo: Virginia Rouse).

But what is a proper movie? After all,filmmakers, even those with no more than a toe in the mainstream, want an audience. So, is a proper movie one that makes money, or one that just thinks it’s going to make money? Australia hasn’t made many of the former in the last few years (not surprisingly, perhaps, since a 48% return is all the investor needs: the tax break takes care of the rest). But there have been quite a few of the latter: films that aimed for the big bucks and came home with the little bickies. Readers may fill in the titles at their leisure. Those, surely, are the /^proper movies, made to a formula that didn’t work?

When it comes down to it, Australia has two ways to make proper movies (apart from the M ad Maxes,, and even those aren’t as proper as they used to be). Both ways involve the overseas market, which is what lots of this special Cannes issue is about. And the world market tends to accept only two sorts of films from abroad (in this case, from Australia): licence plate films, in which you have to look carefully at the cars to see where the films were made; and specialist films — art films, if you like — which have a long, long shelf life.

Of late, thougji, proper movies have been defined here almost exclusively in financial terms: films for which the package was right.

Without 10BA, that is going to look a pretty sorry definition. And, if this were lOBA’s bequest to the Australian film industry, it would be a sad epitaph for an enlightened piece of tax legislation.

There is nothing inherently wrong with ‘licence plate’ films. But, if the Australian film industry is going to outgrow 10BA, it will have to accept Cinema Papers is published that the other kind of films — the Picnics, the Breaker Morants, the with financial assistance from the Fringe Dwellers, the Kangaroos, the Devils in the Flesh and the AUSTRALIAN FILM Cactuses: the films someone cared about — are the ones on which a COMMISSION healthy and a financially sound industry is based. That makes them and FILM VICTORIA proper movies, too.

Film Victoria

Nick Roddick CINEMA PAPERS May — 5

JO H N LAING'S

RICHARD RIDDIFORD'S

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DANGEROUS ORPHANS They go too far to escape free

GEO FF MURPHY'S

THE

It started with a romantic reunion..

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M ICHAEL FIRTH'S

JO H N LAING'S

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Starring LISA HARROW A dangerous love story

GAYLENE PRESTON'S

mu JO HkNi Dcir REID'S

ILEAVE ALL FAIR!

I\kWrong DAILY CANNES SCREENINGS A T OLYM PIA "The N ew Zealand cinema is one of the wonders of the world... an unparalleled success story... a major achievement."

-A M ERIC A N FILM INSTITUTE

NEWZEALANDFRHCOMMISSION AT C ANN ES: RESIDENCE FESTIVAL, 2 N D FLOOR, 52 LA CROISETTE. TEL: 3 8 3 5 6 0 IN N E W ZE A LA N D : P O B O X U -5 46 , W E LU N G TO N .TE L (4) 8 5 9 -7 5 4 . TELEX: N Z 3 0 3 8 6 FILM CO M

Don’t hold it all in!

Write and tell us when we get it right — and when we get it wrong.

written by myself and Leon Narbey, will be produced by Don Rey­ nolds’s Cinepro, in conjunction with Congratulations on your superb pro­ the Chinese Co-Production Facility in duction of the new-format Cinema Beijing, making it the first co-producPapers. It presents a very exciting tion the Chinese have entered into lay-out which is easily read, and has outside their own territory. a high-quality look.

The screenplay is heavily based I am very proud that my home film on the diaries of an Australian, Alex­ industry can be represented inter­ ander Don, who was born in nationally by a periodical which Bendigo about the middle of the last stands tall among its overseas century. As a young man, he ‘heard equals. the call’, and became a Presbyterian minister and, later, a missionary. For From Michael Freedman, Woollahra, many years he conducted a mission NSW. among the Chinese goldminers in the south of New Zealand's South I’m not sure how much Paul Kalina Island. knows about French cinema (or any cinema, for that matter), but any in­ From Ian Pringle, Seon Film Produc­ sights he may possess were sadly not evident in his acerbic review of tions, Armadale, Vic. last year’s ‘Film nouveau’ in your It was heartening to read Rod March issue (Cinema Papers 56).

Bishop’s comments on Wrong World To dismiss Daniele Dubroux's Les (Cinema Papers 56, March 1986). I amants terribles as “ cheap and feel that filmmaking in this country at inept” smacks both of arrogance the moment is a bit like being on a and ignorance. Large budgets do sinking boat. The sooner they get rid not necessarily imply good films, of 10BA the better, so that the film and Les amants terribles was an again becomes more important than intelligent and visually sophisticated the deal. film, the meaning of which appar­ ently escaped your reviewer.

From Andrew Pike, Ronin Films, “ Nasty and offensive" are all Mr Braddon, ACT. Kalina had to say about Escalier C Congratulations on the new format which, if not the most profound, was and content for Cinema Papers: at certainly one of the most enjoyable last it fits properly on my shelves and and sincere films of the festival. But I don’t get ink smudges on my they are two words on which I could fingers! But, more importantly, I not improve for a fitting description found a lot more to read than usual of Mr Kalina’s so-called 'review'.

— the new columns at the front are especially useful and interesting.

From R.L. Priest, Melbourne, Vic. From David Halliday, Albany Forest, Qld.

Congratulations on your new format.

I think it’s fantastic and I approve of all the changes, especially the size.

It’s now much easier to handle and store. I have every issue of Cinema Papers apart from three of the early issues.

For a while I was a subscriber, but the last few years I have been buying the magazine at newsagents.

I’ve now decided to resubscribe.

From Martin Edmond, Glebe, NSW. I refer to the article by Mike Nicolaidi on page 11 of your March issue (Cinema Papers 56).

Illustrious Energy, a feature film project mentioned therein, is not in fact due to go into production until January 1987. The film, to be directed by Leon Narbey, and

From M argaret M errall, Cairns Cinema Group, Cairns, Qld. We are a film club which screens mainly 35mm films not normally available on the commercial circuit in Cairns. We usually screen two films once per fortnight in conjunc­ tion with the Capri Cinema, and prefer screening 35mm films (al­ though we do show 16mm if the title is not otherwise available).

We find the Group's subscription to Cinema Papers extremely helpful, and were delighted to find that you have extended the number of film reviews. We are, however, chag­ rined that no information about the distributor is given with the ‘A-Z of short reviews’.

Is there any chance of such information being given in the

future? Tracking down Australian distributors is a major problem for us.

(No sooner said . . . See pages 88-91 of this issue. Ed.) From: Sam Pillsbury, Pillsbury Films Limited, Auckland, New Zealand.

I was pleased you liked The Quiet Earth and had some positive things to say about Heart of the High C o un try (Cinem a Papers 53, September 1985), but I was a little unhappy that my name was not mentioned in connection with either.

I do not want to sound petty or egotistical, but apart from co-writing and directing The Scarecrow, I initiated, developed, co-wrote and produced The Quiet Earth. It repre­ sented a large portion of my life and a pretty amazing physical and emo­ tional input. In view of the compli­ mentary things you had to say about the film, I was surprised and a little embarrassed that I didn’t get a passing mention. In fact, I line-pro­ duced the film while Don Reynolds was doing Sylvia, and I only handed him the post-production when I moved on to Heart of the High Country, which I directed and which was screened to an average prime­ time audience of ten million in the United Kingdom in November.

This is certainly not a complaint.

But I am working in the industry in New Zealand and have done so for sixteen years. I am planning future projects with Larry Parr, Don Rey­ nolds, Lloyd Phillips, Rob Whitehouse and Gary Hannam, and have just been appointed to the NZ Film Commission for three years. I am discussing Australian productions with PBL, Bob Weis and Brian Rosen. When I read your article, I had the impression I didn’t exist. I am alive and kicking and making films!

From Almos Maksay, Ballarat College of Advanced Education.

Congratulations on your new format and the expression of editorial opinion that accompanied the launch of the new Cinema Papers.

I read a section of the editorial to one of our advanced film classes.

Judging from the response, I take it that some of the students were sufficiently motivated to take out new subscriptions!

From Robyn Gardiner Management, Artarmon, NSW. I would like to draw to your attention the fact that Ned Manning is the male lead in the feature, Dead-End Drive-In, and not, as stated on page 17 of Cinema Papers 56 (March 1986), Ned Lander.

FINAL CUT Competition results It turns out that our readers are more attentive than we are: not one but three non-American, non-Australian films got a mention in every issue of Cinema Papers from May to Novem­ ber 1985 inclusive.

The answer we were expecting was Father on a Business Trip — Otac na sluzbenom putu to those of a purist disposition — which won the Palme d ’Or at Cannes last year, and which has recently been released in Australia under the title When Father was Away on Business.

Other acceptable answers were Heimat, Edgar Reitz’s sixteen-hour German supersoap, and The Quiet Earth, the New Zealand sci fi movie due to open here through Valhalla films this winter.

There were thirteen correct answers, and the first five to be drawn were, in alphabetical order: Ken Berrym an, National Film & Sound Archive, 47 Little La Trobe Street, Melbourne, Vic 3000.

Bruce Hodsdon, 67 Warragamba Avenue, Duffy, NSW 2611.

Steven Kellaway, 159 Palmerston Street, Carlton, Vic 3053.

Michael Slee, 22 Station Road, Williamstown, Vic 3016.

J.K. W hite, 52 Glen Street, Kelvin Grove, Qld 4059.

Meanwhile, there is another, quite different, book to be won on page 94 . . .

CINEMA PAPERS May — 7

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Cannes 1986: a record or a swansong?

More films than ever, but major changes on the horizon The 39th Cannes International Film Festival promises to be an interest­ ing one for the Australian film industry. At our time of going to press (18 April), eight films — four features and four shorts — have been selected for a variety of com­ p e titiv e and n o n -c o m p e titiv e sections, and there is a distinct possibility that a ninth, Bill Bennett’s Backlash, will find its way into the Directors’ Fortnight.

The big competition film, Bruce Beresford’s The Fringe Dwellers, comes as no great surprise: Beresford has had two previous films in competition (Breaker Morant and Tender Mercies), as well as one (The Getting of Wisdom) in the Directors’ Fortnight, and the Cannes selectors have always liked a track record.

But some of the other selections may cause surprise to Australians: Burke & Wills (in ‘Un certain regard’) is apparently well liked by the French, and Jane Campion’s ABC telefeature, 2 Friends, a late addition to the same section, caught most pundits by surprise.

Campion has every reason to be delighted: she also has three other films, all shorts, in various sections: Peel in competition, Passionless Moments and A Girl’s Own Story in ‘Un certain regard’. This may well be a record for any director, let alone an Australian one.

The biggest surprise, however, is the omission from the main competi­ tion — and, at time of writing, from everything else as well — of Paul Cox’s Cactus. Festival director Gilles Jacob is reported to have promised the film’s star, Isabelle Huppert, that a place was assured. That assur­ ance now seems to have evapor­ ated.

- Political m anoeuvrings have always characterized the Cannes selection; and most observers, though recognizing that politics are behind the change, are at a loss to work out the details. Cox remains unperturbed: “ I don’t make films to compete,” he says. Since he will be filming in nearby Arles at the time of the festival, he may well set up a special ‘in v ite d ’ screening in Cannes, thereby leaving Cactus open for selection at Montreal, a festival which has always responded warmly to his work.

M e a n w h ile , c o n tro v e rs y of another kind has surrounded the choosing of former Cinema Papers editor Scott Murray’s Devil in the Flesh for the Critics’ Week. Murray and his father, producer John B. Murray, had for some time been trying to prevent French distributor Georges Alain-Vuille from breaking his contract and releasing a radically different version of the film than the one Murray made.

If the film had been released in France, it would not have been eligible for the Critics’ Week, al­

8 — May CINEMA PAPERS

though the selectors were appar­ ently prepared to make an exception under the circumstances. The French courts, however, found in favour of the Murrays on 14 April, so the dilemma does not arise.

Scandals apart, the plethora of Australian films has prompted Minister for Arts, Fleritage and E nvironm ent Barry Cohen to enthuse about the situation in a rather hasty press release, which welcomes ‘ ‘an unprecedented seven films” at the head of a page that lists eight, then comments on the 28 feature films being marketed at Cannes this year. Our reckoning — see the list on pages 45 to 51 — puts the total at 34.

Notable omissions from the line­ up include the Paul Flogan epic, Crocodile Dundee, featured on our cover; a couple of films from the B urro w e s-D ixo n stab le, C ool Change (reviewed in this issue) and Free Enterprise; the eagerly awaited Right-Hand Man, which is still not finished; PBL’s Birdsville (the title to which Good Man Down has merci­ fully reverted) — although this may be shipped over for a special screening at the last minute, if problems with the Super-Techniscope format can be ironed out; and Australian Dream, withdrawn from the Berlin competition in February, and now apparently being recut.

One major point of debate this year is just how important Cannes now is to the Australian film industry, given the great impression the American Film Market made on Aus­ tralian filmmakers this year.

The Australian Film Commission’s Marketing Director, Clive Turner, described the AFM as "exceptional: the buyers were really looking for product” . Indeed, the AFM could well become the key market for Aus­ tralia, setting up deals that can be fine-tuned at Cannes. The latter, says Turner, "is a very, very difficult market, and it’s hard to get publicity on individual films.” ‘ ‘ Businesswise,” says Nilsen Premiere’s Tom Broadbridge, "the AFM is far superior to Cannes. At Cannes, you have all the heavies, and you can’t compete with them in terms of advertising.”

Cannes has one major advantage over the AFM for Australian film­ makers, however: it fits the Austra­ lian production schedule of an early summer shoot, a Christmas wrap, and three months post-production in time to have a print ready for Cannes.

The cultural promotion aspect of Cannes still remains as strong as ever, even if the AFC, sensible to comments about lavish spending on parties in a recent National Times article, is keeping its head down a little this year.

More significantly, the AFC has combined with Film Victoria and the South Australian Film Corporation to

set up a new contacts and marketing office in what used to be the be­ leaguered British company, Goldcrest’s, suite in the Majestic.

Says Film Victoria’s Greg Tepper, who will run the office with the AFC’s London manager, Gary Hamilton and the SAFC’s Jim Henry: "The AFC has already announced it is moving out of the marketing sphere, w h ich m akes it d iffic u lt fo r independent producers. What we are doing is providing a space for producers.” The new Australian Pro­ ducers' Sales Office will thus take over from the top floor of 52 La Croisette as the hub of Australian activity in Cannes.

Remaining entirely separate as usual is the New South Wales Film Corporation, which screened no new product at the AFM, and has held back its major push — includ­ ing the ingeniously titled ‘Northern Hemisphere Premiere' of The More Things Change — for Cannes.

Marketing consultant Danny Collins sees the AFM’s function as “ letting the majors know we exist, and that we have new product coming down the pike.” The NSWFC, says Collins, is primarily interested in doing package deals on its titles, with territory-by-territory arrangements coming a distinct second. The Cor­ poration, stresses Collins, sees marketing as an ongoing activity, not one restricted to festivals. In the words of the NSWFC’s Los Angeles representative, Bob Lewis, “ where is it written that you only sell at markets?”

The real sword of Damocles hang­ ing over the Australian presence at Cannes this year, however, is not the threat of the AFM: it is the perennial uncertainty over the future of the industry’s tax status, which is start­ ing to peak again. Rumours are cur­ rently rife of a May mini-budget which will axe the 10BA tax conces­ sions entirely, thrusting the industry into a far deeper crisis than that caused by last year’s reduction in the concession rates.

Such rumours — or leaks — are, of course, part and parcel of Austra­ lian political life. And the rumours often turn out, for obvious tactical reasons, to be far worse than the reality (tell someone you’re going to cut off his hand, and he may well thank you when all you do is stamp on his finger).

But the last-minute cancellation of the Minister’s trip to the South of France, especially in a year when there is so much national and inter­ national political capital to be made out of the state of the Australian arts, is likely to fuel the rumours. After all, Cohen would scarcely want to be on a foreign shore, surrounded by Aus­ tralian filmmakers, just as his col­ le a g u e s b a c k h o m e w e re announcing the end of the whole tax-support system. ‘Un certain regard’ wouldn’t be the word for it.

Kristina Nehm and Bob Maza in The Fringe Dwellers (competition).

Nigel Havers (left) and Jack Thomp­ son in Burke & Wills (Un certain regard).

David Argue (left) with director Bill Bennett on location fo r Backlash, a strong possibility fo r the Director’s Fortnight.

Isabelle H u ppert and R obert Menzies in Cactus: its omission is a mystery.

Jane Campion on location fo r 2 Friends (Un certain regard).

Steve Bisley (left) and R od Zuanic in Fast Talking (Junior Cannes).

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SHORT CHANGED DEAD-END DRIVE-IN THE BEE-EATER I N T H E T R A D I T I O N O F O U R M O N E Y - M A K I N G PAST: AUSTRALIA NOW THE BEST OF FRIENDS BLISS CAREFUL HE MIGHT HEAR YOU CATHY’S CHILD THE CITY’S EDGE THE CLUB CROSSTALK GOODBYE PARADISE HOODWINK THE JOURNALIST LAST OF THE KNUCKLEMEN THE LONG WEEKEND MAYBE THIS TIME MY BRILLIANT CAREER MOLLY NEWSFRONT THE NIGHT THE PROWLER STIR THIRST .. .and many others ROBERT LEWIS

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■ Spielberg wasn’t the only one to get a slap in the face at the Oscars.

In an elaborate acceptance speech, writers of Witness William Kelley, Pamela Wallace and Earl W. Wallace, thanked the producers and Paramount, while mention of the film’s Aussie director seemed to slip their mind. Director Carl Schultz, a friend of Weir’s was reported to have thrown his shoe at the television!

True mateship. Apparently Weir demanded considerable rewriting of the script, causing disagreement with the writers and eventual conflict with Paramount.

Perhaps there are gnomes in, the satellite, but the cinematographer’s award, the only other in which an Australian was mentioned, was, at least in the Sydney telecast, also blacked out.

■ The Australian Teachers of Media (ATOM) is one group which gives kids voting power — though they don’t always agree with the adult panel when it comes to handing out the prizes. The anima­ tion Waltzing Matilda was the only film to receive a double elephant stamp at the 1986 ATOM awards in March. However, kids and adults differed on the winners in the other sections which included in the general category: Pitjiri — The Snake That Will Not Sink produced and directed by Karen Hughes (Best Australian Short Educational Film); Ivan Gaal’s Ibrahim (Social Issues); Down There directed by Sabina Wynn for Best Science and Nature Film as well as the Jury Prize for its animators Pamela Lofts and Lee W hitm ore; D ennis O 'R o u rk e ’s Couldn’t Be Fairer (Best Documen­ tary); and Top Kid directed by Carl Schultz (Best Narrative).

■ The AFI’s Shooting Gallery season of short films is a mix of thrills and spills. Smartly packaged, it has managed to bypass the distribution hassles individual films or videos might have had. The films have been funded through the AFC’s Creative Development, No Frills and Women’s Film Funds. It’s a united

Contributors Naoko A be and G eorgina Pope head the Tokyo-based Goanna Films.

Barbara A lysen is a news producer at SBS-TV. John B axter is a film reviewer for The Australian and author of numerous books on the cinema.

A nn ette B lo nski is a script editor and writer on film.

M arcus Breen is a Melbournebased journalist, freelance writer and documentary filmmaker.

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

Rolando C aputo is a freelance writer on film.

T ony Cavanaugh is currently a story editor at Crawford Produc­ tions.

Lorenzo C odelli is a freelance journalist based in Trieste, a contri-

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front — try and catch a few of the programmes, then decide what's to be shot down. There will be screen­ ings in Sydney, Brisbane, Hobart, Melbourne, Perth and Adelaidefrom March 21 to June 30.

■ AFC Special Production Fund commitments have sparked further activity in a range of productions.

These include the features: A Lift for a Lady (Greg Ricketson), High Tide (Sandra Levy), Australian Dream (Ross Matthews), Candy Regentag (Don Catchlove and Graeme Isaac), Escape from Madness (Michael Pattinson), Promises to Keep (Jane Scott) and Twelfth Night (Don Catchlove); two documentaries: Australian Wilderness Series (John Richardson) and Family Life (Curtis Levy); three TV miniseries: Always Afternoon (Henry Crawford), The Challenge (Bob Loader and Tristram Miall) and The Shiralee (Bruce Moir); and a telemovie: Army Wives (Pamela Vanneck.

Closing dates for 1986 assess­ ments for the Co-Productions Pro­ gramme are May 7, July 16 and October 3.

■ Planning is underway again for the second Pacific International Media Market in Hong Kong from June 22-25 at the Royal Meridien Hotel, Organisers Suzanne Wagner and Philippe de Montignie said that 16 new com panies have already expressed interest in attending.

The location signifies the opening up of the Asian Pacific region to many groups not usually involved in international film and television markets.

Independent producers and distri­ butors will have access to viewing rooms and other facilities for a partial fee if they do not want to stay for the duration of the Market.

■ Revcom Television, a French production and distribution com­ pany, recently established an Aus­ tralian subsidiary in Sydney. “ We're taking a much higher pro­ file,’’ Revcom's chief executive, Geoffrey Daniels said. “ Now we’ll be able to move much quicker without having to go back to Paris all the

time.’’

For example, negotiating over­ seas distribution for Australian pro­ ductions and supplying overseas television programmes to Australian networks will be organized through the Sydney headquarters.

The company’s current invest­ ment in Australian productions is about $8 million through co-produc­ tions, distribution guarantees and script development. “ At the moment we're involved in 45 hours of television using different methods of finance,” Daniels said.

Revcom is planning a co-produc­ tion with the ABC of a miniseries, The Wind and the Stars based on Captain Cook’s Pacific explorations.

However their main focus is usually children’s drama. Television rights have been bought to Hills End

by Ivan S outhall, and James Aldridge’s The Adventures of Spit McPhee. “ We’re interested in doing child­ ren’s drama, or family drama as we like to call it. We try to keep up the quantity of these productions,” Daniels said.

b u to r to P o s tif a n d Ita lia n correspondent for the International Film Guide.

Mary C olbert is a Sydney-based journalist.

Paul C o ulte r is a freelance writer on film.

C h ristine Cremen is a freelance writer on film.

S ophie C unningham is a film student and freelance writer. She c o n trib u te s re g u la rly to the Melbourne Times.

T ony D rouyn is a freelance writer on film who also plays and teaches classical guitar.

Derek Elley is associate editor of the International Film Guide.

Debi Enker is editor of Video Week.

Sandra den Ham er works for the Dutch Film Market in Utrecht.

P atricia King Hanson is editor of the American Film Catalogue and a contributor to the Los Angeles Times, American Film and Stills.

Steve Hanson is a film writer and author of the Film Review Index,

Fred Harden is a film and television producer, and has a regular column on technical information in The Video Age. Paul Harris is co-host of Film Buff’s Forecast on 3RRR and a regular contributor to The Age. Sheila Joh nston is a Londonbased writer and translator. She is film critic for LAM magazine.

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

Paul Kalina teaches media studies and photography at St. Joseph’s Tech, and is a freelance writer on film.

Brian M cFarlane is a lecturer in English at the Chisholm Institute, and author of Words and Images.

Belinda Meares is a Paris-based freelance writer.

T ony M itchell teaches film and theatre at the University of NSW. M ike N icola id i is a freelance writer and contributor to Variety.

Norbet Noyaux works as an inter-

The other symposium focused on film restoration and the kinds of ‘edi­ torial’ difficulties it involves. Con­ fronted with a number of versions (particularly with the silent classics) and continual technical hitches, how do you put the jigsaw puzzle together?

Enno Patalas of Munich intro­ duced the screening of the longest remaining version of Metropolis (1926). A Canadian film, Back to God's Country (1919) was shown, and NFSA staff detailed their experi­ ences working on the reconstruction of the Australian classic, For the Term of His Natural Life (1927).

It was the first time the Congress was held in the southern hemi­ sphere and coincided with the 50th anniversary of film archiving in Australia.

Polish film historian and founding director of the Australian Film and Television School, Jerzy Toeplitz, participated. An expert in computer usage in film archives, Harriet Harri­ son of the Library of Congress and President of the FIAF Cataloguing Commission, also attended.

■ The cobwebs and the dust didn’t have time to settle at the National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA) in April. The NFSA, based in Canberra, was host to the 42nd Congress of the Fédération Internationale des Archives du Film (FIAF).

Film restoration and the use of com puterized systems in film archives were the two main topics addressed at the event, which brought together 70 delegates from 40 different overseas archives, as well as six Australian participants.

The keynote address, ‘Towards the Global Data Base?’, was given

by Roger Smither of the Imperial War Museum (London), and high­ lighted the problems resulting from film archivists using incompatible cataloguing systems.

A session on computerized collec­ tion management gave the NFSA the opportunity to demonstrate their own system, FLICS, which tracks the movement of film and television material and helps in the updating of basic cataloguing information. preter for the French Commercial Office in Melbourne and is a free­ lance writer on film.

D ieter O sswald is a journalist and contributor to Filmecho.

N oel P u rd o n teaches cinema studies at Flinders University. He has a special interest in Pasolini and is a contributor to a number of Aus­ tralian and overseas film journals.

Brian Shoesm ith lectures at the WA College of Advanced Education.

Mark S pratt is a freelance writer on film.

Ian S tocks is a documentary film­ maker who has been visiting and filming in Papua New Guinea since 1973.

David S tratto n is host of Movie of the Week on SBS-TV and reviews films for Variety.

R.J. Thom pson teaches cinema studies at La Trobe University.

Sue T u rn b u ll teaches in the Media Centre, La Trobe University.

M ichael V isontay is a journalist at the Sydney Morning Herald.

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The Australian Film and Television School is now seeking applications for the 1987 1-year Screenwriting Course and the 3-year Fulltime Program Course which offers courses specialising in Screenwriting, Production, Camera, Direction, Sound and Editing, with specific training conducted in Documentary, Television and Drama.

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Intending applicants are required to submit a portfolio of supporting work.

For screenwriters this is written material. For all other craft areas the preferred form of supporting material is a short film, video or sound tape.

This date is final and no ex te n sio n s are available.

Supporting material which applicants consider as a suitable demonstration of potential ability in their chosen craft is also acceptable.

The School seeks people who have a commitment to film and television with a wide general knowledge of its history, achievements and future

There are no specific educational prerequisites, although most successful applicants have reached matriculation standard.

The closing date for app lications is 30 June 19S6.

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People who will make an impact on the different areas of Australian film and television.

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People who can demonstrate clear creative potential and talent through their work, imagination and concerns.

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People who wish to develop artistic and technical control of the medium in a responsible and professional way.

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People who are passionate about learning their craft or skills and through this control develop their artistic abilities.

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People who are highly motivated and self sufficient, who can work co-operatively and on their own initiative and who have a clear commitment to a professional career in film and television.

For the 1-year Screenwriting Course the School seeks wnters of some experience who wish to develop their screenwriting ability.

Students are paid an allowance during their course, which currently stands at $7618 per annum, plus dependants allowances where applicable. Interstate and New South Wales country students receive assistance with removal and settling-in expenses to allow them to take up the course in Sydney.

There is a future in Australian film and television. If you feel you can contribute to this future, either complete the coupon below or contact: Lynn Brown, Students Officer, Telephone: (02) 887 1666.

Australian Film and Television School r

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| AUSTRALIAN FILM AND TELEVISION SCHOOL * ■ * ® * I | |

Further information and application forms are available from: AFTS Students Officer, PO Box 126 North Ryde NSW 2113 Please forward Fulltime Program information brochure and application form for: □ 3-year course □ 1-year screenwriting course

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CLOSING DA TE: 30 JUNE 1986

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by Sheila Johnston British Academy honours Spielberg in a dull year ’Tis the season of award ceremonies again, with new shortlists of con­ tenders being announced almost weekly in the trade press. Not a lot for partisans of Britpix to cheer about, though. The most gratifying event for them has been the strange case of Brazil, which the US distri­ butor, Universal, had consigned to the shelf (despite vociferous protest from director Terry Gilliam), until a special screening for the Los Angeles Film Critics’ Association netted it a fistful of gongs (for Best Film, Director and Screenplay), and finally earned the film a Stateside airing.

More belated justice for some in the otherwise unadventurous British Academy (BAFTA) Awards: J' ■- '

Bob Geldof, an unpopular omission from the New Year’s Honours List, took two trophies for Live Aid, while Steven Spielberg, snubbed by the American Academy in this year’s Best Director nominations, was nominated as a fellow of BAFTA. Brazil was the only UK production to figure in the Oscar nominations (it was named for Best Screenplay and Best Art Direction, but got neither); not much chance of Hugh Hudson and friends crowing that “ the British are coming” this year. In fact, Hudson’s Revolution was conspicu­ ously absent from all the lists, having received only brickbats from the American critics, and an equally savage drubbing in this country at the time of its January release.

Absolute Beginners, the film that will — or won’t — save Goldcrest. Above, Patsy Kensit as Suze, singing ‘Having it all’. Below, Lionel Blair as pop promoter Harry Charms with once and future star, Baby Boom (Chris Pitt).

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Poor Hugh Hudson: his was a film prejudged on its budget. The press had been primed for the kill by Goldcrest’s recent financial crisis (largely precipitated by the alleged excesses of Revolution). Now, an awful lot is riding on the company’s next big splurge, Absolute Beginners, which also overspent, albeit not so badly.

So far, Julien Temple’s avidly awaited musical adaptation of Colin Mclnnes’s portrait of teen life in latefifties Soho, has attracted an extra­ ordinary amount of media hype, which might (or might not) be a good sign. Palace, the co-distributors, managed to balance supersaturated press coverage and buoyant box office on Company of Wolves, at least In the UK. Now the question is whether they can pull off the same stunt again. Unveiled to the press to the sound of enthusiastic cheers mingled with the distant sharpening of knives, Absolute Beginners opened in the UK in early April, well beyond the deadline for this column.

Meanwhile, Goldcrest, still reeling from Revolution, has announced a ‘contingency plan’, which cynical industry insiders interpret as not much more than a cosmetic exercise to indicate that the company is still in business. And the TESE manage­ ment takeover, planned for 28 February (see my column in Cinema Papers 56, March 1986), is still pending, as chairman Gary Dartnall casts around for the necessary cash.

On the production front, events have quietened down of late, whether because of the recent cold snap of Arctic weather or a chilly business climate. Cannon’s latest project, an adaptation of Tom Kempinski's Duet for One, about a concert violinist hit by multiple sclerosis, went into production at the beginning of February. Director Andrei K onchalovsky aroused interest for his choice of star: Julie Andrews, in a serious dramatic role.

The other biggie is HandMade’s Shanghai Surprise, a thriller about the opium trade in the thirties, which pulled off the impressive casting coup of teaming Madonna (also In an unexpected role, as an American missionary) with husband Sean Penn. Jim Goddard directs.

Perhaps the most intriguing pro­ ject in the pipeline, however, is an ambitious, double-headed film ver­ sion of Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit, financed by TESE to the tune of £5 million ($10 million). Directed

by Christine Edzard, two separate two-hour films (being shot simultane­ ously) will tell the story through the contrasting viewpoints of Little Dorrit herself (Sarah Pickering) and her suitor (Derek Jacobi).

At the box office, Back to the Future has continued as the front­ runner, while Santa Claus the Movie disappeared smartly in a cloud of snow once Christmas was over.

Rocky IV predictably clocked up huge, record-breaking returns, outgrossing even Rambo. Other hits have included A Chorus Line, Kiss of the Spider Woman and Teen Wolf.

After Revolution (which at least had the Monthly Film Bulletin to sing its praises), the biggest British flop has indisputably been TESE’s tacky Julie.

Walters vehicle, Car Trouble, which a number of critics have already set aside for their year’s worst lists.

France

by Belinda M eares The tube row continues; Serreau’s caps the Cesars comedy 1986 got off to an eventful start on the home entertainment scene. Con­ troversy rages (and still does) over the government’s decision to give France’s first fully commercial tele­ vision channel, TV5, to the Berlusconi-Seydoux-Riboud consortium (see my column in Cinema Papers 56, March 1986). Now, to add Insult to injury, a major share in TV6, the second in d e p e n d e n t channel (mainly a music channel, aimed at teenage viewers), has gone to Nicolas Seydoux, brother of TV5’s Jerome Seydoux, who is the director of Gaumont. Other major share­ holders are a duo of advertising groups and NRJ, Paris’s most popular independent radio station.

With the majority of French film­ makers still unprepared to col­ laborate with TV5, because of its policy of interrupting films with com­ mercials, and given the technical problems confronting both new channels, the era of independent TV in France seems to have got off to an inauspicious start.

Disturbing reports have revealed that the state broadcasting service, TDF, was over-optimistic in its assessment of the number of house­ holds the new channels would

From riches to rags: Sandrine Bon­ naire as Mona in Varda’sV agabonde.

reach. Apparently only between 30% and 40% of televiewers can receive TV5 and TV6, and even that lucky minority tends to complain of fuzzy pictures.

In fact, TV6, which got off the ground just two days after ‘the Fifth’, passed almost unnoticed. Both channels suffer- from a lack of pro­ grammes, and have generally received a lukewarm reception from French vie w ers. In tia lly well supported by advertisers, they will have to prove their worth in the ratings figures if they are to survive.

France’s New Year cinema is runof-the-mill, at any rate from a movie­ goer’s perspective. The fourteenth annual Avoriaz festival (film fantas­ tique) took place in freezing Alpine temperatures in January. The fare was d isap pointin g, no doubt because the abundance of sciencefiction and horror movies over the last decade has plundered the last sparks of originality. Predictably, critics lamented the deja-vu triteness of most of the fare. Winner was Alan J. Pakula's Dream Lover, with special awards going to Richard Franklin’s Link, Tom Holland's Fright Night, Stephen Miller's House and Wolfgang Petersen’s Enemy Mine.

But the real hit of the festival was Russell M ulcahy’s Highlander, which was not in competition.

The Cesar awards (France’s equivalent to the Oscars) went off without many surprises, at least from the public’s point of view. Chris­ tophe Lambert got Best Actor for his performance as Fred in the cult film, Subway, and Sandrine Bonnaire Best Actress for Agnès Varda’s Sans toit ni loi (Vagabond). Named

France’s brightest new stars were Wadeck Stanczak for Rendez-vous and Charlotte Gainsbourg for her role in the 1985 Prix Delluc-winner, L'effrontée. And Coline Serreau’s Trois hommes et un couffin won the Césars for Best Film and Best Screenplay. This immensely popular comedy is still screening in Paris after six months, and has (so far) reached the score of 1,720,000 admissions, with an estimated 6,000,000 nationwide.

More recent French releases have not fared nearly so well. Apart from L ’effrontée (with 610,000 entries to date), the New Year’s hopes were pinned on Gilles Behat’s Les longs manteaux and Philippe de Broca’s La gitane, both of which were dis­ appointing after reasonable first weeks.

Overall, cinema attendances have been boosted by America’s celluloid musclemen, Stallone and Schwarze­ negger, in Rocky IV and Commando respectively. Other creditable per­ formances by foreign movies came from Prizzi's Honor, followed by White Nights, A Chorus Line and The Journal of Natty Gann. Fellini’s Ginger e Fred only made the alsoran category, and Fred Schepisi’s Plenty, around for two months, has failed to pass the 100,000 mark.

Presented with an impressive batch of new talents on both sides of the camera, French cinema fans may be wondering why it is proving so difficult for local filmmakers to rekindle the new wave magic. After the comparative flatness of 1985, films presently in production will have to provide a lot more punch, since the credibility of French cinema is now at stake worldwide.

Frank Cassenti is opting for a politico-historical direction with his adaptation of a novel by Jewish writer Elie Wiesel, Le testament d ’un poète juif assassiné. Filming is cur­ rently under way in Israel, with Michael Jonasz, star of Qu'est-ce qui fait courir David (What Makes David Run, 1982) in the leading role.

Tony Gatlif, director of Les princes (The Princes), seen at last year’s Melbourne Film Festival, has chosen a theme approaching his own life for his second feature: La rue du départ, filmed in Paris and Le Havre, is about the escape of a young girl (Anne Gisel Glass) from her bour­ geois background to her downfall among a group of marginal delin­ quents. Gérard Depardieu (lest we forget) makes an appearance as the girl’s father.

La mémoire tatouée, directed by Ridha Behi of Soleil des Hyène (Hyenas’ Sun, 1977), unites Ben Gazzara, Julie Christie and young French actor Patrick Bruel, seen most recently in P.R.O.F.S. And a new production company, Forum (art-house distributors since 1972) has been bolstered by capital from Virgin France, the subsidiary of the British company. Forum’s first two productions are due to begin shoot­ ing in April and May respectively.

First up will be Désordre, directed by O livier Assayas, co-w riter of Téchiné’s Rendez-vous, and Jeux d ’artifice, directed by Virginie Thévenet (La nuite porte-jaretelles).

New Zealand

by Mike N icolaidi Tax changes stem tide but not vigour of Kiwi industry The Kiwi contingent at Cannes, though no less energetic, is bearing fewer new cans of film than in the last two years.

The marketing director of the New Zealand Film Commission, Lindsay Shelton, says two features will have their premier unveiling in the market, while two others — shown at the ‘Indian Summer’ market in Milan and at the American Film Market — will make their Cannes overtures.

The new product comes from the A u c k la n d p ro d u c tio n house, Cinepro: Dangerous Orphans, a y o u th -o rie n te d urban th rille r, directed by John Laing (Beyond Reasonable Doubt, The Lost Tribe) and Arriving Tuesday (formerly known as Monica), a low-budget love story and first feature by a young Wellington director, Richard Riddiford. Both films are produced

by Don Reynolds, who shared pro­ duction credit with Sam Pillsbury on Geoff Murphy’s The Quiet Earth, the New Zealand film industry’s big suc­ cess on the American market earlier this year.

The other films are Other Halves, also directed by John Laing, and starring Lisa Harrow and Mark Pilisi, from Finlayson Hill Productions, and Mirage Films’ Bridge to Nowhere, produced by Larry Parr and directed by Ian Mune (Came A Hot Friday). Other Halves is a love story that breaks barriers of age and race, and Bridge to Nowhere a drama involving five teenagers and an enig­ matic hunter, played by Bruno Lawrence.

Repeat screenings of The Quiet Earth, Michael Firth’s Sylvia, Gaylene Preston’s Mr Wrong (screening in the United States this month under the title Dark of the Night) and John Reid’s Leave All Fair complete the New Zealand catalogue for Cannes this year.

According to Lindsay Shelton, the vigour of the Kiwi representatives reflects the strong impact New Zealand films are now making at home and abroad. On the local market, the industry has scored a string of successes over the last nine months with Came A Hot Friday, Mr Wrong, Shaker Run (another Larry Parr production) and The Quiet Earth.

Three* features due for completion later in the year will also be pro­ moted: John O’Shea's production, Ngati, directed by Barry Barclay, the full-length animated feature, Footrot Flats, and Parr’s Queen City Rocker, directed by Bruce Morrison.

The NZFC team is boosted this year by the presence of chairman David Gascoigne and executive director, Jim Booth, who will be p u rs u in g fu tu re in v e s tm e n t prospects with a number of inter­ national companies. Along with several independent production houses, they could benefit from recent legislation designed to ease

film co-production deals with other countries.

The search for off-shore finance is partially a result of a report by the auditor-general criticizing both the Commission and the Broadcasting Corporation of New Zealand for using third -pa rty investors to minimize tax.

Despite the auditor-general’s statement, Gascoigne is pressing on regardless, declaring the report "selective” . “ Techniques adopted by the Commission are no different to those entered into by other, much larger, quasi-government bodies like Air New Zealand, and the government itself, in respect of developing major energy projects, such as gas,” he said. "We have to support an industry that is high-risk and not readily visible. This means we have to be innovative and robust in our approach.”

The greatest problem currently affecting private individual invest­ ment, now reinforced by the auditorgeneral’s observations, is the action of the commissioner of inland revenue in delaying tax settlements for many private investors in film between 1982 and 1984. No one is prepared to say how many indivi­

Street wise: Hunter and Will oughby in Queen City Rocker. duals are involved, but it is generally estimated to be well over a hundred.

Gascoigne says there is currently little point in seeking film investment from individuals, although corporate investment has not been greatly affected.

Two planned Kiwi features not receiving pre-publicity in the south of France (though not for political reasons, the makers stress) are pro­ jects linked to the sinking of the Greenpeace ship, Rainbow Warrior.

Phillips Whitehouse Productions is actively pursuing, a New ZealandCanadian co-production focusing on the incident, with script by Bill Deverell, a novelist and lawyer, and founding member of G.reenpeace.

Sam Pillsbury, who returned from talks in Vancouver in March, is expected to be named director, with shooting scheduled to begin in Auckland in July or August.

Former Los Angeles lawyer Mark Chambers, now resident in Welling­ ton, is planning what he describes as "a comedy about Gallic military intelligence activities in the South Pacific that backfire” .

His co-author is writer and actor John Banas, with Murray Newey (Death Warmed Up) tagged as line producer. The project, with a working title of All the President’s Frogmen, has received initial development finance from the NZFC and the country’s Development Finance Corporation.

CINEMA PAPERS May — 13

PAUL HOGAN in

CROCODILE DUNDEE LINDA KOZLOWSKI MARK BLUM DAVID GULPILIL MICHAEL LOMBARD and JO H N MEILLON D irector of P hotography RUSSELL BOYD ACS. O riginal Score b y PETER BEST W ritte n by PAUL HOGAN &KEN SHADIE Produced by JO H N CORNELL D irected by PETER FAIMAN DOLBY STEREO |

H G H Ïs D ïs M m n

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MGM takes some of the steam out of 91/2 Weeks As befits a minor Hollywood legend, 9V2 Weeks opened to lots of head­ lines and plenty of raised eyebrows.

Its controversial journey began with an erotic novella of the same title, written under a pseudonym. The story of a nine-and-a-half-week rela­ tionship that went from hearts and flowers to blindfolds and handcuffs, the project gained momentum when Adrian Lyne agreed to direct (making it his first film since Flashdance), and with the casting of Mickey Rourke and Kim Basinger.

The film that has finally emerged is the result of at least ten screenplay drafts and, by Lyne’s own admis­ sion, extensive editing. And reediting. Originally set for release in the summer of 1985, the film opened in mid-February because of all that editing, which defogged some of the steamier scenes.

This was done so the film would be ‘accessible’ (i.e. R-rated instead of X-rated). Accessibility being what it is in the United States, not all the controversial elements from the book made it to the screen. The handcuffs are gone, except for a pair that are seen briefly during a striptease routine. The blindfolds are gone, except for one that Basinger wears when Rourke teasingly feeds her all variety of foods.

A scene that found Basinger and Rourke committing a stick-up in an elevator (Basinger is urged on by Rourke) has been rem o ved , because test audiences found it un­ savoury (after holding a switchblade to a terrified businessman’s throat, Basinger seductively kisses him).

As is sometimes the case with pro­ vocative content, overseas audi­ ences will see more than Americans

have. Thus, a kinky love scene in an alleyway will play longer overseas.

You will also see a sequence that Americans won’t: a bizarre sort of play-acting scene, in which Basinger crawls on the floor, picking up money to bring to Rourke, who seems to be trying to see how far he can humiliate her. That sequence caused such a furore at an MGM test screening that Lyne, by his own admission, “ just about had to run for my life” .

Also, where the book had a dark ending, with the heroine suffering an apparent breakdown, the film ends more upbeat, with the woman resolving to leave her lover. The. reason, explains Lyne, is that “ this is a story of a downward-spiralling, self-destructive nightmare that the girl has to escape in order to save herself. But, if I’d been totally true to the original script, then, in the course of the movie, audiences would have lost sympathy for the character.”

Of the extensive editing (much of it done after the test screenings), Lyne admits: “ I believe you must take audiences seriously, otherwise you'd be making 8mm movies and showing them on your bathroom Walls.”

No word yet on the decor or the actual title of Untitled Comedy, now shooting on the Universal Pictures lot, with John Landis directing. What is known is that it’s in the tradition of his early hit, Kentucky Fried Movie (1977) — that is, it’s a series of sketches, some less than a minute long. And, if nothing else, the castin g is e cle ctic: Rosanna Arquette, Ralph Bellamy, Steve Guttenberg, Carrie Fisher, Robert Loggia, Howard Hesseman, Steve

Germany

cinemas and, in Berlin, where it was shown amid massive police security (see David Stratton’s Berlin report on page 18) demonstrators threw stinkbombs.

The awarding of the Golden Bear to Stammheim was the occasion for even more uproar: jury president Gina Lollobrigida complained to the news magazine, Der Spiegel, of political pressure, and festival direc­ tor Moritz de Hadeln responded that this was “ total nonsense” . The result of all this publicity is that Stammheim has become an enormous box-office success.

Another huge hit has been the German film, Manner, directed by Doris Dorrie. Although in many ways the film is nothing much more than a neat comedy about educated men, it has been received with something approaching hysteria: the media have praised the film to the skies, and cinemas have been regularly putting up the 'House Full’ sign.

This sort of reception seems to be symptomatic for German films at the moment. The low-budget Daheim sterben die Leut has also been an unexpected hit. In the university town of Tubingen alone, the film has clocked up 20,000 admissions, breaking all records. Daheim

by D ieter O ssw ald Uproar makes Stammheim a runaway hit Stammheim, the film dealing with the trial and suicides of German terrorists Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, has been the cause of a series of major upheavals recently.

Avidly discussed in the media, it has had c o n s e rv a tiv e p o litic ia n s demanding that public funds used in its making be reimbursed, and demonstrators from the radical left interrupting its premiere in Ham­ burg. In other cities, copies of the film have been stolen from the

Rainer Strecker (left) in Westler.

Rough trade: Mickey Rourke and Kim Basinger between bouts in M GM ’s sultry, controversial 9Vi Weeks.

Forrest, Timothy Leary, Russ Meyer, Paul Bartel, Steve Allen . . .

Further north, at Mammoth Moun­ tain, the Californian ski resort, Eddie Murphy is at work on Paramount’s The Golden Child. Directed by Michael Ritchie, it’s a comedyaction-adventure that finds Murphy hired to find a missing ‘golden child’, kidnapped leader of the people of India.

And, back east, in Chicago, The Color of Money picks up where The Flustler left off. Well, actually, it’s 25 years later, and young hotshot Tom Cruise has come under the tutelage of Paul Newman. Martin Scorsese is directing for Touchstone (a.k.a.

Disney).

Speaking of reunions: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 is readying to shoot in Austin, Texas. Tobe Hooper, who did the notorious original, directs from a screenplay

by L.M. Kit Carson. Almost inevit­

ably, it’s for Cannon. The story picks up the action thirteen years later (the original was released in 1974), and finds three of the original ‘Chainsaw family’ members still in business, so to speak. In fact, they run a catering service! The action takes place over the weekend of the big game between the University of Texas and Oklahoma U. Qh, and this time around, the family’s principal targets are yuppies.

On the box-office front, the Ron Howard-directed Gang Ho had the year’s best opening, with more than $US7 million in ticket sales in its opening weekend (the previous 1986 record-holder, Iron Eagles, claimed SUS6.1 million in the same period).Police Academy 3 beat it out the following week. Bad news, too, however: Walter Hill’s Crossroads opened with a dismal $US2 million.

And, after playing just a handful of theatres its first weeks out, 9 1/ 2 Weeks opened wider to less-thanseductive results. Its ticket sales to date: SUS1.6 million. But, as the headlines continue, so perhaps the ticket sales will go up, too.

sterben die Leut is a satire about country life, with an entirely amateur cast.

The film which started all this cine­ matic nationalism, Otto — der Film (see most of my previous columns!) is, not surprisingly, to have a sequel, Otto — Teil 2, which is promised for 1987. Meanwhile, there have been some bizarre developments: politi­ cians are appearing on the screen.

To be specific, the Greens’ environ­ ment minister, Joschka Fischer, plays a taxi driver in a new thriller called Va Banque.

In among all this entertainment fare, one new film stands out for Its u n c o n v e n tio n a l an d h o n e s t approach, and shows every sign of becoming a cult movie. The film is Westler, a love story set between East and West Berlin. It is not, how­ ever, a boy-meets-girl story: it's boymeets-boy. The first-time director is Wieland Speck, who runs the Berlin festival’s ‘Panorama’ and special programmes.

Westler won the audience prize at the Max Ophuls Festival in Saar­ brücken. Already broadcast on tele­ vision, tapes of that screening have become much sought-after items.

The film is due for theatrical release in the autumn.

With Enemy Mine sold all over the world (see the ‘Profiles’ section and the Short Reviews In this issue of Cinema Papers), director Wolfgang Petersen already has a new project in hand. Called (provisionally) Rose of the Desert, it is about the FrancoSwiss novelist, Isabelle Eberhardt, who, at the end of the last century, lived out an adventure story of her own in Arabia. Petersen is making the film for Universal; but, as with Enemy Mine, he will shoot it at Munich’s Bavaria Studios.

Another transatlantic commuter, Wim Wenders, has evidently had enough of stories about dead-end relationships after Paris, Texas (1984). His new film, Bis am Ende der Welt, tells the love story of three — yes, three — people who travel round the world to find themselves.

At the box office, Rocky IV has naturally taken first place, followed by the aforementioned Manner.

Third and fourth places respectively have gone to A Chorus Line and the German ski-acrobatics film, Willi Bogner’s Feuer und Eis. The major disappointments have included Silverado, Black Moon Rising, Mishima and the German thriller, Killing Cars, which was — and deserved to be — a flop. ►

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Japan

Monicelli hits top form again with an all-star comedy

by Naoko Abe and Georgina Pope

As usual, the commercial ‘high season’ which ended with the Easter holidays confirmed the box-office strength of American imports like Out of Africa and other Oscarized items. This year, though, it gave added weight to the current protests by filmmakers' unions against the government’s proposal to remove all levies on movie tickets, thus giving the American distributors practically double their current returns.

Maccari and Furio Scarpelli, is put­ ting the final touches to another longstanding project, La famiglia, an amusing desecration of that stilldominant institution, in a film that will cover 80 years of history, from 1906 until the present.

Pupi Avati, as active as ever, will finish Regalo di Natale, a dark drama about four characters playing poker for everything they’v e ' got, and is also to produce the first film

Backhander: Liv Ullmann and Philippe Noiret in Monicelli’s hit comedy, Speriamo che sia femmina.

by his former assistant, Cesare Bastelli, Una domenica si. Finally, the father-and-son team of pro­ ducers, Mario and Vittorio Cecchi Gori, who have 124 hits behind them in the commedia all’italiana genre, are putting together a feast for their 125th: Grandi magazzini, directed by Castellano and Pipolo, will star all — really all — of Italy’s comedians.

Nanni Loy will return to his beloved Naples to direct a prison drama, Scugnizzi, which will also in­ clude a number of scenes to be shot in New York. Gianfranco Mingozzi is going into the growing soft-core market with his adaptation of Apol­ linaire’s Le imprese di un giovane Don Giovanni, written by JeanClaude Carrière and Peter Fleischmann, and starring two quite different sex queens: the slender Monica Guerritore, and the ample Serena Grandi.

Am ong Ita ly’s internationally known directors, M ichelangelo Antonioni is recovering from a stroke and will hopefully be back at work on his Due telegrammi, and Franco Zeffirelli is recovering from a tax judgement that he has to pay hundreds of millions of lire on his pictures made abroad.

Gian Maria Volonté will star in Francesco Rosi’s adaptation of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold, then will return to the role of late Christian Democrat leader, Aldo Moro, in Giuseppe Ferrara’s / giorni dell'ira. The film Is about the terrorist killing of Moro which was not so vaguely presaged in Elio Petri’s Todo modo (1976), in which Volonté starred as a carica­ ture of Moro.

Finally, it is still not clear whether Marco Bellocchio will see his version of the much-discussed II diavolo in corpo go into distribution, or whether he will be won over by pro­ ducer Leo Pescarolo, and the reedited version will be shown. At time of writing, the film is a hot favourite for the Cannes competition.

This is not the only giveaway: a lack of control over the share of Italian-made programmes produced and aired every year would be a gift to Berlusconi’s private networks; and the indiscriminate awarding of public money prizes to all films would help quick, cheap concoc­ tions at the expense of the rarer quality fiims.

The sleeper of the season, which reached the top half of the box-office charts after being turned down by all national distributors was Speriamo che si femmina. Conceived by the fertile mind of Tullio Pinelli, Fellini’s former right-hand man, it was scripted by the cream of Italian screenwriters: Pinelli, Suso Cecchi D’Amico, Leo Benvenuti, Piero De Bernardi and Mario Monicelli, who also directed.

Working with a young producer, Gianni Di Clemente (an example of how a new generation of intelligent, even intellectual, money-men is gradually replacing the powerful wave of greedy old sharks), the veteran Monicelli put together a splendid international cast: Cath­ erine Deneuve, Liv Ullm ann, Philippe Noiret, Bernard Blier, plus the younger talents of Giuliana De Sio, Athina Cenci, Paolo Plendel and newcom er Letizia Lante della Rovere. Speriamo che sia femmina is a multi-faceted, Chekhovian story about a placidly decaying bourgeois family and its replacement by a com­ munity of women.

Several projects announced by established directors will hopefully go before the cameras this summer.

Firstly, there is Damiano Damiani's L'inchiesta, a script by the late Ennio Flaiano, which has been around for 20 years or more, about a criminal investigation into the death of Christ by a Roman detective just after the crucifixion. Next, Ettore Scola, together with friends Ruggero

16 — May CINEMA PAPERS

Hollywood films at home; Oshima at work abroad Nagisa Oshima has been busy in Europe, making Max, mon amour for French producer Serge Silberman, whom he met in Tokyo when Silberman was there during the shooting of Kurosawa’s Ran. In the new film, Anthony Fliggins plays an English diplomat who discovers that his French wife (Charlotte Rampling) is secretly keeping a chimpanzee in another apartment, and the film goes on to explore her relationship with the chimp. Based on an idea by Jean-Claude Carriere, the script was written by Oshima and Carriere.

On the home front, however, less quirky pleasures prevail. When Pia Magazine, Tokyo’s leading fort­ nightly entertainment guide with a circulation of over half a million, asked its readers to select their favourite films released in 1985, it got an impressive 12,638 replies, two-thirds of them from men; the respondents’ average age was 2 0 1/2 .

Back to the Future came top, fol­ lowed by Amadeus, Nobuhiko Oba­ yashi’s Sanishinbo (Loneliness), Rambo: First Blood Part 2, Witness, A Chorus Line, The Neverending Story, The Killing Fields, The Ter­ minator and Falling in Love. Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome limped in at No. 67.

This year, a million Tokyoites have already seen Back to the Future, which grossed $9,850,153 at six Tokyo cinemas in the first 60 days.

Second and third came The Goonies ($4,177,440 at four) and A Chorus Line ($4,062,461, also at four).

In the less commercial sphere, the Art Theatre Guild of Japan, founded in 1962 by Toho to import foreign films and finance young Japanese producers and directors, is holding a six-week retrospective of all its pro­

Monkey puzzle: setting up a shot fo r Oshima’s made-in-France comedy, Max, mon amour.

ductions and co-productions. Over 80 titles are to be screened in the 300-seat Sanbyakunin cinema in suburban Tokyo.

The ATG was a launching pad for directors like Oshima, Masahiro Shinoda, Kijyu Yoshida and Kon Ichikawa. In recent years, it has been behind works by Sogo Ishii, Shuji Terayama and Yoshimitsu Morita. The retrospective thus promises to be the most compre­ hensive and exciting expose of recent Japanese cinema ever held.

Japanese pictures off to Cannes this year will include Toho’s The Story of Naomi Uemura, about the adventurer who lost his life last year on Mt McKinlay. Shot on location in Greenland and Canada, and on Everest, Mont Blanc and at the North Pole, the $8-million picture is due to be released domestically in June. Also off to the market is Yoshi­ mitsu Morita’s Sorekara, mentioned in our last column (Cinema Papers 56, March 1986).

To be screened in the Directors’ Fortnight is Comic zasshi iranai (Comic Magazine), directed by Yojiro Takita, and co-produced, written by and starring rock musician Yuya Uchida. Based on and including many real-life events, the film centres on a hardworking ‘scandal’ journalist, who goes to great lengths for scandalous news.

The cast is full of surprises, with reallife pop stars playing themselves, being pursued by and trying to evade the press.

Recent foreign releases have in­ cluded a few pleasant surprises, plus an encouraging lack of cheap horror, splatter and action movies.

Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo has just opened, and Out of Africa is currently playing in four Tokyo cinemas. Among the onecinema pictures is Mark Rydell’s The River, starring Mel Gibson, whose face is plastered all over town, pushing the wonders of Asahi beer.

The biggest Japanese release of the moment is Ronin, a Toho picture from director Yoshitaka Kawai. A swashbuckling adventure based on real events which took place in the eighteen-fifties, it stars singer Tetsuya Takeda and Mieko Harada, who is currently gracing screens around the globe in Kurosawa’s Ran.

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The bitterly cold, sub-zero tempera­ ture on the streets of Berlin seemed to affect festivalgoers more than usual this year. Amid all the sneezing and the wheezing, there were complaints galore about the quality of the films in the competition — complaints which seemed hardly justified, given that the official entries were, for the most part, stronger than they have been for the last couple of years. It was encouraging, too, to see that business at the Berlin Market held up well, despite the intrusion of the American Film Market into its traditional time-slot.

The festival opened with the infec­ tiously enjoyable Ginger e Fred (Ginger and Fred), which is easily Federico Fellini’s best film since Amarcord (1974). Somebody, how­ ever, should explain to Ginger Rogers — who is apparently suing the producers for defamation — that the film isn’t about Rogers and Astaire at all, but about Amelia (Giulietta Masina) and Pippo (Mar­ cello Mastroianni), a former songand-dance team of the forties, who are reunited to replay their old act on a monstrously tacky Christmasevening TV spectacular.

All the old Fellini obsessions about the weirder aspects of showbusiness are on display here, but the film is full of enjoyable asides and the central characters, wonderfully well played by the two veteran stars, are touch­ ing reminders of the old-timers of vaudeville, before television took over the variety shows. Nostalgia, yes, but nostalgia with great humour.

There was not, however, a lot of humour in the festival’s main prize­ winner, Stammheim. Reinhard Hauff’s film, which had already opened in other German cities amid bomb threats, was screened under tight security and the odour of a par­ ticularly noxious stink-bomb. The film is a careful recreation of high­ lights of the 1975 trial of the four members of the Red Army Fraction, popularly known as the BaaderMeinhof gang, using transcripts from the court proceedings, and seemingly attempting to be evenhanded. The pomposity of the judges and the paranoia of the prosecution lawyers, however, pushed audience sympathy into the dock with the accused, making the protests of the left against the film even harder to understand.

It seems that the international jury debated the merits of the film some­ what heatedly and over many hours.

Eventually, a statement made it clear th a t th e ir d e c is io n was n o t unanimous.

Outside Germany, it seems un­ likely that Stammheim will spark much interest. It is well made, very well acted, and doggedly unemo­ tional while working with highly emotive material. But the debates of the film would seem to be of marginal interest to non-Germans, and the courtroom set becomes stiflingly claustrophobic after nearly two hours.

The award of the Special Jury Prize to one of the festival’s three Italian entries, Nanni Moretti’s La messa e finita (The Mass is Over: see Lorenzo C-odelli’s column in Cinema Papers 55, January 1986), probably provoked less debate among the

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Snow business Quality| and controversy at the‘'w ^^^^m ^ . coldest festival jury, and was a worthy selection.

Moretti belongs to a generation of actor-directors who have revived Italian screen comedy in recent years, though the group’s style of humour doesn’t travel well (when Moretti’s trailblazing 1978 comedy, Ecce bombo, was screened at the Sydney Film Festival, it was greeted with derision). Moretti’s new film, successfully mocking the more rigid elements of the church, is funny, yet deadly serious.

Admirers of Georgi Shengelaya’s Pirosmani (1969), surely the best film ever made about an artist, were de­ lighted with the award to this immensely talented filmmaker for his new film, Achaigazrda kompozitoris mogzauroba (Journey of a Young Composer), which won a Silver Bear for Best Director. Set in 1907, two years after a revolt against the Czar (which included the Potemkin mutiny) had been crushed, the film is set in lovingly-filmed rural areas of Georgia, and follows the journey of a young musician who is engaged in recording for posterity (on the most primitive of equipment) the folk­ songs of the hinterland.

As the film proceeds, it becomes clear that a trap, somewhat akin to the trap in Miklos Jancso’s Szegenylegenyek (The Round-Up, 1965), is being set; and the wayward humour of the early scenes gives way to moments of quiet horror. The film was, apparently, too leisurely for some, but seems to me to have been the great revelation of the festival, and deserves the widest possible screenings.

The big names didn’t fare so well in Berlin. Jancso himself, in a French production, L ’aube (Dawn), came up with a heavy-handed, interior piece, set during the British occupa­ tion of Palestine. The film was struc­ tured around a long debate as to

Baader (Ulrich Tukur) and Meinhof (Therese Affolter), with Ensslin and Raspe in Stammheim. whether a British officer (Michael York) should be executed by antiBritish Israelis.

Una Wertmuller’s Un complicate intrigo di donne, vicoli e delitti (known in English rather prosaically as Camorra, after the Naples suburb where it is set), is a frenzied varia­ tion on a vigilante movie, while Liliana Cavani’s Interno berlinese (The Berlin Affair) is a ponderous lesbian romance, presented in Eng­ lish, made in Italy, and set in the Berlin of the thirties.

There were, however, further pleasures to be found in the main programme. Derek Jarman’s Cara­ vaggio, made on the tightest of shoestrings, was a wayward but generally inventive biography of the inventor of chiaroscuro lighting, though the inspiration seemed rather to be the doomed career of Pier-Paolo Pasolini.

Masahiro Shinoda’s Yari no Gonza (Gonza the Spearman — see Georgina Pope and Naoko Abe’s column in Cinema Papers 56, March 1986) was a resolutely traditional adaptation of a Chikamatsu play about m isplaced honour and revenge.

There were, of course, bad films aplenty in Berlin (better, for instance, not to talk about the French entry, by Jacques Rouffio), but there were plenty of strong films in the competi­ tion to capture the interest. And good reports came, too, from the Forum, where Dennis O’Rourke’s Flalf Life won the Peace Film Prize and the Zitty jury prize, indicating that, despite the chilled and frozen doubters, this was a stronger year than usual.

David Stratton

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Comments on the quality were the most frequently voiced opinions at the Fifteenth International Film Festival in the Dutch port city of Rotterdam, where over a hundred ‘art films’ were screened in twelve of the city’s cinemas between 24 January and 2 February.

Festival director Huub Bals again succeeded in creating a programme of wide variety, although this year it was apparently more of an effort.

According to Bals, seeing 500 films used to be enough; now, he has to see more than 900 to pick the best from the growing numbers of inter­ national art/independent/alternative movies, from which Rotterdam’s programme has always been made up.

The festival itself has grown along with the number of possible films.

With sponsorship from the Cannon Group, all the public showings were in commercial theatres this year, and cut off from the Lantaren/Venster complex, which was restricted to professionals (i.e. international guests and press).

Also included for the first time were one or two films which already had commercial distributors, like Kurosawa’s Ran and Maurice Pialat’s Police. But, says Bals, Rotterdam is not taking a step in the direction of ‘easier’ films aimed at a larger audience: he expects the large audience to make the move towards him!

The festival was opened by the Dutch Minister for Welfare, Public Health and Culture, Mr Brinkman, with an appeal for more international — specifically European — co­ operation in film production. He cited the festival’s opening film, A Zed and Two Noughts, as an example of a film which had been made with Dutch and British funds, and promised that more money would be available for sub-titling and making copies. A lot more money will be needed, however, to get international co-productions firmly established.

Eastern block Hunparjian film in doldrums, young directors promising The danger signs that were in evidence at last year’s Hungarian film week (see Cinema Papers 51, May 1985) showed no signs of evaporating this year. The industry is still strapped for cash as the country faces up to the many economic problems that hit the west in the seventies; and there is also an underlying lack of direction in filmmaking as a whole, with some direc­ tors still holding to the ‘realist’ style popular in the early eighties, and others returning to the more ‘cine­ matic’ look of the sixties and seventies.

Sixteen features were on show in early February at the luxurious new Budapest Convention Centre, set amid the hills of Buda. This year, there may have been no Redl ezredes (Colonel Red!) to tower above the rest of the field; but at least the trend of entering into (largely unsuccessful) co-produc­

tions appears to have died a quiet death.

It was, by coincidence, mostly a festival of works by younger direc­ tors, several of whom kept the flame of im a g in a tio n alive. G yorgy Szomjas’s Falfurô (The Wall Driller) was a particularly lively blend of off­ beat comedy, screwball allegory and Godardian devices like off­ screen noise, colour filters and musical fragments. A man sets him­ self up in private business, drilling holes in people’s walls, but gradu­ ally becomes more and more obsessed by a beautiful blonde next door, who may or may not be a highly inventive hooker. Szomjas, who gave Hungarian cinema the ‘paprika western’ and its first rock film, does not overstretch the sexual implications of the title, and the mix­ ture of fantasy and reality is kept admirably balanced somewhere between knockabout humour and

social satire.

Two other works by young talents also traded on the private enterprise d e b a te ^ c u rre n t in H u n g a ry .

E g é s z s é g e s e r o tik a ( S o u n d Eroticism), the first feature from special effects cameraman Péter Timâr, recalled the verve of Dick Lester’s films from the sixties, with every technical effect in the book marshalled into a crazed satire set in a rural box-making factory.

To increase sales, the manager sneaks a closed-circuit TV camera into the women’s dressing room and invites local officials to watch the pro­ ceedings — on condition they buy his products. When the women dis­ cover what is happening, they promptly go on strike and exact their revenge. Timar’s idea runs out of breath in the middle, and the con­ stant mugging sometimes palls; but the film is packed with inventiveness, not least in having the dialogue m ade up entirely of clipped officialese, and is played with gusto by its cast.

Pal Erdôss’s Visszaszamlâlâs (<Countdown) was an impressive second feature, after his awardwinning vérité drama, Adj kiraly

Rotterdam emerges as a major port of call

Gerard Thoolen in Orlow Seunke’s Pervola, awarded best Dutch feature at Rotterdam and soon to be seen at the Sydney and Melbourne festivals.

Art flint' festival and market going from ¡§ strength to strength

Laundrette, the hit of the Edinburgh festival, and The Coca-Cola Kid, whose director, Dusan Makavejev, was one of the festival’s featured directors, with a complete retrospec­ tive.

Particularly fascinating was the debut of young American filmmaker Rachel Reichmann with The River­ bed, a simple story beautifully shot in black and white. The Riverbed had some Dutch money in it; and another Dutch film, this time about money, attracted a lot of attention, too: Johan van der Keuken’s out­ standing documentary, / Love Dollar. Filmed in New York, Hong Kong, Geneva and Amsterdam, van der Keuken’s film looks at the world­ wide fascination with money in a distinctly personal way. He inter­ views bank directors, currency traders and stockbrockers, showing

In A Zed and Two Noughts, by director/painter Peter Greenaway, two brothers, prompted by the death of their wives, launch into a feverish search for meaning, by studying films about evolution and doing photographic experiments on rotting animals. The film, shot in Rotterdam zoo, is bizarre, mystical and occa­ sionally distasteful.

For the first time in Rotterdam this year, there were prizes. A large inter­ national jury made up of festival directors and members of the inter­ national press was asked to select films in a number of different cate­ gories. The Rotterdam Award for the most innovative film of 1985 went to Jean-Luc Godard for Detective.

Claude Lanzmann’s impressive Shoah won the award for best docu­ mentary. Nine hours long, Shoah had been seen recently on Dutch television, where it generated quite a commotion. The Oeuvre award went to Raul Ruiz, and Mitsuo Yanagimachi received the Port of Rotter­ dam award for the best non-Euro­ pean, non-American film, Himatsuri (Fire Festival). Finally, the Dutch broadcasting organization, VPRO, gave the award for the best Dutch feature of 1985 to Orlow Seunke’s Pervola.

Audience favourites during the festival were Bez konca (No End), by Polish director Krystof Kieslowski, Stephen Frears’s My Beautiful

katonat! (The Princess, 1983). Also shot in moody black and white, but having less of the appearance of a ‘factional’ documentary, it traces a lorry-driver’s attempts to make a success of his own business in the face of kickbacks and a strained marriage. The film is flawed by an over-schematic script — an illness forces the man to ‘share’ his success with others — but shows a true sym­ pathy for its characters, and features fine performances by Karoly Eperjes as the driver and Erika Ozsda as his young wife.

More established names dis­ appointed this year. Zsolt KezdiK o v a c s ’ s A R e jtozko do ( The Absentee) aimed for the skies and fell flat on its face with an existential yarn about an agricultural pilot’s emotional problems; only the actress Vera Pap — Gabor’s Angi Vera — emerged with any credit from the confusion. Istvan Gaal's version of Gluck’s opera, Orfeusz es Eurydike, suffered from a lack of imagination, other than in its Powell-like section in the underworld. ^ And the longabsent Gyula Maar_ also made a poor return with Elso ketszaz evem (My First Two Hundred Years), a ► how the world is tied together by money trading.

Almacito di Desolato, a new feature by Dutch director Felix de Rooy, based on a scenario by his producer, Norman de Palm, is based on Caribbean legends about the struggle between creative and destructive spirits, fertility and drought. It is set on the island of Curacao around the turn of the cen­ tury, made in the local language of Papiamento, with the traditional zumba music, and creates an atmosphere which provides a good insight into the authentic cultural traditions and legends of the Caribbean.

In A Woman on Her Own, Polish director Agnieszka Holland tells a gripping story taken from the diaries of two Polish women. As the film has only been seen in Poland on illegal videocassettes, the director regards the Rotterdam screening as a sort of world premiere for what she sees as her most significant work.

Among the festival's international guests was Oja Kadar, who worked and lived with Orson Welles for more than 20 years. Not seen in public since Welles’s death in October, Kadar told the international press in Rotterdam of her plans to get the un­ finished work of Welles — The Dreamers, The Other Side of the Wind and Don Quixote —- ready for release.

As a back-up to the festival, Rotterdam also hosted the third Cine-M-Art, where sales could be made, co-production possibilities discussed and contracts estab­ lished. Relatively quiet by inter­ national film market standards, CineM-Art attracted about 30 inter­ national companies offering films and projects to 100 buyers (distri­ butors, festival directors and broad­ casting organizations), and the over­ all feeling was one of satisfaction, especially with regard to co-produc­ tions. And that must have made Mr Brinkman happy.

Sandra den Hamer

CINEMA PAPERS May — 19

Cont'd from previous page

potentially witty portrait of the absurdities of thirties society let down by flat direction, lack of music and over-emphasis on the Jewish problem in the second half.

Far better in its off-centre look at recent Hungarian history was A tanitvanyok (The Disciples), the first feature by scriptwriter/playwright Geza Beremenyi. The odyssey of a peasant lad through the tangle of p re - a n d p o s tw a r B u d a p e s t academia, the film begins with some tour-de-force mingling of archive footage and fictional material. Bere­ menyi shows a striking talent for cinematic imagery, but the script is often too elliptical and allusive for full understanding by foreign audi­ ences.

Peter Gothar’s Ido van (Time), his long-awaited third feature after Ajandek ez a nap (/A Priceless Day, 1979) and Megall az ¡do (Time Stands Still, 1982), is equally inven­ tive and far more accessible. Like The Wall Driller, it is a Hungarian absurdist comedy, focusing on the misguided ambitions of dreamers — here, a family who take a longawaited holiday at Lake Balaton and

February’s American Film Market was anything but down and out in its new Beverly Hills location. Despite many predictions that European buyers in particular might be in­ clined to go to Berlin, or to stay home and wait for Cannes, the American Film Marketing Associa­ tion seems to have staged one of its most dynamic markets in several years. Among the many factors cited by participants were: a decline in the value of the US dollar; an increased emphasis on video; and the opening of the market to non-members of the AFMA. However, a not inconsider­ able factor was the organization’s move ‘uptown’ from its old Hyatt on Sunset setting to the more spacious and accessible Beverly Hilton.

Even the Europeans were im­ pressed by the new venue. “ The organization of the AFM was better than in previous years,’’ said Michael Krohne from West Ger­ many’s Senator Films. “ The sellers seemed more relaxed about poss­ ible gains and losses this year, and so did the buyers.” “ The Hilton’s a wonderful place,” agreed Omega Entertainment’s Nico Mastorakis.

"People wanted to stay in the hotel longer and do business.”

Indeed, the subject of much of the business this year was Mastorakis’s own action-adventure thriller, The Zero Boys which, with Inter-Ocean’s Salvador and Goldwyn’s Hostage, Dallas, constituted the closest things to ‘hot’ titles. And, while there were no ‘must-buys’ or blockbusters, there did appear to be an ample enough supply of solid product to satisfy even the most highly competi­ tive terrorities.

For the most part, though, the larger producer-distributors like Goldwyn, Cannon and PSO, which maintain output agreements with overseas distributors, spent the market previewing new product and fine-tuning previously negotiated contracts. PSO, which recently changed its philosophy from solo production to joint ventures, had a

20 — May CINEMA PAPERS

end up pursued by their nightmares (in the form of a giant hair which sprouts from the wife's cheek).

Brilliantly mounted and scattered with jokes both historical and scato­ logical, it lacks the depth of Gothar’s previous films (and flags somewhat in the middle), but at least it shows a director with verve and imagination, and provides more than an echo of the classic Karinthy school of satire.

Gothar's film, along with The Wall Driller and Sound Eroticism (which received the biggest ovation from the local audience), were the most purely pleasurable of the films on show. On a less significant level, Gyorgy Dobray and Peter Horvath’s sunny Szerelem elso verig (Love Till First Blood) also provided several delights, not least the likeable play­ ing by its young cast and the smooth, assured direction.

Even though established names like Makk, Meszaros, Bacso and Szabo had nothing on show this year (the first three have works in the pipeline, and the last has had problems raising finance), there was still enough to prove that, even in an indifferent year, Hungarian cinema can still field more worthwhile

material per square filmmaker than almost any other industry.

As if to prove so — and as a healthy reminder that the ‘factional’ school is still alive, despite signs of a shift to more ‘cinematic’ works — this year’s surprise from left field came in the form of a tiny production from the 58-year-old maverick, Pal

Light fantastic: Janos Ban and Renata Szatler in Gyorgy Szom jas’s free enterprise’ comedy, Falfuro (The Wall Driller).

Up and running in Beverly Hills 1986 American Film Market hints that year- , long slump may be over particularly active market, restructur­ ing existing output arrangements with foreign distributors, so as to provide the same guarantees, but on a picture-by-picture basis.

The smaller producers’ ‘reps’, on the other hand, emphasized hard bargaining, as they attempted to slip their products into the gaps, and to line up uncommitted distributors. In support of this activity, the AFM exploited its Los Angeles location by experimenting with a guest-pass policy. These tickets, priced at SUS100 per day ($US500 for the duration of the market), brought m any u n a ffilia te d film m a k e rs together with established distributors interested in investing in new projects. While few immediate deals were struck, all parties seemed to consider the experiment worthwhile in opening up new channels of supply, and they praised the AFMA’s new-found tolerance of non-members. “ It was a healthier market this year,” asserts AFM director Tim Kittleson. “ The increase in partici­ pants from Scandinavia, Australia and New Zealand was particularly significant, and more than offset de­ creases from France, Germany and the UK.” In all, attendance climbed by 40% over 1985, to a total of 2,963. With the addition of the 1,680 attending the Location Expo held in the Hilton Ballroom — virtually a market within a market — the tally climbed to 4,643.

British, Spanish and Scandinavian buyers in particular were lured by the conclave's strong home-video thrust. In fact, 1986 marked the emergence of the AFM as America’s first true multi-media market. Both

TV syndicators and home-video labels (including such giants as Vestron, CBS/Fox and Embassy Home Entertainment) were out in force. Not to be outdone, the Japanese also jumped into the soft­ ware arena, with both Toshiba and JVC announcing new video distribu­ tion ventures. And one of Japan’s largest distributors, Toho Towa, entered into that country’s first out­ put agreement with an American producer, when it contracted with Lorimar for theatrical, television and home-video rights to all forthcoming product.

But it was, of all things, the Nor­ wegian contingent that appeared to set the trading pace for this year's market. Alarmed by declining theatrical attendance at home, the country’s distributors competed aggressively with one another for the available product. According to one seller, Skouras Pictures’ Janet Fleming, this intense competition actually resulted in some of the Nor­ wegian buyers paying “ 100 to 150% more than the product was worth last year” .

Kittelson: “a healthier m arket”.

Zolnay. Embriok (Embryos), shot in grainy black and white over a period of two years, opens like the worst example of a talking-heads docudrama, but develops into a moving portrait of a doctor’s dilemma of whether or not to abort her child by a married man. Involvingly played by the three main actors (especially Erzsebet Gaal as the obstetrician herself), it is decidedly a festival or TV movie, but packs no less emotional clout for all that.

Derek Elley

For the most part, the money offered for video rights alone this year just about equalled 1985’s selling price for all rights in the most highly competitive territories. And, as producers continued their recent tendency to negotiate separate deals for theatrical and ancillary (television, home-video) options, a number of distributors responded by exploring investments in a variety of projects in development. “ By doing this,” admitted Gaumont’s Pierre Ange Le Pogam, “ we can share in the profits, not just from theatrical, but from video and TV — as will the producers.” “ It’s money out of pocket now,” added another execu­ tive, “ but it keeps our options open in ’87 and ’88.” “ On the whole, I think people came to buy,” noted Shapiro Enter­ tainment President, Lenny Shapiro, summing up the market. “ They were much more aggressive than at MIFED, and I think this will carry over to Cannes and the next MIFED.” Indeed, by market’s end, there appeared to be few losers, judging from the claims of most of the partici­ pants. Even those who only came to look around and “ get acquainted” — like Kings Road's Stephen Fried­ man — felt they were able to estab­ lish beach-heads in the international m a r k e tp la c e w h ic h ca n be expanded at Cannes. Although individual companies’ reports or sales successes are subject to a variety of interpretations, the 1986 AFM clearly indicated that the inter­ national marketplace has begun to emerge from its year-long slump.

Some kind of momentum was started in Beverly Hills; but the ultimate yardstick will be whether th a t m om entum co n tin u e s at Cannes. If it does, then, paradoxic­ ally, the AFM will have been a success.

Steve and Patricia King Hanson

NB. For details of Australian reactions to the AFM, see the main news story on page 8.

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Talking about films that have not already been shown in the eastern states proves an almost impossible task when writing about the Festival of Perth. All but one of the 28 films screened in the eighteen pro­ grammes (Zanussi’s Year of the Quiet Sun) have previously been screened in the east, and most of them have been reviewed in Cinema Papers.

The Festival of Perth Film Festival is not like other film festivals in Aus­ tralia: it is an adjunct of a larger cultural event. Interestingly, it has always been a profitable part of that event. In 1986, however, profits will probably be down, due to the unseasonal weather. Normally, Perth audiences bask in the open-air garden setting of the Somerville Auditorium at the University of Western Australia. This year, how­ ever, the hardy had to sit wrapped in blankets.

Another very important factor in the Perth film scene is the continuity in the film-selection panel. Film co­ ordinator Sherry Hopkins, and Diana Warnock, Ian ¿earns and John McCracken have been selecing the films for the past 20 years.

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Noni Hazlehurst in Fran; an act o f affirmation fo r Perth audiences.

Hindley and vine

Cali Me Girlie with Vigil. It would seem that the length of the films rather than other considerations determined the couplings.

Two programmes in particular did cause real concern. Frame On Dreaming, an austere exercise in Lacanian theory applied to the 1984 A bo rig in a l Arts Festival, was coupled with Glenda Hambly’s Fran.

The films were put together because they were both local products, but the coupling was not a success.

Similarly, there seemed no link what­ soever between the enjoyable but frothy Loose Connections and Dennis O’Rourke’s amazing Half Life, and I left the cinema feeling that Half Life had been poorly done by.

There can be no doubt that the highlight of the festival for Perth audiences was the screening of Fran. The Windsor was filled to capacity for most of the screenings.

To see Fran and enjoy it became an act of affirmation for West Austra­ lians. Barron Films, who were behind it, have done a lot to estab­ lish a viable commercial feature-film industry in Perth. But they are first and foremost a commercial enter­ prise, and Fran was only made in Perth because the WA Film Council made a strategic investment at a crucial moment: the film could have been made in any Australian state.

This is really just a cautious way of saying that I don’t share the general

Place, politics and poetry on the Adelaide fringe

Doubling troubles Programming problems at the Perth festival They have developed a fine sense of what sort of film will be successful at the festival, and have constructed an ‘art-m ovie’ audience which is reflected in the festival’s venues: the Somerville Auditorium and the Windsor in Nedlands, drawing upon a la rge ly un ive rsity-e du cated , affluent audience who may well not go to the cinema at any other time of the year.

Not everybody is happy with the state of affairs. David Noakes, an independent filmmaker of some note, is scathing about the festival’s policy of relying on art movies. He wants more than a leavening of alternative or documentary films in­ cluded in the programme.

Dissatisfaction with the program­ ming was not just confined to local alternative filmmakers, however.

Other critics cite the programme’s p re dicta bility: European films, especially French and Italian, will dominate the proceedings; a new film by Satyajit Ray will be an auto­ matic inclusion; humorous and off­ beat American films like Stranger Than Paradise and Blood Simple will get a guernsey.

This year, though, the general dissatisfaction crystallized into some­ thing more concrete. Ann Macbeth, director of the Film and Television Institute in Fremantle, actually went on local television to criticize the pro­ gramming. Macbeth was particularly cross about the double bills. The Times of Harvey Milk was screened with Backstage at the Kirov, Don’t

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enthusiasm for the film, and would like to see it again in two or three years time, when all the hype has disappeared. I found the first third tedious, as it skirted round the cen­ tral issue of class, which was never addressed seriously.

A film I did enjoy was Yuri Raizman’s Vremia jelanii (A Time of Desire), which had more than a passing structural and thematic resemblance to Fran. In both cases, the central characters are women seeking men as partners, but Raizman’s character is more restrained and self-contained than Hambly’s.

Fran is a victim, Raizman’s woman an active manipulator who plays the system to construct her world.

Another film with some impact is Blood Simple. Its elegant reformula­ tions of Hollywood B-movie codes and film noir thematics is most enjoy­ able. De vierde man (The Fourth Man) was also well received, although its conscious symboliza­ tion, its misogynist tendencies and its desire to shock for shock’s sake didn’t impress this reviewer. Of a different order of shock was Gebroken spiegels (Broken Mirrors), which upset a considerable portion of the traditional festival audience. If it served no other function, that must be considered a distinct plus. For the rest of the films, they were pre­ dictable, and they have been reviewed extensively elsewhere.

For the future? I confidently predict more of the same in 1987.

Brian Shoesmith

With its Hindley^ Street venue re­ dubbed the ‘Cinemas du Sous-Sol’, the Adelaide Fringe Film Festival was almost like being in Paris. Per­ haps this explains the aggresivite of some of its bureaucrats, almost mirroring their choice of films with emotional, contradictory accounts of economic and sexual politics.

It was fitting, then, that several films concerned themselves in one way or another with location: where are we on the map? Of local film­ makers, Marg Hazelgrove was first.

Patterns is an ambitious film, attempting to cut in an enormous range of information, both historical and aesthetic.

Also local was Karen Hughes’s Pitjiri: The Snake that will not Sink.

Strong on mysticism, golden auras and Euroaboriginal apocalypses, it perhaps revealed more about Ruth Hancock, the buoyant reptile of the title, than it intended.

Camera Natura explored an even larger topography. This little gem, directed by Ross Gibson, had stylish graphics, shrewd semiotics, and bare, geometric camerawork that suited its subject of Europeans and a n tip o d e a n la n d s c a p e . W ith economic choice of verbal and visual quotation, it created a fascina­ ting argument about the split Austra­ lian use of space, especially sharp in its observations of speed and the automobile.

Rocking the Foundations (re­ viewed in Cinema Papers 55, January 1986), which opened the festival, won Pat Fiske a welldeserved award. Besides setting a seasoned political tone, her direc­ torial strategies high above Sydney gave new meaning to the term ‘crane shot’.

By contrast, the video programme showed some starry electronic eyes and hands captivated by technology and their Fairlight computers.

Shown In sequence, they ran into an in d is tin g u is h a b le blob — an ominous sign for their possible future as ornate wallpaper in the corridors of international banks.

Is there a shift away from social issues in video production, and towards a preoccupation with special effects? A seminar after the screening failed to provide answers to this question, mainly because it was patently clear that there was.

The animation section somehow seemed more adventurous, from Chataway and Cusack’s Waltzing Matilda to Antoinette Starkiewicz’s spunky and elegant dance routines.

An audience favourite was The Whistler and his Dog, a warm­ hearted, shaggy live/animation success story.

Sol run Hoaas’s Preoccupied, on the other hand, seemed to me the worst and most dishonest film she has ever made, precisely because her other work Insists on poetic sensitivity to subject and object rela­ tions. With poor scripting, signpost dialogue and stilted acting, it had all the resonance of a cracked temple bell.

Meanwhile, Blood Ties was sensa­ tional: three atm ospheric little stories, directed by Louise Hubbard, Jane Stevenson and Danae Gunn, it made up one of the best pieces of new work to be seen. With an expressionist use of wide-angle e x te rio rs and c la u s tro p h o b ic interiors, it combined superb central performances, and well evoked its mood of sullen fear and frustrated passion.

In Little Queen, Peter Wells was as reflective as the biscuit-tin lid which started off his regal meditation. With the dull sheen of a fifties cake-knife, he created a highly individual visual style. Not so successful, because of its wish to be more endearing to the gay com m unity, was Michael Rogowski’s Sleepin ’ Round, a tale of the city about the bittersweetness of living with lovable modern young persons in a church and having it off with the milkman. I didn’t believe it.

Half-way through Corinne Cantrill’s 147-minute account of her­ self in In This Life’s Body, I had the sinking feeling of being collared by the Ancient Mariner. With gimlet eye and the remorselessness of some­ one armed with the family slide-pro­ jector, she fixed the spectator with images of herself in the first/third person. In fact, there is much that is admirable in both Cantrill’s life and her long career of subjective and experimental filmmaking, and this open-handed show reveals a careful interplay between past and present, love and hatred, despair and hope.

But it leaves little room for the spec­ tator; and its repeated questions, for all the unconventionality of her life, revealed someone whose mind has been held in chains.

The highlight of the festival for me was Laleen Jayamanne’s A Song of Ceylon. With a wonderful sensuous texture blown up from Super-8, it

The BLF’s Jack Mundey, in a scene from Rocking the Foundations, which won the Adelaide prize. had a feel for ritual — ritual objects, ritual speech, whether daemonology or psychoanalysis — that set it firmly in the area of Maya Deren and the West Coast mythologists. But it also displayed, in its lighting, editing, voice-over and theatrical absences, a critical intelligence working over the text in a way that finally brought the contradictions of the whole festival together.

Noel Purdon

CINEMA PAPERS May — 21

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“ The best way to change non-Aboriginal perceptions is for Aboriginals to be their own interpreters of a modern reality. We need to be the generals In a peaceful cultural revo­ lution,” claims playwright/screenwriter Bob Merritt.

It’s a theory he has put into practice several times. Merritt was the first Aboriginal playwright to have a play (The Cakeman) pub­ lished and performed; he was the ‘architect’ and director of Eora, an Aboriginal visual arts and per­ forming centre in Redfern; and he is the first black screenwriter to portray his people’s plight in feature films, including Shortchanged, made with funding assistance from'the NSWFC. Merritt’s formula is one of enter­ prise — he is an idealistic realist involved In a vision of cultural renais­ sance — and it was this positive energy that prompted him to write The Cakeman. In 1973, he heard that a visiting black American director was attending a play­ w rights’ conference, and had expressed an interest in reading some black works here, only to be told that they didn’t exist.

Merritt took this as a personal challenge. He quickly Investigated how much time he had (until the end of the conference!), and figured he could just about make it. He didn’t let the fact that he’d never been to a theatre act as a deterrent.

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Positive action Bob Merritt, playwright and screenwriter The Cakeman was written in ten days, has com p le te d several successful seasons locally, and received standing ovations at the 1982 World Theatre Festival in Denver, Colorado.

Merritt applied a similar spirit to his involvement with Eora, which pro­ vides Aboriginals with an exciting alternative to NIDA and the AFTS. He openly admits to trading on the political climate for funds, and is rather proud of the non-elitist, ‘open door’ system, whereby "first in, best dressed” is the policy. “ Here, we can build a renais­ sance of our culture,” he says, “ but first we need to work on the students’ confidence and disorien­ tation, which are the result of spiritual and psychological genocide over the last 200 years. “ The idea, though, is not to create a ghetto sub-culture but, by a process of discovery, to develop self-worth and creative talent. I see it as a marathon race, not a sprint: we can plant the seeds, but the next generation will reap the harvest.”

Identity, historical roots and peer pressure are at the very heart of Shortchanged, Merritt’s second

feature script (he prefers to “ write off” The City’s Edge, which he did in collaboration with Ken Quinnell: “ It really was a preparation for this: I needed a track record” ).

Shortchanged he describes as a sort of “ black/white Kramer vs Kramer", focusing on the relation­ ship between an Aboriginal (played by scre e n n e w c o m e r D a vid Kennedy), his white wife (Susan Leith) and their son, Tommy (tenyear-old James Agius). Several years after the marriage breaks down, Stuart (Kennedy) attempts to re-establish contact with his son, and to teach him about his heritage as an Aboriginal.

In many ways, the script covers new ground: it depicts a main character who attempts to come to terms with himself and society’s shifting values, it is set in a con­ temporary urban context, and is told from a black perspective. “ Yet it does not adopt a negative militant stance,” says Merritt. “ It shows the character on a journey — physical and spiritual — which ends on a realistic compromise. He is in a nowin situation: he can’t integrate fully with the blacks or the whites, so

ultimately it’s a matter of coming to terms with himself.”

Merritt feels that previous attempts to depict Aboriginals in features was "writing black content from white records” : the protagonists were stereotyped or sensationalized or just plain bland. “ For instance, in Storm Boy, the Aboriginal presents no viewpoint: rather, he is sent in to bat against a pelican and a kid. Or in The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, there is the jungle nigger solving his problems naively with an axe. I didn’t see any reflection of myself or anyone else I know in those films. As for Where the Green Ants Dream . . . ” He laughs, at a loss for approp­ riate words.

Merritt’s own script deals with the complexity of modern reality — the kind that the main character dis­ covers in a jail-wall inscription: Born into madness, I have two souls; A dim light shines Yet neither one glows.

Merritt now feels apprehensive about the final product, however.

Certainly, the $1.25-million drama has an impressive creative and tech­ nical crew, headed by director George Ogilvie and DOP Peter Levy (who shot A Fortunate Life). “ But it is a performance drama, and I really wanted to direct it myself,” Merritt admits candidly. "I had started the basic storyline in 1981 and 1982, left it for a while when I applied for script development money, but then I got sick of pushing it. I realized that, to get the funding, I had to allow someone with a track record to do it.

Not that I was incapable of it: I know the craft, am an experienced dramaturg- and, in terms of getting per­ formances out of blacks, I was highly qualified. “ There were other factors as well: The Cakeman had been a long and exhausting haul, and I didn’t want to be 130 before I got my next work done. So, I was prepared to hand over to George Ogilvie. Why him?

We had worked together on my play when he directed it at the Bondi Pavilion in 1976. He has a soul, he is open to ideas, and he understands blacks. I don’t know any other director who can relate to them the same way. He’s taught drama at Eora . . . ” Like other writers who relinquish control, Merritt had doubts. “ I really had second thoughts, and even applied to relinquish the contract, but by then it was unfeasible. I was genuinely worried that we’d end up with a white person’s view in black skin. And George works very dif­ ferently from me, relying much more on camera people.”

If Shortchanged focuses on a black in a predominantly white world, Merritt’s next project, Dreamstealer — “ already well on the way” — will be set totally in a black world, using an Aboriginal crew.

This, he feels, should strengthen his claim to direct. “ And, next time, unless I direct the film, it won’t be about blacks. With so few films pre­ senting our perspective, there’s too much at stake. I can’t afford the possibility of misrepresentation.

There’s been too much of that Already.”

Mary Colbert

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Funds and gains Vicki Molloy, Executive Director of the AFI Talking this early to Vicki Molloy about the Australian Film Institute is a bit unfair, somehow akin to asking the new kid on the block to examine, define and possibly redesign the neighbourhood. But, while the new Executive Director of the AFI had yet officially to take over the reins early in March, she was obviously no stranger to the organization’s workings.

Following two years as director of the Australian Film Commission’s Creative Development Branch, pre­ ceded by four years as the head of the Women’s Film Fund, Molloy made the transition from funding body to funded body in search of “ a challenge” — though she admits this sounds "like a cliche” .

"I think that the AFI is an essential organization, that has the chance to develop over the next few years in ways that are very exciting,” she observes. “ It’s had a troubled history, but it has attained a degree of stability over the past twelve months. Now the way is wide open for it to start to tackle more activities

Boat person Wolfgang Petersen, director With his first international success, Das Boot (The Boat, 1980), director Wolfgang Petersen acquired some­ thing of a distinction: The Boat was nominated for an Oscar, as Best Foreign Film, and also won Petersen an Emmy, as best director of a TV miniseries. Fie was the first German to do so, and it gave him a good deal of clout in the film business.

Not as much as his next film, how­ ever: Die unendliche Geschichte (The Neverending Story, 1984), which was — and still is — Ger­ many’s most expensive film of all time. But its budget of 60 million Deutschmarks ($37 million) pales by comparison with the 250 million Deutschmarks ($155 million) it has so far taken worldwide.

Born in 1941 in the north German city of Emden, Petersen started out, aged nineteen, as an assistant stage manager in theatre, graduating to direction in television with a docudrama called Smog (1972). It was about an environmental disaster in Germany’s heavily industrialized Ruhr, and it won Petersen a silver Prix Futura in Berlin.

Five years later, also for television, he directed a drama about homo­ sexuality, Die Konsequenz (The Consequence), which hit the head­ lines when Bavarian television refused to show it for “ moral” reasons — an unenviable first in the history of German television.

It seems quite a leap from such socially critical television work, to picture-book filmmaking like The Neverending Story and the science

and to consolidate its role.

"It’s the only organization which can address issues concerning film culture, and represent them to the p u b lic, to oth e r g o ve rn m e n t organizations, and to the govern­ ment,” she says. "It can operate in distribution and exhibition spheres that aren’t primarily commercial, and it can tackle questions of screen education and the promotion of debate in all areas of film.”

Molloy defines the AFI’s mission as being “ to encourage film culture in Australia, with particular attention to Australian film” . And, she adds, ‘‘there needs to be a clear under­ standing between film organizations — including the AFC, the film schools, the National Film Archive, the state film libraries and the AFI — as to what each organization does best, and how its activities can complement rather than compete or overlap with other bodies.” fiction of Enemy Mine, his new film which opened recently in Australia.

But Petersen doesn’t see it as a complete change of direction, least of all as far as Enemy Mine is con­ cerned. “ Of course there are differ­ ences,” he says, “ because the cinema is a lot more ‘commercial’ than television. But that is not neces­ sarily a negative thing. For me, what is important is the combination of entertainment value and a good story. Besides, god knows, Enemy Mine has its critical side! I think there are quite a few similarities between it and The Consequence. “ But the entertainment side is very important. I like going to the cinema, and I like spending an hour and a half being kept in suspense and being able to see amazing, spec­ tacular things. That’s what cinema is about: it’s about longing and dreams and wishes. But I think cinema is also like a journey: you start out at a certain point, cover a certain amount of experience and undergo certain changes. The better I can encourage the moviegoer to make his or her own journey, to break out, to go a little bit further, the more successful I think I’ve been.”

To date, Petersen’s films have gone especially far in action and special effects, and he is more aware than most directors of how such things can get in the way. “ The effects are not that important in Enemy Mine," he says. “ The focus is really on the story. It’s like an ideal combination of The Boat and The Neverending Sfory. As a filmmaker, I think you haye to be careful to remember that the story is as important as it ever was. Just recently, I have felt, with a lot of films, that the soul was going out of cinema: it’s becoming too cold, too

Other than the annual AFI Awards, Molloy specifies two highpriority activities that appear to take on a personal importance for h e r:. contextualized mini-film festivals (or ‘events’), and the distribution of films according to regional requirements.

While the State cinema in Flobart is functioning as a venue for firstrelease, art-house films (which would otherwise probably not have been taken up for distribution in Tas­ mania), the Chauvel in Sydney is functioning as a cinémathèque-style alternative venue. ‘‘The Chauvel has just launched a calendar that is the best season it has put on in years,” she enthuses. “ It’s exactly the sort of work the AFI should be doing. There’s a season of films based around the people from Cahiers du cinema and the American films that influenced their positions. There’s an Orson Welles retrospective, a season of new Aus­ tralian independents and numerous other programmes.” She notes that the attendances — “ building at a rate of knots” — may augur well for the expansion of a Chauvel-style programme to other cities.

Through Molloy’s involvement in film — which includes Swinburne; research; editing and presenting for the ABC and the BBC; work on lowbudget, independent shorts; and the production manager’s job on Mouth to Mouth (1978) and Dimboola (1979) — a common thread has

been an interest in and commitment to "the other side of filmmaking” . It is a commitment that also links Molloy’s jobs at the WFF, the CDB and the AFI. For her, video provides major potential for enabling this ‘other side’ to gain a wider public aware­ ness. “ Besides offering a distribution service for independent Australian, films, through non-theatrical rentals, print sales and casual sales to TV — which has been a very important role for the AFI — in the next year, we must look at ways to make those titles available on video.”

Molloy adds that an outlet for specialized local work could be viable and, as well as serving educa­ tional purposes, may fill a need in sections of the video market for more diverse product. “ Through the work at the CDB over the past couple of years, I’ve gotten to know the workings of all the funded film organizations and filmmakers throughout Australia,” she says. “ That knowledge and experience can certainly be trans­ ferred to the AFI.” The other asset that can be drawn upon, of course, is an understanding of the AFC, the AFI’s chief funding body. With a degree of wry under­ statement and a fleeting grin, Molloy notes that she can see “ no dis­ advantage” in her familiarity with the workings of the purse strings:

technical.”

Enemy Mine, which Petersen in­ herited after the first director, Richard Loncraine, had been taken off it, fascinated him from the moment he first encountered it (though, for once it hasn’t exercised quite the same fascination over cinemagoers). “ The material is totally innovative,” he says. “ There’s never been a film quite like it. It’s an adventure film with lots of action, but it’s also about the meeting between two totally different characters, one human, the other an extraterrestrial being. For me, that is the whole ten­ sion and beauty of the film. And its source of emotion. I think Enemy Mine is a very emotional film: you need lots of Kleenex to get through it! It’s not at all the sort of film that can be saved by all the technical tricks you usually get in space films.”

Nevertheless, Petersen is enthusi­ astic about the opportunity that the film provided him for working with the special-effects team at Lucasfilm. “ It’s a lot of fun, working with those guys, because the whole atmosphere is tremendously crea­ tive. They’re full of brilliant ideas,

and most of them are amazingly young — between 20 and 25 years old! Routine is totally alien to them.”

Now in his mid-forties, Petersen is keen, like Steven Spielberg, to put his name and his know-how behind a new generation of young directors.

His track record of discoveries is, after all, quite good: an episode he directed in the German television crime series, Tatort, launched Natassja Kinski.

But he will do it in Germany, not the USA. “ I used to dream of being able to work there,” he says. “ But, the more time I’ve spent in the United States over the last few years, the more I’ve realized that this [Germany] is my place. For a Euro­ pean, the atmosphere in America is rather superficial, the lifestyle too ritualized, too dependent on empty words like ‘positive1 and ‘optimistic’ and ‘dynamic’. And I found it rather unpleasant to have to look on a film as something purely industrial. In fact, right now, after Enemy Mine, I need a little time to recover from the whole ‘business’!”

DebiEnker

Dieter Osswald

Walter Burley Griffin, sometime teacher of Frank Lloyd Wright and architect of Canberra, also designed some parts of the Sydney suburb of Castlecrag, including an incinerator in plastered neo-Aztec. Today, restored, it is a restaurant called (what else?) T he Incinerator’. We Australians take a perverse delight in calling a spade a bloody shovel.

I mention The Incinerator because it lies between the harbour and the home of Paul Hogan — Hogan, who worked on the Sydney Harbour Bridge until he was 30; who entered a TV talent contest, made fun of the judges and ended up a star; whose TV commercials for the big, broad, friendly land down under electrified the tourism figures, and who got sixteen minutes of 60 Minutes just to talk about his home country.

Hogan, the little bloke with the blue eyes — ‘Hoges’ to his mates (who seem to include the entire male blue-collar popula­ tion of Australia) — has just starred in his first feature film, an $8.8-million comedy/ rom ance/adventure and, in Hogan’s words, “ feelgood movie” , called Crocodile Dundee.

Hogan looks older than his pictures, wearier. The brows curve down on either side of the china-blue eyes, imitating the tautness of a facelift in reverse. He is 45 or near enough, a five-child family man with a cement mixer in the front yard and his house in the turmoil of renovation.

There’s something of the country home­ stead about the Hogan home — an Edwar­ dian solidity updated, not to the eighties, but to the fifties. Hollywood used to live in something like this style, only for them it

“ There’s such a lot of wankers in the Australian film industry.

More so than in television. And there’s a lot of wankers in television” was modified Mission. Here, walls everywhere are veneered in dark wood; elsewhere, it’s pine and teak and heavy woven wool. A Chinese panel of cranes in a lacquered and bronzed frame dominates the living room, but the knick-knacks are a clutter of sixties kitsch: leaping dolphins in white porcelain and, upstairs, glimpsed 26 — May CINEMA PAPERS

guiltily through bedroom doors, Elvis memorabilia and a pile of stuffed koalas.

Elements of the family trickle in through the hour we have to talk. Most, including his early-teenage son, Scott, announce their arrival with a yell of “ I’m home!” and a slammed door. The view beyond his back windows is a stark sweep of the coast, notched far below by a beach that, today, is just grey but, on a better day, must gleam gold.

Down there is Palm Beach, where the other movie people live — the “ wankers” who, as Hogan will have it, are ruining the Australian film industry with their selfindulgence. These windy heights are for right-minded people. People who don’t bugger about. People who know what movies are for. People who call an incin­ erator a bloody incinerator. “ My old man was a soldier,” says Hogan, “ a professional soldier, but he’s been dead a long time. There’s no film­ makers and no entertainers in my back­ ground. I was never a film buff, nor had any desire to make films or be in showbusiness until I was 30.”

What did he do until then? “ Aw, you name it . . . The last proper job I had was as a rigger on the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

After I left school, I was an apprentice moulder — a terrible job, the absolute pits: black and grubby and hard work. It was like working down a mine, only worse, because it gets up to about 140 degrees every afternoon when you pour. That was the worst job I ever had.”

He left after eighteen months. “ After that, I worked for the Railways, the Water Board, a flour mill, Transport, the wharves, the abattoirs — just about the spectrum of the blue-collar world. Jobs were easy to come by in those days: I had three jobs in a fortnight at one stage.”

At 23, he took a job on the Sydney Harbour Bridge and held it for seven years. “ I had no theatrical ambitions, though I might have been a good heckler — good with the odd smart remark.” No amateur hours? No charades at parties? No singing along with the TV? “ No.” What about the movies? Did he go to the movies? What’s the first movie he remem­ bers? For the first time, Hogan’s voice rises out of a monotone. It’s almost as if he dis­ believes the question. “ I wasn’t a movie buff,” he starts slowly, testing the ground. “ Tarzan’s Savage Fury or something like that was the

“ Tarzan’s Savage Fury or something like that was the first thing I ever remember seeing.

Might have been a John Wayne western. And lots of Elvis movies and James Dean movies” first thing I ever remember seeing. Might have been a John Wayne western. And lots of Elvis movies and James Dean movies.”

He warms to the subject. “ That was at the Granville Cinema. In those days, there was the Crest and the Castle, too. There were three cinemas in that suburb, as there were in all the suburbs. I went to the movies every weekend, like everyone else.” Satur­ day matinees? “ Matinees as a kid, then Saturday nights or Friday nights, or during the week when you got older. “ It was a social event then. You always got dressed up to go to the movies on Friday night. You went to the pub and had a few quick ones first, and then you tried to get onto a bird. It was a social contact centre in those days.” In his club act, Hogan has joked about the rituals of moviegoing: chocolate-coated scorched almonds for your real girl but, for the second string, just a cellophane bag of ‘Conversation Lollies’ — scented pastel plaques with coy messages like ‘Do you really love me?’ “ Saturday night, funnily enough, you went with your girl, if you had one, or your wife or whatever. You got a little bit more dressed up. And, usually, you had to book.

Even in Parramatta and Granville, the Roxy and the Civic and the Castle and all those theatres — quite often you couldn’t get in if you didn’t book. They were grad­ ually replaced in the late fifties, as rock ’n’ roll took over the country. Until then, the movies were the social mecca of the suburbs. All that’s gone.”

At 30, Hogan still had no ambitions to get into movies, TV, the stage. “ I was looking at politics: the Trades and Labour Council. I was a union organizer for the Federated Ironworkers. I would have liked to be National Secretary. I went into tele­ vision instead.”

The talent show, New Faces, had been going for eight years when it attracted Hogan’s attention in 1971. “ Mainly

Paul Hogan, who hit the big time via New Faces in the early seventies (he registered as a knife thrower and tap dancer, then proceeded to send up the show), has now hit the big screen with Crocodile Dundee. And not before time, he reckons: the Australian film industry needs him.

A FISTFUL OF | § 5À L j| S because it was terrible. New Faces went for 20 years and never discovered anyone.

They’d always give the prize to a tapdancing kid or a cello player. You never saw a tap dancer or a cello player with their own show on television. “ They’d just introduced the gong business, so they’d have these poor, some­ what talentless kids out there, singing, tapdancing, juggling or whatever, and they’d gong ’em and humiliate them. And then, the so-called professional entertainers would crucify these would-be talents, and usually send them off in tears. That’s what it was all about: ‘Let’s humiliate the amateurs!’ “ It was just one of those things where you sit around at work — this was actually on the Bridge — and somebody says, ‘Yair, someone should get on and take the mickey out of those people, cut ’em down to size’.

It’s always ‘someone’. So I said: ‘All right, /w ill!’ So I did.”

Hogan described himself on his New Faces application as “ tap dancer, knifethrower and trapeze artist” . But, the moment he got in front of the cameras, all he did was throw a few knives around, then zero in on his real target. “ I started out having a go at the actual show and the way they ran it: the people who sat up there and adjudicated, whether you had any talent or not. I posed the question of how much talent they had themselves.”

How did they take it? “ Not too good.

But they had to pretend they liked it. I knew that. There was no way they were going to make me run off the stage in tears.

And I think the public knew that. And so, whether I was funny or not, they took to me.”

What about the camera? Did it bother him, as a non-performer? “ It didn’t worry

“ New Faces went for 20 years and never discovered anyone.

They’d always give the prize to a tap-dancing kid or a cello player.

You never see a tap dancer or a cello player with their own show on television” me: I had a purpose. My purpose was to cut down those people who were sitting up there, scoring points off kids or old-age pensioners playing the saw or middle-aged housewives who’d always wanted to be opera stars. They couldn’t do anything about it, so I went in as self-appointed champion of the underdog and ripped into ’em.”

New Faces established Hogan in his persona of the decent bloke who wouldn’t let the tall poppies wave free unless they had earned their rank. “ I think the viewers knew that I didn’t care, that I was just having a bit of fun. No amount of scathing attacks could dent my armour. I think people identified with that — or envied it.”

But the judges had the last word — a fact that still seems to rankle with Hogan. “ I didn’t win. They had series finals, and I won all the way through to the end of the year. But I got beat by a fifteen-year-old cello player, which was so typical of those silly contests.”

With New Faces over, Hogan found he had a following. He was invited by Mike Willesee to appear regularly on his series, A 28 — May CINEMA PAPERS

Current Affair. “ I started doing the Willesee show for drinkin’ silver while I was still working on the Bridge. Then I woke up one morning and discovered I was a full-time professional.”

Hogan hit the club circuit, standing up to rowdy crowds sated on prawns and beer — an audience of which (and this must have contributed to his phenomenal success) he had, until a year before, been a part. He was tapped for TV commercials, boosting Foster’s lager in Britain and Winfield cigar­ ettes in Australia. He told America it looked like it needed a holiday and suggested Australia as the place to take it.

He launched his own TV series in the seventies (since cut back to a couple of comedy specials a year).

Trench mouth: Hogan’s acting debut, as the irre­ pressible Pat Cleary in Anzacs.

Elected as figurehead of the burgeoning ocker trend, he was assessed in the light of this by the briefly-visiting Clive James, who caught his act at the St George Rugby League Club in 1977. But James found him “ trouncingly boring, with no idea of how to work his material. His earthiness was sheer hard-hat invective. The linguistic fas­ tidiousness of Barry Humphries he just couldn’t match.” If this worried Hogan, he didn’t show it, though he’s no fan of the films Humphries co-wrote with Bruce Beresford, based on his comic strip about ugly Australian Barry McKenzie loose in Europe. Says Hogan: “ Bazza McKenzie’s your repulsive Aussie with two chips on his shoulder, let loose in England to throw up and urinate a lot and do a lot of bodilyfunctions comedy.”

There’s none of Bazza in Mick ‘Croco­ dile’ Dundee. Hogan’s voice reaches a rare pitch of enthusiasm. “ This guy’s got class.” The idea for Crocodile Dundee came to Hogan in New York, before his TV commercials for the Australian Tourist Commission made his face familiar to all Americans and gave him the bankability to feature in a film — which, of course, is precisely what they were intended to do. “ It’s a culture clash. It’s a comedy and a love story and an adventure, probably in that order. It’s basically about a guy who was raised in the Northern Territory, the great wilderness of the western world, and has never been anywhere. He almost went to Darwin once, but it blew away. He’s a crocodile poacher and a barramundi dynamite-fisherman and whatever else, and he ends up in New York, confronting society, confronting civilization.”

Mick Dundee gets to New York, fairly inevitably, because of a woman: New York reporter Sue Charlton reads a report of his exploits (surviving a crocodile attack and dragging himself, bleeding, back to civiliza­ tion) and sets out to find him. They meet, they fall in love, and Sue transports him from the jungle he lives in to the jungle she lives in. Mick does more than hold his own with the toughest New York can throw at him. “ There’s a lot about Dundee that we all think we’re like; but we’re not, because we live in Sydney. He’s a (mythical outback Australian who does exist in part — the frontiersman who walks through the bush, picking up snakes and throwing them aside, living off the land, who can ride horses and chop down trees and has that simple, friendly, laid-back philosophy. “ It’s like the image Americans have of us, so why not give them one? The Americans have been creating folk heroes for years. They made folk heroes out of villains: Billy the Kid was a grotesque, deranged, sixteen-year-old, who went around shooting people in the back with a shotgun. When they made the movie, Paul Newman played the part! But we’ve always been desperately short of folk heroes in this country. Ned Kelly is pathetic. So are the bushrangers. So, I thought: ‘I’ll make one up, a typical modern-day outback lad, and set him loose in New York’.”

At $8.8 million ($US6 million, at a time when the average American feature costs double), Crocodile Dundee is in some ways a modest effort — and, for Hogan, a family one. Producer John Cornell also produced Hogan’s TV shows and com­ mercials. Director Peter Faiman directed them. Hogan co-wrote the script with his regular collaborator, Ken Shadie.

Six weeks were spent working out of Jaja, an abandoned uranium mining camp in Arnhem Land’s Kakadu National Park, with an additional week in North Queens­ land, near Cloncurry. The tiny town of McKinlay became ‘Walkabout Creek’, Dundee’s home town. Then a further six weeks in New York. “ I’m glad we did it in that order. Out there in Queensland, we’d drive 80 miles to a location and, if we met a car on the way

ceived) opponents. “ It’s a very good movie. The movie is exactly what we set out to make it. It’s a piece of entertainment, escapist entertainment — a proper movie. I don’t know if it will win awards or anything; I don’t really care. But I expect it to gross millions of dollars around the world, and I’m planning for it to be Aus­ tralia’s first proper movie. I don’t think we’ve had one yet — not a real, generalpublic, successful, entertaining movie. You name me one.”

The Man from Snowy River is the one they usually quote. I quote it. “ Well, that was hugely successful in Australia,” he acknowledges. “ To be that successful in Australia woula be very nice — though there’s not as many cinemas now, so it might be hard. But the story of a boy and

Number one with a bullet: Hogan as Michael J. ‘Crocodile’ Dundee and Linda Kozlowski as the New York reporter, Sue Charlton, in Crocodile Dundee.

back, we’d know who was in it. Then we went to New York — Times Square and 42nd Street: a lunatic asylum, the exact opposite of what we’d experienced. You didn’t know the people two feet away from you.”

Raising money was not a problem, says Hogan: the production was underwritten early on by Morgan Sharebrokers, without even the now almost obligatory safety-net of a presale. But they had “ a little bit of a confrontation” with Equity on the subject of importing American actress Linda Kozlowski. “ I told them: ‘We’re not wandering around the outback making an Australian telemovie. We’ll be on location in New York for six weeks. We’re going to be covered by the media while we’re there.

We’d look absolutely stupid if we said, “ Here’s our American girl. Of course, she’s an Aussie, but she does a good accent!” ’ That’s just as aggravating to the Yanks as when we watch M*A *S*H and see a Yank doing a bad Pommy accent and saying he’s an Australian. “ Anyway, we didn’t want someone just doing an accent. You just couldn’t do that.

The story was about a New York lady and an Australian man. You’ve got to have a

“ I’m expecting it to gross millions of dollars around the world and I’m planning for it to be Australia’s first proper movie” New York lady. We didn’t even want a Hollywood lady. We got a New. York actress, someone who actually lived in New York.” Equity fought the case through a series of appeals, then (according to rumour) grudgingly signalled acquiescence by simply not turning up for the final hearing.

Hogan has the father’s quiet pride in his film — and plenty of bitterness for its (per­

This is your tinny: Hogan and Strop (John Cornell) on The Paul Hogan Show.

his horse in the wilderness with Kirk Douglas in a dual role didn’t exactly have them flocking along to the theatre in the US and around the world. I don’t consider that to be a standard. What I consider a standard is pictures like Arthur, Back to the Future, Every Which Way But Loose, Romancing the Stone — what I call proper movies. Movies that don’t win Academy Awards, but people flock along in their millions to see them and come out saying: ‘Wasn’t that terrific?’ That’s the kind of movie I want to make. Crocodile Dundee is a feelgood picture: you come out of it with a smile on your face. “ The Australian cinema needs something like us: they need a big commercial success if they’re going to survive. It’s so bloody expensive to make films now, and so hard to get investors, that unless you make one or two movies that really make a lot of money — promotable, commercial suc­ cesses around the world — then the industry will die. “ Because there’s no money in the art film. We don’t have the budget to make The Winds o f War, so we make Breaker Morant. It’s a good story, but when the enemy charges over the hill, there’s fifteen of ’em! Theatre owners won’t put that on the big screen, regardless of the merit and the value that’s in it. I want to make a proper movie that’s mentioned as a movie, not just good for being an Australian one, ending up in the Dendy art cinema, that directors can get excited about. I just want to make mass entertainment for the public: big screen, big sound, genuine escapism without commercial interruptions. “ If you have a couple of big, fat, com­ mercial successes, you can continue to

make those uniquely stylized Australian sort-of-art pictures, if you like: the Picnic at Hanging Rock, My Brilliant Career type of things. They’ve got to be subsidized by something, because they’re too expensive and they don’t pay their own way.”

“ Probably the government shouldn’t be involved at all in the film industry anyway. Who needs them? They clutter up the place half the time” What about government involvement in films, and the argument that films shown to discriminating (if small) audiences overseas are good for the image of Australia — the minds-in-gear, not bums-on-seats phil­ osophy? “ It’s like this nonsense about films promoting tourism. Nobody decided to go on holiday to Italy after they saw A Fistful o f Dollars. If you make a movie here, no matter what it’s about, it doesn’t affect tourism. Probably the government shouldn’t be involved at all in the film industry anyway. Who needs them? They clutter up the place half the time. And, if an industry’s worth persevering with, it should hold itself up.”

But perhaps a decade of government funding has destroyed that instinct. Can people still go out and raise money on their own for films? Hogan sighs. “ Well, obviously not. There’s such a lot of wankers in the Australian film industry.

More so than in television, and there’s a lot of wankers in television. There are people making boring little films that are about nothing; and then, because the public doesn’t like them, they wank off about how it’s too clever for ’em or it going over their heads. “ You kid yourself that you can go off with your little film under your arm and walk into any of the international theatre chains and say: ‘It’s an Australian movie!’ and they’re going to go: ‘Oh, wow! Let’s have a look at it!’ They’re more inclined just to shrug. Unless they’ve got a little artcinema chain in Los Angeles, you’re going to end up on Home Box Office. Where did I see Razorbackl Three o’clock in the morning on Home Box Office. And, boy, was it embarrassing: I was glad it was on at three in the morning.”

What if Crocodile Dundee goes the way of The Coolangatta Gold, another attempt at a proper movie that lost its shirt? “ My career won’t be at an end: I’ll just make some specials for American network TV, which I have an open invitation to do.”

Television made Hogan the star he is. It even trained him for a dramatic career by giving him a try-out role in the miniseries, Anzacs. But, though it may be his salvation, it is, ironically, TV which has made increasingly remote the possibility of continuing a proper feature-film industry in Australia. And Hogan recognizes this. “ If you don’t have the big commercial success here and there, then all your technical people — our behind-the-scenes people, who are so good — will go back to making TV commercials. They won’t be able to afford to stay in movies, and the film industry won’t be able to afford them, either. They’re too expensive now. They’ll all be filming the margarine melting on the + steak, and beer commercials.”

CINEMA PAPERS May — 29

Rick Thom pson ruffles the surface of TV’s most glamorous cop show Miami Vice is a dual-hero show: two elite detectives, one white, well into his thirties — Crockett (Don Johnson); the other black, younger — Tubbs (Philip Michael Thomas). At the outset, their immediate social location is the ‘vice’ unit presided over by a Captain Rodriguez (Gregory Sierra from Barney Miller, playing gritty and straight). Their colleagues include a Hispanic woman (Saundra Santiago) and a black woman (Olivia Brown), whose character names don’t get used very often.

There is also a weird Mutt-and-Jeff pair in Hawaiian shirts, Stan Switek (Michael Talbott) and Larry Zito (John Diehl), who usually function as a kind of light relief.

Crockett seems to have a continuing casual affair with the Santiago character.

30 — May CINEMA PAPERS

Series television is comfortably divided between anthology shows with no continu­ ing characters from week to week — Police Story, for example — and shows which are concerned with establishing their own ‘family’ of characters. Miami Vice — like Hill Street Blues (or Prisoner) — has a con­ tinuing matrix of situations, characters and motifs which stretch and build over time, but each 48-minute unit must solve the formal problem of completing a narrative.

While the plotwork goes forward, however, the series presents its family and defines their characters and relationships, indexing them against two scales: the one-off problem presented in each plot, and the continuing relations between family members.

Australian viewers may have a bit more difficulty establishing the continuity: the two-hour pilot episode was never screened here, eliminating any details of personal history it may have provided (though, given the show’s tendency towards deadpan parsimoniousness in this area, there may not have been much there anyway).

In the fourth episode screened here, Miami Vice jolted our assumptions. The assassination of Rodriguez (he took a bullet for Crockett) created an unexpected Oedipal spiral in the series’s always chancy mental health: the ‘family’ no longer had a ‘father’. Two solutions were offered. First, Miami Vice spun out two new occasional characters to fill comic needs and continue a policy of ethnic prominence. Both were

con-men. The black character, the Noog Man (Charlie Barnett), is verbally and sartorially manic, making an incredibly fast set of moves to match his disco-rap dialogue. The Hispanic character, Martino (Martin Ferrero), is a ferrety, calm source of Arthur Daley-style malapropisms, at his most relaxed (if slightly indignant at the interruption) when caught red-handed in petty crime. When these characters recur, the narrative always involves their being used by the police heroes, and the moral problems involved in this are always articu­ lated in discussions among the police.

Only one of the episodes seen here has been completely inflected for comedy: ‘Made for Each Other’, directed by Rob Cohen. In it, Crockett and Tubbs are removed entirely, putting the case in the hands of Switek and Zito. They in turn employ both the Noog Man and Martino in a story that has three lines: Switek and Zito exchanging a girlfriend; the Noog Man marrying a stripper; and a kingpin from the world of crime whose incomplete childhood leaves him with the obsessive need to buy a yellow -and-purple-polkadot concrete­ mixing truck. But, while ‘Made for Each Other’ may be untypical in its comic emphasis, most episodes have spaces left to be filled by play of one sort or another.

I mention the comic strains in Miami Vice because the mainstream of the show is a long way from humour. There is none of Starsky and Hutch's “ Freeze, turkey!”

Aside from some well-turned TV-noir dialogue, as a measure of Crockett and Tubbs’s cynicism and their aggressive posture towards the world (and to provide graphic «0/2-visual images of poetic violence), Miami Vice is one serious show.

This is not the locker-room camaraderie of the aforementioned Starsky and Hutch, on which several of the show ’s producers, direc­ tors and writers have worked: these people are wired tightly into a circuit whose poles are Old Testament rectitude on the one hand, and the accompanying Montezuma’s

Revenge of terminal angst on the other.

The second way in which the series responded to the family crisis — the ‘death of the father’ — was, of course, by finding a new captain, in the form of Edward James Olmos as Castillo. Olmos is another Hispanic actor from here and there, but signs of his Castillo characterization can clearly be seen in his fine moments as the demonic pachuco manipulator in Zoot Suit (which comes round on late-night television here about once a year). Olmos holds the show together in several ways, one of them being by going against its grain. Miami Vice is a series noted for its up-to-theminute wardrobes (male cops clad in immaculate baggy white designer pants, or Italian suits and jackets). This is a point that has escaped no one, least of all Garry Trudeau who, in a Doonesbury strip that appeared in last September’s Australian, has one character exclaim (while watching the show): “ Oh, no! He didn’t actually fall down in those designer pants, did he?” “ No, dear,” comes the response. “ The pants have a stunt double.” Castillo, how­ ever, has only one outfit: a nondescript single-breasted suit, white business shirt and (perhaps as a concession to pachucismo) a cool, skinny black tie with a tight knot.

Castillo’s place in the series was quickly cemented in a two-part episode, ‘Golden Triangle’, in which he lost his wife, and in which we learned more about his past than we know about the front-line heroes.

Castillo radiates intensity while doing very little. He never raises his voice, makes only the tiniest of gestures, and lives by the book — the Law — in a pre-post-modernist world. He is, in fact, dead calm and dead right, presenting Authority as Fate. He seems to know all about the various forms of death, and represents them institution­ ally. He has come to terms with the anxieties tormenting his underlings: finally, it seems, we have a cop in a TV cop show who knows what these shows are about.

Crockett and Tubbs don’t know. They have identity problems — something built into undercover police work. Crockett and Tubbs are repeatedly called upon to assume

different personalities. Tubbs can handle this because he speaks American, Jamaican and Spanish — and, maybe because, in the melting pot of Miami, it is assumed that black people have more experience at adapting and at passing for something they’re not. Crockett, on the other hand, behaves essentially as himself, but on the other side of the law. He merely gives a false name.

Undercover cops don’t wear brand-name uniforms, and don’t begin with a flash of the badge and an assertion of authority.

They have it both ways, spending most of

their time in the criminal world, acting (out) as criminals, then switching back identities again at the conclusion of the show. They make perfect crooks (rationale: it’s their job). But, having it both ways, they sometimes have it neither. Multiple identities involve deception, and deception usually involves betrayal, not to mention escalating confusion. The first episode of the series screened here involved an old colleague of Crockett’s — a federal, not a local cop — who had reached crisis point.

He’d got so far into his undercover identity that he could no longer sort out the various parts of his life — a cautionary tale indeed for a character heading for burn-out as fast as Crockett seems to be.

A subsequent episode detailed Tubbs’s problems in this area. What we know of his background is that he is not a Floridean, and that his partnership with Crockett began with the series, as a result of his problems as a New York cop watching his brother gunned down by a big drug trafficker. The trafficker returns in a later episode, outstandingly directed by Starsky and Hutch import, Paul Michael Glaser. In that episode, Tubbs must get close to a woman who travels with Calderon, the trafficker, but whose relationship to him is not clear (“ Who is she to Calderon,” Crockett asks a witness: “ wife, mistress, hooker?” ). Too late, after Tubbs has fallen in love with her, it is revealed that she is (unknowing, innocent) his daughter. After the death of her (the) father — Crockett, not Tubbs, does it, with the daughter watching — she confronts Tubbs with most of the moral problems of what he has done, while Tina Turner’s ‘What’s Love Got to Do With It’ overwhelms the dialogue track. Crockett looms into the foreground, puts an arm around Tubbs, and says: “ Let’s go home” . Which they do, smash­ ing through a boundless ocean in an enor­ mous, open, ocean-racing powerboat.

In a later episode (‘Evan’, directed by Rob Cohen), what we are beginning to regard as the undefined and suppressed subconscious of Crockett’s past provides another former colleague not too sure which side of the undercover law he is on.

What is clear is that the cop, Evan, is gay, and that his claim on Crockett’s past is personal as well as professional. The episode begins with him using an Ingram to shred a row of female mannequins, and ends with Evan taking a bullet for Crockett and dying in his arms (Crockett’s guilt snowballs, show by show, like the national debt of a small nation). The episode ends with Evan’s face — the release of death — and Crockett’s face: confusion, anguish, hurt. Looming out of the blank back­ ground on the centre-line of the screen, Tubbs, in dark gray, still standing, puts a CINEMA PAPERS May — 31

comforting hand on Crockett’s shoulder.

An odd pieta.

If the characters appear somehow adrift, the show itself is similarly loosely con­ nected. The act of watching television demands that any new item be compared with our experience of its predecessors, in television or out of it. This is a two-way exchange in which the TV show and the viewer conspire to know, to refer, to compare — and to be one step ahead of each other.

With Miami Vice, it is a race to keep up.

From the first instant of any episode, it is set apart from other series. Most announce themselves immediately, flashing their names up on the screen. Miami Vice chooses not to: as the Channel Nine logo fades to black, we are thrust in medias res, into a space and situation of which we know nothing.

The series does not coddle us with a pre­ credit sequence assembled from tasty bits of the episode we are about to see — a sequence other shows use to lure us on and to provide (sometimes inaccurately) a synopsis of the story to come. Rather, it gives us a short but complete narrative vignette, which sets the tone of the episode to come, often in a disorienting manner.

This sequence may or may not provide clear information. Indeed, it may not include any of the actors or character we already know from other episodes. These first sequences also invariably begin quietly, sometimes lazily, even playfully, but build towards an explosion of violent energy.

Then we are allowed to see the standing credits: the block of images, music and actors’ names which do not vary from week to week. This sequence, too, presents itself differently. Like other credit blocks, it displays minimal information about the continuing players, but it does not show us images of the characters. Nor does it use its

images to establish situations or to set tone.

It is a travel-brochure series of images (see illustrations). There are no cast members.

No social or personal interaction. No action, no violence, no crime. There are more women — mostly in bathing suits — than men (unless you count the jockeys).

The credits want to construct a highly specific and limited view of the city: Miami.

The stance of this view is distant. Its stress is an impersonal public (but not civic) surface. Its content is a compound of glamour, conspicuous consumption, sport and competition, exotic creatures in urban confinement — elements of an implied life­ style concerned with pleasure.

The image of the jai alai player hints at the Hispanic strain of the city. In a parallel way, the ambitious construction of some of the images and the use of slow motion point towards stylistic moves to come. It is a morally pregnant picture of Miami — the Miami we think of, but also the surface the series wants to chew up. It is as unusually thought-out a credit block as the one for The Rockford Files', unlike that one, however (and most of the others), it does not want to make us feel at home.

Most of the physical operation of Miami

Vice is concerned with making things strange. Much has been said about the show’s use of pop music and video-clip visuals. Other, less recognized, devices include Jan Hammer’s eerie synthesizer scoring, the effect of which is an immediate alienation from otherwise inviting or familiar images; the use of special cinema­ tography, which transforms the night into a very strange place; and precise art direction which uses, for example, the same colours and graphic design lines for a jai alai fronton and the police morgue (steel grey with magenta vertical stripes).

Given the ritzy lifestyle of the heroes and their submersion in a world which leans towards moralities of convenience and twilight-zone dealings, this defamiliariza­ tion could result in an ambiguous presenta­ tion of the heroes’ morality. It doesn’t, because they are incorruptible. So the show takes the other road: it constantly under­ cuts the possibility of us feeling secure with the characters — of our understanding them, predicting them, trusting them.

Over the first sixteen episodes, the show has been a kind of race between Crockett and Tubbs, presided ovdr by Castillo.

Tubbs’s method alternates between a zombie-like base state (he has eyes which belong in a horror or science-fiction movie) and musically-inflected fantasies. For Tubbs, the result is a progressive aliena­ tion, in which the producers of the series conspire.

For Crockett, there is less method. He isn’t sure enough of who he is to imper­ sonate anybody else. He can say, while peering through a spotter scope at a surveil­ lance suspect: “ I didn’t become a cop to spectate” . If he wasn’t a cop, you’d swear he was coked to the gills.

But what the race between Crockett and Tubbs is about is to see which one will go completely crazy first. ^

D o o n esb u ry ..AND AFTER YOUGET /fa'**.

SETTLED IN, I'D UKB 60m TO SPEAK WITH EACH J0 æ \ FAMILYABOUT YOUR M ERRO1 sa ted )

32 — May CINEMA PAPERS

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Around th e W o rld in 8 0 W ays Backlash The Big H urt Burke & W ills Cactus D ead-End D rive-In D eath of a S o ld ier D eparture

Australia at the 1986

Cannes International Film Festival D evil in th e Flesh E m m a’s W a r The Em pty Beach Fair G am e For Love A lone Fran The Fringe D w e lle rs Going Sane H ousebroken I Own th e R acecourse Jenny Kissed M e K angaroor M alco lm The M ore Things C hange T he N aked C ountry Playing B eatie Bow R ebel T he R ight-H an d M an S hortchanged S pirit Chaser The S till Point A S treet to D ie T he S urfer T w elfth N ight W ills and Burke W in d rid e r

“A simple love story” — Isabelle Huppert Colo in Cactus.

In cinema, especially European cinema, there are certain faces that seem to repre­ sent a whole generation of films: Giulietta Masina for Italy in the fifties, Julie Christie for Britain in the sixties, Hanna Schygulla for the late seventies in Germany. And Isabelle Huppert for the same period in France.

Huppert is the star par excellence of that period of massive transition, which saw the French cinema finally abandon the death throes of the new wave and emerge hesi­ tantly into the period of uncertain identity from which it has yet to emerge.

In the films she has made with Bertrand Blier, Bertrand Tavernier, Claude Goretta, Claude Chabrol, Maurice Pialat, Jean-Luc Godard and Joseph Losey, however, Isabelle Huppert has established herself as more than just the face of a generation (which — vide Madonna — can sometimes be a question of almost random selection): Huppert’s pre-eminence comes from the disconcerting intensity of her screen per­ formances. Neither Masina nor Schygulla nor Huppert is beautiful in the traditional sense (and Christie’s real beauty is actually at variance with her swinging dolly-bird image of the sixties). But the camera trans­ forms them all — a fact to which Steven Bach testifies in his book, Final Cut (reviewed elsewhere in this issue). Bach was initially convinced that she had “ a face like a potato” ; on screen, however, he was amazed to find she was “ incandescent” . If he had done his homework better, he might not have been so surprised.

Towards the end of her latest film, Paul Cox’s Cactus, there is a scene in which she and her lover (Robert Menzies), who is blind, are alone at the end of St Kilda pier.

Finally, he asks here a question that has long been lingering: “ Are you beautiful?”

important film for a whole generation,” recalls Huppert, “ who were sort of rightwing anarchists. I was at school in May ’68, but I remember how we all believed in collective revolt. Les valseuses was a glori­ fication of individual revolt, and it looked at sexuality from a very comic point of view. It launched Depardieu and Dewaere” — Patrick Dewaere, who recently com­ mitted suicide. “ It launched me, too, to some extent. Although I only had a little scene, it was a scene that people remem­ bered, because it was fairly violent.” In that scene, Huppert, a seventeen-year-old from a good family, joins up with the two tearaways, Depardieu and Dewaere. She helps them steal the family car; in return, they deflower her — joyously, the film would have us believe.

That, and another small part in Yves Boisset’s Dupont Lajoie (1975), got her noticed by other directors. And, although she has since worked again with Blier on La The fu r country: Huppert in Michael Cimino’s femm e de mon pote (1983), her career since Heaven’s Gate. then has been mainly outside the French mainstream represented by directors like Blier and Boisset. “ It’s curious,” she says: Nick Roddick talks to Isabelle “ those early roles had nothing to do with Huppert, star of the parts I played later. They were chubby, slightly sexy teenagers. But that’s where Paul Cox’s Cactus.

Tavernier first saw me, and Goretta.”

No, replies Huppert . . . “ pas vraiment” The role that really launched her was, — not really. If there is such a thing as cine­ indeed, v different: Claude Goretta’s La matic (rather than dramatic) irony, it is dentelliere (The Lacemaker, 1976), in exemplified by that scene: a statement per­ which she played Pomme, the young hair­ ceived as true, but denied by the entire dresser driven to insanity by a love affair context of the film. with a young student who is embarrassed The first movie in which anyone noticed by her lack of education and wants her to Isabelle Huppert, then seventeen, was better herself. The film is the one that most Bertrand Blier’s Les valseuses (Making It, non-French people associate with Huppert, 1973), a seminal but rather unpleasant film and it was also, apparently, the film that which, if nothing else, marked the defini­ Cox had in mind when he wrote Cactus tive end of the sixties in France. “ It was an around her. ► CINEMA PAPERS May — 37

“ We met in Cannes,” says Huppert, “ when I was on the jury, and Paul was there with Herzog for Where the Green Ants Dream. He knew me from La dentel­ lière, and he had been wanting to make a film about blindness for a long, long time — fifteen or twenty years, I think. I have a friend, a French distributor, who had talked to me a lot about Paul, but I hadn’t seen any of his films. Curious as it may seem, I don’t go to the cinema much. But I went to see Man o f Flowers, which opened in Paris about three weeks later. I remem­ ber saying to Paul: ‘I’m making a film with you, but otherwise I’d probably never have seen any of your films!’ ” Cactus is quite different from Cox’s previous films: visually more ambitious, but also simpler, more trusting in its material. And it is tempting to think that Huppert, in whom he trusts most, has a lot to do with this. Cactus is the story of a French woman (Huppert) who arrives in A u stra lia, fleeing an unsuccessful marriage. Near the start of the film, she has a car accident and loses an eye. Doctors tell her that, if she doesn’t have the eye removed, she will lose the sight of the other one — apparently an established medical phenomenon. “ So much for the medical side,” says Huppert. “ Anyway, while she is deciding what to do — because, at first, she refuses to have the eye removed — she meets a blind man, played by Robert Menzies, and falls in love with him. He has a greenhouse full of cacti, and they become a kind of metaphor. He lives among them, but he doesn’t feel threatened by them: he touches them and, in one scene, even uses their spines to make music. In the end, he is the one who enables her to get her confidence back. It’s really a very simple love story. “ But, about all, Cactus was, for me, an ideal way of working. I haven’t met many directors who want as much as Paul does to get back to a simpler form of filmmaking.

When cinema started, that was how it was: films were made in just a few days. Then it all turned into an industry and developed an infrastructure. What Paul is trying to do is rediscover that simplicity, that artisanal side of cinema. He doesn’t want to be over­ taken by the whole industrial side of the thing. “ For example, he’ll decide the evening before what scene he is going to shoot the next day. If it’s a difficult scene, he’ll say: ‘OK, if we’re ready, we’ll shoot it. And, if we don’t want to, we won’t!’ That’s some­ thing you never find in films these days, even on low-budget French films. I’ve made a lot of those, because I’m a bit of an anomaly in France: I’m a star, but I work with directors like Godard, not the big commercial ones. But, even on those little films, the infrastructure is always present.

Paul is fighting to get away from that completely. “ His direction can be very complicated, though, with complex camera movements, tracking shots, 360-degree pans and so on.

For instance, he doesn’t like to do a wide shot of the countryside, then a close-up of me, then a reverse angle on Robert: every­ 38 — May CINEMA PAPERS

thing is all in it together — the actors, the countryside, everything. It’s just like the human eye: sitting here, I can see you and what’s on the table and the room and all those things. I think that’s the way cinema ought to be.”

One of the final scenes of the film — and the last to be shot — indicates this pre­ cisely. In it, Huppert’s character tries a trip into town, her damaged eye still in place, her good one fading, and gets no further than crossing the street outside the railway station. The scene was filmed outside Mel­ bourne’s Flinders Street, just before the rush hour, unnoticed by most of those at what is one of the city’s busiest inter­ sections. There were no generator trucks, no lights, no first, second and third assistant directors with walkie-talkies and police liaison. “ There were just three of us,” says Huppert. “ I come out of the station, and it’s a hand-held shot. Then there is a closer shot of me in the crowd, done with a little 16mm camera he loves to use. If we’d wanted to do that ‘normally’, with a crew of 30, we simply couldn’t have done it. Paul did it in a quarter of an hour.

I’ve seen the rushes, and they’re fabulous.

Flavour o f the year: Huppert in her best-known film, as Pomme in Claude Goretta’s La dentel­ lière (The Lacemaker).

“ From an actor’s point of view, the best directors are the ones whose films the actors come out of best. In that sense, Godard is a magnificent director of actors: he lifts the actors, he sublimates them. You have the feeling of being important when you work with him, and there is a kind of magic in his way of filming: he has a very special way of looking at actors. “ Paul is great that way, too, but he hardly directed us at all. For a while, I was a little disconcerted, even though I don’t usually expect a director to direct me. But I think the director’s job is to make things happen. And Paul certainly made sure things happened. Cactus may be a simple story, but it’s not an easy one — a love affair between a blind man and a woman who is going blind. It’s very tricky, even dangerous. But Paul made it work.”

Born in the Parisian suburb of Ville d’Avray, Huppert originally trained, semiclassically, as a stage actress. But, although she has done some stage work (including a major Paris production of Musset’s On ne badine pas avec I’amour), the reason she gives for preferring cinema is a revealing comment on her way of working. “ For the theatre,” she says, “ you do the same kind of internal preparation, but then you have to externalize it. A nd, when you externalize, it’s necessarily to the detriment of what is /«side.”

Huppert’s performances, in Cactus and before, are never to the detriment of what is inside: tiny gestures — a blink, a tentative hand movement towards the face — reveal the interior emotion in a way that makes her rise to stardom easy to understand. It also explains, perhaps, why her choice of directors has not so far included any member of the new generation of French directors — Luc Besson, Jean-Jacques Beneix — who are, after all, her generation.

Huppert belongs — as does Paul Cox — to an older tradition: that of an actor’s cinema. The new generation, she says, “ has been very much influenced by television and video-clips and that whole culture of the image. But they don’t always make very good use of it. Godard is part of that culture too, but there is always a degree of criticism in the way in which he uses it. “ For me, good cinema is cinema which focuses on the actor, the dialogue and, above all, the emotion. The films the new French directors are making tend to be a little lacking in emotion: it’s all images, all visual. There’s a great deal of technique, but it’s not something which appeals much to me. I think they’ve lost sight of just the thing that Paul Cox is trying to rediscover: the artisanal side of cinema. And, in the final analysis, films that come from there have always been the best kind of films.”

Faustine ou le bel été (Faustine*. Nina Companeez, 1971); César et Rosalie (César and Rosalie*. Claude Sautet, 1972); Le bar et la fourche (Alain Lèvent, 1972); L ’Ampelopède (Rachel Weinberg, 1973); Les valseuses (Making It/Going Places*.

Bertrand Blier, 1973); Rosebud (Otto Pre­ m inger, 1974); A lo ise (Liliane de Kermadec, 1974); Le grand délire (Dennis Berry, 1975); Sérieux comme le plaisir (Robert Benayoun, 1975); Dupont Lajoie (Rape o f Innocence*. Yves Boisset, 1975); Docteur Françoise Gailland (No Time fo r Breakfast*. Jean-Louis Bertucelli, 1975); Je suie Pierre Rivière (Christine Lipinska, 1975); Le petit Marcel (Jacques Fansten, 1975); Le juge et l ’assassin (The Judge and the Assassin*. Bertrand Tavernier, 1975); La dentellière (The Lacemaker*. Claude Goretta, 1976); Les Indiens sont encore loin (The Indians are Still Far Away*. Patricia Moraz, 1977). Violette Nozière (Violette*.

Claude Chabrol, 1978); Retour a la bien aimée (Jean-François Adam, 1978); Les soeurs Bronte (The Bronte Sisters*. André Téchiné, 1978); Loulou (Maurice Pialat, 1978) ; Heaven’s Gate (Michael Cimino, 1979) ; Sauve qui peut la vie (Slow Motion*.

Jean-Luc Godard, 1979); Orôkseg/Les héritières (Marta Meszaros, 1980); La dame aux camélias (Mauro Bolognini, 1980); Les ailes de la colombe (Benoît Jacquot, 1980); Passion (Jean-Luc Godard, 1981); Coup de torchon (Clean Slate*. Bertrand Tavernier, 1981; Eaux profondes (Michel Deville, 1981). La truite (The Trout*. Joseph Losey, 1982); Coup de foudre (Diane Kurys, 1982); La storia de Piera /L ’histoire de Piera (Marco Ferreri, 1982); La fem m e de mon pote (Bertrand Blier, 1983); La garce (Christine Pascal, 1983); Signé Charlotte (Caroline Huppert, 1984); Sac de noeuds (Josiane Balasko, 1984); Cactus (Paul Cox, 1985). * English titles are only given where they differ from the French title, and where the film has been released in an Englishspeaking country.

Tk

THE (NEW) FRENCH CONNECTION Le Plot: Geoffrey Daniels, former Head of Drama of the ABC, has talked Michel Noll, chief executive of Revcom Television, Paris (over a glass or three of champagne) into setting up a subsidiary company in Australia — Revcom Productions — with Geoffrey as Director and Executive Producer.

Le Workload: Production and co­ production of children’s and adult drama in Australia; worldwide distribution; supplying overseas program m es to Australian networks.

Le Contact: 133-135 Alexander Street, Crows Nest, NSW 2065. Telephone (02) 439 5488.

;;

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TOURS ¿TRIPS

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The Fringe Dwellers D ir e c to r : B ru c e B e re s fo rd . P r o d u c e r : S u e M illik e n .

In competition, Cannes 1986 "The film is based on a novel I read nine or ten years ago. I stumbled across it in London, in one of those secondhand book barrows! It's a first edition, with the dust-jacket and everything: it's probably quite valuable now! But I'd never heard of it or the author then: I bought it because somebody told me It was interesting.

"It reminded me of my child­ hood, of the Aboriginals I'd known then. And no, it doesn't worry me that I'm a white Austra­ lian directing it. When you're directing anything, it's always an interpretation. I made a film about the Boer War, and I was never there. I made a film about schoolgirls in Melbourne, and I was never that. Now, I'm about to start a comedy set In the Deep South. I've never filmed anything autobiographical. Anyway, the fundam ental emotions are always the same.

"The actors in The Fringe Dwellers are not known, but they were all very professional in their approach, and they give wonderful performances. The only real difference is that they aren't world-famous!"

Australia at the 1986

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Bruce Beresford

CINEMA PAPERS May — 41

David Stratton talks to producer Margaret Fink about her latest, and long-awaited, project.

The similarities between My Brilliant Career (1979) and Margaret Fink’s subse­ quent production, For Love Alone, are immediately striking: both are adapted from autobiographical Australian novels written by women, and both have as their central characters heroines who are deter­ mined to live their lives unimpeded by con­ ventional morality or custom. Given these parallels, it is not surprising that Fink was so determined to film Christina Stead’s novel, despite the sometimes seemingly in­ surmountable difficulties she faced over the years. “ When I read the book, I could see the film,” she says. “ Or, rather, a film: obviously not the one that’s finally been made.”

Despite her formidable success with My Brilliant Career, the problem of raising the money for For Love Alone almost defeated her. “ I had a terrible time. I don’t like to sound as if I’m whingeing, but people were getting countless millions to make films and I couldn’t raise the money, even though I had a track record. I felt the injustice of that a great deal. I can’t explain why it took so long. The budget was $3.8-million, and I think there’s more than that up there on the screen. It was a heartbreaking time for me.” Finally the money came from UAA, Greater Union and the Australian Film Commission.

Fink puts these difficulties down to a variety of causes. “ They didn’t like the book, though frankly I don’t think many of them read it. It’s not an easy novel to get into: Christina Stead isn’t an easy read.

And I don’t think people liked the idea of it. But then, they didn’t like the idea of My Brilliant Career. Pat Lovell doesn’t have too easy a time, either. I don’t think it’s because we’re women, but it could be.” I

42 — May CINEMA PAPERS

wondered if, perhaps, her reputation as a tough, no-nonsense producer might be a reason, hesitating to use the word ‘diffi­ cult’. “ Could be. I know that is said of me, but only by people who haven’t worked with me.”

One of the things behind the on-again, off-again delays was casting. Originally, another actress was cast in the central role (the same thing had happened with My Brilliant Career). “ We were looking for a newcomer. The character’s age shifts from 18 to 24, and we felt we couldn’t have anyone older than 23 in the part. So we were looking at NIDA graduates, though we tested a few outsiders. It literally took years to find Helen Buday. Hilary Linstead (of M & L Casting), Stephen Wallace and I searched for her for years. Of course, if we’d got the money earlier, another actress would have played the role!”

She was, she says, never tempted to use Judy Davis again, mainly because she felt that it would be too much repetition (“ though I think Judy’s a great actress” ).

Nor, for similar reasons, did she consider using Gillian Armstrong again as director. “ I saw Stir and I rang Stephen the next day and said: ‘I want to work with you’. I gave him a script I had, but he felt it wasn’t for him. Then I gave him a copy of the book, For Love Alone, and he really responded to it. I was sure he had the depth to cope Ivith it, and we set about trying to make it accessible to a wide audience. As you know, we’re not making films for an elite, and that’s a tight-rope we have to walk: making a work of art that’s commercial.

It’s not easy. Five years later, I have even more respect for Stephen than I had at the beginning: it really has been a wonderful working relationship. I know that’s a

cliche, but it really has.”

Another problem was finding a suitable lighting cameraman. Russell Boyd dropped out, and Don McAlpine (who shot My Brilliant Career) was busy in the US. Fink had seen the New Zealand film, Vigil, at the Sydney Film Festival and contacted its cinematographer, Alun Bollinger. “ He did a very sensitive and poetic jo b ,” she says.

A ten-week shoot was planned: one week to be shot in Britain, where in fact about fifty per cent of the story takes place. None of the actors went overseas, and a great deal of front projection was used, as well as some striking sets by John Stoddart re­ creating Britain in the thirties in Sydney.

The shoot was dogged by bad weather: pro­ duction started in March and it rained all through April. But, says Fink, that turned out to be an advantage, because it doesn’t look too bright — there aren’t too many dazzling blue skies.

Now that the film is finished and ready to go into distribution, Fink is cautiously opti­ mistic. A few previews, including one for federal parliamentarians, have gone over well, and she’s delighted with the team at Greater Union who are working on publicity and distribution. She even has time to take stock of the state of the Aus­ tralian film industry. “ The tax boom is over, and the carpet­ baggers are getting out. A lot of people have been making films who probably shouldn’t have been, and the standards have obviously declined. So we’re entering an interesting era. One thing’s sure: you can’t stop the real filmmakers. You won’t stop the Phil Noyces and the Pat Lovells and the Margaret Finks! No matter what happens with the funding arrangements, we’ll go on working in film.”

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CA N N ES DOERS

The Australian film industry at the 39th International Film Festival

P h illip Adam s, Chairman, Austra­ lian Film Commission.

Rea Francis, The Rea Francis Com­ pany. c/o Majestic. Tel. 68.91.00.

David A rm strong , Manager, North America, J.C. Williamson.

G a ry H a m ilt o n , U K -E u ro p e Manager, Australian Film Commis­ sion. c/o Australian Producers’ Sales Office and Australian Film Commis­ sion.

J a n e B a lla n t y n e , p ro d u c e r, Cactus, c/o Seawell Films or the Australian Producers' Sales Office.

Paul D. Barron, Barron Films Ltd., Sofitel-Mediterranee. Tel. 99.22.75.

W ilfred Beaver, Manager, London office, New South Wales Film Cor­ poration. c/o New South Wales Film Corporation.

B ill B ennett, Backlash and A J.C. Williamson Producers’ Sales

producer/director, Street to Die. c/o or the Australian Office.

Tom B roadbridge, Director, Nilsen Premiere Ltd. c/o Australian Pro­ ducers’ Sales Office.

Don Catchlove, producer, Twelfth Night, c/o Australian Producers’ Sales Office.

Daniel Cham bon, DCF Film Distri­ bution. c/o UniFrance, Nouveau Palais, or Australian Film Commis­ sion.

S tew art C hilton, Managing Direc­ tor, J.C. Williamson.

J o n a th a n C h is s ic k , Managing Director, Hoyts Corporation, c/o Majestic. Tel. 68.91.00.

Je n n ife r Cluff, actress, A Street to Die. d o Australian Producers’ Sales Office or J.C. Williamson.

Danny C ollins, Marketing and Sales Executive, New South Wales Film Corporation.

Peter C ollins, Executive Vice-Presi­ dent, World Film Alliance.

Rosa C olosim o, Colosimo Film Pro­ ductions, producer, The Still Point, d o J.C. Williamson.

M ila n k a C o m fo rt, pro d u ctio n manager, Cactus, d o Seawell Films and the Australian Producers’ Sales Office.

D a n i C o w b u rn , A ssista n t to Manager, London office, New South Wales Film Corporation.

Frank Cox, Newvision Films, c/o Hotel Bleu Rivage, 61 La Croisette.

Tel. 94.24.25.

Paul Cox, director, Cactus, d o Sea­ well Films and the Australian Pro­ ducers’ Sales Office.

Ross Dimsey, Director, Naked Country Productions and producer, Kangaroo, d o World Film Alliance and Australian Producers’ Sales Office.

Dr Decian D raskovic, Theatrical and Television Worldpool, repre­ senting Around the World in 80 Ways. Tel. 94.00.02.

David E lfick, producer, Around the World in 80 Ways and Housebroken. c/o S o fite l-M e d ite rra n e e . Tel. 99.22.75.

David Hannay, David Hannay Pro­ ductions, co-producer, Death of a Soldier, d o Bromco International.

John Hanrahan, Sydney Sun, 2UE, Australian correspondent, Holly­ wood Reporter. Hotel le Vendôme, 37 blvd. d ’Alsace. Tel. 38.34.33.

Lyn McCarthy, Dendy Films/Dendy Cinema. Residence Medicis, 2 rue Jean-Baptiste Dumas. Tel. 38.68.51.

T e re n c e M c M a h o n , G eneral Manager, Greater Union Film Distri­ butors. c/o Sofitel-Mediterranee. Tel. 99.22.75.

G arry Maddox, Editor, Encore, d o Hotel Saint-Christophe (8-11 May); Cannes-Palace, 14 av. de Madrid (12-19 May). Tel. 43.44.45.

Carolin Henry, Marketing Assistant, South Australian Film Corporation, c/o Australian Producers’ Sales Office.

B ill M arshall, Director, Naked Country Productions, c/o World Film Alliance.

Jam es Henry, Australian World Marketing, for the South Australian Film Corporation, c/o Australian Pro­ ducers’ Sales Office.

Natalie M iller, Sharmill Films/Longford Cinema, c/o Gray d ’Albion. Tel. 48.54.54.

J ill Hickson, wife of the Premier of New South Wales, c/o New South Wales Film Corporation.

Sue M illiken, producer, The Fringe Dwellers, d o Virgin Films, Rms 144-145, Carlton. Tel. 38.67.10.

Susie Hoste, Distribution Manager, Europe, J.C. Williamson.

Mary Moody, David Hannay Pro­ ductions. c/o Bromco International.

M A JO R O F F IC E S

0

ï

Australian Film Commission, 8th floor, Résidence du Festival, 52 La Croisette. Tel. 38.65.43. Tlx 470793 F AUSTRAL. Australian Producers’ Sales Office, Salle Touquet, Hôtel Majestic. Tel. 38.70.94.

Bromco International, 1st floor, Villa Lutèce, 4 rue Jean-Baptiste Dumas.

Tel. 34.63.57. Tlx 461784 BROMCO. J & M Film Sales, Rms 217-218, Carlton. Tel. 38.78.06.

New South Wales Film Corporation, Apt 143, 3rd floor, Résidence du Festival, 52 La Croisette. Tel. 38.35.26.

Seawell Films, Résidence du Grand Hôtel, Cormoran 1, 47 La Croisette. Tel. 38.62.02 and 38.62.12.

UAA Films Inc., Carlton. Tel. 38.74.18.

J.C. Williamson Film Distributors, 87 rue d’Antibes. Tel. 68.10.29.

World Film Alliance; Salon d’Alliance, Carlton. Tel. 68.91.86.

M A JO R H O T E L S

§

Carlton, 58 La Croisette. Tel. 68.91.68. Tlx 470720.

Gray d’Albion, 38 rue des Serbes. Tel. 48.54.54. Tlx 470744.

Majestic, 14 La Croisette. Tel. 68.91.00. Tlx 470787.

Martinez, 73 La Croisette. Tel. 68.91.91. Tlx 407708. $ Sofitel-Mediterranee, 2 blvd Jean Hibert. Tel. 99.22.75. Tlx 470728.

David Hurley, Press Secretary to the Premier of New South Wales, c/o New South Wales Film Corporation.

C lytie Jessop, co-producer, co­ writer and director, Emma's War. d o Australian Producers' Sales Office.

Mark Josem, Joint Managing Direc­ tor, Filmways; President, World Film A lliance and Director, Naked Country Productions, c/o World Film Alliance.

Brian Kavanagh, director, Depar­ ture. d o Australian Producers’ Sales Office.

Leon Fink, Chairman, Hoyts Cor­ poration. c/o Majestic. Tel. 68.91.00 A n d re n a F in la y , co-producer, Emma's War. d o Australian Pro­ ducers’ Sales Office.

C aroline Koopm ans, Sales Officer, London Office, Australian Film Com­ mission. c/o Australian Producers’ Sales Office and Australian Film Commission.

Alan Finney, National Director of Marketing and Distribution, Village Roadshow Corporation, c/o SofitelMediterranee. Tel. 99.22.75.

Pamela Lange, Head of Acquisi­ tions, Village Roadshow Corpora­ tion. c/o G ray d ’A lbion. Tel. 48.54.54.

44 — May CINEMA PAPERS

R obert Lewis, President, Australian Films International, c/o New South Wales Film Corporation.

P hilip pe Mora, director, Death of a Soldier, d o Bromco International.

Di M orrissey, Good Morning Aus­ tralia, Ten Network, c/o Residence Panoramique, Apt K, 6th floor, 93 La Croisette. Tel. 38.78.69.

S co tt M urray, writer/director, Devil in the Flesh, d o Sofitel-Mediterranee (Tel. 99.22.75) or W orld Film Alliance.

M atthew Ody, General Manager, European Operations, J.C. William­ son.

David Parker, producer, Malcolm, d o Australian Producers’ Sales Office.

Paul R iom falvy, Chairman, New South Wales Film Corporation.

J ill Robb, producer, The More Things Change, d o Fouquet’s, 2 rondpoint Duboys d ’Angers (Tel. 38.75.81) and New South Wales Film Corporation.

Joh n R ochester, Chief General Manager, Greater Union Organisa­ tion. c/o Sofitel-Mediterranee. Tel. 99.22.75.

N ick R o dd ick, Editor, Cinema Papers, d o Hotel Bristol, 14 rue Hoche (Tel. 39.10.66) and Austra­ lian Film Commission.

Barbara de International.

Rom aine,

Bromco

F loyd R appaport, Vice-President, UAA Films Inc. O scar Scherl, executive producer, Death of a Soldier, d o Bromco Inter­ national.

Jea nn ine Seawell, Seawell Films, executive producer, Cactus, d o Seawell Films.

F rank Shields, director, The Surfer. c/o J & M Film Sales.

B roo k Sim ons, Director, Creative Affairs. UAA Films Inc. M alcolm S m ith, General Manager, Film Development, Australian Film Commission.

Max S tea rt, M.C. Steart Associates, c/o Australian ducers’ Sales Office.

and Pro­

D avid S tra tto n , correspondent, Variety, No. 3, Apt La Josefa, 7 rue du 14 juillet, or c/o Australian Film Commission.

C h ristin e Suli, producer, Depar­ ture. d o Australian Producers’ Sales Office.

Nadia Tass, director, Malcolm, d o Australian Producers’ Sales Office.

Greg Tepper, Projects Manager, Film Victoria, c/o Australian Pro­ ducers’ Sales Office.

Sue Thom pson, Valhalla Films, representing The Big Hurt, d o Hotel des Orangers, 1 rue des Orangers.

Tel. 38.99.92.

G raem e T u b b e n h a u e r, Dendy Films/Dendy Cinema. Residence M edicis, 2 rue Jea n-B a ptiste Dumas. Tel. 38.68.51.

C live Turner, Marketing Director, Australian Film Commission, c/o Australian Producers’ Sales Office and Australian Film Commission.

A nd rew L. Urban, The Australian-, Australian correspondent, Screen International, c/o Screen Inter­ national, Rm 201, Carlton.

Jam es Vernon, producer, Surfer, c/o J & M Film Sales.

The

Maria W alsh, Director, Ronin Films, c/o Hotel Palma, 77 La Croisette.

Tel. 94.16.29.

M ichael W alsh, Joint Executive Director, Ronin Films, c/o Hotel Palma, 77 La Croisette. Tel. 94.16.29.

R o be rt W ard, Joint Managing Director, Filmways; Director, Naked Country Productions; Senior VicePresident, Marketing and Produc­ tion, World Film Alliance, c/o World Film Alliance.

N eville W ran, Premier, New South Wales, c/o New South Wales Film Corporation.

A n to n io Zeccola, Palace Film Dis­ trib u to rs . c /o M a rtin e z . Tel. 68.91.91.

Up from under ’86 Australian films at the 39th Cannes International Film Festival Around the World in 80 Ways A feature debut by Steve MacLean, who wrote Starstruck but whose directorial experience has been on video clips, Around the World in 80 Ways is a stylized comedy about the prematurely senile Roly (Allan Penney), who makes a world trip without ever leaving the front porch, and grows younger by the kilometre as he does so. The producer, David Elfick^ is in Cannes (at the Sofitel-Mediterranee), but the film is being sold internationally by representatives of the Australian and Euro­ pean Finance Corporation.

A round th e W orld in 80 Ways. Directed by Stephen MacLean. Produced by David Elfick and Steve Knapman for Palm Beach Entertain­ ment Pty Ltd. Written by Steven MacLean and Paul Leadon. With Philip Quasi, Diana Davidson, Allan Penney, Kelly Dingwall and Gosia Dobrowolska.

Sales representative: Dr Decian Draskovic, Theatrical & Television Worldpool. Tel. 94.00.02.

“With Backlash, I wanted to make a film that worked principally on dramatic structure, and which used the freedom o f improvization. I worked from a 27-page scene breakdown.

Sometimes we stuck to it, other times we deviated markedly. But I knew we could always tighten things up at the editing stage.

“The film has a lovely sense o f flow. David Argue and Gia Carides [the actors] took to it well, but it was difficult at times. In some scenes, we were feeling our way; others were clearcut. It was an enormous risk, working without a script: it’s a territory that hasn’t really been covered. But it’s paid o f f , I think: the overall result is quite remarkable!

“Backlash's qualities make it different from other Australian films: it has a disciplined looseness; it is tight and pacy; and the improvization has given it a natural rhythm.

“Visually, I think the film is stunning, but I do fin d it hard to talk about my own film s . . ! ” Bill Bennett

Backlash A second feature from Bill Bennett (whose earlier A Street to Die is also at Cannes this year), Backlash is the story of a policeman and a policewoman taking an Aboriginal woman charged with murder from Sydney to the outback outpost of Bourke. Quite a stylistic departure for both Bennett and Australian cinema, the film makes extensive use of improvization.

Australia at the 11)86

Backlash. Directed, produced and written by Bill Bennett for Mermaid Beach Productions Pty Ltd. With David Argue, Gia Carides, Lydia Miller and Brian Syron.

Sales representative: J.C. Williamson Film Distributors Pty Ltd, 87 rue d ’Antibes. Tel. 68.10.29. Bill Bennett can be contacted through J.C. Williamson, or through the Australian Producers’ Sales Office, Salle Touquet, Majestic.

Tel. 38.70.94

The Big Hurt An inventive, low-budget thriller, The Big Hurt is about a journalist who has just got out of jail after serving a sentence for contempt, and who gets caught in a sleazy search for a dead man. It comes from the ingenious team of Barry Peak and Chris Kiely, whose other credits include Future S chlock, C ha nn el C haos and the upcoming The Cricketer. The Big Hurt is their film noir.

The Big Hurt. Directed by Barry Peak.

Produced by Chris Kiely for The Big Hurt Ltd and Valhalla Holdings Pty Ltd. Written by Barry Peak and Sylvia Bradshaw. With David Bradshaw, Lian Lunson, Nick Wafers and Alan Cassell.

Representative: Sue Thompson, Valhalla Films, Hotel des Orangers, 1 rue des Orangers. Tel. 38.99.52.

“The biggest jum p they’d ever done in The Fall Guy was 150 feet, but the stuntman fractured three ribs and wasn’t very well at the end o f it. A nd the biggest jum p anyone’s ever done was 186 feet, in The Dukes of Hazard: a guy went over a train. But he was wiped out: you get a lot o f rib and internal damage with jumps.

“On Dead-End Drive-In, I did 162 feet. But the best thing about it fo r me, apart from it working so well visually, was the fact that my special seat worked. A s I started coming down, I braced myself and was squeezing down in the seat: I actually bent the steering wheel! A n d then, bang, my head came up and I hit the roof. I was waiting fo r more, but that was it. A ll I could hear was the churning o f the camera. ” Guy Norris, stuntman

CINEMA PAPERS May — 45

Burke & Wills Last year’s big Aussie Christmas release, directed by Graeme (Frances) Clifford, Burke & Wills is about a classic piece of Australian history: the story of the two nineteenth-century explorers who set out from Melbourne for the Gulf of Carpentaria (overseas readers: this is the chunk missing from the top of the continent), made it, but didn’t get back. With two excellent central performances by Jack Thompson and Nigel Havers and a first-rate supporting one by Matthew Fargher, the film report­ edly has a quite different impact on nonAustralian audiences who, unlike every Aussie schoolkid, don’t know what is going to happen at the end.

Burke & W ills. Directed by Graeme Clifford.

Produced by Graeme Clifford and John Sexton for Hoyts Edgley Productions. Written by Michael Thomas. With Jack Thompson, Nigel Havers, Greta Scacchi, Matthew Fargher, Ralph Cotterill, Barry Hill.

Sales representatives: J & M Film Sales, Rooms 217-218, Carlton. Tel. 38.78.06.

Cactus The latest and most ambitious film from Australia’s best-known ‘independent’ filmmaker, Paul Cox, Cactus is about a woman losing her sight as a result of a car accident, and about her love affair with a man who has been blind since birth. The film’s leading actress, Isabelle Huppert, is interviewed on pages 36-38.

Cactus. Directed by Paul Cox. Produced by Jane Ballantyne and Paul Cox for Dofine Ltd. Written by Paul Cox, Norman Kaye and Bob Ellis.

With Isabelle Huppert, Robert Menzies, Norman Kaye, Monica Maughan, Peter Aanensen, Sheila Florance and Bunduk Marika.

Sales representatives: Seawell Films, Residence du Grand Hotel, Cormoran 1, 47 La Croisette.

Tel. 38.62.02 and 38.62.12, or through the Aus­ tralian Producers’ Sales Office, Salle Touquet, Majestic. Tel. 38.70.94.

“Reb Brown was the star o f Howling II, my last film, in which he played a comic-strip hero. But I was quite convinced he could play Leonski in Death of a Soldier.

“With guys who look like Reb, it's like the old thing that applies to beautiful women in showbusiness. Everyone says, ‘Oh, they can’t act! They’re just good looking! ’ Like Marilyn Monroe. It applies to men, too. I f they’re hunks, they don’t often get the chance to act, because they ’re just lumbered with stereotypical, hunk roles.

“Leonski himself was exactly that big. Ira C. Rothgerber, who was his defence counsel, was mesmerized. He held R eb’s hand, and he said: ‘My god! I t ’s the same size hand!’ We were at dinner and he said: ‘Look, there is one thing you may fin d interesting. My one memory o f the court martial is that, when they came in to give sentence, Leonski suddenly said: “Ira, can you hold my hand, please?” ’ It was exactly as in the film ! A nd Reb was there.

He said: ‘How did you hold the hand?’ And they did it fo r real. It was very moving fo r Rothgerber: forty years later, he is still defending Leonski. ” Philippe Mora

Dead-End Drive-In Based on a short story called ‘Crabs’ by Peter Carey, who wrote last year’s contro­ versial Australian competition entry, Bliss, Dead-End Drive-In is a very different kind of movie: an action adventure movie with an apocalyptic theme, directed by Brian Trenchard-Smith (who has no less than three films at Cannes this year, but won’t be on the Croisette because he is, as usual, shooting a film). With its story of kids locked up in a drive-in and pacified with sex, drugs and rock 'n roll, Dead-End Drive-In looks like Australia’s most canny bid yet for the ‘cult movie’ market. Screening Olympia Four, Tuesday 13 May (10.00 am), Thursday 15 May (4.00 pm), Friday 16 May (10.00 pm).

D e ad -E nd D riv e -In . D irected by Brian Trenchard-Smith. Produced by Andrew Williams and Damien Parer for Springvale Productions Pty Ltd. Written by Peter Smalley, based on the short story by Peter Carey. With Ned Manning, Natalie McCurry, Peter Whitford, Ollie Hall, Wilbur Wilde and Brett Climo.

Sales representative: The New South Wales Film Corporation, Apt 143, 3rd floor, Residence du Festival, 52 La Croisette. Tel. 38.35.26.

“The fact that the novel was set in France and the film is set in Australia doesn’t concern me particularly. There are aspects in any novel which can be transposed to any country, and Devil in the Flesh is not a picture o f Australia. The world is just the world o f the film : even the time is a little vague.

“That’s how I see pretty well all films: the thing I most like is to be drawn into their world.

A nd I don’t think the world o f a film has to obey the same rules o f logic and time and space as the outside world. I think realism has been the near-death o f the cinema. One is entitled to create one’s own unique world in a film , as long as it has its own inner logic and consistency. ” Scott Murray

46 — May CINEMA PAPERS

Death of a Soldier Having gone through a bewildering array of title changes, The Leonski Incident has emerged, via War Story, as Death of a Soldier. It is director Philippe Mora’s first Australian feature in three years, and docu­ ments the explosive situation that developed in Melbourne in 1942 when an American G.I., one of several thousand both welcomed and resented in the city, committed a series of grisly murders. The original defence attorney at the Court Martial of the real Leonski, Ira C. Rothgerber, advised on the film.

Death o f a Soldier. Directed by Philippe Mora.

Produced by David Han nay and Bill Nagle for Suatu Film Management. Written by Bill Nagle.

With James Coburn, Reb Brown, Don Gordon, Bill Hunter and Maurie Fields.

Sales representatives: David Hannay and Oscar Scherl, c/o Bromco International, 1st floor, Villa Lutece, 4 rue Jean-Baptiste Dumas. Tel. 34.63.57. Tlx. 461784 BROMCO.

Departure Based on the highly-acclaimed play, A Pair of Claws, by Michael Gurr (compared by one Australian reviewer to Sam Shepard’s Buried Child), Departure is a feature debut

for both director Brian Kavanagh, a wellestablished editor, and producer Christine Suli, the Australia and New Zealand rep for Motion Picture Guarantors Ltd. It is about a traumatic evening in a city hotel, where a distinguished retired diplomat faces up to the ghosts of the past and the way in which they haunt his present. It is also distinctly unusual for an Australian film, in that it was filmed in Tasmania.

“What interested me, with Going Sane, was the idea o f a man who was obsessed with time, and who turned his life into minutes, and finally seconds, in a desperate attempt to reassure himself that his time bank was a lot bigger than it really is — or was!

“I thought how funny this could be, if no one around him understood what was going on.

And, o f course, that’s what happens in the movie: he is, quite literally, going sane, but the people around him remain totally mad, even when they’re highly successful!

“The main focus is on his adjustment to it, and his acceptance o f time. He changes his life.

H e’s got a spoilt wife and a huge house and a top job at the beginning. And, by the time he’s finished reckoning up his true worth, he has a different and far more civilized life style. ” John Sandford

Australia at ike 1986

Cannes International Film Festival

Departure. Directed by Brian Kavanagh.

Produced by Christine Suli and Brian Kavanagh for Cineaust (One 1983) Ltd. Written by Michael Gurr, based on his own play, A Pair of Claws.

With Patricia Kennedy, Michael Duffield, June Jago and Serge Lazareff.

Representatives: Brian Kavanagh, Christine Suli and Max Steart, d o the Australian Producers’ Sales Office, Salle Touquet, Majestic. Tel. 38.70.94.

Devil in the Flesh A note of pride creeps in here: Devil in the Flesh is the first feature by former Cinema Papers editor, Scott Murray, and it has been invited into the Semaine de la Critique. Based on Raymond Radiguet’s twenties novel, Le diable au corps — and not, Murray is swift to point out, the 1947 film by Claude Autant-Lara — it deals with the sexual and emotional awakening of a cold and not very likeable young man. The cinematography, by Andrew De Groot, is magnificent.

Devil in the Flesh. Directed by Scott Murray.

Produced by John B. Murray for Collins Murray Productions and World Film Alliance. Written by Scott Murray, based on the novel by Raymond Radiguet. With Katia Caballero and Keith Smith.

Sales representatives: World Film Alliance, Salon dAlliance, Carlton. Tel. 68.91.68. Scott Murray can be contacted at the Sofitel-Mediterranee, Tel. 99.22.75.

“Lawrence is about the only great modern writer who’s bothered even to come here and take an interest in the place, and who’s stayed long enough to form an impression. He has a very special interest fo r us — particularly, I think, because he was so acute: not just acute in a poetic way, but sociologically acute. He only had to be here fo r five minutes to pick up on the bulk o f the thing.

“What makes Kangaroo so interesting, and what makes it such a vivid sort o f film , is that it is the least doctored o f all his novels. He wrote it very fast, and it is very autobiographical. He was in touch with a lot o f things going on in Australia that a lot o f Australians didn’t know about. What you have is really a very simple story with a lot o f decoration, fascinating characters and a fascinating insight into the place 60 years ago.

“I ’m damn sure it’s more accurate than anything Australian literature was turning out at the same time. A nd he does ask a number o f really key critical questions about the sort o f things we were into. ”

Tim Burstall ^

CINEMA PAPERS May — 47

Emma’s War

Film Festival in Perth, the city where it is set.

One of a trio of films at Cannes this year about Australia during World War II, Emma’s War is the story of a woman and her two daughters coping with the traumas of death and separation. The film was shot in the Blue Mountains at the end of last (Australian) summer, and saw Lee Remick making her first down-under movie.

Fran. Directed and written by Glenda Hambly.

Produced by David Rapsey for Barron Films Ltd. With Noni Hazlehurst, Annie Byron, Alan Fletcher, Narelle Simpson, Travis Ward and Rosie Logie.

Sales representative: Tom Broadbridge, Nilsen Premiere, c/o Australian Producers' Sales Office, Salle Touquet, Majestic. Tel. 38.70.94. Paul D. Barron of Barron^ Films Ltd is staying at the Sofitel-Mediterranee. Tel. 99.22.75.

E m m a’s War. Directed by Clytie Jessop. Pro­ duced by Clytie Jessop and Andrena Finlay for Belinon. Written by Clytie Jessop and Peter Smalley. With Lee Remick, Miranda Otto, Bridey Lee, Terence Donovan and Mark Lee. Representatives: Andrena Finlay and Clytie Jessop, c/o Australian Producers’ Sales Office, or Bill Gavin, of Gavin Film Ltd.

The Empty Beach Based on the novel by Peter Corris, The Empty Beach is an updated Chandleresque tale of loyalty and lost illusions, in which the unique light and seascapes of Sydney replace the smog and palm trees of Los Angeles. Bryan Brown, now poised on the brink of major US stardom, plays private eye Cliff Hardy, whose toughness is, as in all the best shamus movies, a shield against the world. Stunningly shot by John Seale and intelligently directed by Chris Thomson, The Empty Beach makes a good fist of a genre the Australian cinema has not often attempted.

The E m pty Beach. Directed by Chris Thomson.

Produced by Tim Read and John Edwards for Jethro Films. Written by Keith Dewhurst, based on the novel by Peter Corris. With Bryan Brown, Anna Maria Monticelli, Ray Barrett, John Wood and Nick Tate.

Sales representative: The Australian Producers' Sales Office, Salle Touquet, Majestic. Tel. 38.70.94.

For Love Alone For Love Alone sees the welcome return to the screen of producer Margaret (My Brilliant Career) Fink, and centres on another great woman’s role delicately b a la n ce d betw e e n rom ance and independence. The director this time is Stephen Wallace (Gillian Armstrong did Career), and the star is Helen Buday (in Career, it was Judy Davis). For more details, see the interview with Margaret Fink on page 42.

For Love Alone. Directed by Stephen Wallace.

Produced by Margaret Fink for Waranta Pty Ltd. Written by Stephen Wallace, based on the novel

by Christina Stead. With Helen Buday, Sam Neill, Hugo Weaving, Hugh Keays-Byrne and Judi Farr.

Sales representatives: UAA Films Inc., Carlton.

Tel. 38.74.18.

The Fringe Dwellers Bruce Beresford’s third film in competition at Cannes (after Breaker Morant and Tender Mercies), The Fringe Dwellers is actually his fourth film to be officially selected on the Croisette (The Getting of Wisdom was in the Directors’ Fortnight). It also marks his return to Oz, after a mixed career in the US. The story of an Aboriginal girl’s struggle to leave home, it is both an emotional and a humorous film, and there is a double-page spread of pictures from it on pages 40-41. Unless there have been any last-minute changes of plan, Beresford himself won’t be in Cannes: he started shooting a new film for Dino De Laurentiis, Crimes of the Heart, on 5 May.

Glenda Hambly’s harrowing story of a welfare mother, which won Noni Hazlehurst Best Actress at last year’s AFI Awards, is making a return visit to Cannes after a generally good reception last year.

Since then, it has played well in Australia’s capital cities, and was recently the hit of the 48 — May CINEMA PAPERS

I Own the Racecourse Made for well under a million (Australian dollars), / Own the Racecourse is a story whose main attribute is its charm: it tells of a somewhat dim-witted teenage boy who is conned into believing he has bought the Harold Park Racecourse for $20. The out­ come of the scam, though, is not quite what one might expect.

I Own the Racecourse. Directed by Stephen Ramsey. Produced by Timothy Read and John Edwards for Barron Films Ltd. Written by John Edwards. With Gully Coote, Safir Redseposki, Rodney Burke, Tony Barry and Brett Climo.

Sales representative: Tom Broadbridge, c/o Aus­ tralian Producers' Sales Office, Salle Touquet, Majestic. Tel. 38.70.94. Paul D. Barron of Barron Films Ltd is staying at the Sofitel-Mediterranee.

Tel. 99.22.75.

Jenny Kissed Me The Fringe Dw ellers. Directed by Bruce Beres­ ford. Produced by Sue Milliken for Fringe Dweller Productions Pty Ltd. Written by Bruce Beresford, based on the novel by Nene Gare. With Kristina Nehm, Justine Saunders, Bob Mazza and Ernie Dingo.

Representative: Sue Milliken, c/o Virgin Films, Rooms 144-145, Carlton. Tel. 38.67.10.

Going Sane Going Sane is a coming-home present from John Sandford, a literary and radio figure of the fifties, who spent a large portion of his career in the UK, where he gave up a successful advertising career in the early seventies to train as a screenwriter with Carl Foreman. It is a comedy about a mining engineer who becomes obsessed with the minute-by-minute passing of time.

Screening at Olympia Four, Monday 12 May (12.00), Wednesday 14 May (4.00 pm), Saturday 17 May (10.00 pm).

G oing Sane. Directed by Michael Robertson.

Produced by Tom Jeffrey for Sea Change Films Pty Ltd. Written by John Sandford. With John Waters, Judy Morris, Linda Cropper and Kate Raison.

Sales representative: New South Wales Film Corporation, Apt 143, 3rd floor, Residence du Festival, 52 La Croisette. Tel. 38.35.26.

Housebroken Housebroken, formerly Emoh Ruo, is one

Fran

Produced by David Elfick for Palm Beach Pic­ tures and UAA Films. Written by David Leadon and David Poltorack. With Joy Smithers, Martin Sacks, Jack Ellis, Philip Quasi and Max Phipps.

Sales representatives: UAA Films Inc., Carlton.

Tel. 38.74.18. David Elfick is staying at the Sofitel-Mediterranee, Tel. 99.22.75.

of a trio of films making a comeback from last year’s Festival, where its star, Joy Smithers, was the darling of the Croisette.

The film has since opened to disappointing business in Australia — a pity, because its comedy has a freshness and edge to it that all too often deserts Australian forays into the genre.

Housebroken. Directed by Denny Lawrence.

Described by its director as a “ tearjerker for men” , Brian Trenchard-Smith’s Jenny Kissed Me is a moral tale about a woman who quits her man and her home in the woods for the big, sleazy smoke (Melbourne) and there falls into some wicked ways. The Jenny of the title is her eight-year-old daughter, whom she takes with her, but who would rather be back with her ‘Dad’, Dad, meanwhile, is dying . . .

Jenny Kissed Me. Directed by Brian TrenchardSmith. Produced by Tom Broadbridge for Nilsen Premiere. Written by Warwick Hind, based on an original screenplay by Judith Colquhoun. With Deborra Lee-Furness, Ivar Kants, Tamsin West, Paula Duncan and Steven Grives.

Sales representative: Tom Broadbridge, c/o Australian P roducers’ Sales Office, Salle Touquet, Majestic. Tel. 38.70.94.

Kangaroo The end of a long battle by director Tim Burstall to film what is arguably the only novel by a major novelist to have been set in Australia, Kangaroo is a fascinating mixture of D.H. Lawrence’s perceptions of the Australia of the twenties, a portrait of a sinister fascist army run by the title character, and an anatomy of Lawrence’s relationship with his wife Frieda. The couple — Somers and Harriet in the film — are played by the husband-and-wife team of Colin Friels and Judy Davis, and this is their first screen partnership.

Kangaroo. Directed by Tim Burstall. Produced

by Ross Dimsey for Naked Country Productions Ltd. Written by Evan Jones, based on the novel

by D.H. Lawrence. With Judy Davis, Colin Friels, John Walton, Julie Nihill, Hugh Keays-Byrne and Peter Hehir.

Representatives: Ross Dimsey, Robert Ward, Mark Josem and Bill Marshall, c/o World Film Alliance, Salon d ‘Alliance, Carlton. Tel. 68.91.68.

Malcolm Rapturously received at the American Film Market in Los Angeles in February, Malcolm is an off-beat comedy about a lad who loves trams. It is the debut feature by actress and stage director Nadia Tass, and is written, produced and shot by Tass’s husband, David Parker, one of Australia’s most distinguished stills photographers. If it is possible for a film to be a sleeper before it is even released, Malcolm is this year’s Australian sleeper: a film that quietly went through production while a lot of lesser movies did so a great deal more noisily, and now looks like cleaning up where they may hardly leave a scratch.

Malcolm. Directed by Nadia Tass. Produced by David Parker for Cascade Films Pty Ltd. Written

by David Parker. With Colin Friels, John Hargreaves, Lindy Davies, Chris Flaywood, Beverley Phillips and Charles ‘B ud’ Tingwell.

Representatives: David Parker and Nadia Tass, d o Australian Producers’ Sales Office, Salle Touquet, Majestic. Tel. 38.70.94.

The More Things Change Very warmly reviewed in these pages when it opened in Australia in March, The More Things Change is the first film to be pro­ duced by Jill Robb since the highly successful Careful, He Might Hear You, and is a debut feature as director by actress Robyn Nevin. The film, which set a house record at the Sydney Entertainment Complex, is a tale for the eighties, about a ten-year relationship going through a crisis from which it cannot emerge unscathed. It has what is billed as its ‘Northern Hemisphere Premiere’ at Olympia Four on Wednesday 14 May at 10.00 pm.

The More T h in g s Change. Directed by Robyn Nevin. Produced by Jill Robb for Syme Inter­ national Productions. Written by Moya Wood.

With Judy Morris, Barry Otto, Victoria Longley, Lewis Fitz-Gerald and Owen Johnson.

Sales representative: New South Wales Film Corporation, Apt 143, 3rd floor, Residence du Festival, 52 La Croisette. Tel. 38.35.26.

The Naked Country Packing up its spear and bull, The Naked Country is back for a second year on the rue d ’Antibes. Another collaboration between producer Ross Dimsey and director Tim Burstall (to whose company it has lent its name), it is based on a novel by Morris West about dangerous goings-on in the North.

The Naked Country. Directed by Tim Burstall.

Produced by Ross Dimsey for Naked Country Productions. Written by Ross Dimsey and Tim

Burstall, based on the novel by Morris West. With John Stanton, Rebecca Gilling, Ivar Kants and Tommy Lewis.

Representatives: Ross Dimsey, Robert Ward, Mark Josem and Bill Marshall, c/o World Film Alliance, Salon d ‘Alliance, Carlton. Tel. 68.91.68.

She Was Fair Game. Directed by Mario Andreacchio. Produced by Harley Manners and Ron Saunders for Southern Films International.

Written by Rob George. With Cassandra Delaney, Peter Ford and David Sandford.

Representation: Australian Producers’ Sales Cffice, Salle Touquet, Majestic. Tel. 38.70.94.

Playing Beatie Bow Shot predominantly on the South Australian Film Corporation’s backlot last (Australian) summer, where Sydney’s historic Rocks district was reconstructed, Playing Beatie Bow. is, claims its producer, Jock Blair, aimed chiefly at the thirteen-to-fifteen age group. It is the story of a girl from the nineteen-eighties who finds herself trans­ ported back to the eighteen-seventies, into the world of the Rocks, where she falls in love with a boy who, on her time scale, has been dead for 70 years.

Playing Beatie Bow. Directed by Donald Crombie. Produced by Jock Blair for SAFC Pro­ ductions Ltd. Written by Irwin Lane and Peter Gawler, based on the novel by Ruth Park.

Sales representative: James Henry, c/o Austra­ lian Producers' Sales Office, Salle Touquet, Majestic. Tel. 38.70.94.

Shortchanged 1986 at Cannes sees a plethora of films with Aboriginal themes, including Backlash and The Fringe Dwellers. Shortchanged, however, is the only one to have been written by an Aboriginal, Bobby Merritt, who is profiled on page 24 of this issue. It is the story of an Aboriginal drover who is trying to re-establish some kind of contact with his son from a marriage that has long since broken down. Merrit is the first Aboriginal writer to have a play performed in Australia, and Shortchanged he regards as his first ‘real’ feature film. Director is George Ogilvie, a man with a great deal of stage experience- who recently shared directing chores with George Miller on Mad M ax: Beyond Thunderdom e. Short­ changed screens at Olympia Six at 10.00

am on Sunday 11 May, and at Olympia Four on Wednesday 14 May (4.00 pm) and Friday 16 May (10.00 am).

Rebel Based on the Bob Herbert

play, No Names . . . No Packdrill, Rebel turned out to be the only Australian film to perform anywhere near expectations at the local box office in 1985. A highly-coloured — in every sense of the word — musical romance between an American deserter and an Australian nightclub singer, Rebel’s panache encompassed its extraordinary sets (by Brian Thomson), its lavish musical numbers and its lead performance by Aus­ tralian singing star, Debbie Byrne.

Rebel. Directed by Michael Jenkins. Produced

by Phillip Emanuel for Phillip Emanuel Produc­ tions and the Village Roadshow Corporation.

Written by Michael Jenkins and Bob Herbert, based on the latter’s play, No Names . . . No Packdrill. With Debbie Byrne, Matt Dillon, Bryan Brown, Bill Hunter, Ray Barrett and Julie Nihill.

Sales representatives: J & M Film Sales, Rooms 217-218, Carlton. Tel. 38.78.06.

She Was Fair Game Made as Fair Game — a title with which there were apparently clearance problems — She Was Fair Game is the first wholly independent feature film ever to have been made in South Australia. It is an exploitation action movie about a beautiful young woman being hunted by a truck called The Beast’. Some of the stunts are already legendary.

S hortchanged. Directed by George Ogilvie.

Produced by Ross Matthews for Magpie Films Pty Ltd. Written by Robert J. Merritt. With David

Australia at the 1986

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Kennedy, Susan Leith, Ray Meagher, Mark Little and Jamie Agius.

Sales representative: New South Wales Film Corporation, Apt 143, 3rd floor, Residence du Festival, 52 La Croisette. Tel. 38.35.26.

Spirit Chaser Originally known as Frog Dreaming, Spirit Chaser is the film which brought E.T. star Henry Thomas down under for a tale about a lad who suspects — with some justifica­ tion — that there is something nasty lurking in a local pond called Donkegin Hole. The director is the ubiquitous Brian TrenchardSmith, who reveals a softer side that few films have allowed to come through.

S p irit Chaser. Directed by Brian TrenchardSmith. Produced by Barbi Taylor for Middle Reel Productions. Written by Everette De Roche. With Henry Thomas and Tony Barry.

Sales representation: UAA Films Inc., Carlton.

Tel. 38.74.18.

The Editor, the Publisher and the staff of Cinema Papers congratulate Scott Murray, former Editor of the magazine, on having his first feature, Devil in the Fleshy The Still Point selected for the Semaine de la Critique. S li L A film for a limited market but with integrity

and definite appeal, The Still Point follows an adolescent girl as she copes with the ► CINEMA PAPERS May — 49

twin problems of deafness and the break­ down of her parents’ marriage. The director is Barbara Boyd-Anderson, and the lead role is played by Nadine Garner, a young actress who has recently become very busy on Australian television.

The S till Point. Directed by Barbara BoydAnderson. Produced by Rosa Colismo for Colismo Film Productions Pty Ltd. Written by Barbara Boyd-Anderson and Rosa Colismo. With Nadine Garner, Lyn Semmler, Robin Cuming.

Steve Bastoni and Alex Menglet.

Sales representation: J.C. Williamson Film Distri­ butors Pty Ltd, 87 rue d'Antibes. Tel. 68.10.29.

A Street to Die Bill Bennett’s films (which won Chris Hay­ wood the Best Actor Award at the 1985 AFI Awards) is an intense docu-drama about a Vietnam veteran who discovers he is dying, and traces the cause back to his exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam. Already shown on television in Australia, A Street to Die is one of the more auspicious debuts of recent years for former documentarist Bennett.

A S treet to Die. Directed, produced and written

by Bill Bennett for Mermaid Beach Productions and Multifilms. With Chris Haywood, Jennifer duff, Peter Hehir, Peter Kowitz and Pat Evison.

Sales representative: J.C. Williamson Film Distri­ butors Pty Ltd, 87 rue d ’Antibes. Tel. 68.10.29.

Bill Bennett and Jennifer d u ff may be contacted through them.

“Malcolm is a comedy which travels: it isn’t based on Australian humour. It comes out o f the situations and characters we have built, and it’s not reliant on particular Australian sayings or attitudes. I ’m not Australian-born: I ’m European, so I ’m able to incorporate all o f that and make sure that it’s not just fo r Australia.

“Another thing: I don’t think you have to play funny to be funny. That’s a mistake we’ve been making fo r so long. It was something I really had to work hard on with the actors. God, if you played Chekhov funny, yo u ’d fall flat on your face!

“Malcolm is a character who, on the surface, appears to be stupid. In the film, we see an exposition o f his ability; so, even though he might be classified as retarded, we recognize a real, thinking human being behind that who, given the right sort o f circumstances — not an institution, not a patronizing situation — will come out o f himself.

“There are other people like that: they just can’t function in this society. I t ’s much safer just to hide away. For Malcolm, it takes a criminal and his girlfriend to bring some warmth, some life, into his world and to tap his genius. H e’s a very likeable person.”

Nadia Toss

The Surfer Directed by Frank Shields, previously responsible for Hostage, and filmed in Southern Queensland, The Surfer promises to be one of the few Australian films successfully to tap into that bedrock of Aus­ tralian culture, surfing. Gary Day plays an ex-surfie, now proprietor of a beach-hire stand, who gets caught up in a murderand-blackmail plot. At time of going to press, only a promo reel is likely to be available in Cannes.

The Surfer. Directed by Frank Shields. Pro­ duced by James M. Vernon for Night Flight Ltd, in association with Producers’ Circle. Written by David Marsh. With Gary Day, Gosia Dobrowolska, Tony Barry, Rod Mullinar and Kris McQuade.

Sales representation: J & M Films, Rooms 217-218, Carlton. Tel. 38.78.06.

Twelfth Night Tackling the difficult proposition of filming one of Shakespeare’s more elusive comedies (apparently lightweight, with a serious undercurrent), producer Don Catchlove and stage director Neil Armfield (who directed the stage version for the Lighthouse Theatre in South Australia) have opted for a filmed play in a large, highly artificial set (actually the disused Bijou Cinema in the Sydney suburb of Balmain), and have devoted their attention to bringing out the play’s stranger and more modern aspects.

T w e lfth Night. Directed by Neil Armfield. Pro­ duced by Don Catchlove for Twelfth Night Pty

50 — May CINEMA PAPERS

“As well as being a very intelligent kid, Henry Thomas o f E.T. fam e had the experience o f four features behind him. So, on Spirit Chaser, I treated him as an equal partner — not, like, T ’m 39 and y o u ’re fourteen’. I asked him how he’d react in each situation, because I don’t think through the mind o f a fourteen-year-old.

“You can’t treat kids like robots and just tell them what to do: it’s fa r better to create a situation in their minds so they’re not acting it, they’re being it. That applies to all actors, o f course, but kids can operate on that level much more easily than adults. A nd it’s rather fu n watching it happen. ” Brian Trenchard-Smith

Ltd. Written by William Shakespeare. With Ivar Kants, Peter Cummins, Tracy Harvey, Gillian Jones, Russel Kiefel and Stuart McCreery.

Sales representation: J.C. Williamson Film Distri­ butors Pty Ltd, 87 rue d ’Antibes. Tel. 68.10.29.

Don Catchlove may be contacted through them or through the Australian Producers' Sales Office, Salle Touquet, Majestic. Tel. 38.70.94.

2 Friends What started out — and, for that matter, remains — an Australian Broadcasting Cor­ poration telemovie has turned out to be the dark horse of this year’s Australian Cannes contingent, winning a place in the ‘Un certain regard’ sidebar. The director is Jane Campion, who made the highly acclaimed 30-minute short, After Hours (from which one of 2 Friends’ leads, Kris Bidenko, also comes), 2 Friends is the first teleplay by Helen Garner, who wrote Monkey Grip. The producer is Jan Chapman, one of the most consistently innovative of those currently on the ABC roster.

2 Friends. Directed by Jane Campion. Pro­ duced by Jan Chapman for the Australian Broad­ casting Corporation. Written by Helen Garner.

With Emma Coles, Kris Bidenko and Kris McQuade.

Wills and Burke

“I ’ve never worked on a film set before where the energy level from cast and crew was so high: you can see it on the screen. The Surfer is a fast-moving thriller, and its quality is unlike most present-day product in Australia. I think Frank Shields has created a look — or a texture — that is very European, almost French. ” James Vernon

As Hoyts/Edgley’s $9-million dollar epic trundled its way across the continent, producer/director Bob Weis put together his version for just over a fifth of the price and by never going more than an hour’s drive from Melbourne. Or, as the press campaign (one of the film’s more inventive elements) put it: "With courage and camels, they double-crossed a nation’’.

Setting the tone of the piece, Burke is played by Garry McDonald, known to Aus­ tralian televiewers (and others) as Norman Gunston.

W ills and Burke. Directed by Bob Weis.

Produced by Margot McDonald and Bob Weis for Stony Desert Limited. Written by Philip Dalkin.

With Garry McDonald, Kim Gyngell, Peter Collingwood, Jonathan Hardy and Roderick Williams.

Representation: Australian Producers' Sales Offce, Salle Touquet, Majestic. Tel. 38.70.94.

Windrider Marking the directorial debut of cinemato­ grapher Vince Monton, Windrider is a comedy-romance about a windsurfer who falls in love with a rock musician, the former played by Snowy River star Tom Burlinson, the latter by Nicole Kidman, one of the busiest Australian actresses of 1985. The soundtrack is by Kevin Peek, who did the one for the British film, The Long Good Friday.

W indrider. Directed by Vince Monton. Pro­ duced by Paul Barron for Barron Films Ltd. Written by Everett De Roche. With Tom Burlin­ son, Nicole Kidman, Charles ‘B ud’ Tingwell and Jill Perryman.

Representative: Paul D. Barron, Managing^ Direc­ tor, Barron Films, c/o Sofitel-Mediterranee. Tel. 99.22.75. ^

“Kris Bidenko and Emma Coles may be relatively inexperienced, but it’s they who make 2 Friends work. I f they were too experienced, they’d be hitting marks too much, and they’d lose the sense o f idle casualness that they lend to it. A nd any way, it’s ridiculous to consider them anything but professional: they have been from the beginning. They always have their lines down, and there is no difference in their behaviour on set, except that perhaps they get a little more emotional than the adults. ” Jane Campion

CINEMA PAPERS May — 51

N EW ZEA LA N D AT CANNES

Bruno Lawrence Nowhere.

in

Bridge

The 1986 Kiwi presence on the Croisette is a little muted this year, at any rate in terms of numbers. And the familiar first-floor-withterrace at 52 La Croisette has gone — though not, says New Zealand Film Com­ mission Marketing Director, Lindsay Shelton, for reasons of economy: the first floor gaff was not, for some reason, avail­ able this year. The NZFC is thus up one, on the second floor left.

Of the eight films being screened at the Olympia, only four are new to Cannes: Bridge to Nowhere, Other Halves, Arriving Tuesday and Dangerous Orphans. But only the last two are genuine premieres, Bridge to Nowhere having been on show at the AFM, and Other Halves having already successfully played the home country (interestingly enough, before last year’s Cannes Film Festival).

Richard Riddiford’s Arriving Tuesday, formerly Monica, is produced by the ubiquitous Don Reynolds (whose name appears on no less than half this year’s Kiwi crop), and is about an expat returning to the homeland and a former lover. Judy McIntosh stars in what used to be the title role.

Dangerous Orphans (Reynolds again) is directed by John Laing, one of the few veterans of the New Zealand film scene {Beyond Reasonable Doubt, The Lost Tribe, Other Halves). It is an urban thriller, set in Wellington, about a trio of kids who take on a multi-million-dollar heroin set­ up.

Dorothee Pinfold of the Gibson Group is representing Dangerous Orphans and last year’s The Quiet Earth; Shelton is looking after Arriving Tuesday, Other Halves, and last year’s Sylvia and Mr Wrong; and Larry Parr, Paul Davies and Henry Fownes are on hand from Mirage Films/ Challenge Film Corporation to take care of Bridge to Nowhere and to show a promo reel of Queen City Rocker (fuller details in Mike Nicolaidi’s regular New Zealand column at the front of the magazine).

The New Zealand Film Commission, Résidence Festival, 2nd floor left, 52 La Croisette. Tel. 38.35.60.

to

Eleanor D avid in Sylvia.

Heather Bolton in Mr Wrong.

Bruno Lawrence in The Quiet Earth.

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Bridge to Nowhere Dangerous Orphans Arriving Tuesday Other Halves Leave All Fair Bridge to Nowhere The Quiet Earth Mr Wrong Dangerous Orphans Other Halves Arriving Tuesday Sylvia Dangerous Orphans Arriving Tuesday The Quiet Earth Other Halves Bridge to Nowhere

(Olympia (Olympia (Olympia (Olympia (Olympia (Olympia (Olympia (Olympia (Olympia (Olympia (Olympia (Olympia (Olympia (Olympia (Olympia (Olympia (Olympia

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Of Petrov, prisons and grips Three Victorian productions provide exercises in problem-solving Cheating is a major part of Australian filmmaking — in the nicest possible way, of course. For his last film, Wills a n d B u rk e , M e lb o u rn e p ro ducer/director Bob Weis cheated like mad, recreating the red centre of Australia in its generally green bottom right-hand corner. Now, for his latest project, Petrov, which Weis is pro du cing as a four-hour, $3-million-plus miniseries for PBL, the cheating is less spectacular, but equally crucial.

The main problem here has been recreating fifties Canberra in and around eighties Melbourne. To the rescue have come the old Gas & Fuel Building on Flinders Street, all big, tall corridors and dreary panelled rooms, and the regimented neatness of the RAAF base at Laverton — an ideal equivalent for the nation’s capital 30 years ago.

The vital thing, says Petrov's pro­ duction designer Jo Ford, is to cap­ ture the feel of what it was like for Russians to come to Australia in the fifties. “ They moved from a society that was very well-established to . . . well, Australia — and to Canberra in 1954, which would have been, pre­ sumably, as dull as ditchwater. “ You have to remember that this is the early fifties, which would be the equivalent of the mid-forties any­ where else in the world. We talked to the real Mrs Petrov about the interior of the Russian embassy. And, if we’d made the sets as stark as she said they were, no one would have believed us. They would have thought we were doing it all for twoand-six — which is probably what the Russians did their interiors for, anyway!”

Petrov deals with the defection, in 1954, of Soviet diplomat Vladimir Petrov — an event whose reper­ cussions would be felt in Australian politics for two decades to come, and would effectively keep the Aus­ tralian Labor Party out of office for 20 years, thanks to Menzies’ ability to make political capital out of the links between the Soviets and the ALP under its then leader, Dr Evatt, played in the film by Simon Chilvers. “ Act One is a spy thriller,” says director Michael Carson. "Acts Two and Three are the personal story: in Two, Petrov defects; in Three, Mrs Petrov defects. That is at the centre of it, because defecting to a foreign country is almost a bigger deal than shooting your lover, and I question whether there has ever been such a beast as a happy defector. Mrs Petrov didn’t even want to bloody defect: he forced her to. Then, in Act Four, Evatt is the central character, and we focus on the political side of the affair.”

Petrov himself is played by Alex Menglet, a Russian actor who left Russia — he is at pains to point out that he d idn’t defect — in 1980. For him, the series is mainly “ a spy thriller” , or that, at any rate, is how he is approaching it. “ It widens the space for the actor. The way they play Lenin in the Soviet Union, you

have to recreate Lenin, you know?

With Petrov, I’ve got much more space.”

Menglet is not the only Russian on the set of Petrov: during the lunch break, the corridors of the Gas & Fuel Building are heavy with foreign voices, and it turns out that the reason why all the faces in the Embassy party scene which had taken up the morning looked so right, was because they were right.

The extras have provided both director and designer with vital background information on every­ thing from the shape of the armbands Russians wear when mourn­ ing, to the correct way to drink vodka. The more onerous side of the research which lies behind Mac Gudgeon and Cliff Green's script, however, was done by La Trobe Politics lecturer Robert Manne.

One completely unreliable source of information has turned out to be ASIO which, though heavily involved in the Petrov affair, was a fledgling organization at the time. “ ASIO wouldn’t tell us a thing," says Ford. “ They wouldn’t even tell us if they had telephones, in case that gave something away!”

An equal degree of non-coopera­ tion resulted in the other big cheat of the autumn schedule: the finding of a prison location for Entertainment Media’s Just Us. Based on the book

by Gabzrielle Carey, co-author of Puberty Blues, it parallels the love affair between Carey and Parra­ matta inmate, Terry Haley, leading to Carey’s desperate (and unsuccess­ ful) campaign to get Haley released.

The Victorian Department of Cor­ rective Services proved as unhelpful as ASIO: there was no way they were going to allow director Gordon Glenn to film inside — or, for that matter, outside — Pentridge. Glenn and his producer, Peter Beilby, were in despair, until the first assistant director happened to drive past the old Mint in Victoria Parade. With its design intended to keep people out, it looked just like a building meant to keep people in. A boathouse on the edge of Albert Park lake then pro­ vided the setting for the prison theatre, which is where Carey and Haley met.

The boathouse, which had few windows, was much to the liking of Ellery Ryan, a cinematographer for whom the passing of film noir was a dark day [sic]. Stills photographer Emma Shmith was having major problems, but Ryan remained unmoved. “ If the stills photographer doesn’t complain,” he said, “ I feel like I’ve done something wrong.”

Beilby and Glenn, who met while both were working in the Media Centre at La Trobe, and who have worked together on a number of previous projects, have spent two occasionally frustrating years putting Just Us together. Beilby sees the film as having a small but real theatrical potential, citing Fran as an example of a movie whose limited big-screen exposure could do wonders for its ►

P o litic a l intrigues: Sw aw om ir Wabik (Dr Michael Bia/oguski), Melita Jurisic (Nina Morozov) and Eva Sitta (Evdokia Petrov) in Petrov.

Cautious smiles all round: Dennis Moore (Rupert Lockwood), Bill Fox (Fergen O ’Sullivan) and A lex M englet (V ladim ir P etro v) in Petrov.

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TV career: "Fran is going to rate its arse off when it is shown on TV,” he says.

Just Us has, says Beilby, a twin focus: the ‘people’ story — the rela­ tionship between the inmate (played

by Scott Burgess) and the journalist (Catherine McGuinness, soon to be seen in The Right-Hand Man); and the issue of the injustice done to Terry Haley who, since the age of nine, has spent only one year of his life on the outside. “ We were all out­ raged that that kind of situation could exist: that’s another reason we made the film,” he says.

Glenn, who had spent most of the lunchbreak asleep on the grass, indicating the rigours of a five-week schedule which requires him to deliver three minutes of screen time a day, is eager to point out that Just Us is not a stereotypical prison tale — all beatings and vicious warders and clanging doors. ” We did try to get permission to go out to Pentridge,” he says, “ but they wouldn’t cooperate at all. I think you can understand their point of view: every time someone does make a prison film, it’s always very unsympathetic to the system. What we’re trying to do here is show how it happens. In Ted Roberts’s script, there is this one warder who is out­ raged that they can get away with this. I wanted to show how that came about, not just portray him as mean and vicious.”

Budgetary limitations on Just Us may have produced a tight shooting schedule, but they do not seem to have otherwise hampered the project.

Working with “ an enormous cast of untried actors” and a low budget does make for an arduous situation, however — a fact to which Dogs in Space producer Glenys Rowe will readily testify. There have been spectacular moments: organizing six rock bands and a crowd of 200 at the Seaview Ballroom, dressing up 350 people as punks in an hour for a shoot at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. But surprisingly, one of the most spectacular shots has come from the grip department.

Noel McDonald’s double-armed crane was built especially for a shot in Dogs in Space, which demanded more flexibility and movement than the usual single crane, or even the more sophisticated Louma crane, could handle. Constructed by McDonald at a cost of $9,000, it is the only one of its kind in Australia.

The crane itself looks like a pre­ historic monster, particularly when parked in a narrow, tumble-down street in Richmond, where it is set up on the back of a gleaming, silver converted F100.

For the shot, the camera has to follow the actor walking past the front of a two-storey house and in the gate; it then has to move back, go straight up to the top verandah and in the window of the front room.

In effect, it is a double movement with the small, top, crane making corrections. A normal crane would only have been able to go up or down and through an arc of less than what was needed to follow the action. This had to work in a street less than six metres wide. “ In the States, they would have used a Louma crane on the end of a

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Chapman,” says McDonald, “ which is basically the same as what I’ve done here,except the Louma crane has a ’hot head’ (that is, it’s remote control). You can’t ride a person on it. That’s good and bad. But if you’re doing a critical shot like this one, it’s probably better to have the operator there with the camera than rely on video splits. This crane is also a little thicker and bulkier, but it still only weighs about half a ton.”

One of the biggest problems the grips had was indeed the weight.

With the camera operator on the end of the small crane and the assistant grip (Wayne Marshall) on the big crane, there needed to be a good counterbalance — a 1,000 pound block of lead, in fact. The double crane also required two other operators on the ground.

Eight takes and the shot was done. After two weeks of prepara­ tion, everything in the grip depart­ ment, at least, seemed to go s m o o th ly. But, a c c o rd in g to McDonald, that won’t be the end of this new device. “ There are so many uses for the double crane,” he enthused. “ At different times when I’m on jobs or just driving around, I dream up all these crazy shots, hoping that somebody will say, ‘let’s do it!’ ” He believes cranes should be used more often in Australia because it multiplies possibilities for the DOP and saves setting-up time: “ You don’t lay tracks, you just move the arm and you get a dolly shot. If you want to go down, you move the crane to ground level and don’t have to build scaffolds or rostrums.”

Photo by Steve Pyke

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Production notes The Australian obsession with crocodiles continues. Dark Age, the $4.8-million thriller about a sevenmetre rogue croc that terrorizes the inhabitants of Darwin, started shoot­ ing on 21 April in Northern Queens­ land. In other exotic locations, this time Sydney(?) and Bali, filming began on Promises to Keep, starring Wendy Hughes and John Lone.

Producer Jan Sharp’s other project, The Umbrella Woman, with Rachel Ward, Bryan Brown and Sam Neill is underway, as is Barron Films’ Shame, a drama set in an outback town.

The feature film/miniseries Great Expectations — The Australian Story will be shooting . until 11 July.

Directed by Tim Burstall, it is an ABC/International Film Management co-production. Filming on Richard Lowenstein’s Dogs in Space is now on the downhill; Set in inner urban Melbourne in the late seventies, it is one of the few films attempting to commit contemporary events to celluloid.

Production of Yoram Gross’s animation features Dot and the Bunyip and Dot and the Whale will be spurred) on by the company’s

recent deal with Disney. Both films were sold in a package which in­ cluded five feature films. Another animated project, Magpie Produc­ tions’ Footrot Flats — The Movie, is still going, and is expected to be ready, by Christmas.

Producers of the comedy, Spirits of the Air, originally planned as a 50-minute short, have got further financial backing for an 86-minute feature film and are shooting from 14 April to 25 May. The Bee Eater and Just Us wrapped at the end of March. Still in pre-production, Some­ thing Great is yet to find another director, after Jonathan Hardy’s name was crossed off the list.

In the television industry, another change of directors (or direction) caused more drama than most. Jack Thompson’s directing debut in the miniseries, Joe Wilson, was abruptly ended after two weeks of shooting.

Filming began again on 14 April, this time with Geoffrey Nottage at the helm and a new DOP, Peter Levy.

Television crews are also flocking to the desert. Two more productions set in the outback both rolled in April: The Last Frontier, a $10-million miniseries starring Linda Evans; and Gallagher's Travels, a telefeature directed by Michael Caulfield for Network Ten. Finally, Shark’s (not crocodiles) Paradise, the story of three undercover cops working on the Gold Coast, began production in May. .. ^

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E d ito r......................................................Jill Bilcock Prod, assistant................................................Lydia Cover Exec, produce r.................................Robert Le Tet 1st asst d ire c to r................................................ Bob Donaidson Prod, m anager...............................................Lynda House 2nd asst d ire c to r................................... Ian Kenny Unit m a n a g e r........................................ Kim Lewis 3rd asst d ire c to r..............................Brian Gilm ore Prod, s e c re ta rie s........................ Sue Stephens, Location lia is o n .............................Stuart Menzies Jakki Mann C o n tin u ity......................................C hristine Lipari 2nd asst d ire c to r.............................................. PaulG rinder C a s tin g .................................................................Liz M ullinar 3rd asst d ire c to r........................ Margot Salomon Camera o p e ra to r...........................................David Eggby C o ntinuity....................................................... Gayle Pigalle Focus p u lle r.................................. David Stevens Casting co n su lta n ts.................................. Forcast C lappe r/loa der.............................................. Leigh Parkei Camera o perator.................................. Paul Elliot Key g r ip ............................................................Greg W allace Focus p u lle r.................................................... Steve McDonald G a ffe r............................................................... Colin W illiam s C lapper/loader......................... M andy W alker Boom o p e ra to r...............................................Grant Stuart Key g rip .................................Noel M cDonald Asst art d ire c to r.............................David O 'G rady Asst g r ip ................................W ayne Marshall Casual extras d re s s e r..................M arita Mussett G affer............................................ Paul O ’Neill C o-ordinator.......................................................PhilChambers Boom operator.................. Stephen Vaughan M ake-up..........................................................Fiona Campbell Art d irector................................. Jody Borland S u pervisor..................................... Sandy Cichello Hair and m ake-up..................... Carolyn Nott, H a irdre sser.................................... Pietra Robbins initiation into manhood through trial and ordeal Troy Davies W a rd ro b e .........................................................Jane Hyland after a plane crash in the remote Australian W Stand-by w a rd ro b e .....................................Margot Lindsaya rd ro b e .................... Lynne Marie Milburn, rainforest. It is a life or death journey that M a c h in is t...................................................Fay Day Karen Ansell involves m agic and ritual.

Props b u y e r.............. ...Steven Jones-Evans Props m a s te r................................ Ross Newman Standby p ro p s .................... M acgregor Knox Stand-by p rops................................................Chris Jam es PANDEMONIUM C o-ordinator...............................................Krystine Porter Special e ffe c ts ............................Peter Stubbs Prod, c o m p a n y ................K.F.M. Pandem onium Set decorators................................................ Peter Kendall, Set co n stru ctio n .............................. Ian McLay Pty Ltd Asst e d ito r...............Christina De Podolinsky Barry Kennedy P roducer........................................Robert Francis Set c onstruction.............................Bruce Michell, Music performed D irector.......................................... Haydn Keenan Campbell Burden, by....................... Various M elbourne bands Scriptw riters......................................Peter Gailey, Ron Michell, Sound e d ito r..............................Dean Gawen AVENGERS OF TH E CHINA S E A S Haydn Keenan M urray Wilson, Stunts co-ordinator................... Glen Boswell Prod, com p a n y........................... Nilsen Premiere Exec, producer................................. Patric Juillet Mai Punton, Still photography...................................... Steve Pyke P roducer............................................................Tom Broadbridge Assoc, p ro d u c e rs .............................Alex Cutler, Johnny Rodder Best b o y ..................................................... Peter Scott D irector............................ Brian Trenchard-Sm ith Michael W ilcox Sound s upe rv is o r......................... Terry Rodman Runner............................................Jules Taylor S c rip tw rite r...................................................Patrick Edgeworth M usic.................................................... Greg Ham, Still photography.............................................Greg Noakes Laboratory............. ...................................... VFL Based on the original idea Colin Hay, Painter.............................................................. Allan Simms L e n g th ..............................................93 m inutes by................................................................Patrick Edgeworth Jam es Reyne, Brannigan's asst and c h a u ffe u r............Ian Jury G auge..................Super 35 mm Techniscope E d ito r.......................................................Alan Lake Ross Wilson R unner....................................................Rick Lewis Shooting s to c k ......................................... Kodak 5294 Producer’s assistan t...................... Am anda Hay P hotography............................. David Sanderson Publicity...........................................................Suzie Howie L ab ora tory................................................Colorfilm Sound and m usic d ire c to r..........Cameron Allan Cast: Michael Hutchence (Sam), Saskla Post C a tering...................................................... Richard Roques B u d g e t..................................................$4.6 million E d itor.................................................... Paul Healy (Anna), Nique Needles (Tim), Andrew ClaytonB u dget.................................................................. $7 million G a u g e .................................... 35 mm anam orphic Prod, de s ig n e r..............................M elody Cooper Jones (Nick), Tony Helou (Luchio), Martii Coles L e n g th .................................................................120 m inutes S y n opsis: A contem porary action-adventure Cast: Am anda Dole,Candy Raymond, Ian (Mark), Catherine Delaney (The girl), Peter Cast: Laura Brannigan (Jenny Anderson). story set on the South China Sea. Nimmo, David Argue, Richard Moir, Mercia W alsh (Anthony), Caroline Lee (Jenny), Gary Synopsis: A contem porary com edy/dram a set Deane-Johns, Henk Johannes, David Bracks, Foley (Barry). in M elbourne and New York. It is the story of a Ashley Grenville.

TH E C R IC K ET ER S yn opsis: A fast and furious love story set female Am erican singing star who has S yn opsis: A pagan passion play set under and amid the comedy, chaos and crazy con­ Prod, com pany........................................... M onroe Stahr achieved worldwide success in the rock music on the shores of Bondi beach, with bulk fu s io n of a ty p ic a l in n e r -c ity s h a re d Productions Ltd field, but now wants success as a dram atic ratbaggery and m eaning. household as the indulgent years of the P ro d u ce r..........................................................Chris Kiely actress. She travels to Australia and struggles seventies give way to the harsher realities of to rebuild her career and her life.

Director.............................................................Barry Peak THE ROBOT STO R Y life in the eighties.

Based on the original idea b y ............Barry Peak Prod, com pany............................................. Yoram Gross Exec, producer.............................................. Phillip Dwyer DARK AGE Film Studio Pty Ltd Prod, m anage r..................................................Ray Pond Prod, c o m p a n y ................F.G. Film Productions DOT AND TH E BUNYIP P ro d u c e r.......................................................Yoram Gross Prod, acco u n ta n t......................................... Maree Mayall (Aust.) Pty Ltd for D ire c to r......................................................... Yoram Gross Prod, com pany............................................. Yoram Gross B u d g e t......................................................$690,000 international Film M anagement Limited S crip tw rite r......................................................Greg Flynn Film Studio Pty Ltd G auge................................................Super 16 mm Dist. com pany....................... RKO Pictures Inc. Assoc, produce r......................................... Sandra Gross Dist. co m p a n y ................................Cori Films Inc. S yn opsis: T here’s a stranger in town whose through Embassy Home Entertainm ent L e n g th ...................................................75 minutes P ro d u c e r.......................................................

Yoram Gross skill with a cricket bat is almost unnatural . . .

Producers...............................Antony I. Ginnane, G auge........................................................... 35 mm D ire c to r......................................................... Yoram Gross he’s gotta have a secret.

Basil Appleby S c rip tw rite r......................................................

Greg Flynn S yn opsis: A boy and his robot pal are D ire c to r........................................ Arch Nicholson Director of p h o to g ra p h y.......................... Graham Sharp launched into space.

DOT AND TH E TR EE S crip tw riters................................ Tony Morphett, Director of a nim a tion...............................

Jacques M uller Sonia Borg, Prod, com pany............................................. Yoram Gross Assoc, produce r..........................................Sandra Gross SOMETHING G REAT Stephen Cross Film Studio Pty Ltd L e n g th ...................................................75 minutes Based on the novel b y .............. Grahame W ebb P ro d u ce r....................................................... Yoram GrossProd, com pany..........................Boulevard Films G auge...................................................... ....35 mm P h otog rap hy.............................. Andrew Lesnie D ire c to r......................................................... Yoram GrossD irector.......................................To be appointed C haracter v oices: Robyn Moore, Keith Scott.

Sound re c o rd is t.............................................. Gary W ilkins S c rip tw rite r...................................................... Greg FlynnS c rip tw rite rs................................ Frank Howson, S yn opsis: A circus owner attem pts to capture Prod, designer............................. David Copping Anim ation d ire cto r..........................................AtholHenry Jonathan Hardy a mysterious Bunyip, but Dot and her bushland Exec, p ro d u c e r............................. W illiam Gavin Assoc, p roduce r......................................... Sandra GrossExec, producers.......................... Frank Howson, friends attem pt to foil his plans. Dot soon Prod, m anager.............................Renate Wilson L e n g th ................................................... 75 minutes Peter Boyle discovers that the circus is merely a front for an Unit m anager...................................... Chris Jones G auge!....... ...................................................35 mm Prod, accou ntan t..............................Newell Lock international w ildlife sm uggling operation.

Prod, secretary.............................. Paula Bennett S yn opsis: Dot and Old Tom, the violin-m aker, B u dget................................................$5.5 million Prod, accountant...............................................Lea Collins find the spread of a big city threatens their L e n g th ................................................ 120 m inutes 2nd asst director................................................Kim Anning S yn opsis: The true story of the trials and lifestyles.

DOT AND TH E W HALE C o ntinuity....................................... Kay Hennesy triumphs of Australia’s golden boy of boxing Casting......................Martin Productions Pty Ltd Prod, com pany............................................. Yoram Gross who fell from grace as a result of World W ar I ’s DOT IN CO N CERT Focus p u lle r....................................................

Colin Deane Film Studio Pty Ltd conscription hysteria and was resurrected as a Prod, com pany............................................. Yoram Gross Clapper/loader............................... Peter T arakas Dist. c o m pany............................ Cori Films Inc. hero, when he died in Memphis, lonely, Film Studio Pty Ltd Key g rip .............................................................Brett McDowell P ro d u c e r.......................................................Yoram Gross bewildered and reviled at the age of 21.

P ro d u ce r....................................................... Yoram Gross Asst g r ip ..................................................John Tate D ire c to r......................................................... Yoram Gross D ire cto r..........................................................Yoram Gross Camera support system/ S criptw riter.......................................................John Palmer TER RA A U STRA LIS S c rip tw rite r...................................................... Greg Flynn arm ourer...................................................... Brian Bosisto Based on the original idea Assoc, produce r..........................................Sandra GrossProd, com pany................................ Yoram Gross G a ffe r...............................................................Peter O ’ Brienb y ............................................................... Yoram Gross Film Studio L e n g th ................................................... 75 minutes E le c tric ia n ...................................................... Steve CarterPhotography............................... Graham Sharpe P ro d u c e r...........................................Yoram Gross G auge........................................................... 35 mm Art d ire c to r......................................Ron Highfield Director of a nim a tion......................Ray Nowland D ire c to r............................................. Yoram Gross Synopsis: Dot and her friends team up for a Asst art d ire c to r.......................... Ro Bruen-Cook Assoc, produce r......................................... Sandra Gross S c rip tw rite rs................................................... Greg Flynn, musical special which features a ’ ’ liv e " star Art departm ent runner................Toby Copping L e n g th ................................................................... 75 minutes Yoram Gross performer.

Make-up supervisor.....................Bob McCarron G auge........................................................... 35 mm Photography...............................Graham Sharpe Make-up artist..................................... Sonja Smuk Cast: Character voices: Robyn Moore, Keith Director of 8341: TH E PYJAM A G IRL MURDER H airdresser.......................................................PaulW illiam s Scott. model design..........................................Norman Yeend (Working title) Wardrobe supervisor....................................Annie Benjamin S yn opsis: In a desperate bid to rescue a whale Consultant z o o lo g is t....................... Dr M. Archer Wardrobe a s s is ta n t.............

Lucinda M cGuigan stranded on a beach, Dot and Neptune the Prod, c o m p a n y....... U lladulla Picture Company L e n g th ...................................................80 minutes Props b u y e r................................................. Derrick Chetwyn dolphin hunt the ocean depths searching for a in association with G auge........................................................... 35 mm wise old octopus called The Oracle who knows Standby p ro p s.................................................

Liam Liddle Casablanca Film W orks S yn opsis: Based on scientific findings, the film how to save whales.

Special effects/model m a k e r.............Bill Dennis P ro d u ce rs........................................................John Rogers, is set in prehistoric Australia.

C arpenter..................Andrew W hitney-G ardiner John W all R ig g e r.........................................................Bernard Martin D ire cto r.............................................................John Rogers Construction m a n a g e r.................................. John Parker FOOTROT F LA T S — TH E MOVIE Scriptw riters...................................................... Sue Tate, Asst construction m anager...............Paul Martin John Rogers Prod, com pany............. Magpie Productions Ltd Stunts co-ordina tor........................................Chris Anderson Based on the novel by...............Robert Coleman P rodu cers........................................ John Barnett, Still photography............................................... Jim Townley Prod, d e sig n e r..............................................DarrellLass Pat Cox Transport m anager.............................Ralph Clark Exec, producer............................. Russell Keddie D irector................................................M urray Ball Asst transport m anager...... Jerem y Hutchinson P ost-production.............................. W inning Post Screenplay.........................................

M urray Ball, Best b o y ................................... Jonathan Hughes BA CKSTAG E Lab ora tory.......................................................Atlab Tom Scott Production ru n n e r/tra in e e .............Ffion Murphy Prod, com p a n y............ Backstage Films Pty Ltd B u d g e t.............................................................$2.75 million Based on the characters P u b lic ity ............................................................. Rea Francis L e n g th .................................................................120m inutes P roducer.......................................G eoff Burrowes created b y ....................................... M urray Ball C atering......................... MMK Catering Services Anim ation director..........................Robbed Smit G auge............................................................35 mm Co-producer................................... Frank Howson L ab ora tory................................................Colorfilm Shooting s to c k ............................................... 9247,5294 D ire c to r.............

Script editor.................................Chris Hampson ..... Jonathan Hardy Lab. lia iso n ............................Richard Piorkowski Synopsis: The film is based on the true story of Production m a n a g e r............ Mark D ’Arcy-Irvine S crip tw riters..... .....Jonathan Hardy, L e n g th ...................................................................90 minutes Production asst...........................Kate Robinson the Pyjama Girl Murder. A girl's body was Frank Howson G auge............................................................ 35 mm found in Sydney in 1934 and kept in a form alin Prod, d e s ig n e r.. ..................Les Binns Shooting s to c k ..............................................Kodak Background a d is t.................... Richard Zaloudek bath at Sydney University, on view to Synopsis: A huge rogue crocodile terrorises Photography...... ........ Keith W agstaff Colour s ty lis t............................................... Sharon Jackson thousands of people, until the murder was the inhabitants of Darwin.

Sound re c o rd is t. ...John Schiefelbein Ink and paint..................................................... Jack Petruska solved in 1944.

E d itor.................. ................. Ray Daley (Animation Aids) ............. John Capek Prod, designer...

R e n d e rin g ........................................................VickiJoyce DOGS IN SP A C E Exec, producers .Geoffrey Burrowes, INITIATION C a m e ra ..........................................................Jenny Osche Prod, com pany.................. Entertainm ent Media Dennis W right, E ditor............................................................. Dennis Jones M anagement c o m p a n y ......... International Film Pty Ltd in association with John Kearney Sound e d ito r......................................John McKay M anagement Ltd the Burrowes Film Group Assoc, p ro d u c e r... ...............Peter Boyle Prod, acco u n ta n ts..........M oneypenny Services P rodu cer......................................Jane Ballantyne P ro d u c e r......................................... Glenys Rowe Prod, supervisor... ................ Bill Regan (Australia) D irector........................................................ MichaelPearce D ire c to r................................Richard Lowenstein Prod, co-ordinator. ...................

Jan Stott David Petterson (New Zealand) Scriptw riter......................................................... Jim Barton S crip tw riter.......................... Richard Lowenstein Unit m a n a g e r....... ................ Don Keyte Producer’s a ssista n t..............................

Rose Lai Exec, p ro d u ce r.......................Antony I. Ginnane Based on the original idea Asst unit m anager............................ Tom Jannike B u dget...................................................................$3 million b y ......................................Richard Lowenstein Lay-out adis ts............................ Bruce Pederson, Prod, secretary...........................Karen McKenna G auge........................................................... 35 mm P h otog rap hy............................. Andrew de Groot Steve Lumley, A cco unta nt....... Stan Seserko — M anagecomp S y n opsis: A high adventure story of a boy’s Sound recordist.............................. Dean Gawen Pere Van Reik, ►

The Cinema Papers Production Survey

A full listing of the features, telemovies, documentaries and shorts now in preproduction, production or post-production in Australia.

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Production Survey continued

Costum e d esigner.................. Jeannie Cameron M ake-up................................... Felicity Schoeffel Hairdresser..................................................... ..PaulPattison W a rd ro b e ................................M argot M cCartney Vehicle co-ordinator....................................Robert M cLeod PRO M ISES TO K EEP Props buy e r/d re s s e r..................................Harvey Mawson Standby p ro p s .................................... Brian Laing Prod, com pany........................................ Laughing Kookaburra Special effects...................................Brian Pierce Productions Set c onstruction................................Ray Pattison P ro d u c e r................................................Jane Scott Still photography.................................Suzy Wood D ire c to r..............................................Phillip Noyce G a uge............................................................35 mm S c rip tw rite r............................................ Jan Sharp Cast: Sigrid Thornton (Blanche McBride), Exec, p roduce r...................................... Jan Sharp Simon Burke (Wyn), M artin Sacks (Slate).

B udget....................................$2.6 m illion approx.

S yn opsis: A com pelling dram a of abduction Cast: W endy Hughes, John Lone. and obsession set along the M urray River in S yn opsis: An exotic romance to be shot on the late sixties. Two brothers, Slate and Wyn, locations in Sydney and Bali. kill a policem an w hile robbing the bank of a sm all country town. A young school teacher, SHAME GREAT EXPECTATIONS — Blanche M cBride, witnesses the crim e and is Prod, co m p a n y................... Barron Film s Limited THE AUSTRALIAN STORY kidnapped by the brothers and taken across Dist. c o m p a n y ....................................... UAA Film the state to a hideout.

Prod, c o m p a n y............ Australian Broadcasting M anagem ent Limited Corporation, International Film P roducers........................................Damien Parer, SP IR IT S OF TH E AIR M anagement Limited Paul Barron P ro d u c e rs............................................ Ray Alehin, Prod, c o m p a n y ............ M eaningful Eye Contact Director.............................................. Steve Jodrell Tom Burstall Pty Ltd S crip tw riters.............................M ichael Brindley, D ire c to r............................................................... Tim Burstall Producers.....................M eaningful Eye Contact, Beverley Blankenship S crip tw riter.........................................................Tim Burstall Andrew M cPhail Based on the original idea Based on the original idea D ire c to r ................................ A lexander Proyas b y ........................................... Michael Brindley, b y ....................................................................Tom Burstall S c rip tw rite rs ...........................Alexander Proyas, Beverley Blankenship Sound re c o rd is t..............................................Peter Barber Peter Sm alley P h otog rap hy................................. Joe Pickering E d itors......................................... Tony Kavanagh, Photography.......................................David Knaus Sound recordist..................................... Kim Lord Lyn Solly Sound recordist a tta c h m e n t...........David W hite E d ito r...................................................Kerry Regan Prod, d e signer...............................................Laurie Johnson E d ito r.................................................. Craig W ood Prod, designer...................................... Phil Peters C om poser.................................................... G eorge Dreyfus Prod, de s ig n e r...............................S eanC a llinan Exec, producer..............................David Thomas Exec, p ro d u c e r.......................Antony I. Ginnane Exec, p roduce rs............................................. AFC, Location m anager........................ Ross Reading Prod, m anage r.............................................Dennis KielyProd, c o-ordina tor.....................Susie Campbell M MA M anagem ent Location m anager.............................................. ValW indon Prod, m a n a g e r........................................... Andrew M cPhail Prod, m a n a g e r.......................... Debbie Copland Prod, s ecretary....................... Maureen Charlton Unit m anage r................................... Steven M iller Unit m anage r...................................................John Rapsey Prod, a ccou ntan t........................... Judy M urphy Prod, a s s is ta n t...............................Allison Pickup Prod, s ecretary..................Am anda Etherington 1st asst d ire c to r..............................W ayne Barry (Broken Hill) Prod, accountant....................The Balancing Act 2nd asst d irector..............................................G ary Stephens 1st asst director..........................................Andrew McPhail 1st asst d irector..................................Stuart Wood Unit m anager......................................... Don Page 2nd asst d ire c to r..................................................Kit Q uarry 2nd asst director........................... Peter Kearney C o ntinuity........................................ Sian Fatouros Focus p u lle r.......................................................Lisa Sharkey 3rd asst d ire c to r................................. Chris Lynch C a s tin g ........................................................... Jenny AllenC o ntinuity....................................C hris O 'Connell Camera atta ch m e n t....................................Allison Maxwell Lighting c am eram a n.....................Peter H endry Boom o p e ra to r...................................C raig Wood C a s tin g ..............................................................John Rapsey Camera o p e ra to r........................... Roger Lanser Art d ire c to r......................................... Peter M iller Casting consultants.......... Maizels & Associates Focus p u lle r...................................................... PaulPandoulis Art dept ru n n e r....................... Phil Cunningham Lighting cam eram an....................Joe Pickering C lappe r/loa der............................... Robert Foster Costume d e s ig n e rs ....................................Angela Tonks, Camera op e ra to r.......................... Joe Pickering Key g r ip ............................................................ Long John M atthew Anderson Asst g rip ............................................................ G ary Burdett M ake-up..................................................... M atthew Anderson C lappe r/loa der................................... M arkZ agar G a ffe r.................................................................. Tim Jones H a irdre sser............................................... M atthew Anderson Key g rip ....................................... Karel Akkerm an E le c tric ia n s....................................................... Ken Pettigrew, Asst g rip ...........................................................David CrossCarpenters...................................................... David Thompso Robert Wickham Danny 2nd unit p h o to g ra p h y.............Simon Akkerm an Boom operator.............................. David Pearson Set construction G a ffe r................................................................. Guy Bessell-Brown Designers............................... John Pryce-Jones, Boom o p e ra to r................................................ G ary Carr m a n a g e rs ..........Derek W yness (Broken Hill), Ken Muggleston Peter W atson (studio) Art d ire c to r.............................................Phil Peters Asst designer...................................................... ColRudder Asst art d ire c to r........................................ Julianne Mills Flying m achine Costume d esigner.....................................Q uentin HoleCostume designer........................................... NoelHowell construction.......................Jonathon Clouston M ake-up.......................................Christine Elhert, M ake-up........................................................M arilyn SmitsModel m aker...................................................Lewis M orley F o o tro t F lats.

Jiri Pavlin Editing a s s is ta n t............................................Alicia Ganvin W ardro be..........................................................NoelHowell W a rd ro b e ............................................ Ron Dutton C a te rin g ...................................The Happy Carrot Standby w a rd ro b e ...................................... Denise Napier FRENCHM AN’S FARM W ardrobe as s t.................................... R oily Cano L ab ora tory............................................... Colorfilm Props b u y e r................................................... Kelvin Sexton Prod, com p a n y...........................Mavis Bram ston P rops.................................................... C lint W hite, Lab. liaiso n..................................W arren Keavers Standby p rops................................................Kelvin Sexton Productions Limited Russell Burton, L e n g th ................................................... 86 m inutes Special effects/ C hris Ryman Dist c o m p a n y .............................CEL in Australia, G vehicle co-o rd in a to r.................................. Peter Marlowauge............................................................16 mm Goldfarb Distribution Inc in USA Props b u y e rs ................................................ Paddy McDonald, Art dept co-ordina tor.................................... Heinz Boek Shooting s to c k ................................................7291 P ro d u ce r..................................... Jam es Fishburn Susan G lavich C a rpenter.......................................................... Alex DixonCast: MichaelLake (Felix), M elissa Davis Director.................................................... Ron W ay Special e ffects................................Brian McClue (Betty), The Norm (Smith).

Set construction............................Peter Carmen S crip tw riter.................................. W illiam Russell A rm ourer..........................................Peter Leggett Stunts co-ordinator........................................ Peter WestS y n opsis: A crippled man and his fanatically Set dresser............................. Robert Hutchinson religious sister live in a shack in the m iddle of a Based on the screenplay S tu n ts .....................................W.A. Stunt Agency, Construction m anager...................... Laurie Dorn vast desert. The man dream s of leaving in a b y ............................................... W illiam Russell John Clarson Asst e d ito rs .....................................................SandiEyles, P h otog rap hy........................Malcolm M cCulloch M echanic........................................................ David Fry flying m achine of his own invention. A com edy W ayne Pashley of the ironic.

Sound recordist.................................................Max Bowring Best boy.......................................Phillip G olum bic Neg. c u tte r ..........................................Pam Toose E d ito r............................................Pippa Anderson Runners............................................................... Nic Sadler, Sound editors..................................................Peter Townsend, TH E STEAM DRIVEN A DVEN TURES C o m poser.............................Tom m y Tycho MBE Trish Robinson Lawrie Silvestrin OF RIVERBOAT B IL L Exec, producer.............................................Colson W orner B u d g e t................................................$1,160,000 Assoc, p ro d u c e r.............................................. M att W hiteM ixer..................................................................M ark W alker L e n g th ................................................................... 90 minutes Prod, com pany.........................Phantascope Ltd Stunts co-ordinator........................................

Peter Arm strong Prod, co-ordinator...............................Tina Butler G auge.................................................................... 16mm P roducer...........................................Paul W illiam s Still photography...........................Gary Johnston Prod, m anager.................................... Penny Wall Shooting s to c k .................................. Kodak 7291 D irector............................................. Paul W illiam s Horsem Location m anager..........................................David Aderm ann aster...............................................Graham W are Cast: Deborra-Lee Furness (Asta), Simone S criptw riter.........................................................C liff Green Special horses............................... Evanna H arris Prod, s e c re ta ry ........................M argaret G arland Buchanan (Lizzie), Tony Barry (Tim), David Based on the novel b y ..................................... C liff Green P u blicity..........................................G eorgie Brown Prod, a c c o u n ta n t....................................... Belinda W illiam s Franklin (Danny), Peter Aanensen (Cuddy), Photography...................................................Diane Bullen C a te rin g ......................................... A & B Catering 1st asst d ire c to r........................................... Dorian Newstead G illian Jones (Tina), M argaret Ford (Norma), Sound re c o rd is t...........................Brian Laurence S tu d io s ..............................

ABC, French’s Forest 2nd asst d ire c to r............................................. G ary W ade Bill M cCluskey (Ross).

C om poser.......................................Kevin Hocking 3rd asst d ire c to r................................................Kurt OlsenMixed a t.................................ABC Forest Studios S yn opsis: A female lawyer inadvertently dis­ A nim ation........................................ Gus McLaren, Lab o ra to ry................................................Colorfilm C o n tin u ity ..........................................Anthea Dean covers the brutal background to an attack on a Paul W illiam s, Length........................ M iniseries 6 x 50 minutes, C a s tin g ..........................................................Jam es Fishburn young girl in an Australian outback town. Spec­ M aggie Geddes, Feature film 2 hours C inem atographer......................................... Henry Pierce ta c u la r stu n ts p u n c tu a te th is pow erful, Steven French G auge............................................................35 mm Focus p u lle r......................................................Brad Shield dram atic contem porary story.

L ab ora tory...............Victorian Film Laboratories C a s t: Jo h n S ta n to n (M ag w itch), S igrid C lappe r/loa der................................................ TontiC onnolly L e n g th ................................................... 75 m inutes Thornton (Bridget), Robert Coleby (ComS LA T E & WYN AND BLAN CHE Camera a ssistan t...........................................G eoff Owen G auge............................................................16 mm peyson), Noel Ferrler (Jaggers), G erard McBRIDE Key g rip ..............................................................Jack Lester Shooting s to c k ................................ Eastm ancolor Kennedy (Tooth), Todd Boyce (Pip), Anne Asst g rip ........................................................W arren Grieef Prod, com pany.................. Ukiyo Films Australia Cast: Voice overs: Frank Thring, Brian Louise Lam bert (Estella), Bruce Spence Pty Ltd for,International Hannan, Hamish Hughes, Beate Horrison, (Gargery), Ron Haddrick (Tankerton), Jill G affer................................................................ Tony Holtham Film M anagem ent Limited D ebby C u m m in g , Ben W illia m s, Adam Forster (Miss Havisham).

E lectrician....................................................... Adam W illiam s Dist. c o m pany..........Hemdale Film Corporation Williams.

S y n opsis: G reat E x p e c ta tio n s — T he A u s ­ Boom o pe rator.................................................M ark Keating P ro d u c e r........................................................... Tom Burstall S yn opsis: Anim ated adventure set on the tra lia n S to ry takes the character Abel Mag­ Art d ire c to r...................................................R ichard Rooker D ire c to r,............................................................. Don M cLennan M urray River at the turn of the century. witch from Charles D ickens’s novel G reat M ake-up/hairdresser............. M argaret Lingham S crip tw riter........................................................

Don McLennan Riverboat Bill and his crew attem pt to protect E x p e c ta tio n s , and builds a story around his W ardro be...................................................Maureen Klestov Based on the novel b y ..............................G eorgia Savage an illegal bunyip from the long arm of the law.

W ard, a ssista n t..............................................Helen Mainslife, from the tim e he was exiled in Australia as Photography...................................................David Connell a convict, until he made his fortune and Props b u y e r................................................Jill Loot Sound re c o rd is t......................................... Andrew Ramage returned to England.

Standby props................................................. John W atson E d itor................................................................Peter Friedrich Special e ffe c ts ................................................ Peter Shoesm ith Prod, designer.............................................. Paddy Reardon Set construction.............................................David Franks PETER KENNA’S Exec, producers..................... Antony I. G innane, Asst e d ito r.......................................................... Ray Cooper UMBRELLA WOMAN W illiam Fayman Neg. m a tc h in g ...............................................Atlab Prod, com pany................. Laughing Kookaburra Line producer........................ Brian D. Burgess Musical d irector...................Tom m y Tycho MBE Productions Prod, co-ordinator.................

Rosslyn Abernethy Sound e d ito r...... ..................................... G reg Bell Dist. c o m p a n y ........................ Atlantic Releasing Unit m anage r.............................................. M arcus Skipper Editing assistan t.................... Danielle W eissner Help us make this Production Corporation Prod, assistant...............................................Jenny G ray M ix e r.........................................Julian Ellingworth Survey as complete as poss­ Prod, a c c o u n ta n t.......................C andice Dubois Stunts co-ordina tor........................................... PhilBrockProducer............................................... Jan Sharp ible. If you have something D ire c to r............................................Ken Cameron Account assistant..........................................Debra Cole Still p h o to g ra p h y................... Richard Campion, S c rip tw rite r......................................................Peter Kenna 1st asst d ire c to r..............................................Ross Hamilton which is about to go into preG ary W ade Based on the original idea b y .........Peter Kenna 2nd asst director..............................................Brett Popplewell production, let us know and we O p tica ls........................................................... Atlab P h otog rap hy...................................David Gribble C o ntinuity...................................... Shirley Ballard Safety o ffic e r.....................................Ken M cLeod will make sure it is included.

E d ito r.....................................................John Scott C a s tin g .................................................... Jo Lam er Unit n u rse ........................................................Paula C onnolly Call Kathy Bail on (03) Prod, d e s ig n e r.............................

Sally Campbell Lighting c am eram a n.................................... David Connell Best b o y .............................................................. Les Frazier 329 5983, or write to her at C o m po ser..................................... Cameron Allan Camera operator............................................David Connell R u nners.............................................................. Lee Dunlop, Cinema Papers, 644 Victoria Assoc, p ro d u c e r............................................Helen W atts Focus p u lle r .................................................... Greg Ryan M arc V alinoti B u d g e t............................................................... $3.5 m illion Street, North Melbourne, Key g rip ........................................ ...David Cassar P u b lic ity ..............................................................Rea Francis L e n g th .............................................

100 m inutes Asst g rip ....................................................... M arcus M cLeod Victoria 3051.

Unit p u b lic is t................................................Ronnie Gibson G auge............................................................35 mm G affer............................................................Stew art Sorby C a tering........................................................... Frank M anley Cast: Rachel W ard (Marge Hills), Bryan Brown E le c tric ia n ....................................................... Peter Molony Mixed a t ................................................ Atlab Aust.

(Sonny Hills), Sam Neill (Neville Gifford), Genny o pe rator........................................... .'...Dick Tum m el L a b o ra to ry........................................... Atlab Aust.

Steven Vldler (Sugar).

Boom o p e ra to r............................................... Scott Rawlings Lab. lia is o n .................................... G eorge Kenny

Lay-out a rtis ts ................................/Deane Taylor, Paul Styble, Jam es Baker, Leanne Hughes, Jan D’Silva, John M artin A n im a to rs....................................Don M ackinnon, Jon M cClenahan, A listair Byrt, G airden Cooke, Chris Hauge, Bob Baxter, Andrew Szemenyai, Jim W ylie, Simon O ’ Leary, Lianne Hughes, Nick Harding, John Burge, Henry Neville, Jam es Baker, Greg Ingram A ssistants....................................Denise Kirkham, M urray Griffin, Lucinda Clutterbuck, W ally Macarti, Darek Polkowski, Astrid Nordheim , Barbara Coy, Paul Stibal, Victor Juy In-b etw eeners............................. M axim Gunner, Rick Tinschert, Barbara Coy, Gaillyn Gadston, Paul Baker, Liz Thomas, Robert Malherbe, Carol Seidl, Ken Keys, M elanie Allen, Maria Haren, Phillip Scarrold, C hris Evans, Kathy O ’ Rourke, Clare Lyonette, W ayne Kelly, Darek Polkowski, Sarah Lawson, Victor Juy Anim ation checke rs.......................... Kim Craste, Liz Lane, Kim Marden P u b licity...............................................Rea Francis Lab o ra to ry................................................C olorfilm Cast: Voices: John Clarke, Peter Hayden, Fiona Samuel, Dorothy McKegg, Billy T. James.

Synopsis: An aminated feature. The adven­ tures of Dog and Wal, and the characters of

B u d g e t.............................................. $2.47 m illion L e n g th ...............................................102 m inutes G auge............................................................ 35 mm Shooting s to c k ...................... Kodak 5247 & 5294 Cast: Tracey Tainsh (Jackie G renville), David Reyne (Barry Norton), Norm an Kaye (Rev. Aldershot), John M eillon (Bill Dolan), Ray Barrett (Benson), Andrew Blackm an (Det. Mainsbridge), Phil Brock (John Hatcher), Kym Lynch (George Slater), Andrew Johnston (W illiam Morris), Lynne Schofield (Madame Cheveraux).

S y n opsis: A university student is driving back to Brisbane in the sum m er of 1984 when she passes through a tim e warp taking her back into the 1940s. A bizarre m urder m ystery unfolds.

S y n opsis: The film tells the story of a woman who breaks with convention and defies the taboos of an era in the pursuit of self-know­ ledge and sexual fulfilm ent.

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Boom o p e ra to r.............................................. G rant Stuart E lectricians......................................Colin Chase, Asst art d ire c to r................................................. PhilDrake 3 F.U.K. FM (106.3 ON YOUR DIAL) T ra in e e ........................................ Jennifer Horton Paul Moyes Costume d e s ig n e r.........................................Anna French Prod, c o m p a n y ...........................MS Productions Asst art d ire c to r......................... David O ’Grady Boom ope rators...................Graham McKinney, Asst to costum e d esigner.............................Fiona Reilly P roducer.......................................... M artin Burke Make-up supervisor................... Fiona Campbell Kate Gunn M a ke-up...........................................................Joan Hills, D irectors.......................................... Martin Burke, Make-up a ssistan t......................................... Anna Kapinskl Art director................................................... Derrick Chetwyn Johanne Santry Steve Evans H a irdre sser..................................................... DarylPorter H airdressers................................................... Joan Hills,Asst to the art d ire c to r............ Clare M cClelland S criptw riters..................................................Martin Burke, Make-up bus drive r......................................Kelvyn O ’ Brien Johanne Santry Costume d e s ig n e r................. Bruce Finlayson Steve Evans W ardrobe supervisor................................... Jenny Arnott M ake-up.........................................................Elaine Carew Standby w a rd ro b e ........................................ Fiona Nlcholls M u s ic .......................................................The Pulse W ard, c o-ordina tor............................................ Viv W ilson Make-up a ssts.........................Violette Fontaine, Ward, a s s is ta n t.......................... Julie Frankham L e n g th ................................................... 90 minutes W ard, assistant......................................... Michelle Leonard Lynette Harding, Wardrobe van d riv e r.................. Simon Hawkins G auge................................................Super 16 mm Standby w a rd ro b e .....................................Frankie Hogan Jill Porter Props buyer.................................................Alethea Deane Synopsis: Super Rat and Ferel (alias James Props Hairdresser................................................... CherylW illiam s co -o rd in a to r.......................................... Krys Porter Standby p ro p s .................................. Colin Gibson M addock and Doug Hunter) are two popular Props b u y e r...................................................Stuart Menzies Hairdressing a s s ts ....................................Yvonne Savage, Special e ffe c ts .................................................. Ray Fowler FM disc jockeys who find them selves suddenly Standby props.................................................Chris Jam es Terri Meissner Special effects a s s t...............................Colin Holt out of work, and in need of money quickly.

Art dept runner.............................. Ross Newman W a rd ro b e .........................................................Julie Barton Set d e c o ra to r........................................... Lea Haig They im plement a series of get-rich-quick Special e ffe c ts .................. Visual Effects Pty Ltd Props b u y e r........................................... Billy Allen Set fin is h e r........................................................ Sue Maybury schemes as well as elaborate cons to set up a Fx co-ordinator............................................... Brian Pearce Standby props................................. John Daniell, D raughtsm an..................................... Dale Duguid pirate radio station.

Fx a s s is ta n ts ...........................Jam ie Thompson, W ayne Truce Construction m an a g e rs.................................. PhilW orth, Peter Stubbs, Special e ffe c ts .................................................. Ray Fowler W ayne Allan G eoff Little, Art dept a s s t....................................................Toby Copping Art dept runner....................................... Grant Lee Steve Pearce, Scenic a rtis t...........................................Eric Todd Asst edito r................................................Rick Lisle Peter Arm strong Carpenters........................................................ Con Mustard, Second asst e d ito r.......................................... Nick Breslin Set decorators...............................Peter Kendall, Kim Sexton, Dubbing e d ito r.................................................. Tim Jordan Barry Kennedy David Stark, Asst dubbing e dito rs.......................... David Rae, Marcus Erasmus Scenic a rtis t......................................................Kate Joyce Nick Breslin P a in te r...............................................................Alan Sims Set construction m anager............Danny Burnett BA CKLA SH Musical d ire c to r....................................Chris Neal Set construction........................... Bruce Mlchell, Asst e d ito r......................................................Jason Adams Prod, com pany......................................... Mermaid Beach Sound e dito r................................................... Anne Breslin Ron Michell, Productions Pty Ltd Editing assistan ts............................................Rick Lisle,Editing assistan t...............Noelleen W estcombe Mai Punton, Stunts co-ordinator...................

Peter Arm strong Dist. c o m p a n y...................................................J.C. W illiamson Nick Breslin M urray W ilson A rm o u re r...................................... Roger Newman Film D istributors Pty Ltd M ix e r................................................................Peter Fenton Asst edito r....................................G ary W oodyard Still photography...........................................David Appleby, P rodu cer...............................................Bill Bennett Stunts co-ordinator..........................................Guy Norris Ken George Stunts co-ordinator....................C hris Anderson D irector................................................. Bill Bennett Still photography...............................................Jon Lewis, S tu n ts .............................New Generation Stunts Head w ra n g le r..................................................Ray W inslade Scriptw riter........................................... Bill Bennett Jim Sheldon W ra ngle rs...................................Tony Jablonski, Safety supe rvisor.............................Peter Culpan Based on the original idea by........... Bill Bennett Dialogue c o a c h ............................................... G ina Pioro Steve Pye Still photography..............................Greg Noakes P h otog rap hy...................................... Tony W ilson Best b o y ......................................................... Jason Rogers Best b o y ............................................................ PaulG antner Transport co-ordina tor........... Cam pbell Burdon Sound recordist.................................................Leo Sullivan R unner............................................................ DarrylG rant R u n n e rs.......................................................... Brigit W ilson, M echanic............................................................. BillHeller Editor..............................................................Denise Hunter C haperone............................................... Jan Reid John Wood, Best boy.............................................. Greg W ilson C o m po sers.................................................MichaelAtkinson, N u rse s.......................................................Meredith Clark, Alison Pickup R unner...............................................................Rick Lewis Michael Spicer Maggie McKay C a tering.............................................

O ut to Lunch N u rs e ................................... Rosemary Rogerson Prod, m a n a g e r..................................................Sue Seeary Unit p u b lic is t..................................................Annie PageLaboratory...................................................... Atlab C a tering....................................... Richard Roques Unit m anager...........................Deborah Samuels C atering................................................Kathy T rout Lab. liaison.............................................David Coll Mixed a t.................................................Soundfirm Prod, a ccou ntan t................. G & S M anagement Mixed a t......................................................... United Sound G auge........................................................... 35 mm B u d g e t................................................ $6.6 million 2nd asst d ire c to r......................................... Adrien Seffrin Lab oratory................................................Colorfilm Shooting sto c k ...............................Eastm ancolor L e n g th .................................................................100 minutes Casting (locatio n)........................................Bobbie Pickup Lab. lia is o n ...........................Richard Piorkowski Cast: Vanessa Redgrave (Mrs Carlyle), Alex G auge........................................................... 35 mm Focus p u lle r......................................... Derry Field B u dget...............................................................$2.4 million Norton (Silhouettist, McCallum, W itch, Mad Shooting s to c k .................................. Kodak ECN W ardrobe....................................................... Martin W right, G auge........................................................... 35 mm Photographer, Captain), Jerem y Flynn (James Cast: Jon Blake (Dave), Mark Hembrow Louise Fischer Shooting s to c k ............................................. Kodak Brine), Arthur Dignam (Fop), John Hargreaves (Peter), Nikki Coghill (Jill), Terry Donovan Props b u y e r......................................... Lisa Evers (Convict), Robin Soans (George Loveless), Cast: John H argreaves (Neil McAdam), (Bangles), W arwick Sims (Martin), Gerard Asst e d ito r....................................................... Dany Cooper W illiam G anim ara (James Loveless), Stephen Heather M itchell (Margot Ryan), Tushka Hose Kennedy (Big Jim ), Toni Lamond (Mum), Bill Neg. m a tc h in g .................................. Chris Rowell Bateman (Old Stanfield), Phil Davies (Young (Ellie McAdam), Margo Lee (May Ryan), W illie Kerr (Gilman), Barry Hill (Sir Julian), Patrick Productions Pty Ltd Fennell (Fred Ryan), Garry M cDonald (Dan Stanfield), Keith Allen (James Hammett).

Ward (Mulcahy), Perer W hitford (Terry).

Sound e d ito r................................................... Dany Cooper S yn opsis: The story of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, Burroughs), Julie Hamilton (Enid Burroughs), S yn opsis: An action/thriller/com edy.

M ix e r............................................. Brett Roninson a group of six Dorset farm workers who, in the A ileen B ritton (Gran), Brendon Lunney Still photography..........................Harold Ashfield early 1830s, form ed one of the w orld’s first (Seymour).

JU S T US Title de sig n e r.......................................Fran Burke trade unions and, in doing so, were convicted Synopsis: A bitter-sweet com edy about love Mixed a t ..........................................Sound on Film Prod, com pany................. Entertainm ent Media of sedition and transported to the penal colony and sex and growing up in the sixties.

Lab ora tory.................................................. ...Atlab Pty Ltd of New South Wales. Their plight became a Lab. liaison........................................... David Cole P roducer.............................................Peter Beilby ca u se cé lè b re , which finally led to them being Lab. consultant..............................................Bruce W illiamson COMRADES D irector...........................................

G ordon Glenn pardoned, largely as a result of the w ork of Mr L e n g th ...................................................90 minutes S c rip tw rite r........................................ Ted Roberts Prod, com pany....................Skreba Productions Pitt.

G auge..........................................................35 mm Based on the novel b y ...............G abrlelle Carey in association with Cast: David Argue (Trevor), Gia Carides Photography......................................... Ellery Ryan David Hannay Productions FR EE EN TER P RISE (Nikki), Lydia M iller (Kath), Brian Syron (Lyle).

Sound recordist........................................ Ian Ryan Dist. c o m p a n y ......................... Curzon/Bill Gavin S yn opsis: A story about a policem an and a Prod, com pany....................... B & D Productions E d itor................................................................ John Dutton Producer............................................Simon Relph policewom an escorting an Aboriginal woman Producer......................................................... G eoff Burrowes Exec, producer..............................Robert Le Tet C o-producer................David Hannay (Australia) charged with m urder from Sydney to Darwin.

D ire c to r............................................................ John DixonProd, co-ordina tor........................ C hristine Hart D ire c to r................................................................BillDouglas S criptw riter......................................................

John Dixon Prod, m a n a g e r................................................John Jacob S crip tw riter..........................................................BillDouglas TH E B EE-EA TER Based on the original idea b y ........... John Dixon Unit m anage r.................................................. Tony Leach Based on the original idea Photography..................................Keith W agstaff Prod, secretary...............................................Kerry Stacey Prod, co m p a n y....................................... Daedalus Films b y ......................................................................BillDouglas Sound s upe rv is o r.........................Terry Rodman Prod, a c c o u n ta n t.................................. Anne G alt Photography................................. Gale Tattersall P roducer......................................................... Hilary Furlong Sound re c o rd is t.....................

John Schiefelbein 1st asst d ire c to r............................Robert Kewley Sound re c o rd is t.............................................. Clive W inter Director.........................................................George Ogilvie E d itor.................................................................. Ray DaleyC o ntinuity............................... Joanne M cLennan E d ito r................................................ M ickA udsley Scriptw riter..................................................... Hilary Furlong Prod, d e s ig n e r...................................................Les BinnsCasting consultants............ Liz M ullinar Casting Prod, designer........................M ichael Pickwoad Based on a short story b y ................ Jane Hyde Exec, producer............................................Dennis W right Camera o p e ra to r.................................Ellery Ryan Assoc, p ro d u c e r.................................... Redmond Morris "Photography....................................... Jeff Darling Prod, supervisor.................................................BillRegan Focus p u lle r............................... Leigh McKenzie Prod, c o -o rd in a to r...................................Vanessa Brown Sound re co rd ist................................. Phil Stirling Prod, co-ordinator................................... Jan Stott Key g r ip .......................................... Barry Hansen Prod, m a n a g e r........................... Charles Hannah E ditor.......................................................... Nicholas Beauman Prod, secretary..............................................Karen M cKenna G affer.............................................. Ted Nordsvan Asst prod, manager..................... Jake Atkinson Prod, designer............................................... Owen Paterson Prod, assistant............................................... Lydia Cover E lectrician......................................John Brennan Unit m a n a g e r........................Steven Macagnan C om poser.............................................. Chris Neal Location m anager......................... Phil McCarthy Art d ire c to r............................... Geoff Richardson Location m a n a g e r.........................................Peter Simon Prod, supervisor.................................Lynn Gailey Asst location m a n a g e r...................................Stan Leman Asst art d irector......................................... Jill Eden Prod, accou ntan ts.................Howard W heatley, Prod, m a n a g e r....................... Fiona M cConaghy Prod, a c c o u n ta n t............M anagecomp Pty Ltd, M ake-up/hair....................... Am anda Rowbottom Allan John Unit m anager.................................................. Hugh Johnston Stan Seserko W ardrobe.................................. Alexandra Tynan Asst accountant............................................Nancy Bekhor Location m a n a g e r........................................ Robin Clifton Financial controller........................John Kearney Ward, a s s is ta n t......................... Denise Braddon Prod assistant................................................. Brigit W ilson Prod, secretary...........................Vicki Popplewell Financial adviser.............................................Kent LovellProps buyer/set d re s s e r.....Keith Handscom be 1st asst d ire c to r..................................... Redmond Morris Base office lia is o n ........................ Janene Knight 1st asst d ire c to r................................................Bob Donaldson Standby pro p s............................Greg O ’Connell 2nd asst d ire c to r.......................... Christine King Prod, a cco u n ta n ts........ M oneypenny Services, 2nd asst d ire c to r...................................Ian Kenny R u nner/o ffice....................................................Kris Gintowt Alan Marco, 3rd asst d ire c to r................... Michael Megennan 3rd asst d ire c to r................................... Don Keyte Laboratory..................................................Cinevex Assistant to d ire c to r....................... Barney Reicz M ichele Day C o ntinuity......................................C hristine Liparl L e n g th ................................................................... 95 minutes C o n tin u ity .........................................Penny Eyles 1st asst director..................................Chris W ebb Producer's a ss is ta n t........................................ Joy Souter G auge........................................................... 16 mm C a s tin g .......................................................Forcast, 2nd asst d ire c to r..........Carolynne C unningham Camera operator.............................................John Haddy Shooting s to c k ........................................ Eastman M ichael Lynch, 3rd asst d ire c to r......................... Henry Osborne Focus p u lle r................................... David Stevens C a st: S co tt Burgess (Terry), C a the rine Rae Davidson C o n tin u ity............................................................. Jo W eeks C lappe r/loa der.................................................. Lee Parker M cClements (Gabby), G ina Riley (Jenny), Kym Casting a s s is ta n t.................... Clare McClelland Casting consu ltants....................Hilary Llnstead Trainee........................................................ M agnus Mansie Gyngell (Mouth). .

Lighting cam eram a n.................. Gale Tattersall & Associates Key g rip ............................................................David Cassar S yn opsis: A love story based on a book of the Camera operator..........................Gale Tattersall Focus p u lle r ................................................... Garry Phillips Asst g rip s ..................................

M arcus McLeod, same name by G abrielle Carey.

Focus p ullers...................................

Jerem y Gee, C lappe r/loa der.....................................Susi Stitt Ian (Jo) Jury Nick Mayo Key g rip .......................................................Brendan Shanley Special fx C lappe r/loa der................................

C hris W hite Asst g r ip s .................................................. M atthew Tindale, Please help us keep this survey Key g r ip ..............................................................Ray Brown photography................ -.Visual Effects Pty Ltd Rourke Crawford-Flett G a ffe r..............................................Colin W illiam s Asst g rip s ......................................................... Tony Larkin, accurate. Phone Kathy Bail on G affer..................................................... Simon Lee Tracking vehicle op e ra to r............ Brian Bosisto Ian Bird, E le c tric ia n ....................................Shaun C onway (03) 329 5983 with any errors or E lectrician....................................... Guy Hancock Max W orrall Boom o p e ra to r............................ M ark W asiutak omissions.

Gene operator.......................... Steven Bickerton G affer......................................... Brian Bansgrove Art dept co-ordinator................. Sue Pemberton

PO S T-P R O D U C TIO N

58 — May CINEMA PAPERS

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STATE OFFICES NSW 16 Suakin Street Pymble. NSW 2073 Tel: (02) 4495666 Telex: 71289 VIC Regent House, 63 Kingsway South Melbourne VIC 3205 Tel: (03) 613541 Telex: 34732 OLD Unit 1,139 Sandgate Road Albion. OLD 4010 Tel: (07)2628366 Telex: 43396 SA 34 King William Street Kent Town. S.A. 5067 Tel: (08)429827 Telex: 89202

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WA Unit 1.106 Oxlord Street Leederville. W.A. 6007 Tel: (09)3285122 Telex: 93345

Production Survey continued enter ballroom and Latin Am erican dance G auge......................... ................................. 16 mm S crip tw riter................................Steven Jacobson MY CO UNTRY competitions. The film follows a group of Shooting s to c k ............................................Kodak Based on the original idea Prod, c o m p a n y...............W arhead Films Pty Ltd dancers who vary in age from eight years old to b y ...............................................................Steven Jacobson S yn opsis: Twenty people are left in the P rodu cers..................................................... Angus Caffrey, Western Australian desert on a bush survival P h otog rap hy....................................M arcus Corn 60 years old.

Ali Kayn Sound recordists.............................M ichael Siu,' D irector.......................................................... Angus Caffrey Marcus A dler VINCENT, TH E LIF E AND DEATH OF S criptw riters..................................................Angus Caffrey, Editors...........................................................

Steven Jacobson, HOW THE W EST WAS LO ST VINCENT VAN GOGH Ali Kayn Marcus Corn Based on the original idea Prod, c o m p a n y ...........Frends Film Productions Prod, com pany........................Illum ination Film s C o m po ser....................................................... Peter Myers b y ................................................................ Angus Caffrey Producer..................................................... Heather W illiam s P roducers........................

Tony Llewellyn-Jones, 1st asst d ire c to r.............................................Kathy Chambers Photography......................................................Ray Boseley D ire c to r........................................................... David Noakes W ill Davies C o n tin u ity............................................ T ob yThain Sound recordist..................................... Peter Falk S crip tw rite rs.................................................. David Noakes, Director..................................................... Paul Cox Lighting d irector............................................ David W alpole E d ito r........................................ Clayton Jacobson Paul Roberts Based on the original idea b y .............. Paul Cox Focus p u lle r.......................................... Mark Lane C o m p o se r..................................................Stephen BatesBased on the book b y ...................................... Don McLeod P h otog rap hy........................................Yuri Sokol Clapper/loader...............................M atthew Corn Assoc, p ro d u c e r............................................. Cam Lappin P hotography..................................................Phillip Bull Prod, designer......................................Asher Bilu Key g rip ............................................................Peter Darby Prod, m a n a g e r....................................................AliKaynSound re c o rd is t.........................................M ichaelRaynes C om poser.......................................... W alter Sperl Asst grips.................................... Gideon W arhaft, Unit m a n a g e r...................................................... AliKaynEditor................................................. Frank Rijavec Prod, accountant......................Santhana Naidu Nick Towler, 1st asst dire cto r................................................PaulCaffrey R esearcher/consultant.................................. PaulRoberts 1st asst director.........................Brendan Lavelle C hris Ward 2nd unit d ire cto r................................................Ray Boseley Additional re s e a rc h ....................................Marion Benjamin Camera ope rator............................................. PaulCox G affer........................................

Cameron W allace C a sting..................................................John Flaus Prod, c o-ordina tor.................................... Heather W illiam s Camera a s s is ta n t..................... Brendan Lavelle Boom o pe rator.................................Stephen Ellis Lighting cam e ra m a n ....................................... Ray Boseley Prod, secretary......................Film Type Services Key g r ip ......................................Paul Am m itzboll M ake-up....................................................

Phillippa O ’Collins Camera operator...............................................Ray Boseley Lighting c am eram a n................................... Phillip Bull Costume c o n s tru c tio n ............................Beverley Boyd Special make-up e ffe c ts .......

Clayton Jacobson Focus p uller..........................................................Jo Bell Camera operator.......................................... Phillip Bull Mixed a t ....................................Hendon Studios Set construction..............................................

Noel Abrecht Clapper/loader.....................................................Jo Bell Camera assistant........................................... Anne Benzie Laboratory................................................. Cinevex Still p h o tograph y.......................................M ichaelJacobson Camera assistant................................................ Jo Bell 2nd unit p ho tograph y....................................Anne Benzie G auge................................................................... 35 mm Dialogue coa c h ................................Peter Tulloch Key g r ip ....................................................... MichaelRoof P rops............................................................. Marion Benjamin Shooting s to c k ..................................................Fuji Best b o y ...........................................................Chris Corbett Asst g r ip ............................................ Paul Caffrey Neg. m atching...............................Tang Thien Tai Synopsis: A film about the life and work of R u nner......................................

Jenni Cannon E le ctricia n .................................................. Andrew Murphy Still photography............................................Crew Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890).

P u b lic ity .............................................................NeilWard Boom operator...............................................Derek Newman Publicity...................................................... Heather W illiam s C a tering..........................................

Val Jacobson, Art d ire c to rs ........................................................Ian Cameron, Lab ora tory................................................C olorfilm WAR BRIDES Jill Corn C hris Hubbard Lab. lia is o n ..................................................... Kerry Jenkin Prod, com pany...........Tony Wilson Productions Laboratory.........................................................

VFL W ardro be................................... Shelley Simpson B u d g e t......................................................$130,000 P roducers.................................. Lucinda Strauss, Len g th ...................................................................20 m inutes L e n g th ...................................................................72 minutes Neg. m atch ing...................................Ursula Jung Tony W ilson G auge...........................................................

16 mm Musical d ire cto r........................................Stephen BatesG auge....................................................................16mm Director.............................................................Tony W ilson Shooting s to c k ............ Eastman 7291 and 7294 Shooting s to c k ............Eastman 7291 and 7294 Sound e d ito r......................................................Ray Boseley P hotography...................................................Tony W ilson Cast: Steven Jacobson (Chris), Adrian Ward Cast: Jacob Oberdoo, Crow Nyangurharda, N a rra to rs............................................John Flaus, Sound recordist.................................................Leo Sullivan (Tom).

Snowy Judamai, Don McLeod, the Strelley Richard Hutson L e n g th .................................................................. 50 minutes S yn opsis: An alien spacecraft is the last thing community.

Still p h o tograph y.................................... Ali Kayn, G auge....................................................................16mm Chris expects to find in his backyard. Even Synopsis: How the West Was Lost is the Cam Lappin Synopsis: War Brides is the story of some of more unexpected are the exciting events which story of the Aboriginal pastoral w orkers’ strike C a te rin g ............................... The Director’s Mum the 15,000 Australian women who married follow. A fantasy adventure featuring a teenage of 1946-49 told through a com bination of B u d g e t..................................................... $336,000 American servicemen during W orld W ar I boy's encounter with a vicious alien. documentary and dram atic reconstruction.

L e n g th ................................................80 minutes Exiles by choice, the m ajority left Australia in Aboriginals in the north-west were virtually G auge........................................................... 16 mm the US Arm y’s massive manoeuvre called OUT OF TH E FRYING PAN slaves to the large pastoral operators until they Shooting s to c k ...................................Kodak 7291 'Operation Brideship’ to join their sweethearts began to question their lot with the help of Cast: John Flaus (Danby, Danby, Danby and Prod, com pany............................Full Moon Films on the other side of the world. Forty years later, white prospector, Don McLeod. In 1942, Danby), Susanna Lobez (Angela Jeffries), Producer............................................Leo Berkeley they talk about their experiences.

McLeod met w ith hundreds of A boriginals from Frank Percy (Milton Stephenson), Richard D ire c to r.............................................Leo Berkeley the Pilbara region and, after six weeks of Hutson (Edmund Montague), Susue Arnold S crip tw riter.......................................Leo Berkeley WITCH HUNT m eetings it was decided the only way to achieve (Marjorie Allsop), Don M unro (Grandad), Denzil Prod, assistant.......................................Dow Long Prod, c o m p a n y ............. Documentary Film s Ltd justice was to strike, after WWII. This is the Howsen (G overnor-G eneral), David G rey Art director........................................ Annie Maver Producers................................................... Damien Parer, story of their struggle as told by those who lived (Clerk of Courts), John Howard (David Music b y ............................................ Greg Murray, Barbara A. Chobocky it.

John W illiam s S ilv e rm a n ), A n d re w B one (C h ris to p h e r D irector.............................. Barbara A. Chobocky Title d e s ig n e r................................... Peter Nagels Columbus), Lee Harding (The Surgeon).

LIFE IN SP A C E E d itor....................................................................Liz Stroud Laboratory..................................................Cinevex Synopsis: The true story of the discovery of 1st asst d ire c to r.................................................. Liz Stroud L e n g th ...................................................19 minutes Australia. Sort of.

Prod, co m p a n y..........Independent Productions L e n g th ...................................................90 minutes G auge........................................................... 16 mm Dist. c o m p a n y............Independent Distributors G auge........................................................... 16 mm Shooting s t o c k ..............................Eastm ancolor TH E SU R FER P rodu cer................................................ Peter Butt Shooting s to ck................................................ ECN Cast: Angela McKenna, C hris Askey, Rob D irector...................................................Peter Butt Prod, c o m p a n y..........................Night Flight Ltd Finlayson.

Exec, p roduce r......................................... Graham Ford Cast: George Donikian. in association with Synopsis: Witch Hunt is a story of trial and S yn opsis: An action film about housework, L e n g th .................................................................. 50 minutes Producers’ Circle error, innocence and guilt. It was an attem pt to with many cym bals [sic] below the surface.

Synopsis: The origin of life and the Producer....................................Jam es M. Vernon find a crim e — the so-called “ G reek controversial suggestion that life did not begin D ire c to r...........................................Frank Shields Conspiracy” , but it turned into a massive error TH E ROOM on earth but was seeded from the depths of S crip tw riter...................................... David Marsh in judgem ent that was revealed as a Prod, c o m p a n y............................ Odyssey Films P h otog rap hy....................................................Mike Edolsspace. conspiracy of a far larger order — a conspiracy Producers................................ Steven Jacobson, Sound recordist................................................ Max Bowring against members of the Greek com munity.

MAKE WAY FOR TH E MACHINES Marcus Corn E d ito r........................................................Greg Bell D irector........................................................ Steven Jacobson Prod, co-ordina tor............................ Gay Dunlop Prod, co m p a n y ..........Independent Productions S criptw riter...................................................Steven Jacobson Prod, m anager..............................................Penny W all Dist. co m p a n y............ Independent Distributors Based on the original idea Unit m anager.................................. Grant Neilson P rodu cer................................................ Peter Butt b y .............................................................. Steven Jacobson Location m an a g e r.................................... Charles Carbone D irector...................................................Peter Butt P h otog rap hy.................................... M arcus Corn 1st asst d ire cto r.............................. John Warren Exec, pro d u ce r......................................... Graham Ford Sound recordists............................M arcus Adler, 2nd asst director.............................................Peter Kearney L e n g th .................................................................. 50 m inutes Ben Lowe C o n tin u ity............................. Stephanie Richards Synopsis: Investigates the effect of new Editors......................................

Steven Jacobson, Focus p u lle r....................................John Ogden THE ANNIVERSARY technology on work and leisure in capitalist Marcus Corn C lappe r/loa der...................................Paula South society.

Prod, com pany........... Shadowplay Productions C o m po ser.......................................................Peter Myers Key g r ip ............................................. M urray Head Producer.......................................... Rod Wayman Prod, assistant............................... Jenni Cannon G a ffe r.................. ................................. Ken M offat A MEETING OF MINDS Director.............................................Rod W ayman C o ntinuity........................................................ Toby Thain Boom o p e ra to r..................................... Eric Briggs Scriptw riter.......................................Rod W ayman Prod, co m p a n y............. M inistry of E ducation— Focus p u lle r.................................Anthony W ilson Art director........................................Martin O ’Neil P h otog rap hy...................................Terry Carlyon Curriculum Branch C lapper/loader................................ M atthew Corn Art dept ru n n e r................................Jam es W yng Sound re c o rd is t.............................. Sean Meltzer Dist. com pany............... M inistry of Education — Camera assistan t........................................ Adrian Ward M ake-up..........................................................Annie Heathcote E ditor...........................Edward McQueen-Mason Curriculum Branch Key g rip ............................................Steve Pawley W ardrobe........................................................ Fiona Nicholls Prod, assistan t............... Rhonda Bark-Shannon P roducer................................................ Ivan Gaal Asst grips.........................................Noel Abrecht, Standby p ro p s .................................Colin Gibson C o n tin u ity ...................................................Rhonda Bark-Shannon D irector...................................................

Ivan Gaal Scott McLure Asst editor................................... Daniel W iessner Camera o p e ra to r........................................... Terry Carlyon S criptw riter............................... Arthur Thompson G affer....................................... Cameron W allace Stunts co-ordinator........................... iMax Aspin Camera a s s is ta n t.................................Keith Platt Photography.................................................... John Ruane E le c tric ia n ................................... Gideon W arhaft R ig g e r............................................................. David Thomas Boom operator.................................Patrick Slater W a rd ro b e ........................................Sarah Lazzari Still photography.......................................... Pierre VinetSound re cordist............................ David Hughes Art d ire c to r.................................... Dianne G iulieri E d itor.......................................................Ivan Gaal Props b uye r..................................................... Leon Baina Safety o ffic e r.....................................................Ken McLeod M ake-up.......................................................Andrea Cadzow Composer.......................................Laurie Balm et Special e ffe c ts ........................................... Rolland Pike Unit p u b lic is t..................................................... Ken Doyle Hairdresser..................................................Andrea Cadzow Exec, p ro d u c e r.............................W.O. Thomas Still photography............................................Chris Lazzari C a terin g..............................................................Jan Drummond W ardrobe.......................................Dianne G iulieri Assoc, produce r..........................

Helen Redden Tech, adviser.............................. John Jacobson L e n g th ...................................................................90 m inutes Editing assistant...........................Alan W oodruff Prod, m anage r............................ Rob McCubbin Best b o y ............................................................Nick Towler Cast: G ary Day (Sam), Gosia Dobrowolska Still photography.......................... Tibor Hegedis Music performed b y ...................

Laurie Balm et P u b lic ity ................................................. Neil W ard (Gina), Tony B ariy (Calhoun), Rod M ullinar C a te rin g ......................................................... Flirtys Sound edito r.................................David Hughes C a tering.......................................... Val Jacobson, (H a g e n ), G e ra rd M a g u ire (Ja c k ), Kris Laboratory.................................................. Cinevex Editing assistants........................

Mark McAuliff, Jill Corn McQuade (Trish), David G lendinning (Murph), L e n g th ...................................................................25 minutes Tony Paice L e n g th ...................................................................25 minutes Steven Leeder (Slaney).

G auge......................Super 16 for 35 mm release Laboratory.........................................................VFL G auge..................................................Super 8 mm Shooting s to c k ................................ Eastm ancolor L e n g th ...................................................................25 m inutes Shooting s to c k ................................. Kodachrom e 40, Cast: Lloyd Cunnington (Nigel), Maureen G auge........................................................... 16 mm Ektachrom e SM 7244 Edwards (Cynthia), Robyn Gibbes (Carmel), Shooting stock............................. Eastman Color Cast: Rachel Friend (Melissa), Adele Hakin Paul Young (Eric), Rowena M ohr (Candy), Synopsis: The film follows the involvem ent (Carol), Natalie Lewenberg (Jenny), Chris Michael Duffield (Wilbur), Rebecca Gibney and progress of four students with various Ward (Matt).

(Jilly), John Larking (McPherson), Fion Keane b a c k g ro u n d s and in te re s ts w ith th e ir (Arthur). prospective mentors.

S yn opsis: Nigel and Cynthia Hamilton hold a A LIC E ALIVE, H A LLE Y ’S ARRIVED dinner-party to celebrate 25 years of marriage, SAMBA TO SLO W FOX Prod, com p a n y...... ..........Spinefex Productions with disastrous results. A madcap comedy.

P ro d u ce r................. ..........................Jim Brennan Prod, c o m pany............................ Stratford Films D irector...................

Producer....................................... Maria Stratford NERVOUS PASSION P h otog rap hy.......... ........................ Laurie G ilbert Director..........................................M aria Stratford P ro d u c e rs ........................................................ Seth Lockwood, Sound re c o rd is t..... ..........................Rob Cutcher S c rip tw rite r.................................. Maria Stratford Help us make this Production Noeline Harrison L e n g th ..................... ............................. 60 m inutes Based on the original idea Survey as complete as poss­ D irector........................................ Seth Lockwood G auge...................... .................................Betacam b y ................................................M aria Stratford Photography................................ Allison Maxwell ible.

If you have something P h otog rap hy................................................Jaem s Grant Sound recordist.............................................Victor Gentile during the event of H alley’s Comet. which is about to go into preSound recordist.............................. Phillip Healey Camera o p e ra to r...........................................Anne Benzie production, let us know and we E d itor............................................................ Bettina Petith B u d g e t........................................................ $53,000 GOING BUSH Camera o p e ra to r.........................................Jaem s Grant L e n g th ...................................................................24 minutes will make sure it is included.

C lappe r/loa der.............................................. Sonia Leber Prod, com pany......................................... Cast Ltd Call Kathy Bail on (03) G auge........................................................... 16 mm 2nd unit p hotography..............Kath Chambers Dist. com pany....... Central Television PLC (UK) S yn opsis: Tony is confronted with his own 329 5983, or write to her at Still p hotography..........................Virginia Rouse P rodu cers.................................... Charles Target, sexuality when he meets a homosexual.

Cinema Papers, 644 Victoria Laboratory....................... .......................... Cinevex Simon Target Street, North Melbourne, Lab. lia is o n .................................................... Bruce Braun D irector............................................Simon Target NIGHTFIND Victoria 3051.

B u d g e t...................................................... $32,250 P h otog rap hy........... ........................Joel Peterson Prod, c o m p a n y........................................ Odyssey Film s L e n g th ...........................................24-30 minutes Sound recordist......................................G ary Carr Producers.....................................................Steven Jacobson, G auge........................................................... 16 mm E d ito r............................................... Neil Thomson Shooting s to c k ........................ Kodak Ecta 7294 M arcus Corn Prod, assistant.....................Rosemary Cameron D ire cto r.........................................................Steven Jacobson Synopsis: A docum entary about people who L e n g th ................................................... 50 m inutes

SH ORTS

D O CUM EN TAR IES

PRODUCERS

60 — May CINEMA PAPERS

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Production Survey continued

Synopsis: At first, The Room seemed just like

In-betweener.................................Wayne Kelly Sound recordist..........................Rod Simmons NEWS Camera asst................................. Beverly Lloyd Editor.......................................... Tom Litchfield Prod, company............................................. FilmAustralia Assoc, producers............................Gerry Letts, Tech, adviser....................................Don Ezard Dist. company...............................................FilmAustralia Length.............................................. 13 minutes Ian Adkins Producer.................................................. MacekRubetzki Gauge...................................................... 35 mm Length.............................................. 48 minutes Director/Editor.......................................GrahamChase Shooting stock........................................ Kodak Gauge...................................................... 16 mm Sound recordist............................................ BobHayes Synopsis: The creative force of women as Synopsis: A film about the top stratum of S H A R K Y ’S PA RTY Assoc, producer............................................. IanAdkins reflected In their contribution to prehistory, commercial and social life in Hong Kong. It Prod, company..................Lawless Enterprises Camera assistant................................ Jim Ward mythology and civilisation. An animated tale for centres around the Royal Hong Kong Jockey Producer.....................................................PeterLawless Gauge...................................................... 16 mm all ages.

Club, observes the values which once made D irector....................................Greg Woodland Synopsis: The film is an inside story of life at Britain a great colonial power, the clubs, the Scriptwriter.............................. Greg Woodland The Sydney Morning Herald. The film looks at DOWN TH ER E Taipans, the servants and the good life. Yet, for Photography.............................................. Steve Dobson the daily process from the editorial decision­ Prod, company............................Film Australia, this world, the days are now numbered. making, the news gathering, the meetings, to Budget................................................... $70,000 Family Planning Association Length............................................................. 30minutes the late night rolling of the presses.

Dist. company.............................Film Australia, RUNNING FROM TH E G HO ST Gauge...................................................... 16 mm Sabina Wynn Prod, company............................................. FilmAustralia SIN G LES Synopsis: Sharky’s social style is lacking, but Producer.....................................Sabina Wynn Dist. company.............................................. FilmAustralia his luck shines at a party where men are ockers Prod, company............................................. FilmAustralia Director....................................... Sabina Wynn Producer.................................................. MacekRubetzki and women demand more.

Dist. company.............................................. FilmAustralia Scriptwriters............................... Sabina Wynn, Director..........................................Nick Torrens Producers............................... Macek Rubetzki, Louise Cox, Photography................................. Andy Fraser Ian Adkins Claudia Vidal Sound recordist.......................... Rod Simmons Director......................................... Karl McPhee Photography............................... Sally Bongers Editor............................................. Nick Torrens Photography.................................Tony Wilson Sound recordist........................Vicky Wilkinson Assoc, producers..........................Gerry Letts, Sound recordist............................ Leo Sullivan Editor....................................... Denise Haslem ian Adkins Editor..........................................Lindsay Fraser Exec, producer...........................DanielaTorsh Length.............................................. 48 minutes Assoc, producer................................ Ian Adkins Producer’s assistant............ Rosalind Gillespie Gauge...................................................... 16 mm Length............................................................. 90minutes Lighting.......................................Sally Bongers Synopsis: A film set within the Chinese com­ Gauge......................................................16 mm Gaffer.......................................... Lee Whitmore munity of Hong Kong. Here, people know little Synopsis: The film is a foray into the world of Backgrounds.............................. Lee Whitmore of the romantic social life generated by British the unattached. Charles is recently divorced Photography animation................... Don Ezard presence. The film is about two hawkers, a FILM A U S TR A LIA and struggling to get his life together. He is in Animator........................................... Pam Lofts squatter and their families as they struggle to love and trying to establish a relationship. At Length.............................................................20minutes make a home and living in the face of a wellthe same time, a small group of women vie for Gauge..................................................... 16 mm organized bureaucracy._______ his attention.

A USTRALIAN INNOVATION Shooting sto ck........................................... 7291 Synopsis: An educational film about female LOOKING A FTER Y O U R SELF Prod, company............................................. FilmAustralia TH E VISIT reproduction and sexuality.

Dist. company.............................................. FilmAustralia Prod, company............................................. FilmAustralia Prod, company............................................. FilmAustralia Producer......................................................JohnShaw Dist. company.............................................. FilmAustralia EQ UAL PAY Dist. company..............................................

FilmAustralia Director...........................................................IanMunro Producer.............................................. ElisabethKnight Exec, producer.............................. Tom Haydon Scriptwriter..................................................... IanMunroProd, company........................... Film Australia Director.............................................. Keith Gow Producer.................................................. MacekRubetzki Dist. company............................ Film Australia Researcher......................... Con Anemogiannis Scriptwriters.................................... Keith Gow, Director........................................ Tony Wheeler Producer.....................................Daniela Torsh Sound recordist...................................... RodneySimmons Elisabeth Knight Photography...............................................TonyWilson Director...................................................CynthiaConnop Unit manager......................Con Anemogiannis Producer's assistant.............. Virginia Pridham Sound recordist............................................ LeoSullivan Asst producer.....................................Gary Letts Scriptwriter............................................. Cynthia Connop Narrator.......................................... Katrina Lee Editor.............................................................SueHorsley Length............................................ 125 minutes Photography................................... Erica Addis, Length............................................. 20 minutes Assoc, producer........................................ ClareEdwards Gauge...................................................... 16 mm Kevin Anderson, Synopsis: Mature Onset Diabetes is very Gauge......................................................16 mm Andy Fraser, Shooting stock............................................ ECN common among older people. This film shows Synopsis: The film is about a Vietnamese Jan Kenny Synopsis: A positive look at the achievements older people how they can manage their refugee family and the visit to Australia of a son Sound recordists................................ Pat Fiske, of Australian innovation, presenting an diabetes by proper diet, exercise, care of the they haven’t seen for four years. A moving film Sue Kerr, analysis of how it works, how it has worked and feet, and consultation with their dieticians and which witnesses the family’s attempts to come Averil Nicholl, where it and its contemporary counterpart, doctors. to terms with their past and to share their Geoff Wilson technology, should go. present with their son.

Editor...............................................Fiona Strain REAL LIFE SERIES Asst editor................................................. CathyChase DAVID W ILLIAMSON — Prod, manager........................................... NeneMorgan TH E SC IEN C E OF WINNING COM PULSIVE PLAYW RIGHT DEM OCRACY Unit managers............................................ JaneGriffin, Prod, company............................................. FilmAustralia Prod, company.............................Film Australia Prod, company.............................................FilmAustralia Marguerite Grey, Dist. company.............................................. FilmAustralia Dist. company.............................. Film Australia Dist. company.............................................. FilmAustralia Elizabeth Lovell, Exec, producer............................................ TomHaydon Producer.................................... Malcolm Otton Exec, producer............................. Tom Haydon Adrienne Parr Producer..........................................John Shaw Director.............................................. Ian Walker Producer..................................................

Macek Rubetzki Camera asst.............................Robyn Peterson Director.................................Don Featherstone Photography.............................................. KerryBrown Director..................................................GrahamChase Producer’s asst............................ Sharon Miller Scriptwriter...........................Don Featherstone Sound recordist..................................... GrahamWiseGaffer..............................................................IanBosman Photography...............................................TonyWilson Researcher.....................................Jon Ossher Editor.......................................... Peter Jennings Sound recordist............................ Leo Sullivan Music b y ..................................................SharonCalcraft Photography........................................... Andrew Fraser Producer’s assistant............. Virginia Pridham Assoc, producer.............................................IanAdkins Length............................................................. 48minutes Sound recordist.................... Rodney Simmons Length............................................................. 27minutes Editor.....................................................GrahamChase Gauge......................................................16 mm Editor......................................................

LindsayFraser Gauge...................................................... 16 mm Gauge......................................................16 mm Shooting stock........................................Kodak Unit manager...................................Jon Ossher Shooting stock............................. Eastmancolor Synopsis: The ’comparable worth’ test case is Synopsis: The film follows a political candidate Asst, producer.................................Gerry Letts Synopsis: The first in a series of films entitled in a marginal seat through the seven weeks of the latest milestone in a 100-year battle by Camera assistant...................................... AntonGraham Voices on the Page about contemporary Aus­ women for equal pay. the campaign, to the numbers coming in and 2nd unit photography..................................JohnHosking tralian writers and their work, planned for use the gathering of the faithful for the electionG affer........................................................ BruceGailey in secondary schools, Colleges of Advanced TH E HAVEN night party.

Narrator........................................................PaulRicketts Education and tertiary institutions generally.

Prod, company.............................................Film Australia Length.............................................................48minutes The series is concerned with writers as inter­ DOCTORS Dist. company..............................................

Film Australia preters of society. David Williamson is seen in Gauge...................................................... 16 mm Producer........................................... John Shaw Prod, company.............................................FilmAustralia Shooting stock............................................ ECN various activities, such as a rehearsal of his Director................................James Richardson Dist. company.............................................. FilmAustralia Synopsis: Australian sporting achievement play The Club, writing at home, and discussing Photography.............................................. KerryBrown Exec, producer............................................TomHaydon has declined dramatically since the golden age his working methods with drama students and Sound recordist......................Bronwyn Murphy Producer..................................................

MacekRubetzki of the sixties. The debacle at the Montreal young playwrights. The film gives an insight Editor..................................... Martha Babineau Director.......................................................TonyWheeler Olympic Games prompted the government into into Williamson’s philosophy and his approach Prod, manager............................. Nene Morgan Photography............................................. SteveMason action and there are now many national and to play- and screenwriting.

Length.............................................................82minutes SouncTrecordist........................................... MaxHenser commercial sports science institutes. How Gauge..................................................... 16 mm Editor............................................................ SueHorsley effective are they? Are the commercial, D ECO RATIVE PAINT WORK Synopsis: Observational film about the Assoc, producers...................... Clare Edwards, scientific and national pressures too much for journey through the rehabilitation process of Prod, company............................................. FilmAustralia Rosalind Gillespie an athlete? What are the ethics . . . is it still alcoholic Aboriginals at Bennalong’s Haven.

Dist. company.............................................. FilmAustralia Length.............................................................90minutes sport?

Producer...............................................ElisabethKnight Gauge...................................................... 16 mm HENRY HANDEL RICHARDSON Director.............................................. Keith Gow Synopsis: The film follows Dr Bruce Shepherd SO LID PLA STER IN G Prod, company............................ Film Australia Scriptwriters......................................Keith Gow, through the aftermath of the Medicare dispute.

Dist. company..............................Film Australia Elisabeth Knight Shepherd is committed to the privatization of Prod, company............................................. FilmAustralia Producer................................................

Daniela Torsh Photography.................................. Kerry Brown health care, and the film explores the Dist. company.............................................. FilmAustralia Director..............................................Jane Oehr Sound recordist.....................Rodney Simmons personalities and the lifestyle of the surgeons Producer...............................................ElisabethKnight Scriptwriter........................................ Jane Oehr Editor..................................................Keith Gow and their relationships with the community.

Director.............................................. Keith Gow Producer’s asst....................................... SharonMiller Prod, assistant........................Virginia Pridham Scriptwriters.......................... Elisabeth Knight, Prod, manager...........................................NeneMorgan GETTING STRA IG H T Length.............................................. 15 minutes Keith Gow Length.............................................................75minutes Gauge...................................................... 16 mm Photography.............................................. KerryBrown Prod, company.............................................FilmAustralia Gauge...................................................... 16 mm Synopsis: This is the sixth in the Australian Sound recordist....................Rodney Simmons Dist. company.............................................. FilmAustralia Synopsis: Olga Roncoroni was Henry Handel Heritage Commission’s series, Artisans of Editor................................................. Keith Gow Exec, producer............................................ TomHaydon Richardson’s personal friend, secretary and Australia. It shows the work of Christine Cooke Prod, assistant....................... Virginia Pridham Producer.................................................. MacekRubetzki companion for 27 years. In 1947, a year after and Elizabeth Stevens who work in Melbourne.

Length.............................................. 13 minutes Director..................................Phillip Robertson They demonstrate marbling, woodgraining, the novelist had died, Olga returns to the Gauge......................................................16 mm Photography.............................................. TonyWilson house. gilding, tortoiseshell, porphyry, stencilling and Synopsis: This is the fifth in the Australian Sound recordist......................Bronwyn Murphy some investigation work on the walls of Villa Heritage Commission’s series, A rtisans of Editor............................................................RayThomas HOM ELESS Alba, an unrestored and unoccupied building Australia. It shows the work of Larry Harrigan, Assoc, producer................................ Ian Adkins in Studley Park, Melbourne.

Prod, company.............................................FilmAustralia a third generation solid plasterer. He has been Gauge......................................................16 mm Dist. company.............................................. FilmAustralia working on the exterior of the Collingwood Synopsis: The film follows a group of patients Producer.................................................Colleen Clarke Town Hall in Melbourne for the past seven from a drug and alcohol treatment clinic during D OUBLE X Director.......................................................AnnaWhyte years and has almost finished the massive their last days in the clinic and the first few Prod, company.............................Film Australia Scriptwriter................................................. AnnaWhyte restoration job. He demonstrates the various weeks of their return to the community as they Dist. company.............................. Film Australia Photography........................................... AndrewFraser kinds of plastering Including running moulds, struggle to cope with a world without drugs.

Producer......................................DanielaTorsh Sound recordist.............................Howard Stry making an urn, casting a baluster.

Director........................................................Julie Cunningham Prod, manager...........................................NeneMorgan KIDS IN TRO U BLE Scriptwriter................................................. Julie Cunningham Lighting.......................................................... IanBosman Prod, company............................................. FilmAustralia Photography......................................... LorraineBinnington Length.............................................................28minutes Dist. company.............................................. FilmAustraliaULURU — AN ANANGU STO R Y Editors..........................................Anne Breslin, Gauge...................................................Betacam Producer.................................................. MacekRubetzki Dominique Fusy Prod, company............................................. FilmAustralia S y n o p sis: Four short videos for the Director.........................................................SueCornwall Sound mixer.............................. Ian McLoughlin Dist. company.............................................. FilmAustralia International Year of Shelter for the homeless.

Photography..............................................

Tony Wilson Asst producer.........................Virginia Pridham Producer....................................................... DonMurray Sound recordist............................................ LeoSullivan Producer's asst............................ Sharon Miller Director...................................................... DavidRoberts THE HUMAN FACE OF Editor............................................................. LesMcLaren Scriptwriter................................................DavidRoberts Editing assts................................ Julie Gelhard, HONG KONG Laura Zusters Assoc, producer................................Ian Adkins Photography............................................... TonyGailey Asst director..................................Lisa Noonan Anim ation............................Julie Cunningham, Sound recordists......................................... MaxHennser, B ET TER RICH THAN RED Lee Whitmore, Length.............................................. 90 minutes Rob Stalder Prod, company............................................. FilmAustralia Paul Livingstone, Gauge...................................................... 16 mm Editor............................................................ RayThomas Don Ezard, Dist. company.............................................. FilmAustralia Synopsis: The film is about the criminal justice Producer’s assistant.................................. Trish DeHeer Exec, producer............................................ TomHaydon Margaret Johnson, system and its treatment of juvenile offenders.

2nd unit photography.............................Andrew Fraser Producer.................................................. MacekRubetzki Ian Barbour The film includes, for the first time, footage Asst camera.................................... Mandy King Director............................................ Curtis Levy shot in the Australian court while cases are Painters.................................. Paul Livingstone, Length............................................................. 50minutes Cynthia Miller Photography................................. Andy Fraser being heard.

Gauge................................... 16 mm, videotape ► any other. But ,to four children left alone in the house one night, it would become a nightmare — something beyond their comprehension. A special kind of fantasy drama.

GOVERNMENT FILM PRODUCTION

CINEMA PAPERS May — 61

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FILMWEST FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT: Filmwest Corporation Pty. Ltd. 75 Bennett Street, Perth, W.A. 6000 Tel(09)3251177/3251423 Telex: AA94150

Percy Jones ° Motion Picture Services 1st Floor, 29 College St. Gladesville. N.S.W. 2111 Telephone: (02)816 3371 'im i M ' •:

Alan Lake Film Production Services Pty. Ltd .

32 Barcoo Street East Roseville. N.S.W. 2069 Telephone: (02) 406 6443

Peter Grbavac Photographic & General Instruments.

203 Rocky Point Rd. Ramsgate, N.S.W. 2217 Telephone: (02)525 6314

John Bowring-LemaC Film s (Aust) Pty. Ltd .

279 Highett Street Richmond. Victoria.3121 ■ Tel(03)428 3336/429 2992 ,

Filmwest Pte. Ltd .

Suite 157 Raffles Hotel 1-3 Beach Road, Singapore 0718 Tel: 337 8041/336 1509 Telex: RS36389

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Synopsis: Uluru — An Anangu Story is a unique portrayal of Australian history. Rarely if ever before has the opportunity been available to present the entire history of an area, from the times before the white man to the present day through the perspective of Aboriginals whose lives have spanned such a period. The program is set against the backdrop of Uluru (Ayers Rock) and is a personal, human story.

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Musical director.......................... Chris Copping Mixer.......................................... Tony Patterson Laboratory..............................................Cinevex Budget................................................... $25,000 Length...............................................23 minutes Gauge...................................................... 16 mm Synopsis: A film made for the Department of Sport and Recreation and the Victorian C am ping A sso cia tio n co n c e rn in g the integration of disabled people into the Residential Camping Program.

Production Survey continued Editor........................................... Denise Hunter Prod, manager............Margaret-Rose Stringer Post-production facility.................... Visualeyes Length............................................. 7’/2 minutes Shooting s to c k..................................... Betacam Synopsis: An information video program which demonstrates the rules and regulations pertaining to roundabouts. A short jingle emphasises the main points to remember when a motorist approaches, travels around and leaves a roundabout.

Length...............................................75 minutes Gauge......................... .-........................... 16 mm

Synopsis: Lena, a 34-year-old woman and Ned, a 60-year-old man drift through life unaware they are growing older daily. When they meet at a country hotel, a friendship develops with more entangling ramifications — much to the irritation of both.

FU TU RETRO U PERS

Prod, company.................... Chadwick/Douglas Film and Television Prod, company.............................Film Australia F R E E CLIMBING Producer..................................... Brian Douglas Dist. company..............................Film Australia Scriptwriter..................................Brian Douglas Producer.........................................................IanDunlop Producer.................................................... VinceO’Donnell Director........................................................... IanDunlop Based on the original idea Director................................................... Natalie Green b y ............................................ Brian Douglas Scriptwriter......................................................IanDunlop Scriptwriter.............................. Louise Shepard Prod, associate..........................Kent Chadwick Photography............................................... GaryKildea, Photography........................

Natalie Green Prod, manager............................. Phillip Collins Ian Dunlop Exec, producer................... ^Vincent O’Donnell Sound recordists........................................ GaryKildea, Prod, secretary............................... Anne Pryor Exec, assistant................... Mary Gustavsson Script editor......................... Patrick Edgeworth Philippa Kirk Length............................................................. 20minutes PRE-PRO DUCTION Length.......................................13 x 30 minutes Editors............................................. Ian Dunlop, Gauge............................................Super 16 mm Gauge...................................................1" video Philippa Kirk Shooting sto ck..................................... Eastman Synopsis: In the near future, an out-of-work Producer’s assistant...................................... IanAdkins Synopsis: A film that promotes rock climbing theatre troupe inadvertently prevent the piracy Narrator..........................................................IanDunlop and encourages others to try the sport. The film TH E AUSTRALIAN CA M ELEER S of Australia’s underground power source by a Gauge...................................................... 16 mm will feature experienced women climbers. most devious and deadly organization.

Shooting stock............................................ ECN Prod, company..................Media World Pty Ltd Synopsis: Today, one of the most positive Producers...................................................JohnTatoulis, NATIONAL HERBARIUM aspects of traditional Aboriginal Australia is the LONG TAN Colin South Scriptwriters................................................... JillMorris, outstation or clan homeland movement. After a Director....................................................... JohnTatoulis Prod, company............. The Long Tan Film Co. Mary Lancaster general introduction to Yirrkala Aboriginal Scriptwriter..................................................John Tatoulis (proposed) Exec, producer....................................... VincentO’Donnell township in north-east Arnhem Land, and the Photography.................. Gaetano N. Martinetti Scriptwriters............................ David Horsfield, Prod, co-ordinator....................................... SallySemmens Yirrkala Homeland Resource Centre, the film Editor..............................................

Mark Gracie Lex McAulay, Length ............................................... 20 minutes goes to Baniyala, homeland settlement of the Assoc, producer........................ Yvonne Collins Bruce Horsfield, Gauge...................................................... 16 mm Madarrpa clan. The picture that emerges is of Prod, manager........................

Georgia Hewson Julianne Horsfield Scheduled release.................. December 1985 traditional Aboriginal people running their own Prod, secretary....................Tania Paternostro Based on the original idea Synopsis: A film to delve behind the bland affairs, and exploiting western technology in Budget................................................. $200,000 by..........................................Bruce Horsfield scientific walls of an herbarium, to reveal the the process, with competence and joy.

Length............................................................. 60minutes Exec, producer........................ Bruce Horsfield rich matrix of history, scholarship and common Gauge...................................................... 16 mm Prod, accountant.........Manfred and McCallum unity found there.

WHAT IS A JEW TO YOU? Shooting stock......................................... Kodak Length............................................ 110 minutes Synopsis: A dramatized documentary on the Gauge...................................................... 35 mm Prod, company.............................Film Australia W ONDERS DOWN UNDER plight of the Afghan cameleers brought to Synopsis: A recreation of the Battle of Long Dist. company..............................Film Australia Prod, company........Production Group — AAV Australia to open the outback.

Tan, when an Australian patrol of 108 men Exec, producer.............................. Tom Haydon Producer................................................... DavidCampbell fought off more than 1000 experienced Viet Producer.................................. Macek Rubetzki Director.........................................Ray Wagstaff Cong. Based on the survivors own gripping BABAKIUERIA Director.......................................................AvivaZiegler Scriptwriters............Clemenger-Harvie Pty Ltd accounts, the story illustrates the thesis that Photography...................................Tony Wilson Prod, com pany.......................ABC TV Drama Photography....................George Komoneskey the war in Vietnam was won militarily, but lost Sound recordist.............................................LeoSullivan Dist. company..............................................ABC Composers..................................... Men at Work politically.

Editor......................................... Wayne Le Clos Producer....................................................Julian Pringle Exec, producer.......................................VincentO’Donnell Assoc, producer................................Ian Adkins Director................................ Don Featherstone Musical director.........................................KevinHocking MELBA Length..............................................48 minutes Scriptwriter..........................

Geoffrey Atherden Laboratory................................................... AAVCinevex Gauge...................................................... 16 mm Prod, company.................................. CB Seven Based on the original idea Budget................................................. $160,000 Productions Pty Ltd Synopsis: Personal film by Aviva Ziegler about Length.............................................................17minutesby....................................................... GeoffreyAtherden growing up Jewish in Australia.

Producer..................................................... ErroiSullivan Photography............................Julian Penney Gauges......................................... 16 mm, video Director...................................................RodneyFisher SouniJ recordist.......................

Chris Alderton Shooting sto ck..................................... Eastman Scriptwriter.............................Roger McDonald WHEN TH E SN A KE B ITES TH E SUN Editor........................................Michael Honey Cast: John Farnham, Little River Band, Dame Prod, designer.......................................GrahamGouldProd, designer.................................Roger Kirk Prod, company............................ Film Australia Edna Everage, Barry Humphries, Don Co-producer.....................................Pom Oliver Exec, producer..........................................JulianPringle Dist. company............................. Film Australia Dunstan, Prue Acton.

Assoc, producer......................................... Julie Monton Prod, manager...................................... StephenO’Rourke Exec, producer............................................ TomHaydon Synopsis: Tourist promotion for Victoria.

Budget.............................................$6,050,000 Unit manager............................................ LanceMellor Producer........................................... Ian Adkins Length..................................................... 8 hours Prod, secretary...................................... AnnabelJeffery Director............................................. Mike Edcls YOU’VE GOT IT Gauge......................................................16 mm 1st asst director.......................... Vid McLelland Photography....................................Mike Edols, Shooting stock........................................ ¡Kodak 2nd asst director........................................DavidSandy Producer..................................................... SallySemmens Fabio Cavaderi Cast: Linda Cropper (Nellie).

Scriptwriter................................................AlisonTilsonContinuity.............................................. CarolynGould, Sound recordist.......................................... MarkBrewer Synopsis: A miniseries on the life of Nellie Emma Peach Exec, producer.......................................VincentO’Donnell Editor........................................... Tim Litchfield Melba.

Script editor.................................Barbara Masel Budget................................................... $20,000 Producer’s assistant...................................JohnRussell Producer’s assistant................................EmmaPeach Length............................................................. 12minutes 2nd unit photography..................................... VitMartinek TH E SH IR A LEE Casting.................................................. JenniferAllen Gauge..........................................................BVU Gauge......................................................16 mm Boom operator................................... Geoff Krix Synopsis: Equal employment policies of the Synopsis: Personal film about Mike Edols’s Prod, com pany....................SAFC Productions Publicity....................................Geòrgie Brown SEC. return to the Mowayun Aboriginal community in Producer........................................... Bruce Moir Studios........................................ ABC Gore Hill north-west Australia after several years of Scriptwriter................................. Tony Morphett Length.............................................................30minutes banishment.

Based on the novel b y .............................D’ArcyNiland Synopsis: An original play for television.

Story editor.................................................PeterGawler Exec, producer................................ Jock Blair WOMEN’S STU D IES S E R IE S NEW S O U TH W ALES FILM B U TT ER FLY ISLAND 2 Gauge......................................................16 mm Prod, company............................Film Australia CO RPORATION Cast: Bryan Brown.

Prod, company........ Independent Productions Dist. company............................. Film Australia Synopsis: To Macauley, the child was his Dist. company...........Independent Productions Producer................................................ DanielaTorsh Producer................................................. StanleyWalsh‘shiralee’: a burden and a handicap, and also Director........................................................LiliasFraser a constant reminder of bitterness and failure. It Exec, producer.............................

Gene Scott Scriptwriter................................................. LiliasFraser MENTAL H EALTH was his nature to do things the hard way: the Directors.................................. Howard Rubie, Producer's asst........................................SharonMillerProd, company................Meredith Productions way he saw it, there was no other choice. What Bill Hughes Prod, manager........................................... NeneMorgan Producer....................................... Keir Enderby he hadn’t taken into account was the child’s Prod, designer............................Michael Ralph Historical constultant............... Dr Marilyn Lake Director..........................................Keir Enderby overwhelming need for love.

Prod, co-ordinator....................................LesleyThomson Length...................................... 10 x 20 minutes Photography................................... Terry Busch Prod, manager............................ Terrie Vincent Gauge......................................................16 mm Post-production facility ...Meredith Productions TH O SE DEAR DEPARTED Prod, secretary............ Jasmin Forbes-Watson Synopsis: A series for ten- and twelve-yearLength............................................. 30 seconds Prod, adcountant...................................Michele WellsProd, company..........................................PhillipEmanuel olds, for television and schools. The series Shooting stock.................................... Betacam Art director..................................................... IanGracie includes how women fought for the vote, the Productions Ltd Synopsis: A community service announce­ Props buyer........................................... RichardHobbs battle for access to universities and the Producer....................................................PhillipEmanuel ment, outlining directions on where to tele­ Asst props buyer...........................Andrew Paul struggle for equal pay. The programmes are Director.........................................................

TedRobinson phone for information and help in times of Set dresser...............................Murray Gossan being developed in conjunction with the (proposed) mental stress.

Runner........................................................ LukeHobbs Curriculum Development Centre of the Scriptwriter............................... Steve J. Spears Length......................................22 x 30 minutes Schools Commission and all State Educational Length.............................................. 90 minutes ROUNDABOUTS — GAINS A L L Synopsis: Twenty-two episodes depicting the Departments.

Gauge...................................................... 16 mm ROUND lifestyle and experiences of a family-run Synopsis: A black comedy.

Queensland Barrier Reef resort island.

WORLD HERITAGE Prod, company.....Northbridge Films Provision WILLING AND A B E L Producer..................................... Chick Stringer Prod, company............................ Film Australia TH E FISH A RE S A F E Director........................................Chick Stringer Dist. company............................. Film Australia Prod, company........................Liberated Artists Scriptwriter..................................... Dick Jarvis Producer......................................Oliver Howes Prod, com pany............................................ABC Pty Ltd Photography...................................Jack Swart Director........................................Oliver Howes Dist. company..............................................ABC Producers................................................... LynnBayonas, Sound recordist.............................George Lang Producer......................................................

Noel Price Scriptwriter.................................. Oliver Howes Ted Roberts Exec, producer............................................ NoelPriceScriptwriters.................................. Ted Roberts, Prod, manager............................ Nene Morgan Length............................................ 110 minutes Director.................................... Noni Hazlehurst Peter Schreck, Scriptwriter............................ Deborah Parsons Gauge...................................................... 35 mm David Boutland, Based on the original idea Synopsis: A series of documentary films on Peter Kinlock, b y....................................... Deborah Parsons Australia’s five world heritage areas. (South Hugh Stuckey, Photography.......................Ian Warburton ACS West Tasmania, Lord Howe Island, Kakadu, Michael Aitkens, Sound recordist............................................. BillDoyle Willancha Lakes and Great Barrier Reef).

Leon Saunders Pfbd. designer........................................... FrankGarley Script edito r................................... Ted Roberts Prod, manager................................ John Winter Length.......................................14 x 60 minutes Help us make this Production Prod, secretary...................................... Jacquie LambCast: Shane Withington, Grant Dodwell.

Survey as complete as poss­ 1st asst director.......................Peter Trofimovs Synopsis: Two young men, Charles Willing FILM V IC TO R IA 2nd asst director ............................. Neil Wilson and Abel Moore, advertise their services for ible. If you have something any money-making operation. Inept, if Continuity..................................................

Kerry Bevan which is about to go into preCasting........................................................Dina Mann enthusiastic, businessmen, their very jobs lead production, let us know and we Camera operator.......................................... RodCoatsthem into situations that are dangerous, will make sure it is included.

A L L IN TO G ETH ER mysterious and often highly amusing. They are Focus p ulle r............................................. TrevorMoore Call Kathy Bail on (03) Clapper/loader.................... Victor Gugtielmino Prod, com pany..................................... Can-AusFilms aided and abetted by twelve-year-old Parri329 5983, or write to her at Key grip................................Tony Woolveridge Dist. company.............. Focal Communications matta Jones and the delightful Angela Reddy.

Gaffer....................................... Andrew Holmes Producers......................................Mike Boland, Cinema Papers, 644 Victoria Tarni James Electrician..........................

Peter Rossborough Street, North Melbourne, Boom operator...............................................IanCregan D irector....................................................... MikeBoland Victoria 3051.

Asst art director........................................ Judith HurstPlease help us keep this survey Photography................................................MikeBoland Publicity..................................................GeòrgieHoweaccurate. Phone Kathy Bail on Sound recordist...................................... GeorgeCraig Catering.............................. Sweet Seductions Editor.......................................................... TonyPatterson (03) 329 5983 with any errors or Exec, producer....................................... VincentO’Donnell Studios.........................................................ABC omissions.

Prod, co-ordinator....................................... Sally Semmens Mixed at........................................................ABC

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Production Survey continued

Additional material b y ................... John Misto Extras casting....................... Caroline Bonham Neg. m atching........................................ Jennie Keem, Based on the original idea Camera operator.................. David Williamson Jill Lord b y ...................................... Michael Laurence Focus puller..........................Geoffrey Wharton Music editor............................................... DavidHolmes and Hal McElroy Clapper/loader.................................. John Platt Dialogue editors........................................ GavinMyers, Sound recordist............................................DonConnolly Key grip......................................................RobinMorgan Michael Carden Composer..........................................Brian May Asst grip ........................................................JonGoldney Editing assistants........................................FredKirkup TH E CH A LLEN G E Assoc, producers....................................... BrigitHedison, G affer.......................................................... MickMorris M ixer........................................ Richard Brobyn Neil Balnaves Prod, com pany................................Roadshow, Electricians................................................ChrisFleet, Stunts co-ordinator.................. Chris Anderson Prod, co-ordinator..................................JoanneRooney David Scandol Coote & Carroll, Fx editors.................................................... Julie Murray, Prod, manager.....................Sandra Alexander Boom operator..................................... Sue Kerr Golden Dolphin Productions Bruce Climas Unit manager...................Richard Montgomery Art director........................... Virginia Bieneman Dlst. company.................................. Roadshow, Runner..................................... Brett Matthews Asst art director....................................CarolinePolinProd, secretary.....................................AmandaSelling Coote & Carroll Laboratory........................................................Cinevex Continuity....................................... ...Linda Ray Costume designer.....................................

David Rowe Producers.................................. Tristram Miall, Lab. liaison................................................BruceBraun Make-up................................. Wendy Freeman Producer's assistant...................................KylieBurke Bob Loader Cast: Andrew McFarlane (Dr Tom Callaghan), Casting...........................................................Liz Mullinar, Hairdresser.................................Terri Meissner Director..................................... Chris Thomson Liz Burch (Dr Chris Randall), Pat Evison {Violet Suzanne Johanneson Assistant make-up......................Ivonne Pollack Scriptwriter.................................. David Phillips Carnegie), Lewis Fitz-Gerald (David Gibson), Boom operator.....................Graham McKinney Assistant hairdresser.................................

Korel Spooner Photography................................ Russell Boyd Bruce Barry (George Baxter), Lenore Smith Costume designer.........................................MivBrewer Wardrobe supervisor................................. KerryThompson Sound recordist...............................Mark Lewis (Kate Wellings), Maurie Fields (Vic BuckleyL Make-up.........................................................VivMepham Standby wardrobe............................John Shea Editor......................................... Lindsay Frazer Max Cullen (Hurtle), Gil Tucker (Joe Forrest), Hairdresser............................................FranceaSmeets Asst standby wardrobe......................... HeatherLaurie Prod, designer...........................Larry Eastwood Terry Gill (Sgt Carruthers).

Wardrobe.......................................................

PiaKryger Wardrobe asst....................................... FlorindaHart Synopsis: A Royal Flying Doctor Service is Exec, producers.............................Matt Carroll, Wardrobe asst......................... Jane Johnstone Props buyer..............................................

Debra Overton located in the outback town of Coopers Greg Coote Still photography........................Carolyn Johns Standby props................................John Daniell Crossing. The two doctors, Tom Callaghan and Exec, in charge of Publicity................................................. Victoria Buchan Asst standby props................................MichaelMercurlo production.............................Harley Manners Chris Randall, not only contend with the Studios.............................. McElroy & McElroy, Scenic artist..................................................RayPedler Prod, co-ordinators.................... Barbara Ring, medical challenges, but also with the small Five Dock, Sydney Brush hand............................................... DavidDuffin community in which they live.

Julie Ritchie Laboratory........................................... Colorfilm Construction manager............................. DannyBurnett Prod, manager.................................. Jenny Day Budget.......................................................... $10million Carpenters..............................................Gordon McIntyre, Location manager.................... David Malacari G A LLA G H ER ’S TR A V ELS Con Mustard, Length.....................................................4 hours Unit manager............................ Richard Carroll Prod, company................................... GallagherProductions Marcus Erasmus Gauge......................................................35 mm Prod, accountant.............................Catch 1-2-3 Pty Ltd Asst editor............................................. Jo Cook Cast: Linda Evans.

Jenny Verdon Producer................................................AndrewWilliams Synopsis: This miniseries is a contemporary Supervising sound editor.......................... DeanGawen Asst, accountant.................................ElizabethAnderson Director.................................................. MichaelCaulfield love story about an American woman’s Sound editors............................................HelenBrown, 1st asst director..........................................ColinFletcher Scriptwriter.............................................MichaelCaulfield Cathy Fenton struggle to carve out a new life for herself and 2nd asst director..................................... MurrayRobertson Based on the short story b y ........Kenneth Cook her family in the Australian outback, and of the Sound editing assistants...........Phillipa Harvey, 3rd asst director......................................... JaneGriffin Photography............................................. GeoffSimpson Paul Huntlngford, two men who love her.

Continuity........................................ Pam Willis Sound recordist............................................MaxBowring Rufus McCratchett Casting................................................. Forcast, Editor........................................... Sarah Bennett M ixer..........................................................PeterFenton Rae Davidson, MARAUDERS Prod, designer................................ Phil Warner Stunts co-ordinator......................................GuyNorris Michael Lynch Prod, company........................ The Magic Men Composer....................................... Bill Motzing Still photography.......................................... Jim Townley Focus puller........................................ GeraldineCatchpool Producer......................................

Mark Savage Exec, producer........................... Terry Ohlsson Researcher................................................... KrisWylde Clapper/loader................................ Chris Cole Director.........................................Mark Savage Co-producer....................................Irene Korol Unit runner................................... Antony Adare Key g rip ........................................... Ray Brown Scriptwriter...................................

Mark Savage Prod, co-ordinator...................................... Sally Ayre-Smith Art dept runner........................Stephen Warren Asst grips.............................................. Ian Bird, Photography.................................Mark Savage Unit manager...................................Paul Healey Publicity...................................Judy Brookman, Stuart Green Sound recordist........................

Paul Harrington Prod, secretary....................Rhonda Fortescue Network Ten 2nd unit photography................................SteveWindon Assoc, producers........... Richard Wolstencroft, Prod, accountant.......... Rosemary Stephenson Catering............................. Marike Janavicius Gaffer..........................................................BrianBansgrove Colin Savage 1st asst director..........................................KeithHeygate Mixed at....................................................UnitedSound Electrian.....................................................ColinChase Asst director.....................Richard Wolstencroft 2nd asst director.......................................HenryOsborne Laboratory...........................................Colorfilm Boom operator.......................... Jack Freidman Make-up.......................................

Sonia Berton 3rd asst director.......................... Wayne Moore Lab. liaison.........................Richard Piorkowski Art director............................................. AndrewBlaxland Special make-up effects.............. Colin Savage Continuity.................................. Joanna Weeks Budget.........................................................$4.2million Asst art director......................... Rob Robinson Music..................................... John Merakovski, Casting............................. Maizels & Associates Length.........................................6 x 60 minutes Art dept, co-ord......................................... Judith Ditter Mark Horpinitch Lighting cameraman................................. GeoffSimpson Gauge......................................................16 mm Costume designer..................................... AnnaSenior Still photoqraphy............Richard Wolstencroft, Focus puller........................................Wolfgang Knochell Shooting stock............................................

Agfa Make-up.................................................. VioletteFontaine David Bradley Clapper/loader.........................

Joanne Ersklne Cast: Anne Phelan (Mumma), Martyn Sander­ Hairdresser...................................... Joan Petch Catering............................................... Susie Ng Key grip......................................................... PhilShapeira son (Hughie), Anna Hruby (Roie), Kaarin Standby wardrobe....................... Paula Ekerick Gauge....................................................... Video G affer..........................................................JackKendrick Fairfax (Dolour), Gwen Plumb (Grandma), Syd Props buyer..................................Peta Lawson Cast: Colin Savage (Emilio East), Megan Boom operator............................................MarkKeating Conabere (Pat Diamond), Melissa Jaffer (Miss Standby props......................................... LouiseCarrigan Napier (Rebecca Howard), Zero Mantanna Art director......................................... Wilf Flint Sheily), Shane Connor (Charlie).

Set construction........................................ BrianHocking (j.D. Kruger), Paul Harrington (David Fraser), Costume designer..............................

Robi Hall Synopsis: A miniseries based on Ruth Park’s Art dept, runner...............................Marc Ryan Craig Miles (The Ticket Boy).

Make-up.................................................... AnnieHeathcote best-selling novel of the same name.

Asst edito r............................................VeronikaHaussler Synopsis: A stylised horror movie.

Hairdresser...............................................AnnieHeathcote 2nd asst editor................................. Rhyl Yates Wardrobe a sst.......................................... HelenMains Dubbing edito r...........................................PennRobertson JO E WILSON MY BROTHER TOM Props buyer....................................Lisa Graham Best b oy.......................................................PaulGantner Prod, company........Bilgola Beach Productions Standby props............................... Lisa Graham Prod, company...............Crawford Productions Runner.................................. Alison McClymont Producer.................................Alexandra Cann Special effects........................................... PeterShoesmith (Communications) Pty Ltd Catering..................................... Kaos Catering Director..................................Geoffrey Nottage Set construction....................... David Thomson Producer.......................................... Rod Hardy Length........................................6 x 48 minutes Scriptwriter................................Keith Dewhurst Sound editors.............................................SaraBennett, Exec, producers...................................... HectorCrawford, Gauge...................................................... 16 mm Based on short stories by..........Henry Lawson Emma Hay, Ian Crawford, Synopsis: The Challenge is the dramatized Photography..................................... Peter Levy Stephanie Flack Terry Stapleton story of the 1983 land and sea battle for the Sound recordist..............................Paul Brincat Editing assistants...........................Emma Hay, Director.........................................Pino Amenta America’s Cup. The miniseries looks beyond Editor............................................Tim Wellburn Laura Zusters Scriptwriter................................................. TonyMorphett the final contest for the cup to the genius, Prod, designer............................. Herbert Pinter Mixer.........................................................MartinOswin Based on a novel by................. James Aldridge talent and endeavour of those involved, who Prod, co-ordinator................................MargaretSlarke Stunts co-ordinator..................................... GuyNorris Sound recordist........................John McKerrow made an impossible dream become reality.

Prod, manager......................................StephenJones Still photography.......................................GrantDearden Editor.............................................................PhilReid Unit manager.................................Phil Urquhart Snake wrangler............................................NeilCharles Prod, designer...........................................OtelloStolfo TH E FLYIN G D O CTO RS Location liaison/extras casting.... Kate Ingham Mechanic........................................Mark Stone Assoc, producer........................... Michael Lake Prod, company.............. Crawford Productions Prod, accountant........................... Catch 1-2-3 Best boy..........................................Ross Philp Prod, supervisor.......................... Ewan Burnett Producer.................................Oscar Whitbread 1st asst director......................... Deuel Droogan Runner...................................................... RobinNewell Prod, co-ordinator............................Gina Black Exec, producers..................... Hector Crawford, 2nd asst director........................................TobyPease Catering........................................................ JanDrummond Prod, manager..........................................DarrylSheen Ian Crawford, Continuity..................................Jenny Quigley Mixed a t............................................... Colorfilm Unit manager.............................Leigh Amitzboll Terry Stapleton Producers assistant............................... MandyChang Laboratory........................................... Colorfilm Prod, secretary.......................Melissa Wiltshire Directors.................................. Brendon Maher, Focus puller................................Bill Hammond Lab. liaison........................Richard Piorkowski Prod, accountant..........................................RonSinni Colin Budds, Clapper/loader............................... Mandy King Budget............................................ $1.5 million 1st asst director..........................................JohnWild Dan Burstall' Key grip..................................Nobby Szafranek Length............................................ 97 minutes 2nd asst director....................................MichaelMcIntyre Scriptwriters..............................Tony Morphett, Asst grip......................... Rourke Crawford Flett Gauge......................................................16 mm 3rd asst director...........................Peter Nathan Christine McCourt, Gaffer...........................................Rick McMullin Shooting stock......................................... Kodak Continuity....................................................... LizPerry Vince Moran, Electricians................................. Brett Jarman, Cast: Ivar Kants (Danny Gallagher), Joanne Location manager........................... Neil McCart Peter Hepworth Thad Lawrence Samuel (Sally Woodrow), Stuart Campbell Casting.............................................Greg Ross, Photography............................................... BrettAnderson Boom operator.............................Paul Gleeson (Goltz), Jennifer Hagan (Maggie Ballantyne), Dina Mann Sound recordist............................... Paul Clarke Art director....................................Stewart Way Francis Yin (Mr Uen).

Lighting cameraman................................JamesDoolan Editors...................................... Lindsay Parker, Costume designer.................... Anthony Jones Synopsis: Danny Gallagher, investigative Focus pulle r..............................................

HarryGlynatsis Ross Evans Make-up.................................. Marjorie Hamlin journalist, stumbles across an international Clapper/loader........................................... GaryBottomley Composers................................................GarryMcDonald, Hairdresser............................. Cheryl Williams animal smuggling racket mastermined by a Key g rip ..........................................................Ian Benallack Laurie Stone Standby wardrobe...................Davina Maxwell large German named Goltz and an unbeliev­ Asst grip...............................Arthur Manousakis Asst producer...........................................Judith Coward Wardrobe asst......................... Shauna Flenady ably evil Chinese triad. Teaming up with photo­ Gaffer.............................................................

Ian Dewhurst Prod, co-ordinator.........................Lauren Bean Props buyers.............. Simon Chetwynd-Jones, grapher Sally Woodrow, Danny follows the Electrician................................................... NickPayne Prod, manager................................. Chris Page Helen Macaskill villains across outback Australia ending up in a Boom operator...............................Greg Nelson Prod, supervisor...................... C. Ewan Burnett Standby props........................ Robert Moxham brawling climax in the waters of tropical Asst art director........................................ BernieWynack Unit manager................................ Keith Waters Scenic a rtist..................................Peter Collias Queensland.

Costume designer.....................................ClareGriffin Prod, secretary...........................................CarolMatthews Set construction...............................Derek Mills Make-up.................................................. MaggieKolev Prod, accountant..........................................JeffShenker TH E HARP IN TH E SOUTH Asst editor........................................... JeannineChialvo Hairdresser................................................Doug Glanville 1st asst director........... Don Linke, Jamie Leslie Sound editors.................................. Lee Smith, Wardrobe supervisor................................ ClareGriffin Prod, company......................Anthony Buckley 2nd asst director..................................StrachanWilson Jeannine Chialvo Wardrobe asst..........................................Marion Boyce Productions Pty Ltd Continuity.................................................. LeslieForsythe Wrangler......................................Ray Winslade Wardrobe standby........................................SueMiles Producer............................................... AnthonyBuckley Script editor...................................Debbie Cox Best boy...................................................... BrettJarman Props buyer.............................................Murray Kelly Exec, producer........................................RobertMercieca Casting...........................................Jan Pontifex Runner................................. Andrew Merrifield Standby props...................... Shane Rushbrook Director................................................... GeorgeWhaley Story editor.............................Tony Cavanaugh Catering...................................................... JohnFaithful Set dressers............................................... BrianDusting, Scriptwriter............................................ EleanorWitcombe Focus puller................................................CraigBarden Laboratory................................................. Atlab John Rouch Based on the novel b y ......................Ruth Park Clapper/loader........................................... GaryBottomley Lab. liaison.......................................David Cole Art dept runner............................................Trish Keating Photography................................................ PaulMurphy Key g rip.................................................WarwickSimpson Length.........................................6 x 60 minutes Carpenter...................................................

PeterHern Sound recordist.................

Sydney Butterworth Asst g rip.........................................John Dynan Gauge......................................................16 mm Construction manager............................ RobertHern Editor..........................................Wayne Le Clos Gaffer...................................... Malcolm McLean Cast: Matthew Fargher (Joe Wilson), Kim Asst editor.,................................................

PeterBurgess Prod, designer.......................................Bernard Hides Boom operator.......................................... SteveHaggarty Krejus (Mary Brand), Glen Keenan (James Stunt co-ordinator..........................................BillStacey Composer......................................... Peter Best Art director....................................... Brian Betts Brand).

Still photography...................................

Michael Rayner, Prod, manager...........................................Carol Hughes Asst art director................................Len Barrett Synopsis: Based on the Henry Lawson stories Tony Fedder Location manager.................................... RobinClifton Make-up................................................. Andrew Sejben of Joe Wilson.

W rangler.......................................

Gerald Egan Unit manager........................ Roxane Delbarre Hairdresser.......................................Lisa Jones Nurse............................................ Vicki Gilders Prod, secretary..................... Catherine Bishop Wardrobe..................................................RobynAdams TH E LA S T FRONTIER Best bo y ........................................................LexMartin Prod, accountant.......... Moneypenny Services, Standby wardrobe...........................Jo Haddon Runner....................................................... DougGreen Prod, com pany......................Ayer Productions Val Williams Props buyer.................................................GlenJohnson Publicity....................................................SusanWood Dist. company............................. Channel Ten, Prod, assistant.......................................... Nicky Rowntree Special effects........................... Terry Wilcocks Catering................................................

Bandaid Worldvision 1 st asst director............................................Bob Howard Set decorators...............................Dawson Lee, Laboratory....................................................VFL Producer.......................................................TimSanders 2nd asst director................................Ian Kenny John Skovsdal, Length............................................184 minutes Exec, producer..............................................HalMcElroy 3rd asst director................................. Mark Day Brett Vietch Gauge...................................................... 16 mm Continuity.................................................. NickyMoors Director.....................................................Simon Wincer Set construction..................................... GordonWhite Shooting stock.............................. Kodak ECN Casting.......................................................SusieMaizels Scriptwriter............................Michael Laurence Asst editors................................................ June Wilson, Cast: Tom Jennings.(Tom Quayle), ChristoCasting consultants.........Maizels & Associates Additional material b y ................. Roger Dunn, Owen Johnston

PR O D UCTIO N

64 — May CINEMA PAPERS

WARDROBE • MAKE-UP VANS • CAMERA TRUCKS • CAST VANS • PROPS VANS • UNIT VEHICLES • TRACKING VEHICLES

PROUD TO BE SUPPLYING: • Sword of Honour • Lancaster Miller • The More Things Change •Crocodile Dundee • Archer

FOR THE SUPPLY OF ALL FILM PRODUCTION TRANSPORT CONTACT DAVID SUTTOR ON (02) 439 4590

318 WILLOUGHBY ROAD, NAREMBURN, SYDNEY STATION WAGONS • SEDANS • HI-ACE VANS « 4 X 4 TOYOTA LANDCRUISERS • ACTION VEHICLES • TRAY TOPS • BUSES

Prod, secretary......................... Lisa Fitzpatrick an independent television company. It features Camera operator.......................Julian Penney Floor managers.......................... Soren Jensen, the drama and action that goes into making a Studio lighting..................................... Ezio Belli David Watts weekly current affairs program e. “ Assign­ Focus puller.................................................BrettJoyce ment” is the programme. David Lockhart owns Asst directors...............................Jeffrey Gale, Key grip.........................................Alan Trevena Karen Moore, the show, the company that makes it, and is Gaffer............................................Martin Perrot Lesia Hruby the new current affairs “ star” — sharp and Make-up...................................... Elaine Fitcher Casting......................................... Sue Manger, aggressive. We watch his team bring him the Wardrobe.....................................................ElsieEvans Helen Satter big stories each week.

Sound editor............................... David Dundas Lighting supervisor...................... Peter Russell Animation.......................................................BillSykes PRISO NER Staging supervisor................ Gunther Neszpor Opticals............................................. Bill Sykes, Make-up.................................Rachel Del Santo Barry Quick Prod, company.........Grundy Television Pty Ltd Hairdressers.......................... Greg Hanneman, Producer...................................... Marie T revor Title designer................................................. BillSykes NEIGHBOURS Gail Edwards Tech, producer..........................................BarryQuickDirectors............................... Kendal Flanagan, Ward, assistants................. Margarita Tassone, Sean Nash, Publicity.....................................

Georgie Brown Prod, company.........Grundy Television Pty Ltd Norman Tunbridge, Tony Osicka, Studios.......................................ABC, Gore Hill Producer........................................John Holmes Julie Taylor Alister Smart Mixed at......................................ABC, Gore Hill Directors.................................. Brendan Maher, Props.............................................Peter Morris, Budget...................................................$45,000 Scriptwriters........................................... Various Chris Langman, Length..............................................

50 minutes John Messenger Story editor...........................................

Gwenda Marsh Max Varnel, Shooting stock........Betacam/Studio Electronic Set designer.................................... Leore Rose Script editors...............................Neil Luxmore, Andrew Friedman, Cast: Robert Grubb (Barry).

Music editor.................................................Gary Hardman Pauline Clayton Julian McSweiney Synopsis: An original 50-minute play for tele­ Vision switcher..................................... KathleenHinchcllff Based on the original idea b y ........Reg Watson Scriptwriters........................................... Various vision.

Tech, directors................................Pat Barter, Sound....................................Ross Thompson Script editors................................... Rick Maier, Keith Cartwright, Editor............................................ Phil Johnson Phil East Graham Manion Prod, designer..............................Geoff Hatton PRIME TIME Script supervisor................................ Ray Kolle Catering......................................Taste Buddies Composer......................................Alan Caswell Based on the original idea b y ........Reg Watson Prod, company............... Crawford Productions Post-production......................... Custom Video Exec, producer............................... Reg Watson Sound..............................................David Muir, (Broadcast) Pty Ltd Cast: Tom Richards (David Palmer), Leila Assoc, producer............................................

Ian Smith Grant Vogler, Producer.................................... Graham Moore Hayes (Beryl Palmer), Pat McDonald (Fiona Prod, manager...................... Christine Aspinall Keith Harper, Exec, producers.................... Hector Crawford, Thompson), Ian Rawlings (Wayne Hamilton), Prod, secretaries....................................Francis Digiglio, Rob Saunders Ian Crawford, Abigail (Caroline Morrell), Belinda Giblin Wendy Walker Editor......................................................... DavidJaeger Terry Stapleton (Alison Carr), Oriana Panozzo (Susan Palmer), Floor manager.................................Ray Lindsay Prod, designer..........................Robbie Perkins Directors..................................... Paul Maloney, Brian Blain (Gordon Hamilton), Sarah Kemp Asst directors..........................................

Murray Groube, Composer...................................................TonyHatch Chris Sheil, (Charlie), Danny Roberts (Andy Green).

Linda Wilson Exec, producer............................................. RegWatson Steve Mann, Synopsis: Continuing drama centred around Casting..........................................................Jan Russ, Assoc, producer......................................... PeterAskew Peter Andrikidis the Hamilton and Palmer families, their friends Jane Daniels Prod, co-ordinator.....................Debra Schone Scriptwriters............................Terry Stapleton, and relatives in Sydney and Melbourne.

Lighting supervisor...................................... RodHarbour Prod, manager.......................... Roslyn Tatarka Graham Hartley, Staging supervisor......................................... BillWebb Floor managers...................... Peter O’Connor, Shane Brennan, Make-up..........................................................

Jo Pardy Alan Williamson Graeme Farmer Hairdresser.............................................William Mcilvaney Asst directors...................................... MarianneGrey,Script editors...............................Peter Herbert, Wardrobe......................................................BigiMalinausk PO S T-P R O D U C TIO N Jo Rittan Morgan Smith, Props buyer.................................. Mark Grivas Casting.......................................................... JanRuss, Jocelyn Moorhouse, Standby props..........................................SusanBirjak Sal Creswick Erina Rayner, Music editor................................................ John White Lighting supervisor.................. Keith Ferguson Jacki Horvath A LIC E TO NOWHERE Vision switcher............................................. JimMauridis Research.................................................... JaneWatson Staging supervisor..................................... ColinMorris Tech, directors....................................... HowardSimmons, Prod, company....... .Crawford Productions Photography......................................Louis Puli Art director............................................ StephenKeller Peter Merinow ........ Brendan Lunney Producer................

Sound recordist........................................... PaulClark Make-up...................................................... Julie Corbert, Catering.......................................

Helen Louers .................John Power Director...................

David Henderson Editor......................................................... KaranPeel ..........David Boutland Scriptwriter.............

Assoc, producer.....................................HowardNeil Post-production.................ATV 10 (Melbourne) Hairdressers...........................................GlendaMann, Cast: Elspeth Ballantyne (Meg Morris), Maggie .................Evan Green Based on a novel by Prod, supervisor.....................

C. Ewan Burnett Sue Warhurst Kirkpatrick (Joan Ferguson), Gerda Nicholson ................Brian Wright Script editor............

Prod, co-ordinator...................... Simone North Wardrobe...................................................IsabelCarter, (Ann Reynolds), Joy Westmore (Joyce Barry), Photography........... ............ David Connell Asst prod, co-ordinator.......... Sandra Knowles Cathy Turnbull, Ernie Bourne (Mervin Pringle), Lynda Stoner ........Andrew Ramage Sound recordist.....

Post-production co-ordinator............Karan Peel Frenny Cook (Eve Wilder), Louise Siversen (Lou Kelly), ...........

Ralph Strasser Editor.......................

Prod, manager...............................Ron Noseda Props buyer.................................................MarkGrivas Glenda Linscott (Rita Connors), Pepe Trevor Prod, designer......... ..............Philip Warner Unit manager............................. Maurice Burns Standby props........................ Paul Sutherland, (Lexie Patterson), Jackie Woodburne (Julie Exec, producers...... ........Hector Crawford, Prod, secretary..................Kimanie Haemelster Kim Naggs Egbert).

Ian Crawford, Prod, accountant....................... Doug Johnston Music editor............................................WarrenPearson Synopsis: A powerful and unique drama series Terry Stapleton 1st asst directors........................................ TonyForster, Vision switcher..........................................JennyWilliams exploring the lives of women in prison.

Assoc, producer.......... .............

Michael Lake Richard Clendinnen Tech, directors............................................JackBrown, Prisoner is about the crimes they committed, Prod, manager............ ....................Grant Hill Continuity....................................................TaraFerrier, Ric Nott, their personal hell behind bars and their Prod, co-ordinator....... ............Leonie Jansen Carmel Torcasio Howard Simons Location manager....... ............... Murray Boyd Casting director..........................................GregRosspassionate and often violent struggle to come Catering........................................................ Trio Catering to terms with their demeaning experiences.

Asst location manager .... Cameron Strachan Casting consultant................................. KimlarnFrecker Post-production.................ATV 10 (Melbourne) Prod, secretary........... .................. Fiona King Focus puller................................................. PaulTilley Cast: Francis Bell (Max Ramsay), Elaine Smith Prod, accountant........ .... Robert Threadgold Clapper/loader............................Craig Dusting SH A R K ’S PARADISE (Daphne Lawrence), Paul Keene (Des Clarke), 1st asst director.......... ....................John Wild Key g rip ..........................................................IanPhilips Myra De Groot (Eileen Clarke), David Clencie Prod, company..................... Memorelle Pty Ltd 2nd asst director.......... .........Brett Popplewell Gaffer.............................................................

Bill Jones (Danny Ramsay), Peter O’Brien (Shane Dist. company........................................NetworkTen, 3rd asst director.......... ...............Peter Nathan Boom operator...................................Leigh Tate Ramsay), Alan Dale (Jim Robinson), Kylie Worldvision Continuity.................... ................... Sue Wiley Art director..................................Andrew Reese Flinker (Lucy Robinson), Stefan Dennis (Paul Producer.......................................Carla Kettner Casting........................ ........... Graham Moore Asst art director...........................Elena Perrotta Robinson), Anne Haddy (Helen Daniels).

Director.................................... Michael Jenkins Wardrobe supervisor/ Synopsis: Love ’em or hate ’em, but everybody Scriptwriter..................................................GregMillln, Casting consultant..... ................Jan Pontifex Focus p ulle r............... .................. Greg Ryan costume designer.........................

Keely Ellis has got ’em: Neighbours. Ramsay Street . . .

David Phillips Clapper/loader............ ............. Terry Howells Make-up...................................................... BradSmith,Exec, producer........................................ JamesMcElroy the stage for an exciting drama serial . . .

Elizabeth Harper Key drawing back the curtain to reveal the intrigue Photography.............................................MartinMcGrath g rip ...................... ............. Ian Benallack Hairdressers................................................. SueKelly,Prod, supervisor........................................DavidClarkeAsst g rip ...................... ...........Stuart Crombie and the passions of Australian families . . . and Gaffer.......................... ............ Stewart Sorby Doug Glanvllle their neighbours.

Length.............................................................90minutes Best b o y ...................... ............ Peter Maloney Wardrobe.................................... Anna Baulch, Synopsis: The story of three undercover cops Electrician................... ........Richard Tummel Ann Went working on the Gold Coast to keep Surfer’s P LE A S E TO REMEMBER TH E FIFTH Boom operator........... ........... Scott Rawlings Props buyer............................................. RolandPike Paradise safe for the tourists.

OF NOVEMBER Art director.................. ..........Sally Shepherd Standby props.............................................PaulKiely, Costume designer...... ................Clare Griffin Darcy Chene Prod, com pany................. ..... ABC TV Drama SONS AND DAUGHTERS Make-up...................... ....... Felicity Schoeffel Special e ffects............................Terry Wilcock Dist. company.................... ....................... ABC Prod, company.........Grundy Television Pty Ltd Hairdresser.................. ...............Caroline Nott Sound editor...............................................ColinSwann Producer............................. ........ Julian Pringle Producer....................................................PosieJacobs Wardrobe supervisor... .... Margot McCartney Music editor........................................... AndrewJacobson Director............................... .............. Peter Fisk Directors..................................................... MarkPiper,Standby wardrobe...... ..................John Shea Best b o y ..................................................... GregRobinson Scriptwriter........................ ....Keith Thompson Russell Webb, Props buyer................. ...............Lisa Graham Runner......................................................... ConMancuso Based on the original idea Andrew Howie, Standby props............ .... Shane Rushbrook, Publicity....................................................GTV 9 by.................................... ....Keith Thompson Gaye Arnold Brian Lang Studios..................................................... GTV 9 Script editor........................ .......Barbara Masel Scriptwriters........................................... Various Art dept asst............... ............ Diane Bennett Mixed at.......................... Crawford Productions Photography...................... ........Julian Penney Script editor............................... Greg Haddrick Special effects............ ........Conrad Rothman Laboratory..............................................Cinevex Sound recordist.................. ...... Chris Alderton Set dresser.................. ....Graham Blackmore Lab. liaison................................................BruceBraunStory editor....................... Maureen Ann Moran Editor.................................. ........Nola O’Malley Based on the original idea b y ........Reg Watson Gauge.................................... 16 mm (location), Carpenter.................... ...............David Forbes Prod, designer................... ........Leigh Tierney Sound..........................................................

Alan Scott, video (studio) Asst carpenter............ ............ Jim McKeown Composer........................... ..........Chris Harriet Zbyszek Krzyszkowiak Cast: Kris Orchard (David Lockhart), Tony Construction manager. .........Michael McLean Exec, producer................... ........Julian Pringle Editors........................................

Clive Jenkins, Hawkins (Harry Jones), Julianne White (Diana Construction............... ....................Wilf Flint, Prod, manager.................... .Stephen O’Rourke Michael Hagen Fields), Ben Mendelsohn (Bart Jones), Peter David Thompson Unit m anager..................... .........Lance Mellor Prod, designer...........................Ken Goodman Kowitz (Jim Donnegan), Peter Whitford Asst editor................... ................... Jo Friesen Prod, secretary................... .... Annabel Jeffery Composers..................................... Don Battye, (Charles Garrett), Nina Landis (Kate Mac Neg. matching............ ........Warwick Driscoll 1st asst director................... .........Scott Feeney Peter Pinne Arthur), Katrina Foster (Jocelyn Cole), Sonja Sound editors............. ..............Glenn Martin, 2nd asst director................. ...........Kate Woods Exec, producer............................................. DonBattye Tallis (Georgina Jones), Antonia Murphy (Jan Glenn Newham Continuity........................... ..Elizabeth Steptoe Assoc, producer.......................Graham Murray Garrett), David Whitney (Stephen Lockhart).

Editing assistants........ ................ David Field, Producer’s assistant.......... ..Elizabeth Steptoe Prod, manager...........................................Janet Veale Synopsis: Prime Time is a new concept in Averil Nichol ........Jennifer Allen Casting................................

Unit manager................................................ RayWalshM ixer.......................... ..........Richard Brobyn ► serial television: a behind-the-scenes look at Lighting cameraman.......... ...... Julian Penney pher Cummins (Kit Quayle), Keith Michell (Edward Quayle), Catherine McClements (Peggy MacGibbon), Gordon Jackson (Lockie MacGibbon), Ralph Coterill (Dorman Walker), Christopher Plummer (Finn McCoil), Dick Moss (Charlie Castles), Graham Rouse (Sgt Joe Collins), Kerry McKay (Jack Dobey).

Synopsis: The love affair of two youngsters from antagonistic Catholic and Protestant families alienatesthe population of a small country town.

CINEMA PAPERS May — 65

The Night The Prowler

Australian Dream — The Perfectionist — The Last Bastion —

Allies —

SARA BENNETT freelance film editor now has her own FULLY EQUIPPED CUTTING ROOMS

Winds of Jarrah —

near Colorfilm Camperdown FEATURES • MINI SERIES DOCUMENTARIES (02) 519 9752 or (02) 357 5867 Sharky’s Party —

14’s Good 18’s Better —

The Dismissal

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35mm & 16mm Negative Cutting

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A trifling two hours from Sydney, a solitary one hour from Melbourne: a first class studio facility; film and video editing suites; multi-track recording studio; preview theatres (16 and 35mm); and a staff of experienced professional camera and sound operators, editors, script writers, directors and production crews.

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1-3 BOWEN ROAD, MOO NAH, H O BAR T 7009 PHONE: (002) 28 6263 TELEX: AA57148

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W in d M achines - Designed for studio and outdoors.

Feature t i l t swivel, built-in rain and fog. (1 0 machines).

Rain Tow ers - Studio models and outdoor models. T hrow a precise pattern — tan k e r and high pressure pumps. r Fog M achines — Designed for film use — reliable and q u ie t "M in ifo g " "P ortafog " "G asfog" "M e g a fo g " for large output.

Air Cannons - Pyro devices - Fire extinguishers - Release devices - Capsule guns — Steering control for vehicles.

Breakaw ay Glass - S h e e ts - Sim ulated Reinforced - bottles, glasses, plates, specials m ade to order.

Hydraulic and Pneum atic rigs -

B reakaw ay rigs. Falling rigs. Structural design and engineering.

Flying Rigs - 3 dim ensional m ovem ent for models or people to sim ulate weightlessness.

M o d e l M akin g - vacuum form ing - cam era protection - m echanical devices - engineering w orkshop.

evading German forces during the Battle of Asst accountant.............................Donna Willis Crete in 1941. It Is a documentary with drama­ 1st asst director..........................................KeithHeygate tised sequences.

2nd asst director.............................Nicola Long 3rd asst director.......................... Louise Crosby FUN ERAL GOING Continuity................................................SharonGoldie Casting consultant....................................... SueParker Prod, company...................................... ABC-TVDrama Additional casting................................... Jennie Kubler Dist. company............................................. ABC Lighting cameraman.................................... KimBatterham Producer...................................... Julian Pringle Camera operator..............................Ian Marden Director........................................ Julian Pringle Camera assistant.............................John Scott Scriptwriter.................................................. CoryTaylor Key grip.................................................... NobbySzafranek Based on the original idea by.......... Cory Taylor DREAMTIME — TH E MONSOON G affer.......................................................... RickMcMullen Script editor........................................... BarbaraMasel FROG Best boy........................................Brett Keeping Sound recordists...................... Chris Alderton, Prod, company........... Australian Broadcasting Boom operator........................................... GerryNucifora David Dundas Corporation Art director............................................. RichardRoberts Editor........................................... Nola O’Malley Dist. com pany.................................... ABC-TV Costume designer................................. MirandaSkinner Prod, designer............................. Stephen Gow Producer.................................................... RobinJames Make-up/Hairdresser.... Jane Draysey Stewart Prod, manager................... Stephen O'Rourke D irector..................................................... RobinJames Standby ward.............................................. SuzyCarter Unit manager............ ................... Lance Mellor Scriptwriter................................................ BruceMurphy Set dresser.............................. Sandy Wingrove Prod, secretary......................... Annabel Jeffery Adapted from......Aboriginal Dreamtime legend Standby props...................................... MatthewCumming 1st asst director.......................................... ScottFeeney Photography............................................ WayneHarley Art dept assistant................................ Tim Fryer 2nd asst director....................... Vid McClelland Sound recordist................................... WarwickFinlay Special effects..........................................KeronHansen Producer’s assistant................................EmmaPeach Editor..........................................................DavidHalliday Choreography............................... Alita Northey Casting.................................................. JenniferAllen Prod, designer.................................. Nick Reed Construction manager...............Geoffrey Howe Lighting cameraman...................................SamChung Unit manager................................................ LenBauska Scenic artist...................................Lyn Rowland Camera operator....................................... PeterRobson Prod, assistant....................................... DebbieOverell Carpenters.............................. Andrew Tickner, Key grip........................................Alan Trevena Script editor...............................................RobinJames David Stenning, Electrics................................................... MartinPerrot Camera assistant.......................................Colin Hertzog Daniel Flowers Boom operator................................... Geoff Krix Special fx photography.............. Mel Moschella Asst editor........................................ Paul Fraser Make-up....................................................ElaineFitcher Gaffer.............................................Ron Hannah Mixers.........................................................TerryO’Brien, Wardrobe................................................ WendyChuck Electrician......................................Scott Mellon Andrew Host Props.......................................................... PeterBranch Make-up.................................. Dawn Thompson Stunts co-ordinator....................................ChrisHession Props buyer..............................................SusanGlavich Neg. matching............................................BarryMcKnight Tightrope teacher.................................StephenChampion Standby props............................................... IanHayward, Sound editor..............................................DavidHalliday Still photography.....................................RobertMcFarlane Simon Longworth Editing assistant...................................JeanetteMcGown Tutor/dlalogue coach................................CathyGatenby Sound editor.............................................. DavidDundas Mixer..................................................... WarwickFinlay Runner....................................................... LindaPavilack Tech, producer................................ John Nixon Narrator.....................................................BelzaLowah Camera facilities........................................ TramBroadcast Publicity.................................... Georgie Brown Opticals........................................................ KenPhelan Video editing Catering....................................Fillum Catering Studios.................................................. ABC-TVBrisbane facilities...................Video Transfer Services Studios................................. ABC-TV, Gore Hill Mixed a t................................................. ABC-TVBrisbane Mixed a t .........................................Audi O’brien Mixed a t............................. ..ABC Necam Suite Laboratory.......................................... Colorfilm TH E BEERW AH BO LT Budget.........................................................$1.4million Budget...................................................$30,000 Length.............................................................30minutes Length....................................... 12 x 25 minutes Length.............................................. 30 minutes Prod, com pany.......................................... ABC Gauge......................................................16 mm Gauge.......................................................Video Gauge.....................................................1" tape Dist. company.............................................ABC Shooting stock.................................... 7291 and Cast: Rebekah Elmaloglou (Mareka), Helen Cast: Tracey Higginson (Ruth), Bill Zappa Producers.................................... Lee Faulkner, 7294 Eastmancolor Kambos (Yaya), Stavros Economidis (Georgio), (Micky), Steven Jacobs (Dan), Vanessa Bruce Redman Cast: Verle Williams, Adam Baird (Wala).

Mary Kostakidis (Roula), Dominic Elmaloglou Downing (Patricia), Dasha Blahova (Helena), D irector......................................................... LeeFaulkner Synopsis: Based on Dreamtime Legend, this (Costa), Jane Clifton (Mrs Wilson), Jim Holt Paul Bertram (Kevin).

Based on the original idea is the tale of an Aboriginal boy Wala and Quork (Brian Brooking), Joanne Samuel (Chris Synopsis: An original half-hour play for tele­ by............................................. The P.O.T.S. Quork, the frog. Wala tries to kill the frog who Brooking), John Doyle (Professor), Ray vision.

Photography...............................Julian Mather, calls upon Tiddalik, the largest frog in the Meagher (Red Headed Person).

Roger Bradbury world, to help. What follows is a lesson in tact Synopsis: When the going gets tough the kids HEART Sound recordist............................................. LeeFaulkner Wala will never forget. Whatever you do, don’t get going and the world goes five times dizzy.

Editor......................................................... BruceRedman Prod, company...................................Mediacast step on a Quark Quark!

Exec, producer.................Craig Collie (Sydney) Producer...............................................Jim Dale 2nd unit director........................................BruceRedman Director.....................................................RogerHudson FILM STRUCK Lighting cameraman.................... Julian Mather Scriptwriters...........Jonathon Clemens, FLO W ERS OF RETHYMNON Prod, company.....................Mediacast Pty Ltd Camera assistant............................. Tim Wilson Roger Hudson Producer.............................................. Jim Dale Prod, company.................. Media World Pty Ltd 2nd unit photography............................... RogerBradbury Original research.....................................ShaunMcllraith D irector.........................................................IvorBowen Producers...................................... Colin South, M ixer............................................................. LeeFaulkner Photography.............................................. PhilipBull Scriptwriter..................................................John Baxter John Tatoulis Narrators......................................... Chris Frost, Sound recordist............................... Ruth Berry Photography............................... Colin Purnell, Director............................................ Colin South Alan Frost Editors........................................................ PeterSomerville, Graeme Ross Scriptwriters............................................. RogerClarke, Still photography....................................... RogerBradbury Gary Hillberg Sound recordist............................ Glen Turner Phillip Dalkin Tech, adviser..................................Mike Groom Exec, producer.......................................RichardTanner Based on the recollections o f........... Lewis Lind Off-line editors................................Ivor Bowen, Runner..............................................Tim Wilson Prod, manager................................. Peta Spear Gary Hillberg Photography................... Gaetano N. Martinetti Catering.................................. Vicky Matheson, Prod, accountant.................................Riva Dale Sound recordist......................................... SeanMeltzer On-line editor.............................. Bob Crawford Laurie Stanborough Prod, assistant................................Lyn Danzey Editors........................................................ MarkGracie, Exec, producer.................................... Jim Dale Studios......................................................... ABCBrisbane Camera operator........................................PhilipBull Assoc, producer.........................................JohnBaxter Neil Ryan Mixed a t....................................................... ABCBrisbane Camera assistant....................................... DougChatwin Composer............................................... Tassosloannides Prod, managers..........................................PetaSpear, Laboratory..........................................Cinecolor 2nd unit photography.................................DougChatwin Hazel Joyner Exec, producer.............................. Anne Basser Length............................................... 15 minutes Neg. matching......................................Colorfilm Assoc, producer.........................................KevinMoore Prod, accountant................................Riva Dale Gauge...................................................... 16 mm Mixer......................................................StephenAdams Prod, manager...........................Yvonne Collins Prod, assistant.........................Bethwyn Serow Shooting stock..................................7240, 7250 Narrator........................................................PaulRicketts Prod, secretary..........................................TaniaPaternostro Make-up........................................Joy Marwick Cast: Chris Frost, Alan Frost.

Still photography.................................JonathonClemens Prod, accountant....................Georgia Hewson Hairdresser..............................Lori Sedgeman Synopsis: A climber’s eye view of the ascent Animation...................................................DavidWhittam Continuity...............................................Yvonne Collins Wardrobe......................................Jenny Bruce of Mt Beerwah in S.E. Qld. The climb Laboratory........................................... Colorfilm Camera operator............ Gaetano N. Martinetti Set construction............................ Brian Perritt incorporates an overnight ‘hanging bivouac’, Lab. liaison................................ Kerry Jenkins Focus puller............................ Peter Zakharov Sound e ditor................................. Paul Findlay roof climbing, spectacular scenery and some Budget.................................................$330,000 Camera assistant........................................PaulHellard Still photography............................ Joyce Agee of the more obscure problems encountered by Length........................................ 3 x 50 minutes Key g rip ....................................................... PaulAmmitzboil Opticals..................................................... 20/20Vision rock climbers.

Gauge..............................................................16mm Gaffers...................................................... SteveFlounders, Title designer............................Nanou Morgan Shooting sto ck...........................Eastman Neg. Peter O’Brien Length...................................... 10 x 30 minutes C A S S IE Synopsis: The television series, Heart, looks Boom operator..........................................SonyaPemberton Shooting s to ck.................................... Betacam into this wonderful organ and recent advances Prod, company............ Starlite Film Production Art director/set dresser............Stan Antoinades Cast: John Baxter (host). in cardiac medicine. It also discusses society's Producer.....................................Carl T. Woods Make-up.....................................................KerynCarter Synopsis: A ten-part series on the social biggest killer, coronary heart disease. How and Director....................................... Carl T. Woods Wardrobe supervisor................................ElenaDemetriou impact of the cinema. why it develops, who is at risk and simple pre­ Scriptwriter................................. Carl T. Woods Military ward, co-ordinator.... Phillip Chambers cautions we can all take to avoid a premature Photography............................... Paul Ozererski Still photography................................... VladimirOsherov FIVE TIMES DIZZY and painful death.

Sound recordist......................... Harvey Welsh Dialogue coach...................Rena Frangioudaki Prod, company........Samson Film Services Ltd Prod, assistants.................... Tanya Thompson, Runner/location nurse............................PatrickSlater Dist. company ...Samson Film Services Limited Sallyanne Freney Catering.......................................................PamKeating, THE HOUR BEFO RE MY BROTHER Producer......................................................TomJeffrey Casting....................... Starlite Casting Services Feast Your Face DIES Director..................................... John Eastway Lighting cameraman.......Slawomir Jastrzebski Laboratory............................................. Cinevex Prod, company...........Australian Broadcasting Scriptwriters............................Nadia Wheatley, Clapper/loader............................... Ross Wenke Budget...............................................$180,000 Terry Larsen Corporation G rips.......................................... Steven Bolack, Length.............................................................90minutes Dist. company............Australian Broadcasting Mark Robson Based on the novel b y ............. Nadia Wheatley Gauge................................................16 mm/1" Corporation Sound recordist.....................Martin Harrington Boom operator................................Tim Towers Cast: Mark Owen Taylor (Lewis Lind), Stuart Producer...................................................... NoelPrice Editor........................................................AileenSolowiej Make-up...................................... Desi Maddock Wagstaff (Lt Commander Poole), Richard Director..................................... James Clayden Composer..........................................Chris Neal Laboratory........................................... Colorfilm Scriptwriter...................................Daniel Keene Aspel (Dick Plant), Alex Taifer (Andreos), Nikos Prod, manager..........................Adrienne Read Length............................................. 90 minutes Paidoussis (Mayor).

Based on the play by................... Daniel Keene Location manager..................... Craig Sinclair Gauge...................................................... 16 mm Synopsis: A true story set in Crete about a Photography...............................................

Chris Davis Prod, secretary............................................ Julie Plummer Cast: Haley Jolliffe (Cassie), Robin Doyle 19-year-old Australian soldier on the island Sound Co-ordinator........................................BillDoyle Prod, accountant............................................Jill Coverdale (Roger Dunn), Judith Saunders (Darlene),

Asst m ixer............................... John Wilkenson Stunts co-ordinator.......................Arch Roberts Safety officer................................ Kevin Bryant Still photography.......................... Bill Bachman Opticals................. Victorian Film Laboratories Armourer.............................................John Fox Mechanics/drivers......................David Pollock, Mark Stone Art dept runner................................ Ben Jansen Runners....................................... Ken Mahlab, Cameron Mellor Publicity........................................Susan Wood Catering................................... Kristina Frohlich Unit nurse...................................Megan Cooper Post-production supervisor.......John Hollands Mixed at.......................... Crawford Productions Laboratory.............Victorian Film Laboratories Lab. liaison.................................Bill Harrington Budget.............................................$2.8 million Length........................................ 2 x 96 minutes Gauge...................................................... 16 mm Shooting sto c k........... Eastman 5291 and 5294 Cast: John Waters (Johnny Parsons), Rosey Jones (Barbara Dean), Steve Jacobs (Dave Mitchell), Esben Storm (Frog Gardiner), Swawomir Wabik (Ivan), Joy Smithers (Betty Spencer), Ruth Cracknell (Helen Spencer), Martin Vaughan (Jack “ The Dogger” Harris), Gerard Maguire (Tim Sanderson), Ron Graham (Denzil Leary).

Synopsis: A woman is murdered . . . a truck is hijacked . . . and terror comes to the loneliest road in the Australian outback. Alice to Nowhere is a story of desperate men and lonely people. It is an action-packed drama in which the characters act under the awesome influence of the vast emptiness that is the Aus­ tralian outback.

Wilhemina Naprasnik (Brenda), Jim Doherty (Tony Oresto), Leslie Asher (Sophie), Robert Johnson (Sgt Mills), Laurie Barton (Hobo), Jim Lam (Johnny Wah).

Synopsis: A suspenseful and moving story of a young country schoolgirl. Sexually attacked by her mother’s boyfriend, disbelieved and ignored by her mother, she runs away alone to the raw life and pitfalls of the city streets.

CINEMA PAPERS May — 67

The Premier of New South Wales (The Hon. Neville Wran,Q.C., M.P.) has authorised the New South Wales Film C orporation to continue to carry out Recom m endation Two of the Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the D istribution and E xhibition of Australian Films in New South Wales.

The Recom m endation provides fo rth e blowing u p o f 16mm short film s to 35mm gauge. The C orporation will con tribu te towards the cost of blowing up fou r short film s annually if a com m ercial d istrib u to r/ exh ib itor will guarantee that such a short film will be the atrically released in a first class theatre in at least three capital citie s including Sydney and M elbourne. Film-makers should subm it th e ir film s to distributors for assessment.

Such a short film should be: 1. Not longer than tw enty (20) m inutes duration; 2. Not a prom otional docum entary, travelogue or any other film of that kind.

The four film s to be blown up w ithin the schem e will comprise: • The w inner of the G reater Union D istribution Prize at the 1986 Sydney Film Festival.

• Two independently produced films.

• One film produced through G overnm ent supported institutions.

D istrib uto rs will s e le c t th o se film s that they are prepared to exhibit and supply the New South Wales Film Corporation w ith a list of film s in order of preference by July 30, 1986.

It is im portant to em phasise that the New South Wales Film Corporation will not be involved in the selection of such films. This will be an arrangem ent between the film -m aker and d istribu to r/e xhib itor only.

All furthe r inquiries should be addressed to:

EDNA WILSON — Manager Government Documentary Division 3rd Floor, 4 5 Macquarie Street, Sydney (Box 1744 G.P.O.) Telephone: (02) 21 5575 ______________

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Editor.............................................. Barry Munro Catering.................................................... SweetSeduction the family laundromat, hankers after the Producer...................................... Richard Davis Prod, designer........................................ GunarsJurjans Studios........................................Open Channel beautiful and rugged land of Texas. One Director.................................................. RichardDavis Location Designer......................................ColinGersch weekend she escapes with her horse-loving Mixed a t........................................... Sound Firm Scriptwriter............................................. RichardDavis Exec, producer.................................. Noel Price Laboratory.............................................Cinevex friend Joeline to the Tamworth rodeo where Based on the original idea b y .......Danae Brook Prod, manager............................... John Winter Lab. liaison.................................... Bruce Braun they learn a little about the ways of the rodeo — Photography.............................. Hans Heidrich Prod, secretary.........................................SarahHall Budget.............................................$1,192,000 bulls, horses, stetsons, country & western Sound recordist.......................................... NoelQuinn 1st asst director....................James Lipscombe music — and a lot about cowboys and their Length...................................... ,..4x 55 minutes Editors.................................... Terry Morrissey, 2nd asst director.........................Dorothy Faine women.

Gauge.............................16 mm -1 " video tape Jim Stevens Continuity...................................Annette Rogan Shooting stock........................Kodak ECN 7294 Exec, producer................................Gene Scott Casting..................................................... MarionPearce Cast: Sheryl Munks (Angie), Jim Petrovski Prod, manager........................Cheryl Buckman THE PA CK OF WOMEN Lighting cameraman..................... Chris Davis (Alex), Vichea Ten (Saret), Fatima Uygun Still photography.................... Cheryl Buckman Prod, company.................... Sideshow Alley Ltd Camera operator........................... Rod Coates (Fatima), Ly Lackhena Mak (Kanya), Lupco Mixed a t................................................Colorfilm Producer.....................................Diana Manson Focus pulle r............................... Trevor Moore Talevski (Tome).

Laboratory........................................... Colorfilm Director...................................... Ted Robinson Camera assistant..................... Vic Guglielmino Synopsis: In Between is a four-part miniseries Lab. liaison......................... Richard Piorkowski Scriptwriter................................ Robyn Archer Key grip................................ Tony Woolveridge about a group of four adolescents from Budget............................................. $1.1 million Asst grip ..................................................... PhilipOyston Based on the play b y ................. Robyn Archer Turkish, Cambodian, Macedonian and AngloLength........................................ 6 x 5 0 minutes Composers............................................ Various Electrician..............................................AndrewHolmes Australian backgrounds, facing the challenges Gauge......................................................16 mm Boom operator...............................................IanCregan and dilemmas of growing up in a multi-cultural Prod, manager.......................................AntoniaBarnard Shooting stock............................. Eastmancolor Make-up..................................... Ray Cartwright society. It shows the pressures on them, the Designer......................................... Roger Ford Scheduled release...........................April 1986 Wardrobe.......................................Anne Brown conflicts and difficulties they have to face, and Synopsis: A worldwide investigation of the Prod, accountant............Rosenfeld Kant & Co. Ward, designer.......................................GunarsJurjans the decisions they have to make as they are traditions and methods of alternative healers.

Producer's assistant..................Cate Anderson Special effects................................... Rod Clack pushed into adulthood.

The series shows there are methods of Casting................................ Sideshow Alley Ltd Mixer........................................... Paul Freeman healing, used for thousands of years, Musical director............................. Andrew Bell Catering................................. Sweet Seduction developed through constantly changing Studios...................................................ABC-TV TH E JO URN EY Studios............... Melbourne Theatre Company societies but remaining essentially the same.

Budget.................................................$336,326 Mixed at....................................................... ABC Prod, company......................................ABC-TVDrama They work on the root cause of illness and take Length........................................50-60 minutes Laboratory..............................................Cinevex Dist. company............................................. ABC the whole being into account: mind, body and Cast: Robyn Archer, Judi Connelli, Tracy Lab. liaison................................................BruceBraunProducer................................................... JulianPringle spirit.

Harvey, Jo Kennedy, Merryl Tankard.

Gauge..............................................................16mm Director............................................. Ulla Ryghe Synopsis: The programme is based on the Shooting stock............................. EastmancolorNeg Script editor............................... Barbara Masel successful cabaret produced in London and Cast: Rhonda Wilson.

Photography............................. Julian Penney, TR A CY across Australia. Consists of songs, prose and Synopsis: A brother and sister attempt to Laurie McManus poetry fitted together to make up a mosaic of Prod, company........... PBL Productions Pty Ltd come to terms with each other through an Prod, manager.....................Stephen O'Rourke new ways of looking at women.

Old images are Dist. company............PBL Productions Pty Ltd exploration of their past.

Unit m anager.......................................BeverleyPowers juxtaposed with new lyrics, layers of irony and Producers..................................John Edwards, Prod, secretary...................................... AnnabelJeffery Tim Read humour bring out startling meanings in familiar 1st asst director...........................................KateWoods HUNGER songs and new songs celebrate new women.

Directors....................................................... DonCrombie, Gaffer........................................... Martin Perrot Prod, company........................................... ABC Kathy Mueller Budget.................................................. $15,000 Producer.................................... Jan Chapman Scriptwriters...........................................MichaelFisher, Length.............................................. 30 minutes Director.................................................. StephenWallace Ted Roberts, Cast: Jenni Thornley.

THE PETROV AFFAIR Scriptwriter.................................................LouisNowra Leon Saunders Synopsis: Filmmaker Jenni Thornley talks Prod, company...................... PBL Productions Based on the original idea Photography.......................................... AndrewLesnie about her life, her films and motherhood.

Dist. company....................... PBL Productions by.............................................................LouisNowra Sound recordist..............................Bob Clayton Producer.......................................................BobWeisEditors.....................................Andrew Prowse, Photography.............................................JulianPenney LIVING FOREVER Director.....................................Michael Carson Sound recordist.........................Chris Alderton Denise Haslem Prod, company....................

Chadwick/Douglas Scriptwriters.................................... Cliff Green, Asst sound recordist......................... Geoff Krix Prod, designer...................... Stewart Burnside Film and Television Mac Gudgeon Editor................................................. Bill Russo Composer.................................Martin Armiger Dist. company.................................. Thorn EMI Based on the original idea b y .........Sam Lipski Prod, designer............................................. JimMurray Prod, co-ordinator.................... Cathy Flannery Producer.................................................... BrianDouglas hotography......................................Ron Hagen Asst prod, designer.................... Paul Hinderer Prod, manager.................................Mike Fuller Director.......................................................Brian Douglas Sound recordist........................... Lloyd Carrick Exec, producer........................... Jan Chapman Unit manager.......................Christopher Jones Scriptwriter................................................. BrianDouglas Supervising editor ....Edward McQueen-Mason Prod, manager............................Carol Chirlian Prod, secretary........................................... NikkiTraynor Based on the original idea Editors........................................................PeterCarrados, Unit m anager....................................... BeverleyPowers Prod, accountant........................................JaneCorden by............................................................ BrianDouglas Bill Murphy Prod, secretary..............................Susan Wells Prod, assistant.........................................LouiseCrosby Photography.............................................. BarryMalseed Prod, designer....................................... Jo Ford 1st asst director.......................... Graham Millar 1st asst director.................... Philip Hearnshaw Sound recordist............................John Phillips Composer....................................................PaulGrabowsky 2nd asst director........................................SteveStannard Costume designer..................................... HelenHooper Editor........................................... Ken Sallows Exec, producer................................Sam Lipski Continuity.............................................. RhondaMcAvoy Make-up supervisor...................Bob McCarron Prod, designer............................. Bryce Perrin Line producer......................................... MargotMcDonald Casting........................................Jennifer Allen Make-up artist.......................................AnnabelBarton Exec, producer...................................... RichardTanner Prod, manager........................................... TonyWinley Casting assistant........................Irene Gaskell Hairdresser..................................................PaulWilliams Prod, manager......................................... PhillipCollins Prod, co-ordinator.....................................LeslieParker Focus puller.................................... Brett Joyce Wardrobe supervisor....................................LynAskew Prod, secretary............................. Anne Pryor Unit manager................................Mason Curtis Camera assistant....................... Gerard Quinn Standby wardrobe........................................RitaCrouch Prod, accountant.......................... Carolyn Fyfe Prod, accountant.................................... MargotBrockProps buyers..................................................BillBooth, Key grip....................................... Alan Trevena 1st asst director........................... Phillip Collins Prod, assistant........................................MaggieDunn Joyce McFarlane Asst grip..................................... Paul Lawrence Casting..............................................Greg Apps 1st asst director..........................................BrianGiddens Electricians................................ Martin Perrott, Props standby..............................................MaxManton, Casting consultants........... Liz Mullinar Casting 2nd asst director.................................... HamishMcSporran Jo Johanson Pierre Drion Lighting cameraman.................................BarryMalseed 3rd asst director....................................... HalinaSztynda Make-up.....................................................SuzieStewart Special effects............................................ChrisMurray, Camera assistant....................Greg Harrington 2nd unit director.......................................... BobWeis David Hardie Wardrobe..............................................CarolineSuffield Wardrobe............................................... FrankieHogan Continuity..................................................JenniTosi Set finishers................................................... IanHeron, Props.......................................... Roy Eagleton Asst editor..............................................Virginia Murray Script research........................................ RobertManne Martin Bruveris Props buyer............................................. AdrianCannon Budget................................................ $500,000 Casting..............................

Liz Mullinar Casting Scenic artist......................................Alan Craft Props dresser............................................. TonyWilliams Length............................................................ 96minutes Casting consultant.................................... NickyGluyas Special effects................................Laurie Faen Set construction m anager...........................RayElphick Camera operator..........................................RonHagen Gauge......................................................16 mm Asst editor................................... Sasa Vitacek Asst editors.................................. Lyn Williams, Focus p uller......................................Phil Cross Shooting stock..................................Agfa 7294 Erin Sinclair Title designer..............................Lynne Barrett Clapper/loader.........................................Laurie Balmer Cast: Christine Harris (Presenter), Jim Hurtak, Publicity.................................... Georgie Brown Sound dept trainee.................. Andrew Buchan Professor Peter Singer, Professor Arthur Birch, Camera assistant.............................. Phil Cross Editing assistants......................... Lyn Williams, Catering...................................... Out To Lunch Key grip.......................................................TonyHall Barbara McGregor.

Erin Sinclair Length.............................................................90minutes Asst g rip ..................................................... GregTuohy Synopsis: The control of Life. Tomorrow’s Stunts co-ordinator.......................Glen Boswell Gauge......................................................16 mm G affer........................................... Brian Adams people — Today! Australia’s stance in man’s Still photography............................. Vivian Zink Cast: Brendan Higgins (Michael), Melita Jurisic Electrician....................................Tim Morrison next stage of evolution.

Best boy...............................Johnathan Hughes (lleana), John Bell (Consul), Paul Chubb Boom operator........................................... ChrisGoldsmith Publicity.............................. Sandra O’Halloran (Caffrey), Cathy Downes (Sue).

Art director...................................................Rob Ricketson Unit publicist...................... Sandra O’Halloran Synopsis: An original 90-minute telemovie ONE WILD WEEKEND WITH THE Costume designer..................................... RoseChong Catering.......................................................KateRoach written by Louis Nowra.

Make-up......................................Kirstin Veysey LONESOME R U STLER Laboratory...........................................Colorfilm Hairdresser................................Rochelle Ford Budget............................................ $4,509,000 Prod, company...................... Filmworks Pty Ltd Wardrobe supervisor....................................

Phil Eagles Length..................................... 3 x 120 minutes IN BETW EEN Producers................................... Chris Fitchett, Ward, assistant............................................ GailMayes Gauge......................................................16 mm Julie Money, Prod, company..............In Between Television Props buyer...................................... Daryl Mills Cast: Chris Haywood (Steve), Tracy Mann Kylie Burke Productions Pty Ltd Standby props............................................John Stabb(Connie), Nicholas Hammon (Harry), Linda Director....................................................... Julie Money Producers....................................Chris Warner, Choreography..........................................SashaIlyin Cropper (Joycie), Tony Barry (Mick Brennan), Scriptwriter............................................. ShirleyBarrett Kim Dalton Set decorator.......................Graeme Dusebury Aileen Britton (Big Caroline), Jack Webster Photography....................................Ellery Ryan Directors...................................... Chris Warner, Asst editor................................... Alan Woodruff (Bobby), Nicholas Papademetrlou (Theo).

Sound recordist...........................................MaxHensser Mandy Smith Neg. matching.......................................Cinevex Synopsis: A miniseries based on the true story Editor..........................................................ChrisFitchett Scriptwriters......................Maureen McCarthy, Musical director........................................... PaulGrabowsky of cyclone Tracy, which virtually destroyed Prod, designer/ Shane Brennan Musical producer.........................................

Red Symons Darwin in December 1974. art director...........................................AngelaKnight Based on the original idea Post-production sound............................. RogerSavage Composer..................................................

Peter Pitcher b y ......................................................MaureenMcCarthy Stunts co-ordinators......................................BillStacey, Prod, manager.................................Kylie Burke Photography........................

Jaems Grant Chris Anderson WAITING Prod, assistant...........................Lesley Jenkins Sound recordist................................ Ian Wilson Still photography...................................VladimirOsherov 1st asst director......................................... DavidTunnell Editor.......................Zbigniew (Peter) Friedrich Best boy......................................................BrettHull Prod, company......................................ABC-TVDrama 2nd asst director...................Stephen Stannard Dist. company............................................. ABC Composer...................................................MarkMcSherry Runner....................................................... MarkBishop Continuity................................................ JackieCairns Exec, producer..............Cinepak Investments Unit publicist....................................................DiWhiteProducer................................................GrahamThorburn Camera operator............................ Ellery Ryan Director..................................................GrahamThorburn Management Services Ltd Catering......................................Danny Popper Focus puller............................. Alison Maxwell Scriptwriter..................................................JeanBedford Assoc, producer.................................... AndrewWiseman Mixed at............................................. Soundfirm Clapper/loader............................... Conrad Mill Based on the short story Prod, manager............................Ann Darrouzet Laboratory............................................. Cinevex Key g rip .................................................... LesterBishop Unit manager.............................. Wendy Clarke Lab. liaison................................................BruceBraun b y ....................................................... GrahamThorburn Videotape editor........................Nola O'Malley 2nd unit photography................................. John Ruane Prod, secretary.............................. Toni Vernon Length........................................ 4 x 60 minutes Prod, designer...........................Sibella Mannix Gaffers.................................................. DouglasWood, Prod, accountant........Roseby & Lenny Pty Ltd, Gauge......................................................16 mm Philip Cadman Exec, producer..........................Jan Chapman Jennifer Davies Shooting stock......................................... Kodak Technical producer.................Mike Fitzpatrick Boom operator......................... Jack Friedman Prod, assistant.................................... ChristineBrophy Cast: Alex Menglet (Vladimir Petrov), Eva Sitta Prod, manager............................John Moroney Make-up....................................................... BobWasson 1st asst director............................ Jamie Legge (Evdokia Petrov), Swawomir Wabik (Dr Michael Prod, secretary......................................

AnnabelJeffery Wardrobe................................................ AngelaKnight Continuity.................................................RobynCrawford Bialoguski), Simon Chilvers (Dr H.V. Evatt), 1st asst director.......................... Chris Wyldeck' Asst editor.............................................JenniferScottRoy Baldwin (Bill Patterson), Melita Jurisic Focus puller...................................... Chris Cain 2nd asst director.......................................

LanceMellor Still photography..........................................

Reg Money Gaffer.......................................... Rory Timoney (Nina Morozov), Wyn Roberts (Brigadier Producer’s assistant.................Trish Canavan Catering....................................A & B Caterers, Second electrics......................... Daryl Pearson Charles Spry), George Shevtsov (Kislytsin), Bill Shoot Through Catering Casting..................................................

Jennifer Allen Boom operator...............................Craig Beggs Fox (Fergen O’Sullivan), Peter Black (North).

Lighting..................................................... GeoffBrown Laboratory........................................... Colorfilm Art director...........................................GeorginaGreenhill Synopsis: The Petrov Affair is the greatest Senior cameraman...................................

Geoff Clegg Lab. liaison................................................

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Fred Harden reports on the first Cinema Papers film industry seminar, held in Sydney on 22 March.

Taking the picture to pieces: Brad Christiansen, backed up by an image from a vectorscope.

Trying to organize any kind of meet­ ing of film industry people is difficult enough, given that promises of attendance are only ever as firm as shooting schedules and the erratic nature of freelance work. Trying to organize such a meeting in Sydney from Melbourne during a transport strike proved even more difficult. So it was something of a surprise that the first Cinema Papers film industry seminar turned out to be as success­ ful as it did.

The topic of film-to-tape transfers is a crucial one, now that more and more cinematographers’ work is reaching audiences electronically, and it attracted around 40 people, including DOPs, telecine operators, and laboratory and other industry representatives. With the financial assistance of Agfa-Gevaert, the venue of the oddly shaped (and even more oddly named) Sixsmith Room at the N o rth S yd n e y Travelodge was filled with monitors, a video projector and broadcastquality playback equipment.

For the reasons I have mentioned above, the final list of speakers for the morning session came together at the last minute, and most of the speakers had not had a lot of time to produce visual material to support their topics. Happily, though, such material as was available was both very much up-to-date and presented in an open manner — something

which is vital if future seminars are to be as useful as this one was.

The main speakers were Henri Stappaerts, from Agfa’s head office in the Antwerp suburb of Mortsel; Chris Hutson, a telecine operator from AAV in Melbourne; Erik Liepins, who is in charge of video preservation at the National Film Archive; Brad Christiansen, a tech­ nical director at Videopak; Brian Bailey, in charge of quality control at Channel 10 in Sydney; Andrew Mason, special effects manager at Mirage; and cinematographer/directors Peter James and Vincent Monton.

Opening the seminar, Cinema Papers editor Nick Roddick said that he hoped for a relaxed exchange of

“ It says a lot about what people will accept, when you have a fellow who lives down the bottom of a gully, has a set of rabbit ears on his TV set and 22 ghosts, and he says: ‘Oh, the picture’s not bad!’ ” Erik Liepins

ideas rather than a series of formal lectures; and the day was obviously successful in initiating dialogue between industry professionals.

Dom inic Case from C olorfilm summed this up with his comment that “ anything that brings together Vince Monton and Brian Bailey, side by side, has to be a good thing’’.

Opening the morning session, Henri Stappaerts pointed out that film had to keep up with video, and that it was imperative that advances in new emulsions continue at the same rate as those that are being made in electronics. His two-screen slide demonstration of the qualities of the new Agfa negative stocks, XT125 and XT320, while primarily a demonstration of their technical abilities, also served to stress some of the unique characteristics of film.

The ability of negative film to handle an exposure range of several camera stops and a contrast range of 200:1 is something that cannot be fully exploited by available print stocks, even less by telecine transfers. Yet, as Stappaerts pointed out, “ the high definition achieved by negative films — in excess of 1,400 lines — is still much higher than even the high-definition video system standards that are being dis­ cussed” . This makes the continuing use of film as an originating medium attractive, but there is a need to press for improvements in film-to-

tape transfers that can exploit the new stocks.

Videotape standards Brad Christiansen from Videopak noted a problem that was to be taken up by a number of speakers: that we are all apparently quite willing to have technical standards compromised by budgets. This, said Christiansen, left the videotape post-production house with the responsibility of making sure that, no matter what format has been used for shooting (Betacam, BVU, 16mm or 35mm film), the final quality was acceptable, not just to the client, but also to the television station. Chris­ tiansen was the first to point out the difficulty of trying to judge the tech­ nical quality of rushes from VHS or U-matic tape. It was, he said, the tape operator’s responsibility to alert the client to any build-up of video ‘ noise’ , caused by successive generations of tape dubbing. Chris­ tiansen also stressed the final nature of a telecine transfer, pointing out just how difficult it was to change the result once it was on tape.

With the aid of a waveform monitor and a vectorscope image projected on the large screen at the front of the room, Christiansen then demonstrated some of the technical parameters of videotape. It was a demonstration that showed the ►

CINEMA PAPERS May — 71

importance of the colour bars on a monitor as a reference point — an issue that was to come up again and again during the seminar. Bars are an important technical reference for lining up VTRs that will almost always be different from the machine that recorded the film transfer. But the variation between the 1" machine used by Christian­ sen and the U-matic material that was presented later only served to stress the deficiencies of the non­ broadcast format.

Telecine: history and technical development For this issue of Cinema Papers, I will merely summarize Erik Liepins's and Chris -Hutson’s contributions fairly briefly since, with their assist­ ance, we plan to return to the ques­ tion of telecines in a forthcoming issue. In Sydney, Liepins pointed out that both the industry and the audi­ ence have come to accept a drop in standards. The drop in real resolu­ tion from the one-time industry standard of 2" quad VTRs to the Betacam format or even BVU, has been considerable. But this was nothing by comparison with what the end-user was generally pre­ pared to accept, when faced with the greatly reduced quality of VHS or Beta VCRs. “ It says a lot about

72 — May CINEMA PAPERS

Flanked by the enemy: Peter James talks about the problem o f nonstandardized monitors. what people will accept,” said Liepins, “ when you have a fellow who lives down the bottom of a gully, has a set of rabbit ears on his TV set and 22 ghosts, and he says: 'Oh, the picture’s not bad!’ ” While the major part of the morning session was intended to present technical information, Chris Hutson approached the topic with comments about manipulation of the telecine as a very definite part of the creative process, and spoke of the role of the telecine grader in post-production. The subjective aspects of colour and differing inter­ pretation by each individual of terms such as warm, cold and high-key, said Hutson, made it important to look at a particular grader’s work as part of the pre-production process.

Hutson stressed the need for pre­ testing, and for developing a dia­ logue with the cinematographer as a means of eliminating problems.

He then gave a valuable demon­ stration of the range of creative con­ trols that was possible, and showed examples of the common problem areas. He also made it clear that, cinematographers did not neces­ sarily have the monopoly on crea­ tivity in the world of film-to-tape transfers.

Monitors The afternoon session was kicked off by last year’s AFI Best Cinemato­ graphy Award winner, Peter James, who talked about some of the problems that he had encountered with telecine transfers in the North American NTSC system, while working in Toronto. If nothing else, James’s demonstration served to illustrate the quality of our own PAL system.

“ We all know what colour bars look like?

But do we? I’ve never held a colour bar In my hand, or seen it on a wall somewhere” Peter James But James also had some com­ ments about the temptation to pro­ duce ‘bland’ images, knowing that there was so much control available in the telecine process. “ I think this is sometimes a bit of a cop-out,” he said. “ Cinematographers tend not to be courageous in going for it on the original negative. They say: ‘Oh, it’s OK: we'll fix it at post-production’.

And you certainly can fix it a lot more with the new technology. But I don’t think this is an excuse for lazy cinematography. I think you should go for it with style, and have the courage and technical ability to put that style on the screen, whether in the theatre or in the living room.”

James also talked about the growing use of videocassettes for the presentation of rushes. “ Just recently,” he said, “ some produc­ tion manager had a flash of genius when we were out in the desert somewhere, and said that he’d send the rushes to us on W ' . They turned up, and everybody thought it was a great idea, especially the production manager, who didn’t have to find a cinema or a flatbed to screen them on. The first day’s stuff looked terrific. But then we changed to a high-contrast lighting situation, and the results were dreadful. Everyone was walking around with long faces, until we got back to Colorfilm to see how good they were. It is a trap that people are falling into more and m ore — c o m p ro m is in g th e ir standards in viewing the work.”

As James pointed out, it is a psychological truth that the first im­ pression is the one that people will carry away with them, and the final result will never be to their satis­ faction because of it.

James also took up what would become the afternoon’s recurring

theme: that the presentation of video rushes was made even more difficult by the lack of standardization in monitors. Changing from lab to lab usually involved a change in the brand of equipment, and with it a difference in the line-up of the monitors. James suggested that there should be a standard tape of images to be used as an additional reference, using images that were as common to all of us as the ‘china girl’ on a print. This would help to counteract the abstract nature of colour bars. "W e all know what colour bars look like,’’ he said. "But do we? I’ve never held a colour bar in my hand or seen it on a wall some­ where. I find that it’s an ethereal thing that’s in a little scope some­ where, in a darkened room in the basement of a video lab. It bears no resemblance to anybody in the street. People in agencies or clients or even the general public haven’t got a clue what they’re looking at when one comes up.”

James’s suggestion was later taken up by Vince Monton, with his solution of "having a tape of your own, or that belongs to the produc­ tion company, with images that you are used to, and with some holes in it that you can drop the new images into and immediately say: ‘No, it’s wrong’. You need to take something along and say, ‘Hang on! Before we start, just play this tape. I’ve seen it on half a dozen production-house monitors, and I know what it looks like.’ ”

Broadcast: the requirements In his introduction to Brian Bailey of Channel 10, Nick Roddick said that Bailey was either a very confident man or a very brave one, facing a room full of cinematographers and production people. But Bailey proved to be concerned with opening up the subject of quality control on television to a wider group than just the broadcast engineering ‘clique’.

Bailey began by showing a tape with a split-screen comparison between two telecine transfers of My Brilliant Career. The first was of the cinema-release print that was initially supplied, and the other was from a low-contrast print he had requested when alerted by the telecine operators to the problems of exces­ sive contrast.

This lead to the situation where the station had, in effect, regraded the AFI Award-winning work of Don McAlpine, but it was a situation that Bailey believed could have been avoided if there was more wide­ spread knowledge of the technical limitations. As Bailey pointed out, “ the people in the television industry come up on pure mathematics, waveform monitors, and no artistic licence. C inem atographers like yourselves have the artistic licence.

You have those feelings like, ‘Yeah, it looks like an f:8 day out there’. The boffins at the station can’t go up against that.”

He was, he said, looking to the production houses to marry the two ideals together, and was highly critical of them if they did the wrong thing. Dialogue between a TV station

and the production house occurred all too infrequently, however. Bailey cited one approach to this problem, using the example of first 16mm prints, then 1" transfers of the Ameri­ can series, Dallas. After a lengthy process of explanation to — and education of — Lorimar, the results were to everyone’s satisfaction. But, although such negotiation was always possible with a long-running series, time was not always available elsewhere. And Bailey offered a per­ suasive argument for involving the channel in the early pre-production tests.

Like all the speakers during the day — and like anyone who has done much telecine grading — Bailey also found that the biggest single problem in dealing with video post-production houses was the diffi­ culty of finding correctly-adjusted monitors. It was, he felt, the single most frequent cause of qualityrejection problems.

Standards Vince Monton had already started the afternoon discussion earlier with a challenge to Brian Bailey's decision to call for a low-contrast print of My Brilliant Career. Although the telecine operator was happy with the decrease in brightness range, Monton pointed out that “ the cinematographer had already made the artistic decision about brightness range, and didn’t want somebody further down the line changing it” .

Monton began his main contribu­ tion with a further comment about the potential misuse of the controls of the telecine. “ In normal cinemato­ graphy,” he said, “ all we can do later in grading is perhaps alter the density and the colour. On video transfer, you can do almost any­ thing: contrast, colours, re-rack, re­ frame — and this is a fantastic tool.

But, with all these tools, the problem is who controls them, and how much control the original cinematographer has over the product. “ If you are doing the grading on a feature film, you take enormous care. Print upon print is sometimes done to get it absolutely right. You then follow it through to the cinema where it is going to have its first run.

You talk to the projectionist about racking etc., to make sure that the heads are not cut off. After it goes out to the country and the drive-ins, of course, anything can happen: that’s something you can't control.

But, maybe two or three years down the line, you have the film broadcast or transferred to tape for the rental market, and you think: ‘My god, what’s happened to that?’ We do lose control of it, and the thought is that there are gnomes out there in rooms, printing it up or flattening it down, and there is real paranoia. I think a lot of it is our own fault, because we don’t follow it through.”

Monton talked with some passion about how the problem was a repeat of the creative-versus-technical arguments that, 30 years ago, had lead to Technicolor calling for Ozzy Morris to be fired off Moulin Rouge because he wanted to soften the chocolate-box look of Technicolor at the time.

Using Monton’s examples of the

p ro b le m s in c o m m u n ic a tio n between the labs and the creative team, the general discussion then turned to some of the problems individual panel members had en­ countered. Andrew Mason from Mirage began, however, with a statement that summed up a lot of the earlier points. “ Because we are in a relatively new field,” said Mason, “ we have to struggle like crazy. But the same problems affect an artist who has his painting hung in a gallery: he probably doesn’t like the lighting, and complains that that

“ With this film-to-tape explosion, perhaps the channels of communication that we’ve been using traditionally are breaking down” Vince M onton wasn’t how his work was meant to be shown. The same thing applies to a musician in a hall: he complains about the sound system. We hit the same problems getting our own artistic endeavours communicated to a large number of people. The higher the technology that’s in­ volved, the more people there are trying to average out the problems to make sure that most of the information gets across. That’s not a bad thing, but I don’t think we should stop struggling.”

In Mason’s area of special effects work, the precision of telecines is im­ portant for accurate matte work. He pointed out how product that was originally produced for the cinema, like Star Wars, was now available on tape. “ And you can see all the little mattes around the spaceships wandering all over the screen. You don’t see them in the cinema, because the higher contrast of the print is sufficient to kill off the edges.

But, on television, it is all com­ pressed, and people are suddenly aware of it. You have to accept that My Brilliant Career isn’t going to look the same on TV as it did in the cinema. But I agree with John Sayles, who said: 'Cinema is becom­ ing the equivalent of a hardback book release. TV is the paperback, and that’s where the market is.' “ I think that is pretty right. If you’ve really got the luxury, then you make cinema look terrific. But gener­ ally, you’ve got to work knowing that most of the people who will see your work are going to see it on a tele­ vision screen.” The difficulty of esti­ mating the loss that will occur in transmission was also discussed.

One suggestion was that the post­ production house should have a ‘TV set with rabbit ears down a gully’ switch, that would allow some judge­ ment of the lowest common denomi­ nator in reception. The mention of the need for a ‘home TV set’ that would have a ‘default’ setting made it obvious that even cinemato­ graphers have trouble judging the result at home. Various methods of controlling home sets were talked about, and comparisons were made

with NTSC and PAL, citing the latter’s obvious advantages of stable tint and hue.

Special effects cinematographer Ken Arlidge asked about develop­ ments in reducing the amount of telecine ‘float’, the effect that is most noticeable when an electronic title is added over a film transfer, and the film image is obviously ‘floating’ up and down behind it Arlidge men­ tioned the problems they had had with mattes on Tracy, where they had to keep the effects shots to three or four seconds, because of the weave and float between miniatures and real elements.

In reply, Chris Hutson pointed out that there were now telecine gates which would drive the film frame-byframe, and register it through the system. “ The problem arises with variation in the mechanical dimen­ sions of film stocks,” said Hutson. “ They may be close enough in toler­ ance for printing; but, because the telecines have been designed to use the edges as a point of reference, there are variations. I’ve done tests with different stocks, and found some batches are superior to others.

We have a gate at AAV that was built

by CSIRO, and which reduces the weave on 35mm quite considerably.

Registered gates will shortly be avail­ able in most major centres. But, because the current systems use fram e-b y-fra m e reco rdin g, the economics are suited to short sequences, complex mattes, tele­ vision commercials and the biggerbudget feature things. The service will cost more money, and no doubt people will be encouraged to use it because it will be more profitable for the tape house. A general point that may interest you is that 16mm actually has less problem with weave and float, so if you’re doing opticals on tape, you will quite often get a better result than with 35mm as far as telecine stability is con­ cerned.”

Another interesting discussion point was brought up by Brian Bailey, who pointed out the percep­ tual differences between cinema — a darkened theatre — and seeing something on TV, where there are familiar objects in your field of vision that make any dramatic change in colour obvious.

The afternoon session concluded with a vigorous film versus tape session that, while slightly away from the subject, was probably inevitable, given the mix of the audience. And it continued well beyond the formal closing of the session. From it arose a general consensus that the next Industry Seminar should broach the subject of telecines in greater detail, looking at cast studies of video post­ production methods on two filmoriginated TV series. Hopefully, this will cover transfer, editing and audio, and will involve representatives from each of the areas. Further details, a date and a venue will be announced in the next issue. Meanwhile, repeated thanks to Agfa (and especially to Nigel Price). And all suggestions for future topics will be gratefully received.

(A copy of the complete tran­ script of the Seminar is available from C in e m a P a p e rs at a nominal charge of $5.)

CINEMA PAPERS May — 73

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Plumb loco Six years ago, arriving in the US to make films, Russian director Andrei Konchalovsky was hired to develop a script from Stephen King’s novel, The Dead Zone. Konchalovsky’s main problem at the time, according to an interview in last December’s American Film, was what to do about the violence. “ I don’t know if I can make movie with blood and bulging eyes and knife sticking in belly,” Konchalovsky is quoted as saying, revealing a fair idea of what was expected of him and a some­ what haphazard grasp of English.

Whatever has happened to his English, Konchalovsky has certainly learned a thing or two about violence in the intervening years, at any rate on the evidence of Run­ away Train, which has blood, knife sticking in belly and bulging eyes (though the latter are mainly in Jon Voight’s performance).

At first glance, Runaway Train looks like one of those films — The Cassandra Crossing (1977), Terror Train (1980) — in which a group of miscellaneous individuals are some­ how trapped, Outward Bound-style, on a train-ride to oblivion. But Run­ away Train is not really like that at all.

True, two extrem ely miscel­ laneous individuals are trapped on a speeding, driverless train, heading for disaster across the frozen wastes of Alaska. But the focus is emphatic­ ally elsewhere. Manny (Jon Voight) and Buck (Eric Roberts) are escaped cons, Manny a three-time escapee, Buck a young punk who idolizes the older man. If the train crashes, they will be killed. But, if it doesn’t, they will be caught.

They are also pursued by a Chief Guard (John P. Ryan), who has a longstanding feud with Manny. The Guard, Ranken, has had him welded into his cell, .then been forced to unweld him by higher authority. Learning of the escape, he growls skywards: “ God, don’t kill them! Let me do it!” It is not the only line in the film to be addressed in the general direction of the infinite.

The pair escape via the sewer, protected against the Alaskan mid­ winter only by a layer of grease and cling-film beneath their prison track suits. But it is with the train (actually four locomotives coupled together) that they meet their nemesis, and the film its main metaphor. The train is more mythic beast than means of transport, emerging eerily out of a cloud of steam to a growling base note, and losing its engineer to a heart attack the moment Manny and Buck have boarded it.

Konchalovsky very sensibly treats the escalating improbability of the situation — the engineer’s heart attack, the train’s apparent unstoppability, the late appearance of Rebecca DeMornay as a railroad employee who had fallen asleep in another cab — as narrative intensi­ fies, whose justification is not that they are convincing,' but that they work.

Runaway Train wants to be more than just an action movie (though it is, also, a very good action movie).

Freeze frame: Jon Voight as Manny in Runaway Train.

And it is no mere quirk of casting that the film’s last image, ending a tracking shot along a row of convicts still behind bars, should be of the myopic, wrinkled but utterly un­ m istakable face of old Hank Warden, core member of John Ford’s stock company.

Among other things, Runaway Train is a homage. And watching it is like watching a voyage of initiation into American cinema. It is not a gentle journey. Voight, his left eye half closed, his face almost perman­ ently distorted, chews on the lines as though dictating instructions for armageddon. And Roberts, never the most restrained of performers, constantly tries to outdo him, deliver­ ing a performance which is 90% teeth.

Walking a tightrope of absurdities, Konchalovsky em braces these excesses with enthusiasm, adding a few of his own.

Out of it all, breathless and fascinating, comes a kind of Jaco­ bean tragedy of a movie, built round a world-view in which chaos is held in check, not by civilized behaviour or knowledge — not by the control­ ler’s computer or the prison’s rules — but by a power beyond morality, beyond justification.

Completing his cultural transition, Konchalovsky rejects collectivism and Christianity with equal deter­ mination: if there is no social order in this world, there is no god either. “ Miracles, my ass,” snarls Voight. “ One must count on oneself.”

The result is a manic, express-train of a film, beyond belief, but beyond mere liking or disliking, either. Only Sam Peckinpah ever achieved any­ thing quite like it before, and he only once, in his sublime Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974), the one great movie he made.

But that was a film born out of selfhatred and alcoholic paranoia. Run­ away Train achieves its result almost playfully, as thought it were, first and foremost, a question of style. It is a gutsy, clever film, but not a passion­ ate one. And it bodes both well and ill for Konchalovsky’s future work: well, in that it indicates a director of great resource and astuteness; ill, in that it suggests a kind of clean slate, waiting to be written on — a director who could easily become, not John Ford, but Henry Hathaway, Richard Fleischer. . . or even Peckinpah.

Nick Roddick

Runaway Train: Directed by Andrei [Mikhalkov] Konchalovsky. Producers: Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus.

Associate producer: Mati Raz. Execu­ tive producers: Robert Whitmore, Henry Weinstein, Robert A. Goldston.

Executive in charge of production: Sue Baden-Poweil. Screenplay: Djordje Milicevic, Paul Zindel and Edward Bunker, based on a screenplay by Akira Kurosawa. Director of photo­ graphy: Alan Hume. Production designer: Stephen Marsh. Music: Trevor Jones. Editor: Henry Richard­ son. Cast: Jon Voight (Manny), Eric Roberts (Buck), Rebecca DeMornay (Sara), Kyle T. Heffner (Frank Barstow), John P. Ryan (Ranken), Kenneth McMillan (Ed McDonald). Production company: Cannon Films. Distributor: Hoyts. 35mm. 111 minutes. USA. 1985.

CINEMA PAPERS May — 75

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Lucinda Cowden and Anna Maria Monticelli in Handle with Care. returning to normal, the problems with the device of the interview situa­ tion become all too obvious. Arndt is awkward as the interviewer, and the film becomes didactic — something which it had previously avoided.

Margaret tells the audience they must perform self-examination regu­ larly, and must learn to say: “ Why not me?” rather than “ Why me?”

While this is an important message, its delivery is reminiscent of the doctors earlier criticized, and sets the closing scene at variance with the tone of the rest of the film.

Sophie Cunningham

Two women Handle with Care, the television docudrama written by Anne Brooksbank and directed by Paul Cox, treats the topic of breast cancer with a sensitivity usually missing from films with such exploitable potential.

But the hybrid form of docudrama is not something that Brooksbank and Cox handle with such skill.

The film is structured around a TV talk show, on which an interviewer (Bettina Arndt) asks two women, Kate (Anna Maria Monticelli) and Margaret (Monica Maughan), to recount their experiences of breast cancer. And, while the women speak, the film moves into a re­ enactment of their stories.

Kate is a 34-year-old divorcee with an adolescent daughter, whose own mother had died of breast cancer when Kate was a child.

Before having the biopsy, Kate refuses to sign a form allowing the doctor to perform a mastectomy during the operation if the tumour proves to be malignant. On dis­ covering that it is, she returns to hospital to have the mastectomy.

The scene in which Kate goes to the self-help group is one of the strongest in the film: with Kate and the group, we watch a film on breast self-examination, and members of the group then describe their experi­ ences to the camera. All but one of the women who speak have actually had breast cancer. One tells us of her husband, who left her because he thought she would no longer be “ properly a woman” . On reflection, she tells us, she had not been happily married anyway, and was perhaps enjoying life more now.

These women make it clear that you can continue to have a full and happy life after breast cancer, despite the initial trauma, and they emphasize that high self-esteem is essential in overcoming damaged self-image.

For all its strengths, though, it is during this scene that the film becomes stylistically most confused.

Even though we are supposed to be watching the re-enactment of Kate’s experience as she recounts them to Arndt, the women within the drama look straight at the camera, as though they were — as indeed they are — the subjects of a more con­

76 — May CINEMA PAPERS

ventional documentary.

In the film’s second ‘case history’, Margaret, a 46-year-old woman, married with three children, is pre­ sented with a different set of choices to Kate: whether to have a mastec­ tomy or a ‘lumpectomy’. A lumpec­ tomy is the removal of the lump and lymph nodes under the arm, com­ bined with three months of radiation therapy. If cancer cells are found in the lymph nodes, a mastectomy will be necessary.

With the help of large quantities of white wine, Margaret chooses a lumpectomy, against the wishes of her surgeon. This section of the film is better at exploring the range of p e o p le ’s responses to breast cancer, often with a gentle sense of humour. Margaret’s mother (Sheila Florance) rushes to get her some­ thing to eat. Her husband, Geoff (Peter Adams), keeps reminding her he is affected by the problem as well, until Margaret snaps: “ What are we, a collective, an anthill, all for one and one for all?” Margaret her­ self gets drunk, morose and grumpy, but remains a sympathetic character.

Handle with Care's strength lies in the way it shows women that they have options to choose from, once they find they have breast cancer; that they are in a position to make decisions; and that they should do what Is right for them, rather than feeling at the mercy of doctors.

Indeed, doctors do not emerge well from Brooksbank’s script.

Margaret’s doctor, for instance, tells her he did not send her to have a biopsy because “ too many people get alarmed for no reason” .

Since breast cancer affects one Aus­ tralian woman in sixteen and is the leading cause of death in women between 30 and 50, these fears do not seem unreasonable. Margaret’s surgeon tells her husband what treatment he recommends, while she is lying next to them on the bed. “ If it were my wife,” he says, “ I’d recommend a mastectomy.”

H andle with Care is again evidence that Cox’s forte is human drama on what some would call a small scale, even though a subject like this obviously has much wider implications. As the film moves into its final sequence, however, set in the TV studio and interspersed with clips of Kate’s and Margaret’s lives

Handle with Care: Directed by Paul Cox. Producers: Andrena Finlay and Anne Landa. Screenplay: Anne Brooksbank. Director of photography: Yuri Sokol. Production designer: Neil Angwin. Editor: Tim Lewis. Music: Chopin 'Prelude No. 15' played by Sophie Landa. Sound recordist: Ken Hammond. Cast: (Kate’s Story) Anna Maria Monticelli (Kate), Nina Landis (Julie), Lucinda Cowden (Sarah), Alex Taifer (Father), Norm an Kaye (Surgeon), Tony Llewellyn-Jones (Mark); (Margaret’s Story) Monica Maughan (Margaret), Peter Adams (Geoff), Sheila Florance (Margaret's Mother), Charles Tingwell (Doctor), Bruce Myles (Specialist), John Murphy (Surgeon): Bettina Arndt (Interviewer).

Production company: Alsof. First broadcast: ATV-10, Melbourne, 25 February 1986. 16mm. 1 x 90 tele­ vision minutes. Australia. 1985.

Boxed canyons

Nearly a year after the release of the feature film (reviewed in Cinema Papers 51, May 1985), Robbery Under Arms, the miniseries, was shown on television In February. The production as a whole was an unusual if not unique experiment in marketing, with both the miniseries and the movie being shot together, but for two separate mediums. The reason for this approach was, of course, financial: with the addition of another marketplace, the miniseries becam e a viable proposition, despite the inevitable size of its budget.

Unfortunately, as we know, the film was not a success, despite a rather large publicity campaign.

Perhaps audiences knew that, for

the $7.00 price of a cinema ticket, they were only going to get two-anda-half hours of drama, instead of the six hours of miniseries which would come to their television screens for nothing.

The film’s lack of box-office suc­ cess did little to boost expectations for the miniseries. When the Seven Network premiered it over a threenight period, it was without the fan­ fare of publicity that we’ve come to expect with major Australian produc­ tions.

That was something of a shame; for, in this reviewer’s opinion, Robbery Under Arms is one of the best miniseries to have been pro­ duced in Australia since the format became popular some years ago.

What distinguishes this production from others, which have been almost exclusively historical (from The Timeless Land to Cowra Breakout and The Dismissal), is its sheer entertainment value, its charm and humour. Particularly In compari­ son to other bushranging sagas, Robbery Under Arms is like a breath of fresh air.

The scripts, by Tony Morphett and Graeme Koetsveld, crackle with dry one-liners and are filled with escapades rem iniscent of the Richard Lester Musketeer films of the seventies. A somewhat standard gaol break, for instance, is topped by the heroes jumping into a circus balloon and soaring into the sky.

Morphett and Koetsveld, with directors Don Crombie and Ken Hannam, have managed to create a world that looks and sounds like the past, but is seen in a distinctly con­ temporary way. Thus, when a woman is insulted, she doesn’t become demure in the stereotypically Victorian fashion: she punches the man out. Captain Starlight, played by Sam Neill in what must be

Sam Neill as Starlight: the Robbery miniseries stands (up) and delivers. one of his best performances to date, is an unlikely character; yet he is an enormously attractive one, as he casually wanders from the cricket fields of Adelaide to the harsh land­ scape of the bush, smoking long cigars and chatting in French and Chinese as occasion dictates.

Starlight, of course, is not your normal bushranger. Closer to Raffles than to Ned Kelly, he is a man from the British upper class. And it is pre­ cisely this class background that sets off the central battle between Starlight and Morringer (another strong performance, from Robert Grubb) of Her-Majesty’s Constabu-

lary. Starlight, we are told, has ‘‘let the side down” . He moves in the c o m p a n y of s to c k m e n a n d Aborigines, no less.

Although Neill’s Starlight is so appealing, Robbery Under Arms is not really his story. The focus of the drama is on Dick and Jim Marston, two young brothers who slide further and further into a life of crime. Their father, played by Ed Devereaux, works for Starlight and, when Dick and Jim turn up to join the team, they are little more than two innocent tearaways out for a good time. Christopher Cummins and (in particular) Steven Vidler are most convincing, as their characters are slowly drawn into a situation from which both we and they realize there is no escape.

On this level, the miniseries — like the novel — is highly moralistic. And it is also interesting to observe the affirmation of the traditional value of the home. While the nomadic life­ style of the bushrangers is repre­ sentative of their outlaw status, the Marston home is seen again and again as a sort of sanctuary, popu­ lated by the womenfolk left behind.

Dick and Jim and their father return to the safety of the home for periods of peace — and, of course, to revive romances.

But they never stay home long, always heading back into the bush, their very male world. At the end of the drama, Dick Marston, the only survivor, leaves gaol after a lengthy sentence and goes to the only place he (still) knows: home. His woman (Liz Newman) is waiting for him, and the final scenes establish the pair on their property, looking ahead to the future. Dick has learned his lesson.

The life of crime is behind him.

If the script and direction are well above average, the images that place the men against the landscape also deserve praise. Ernest Clark’s photography of the Flinders Ranges is never less than magnificent, and the sweeping wide shots are equal to anything in a John Ford western.

While the two-and-a-half hour feature film may have had some structural flaws, all six hours of the miniseries hold up. The pace rarely flags, and there are cameos (like Paul Chubb's aggressively protec­ tive cook) to delight throughout.

Tony Cavanaugh

Robbery Under Arms: Directed by

Donald Crombie and Ken Hannam.

Producer: Jock Blair. Associate pro­ ducers: Pamela H. Vanneck and Bruce Moir. Screenplay: Tony Morphett and Graeme Koetsveld, based on the novel

by Rolf Boldrewood. Director of photo­ graphy: Ernest Clark. Production designer: George Liddle. Sound recordist: Lloyd Carrick. Cast: Sam Neill (Captain Starlight), Steven Vidler (Dick Marston), Christopher Cummins (Jim Marston), Liz Newman (Gracey), Deborah Couls (Kate), Susie Lindeman (Jeannie), Tommy Lewis (V/arrigal), Ed Devereaux (Ben Marston), Jane Menelaus (Aileen Marston), Robert Grubb (Morringer).

Production company: South Australian Film Corporation, for ITC Entertain­ ment. First broadcast: Seven Network, 17-19 February 1986. 35mm. 3x2 tele­ vision hours. Australia. 1985.

Holy smoke (without fire) It is now 30 years since the curtains parted on the last of Cecil B. DeMille’s biblical sagas. Nor does it seem a day too long — not, that is, on the evidence of Bruce Beresford’s King David, which comes to Australia trailing clouds of inter­ national obloquy. Beresford’s film has been abused by critics and scorned by the public (whereas DeMille’s energetic kitsch was, if not critically admired, at least popular).

Beresford, one of the two or three most successful and able directors of the Australian film revival, has come an undoubted cropper. As a director, Beresford has often been interested in power struggles and in the conflict arising within authority structures; but he has pursued them in the comparatively small-scale circumstances of a school (The Getting of Wisdom, 1977), a court martial (Breaker Morant, 1980) and a league football committee (The Club, 1980). He has not previously tackled the vast sweep of history; and, in doing so, he has signally failed to achieve either epic grandeur or internal coherence.

For King David exists primarily on the level of “ SEE DAVID SLAY GOLIATH!” , “ DAVID FLEES TO THE W ILDERNESS!” , “ DAVID LUSTS AFTER BATHSHEBA!” and so on. Everything is external and, on that level, Beresford reveals little flair for moving vast crowds about or for maintaining interest in a series of events as such. The effects of such an obvious Big Moment as the killing of Goliath is curiously muffled, with a lot of conscientious alternation of crowd and close-up, stillness and noisy movement; but it retains a doggedly imposed look, rather than the sense of a style growing out of and shaping the material.

E lse w h ere, th e re are selfconscious tracking shots — as Samuel (Dennis Quilley) strides to rebuke Saul (Edward Woodward), for instance — which look busy rather than purposeful, together with showy crane shots, murky vistas of barren mountains, and ‘poetic’ shots of silhouetted figures against the sunset. In a word, it is utterly styleless. Whereas before, Beresford has always known how to move a camera authoritatively about a con­ fined space, here he seems at a loss to know what to do with it.

If the film is not even good to look at, it is incomparably worse to listen to and, again, the sheer stylelessness asserts itself. The screenplay veers between the biblical cadences of “ And so it came to pass . . .” or

“ Who knows where next the Angel of Death will strike?” , and the idio­ matic fatuity of “ This is neither the time nor the place . . . ” or "I would have thought that was obvious” .

The film as a whole teeters between ‘reverence’ (though one is not sure for what) and the utterly common­ place. When the young David (Ian Sears) sings the 23rd Psalm to com­ fort the grieving Saul, the sound suggests a Baez groupie of the early sixties, a kind of pop reverence which epitomizes the film’s failure of tone.

Neither Beresford nor his writers (Andrew Birkin and James Costigan) have been able to decide whether King David is a serious retelling of the biblical stories or a Fable for Our Times. If the former, they have not been able to make a string of episodes coalesce into a drama; if the latter, a few scattered references to ‘political necessity’ and ‘land rights’ smack less of contem­ porary relevance than of mere anachronism.

What might have unified the string of episodes was a sense of what they meant to the film’s eponymous hero. Richard Gere, who has several times (American Gigolo and An Officer and a Gentleman) proved himself one of the most gifted of the younger actors, is hopelessly at sea here — perhaps miscast, in that he looks and sounds so resolutely modern. He might have surmounted this if anything in the writing had encouraged him to suggest David’s inner life. But this is a film with no sense of relationships, no sense of the man’s being worked upon by his experiences. Whether he is confront­ ing Saul, loving Jonathan (Jack Klaff), or torn by grief at the death of Absalom or by lust for Bathsheba, his private agonies are reduced to a few smouldering looks. His ageing is likewise no more than a matter of make-up: there is no suggestion of inner change.

Gere’s inability to make anything interesting of David is only the most striking example of how the film resists every attempt to give life to its tableaux (scarcely) vivants. The great oppositions of David’s life — of private pain and public duty, of the flesh and spirit, of the affairs of state and the affairs of God — are ad­ verted to in ways that are both explicit and desultory. That is, the screenplay foregrounds them for our attention, then fails to dramatize them. One assumes Jonathan’s con­ flict of loyalties as he helps David to escape Saul’s wrath, but the rela­ tio n s h ip be tw ee n D avid and Jonathan is no more than a few ludicrously ‘m ea ningful’ looks.

David’s conflict as he sends Uriah (James Lister) off to certain death, the better to enjoy Bathsheba (Alice Krige), is so perfunctorily treated as to set one longing irrationally for Gregory Peck and Susan Hayward in the good old (David and Bath­ sheba) days of 1951.

It is no pleasure whatsoever to be­ labour the film of a director who has so often shown himself a capable craftsman, and one hopes that Beresford’s return to more con­ genial subjects (The Fringe Dwellers, perhaps) will also mark a return to form. King David concludes with the dying hero saying to Nathan: “ Must

you record every word I speak?” , and the reply is: "It’s for the Book of Samuel” . It must be said that the story is better told there.

Brian McFarlane

King David: Directed by Bruce Beres­

ford. Producer: Martin Elfand.

Associate producer: Charles Orme.

Screenplay: Andrew Birkin and James Costigan (story by James Costigan).

Director of photography: Donald McAlpine. Production design: Ken Adam. Music: Carl Davis. Editor: William Anderson. Cast: Richard Gere (David), Edward Woodward (Saul), Alice Krige (Bathsheba), Dennis Quilley (Samuel), Niall Buggy (Nathan), Cherie Lunghi (Michal), Flurd Hatfield (Ahimelech), Jack Klaff (Jonathan). Produc­ tion company: Paramount Pictures.

Distributor: UIP. 35mm. 114 minutes.

USA. 1985.

Bloke power

Don’t litter: Anthony Richards as Bert No. 2 and Martin Vaughan as Frank Phillips in A Fortunate Life.

Since the publication of Bert Facey’s autobiography, A Fortunate Life, in 1981, Penguin have sold more than 300,000 copies. The paperback edition has been reprinted fourteen times; the book has won the NSW Literary Award and the National Book Council Award; and it is on the HSC book list in New South Wales and Victoria. In four years, Bert Facey’s life has become something of a legend, and the book an Austra­ lian classic.

Touted as the year’s most out­ standing television event, the $6.3-million miniseries, A Fortunate Life, is the final and most spectacular apotheosis of the Little Aussie Battler epitomized by Albert Facey.

Facey ended up feeling he had been “ very fortunate: I have lived a very good life and I am thrilled when I look back on i t " . His life, however, had two quite separate phases. The

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second began after meeting Evelyn, the ‘ 'little bobby-dazzler” , the “ fellow bushy” whom he married in 1916 and with whom he remained until her death fifty-nine years, eleven days and twelve hours later.

The miniseries deals with the first part of Facey’s life: life before Evelyn. It is the story of a boy who grows up fast to be a man and, in eight hours spread over four nights, it covers just the first twenty years, from 1897 to 1916.

The story of Facey’s harsh, working-class life in the raw pioneer­ ing days of Australia has been called the extraordinary life of an ordinary bloke. This is rather too glib, as well as missing the point: Facey was an , extraordinary bloke, a special kind of individual. He was a humble, modest and simple man who, despite his lack of formal education, could get to the heart of things with an uncomplicated sensitivity and / honesty that set him apart from most other men in the rough world in which he lived. His innate goodness i and decency allowed him to look at •the world without bitterness or hatred, despite the wretchedness of his early life and the agonies he suffered.

Working-class people like Bert Facey are not normally seen as heroes: from outside, their life doesn’t seem much, and their wisdom is often too close to us, apparently clothed in platitudes. But m the miniseries dutifully pays hom­ age to Albert, while skirting (some­ times very closely) the temptation to embrace the predictable, Boy's Own elements, and reduce the story to appealing populist entertainment.

All the elements are there: young Bert tames the spooked gee-gees in the face of nasty boss Harry’s belittling insults; young Bert, goaded by the jealous, bullying gang boss, Martin, effectively defends his mother’s honour (“ Three cheers for the young fella!” ); young Bert, the underdog, wins through yet again. .

Yet A Fortunate Life never goes too IS . far: .there is always a spark of reality or genuine characterization which, if , only by a deft touch, .redeems it. m The central two parts of the mini­ series are mainly episodic bush adventures, shuffled together with ~t occasional family contacts and with the establishment of Albert’s grow­ ing acceptance of his enigmatic surl vivor of a mother, who had deserted him ‘ (and his young brothers and 118181 . sisters) when he was a child.

These two parts, directed by Wmà Marcus Cole, form the story’s sentiV rpental core. The first and last parts, |f‘ directed by Henri Safran, are more continuous and powerful*- in their dramatic thrust, dealing mainly with ¡¡gp the young lad’s horrendous treat„ ment as slave labour by a brutish jglipi j family of horse thieves, then with his • experience as an Australian soldier at G allipol® » -Ken Kelso’s dialogue is mostly 'sharp and economical, though sometimes heart-warmingly pic­ turesque. But it is this constant striving to be true to the ordinari­ ly' ness, to the understated quality of 8;' fhe man and his story, that renders , the more intensely dramatic confron­ tations, such as the war scenes, powerful and real. By the same, token, however, it can make the less

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dramatic interludes appear too simplistic and a little one-dimen­ sional.

The laconic central character is portrayed on screen over the years by four different actors: Scott Bartle is Albert aged six, Anthony Richards Albert at nine, Benedict Sweeney the teenager, and Dominic Sweeney the young adult. The transitions are smooth, but the acting and direction are not always so even. The appeal­ ing simplicity of the role occasionally lacks the sensitivity of the words of the voice-over, and at times — especially when Albert is a teenager — the bluntness of the delivery turns simple speech'wooden.

Bill Kerr’s lilting narration in the voice of the older Albert, has a satis­ fying quality to it as it summons up the memories, but it does occasion­ ally go over the top into a patronizing delivery that can seem superficial in its exaggerated ‘simplicity’,; For all the understated, naturalistic scenes, it is clear that A Fortunate Life**;is not primarily intended as serious social realism: the pitch is too appealing, the photography — even with the muted brown tone$ — too elegant, and the saccharine strings do well up, making it all palatable for television.

Australia’s film and television in du stry is p ro b a b ly like the country’s politicians: we get what we deserve. A Fortunate Life is one of the few recent Australian miniseries that gives us better than we, as a mass audience, probably deserve.

But, for all that, I cannot help com­ paring it with Masaki Kobayashi’s 1959-60 trilogy, The Human Condi­ tion, admittedly a cinema film,; which chronicled an individual Japanese soldier’s struggle against cruel in­ sensitivity d u rin g ; the war in Man­ churia. That film touched the quick of human emotions; A Fortunate Life, for all its excellence, just caresses them. Maybe this is also a reflection of the difference in cultures: Australia is not, in the final analysis, a country that has ever seen itself in epic terms.

Brian Jones A Fortunate Life: Directed by Henri Safran (Episode 1, Starting Out, 1894-1905, and Episode 4, Provid­ ence, 1914-16) and Marcus Cole (Episode 2, Bush Schooling , 1905-08, and Episode 3, Journey, 1908-1914).

Producer: Bill Hughes: Executive pro­ ducer: Ian Bradley. Associate pro­ ducer: Mike Midlam. Screenplay: Ken Kelso, from the book, A Fortunate Life,

by Albert Facey. Director of, photo­ graphy: Peter Levy. Production designer: David Copping. Music: Mario Millo. Sound recordist: Ross. Linton.

Editora: Richard Hindley and, Kerry Regan. Cast: Dominic Sweeney (Bert Facey as an adult), Benedict Sweeney (Bért Facey as a teenager), Anthony Richards (Bert Facey, aged nine), Scott Bartle (Bert Facey, aged six), Bill Kerr (voice of old Bert Facey), Dorothy Alison (Grandma Carr), Ray Meagher (Bad Bob), Joy Hruby (Ma from Cave Rock), Willie Fennell (Old Bob at Cave R ock , Martin Vaughan*(Frank Phillips). Nikki Coghill (Evelyn Gibson), Val Lehman (Bert's Mother). Production companv PBL Productions First broadcast Nine Network, 9-13 March 1986 16mm 4 x 2 television hours Australia 1985 . ... f f l l i

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TUKANA

Wokabout The First Asia Pacific Film Festival lived up to its promise by screening the Papua New Guinea feature, Tukana, which was billed as the first to be made in Pidgin in that country.

Not one to quibble, but that distinc­ tion may well go to the Oliver H ow es/Film A u stra lia feature, Wokabout Bilong Tonten (1974).

The distinction of Tukana, however, is that it is an original script by a national, Albert Toro, who partici­ pated fully in the production and plays the lead role of a university drop-out who returns to his home village.

Tukana, the hero, is a genial Bukanese who is not keen to work in the garden, has a girlfriend called Lucy (Francesca Semoso) back in the capital, Kieta, and is not happy about his parents’ insistence that he marry the village schoolteacher, Josephine (Regina Talsa). After a struggle, Tukana gets back to Bougainville to work in the Panguna mine; then, after a series of mis­ adventures, he returns to the village, where drama and tragedy await him.

The narrative style of Tukana is relatively straightforward, relying on a simple form of coverage that breaks no new ground in expres­ sion. It tells a basic story using the conventions of mainstream cinema, though it does owe something in content to the ‘anthropological dramas’ pioneered by Jean Rouch in the late fifties with films like Moi, un noir (1958).

Those films combined an ethno­ graphic realism — the actors were locals who were most often ‘acting’ themselves — with an approach to some issue (dislocation of traditional values, change in lifestyle, etc.).

Tukana achieves this well within its modest budget and simple shooting methods, Albert Toro’s vision being brought to the screen by Chris Owen, an expatriate Australian who has lived and worked in Papua New Guinea since pre-independence days. Owen’s long association with Papua New Guinea shows in his awareness of the nuances of daily interactions between village people,

Pidgin premiere: Albert Toro in the title role o f Tukana, which he also wrote and co-directed. and excellent work is also done by Les McLaren (sound).

The film draws its strength from the authenticity of its locales: the clapboard villages, the barracks, and the vast hole of the Panguna mine (“ like a huge tropical ulcer” , as one character aptly puts it).

North Solomons Province (which was one of the investors in the film) is one of the richest in the nation, thanks to income from the mine, and the new affluence is seen clearly in scenes of large-scale drinking and the easy use of consumer goods.

But such affluence is characteristic of the towns rather than the isolated village to which Tukana returns, and the film gives a very clear exposition of the economic realities of village life: students schooled along Euro­ pean lines return to areas where cash is in short supply, and the only work available is based on com­ munal family and village obligations.

New needs and ambitions sparked off in the young often bring them into conflict with village hierarchies.

Tukana (shown in the beginning in a rather confusing flashback as a young lad leaving to study) does not have to stay, but is still bound by the moral strictures of village life. The marriage is arranged by the parental groups, and the prospective wife, Josephine, is paid for and brought to the fathe r’s home without Tukana’s consent. He, of course, is still pining for the flighty Lucy (who later turns him down for the star of the football team). In the end, Tukana loses everything through the efforts of the local sorcerer.

The narrative covers a wide time scheme and, not surprisingly, there are some problems with chronology: sometimes, the story takes huge leaps forward without clue or justi­ fication; at others, it bogs down, and the script cries out for action, conflict being reserved for the last fifteen minutes or so. But, with all the faults perhaps inherent in a minuscule budget and a long shooting period with minimal resources, the film suc­ ceeds in giving an authentic picture of some of the-problem s facing ►

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Papua New Guinea, particularly in terms of the conflict between the potential of youth and national economics.

There seems to be no answer for Tukana, and the enigmatic freezeframe of a drunken worker dancing in a bar is hardly optimistic. Even the obligatory good friend who does the right thing and passes at Agricultural College, then goes back to the village to marry, seems unable to escape the contradictions.

There are memorable scenes, notably those where village people re-enact situations that are the essence of their lifestyle. There is an easy wit and good humour familiar to anyone who has spent some time in a village. And the film does not shirk the less attractive realities of Papua New Guinea life: drunken­ ness, a frustration and aimlessness in the young that often leads to violence, and the still-prevalent belief in and application of black magic are all shown with suitable emphasis. In this context, it is significant that the final blow against Tukana — the death of his arranged wife — is attri­ buted to a magic spell.

This scene recalls an anecdote from the University of Waigani, where a medical student wrote a copybook paper on a biological pro­ cess, then concluded with the state­ ment: “ That’s what you whites think, but we have different ideas". The characters in Tukana also have ‘different ideas', and the skill with which these are presented gives the film a unique impact.

On this level, the film is hugely successful, and it is probably this that accounts for its popularity in Papua New Guinea. The acting is often superb, and the ease of the performances and the sense of timing and humour puts most con­ temporary Australian films to shame.

The film itself is a great advertise­ ment for the honesty and involve­ ment that comes from low-budget, small-scale films that stay close to their subject matter and carry a social critique.

Tukana is in the same genre as that perennial Jamaican docudrama, The Harder They Come, and a very powerful primer to village life in Papua New Guinea. Rather too s long for general audiences, it could do with some judicious pruning before becoming a worthwhile addition to television programming (it was in fact shown on SBS-TV in mid-March) or a candidate for school use.

Ian Stocks

Tukana: Directed by Chris Owen.

Assistant director: Albert Toro. Pro­ ducer: Chris Owen. Associate pro­ ducer: Graeme Kemelfield. Screen­ play: Chris Owen and Albert Toro, from an original script by Albert Toro.

Director of photography: Chris Owen.

Editor and sound recordist: Les McLaren. Cast: Albert Toro (Tukana), Regina falsa (Josephine), Wenceslas Noruke (Tohiana), Francesca Semoso (Lucy), Emily Beani (Agatha), Timothy Ham anin (Tamasi). . P rod uctio n company: Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies and North Solomons Provincial Government. Distributor: Australian Film Institute. 16mm. 120 minutes. Papua New Guinea. 1982.

80 — May CINEMA PAPERS

Way down In the old Factory days, Andy Warhol harboured a photographer who called himself ‘Billy Name’ and lived in a toilet he’d converted into a darkroom. Pallid and covered in sores from vitamin deficiencies, Name would creep out only in the small hours to take his shots of the urban underside.

Paul Morrissey is on record as admiring Name’s "great sensibility".

And Name might also be the patron saint of Morrissey’s new film, Mixed Blood. Working out of Paris these days, Morrissey has largely dis­ carded the comic eccentricity of the Warhol group and its delight in the higher sleaze of New York. But, making a rare return foray to film Mixed Blood, he’s plunged back into it all with glee.

His setting is the jungle of ravaged immigrant tenements bounded by 14th Street uptown and Houston to the south. Cut by Avenues A, B, C and D, it’s known familiarly as The Alphabet', a sub-culture within the larger community of Manhattan’s Lower East Side (now so completely a Hispanic ghetto that the locals call it “ Loisaida” ).

Against this background of vacant lots, condemned tenements and abandoned factories, Morrissey sets . an operatic tale-of life among every­ day drug-dealing folk. The Alphabet survives on a drug economy: queues form 'at every street corner, ahd ’tie,rgin is dispensed like hom'efcm ade lem onade from hastilyTer-ected„sjdewalk stands, or through holes hacked in the cement-block } walls erected as part of the city’s hapless attempt at urban renewal One white upper class capitalist ¡¡hardly old enough to have a driving licence dop£ a little freelance ■dealing-from the front- sei> of his fathers car ¡ M ill

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Business goes on here as it does in more salubrious locations, and there’s the occasional comical nod to conventional morality. A dealer wearing the red beret of the ghetto vigilante groups which keep order on the subways invites everyone to the christening of his child, and chides his fellow gunmen and dopepushers for not belonging to the local block association.

With her bull-like son, Thiago (Richard Ulacia), at her shoulder, and wielding her sword-cane like a general out on a tour of the trenches, heroin queen Rita ‘La Punta’ (‘The Spike’), hilariously played by the Brazilian actress, Mariiia Pera (last seen in Pixote), strides around The Alphabet with queenly confidence.

At the head of a gaggle of juvenile henchmen — under fourteen, you can’t be prosecuted, even for murder — she carries on her murderous vendetta with the dis­ trict’s other dealers, notably The German, who cruises down from uptown with his blonde airhead of a girlfriend (Australian Linda Kerridge) to keep an eye on the business.

Carol falls for Thiago’s Brazilian beefcake and moves in with him, to the fury of Rita, who promptly sets out to dispose of the cuckoo and her rival gangs at the same time.

Thick as a brick and with an accent to m atch,/Richard Ulacia plays Thiago as a logical extension of the Joe Dalessandro characters of Trash and Heat: beside him, the Incredible Hulk-is a Ph.D candidate.

Even Rita, devoted to the boy as a bedwarmer, acknowledges t ie ’s none too bright, and idly wonders who .his • fathér' w as/ B ut to the women of the-film — and Morrissey him self/^-the issue of intelligence is 'irrelevant: placing Ulacia’s Aztec .prqfilpfirmly camera right, Morrissey tracks deliriously through the barrio with, hiring jn a shooting style that owes as much to, Gphfight at the OK Corral as it does to The Wanderers.

The film is a tour de force foi ..Mariiia Pera, delightfully deadpan as

Loisaida story: Mariiia Pera and Richard Ulacia in Mixed Blood. she dithers over the menu for the funeral lunch for a boy gang member whom The German’s mob has tossed from a roof ("W e’ve got a C o o k ie M o n s te r ic e c re a m speciality," suggests the helpful catering girl).

Shopping with Carol, allegedly for wedding clothes, Rita takes her to totally inappropriate establishment which sells only souvenirs of the Puerto Rican sub-teen group, Menudo (whose members are dis­ carded as they pass puberty). While Carol bemusedly shuffles the stock, Rita disdains one outdated sweat­ s h irt, fe a tu rin g a su p e rse d e d member of the group,,/as “ Old Menudo” ,, and extols the talents of the current line-up, as the sub-teen songsters beam down ingratiatingly from a poster on the wall.

The next moment, the rival mob invades the shop and, inevitably, blood (mixed or otherwise) is all over the walls. Carol dies with, a -.45 slug in her bouffant, lamenting at the last: "Gee, I must look awful’.’ . Half the references may pass by those who don’t know the Loisaida as, well as Morrissey; but what remains makes Mixed Blood a treat. Billy Name would be proud.

John Baxter Mixed Blood: Written and directed by Paul Morrissey. Producer: Antoine Gannage. Executive producer: .'Alain Sarde. Associate producer Mark Slater. ■ Additional dialogue: ’ Alan Bowne. Director p f ' pho*ograohy Stefan Zapasnik. Art director: -Stephen McCabe. Music: Sugar-Coated. Andy Hernandez. Editor: Scott Vickrey. Cast: Mariiia Pera (Rita la Punta), Richard Ulacia (Thiago), Linda Kerridge (Carol), Geraldine Smith (Toni), Angel David (Juan the bullet), Ulrich Berr (the German). Production company: Sara Films/Sef Satellite Films. Distributor: CEL. 35mm. 97 minutes. USA. 1984.

[★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

i

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Love’s labour’s won The temptation to draw comparisons between Christina Stead’s 500 pages of prose and the slightly less than two hours of For Love Alone, which producer Margaret Fink has finally succeeded in committing to celluloid, is probably irresistible for those who have read the novel.

Perhaps I am fortunate in being unable to draw them. But, under Stephen Wallace’s direction, For Love Alone works, and for the most part w o rks w o n d e rfu lly well, managing to overcome a shaky be ginning , occasional stylistic lapses (over-lush music, unneces­ s a ry superimpositions and lingering shots of the sea) and a slow-motion finale which smacks of the cop-out.

In Mail-Order Bride (1984) and Women of the Sun (1983), Wallace showed himself to be a sensitive observer of female predicaments.

And, in Love Letters from Teralba Road (1977), he proved that he is one of this country's most intelligent directors when it comes to dealing with a working-class relationship: the film was done with a delicacy lesser directors would have turned into mawkishness. In For Love Alone, Wallace brings a coolness and an almost self-effacing deftness and d ig n ity to S te a d ’s p o te n tia lly treacherous bourgeois terrain, while his screenplay (done with Sandra Levy’s assistance) is literate without being over-literary.

For Love Alone begins badly, how-. ever, with Teresa’s trip from London to Oxford in the company of the socialist poet, Harry Girton (Huw Williams). This arbitrary disruption of narrative chronology (in reality, the

82 — May CINEMA PAPERS

scene occurs near the end of the story being told) was no doubt meant to illustrate the libertarian side of the heroine’s pursuit of love. But it means little to an unprepared audi­ ence: Paddington station seems a highly inappropriate place to start, and things are not improved by Helen Buday’s flat, voice-over rendi­ tion of the novel’s interior mono­ logue.

Nevertheless, Buday quickly moves from strength to strength as the film progresses, exhibiting a clear-eyed assertiveness which is ultimately the film’s strongest single feature. Once we get to the real beginning, she conveys Teresa’s disarming student naivety with a passion ferally close to her only pre­ vious screen role (as Savannah Nix in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome). She and Wallace handle subsequent voice-overs with the sparse toughness the latter brought to Love Letters, while any threat of cuteness or cliche in scenes such as Teresa running along the beach are eliminated by an intensity which speaks of ambition demanding fulfil­ ment.

Even p o te n tia lly d a n g e ro u s scenes like the telescoped ones of her walking two miles every day to work at a hat factory in Surry Hills betray little trace of self-indulgence.

Teresa is sharp in her sparring matches - with her father (Hugh Keays-Byrne) and her "unloved” brothers, cunning when she helps her sister, Kitty (Odile le Clezio), to elope, and cool and assured in her initial responses to the pompous overtures of her misogynist tutor, Jonathan.

Hugo Weaving is suitably smug as this would-be female psychologist with an inverted class snobbery, bringing to the part a little of the insidiously plotting Jardine he

Strangers on a train: Williams and Buday in For Love Alone. played in Bodyline. Teresa’s unself­ conscious declaration of love to him at the Watson’s Bay jetty is one of the film’s memorable sequences, not least because of the lighting and cinematography of Alun Bollinger, whose work on Vincent Ward’s Vigil (1984) was a key element in that film’s selection for Cannes.

Indeed, the Sydney sequences in dhe first half of For Love Alone are a delight to the eye, and the thirties settings are lovingly but economic­ ally evoked. There is not a hint of gloss in the early scene of Malfi’s wedding reception, for example, which is transposed to a ferry, and in which we are allowed to soak in the period costumes without drowning.

These scenes are so enjoyable that it is almost a disappointment when Teresa sails out of Sydney to join the unworthy Jonathan in London. “ What a dreadful-looking country,” is his apt comment on the dreary winter landscape we see from the train window, and it is very much to the film’s credit that it main­ tains an Oz-eye-view of England throughout.

One of the film’s key scenes is a very Australian -— and decidedly anti-Lawrencian — counterbalance to the above-mentioned jetty scene.

Teresa and Jonathan take refuge in a disused sawmill in a storm, and the mill wheel starts turning eerily as the water level rises. The stage is set for a Virgin and the Gypsy-like consum­ mation. But, for Teresa, it is Jona­ than’s last chance to prove himself.

When he cynically reveals he has merely been testing the limits of her professed love, she can easily brush him aside for the socialist London banker she has met on her ocean voyage.

As the banker, James Quick, Sam Neill displays assurance, authority and restraint, without making his affectionate good nature too good to be true. His performance is a solid complement to Helen Buday’s flair, and the film ends on the right note — if not quite in the right style — with Teresa’s marriage to Quick.

Although its rewards are some­ times slow to come, For Love Alone remains a landmark of sorts, and it is often hard to believe that only seven years separate it from Margaret Fink’s previous landmark, My Brilliant Career. Just as Neill’s per­ formance shows an extraordinary growth in assurance when com­ pared with the earlier film, so For Love Alone comes out looking much more mature than its similarly literary predecessor. It is clearly a romantic film, but it is never betrayed by the Zeffirelli-esque excesses which haunt that genre. And that is no mean achievement.

Tony Mitchell

For Love Alone: Directed by Stephen Wallace. Producer: Margaret Fink.

Associate producer: Susan Wild.

Screenplay: Stephen Wallace, from the novel by Christina Stead. Director of photography: Alun Bollinger. Produc­ tion designer: John Stoddart. Editor: Henry Danger. Music: Nathan Wax. Sound recordist: Syd Butterworth.

Cast: Helen Buday (Teresa Hawkins), Hugo Weaving (Jonathan Crow), Sam Neill (James Quick), Huw Williams (Harry Girton), Hugh Keays-Byrne (Andrew Hawkins), Odile le Clezio (Kitty), Judi Farr (Aunt Bea), Nicholas Opolski (Lance Hawkins), John Poison (Leo Hawkins), Linden Wilkinson (Alice Havilland). Production company: Waranta, for UAA. Distributor: Greater Union. 35mm. 101 minutes. Australia.

1985.

(MTV Publishing Limited)

wishes to thank the Australian Film Commission and Film Victoria for their continuing encouragem ent and support.

Cmmisswiv

Film Victoria

F I L M

A N D

Cattle cry A few years back, Geoff Burrowes and George Miller made one of the most successful of recent Australian films together: The Man from Snowy River (1982), which, among other things, spent a lot of screen time celebrating the splendours of the Victorian high country. It also did as much as anything since Banjo Pater­ son to romanticize the mountain cattlemen: tough, free and at one with the landscape.

With Cool Change, Burrowes and Miller have gone back to the high country as it is now. On the surface, as characters in the film keep rem inding us, very little has changed, other than that the cattle­ men now do a lot of their travelling

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renegade, who takes authority badly. "Results aren’t worth a damn,” whines his weedy boss (James Wright), "unless you get them by the book.” Steve is no book person, and there is no doubt where our sympathy is intended to lie.

Besides, we have just seen, in the previous scene, that his heart is in the right place: he has routed a bunch of bikies — the credits call them ‘Yobboes’ (not all forms of anti­ authoritarianism are to be recom­ mended).

That Steve is, finally, the right kind of bloke is demonstrated by his response to a gaggle of environ­ mentalists who block his Landcruiser, and whom he tells to move.

"Are you going to make us, macho man?" sneers the bib-overalled one ('Punk Girl Greenie’, the credits call

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contemporary Australian cinema.

But Cool Change is so singlemindedly intent on tipping the balance towards the cattlemen that it in fact ends up serving their cause rather badly. "W e’re ready to share the high country with the greenies,” says Joanna piously, "but they won’t share a damn thing with us.” It is a claim the film constantly contra­ dicts.

The saddest thing about Cool Change, though, is that it misses the chance to deal, in a popular and accessible fashion — Burrowes and Miller are nothing if not accessible filmmakers — with a major current problem, of which the cattlemen’s plight is just a part: the pauperization of Australia’s farmers, and the in­ creasing, if not unbridgeable, rift between town and country.

COOL CHANGE

H I ö f g g jjlb

crime

Friendly persuasion: Milton Hughes (as Webster’s bodyguard, left) and Tony Rickards mr Robbery.

by Toyota Landcruiser.

But, beware! A cool change — or that, I take it, is the meaning of the film’s catchy, If enigmatic, title — is on the way: the dreaded greenies are coming, and there are plans to turn the high country into a National Park, thus depriving the cattlemen of their heritage.v Cool Change makes no bones about balance: its greenies are devious, shifty-eyed townies, plot­ t in g along the corridors of power, indulging in dirty tricks and even dirtier rhetoric — “ They're turning it into a Hiroshima,” comments archgreenie James Hardwicke (David Bradshaw) on the cattlem en’s alleged over-grazing of the high country — with no real sense of tradition, no respect for true values.

Not so the film: its heart is firmly in the high country, with the cattlemen and their Landcruisers, not with the conservationists and their hatch­ backs, not to mention their beards, their bib overalls, their PR machine and their political henchpersons.

To turn all this into a film, screen­ writer Patrick Edgeworth (with BMX Bandits [1983] under his belt and The First Fleet still to come) has put together a nicely loaded story in which a cattleman’s son, Steve Mitchell (Jon Blake), who has left the high country for the city but ended up a park ranger, is given the un­ enviable job of supervising prepara­ tions for the National Park.

Steve, we learn, is something of a

84 — May CINEMA PAPERS

Riding the high country: Jon Blake and Lisa Arm y tage in Miller’s anti-conservationist Cool Change. her). "Making you would be the last thing on anyone’s mind,” quips our Steve.

The plot — an affair of massive contrivance, relying on the sort of short-term misunderstandings on which Laurel and Hardy films are built — has Steve fall in, and in love, with a mountain cattleperson called Joanna Regan (Lisa Armytage). In the end, pushed too far by the bureaucrats, sickened by the deviousness of the greenies, repulsed by the predatory moves of Ministerial assistant Lee Francis (Deborra-Lee Furness, giving the part her all), and appalled by the m ilitaristic cam paign m ounted against his friends, Steve quits.

The cattlemen ride and, In a knockabout confrontation redolent of a rural Australian A-Team, rout the politicians and the greenies. Steve and Joanna kiss against another stunning skyline: he has been re­ claimed by the high country, the high country reclaimed for those who, in the words of the pressbook, “ must be, and are, [its] custodians” .

This final confrontation is a nicely managed, expertly staged and quite engagingly comic little sequence — a more than proficient piece of filmmaking, evincing a degree of commitment that contrasts with the commercial opportunism of much

True, the latter opposition is there, but only in schematic form: we cut from idyllic vistas to soulless city­ scapes (much as we did in the open­ ing of this year’s Jenny Kissed Me, which made a similar opposition), from regular folks in Akubra hats to irregular ones in imported suits or deviant hair-dos.

But the ‘country’ is no more real than Dallas's Texas: all sense of pauperization, all sense of there being something at stake other than a philosophical loss of freedom and tradition, is absent. Ultimately, Cool Change is every bit as vaguely and woollily romantic about the high country as it tries so hard to per­ suade us the bushwalking greenies are about the bush.

Nick Roddick

ÉÉi IÉIIM

1ÉIÈ.....

I When the Australian Security ¡nielli- I Ig e n c e Service botched its raid on I the Sheraton Hotel in Melbourne, then received the green"light from the government to continue .bUsi¡S|ess as usual, very little changed on $^64 surface of A u s t r a l^ ||s o ( |i||a ^ I Lipplitical life — very .little, that- is, except the realization that fo is country, too, was tied into the vvjprldwide security/paranoia nexus.

Had Robbery looked closely info Ip h at kind of situation, withfoarticular emphasis on the Sheraton-like raid I with which it : starts, it could have beep a much more convincing.', contem porary dram a. Instead,' ^producer-director Michael Thornhill • itw jtlfdraw s froth the hardfoëfobrifjs ||h a t c f u l i have produced a good filmIf leaving .little more than - an average thrillér.

Before • the- titles come up, p i e « S IS -s ty le raid has been botched, leaving one person C|êad. The soldier responsible for the operation, a Major ■Bill Taylor (John Sheene), has been called’ before his superior officer and ordered to take six monfhs ‘leave’. , • ' Dissatisfied; with- ; this state of; Taffairs, the reluctant Taylor meets up with an old' mate, former,,army lieùRuss Stephenson; (Tony Rickards) They dine at, a Renfle man’s club, pf which Stephenson is a member. A tfo ls san§f§plub, bdokfonakers regularly hold illegal raceday gambling shops, turning over Sm ijfpns of dfillars.

Taylor la n d hisS lieutenant talk | bViefly* about the bùpìm akerf. and the ease with which they rh'âkê ; jj | -, mohef. The lieutenant is now a A:'yf|althy businessman)" running his fo d fo lT r'sp fo fo u t he is e x c ite lfly the ,- ? mpnéÿTthat could be made out of rebbi ng ‘ the: hgoki es.

Contacting ¡ | | u | other ex-army _ jo fien , T jflo r and Stephenson train for the ppefatiqh fn the best League of Gentlemen style Meanwhile the p l|p iræ are trying to move in fo n a major criminal w & the nafoepdf, d f Webster H É l t McCcM5çhie). ^The -’Ç * police w |im is s io n e ite ll||D e te c tiv e Inspector Keith Murray (Duncan £ ^ § ^ |)> th a t “ o n political i astor«-

Cool Change: Directed by George Miller. Producer: Dennis Wright. Execu­ tive producer: Geoff Burrowes. Screen­ play: Patrick Edgeworth. Director of photography: John Haddy. Production designer: Leslie Binns. Music: Bruce Rowland. Sound supervisor: Terry Rodman. Editor: Philip Reid. Cast: Jon Blake (Steve Mitchell), Lisa Army­ tage (Joanna Regan), Deborra-Lee Furness (Lee Francis), David Bradshaw (James Hardwicke), Alec Wilson (Bull Raddick), James Wright (Senior ranger). Production company: Geoff Burrowes-George Miller. Distributor: Hoyts. 35mm. 98 minutes. Australia.

1986. '“'W ebstêh^

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« fs p e c t# tb meet "up swith Webster's?I* ’Hjffsider (JosephV'Spano), to find out -' what is going on around town after • % /the big‘ rojDjse^yf wfi ich the ex-comW mandos have by mow carried* ©ifp \yjtln,. precision and determination^ She -gradually gets the lad,!©" talklfl |IV b u t only by offering herself up tornic I* ' (and, in the end ner own) sexual ||^pleasure M S iB iS - „ j j ¡¡1’ 1?

TIYal policewomans role, -% pll| W ' <pjayed by Regina:>Gaigalas, /givesl? * the film great .'possibilities BuUthey ? ir- fare npt developed the film relgss't©©*? . much on the womaq’s sexuality, and : ■y 'not enough on the professional i ^djlem m as she faces * r< •.Meanwhile -the army uo , have^ i J^epadeQup jvid none fishing -jyffitiKj one of them (Tim Huyh'esi tells' all tb? ^;^p%expensive ' ball-guT. -Slne/TelJs/ Webster, who'catches the SQ|di6K} .and’«kills him .^without successfully, ,s|^'Tg|tuqng?him into submissiornfFhey^ •4;^ d o not find out where the" loot* is?

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End game Games, traps, secrets and con­ spiracies — the stuff of drama, of life, journalism and politics — rebound in John Hughes’s film, Traps, which is about all of this, as it is about the pro­ cess of telling stories, and about itself as a documentary/drama. It is heady and difficult material, far more ambitious than Hughes’s earlier films — the earnest and overly respectful Filmwork (1980-81), for example.

Traps is one of the few Australian films that seek to emulate Alex­ ander Kluge’s work, exploring the boundaries of documentary and fic tio n . Put s im p ly , K lu g e ’ s theoretical position is that all cinema is essentially fictional, and that boundaries between fiction and documentary are more to do with genre than with any absolute differ­ ence.

J «;■ , At the end of the film, the police?! ^ uYspector lol-ikt into the camera apd a his loyal officers,r,who are« f ’-f-” gatheqidfaround him" “ So, yo u jo sa l | | ; j r|$e^m nd you lose a few” ’ End ojm f%( ’/¡¡pry? *¡¡11‘ ^ J /w \Qertaihlyi, it, was an excellent jdea,j s||^fe,-have STnember of a gpntlejran jig

-|/inf|?ufi6n / but this conflict .(and« ^iy lp p fe o t^l -wfebpoq, for Th'e^fiImmakeT)J| S j^ jV ^ o t hjghlighted^rThe. story, |^*fseems,,,got-;ihThe.'Way - | "-«9 -i iOne thing Robbery does do is u s |J music to great advantage G le tfl J ‘^ufrhead'and' Mick Walkep^s^cer- ! ^P"-tpinJy one of the best music scpres|| I^ T b r apy-AustralianTelevision prodPcS since The parly work of 'rBri|h( > W& May for the; AB©i ancf it is espec]a|ly/ ‘helpful |rf highlighting' the ' drama;,?

Mr /creating reflective moments" a nd / sedpcingThe^audfence, ;lt is .also/ heigful, j n, cpyreri ng- a multitude-zof^ , / Jims in-ia,script t hah is ultimately, like the robbery,, mncbnv.mcingy' I „ f ¿A„ journalist/says /to the police %-,|i'{|spector^ immediately ^after the ^/robbery has |been ' made known;, - ‘¿Givei/Ps*the,story or I’ll make one iu p !/”rSb; rnmn-’Unacceptable way/? ^r-has Rojpbery^been made up lOhas, ,k0 fpuch' boyish "fantasy, and pots fe-^hough^,©^ the cut and Thrust, o f/ ^ ^ g ailtv/feat bigtingujshd^i'jAustralian" television shows like Division? 4,

Airing her grievances: Judith Camp­ bell as Carolyn in Traps.

Die Patriotic (The Patriot, 1979), little seen in this country, is exemplary in this regard. And Hughes adopts Kluge’s method­ ology: a central protagonist, a fictional ‘investigator’, conducts the viewer through the labyrinth of Aus­ tralian politics and culture. Docu­ mentary footage and interviews con­ ducted by the protagonist combine with a fictional narrative.

While Kluge’s heroine in The Patriot was eccentric, voluble and prone to conduct alchemical experi­ ments in her basement, Hughes’s - - ScalesJpfdpWdpr It is Yperely ta il/’ protagonist is a reporter, Judith, and Carolyn Howard’s performance is f exciting patchy thriller relentlessly dour and deliberately I . *. ’ S Marcus Breen casual — an anti-performance.

None the less, through her investi­ Robbery D ec'3<. W d r r<di c^d m gations we encounter a number of Mi ih m h l S( rn*nn 1 B in true performers, all of whom inhabit the real world of contemporary Aus­ L e / 4 t hr<~n j l ->1 E> v V r p i tralian life, each elaborating his or v S'm y W n h n L it r her own view as one element in the complex arguments Hughes/Judith seek to develop.

W ^ 8 S 8 ^ | i 8 ^ ^ ^ ^ l i Sheerih}] Judith is putting together a story - '((kfa/or. Bill Taylor),^ Tony Riekards (Russ on the events leading up to 1975, but more particularly on the rise of m B M m ^ [ o r Keith M iM ^ ^ B e g in a Bob Hawke as leader of the Austra­ I lian Labor Party, and the possible role of the CIA and the US govern­ ment in that ascension. Bleepers are used during sections of the fitm which address this, self-censorship (Sergeant Snaw), Tina Bursill (Suzy) Production company Indian Pacific being the simplest defence against g* F ns F s / j m s r p tjpt -i,« u libel. Journalism itself is also a topic W - February 1986 16mm 1 x 2 television of investigation, as the film contends that not only does it contribute sub­ stantially to the formation of opinion, I " '■

but also helps to shape policy.

The film’s treatment of journalism is its strongest element. Journalists, Judith maintains, are now like drama critics: they review spectacles and ju dg e perform ances. This apt observation is borne out by footage shot in the tally room in Canberra, as the votes are counted in the 1983 election, and a triumphant Hawke emerges to meet the press. Jour­ nalists from all sections of the media, and representing the whole range of political positions (from Bill Hartley to the ABC and Network Ten), are present, and nowhere in the film is the density of sound and image, the interweaving of the different narra­ tive threads, so effectively handled as in this early sequence.

Just prior to this scene, Judith travels by taxi to the tally room. She listens to a tape-recording of an address given by Alan Carroll to a group of industrialists in 1981, in which he predicted that Hawke would lead the ALP to victory in an election in 1983. This prediction, and the issues raised by the tallyroom sequence, are taken up in different guises throughout the film.

The various threads of the film are not presented in linear fashion: the complexity of association estab­ lished in the early sequences pro­ vide the basic strategy of Traps. The interweaving of fact and fiction, clinched in the tally-room scene, is presaged by the evocative opening of the film, in which the journalist as central player in the drama is first proposed. Hughes uses footage from Newsfront, in which the journa­ list confronts the priest about the role of the church. The priest, played by John Flaus, appears again, this time in the confessional. He reminds Judith of the Cold War, and estab­ lishes the game of secrets by a wonderfully complex telling of the story of Our Lady of Fatima, and of the church’s struggles, often con­ spiratorial, against communism. But the promise of these opening scenes is only briefly recaptured as the film progresses.

In his desire to avoid linear argu­ ments about Australian politics, Hughes adopts instead various forms of ellipsis, allusion, and the complex overlay of sound and image. The risk of confusion is high, but his experimentation with the rela­ tion between sound and image bears fruit in what is, for Hughes, an uncharacteristic (and welcome) attention to the latter, and a desire to play with space and time.

While the narrative of political events and conspiracies unfolds — and journalists describe their role in the unfolding — the fictional narra­ tive involving Judith’s preparation for her story, and the work of her room-mate, Gwenda, as artist-in­ residence for the BLF, are inter­ spersed to provide perspective Adding yet another layer to the fiction/documentary conundrum is the fact that Gwenda was indeed a BLF artist, and is thus playing herself.

She articulates a simple, clear political view of her work, with the implication that she, and the union for which she works, occupy a position of pure, untainted political radicalism, by comparison with the defensive position Judith takes on the role that journalists can play.

Neither of these positions is seriously addressed by the film.

Ultimately, Hughes returns to the beginning, and Judith records her programme. But this scene in the radio station is such an anti-climax that one is forced to re-assess Hughes’s approach to the question of performance. If there is to be a fic­ tional element, involving various conventions of investigation and the search for truth, the viewer might well expect a level of dramatic con­ tent. If there are simultaneous argu­ ments about the masking effect of performance (as there are earlier in the film), then one solution would be to underplay the performances of the fictional characters: the dramatic interest would be transferred to the real people — the journalists and the writers — some of whom ‘perform’ admirably, David Combe being the most obvious example.

But the combination of under­ developed characterization, the e ffo rt to m ake J u d ith seem absolutely ordinary, and the tedium of the fictional thread of the film, undermine, in a quite unproductive way, the complex web of stories being told about contemporary Aus­ tralian politics.

Judith’s work in researching the story for her radio programme is cer­ tainly the backbone of the film. But, while it helps to expose and organize the information and make it accessible, it often results in the simplification of complex arguments.

Traps is caught in a device of its own making. If it wishes to convince us of the role of the US in Australian politics, it can only do so by skirting the edges. It lacks the substance of a film like Allies (1983), to which it alludes, providing us with fragments of information about our history which can never amount to the full picture: the secrets are not fully revealed. Are they withheld? The game takes over and, finally, Traps cannot expose the truth.

Strangely, for a film from the political left, Traps’s lack of resolu­ tion suggests that the truth is finally unknowable — that the system evades such knowledge. A mood of pessimism thus infuses the film at its conclusion. Traps ends with the ALP victorious and once again in govern­ ment; but it is clear by now that the basic assertion of the film is that, g iv e n h o w th is g o v e rn m e n t achieved office and the implications of this for future political life in Aus­ tralia, all activity, whether it be intel­ lectual, political activism or investiga'tive journalism, seems redundant.

Annette Blonski

Traps: Directed and produced by John Hughes. Screenplay: Paul Davies and John Hughes. Director of photo­ g ra p h y : Jaem s G rant. Sound recordists: Pat Fiske, Lou Hubbard, Jack Holt, John Cruthers and Laurie Robinson. Editor: Zbigniew Friedrich.

Cast: Carolyn Howard (Judith Camp­ bell), Gwenda Wiseman (herself), Paul Davies (George), John Flaus (Father Coughlan). With: Tony Walker, Anthony Me Adam, D avid Combe, Greg Hywood, Steve Sewell, Michael Gill, Denis Freney, Mark Aarons, P.P. McGuiness, Paul Lyneham. Distributor: Australian Film Institute. 16mm. 96, minutes. Australia. 1985.

CINEMA PAPERS May — 85

Fiddlers on the hoof Once upon a time, the early Sunday evening time-slot on Australian tele­ vision meant only Disneyland, or some other equivalent child-time delight. Things have changed but it is intriguing to think that those brought up on Disneyland may now be making the programmes that are, at the very least, its substitute.

Dancing Daze, the six-part ABC series, is essential ‘Wish-upon-a-star’ stuff. The Green sisters, initially Phoebe and Kate (though, as they soon reveal, anyone can be a ‘Green sister'), leave the family pig farm and head for the city. The opening song plainly decrees their fate, as well as encapsulating the story: “ But we were desperate to dance, and all we needed was a chance Following clearly in the footsteps of the previous ABC series, Sweet and Sour (1984), also produced by Jan Chapman, Dancing Daze cele­ brates the trials of youth pursuing its ambitions and realizing goals that, previously, were only dreamt of. This time, a handful of characters con­ verge on the reopening of a cabaretstyle nightclub, where integrity is measured not only against artistic merit, but against the corrupt and greedy forces of showbusiness.

Through fate or contrivance (depending on how you see it), the Green sisters meet the reclusive Mr Isaacs (Norman Kaye) and his minder, Oliver (Paul Chubb). These two characters bring the sisters to a realization both of their past — Mr Isaacs turns out to have been the girls’ mother’s lover — and of their future, lending the story a sense of

jo y fu l n o sta lg ia and ge n e ra l ambiguity.

Through the plight of the Green sisters, Dancing Daze has some refreshing observations to offer, many of them realized simply through the casting of Meryl Tankard and Patsy Stephen in the principal roles. Wacky yet sensitive, unconventional yet rational, pre­ cocious and determined, the two sisters function as excellent foils to the (one would hope deliberate) cliches they encounter: the boy­ friend with good connections who wants to make Kate famous; the composer whose sacrifice is to write the music that will make Phoebe famous. To their credit, the series’ writers delicately balance the vari­ ables — romance, the lure of suc­ cess, loyalty to others, personal .goals — and present a vivid portrait of talent as something haphazard, or even just plain lucky.

A showcase of contemporary talent the series certainly is, from the four directors and numerous song­ writers, down to the incidental music coming out of the radios. Dancing Daze is an ambitious — perhaps overly ambitious — project. Stylistic­ ally, it has drawn its inspiration from what must be every conceivable source. Shot on high-band video and trying to look modestly impover­ ished, however, it all too often fails to' embellish itself with the verve and panache that the story matter demands. And, aside from several instances of obtrusively clumsy plot construction, its sporadic blending of a variety of styles — melodrama, parody, naturalism, expressionism,

Turning over a new leaf: Meryl Tankard and Patsy Stephen in a routine from Dancing Daze.

classical and modern dance — undermines the sense of cohesion, that one might have expected and hoped for.

Dancing Daze fails to evoke its own style and mood. A light-hearted (albeit important) tale, it has too much of a tendency to take itself seriously. Similarly, its insist­ ence on looking cheap often ends up with just plain tackiness.

What both its critics and its advo­ cates will probably agree on, though, is that it is ambitious, adven­ turous and inventive. And it is encouraging to see local production setting its goals so high, and trusting in its audience to rally to its support.

Paul Kalina

Dancing Daze: Directed by Geoffrey Nottage (Episodes 1 and 4), Peter Fisk (Episodes 2 and 6), Ron Elliott (Episode 3) and Jane Campion (Episode 5). Pro­ ducer: Jan Chapman. Writers: Michael Cove (Episodes 1 and 6), John Misto (Episodes 2 and 3), Mark Stiles (Episode 4) and Debra Oswald (Episode 5). Series devised by Michael Cove and Chrissie Koltai. Cameras: Murray Tonkin, Peter Robson, Tony Conolly, Michael Osborne, Geoffrey Clegg and Glen Traynor. Production design: Murray Picknett and Janet Patterson, with Roger Ford (Episode 3) and Stephen Gow (Episode 4). Music director: Martin Armiger. Choreo­ graphy: Chrissie Koltai. Executive tech­ nical producer: Jeff Brown. Cast: Patsy Stephen (Kate Green), Meryl Tankard (Phoebe Green), Norman Kaye (Stephen Isaacs), Paul Chubb (Oliver), Laurence Clifford (Joe), Alan Wilson (Paul). Production company: Australian Broadcasting Corporation. First broad­ cast: ABC, 16 February-23 March 1986. High-band video. 6x 50 minutes ( 6 x 1 television hour). Australia. 1985.

In th e land o f th e G e n e ra l What is considered ‘news’ follows a distinct fashion: today’s headline story may soon be considered merely routine. In early 1985, General Augusto Pinochet’s Chilean dictatorship was twelve years old. Its methods — suppression of dissent, torture, 'disappearances’ — had already been amply detailed. Media interest had waned.

Australian documentary filmmaker David Bradbury saw footage of the Chilean resistance in action at the Havana Film Festival in late 1984. A Chilean activist there told him there was still a story to be told,, but complained that nobody went to Chile any more.

Bradbury and his colleagues landed in Santiago in March 1985, telling the authorities they were there- - ! to cover the country’s annual music festival. Then they turned their cameras elsewhere.

m m

CHILE: HASTA CUANDO? Broken barrios: young demon­ strators in the Santiago slums, front David Bradbury ’s Chile.

The result, Chile: hasta cuando? (literally, ‘Chile: How Long?’), looks at a country where business goes on as usual, while non-violent , anti­ government demonstrations are put down with teargas and water can­ nons -~ a country which .has, by S o u th A m e ric a n s ta n d a rd s , manageable inflation, and where protesters are detained, dissidents tortured, and hundreds of opposi­ tion activists have ‘disappeared’; A country of extremes. y Most documentary filmmakers like ,to begin by exhaustively researching ^their .topic. David Bradbury isn’t • among them. He was trained in »-radio news, which instils a sense of urgency, and he has good instincts. ¡(Chile: hasta cuando? follows his . own exploration of w h a t. has, happened in that country since the fAllende government was over­ thrown by Pinochet in 1.973.

K The film begins with’ a brief history ¡ lesson, then a statement, from the General on his g o ve rn m e n t’s .achievement in “ getting rid of the !: communists” The flavour of what he '.means is soon evide nt from the> ‘funeral of a young student — killed by a heart attack,, according to: thpvISSl authorities; tortured to death, claims his mother. ; A rich woman explains that, .under Pinochet, Chileans enjoy\every-freedom, except th@ politically the Roman Catholic church is active

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in trying to restore that lost freedom and to protect the dictatorship’s victims, that has inevitably brought the church into conflict with the elite.

The film includes a scene in which right-wing youths stage a small but a n g ry d e m o n s tra tio n o u ts id e Santiago cathedral, furious that, inside, the Cardinal is “ preaching communism” .

Chile: hasta cuando? talks to the poor in a country with an official un­ employment rate of 14%, It talks to ■the opposition about the chances of change in the face of the dictator­ ship’s military strength. And it fol­ lows trade unionists petitioning for a peaceful | transition to democracy, recording the violent reception accorded to them by the police.

But its most powerful sequence comes from coverage of the events of one day in March 1985. Two men, ¡left-wing activists, are kidnapped. ¡¡ili One is a professor at a private school. His colleagues mobilize, fearing the worst. Then, on the city’s outskirts, three men are found with their throats cut. The crew stays with the friends and relatives, while the bodies are identified as the two kid­ napped men and one other. The crew stays, too, for the funeral service of one of the victims, at which the fourteen-year-old son vows to continue his father's political work.

These killings caused a scandal, * even in Chile. Fourteen members of - the Carabineros’ intelligence section ■ ;'ä S' were charged with murder, and 1 there was speculation that it might X-, mean the beginning of the end for hi- Pinochet. So far, it hasn’t. But, a year Slater, the speculation has been revived. There is a new media I3?& interest jn Chile, formed by the .¡.return of other South American countries ¡like Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil to democracy.

Some observers now see in Chile the same elements that brought down the dictatorships in Haiti and the Philippines: a combination of anti-government protest, a powerful Roman Catholic church urging change and, ironically, disquiet in W ashington over the present regime. They also see ramifications for Chile’s leadership in last year's trial in Argentina, where members of m three successive military juntas were convicted of human rights violations, m Chile: hasta cuando? is David Bradbury's fourth film, after Frontline (about Neil Davis); Public Enemy. mm Number One and Nicaragua: no pasaran.

Academy Awards.

At 60 minutes in length, Chile: hasta cuando? is tailored for tele­ vision release after a season of theatrical screenings. And, although it is not an in-depth analysis of the Chilean dictatorship, it is both accessible and timely — a film.con­ taining some powerful and very moving scenes.

8

Barbara Alyseh

Chile: hasta cuando?: Directed and p ro d u ce d by David Bradbury.

Director's assistants: Maureen Meehan and Simon Dodshon. Assistant pro­ ducer: Leah Cocks. Script: Bob Connolly, Camera: David Knaus arid Peter Schnall. Distributor: David Brad­ bury. 16mm. 58 minutes. Australia.

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DOWN AND OUT BEVERLY HILLS

Boudu saved from nothing Five major elements raised one's expectations of this film. It is a Paul Mazursky comedy about life in the lower reaches of Californian nou­ veau opulence (Beverly Hills, after all, not Bel Air). It is based on Jean Renoir's commentary on Chaplin, Boudu sauve des eaux (1932). It stars cult actor Nick Nolte, cult per­ former Bette Midler, and Richard Dreyfuss, always a site of perverse interest.

The film takes its initial premise from Boudu: a streetpicking bum, Jerry (Nolte), takes his ease in Beverly Hills' compatible clime and gourmet garbage, accompanied by his loyal mutt. (First twinge of doubt: the dog's name is Kerouac.) But the dog is seduced by a leggy joggeress; and, when he goes, so does Jerry’s will to live. There is no river Seine at hand — nothing flows in this film — so Jerry bumbles into a man­ sion, fills his pockets with landscapedesigner rocks (as Virginia Woolf did: the film’s first and only gesture towards feminist consciousness) and jumps in the pool to drown.

The rich, pointedly Jewish owner of the palace, Dave Whiteman (Dreyfuss, made up to resemble an albino hamster who’s just won a Paul Newman lookalike contest), rushes out, saves the would-be suicide, and demonstrates his liberal principles by inviting the unfortunate into his household indefinitely. This outrages all members of the house­ hold except the dog (this is a film in which the dog has the most commonsense, turns in the best per­ formance and has all the good lines).

While we’re listing the good things, the only reason to see this film in a theatre rather than waiting for the video is the combination of the art direction and Don McAlpine’s multi-light source images of the man­ sion's bizarre interiors, a West Coast equivalent of the ritzy fantasy apart­ ments in Miami Vice.

The Boudu• formula — or, given the family constellation represented in Down and Out, the Teorema variant — proposes that a magical or mystical stranger swathed in Other­ ness will intervene in the life of each family member in a therapeutic way.

And this happens. Jerry renders the pooch’s canine psychiatrist redun­ dant by getting the dog to eat: he

Mixed grille: Richard Dreyfus and Bette Midler in Down and Out in Beverly Hills. mixes his own favourite dog foods, puts them in a bowl on the floor, and teaches by example. One down.

The wife (Midler, unfortunately too contained in the role of a fortyish Jewish mother with a guru, an aerobics class, volunteer work, etc.) is cured of her headache and the six years of sexual deprivation it stands for, when Jerry offers her an ‘aura massage’ he learned in an ashram in Oregon.

Dave’s unwelcome efforts to find Jerry a job are put into perspective when Jerry takes him out for a day at the beach with his old bum friends; Dave learns to loosen up and return to life’s simple pleasures. Unfor­ tunately, this lyric episode replaces an earlier stream of images in the film: social realist studies of the ur­ ban poor, close in style to Dorothea Lange-W PA photography. The adolescent son (Evan Richards) experimenting with homosexuality is handled a bit more delicately: Jerry quietly takes him seriously, advising him on which shades of lipstick suit him best.

Before we get to the climactic moves, you should know that the film has employed Little Richard to play the next-door neighbour, a rock ’n roll producer, for the sole purpose of having him watch a limo full of people in Arab garb enter the house next to his and say: “ There goes the neighbourhood” . One’s goodwill evaporates.

The Mexican maid (Elizabeth Pena), worried about not having a green card and being, as the film puts it, “ diddled” by Max, is turned on to Marxist literature by Jerry, and repels Dave’s advances with an analysis likening her situation to that of a Third World country. The place of goodwill is filled with something much less happy when the student daughter (Tracy Nelson), Dave’s little princess and a non-terminal anorex­ ic, is put back on her food by Jerry’s ministrations. Late at night, she finds Jerry playing Debussy in the lounge.

Fade out, and in. She is con­ t e n te d ly m u n c h in g c o c k ta il sausages on toothpicks. This is a film people will use to berate American comedy in general. (Footnote for pedants: the filmmakers should be asked to see Preston Sturges's Sullivan's Travels [1941], and to learn the butler’s speech on poverty by heart.)

The film struggles towards its

climactic moment, a New Year’s party attended by family, friends and neighbours, and a Chinese business delegation who drink Tab with enor­ mous relish and are only too eager to learn the rules of the game. So, wherr-they witness Jerry and Dave battling in the swimming pool, they all ju m p in to o b se rve the Westerners’ strange customs. The movie goes under with them, its' move to farce one of desperation: it lacks the multiple tones which enable Renoir films to integrate farce with irony, sentiment and social analysis: and, on the other hand, it lacks the relentless, inventive comic force which make such scenes the most logical possible resolution of Blake Edwards’s stories.

Any chance the film has to redeem itself is lost at the end. The mystical stranger is exposed: there’s no mystery. He explains himself too well: he was just giving people what they wanted. It is a sad moment when Jerry stops, turns and looks back at the family into which he has insinuated himself. He can’t leave: he’s now part of their world. They may have been saved, but he is lost.

The film wants to demystify the Boudu formula, and it does. But it also pays the price. The post-con­ sciousness-raising epiphanies Jerry wrought are shown to be cynical ploys. His Other-ness is cancelled.

He is not allowed to depart: he is ab­ sorbed by his own materialism into the family he has not, finally, trans­ formed. The ending may be comic, but it is not funny and it is not warm.

It is very sour indeed.

Sue Turnbull and R.J. Thompson Down and Out in Beverly Hills: Directed and produced by Paul Mazur­ sky. Co-producer: Pato Guzman. Asso­ ciate producer: Geoffrey Taylor.

Screenplay: Paul Mazursky and Leon Capetanos, based on the play Boudu sauvé des eaux by René Fauchois. Dir­ ector of photography: Don McAlpine.

Production design: Pato Guzman.

Music: Andy Summers. Sound: Jim Webb and Crew Chamberlain. Editor: Richard Halsey. Cast: Nick Nolte (Jerry Baskin), Richard Dreyfuss (Dave Whiteman), Bette Midler (Barbara Whiteman), Little Richard (Orvis Goodnight) Tracy Nelson (Jenny Whiteman), Evan Richards (Max Whiteman) Production company: Touchstone Films, in association with Silver Screen Partners II. Distributor: Greater Union. 35mm.

97 minutes. USA. 1986.

CINEMA PAPERS May — 87

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Black Moon Rising (Roadshow) is about a sleek black car called (that’s right) Black Moon, which is powered by “ hydrogen split off from water” , or words to that effect. It is made out of the material used in bullet-proof vests. Indeed, .the tyres and windows seem to be made out of that, too, since endless salvos of bullets fail to make it so much as swerve.

The film is also about a freelance operative called Quint (Tommy Lee Jones), who steals something, apparently on behalf of the govern­ ment, then hides it in the back of Black Moon, which is then stolen by Linda Hamilton, who works for a stolen-car ring headed by a sleepily sinister Robert Vaughn. In Black Moon Rising, everyone steals some­ thing.

That’s the wind-up bit. The wind­ ing down is largely made up of car chases, Jones getting graphically beaten up, close encounters between Jones and Hamilton (kinkily vid e o ta p e d by Vaughn), and sporadic appearances by a foulmouthed government operative (Bubba Smith) and vicious freelance hood (Lee Ving). It all ends with an escapade about as convincing as a TV cartoon, in which Jones leaps Black Moon from the 35th floor of one skyscraper to the 35th floor of the next.

Directed with characterless effici­ ency by Harley Cokliss, the script is credited to John Carpenter, who seems to have put it together by randomly scrambling half a dozen unused stories on his word pro­ cessor.

Nick Roddick

Tommy Lee Jones in Black Moon Rising.

Thankfully relegating the usual inter­ view material to the sidelines, Bring on the Night (Seven Keys) is first and foremost a concert movie, with the difference (as one of the musicians points out) that it looks at a band in the process of being formed, not one on the verge of breaking up.

In 35mm widescreen format, Steadicams and all, it charts the lead-up to last spring’s Paris con­ cert, establishing the new Sting line­ up, which then went on to record ‘Dream of the Blue Turtles’.

In fact, the sound recording, camerawork and general show­ casing of the music are all of such a high standard that one wonders why some of it wasn’t used to promote the singles from the album, rather than the videoclips actually being used, which tend to stress the some­ times ponderous lyrics at the

88 — May CINEMA PAPERS

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expense of the sheer musical exuberance. The actual concert footage is as good as anything in the genre, and reveals clarinettist and saxophonist Branford Marsalis as the band’s musical genius.

The film’s low spot is former P o lic e m a n M ile s C o p e la n d , revealed as one of the major creeps of the music scene. But its highspot — the birth of Sting’s son, Jake, which happened to fall within the nine-day shooting schedule — is a piece of seized reality whose near­ perfect framing, editing and on-site decision-making confirms that direc­ tor Michael Apted is (also) one of the world’s top documentarists.

Nick Roddick

Sting in Bring on the Night.

When seven differents sets of people move house in London, all on the same day, their lives link up in The Chain (Ronin), a funny and biting satire about the meaning of home.

The film shows how uncomfort­ able our vices and problems can become when we move out into the world and relocate our lives. The experience is universal, and it is told with a deadpan simplicity as endear­ ing as it is incisive.

Beginning with a young West Indian leaving his Mum to shack up with his girlfriend, the chain is com­ pleted when an old businessman, dying of cancer, goes back to live in his childhood home, and rents the lad’s now-vacant room. In between, Jack Rosenthal’s screenplay reveals the pettiness and foibles of some wonderful characters, who are moving on to a better house and the next stage of their lives.

The central character is Warren Mitchell, as the head of the removalist crew and a student of philosophy. “ You can’t break the c h a in ,’ ’ he tells a w o uld -be capitulator. Wise and phlegmatic in the midst of vanity, parsimony and other deadly sins, Mitchell makes a memorable sage.

The pathos and humour of each situation are impeccably rendered by a distinguished cast under the direction of Jack Gold, and the end result is a slice of life that proves a film doesn’t have to heavy to be good.

Michael Visontay

A Chorus Line (CEL) continues the tradition of backstage musicals, adding a surface realism not unlike that mixed in , to the so-called ‘escapist’ tales for Depression audi­ ences made by Warners in the thirties.

Director Richard Attenborough confines the story to a single setting:

i a Broadway stage audition in which various candidates — sixteen appli­ cants for eight positions — are sub­ jected to intense interrogation by the c h a in -sm o kin g d ire c to r, Zach (Michael Douglas).

Douglas clenches his teeth as he sulks in the shadows of the stalls, growling insults and generally humiliating the assembled hopefuls.

His idea of a good time is to conduct a protracted psychodrama with this sorry group of starry-eyed maso­ chists. His comeuppance is inevit­ able, however, when ex-girlfriend Cassie (Alyson Reed) turns up, job­ less and dejected, after a failed attempt at Hollywood fame.

The latter sub-plot has been ex­ panded to the point where the central ensemble, the raison d'etre of the original stage show, exits stage left, Jeffrey (Flashdance) Hornaday’s musical numbers may well be spectacular, but we’ll never know: according to the dictates of the modern film musical, the per­ formances are arbitrarily truncated by flashbacks, close-ups, cutaways, reaction shots and anything else that reveals the filmmakers’ lack of faith in the audience’s ability to stretch its attention span beyond a few seconds.

Vicki Frederick, last seen as a female wrestler in The California Dolls, is impressive in the thankless role of an over-the-hill auditionee, washed up at thirty.

Paul Harris

The finale o f A Chorus Line.

John Sayles’s career as a director and screenwriter might seem some­ what schizoid. On the one hand, there have been such original and inventive gems as The Return of the Secaucus Seven (1980) and The Brother from Another Planet (1984), in every sense the ‘films of a free man’. On the other hand, there is Sayles’s career as a screenwriter, the earnings from which are used for his more personal projects.

Fittingly, the screenwriter job has usually led Sayles into formulaic musings about the exploitation genre: schlocky-sounding films like Piranha (1978), Alligator (1980) and now The Clan of the Cave Bear (Roadshow).

None of which is to say that The Clan of the Cave Bear is in any way a bad film. Set at the dawn of civiliza­ tion, it features Darryl Hannah as the linchpin in modern man’s transition from Neanderthal to Cro-Magnon.

Her plight, it turns out, is a simplified metaphor for modern feminist issues: as an able hunter and un­ willing subservient, she becomes a threat to the traditional male, and this

eventually leads to her being cast out and having to bear her child alone.

In terms of the screenplay, it may sound a lot like a Sayles film. In the making, however, it contains every one of the trappings of an epic, Time-Life civilization film, some of which are more palatable than others.

But, as predictable and hack­ neyed as it appears, it also packs some unexpected punches, while clearly setting its sights on its audi­ ence and the points it wants to make.

Paul Kalina

“ There’s something funny going on here,” exclaims a cop near the end of Clue (UIP). He should be so lucky: the film comes close to setting a record, for the greatest number of mistimed gags and failed one-liners ever to come out of a major Holly­ wood studio (in this case, Para­ mount).

The idea was always pretty shaky: a film based on the boardgame, ‘Clue’, with all the familiar charac­ ters (Professor Mustard, Miss Plum, Mrs Green, the Butler and the rest), wandering from The Library to The Study to The Kitchen, brandishing outsized candlesticks, lengths of rope and joke-shop daggers.

The original gimmick — three separate endings — did not survive the first week of the film's American release: the idea that anyone might want to sit.through Clue three times is close to unthinkable. In Australia, we have all three endings, one after the other.

A cast of second-string stars — E ilee n B re n n a n , Tim C u rry , Madeline Kahn, Christopher Lloyd, Michael McKean, Martin Mull — mug their way through a constipated script, occasionally managing to wave bravely, but more often drowned by direction that seems to belong to the worst tradition of amateur theatrics.

The truly amazing thing is that script and direction are by Jonathan Lynn, writer of Yes, Minister, and an established stage director. He should have known better, as should John Landis, who had the original story idea, and Debra Hill, who produced.

Nick Roddick

Madeline Kahn as Mrs White in Clue.

Four years ago, Mephisto, directed

by Istvan Szabo and starring Klaus Maria Brandauer, won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. This year, their new film, Colonel Redl (RedI ezredes, Newvision), involving at

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Brandauer in Colonel Redi. least half a dozen of the same •contri­ butors, was in line (unsuccessfully) for the same award.

The two films share a concern with the fate of spectacular losers. Like Mephisto, the new film exhibits a clear, driving intelligence which dis­ criminates with cinematic fluency between the conflicting claims at work on its protagonist, and illumin­ ates their painful collisions.

Alfred Redl (Brandauer), a railway­ man’s son from Galicia, is inspired by loyalty to the Austro-Hungarian empire, and spends his life in the suppression of those elements of his background which might prove inimical to his military career.

His denial of his Jewishness leads to the death of a Czech Jew, Lieu­ tenant Schorm (Karoly Eperjes). His suppression of his homosexuality propels him into a marriage of con­ venience. When his sister, Sophie (Flora Kadar), visits him at his barracks, he gives her money but tells her never to come again.

And yet, Redl never completely loses his hold on our sympathies.

This is due, in various degrees, to the subtlety of the writing, which insists on the complexity and vulner­ ability behind the reserved exterior; to Brandauer’s towering perform­ ance; and to Szabo’s skill in making the film’s structure reflect the inter­ action of the private and the public.

Tensely shot scenes of Redl’s private life alternate with discreetly and exquisitely presented public occasions. The private scenes are fraught with political implications, the public ones with personal chal­ lenges and dangers. Redl is undone by allowing himself to succumb sexually to a handsome young spy (Laszlo Gallfy) and, in doing so, makes himself the scapegoat the Archduke has wanted. The tension between Redl’s inner and outer worlds is never resolved: it just slackens and collapses.

Brandauer is, throughout, the focus for our attention, but he is sur­ rounded by a cast of superb actors.

Of these, Hans-Christian Blech, as the Archduke, should be singled out for his brusque and brutish redefini­ tion of the paternal ideal symbolized by the monarchy, as should Gudrun Landgrebe as Katalin, the woman who not merely seduces, but accepts and understands Redl.

Brian McFarlane

After you’ve whipped the Viet Cong and terminated the urban guerillas, what do you do for an encore? Obvi­ ously, you kick Arab ass. In The Delta Force (Hoyts), Chuck Norris joins Lee Marvin to obliterate a frenzied band of Islamic extremists,

led by an oddly-cast Robert Forster, alm ost unreco gnizab le behind blackface and an accent so thick you could use it to glue up the holes in the story-line.

The Delta Force is a typical, nononsense (?) Norris actioner, with an unashamedly one-eyed approach to contentious international issues.

Forget diplomacy: actions speak louder than words (as well they might, since Chuck’s way with words is a bit of a worry). The message is loud and clear: you can’t talk to the bastards, so let’s blow them away.

The film opens with the abortive Iranian hostage rescue attempt in 1980, then shifts to a detailed recreation of last year’s Athens airport hijack. Scenes depicting the jet’s takeover are surprisingly well handled by director Menahem Golan: the siege is grimly believable and, as the passengers are hustled off to Lebanon, The Delta Force shows promise.

Unfortunately, as the rescue mis­ sion gets under way, serious filmmaking ends and myth-making begins. Chuck and his com ­ mandoes ‘covertly’ storm Beirut, with an invasion that resembles DDay, Inchon and the Charge of the Light Brigade all rolled into one. It’s a pity, because the film squanders an opportunity to contribute some­ thing significant to the debate on terrorism by trivializing it with super­ hero silliness.

Tony Drouyn

D epictions of noble, suffering motherhood have been a staple in­ gredient of the cinema since its inception. Kate Nelligan, star of Eleni (CEL), managed to transcend the cliche of devoted motherhood in Without a Trace (1983). There, her stately aloofness proved an interest­ ing contrast to the passionate woman she portrayed.

award nominations.

It is curious also that Gage, whowas said to be closely involved in the filmmaking, gave the nod to John Malkovich’s all too convincing inter­ pretation of Gage’s own character as almost pathologically cold and inhuman — more like the kind of role usually played by Christopher Walken.

Christine Cremen

After his war film, Das Boot (The Boat, 1980), and the fantasy, The Neverending Story (1984), both financially successful, Wolfgang Petersen, the German industry’s new prodigal, tries his hand (helped by a $38-million budget) at another popular genre: science fiction.

S ad ly, Enemy Mine (FoxColumbia) is a rehashed mishmash of American cliches that have worked well in the past, and will probably work again under more intelligent direction. On a planet reminding us of Alien, Davidge, a stra n d e d A m e rica n a stro n a u t (Dennis Quaid, looking like he got lost on the way to The Right Stuff) hates and loves an alien Drac (Louis Gossett Jnr, in the worst E.T. imper­ sonation yet).

Their life and times together will be shortened when our Robinson Crusoe of the future finds himself the proud father of a baby Drac (a poor imitation of the Gremlins' mogwai), engendered by his Man Friday, who dies while giving birth.

Originality not being Petersen’s forte, the second part of this extremely dull film sees Quaid (looking, by now, more and more like DeMille’s Moses, and acting like Indiana Jones) deliver his son from the claws of evil earthmen.

By the end of Enemy Mine, one can only follow Davidge’s motto (“ Sometimes, I listened to the skies for a faint hope of rescue” ) and wonder what will happen when Petersen tries his hand at comedy.

Norbert Noyaux

Kate Nelligan in Eleni.

Nelligan, however, seems far too saintly and genteel to play the un­ doubted heroine of Nicholas Gage’s book, Eleni. His literary portrait of his mother, whilst allowing for an under­ standable idealization of the subject, made Eleni seem as matter-of-factly courageous and tough as one of her own mountain goats.

Peter Yates, as director of the film version of her life, however, opts for florid melodrama and facile wouldbe feminism. Linda Hunt, playing Eleni’s friend, is allowed to be sonor­ ously sage, and both she and Nelligan are allotted set pieces where they make the kind of stirring speeches designed mainly to win

The rece nt SBS sho w in g of Georgian director Otar losseliani’s There Was a Singing Blackbird (1971) showed that his particular type of whimsical comedy is an acquired taste outside the USSR. His most noted Russian-made film, Pastorale, was not allowed to be shown outside Georgia for six years; and, in 1982, he was forbidden to leave Russia to present it in Italy.

In 1984, however, he went to France and made the 35-minute semi-documentary, Euskadi, a cele­ bration of Basque peasant dances.

N o w h is P a ris ia n c o m e d y , Favourites of the Moon (Les favoris de la lune, Luna), shares its predecessor's director of photo­ graphy, Philipe Theadiere, as well as a similar, po/ona/se-like structure, and it was deservedly awarded a special jury prize at the 1984 Venice Film Festival.

Apart from the film’s intricate geo­ metry of character linkages around a stolen nineteenth-century nude painting and a recycled eighteenthcentury Sevres dining set, it is remarkable for its peculiarly French brand of deadpan, Tatiesque humour, and the fact that it is made

with a cast of mostly non-profes­ sionals.

As well as being a comedy thriller about petty crime, Favourites of the Moon could also be seen as a satire on Western consumerism and acquisitiveness (there is an apt neat­ ness about the way the dinner service is finally swept up by a Tunisian garbo). It almost seems as if losseliani, unlike some of his Russian colleagues who have floundered in the Hollywood mainstream, has set out to mainline straight into the quirky traditions of French comedy.

And outdone a lot of its practitioners in the process.

Tony Mitchell

Marie Parra Aledo and Jean-Pierre Beauviala in Favourites of the Moon.

Quentin ‘W og’ Niles (Martyn Stanbridge) is the star of a cricket club.

Their weekly game is watched by a lone spectator. Flashbacks immedi­ ately establish the cricketers as former English public schoolmates, their observer, Cox (Anton Lesser), likewise — the difference being that Cox was the school scapegoat, a victim of continual bullying.

Thus begins Jack Gold’s Good and Bad at Games (Ronin), another self-lacerating portrait of the British caste system and its habit of feeding off friendship and class ties.

Past and present scenes unfold Cox’s quest for revenge upon Mount (Dominic Jephcott), who is now an army officer with Northern Ireland duties. Cox’s methods have involved investigative journalism, shading into a deranged loosening of violent rage.

The naive Niles is revealed to be an outsider himself, tolerated by Mount and co. only for his sporting prowess. Niles is seduced by Frances (Laura Davenport), Mount’s wife, and finds himself caught in a snare of multiple betrayals, in which he and Cox will be the ultimate victims.

The rather metronomic structure of the film and its simple visual style, leading to Cox’s degradation at school and his revenge attempt in the present, are compensated for by the candidly funny observations of the upper class at school and in their professions, as they cling to the male camaraderie and contempt for others, and of Niles remaining suspended between past and present, trying to conjure up a sense of belonging through repeated playings of a favourite rock song.

Mark Spratt

Borrowing heavily from Poltergeist, Gremlins and Time Bandits, House (Roadshow), written by Ethan Wiley and directed by Steve Miner, suffers ►

CINEMA PAPERS May — 89

not only from the standard cliches of the haunted-house genre, but also from a confusion of genres.

Tension, horror and splatter are oddly juxtaposed with introspection and farce. But the central idea is, for a horror movie, both unusual and full of potential: while trying to write a book about his time in Vietnam, Roger Cobb (William Katt), experi­ ences a number of unexplained and terrifying phenomena in his auntie’s house. And we discover, via a flash­ back, that it was from this house that R oger’s son m ysteriously dis­ appeared some time ago.

The house is, in fact, controlled by the tortured spirit of Roger’s Vietnam buddy whom (it is revealed through one of the many Vietnam flashbacks) Roger had to leave to the enemy.

For this abandonment, the spirit has come back to haunt him.

A different approach, maybe, to one man’s Vietnam nightmare. But writer and director seem more at home with endless scenes of (well) contrived tension. I lost count of the number of times Roger heard a sound and slowly walked up the stairs, not to mention how often a trembling hand reached out in close up for a door handle.

The shock tactics work but a general unwillingness on the film­ makers’ part 'to embrace their themes, going instead for a com­ bination of sincerity and send-up, finally destroys, not only the credi­ bility, but even the frights.

Tony Cavanaugh

Mary Stavin in House.

At the start of the atrocious Invasion USA (Hoyts), we hear the crucial question: “ He is one man alone.

What can he do?”

Ninety minutes of destruction later, Chuck Norris has singlehandedly saved his country from an outrageous terrorist invasion, led by a disfigured Russian. Norris's character, Matt Hunter, is the ‘local hero’ of a world in which men talk with machine guns and the role of women is to scream and sob.

Apart from some entertainment to be had from this awesome violence, the film’s only redeeming feature is that the saviour does not pretend to be a real human being. No, Chuck is a CIA agent stalking his old Russian enemy. Except for an early smile at his pet armadillo, he is a robot-like creature devoid of emotion, driving around in an impenetrable ute, tossing hand grenades with a mini­ mum of fuss and feeling.

One of the most disturbing aspects of the black-and-white message is the blurring of Nazism and communism into one and the

90 — May CINEMA PAPERS

same evil force: the Russian, Rostov (Richard Lynch), also speaks German to his Untermenschen. Yet even the propaganda pales before what is, in effect, little more than a trade fair for arms dealers.

Michael Visontay

Chuck Norris in Invasion USA.

That The Jewel of the Nile (FoxColumbia) — Romancing the Stone II, in case you hadn’t realised — works as well as it does is quite an achievement, since the screenplay (by Mark Rosenthal and Lawrence Konner, the writer of Stone, Diane Thomas having died in a car crash early last year) has little of the verve or the inventiveness of the original movie.

What saves it is the solidity of the original formula, the casting, director Lewis Teague’s briskly intelligent input, Jan de Bont’s stunning desert photography, and a wicked little per­ formance by Avner Eisenberg in the title role [sic] of the umbrella-waving Holy Man. The film’s best moments come when it has fun with the cultural cross-pollenization of the Arab world — a camel train boogies across the desert to disco music from a ghettoblaster strapped to a saddle — or when the love/hate relationship between the dippy-but-resourceful romantic novelist (Kathleen Turner) and the fe ckle ss a d v e n tu re r (Michael Douglas) hits the stride of Romancing the Stone. “ The man’s favourite author,” sulks Turner of her beloved, “ is the one who wrote ‘Pull Tab to Open’.”

But that happens all too rarely.

And, where Romancing the Stone was continuously and engagingly alive, The Jewel of the Nile is rarely more than an efficient comedyromance — a sort of Stanley Donen movie with big set-ups and special effects. It does, however, have a lot more style and irony than the hit single planted in its soundtrack.

Nick Roddick

Turner and Douglas in Jewel of the Nile.

Speaking of Kaos (AZ), the Taviana brothers have called it a film which continues to “ investigate the rela­ tionship between man and nature” .

Set in Sicily — which is of crucial im­ portance to the film — Kaos is another link in the history of the Italian cinema’s interest in the regional south, from Visconti’s La terra trema (1948) to the Tavianis’ own Padre padrone (1977).

In some ways, Kaos is quite ambitious in scope, taking five short stories by Pirandello, presenting them in episodic form and bracketing them with brief but magnificent aerial sequences of landscapes shot from the air. The use of these sequences contrasts the figures acting out the drama in close-up, with the heavenly vistas of villages perched on clifftops, of ancient Greek temples and pastoral lands seen as if in some utopian dream. Given that the Tavianis have, in their previous films, given expression to the themes and images of agrarian utopias, that, too, may be the underlying theme of Kaos.

All the tales (except the last) have ties with Sicilian folklore, but they vary in tone from the quasi-tragic first tale, T he Other Son’, in which an old mother cannot acknowledge the love of an illegitimate son born of a bandit’s rape, to the comically absurdist third tale, T he Jar’, in which an artisan is trapped in a huge olive jar.

The last tale, ‘A Conversation with Mother', is the exception. It tells the story of Pirandello’s return to his native Sicily, to be confronted with the apparition of his deceased mother, who tells him a story of melancholy beauty. Rendered in rich poetic imagery, the tale gives the film a harmonious emotional conclusion.

At three hours, Kaos may at times seem overlong, but it has enough sustained moments of real (and rare) cinematic intelligence to make it definitely worth seeing.

Rolando Caputo

Murphy’s Romance (Fox-Columbia) is a simplistic, lazy, amiable drawl of a film, that spares us the usual to rn a d o e s , flo o d s and rapacious bankers endemic to the ‘country’ genre.

The plot is slim: Murphy Jones (James Garner), the socially active but emotionally guarded pharmacist in a tightly-knit Western community, has his dormant romanticism re­ kindled by a newly-arrived young divorcee (Sally Field), whose irre­ sponsible husband (Brian Kerwin) refuses to leave her alone.

A seasoned charmer, Garner effortlessly oozes traditional decency and quiet assurance. Likewise on safe ground, Field reprises her plucky-little-battler persona.

Focusing on subtle nuances of behaviour, director Martin Ritt makes his moral points with gentle humour and without rancour. One feels that Ritt’s portrait of a sleepy Arizona town is more idealistic than accurate: it’s hard to imagine a more honest, God-fearing bunch of citizens this side of Frank Capra.

Still, the unhurried, old-fashioned rhythms of rural life are elegantly cap tured by W illiam F ra ke r’s

cinematography. The only jarring note is a strident, Carole King/LApop score that is as out of place as a cowby in a gay bar.

M urphy’s Romance leaves a pleasant taste, but little to chew on.

And, if it doesn't fulfil one’s expecta­ tions, it’s probably only because it never created any to start with.

Tony Drouyn

Hugh Brody’s 1919 (Ronin) takes us into a museum whose exhibits fascinate. Books, papers, rich Persian rugs, various archaeological finds and a chaise-longue crowd Freud’s consulting room. It is 1919, and a patient called Sophie is telling Freud of her love for another woman. Another, a White Russian em igre nam ed A le xa n d e r, is struggling with his desire for women he cannot love.

Fifty-one years later, the same two who had undergone psychoanalysis meet in Vienna. The consulting room has literally become a museum, though now Sophie (Maria Schell) and Alexander (Paul Scofield) tell their stories to one another.

Diana Quick in 1919.

Their recollections are conveyed with a Proustian attention to detail and interpreted (or misinterpreted) by the ‘voice’ of Freud (he is never actually seen). The relationship between the two characters is restrained, for the past is still over­ whelming.

The film attempts to situate their lives historically, by cutting in a rc h iv a l fo o ta g e — R ussian peasants p ictu red before the Bolshevik revolution, the storming of the Winter Palace, Hitler’s entry intoVienna: a selection of images pointing to massive material and psychological upheaval.

However, this intersection of the private and intimate with more public, historical forces does not always succeed. Sophie’s socialist leanings, only vaguely borne out in the flashbacks, do seem to sit rather oddly.

1919 is an intelligent film, though, worth seeing at the very least because it affirms the charting of both the individual and the collective mind as a priority.

Kathy Bail

Blatant announcement of intention bring with them great expectations.

Pull it off, and there’s reason to cele­ brate. Not so with Sidney Lumet’s latest offering in media razzmatazz, Power (Roadshow).

Like Lumet’s earlier Network (1976), it offers a look behind the scenes, .this tim e at the

manoeuvrings of the election cam­ paign imagemakers. Pete St John (Richard Gere) is the best in the busi­ ness — for a handsome fee. He can turn a timid, bumbling fool into a cowboy ready to launch into the governorship of New Mexico. His staging of events for different poli­ tical candidates makes for some fascinating and very witty scenes: what you s ee is not what you get.

The plot, however, is straight­ forward and devoid of knotty per­ sonal political intrigues, and P o w er is perfectly suited for the small screen where, after lasting a week in the cinemas, it has already ended up.

Richard Gere's close-ups — of which there are many — are par­ ticularly ideal, and there are stars as well: Julie Christie plays an investi­ gative reporter, and Gene Hackman is another media pundit who knows the game well and doesn’t want to return to the days when the Los A ngeles Times had control.

P o w er takes too long (two hours) to get across a simple message: that votes are won on personalities, not issues, and that selling politicians is a hyped-up version of flogging soap powder.

Kathy Bail

Though it may not please over-thehill (i.e. 25-plus) admirers of John Hughes’s earlier Sixteen C andles and The Breakfast C lub, Pretty in Pink (UIP), which Hughes wrote and produced, but which is directed by Howard Deutch, is streets ahead of most current youth movies.

Molly Ringwald in Pretty in Pink.

If the territory is familiar, though, so, too, is the format: ugly-ducklingin-disguise Andie (Molly Ringwald), both proud and ashamed to come from the wrong side of the tracks, has no prom date until she meets up with a ‘richie’ called Blane (Andrew McCarthy). By way of compensa­ tion, however, there are some great lines (“ Blane!” exclaims Andie’s soulmate, Duckie [Jon Cryer], in disgust. “ That’s not a name: that’s a major a p p lia n ce ” ), an acute observation of the clash between ‘style’ and ‘fashion’ in suburban America, and a neat reversal of a number of generic elements. The opening scene, for example, shows Andie cooking breakfast and nagging her father (Harry Dean Stanton) out of bed, just like a hundred harrassed mothers in a hundred earlier teenage-trauma movies.

And, if it never hits the stride of that definitive study of teenage cul­ ture clash, Valley Girls (1982), Pretty in Pink has all the ingredients for an honest hit: integrity, humour, an

awareness of its own sentimentality, and a terrific soundtrack (including the Psychedelic Furs’ 1981 anthem from which it takes its title).

The central performances by Ringwald, McCarthy and Cryer are fine; James Spader is likewise excellent as a particularly obnoxious richie; and Harry Dean Stanton does a restrained reprise of his bemused resentment number.

Nick Roddick

as far as I can remember, of nothing in the plot): “ If I were a plastic surgeon, I would make my girl a virgin” .

Said plot, by the way, covers the antics of Bobby, Al and ‘Barfer’; Bobby’s frustrated love affair with Nancy (who for some inexplicable reason doesn’t like his playing doctors with one Bambi Bilenka), and the group’s adoption of a Chinese exchange student called Sam Boon Tong.

There are some jarringly close-tothe-bone comments (“ Whenever I go to the bathroom,” snaps Nancy at Bobby, “ I never know whether I’m going to find you jerking off over some gynaecology textbook” ), a touch of sentimentality, and a lot of underwear. The credited director, Alan Smithee, is a pseudonym, and Stitches has been on the shelf — where is should have stayed — for two years.

Nick Roddick

A ykro yd and Vanessa Angel in

Spies Like Us.

Using an increasingly common theme in mainstream American cinema. Spies Like Us (Road­ show) unites the talents of Don Aykroyd and Chevy Chase in a comedy about Russo-American nuclear tension. Directed by John Landis and co-written by Aykroyd (who is also given credit for the story), it’s a surprisingly dull effort.

The plot is never less than predict­ able, introducing Aykroyd and Chase as bumbling fools, chosen by American intelligence to become decoys for the Russians in a covert operation and then dumped into Pakistan. Encountering KGB agents, beautiful women and gun-toting Pakistani tribesmen, they eventually meet up with the real spies, com­ plete the mission and save the world.

The film relies on a string of humorous episodes which are mostly simplistic and repetitive. The two heroes sit in a plane — it crashes to the ground. End of gag. One hero parachutes to earth — the other falls on top of him. End of gag.

Occasionally, the comedy is filmic, relying on editing and providing a pay-off. But that is as rare as the brilliantly executed action sequences. Sometimes the dialogue is sharp and effective, but overall the film is ponderous and not worthy of the talents involved.

Made by a British-based company (Thorn EMI) for American cable TV (Home Box Office) and directed by Karel Reisz, Sweet Dreams (Greater Union) tells the story of the life and loves of country singer Patsy Cline (Jessica Lange), who died in a plane crash in the early sixties. The title comes from a song Cline is shown singing at a Kansas City benefit concert just before her death: “ Why can’t I forget the past/And start loving someone new/lnstead of having sweet dreams/About you?”

The ‘you’ is her hell-raising hus­ band, Charlie (Ed Harris), and both the leads give first-rate perform­ ances. But, by trying to give every­ body everything, the screenplay (by the usually estimable Robert Getchell, who wrote Alice D o e s n ’t Live H ere A ny M ore and B ound for Glory) ends up going round in circles, alternating repetitive scenes of romantic bliss and/or marital strife, with (for Reisz) surprisingly hack­ neyed montages of Cline perform­ ing, recording, or on the road with her band.

The result, despite some beauti­ fully choreographed scenes (notably a romantic one in the parking lot of a country music club), is a curiously dire ctio n le ss film , that even manages to muff its climax — a spectacularly filmed crash into a mountain-side — by telegraphing it so earnestly.

It seems the only moral apparent in

To Live and Die in L.A. (UIP) is that morals no longer matter. Based on the real-life adventures of a US Secret Service agent, William- Friedkin’s film is slick, stylish and flamboy­ antly shallow.

Embroiled in trying to bust a counterfeiting gang which killed his partner (“ He was a friend, too” ), macho hunk Richard Chance (William J. Petersen) literally screws information out of his female informants. Needing $30,000 to set up a deal with the counterfeiters (above the limit for a Departmental ‘buy’), Chance and his sober new partner (John Pankow) kidnap and rob an out-of-town businessman. In the process, the businessman is killed . . . and turns out to be an undercover FBI agent. Showing no remorse, Chance persists with the deal. In the final showdown with the pouting villain (Willem Dafoe), Chance is killed. His previously w im p y p a rtn e r now a d o p ts Chance’s persona, his techniques and even his car.

Friedkin’s talents for presenting action on the screen are put to fine use, especially in one gut-wrenching trip up the wrong side of a crowded freeway. Unfortunately, however, most of the film misses out on the rhythm of Wang Chung’s emphatic and exciting score. What does makes the film worth watching, though, is Robby Muller’s brilliant cinematography: after the rural grandeur of Paris, Texas, Muller now a tm o s p h e ric a lly catches the American urban landscape.

Paul Coulter

John Pankow and William Petersen in To Live and Die in L.A.

Nick Roddick

Tony Cavanaugh

Stitches

(AZ Films) does for medical students what the Police A c a d e m y films did for trainee coppers: reveals them as gross, sexist and slaves to uncontrollable bodily functions of one kind or another.

But, whereas Police A c a d e m y (and even, for that matter, Doin Time, a film I never expected to remember fondly) demonstrated a basic level of competence in script­ ing, performance and structure, Stitches falls short even of that.

Using an average audience — in this case, two other people at an early evening show — as the litmus paper, it rates one guffaw. For the record, that was the line (a propos,

Jessica Lange in Sweet Dreams.

The New Zealand cinema’s first un­ equivocal film d'auteur, Vigil (Ronin) has already been the subject of a feature in this magazine (‘On the edge’, C inem a Papers 53, Septem­ ber 1985), so any review here is mainly for the record. The film’s Aus­ tralian release is over, and has been uneven: a good run in Sydney, a disastrous one in Melbourne, a couple of raves, a few so-so reviews, and a fiercely divided audience.

The story of a young girl (Fiona Kay) reaching puberty on an isolated farm, it is a film of stunninng *

CINEMA PAPERS May — 91

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images — both those assembled by director Vincent Ward, and those lit and filmed by cinematographer Alun Bollinger (who has since done For Love Alone) — and a screenplay that follows an inner rather than a narrative logic.

For those for whom it works — and I have been among them from the start — Vigil is one of the most exciting debut features of the eighties: a film which demonstrates

Fiona Kay in Vigil.

test their abilities as actors in the twodimensional roles allotted to them.

As for the rest of the cast, Helen Mirren is also wasted in a stock part as the girl he left behind him, and it is similarly hard to gauge whether Isa­ bella Rossellini has inherited more than her mother’s wholesome allure and some hauntingly familiar vocal intonations.

Jerzy S k o lim o w s k i’ s b a rn ­ storming performance as a KGB man, though, leads one to hope that this may be the last instance of his moonlighting in front of the camera.

Christine Cremen

both a passion for cinema, and the ability to realise that passion in words and images.

When the hit films and the cult movies of the eighties have gone the way of the baggy suits and the designer knitwear, Vigil, I am sure, will remain.

Nick Roddick

White Nights (Fox-Columbia) is like the lesser Hollywood musicals, where one waits impatiently during the plot exposition for the stars to start dancing again. Instead of the usual romantic entanglement, how­ ever, the movie focuses on the American sport of Ruskie-bashing, with its story of a ballet dancer, played by Mikhail Baryshnikov, who is forcibly held in the country from which he defected when his plane crash-lands in Siberia.

White Nights recalls the smug nliberalism of such sixties movies as The D efiant Ones, by having the character played by Baryshnikov more or less yoked together with black dancer and actor Gregory Hines. Neither of these talented men is allowed properly to display the skill he is noted for, owing to Taylor Hackford’s lacklustre direction of the (all too few) dancing sequences, and they certainly have no opportunity to

"Let’s just sit down and enjoy the game,’’ said the American from the Victorian Gridiron Football League at the preview of Wildcats (Road­ show), a film which turns the ‘sport of kings’ into another spectacle altogether: a comedy starring Goldie Hawn as Coach McGrath.

The male institution she takes on this time is a football team of cool crims and conmen at Central High, a dilapidated school in the Chicago ghetto. It is a position that every other coach has refused. After telling her husband that she needs a life of her own, she begins the job with fighting spirit. Her middle-class sweetness gets her nowhere, how­ ever, and she soon decides to “ show them tough” .

It becomes a bit of a soapie, really: her husband threatens to take custody of their two daughters because of her ‘dishonourable’ con­ nections. For a while, the blunt moral for women is that fulfilling a lifetime’s ambition comes second to mother­ hood. But remember, it is a comedy, so these things tend to sort them­ selves out. It is also true to the Ameri­ can way ("You can be anything you want if you work hard enough” ).

Wildcats has its comic moments.

The team boasts a cheer squad of fast-paced Aretha Franklins — rap music and soul, instead of pom­ poms and high-pitched hysteria — and the breakdancing in the middle of the field is an amusing deterrent to the Wildcats’ conservative college opponents. But, in the end,'Wildcats is like Rocky: the game is all.

Wt

Lisa Eichhorn in Wildrose. resentful of her presence, and even her mother is against her working when the men aren’t.

Parallel to this is the story of a fisherman (Tom Boyer), whose scale of operation is no longer economic­ ally viable, and who is-being gradu­ ally forced off the lake his family has worked for generations by the "goddam sports fishermen” .

The film’s credentials — the same director and production team that were responsible for Northern Lights (1979) — are impeccable, and its background analysis is compel­ ling. But Wildrose’s gamble is to centre the film on a failed relation­ ship (between Eichhorn and Boyer), and to dramatize the issues through personal rather than political con­ frontations.

Strung out between the twin poles of economic analysis and the romantic notion of a cabin in the woods (Eichhorn’s family is Finnish), the story’s focus becomes diluted.

Set up as, precisely, a background, the economic issues become secondary to an impossible love story, and the result is an admirable attempt at a political film for a broader market which, sadly, doesn’t quite come off. The Salt of the Earth — its most obvious ancestor — it isn’t.

Nick Roddick

Kathy Bail

Goldie Hawn in Wildcats.

Baryshnikov and Mirren in White

Wildrose (Ronin) is a film about change and, perhaps, loss. Its central focus is a woman (Lisa Eichhorn) who drives a massive ore truck on the Mesati Iron Range in northern Minnesota. Separated from her hus­ band, she is clinging to her job (for which no one disputes she is well qualified) at a time when lay-offs make the male workers increasingly

92 — May CINEMA PAPERS

N

Winner of the Golden Lion at Venice in 1984, A Year of the Quiet Sun (Rok spokojnego slonca, Sharmill) has taken two years to reach these shores, and one can’t help wonder­ ing why. After all, Krzysztof Zanussi’s film has all the right ingredients: a classical love story with the ravaged landscape of wartorn Europe as its background with, as added bonus, the courage of a director going back to the ‘occupied country’ to make his film.

The film is set in a Poland conju­ gated in the past tense: occupied, wounded by war and Nazism, and coveted by its neighbours. In this

m ldnd where “ hope provides the only courage to live” , Norman (Scott Wilson), a G.I., survivor of a Nazi concentration camp, and Emilia (Maja Komorowska), a Polish widow, whose only family consists of her invalid mother, will try to dis­ cover happiness by uniting their trust in the future.

With a rare minimum of camera movements and a sometimes seductive simplicity of mise en scene, Zanussi often manages with disarming ease to blend hatred and love, bitterness and happiness, coming up with some genuinely touching scenes along the way. He does so, however, at the price of an often inert narrative and some heavy symbolism.

Zanussi’s most em otionally accessible film, A Year o f the Quiet Sun is likely to be remembered less for its whole, than for the few touch­ ing moments it will have offered.

Norbert Noyaux

Rob Lowe in Youngblood.

Youngblood (UIP) is a bizarre (though not unlikeable) cross between Slap Shot and Flashdance.

American farmboy Dean Young­ blood (Rob Lowe) lives and dreams ice hockey, as indicated in a hieratic opening sequence in which sticks, pucks, skates and rinks replace legwarmers and exercise bars. The disco beat remains the same.

Dean gets a try-out with the Hamil­ ton Mustangs, across the border in hostile, alien Canada. Only briefly deterred by a massive bully from the rival Thunder Bay team, Racki (George Finn), Dean toughens up from pretty boy to professional hockey player, thanks to tequila, sexual initiation — first by his land­ lady (Fionnula Flanagan), then by the coach’s daughter, Jessie (Cynthia Gibb) — and to the no-nonsense patronage of Coach Chad­ wick (Ed Lauter).

Dean’s brother (who lost an eye and, with it, his hockey career) and his father (an ex-puckmaster, we gather), help to toughen him up by taking him into the barn and teach­ ing him how to fight — a sequence which ends with the classic injunc­ tion: “ You can learn to punch in the barn, but you gotta learn to survive on the ice!” Needless to say, Dean survives, punching the appalling Racki into unconsciousness and his way into Jessie’s heart.

Lowe, Gibb, Lauter and Flanagan are all excellent, Hamilton looks like a dump, and Canadian junior ice hockey would seem to be a fascina­ ting throwback to ancient Rome.

Nick Roddick

United nil, Artists nil FINAL CUT: DREAMS AND DISASTER IN THE MAKING OF HEAVEN’S GATE by Steven Bach (Jonathan Cape, 1985, ISBN 0-224-02842-1, $43.95).

Final Cut is the best book yet written on corporate Hollywood, the pheno­ menon that emerged when the dreamers left the Dream Factory and the conglomerates moved in.

Not that the factory manufactures dreams (or nightmares) any less frequently: it merely does so accord­ ing to different processes and under different control (in United Artists’ case, it did so under the control of the Transamerica Corporation). It is to that process and that control that Steven Bach’s book is an extra­ ordinary and fascinating guide.

When Heaven’s Gate first hove into sight, Bach was ‘Head of East Coast and European Production’ at United Artists. As the film lumbered through the system, he became joint head of production (with David Field), then went solo, after Field’s abrupt departure for 20th CenturyFox. By the time Heaven's Gate had been (and very swiftly gone) — an “ unmitigated disaster” , in the words of the New York Times's Vincent Canby — Bach was out of a job.

And, in the aftermath of the debacle, United Artists collapsed into the arms of Kirk Kerkorian’s MGM. Originally budgeted at $7.5 million, Heaven's Gate finally staggered home, over a year late, at a negative cost of $35,190,718. This later rose to an alleged $44 million, the figure at which UA wrote the film off after the recut version had also bombed. United Artists never, to the best of my knowledge, revealed the final -returns on Heaven's Gate. It had a critically acclaimed and reasonably successful re-release in London in the summer of 1983, but it is doubtful if that season did much more than cover its promotional costs. Thus, all the signs are that the film recouped rather less than 5% of its final cost.

Not surprisingly, Heaven's Gate has become the cornerstone of eighties Hollywood lore, held re­ sponsible not only for the untimely demise of United Artists, but also for the end of the 'movie brats’ era.

Within a year of Cimino’s nemesis, Steven Spielberg struck out with 1941, and John Landis overspent and underearned dramatically with The Blues Brothers. Neither failure, however, had quite the impact of Heaven's Gate. The days of the ‘artistic’ block-buster were over (though Coppola slipped The Cotton Club under the wire), and so was Hollywood’s brief flirtation with the auteur theory.

Nothing could illustrate the impact of Heaven’s Gate better than the reaction to the screening of the shortened version in Arthur Knight's film class at the University of Southern California, that industry-

oriented cradle of the brats. As the opening credits rolled, the future cream of Hollywood followed its usual procedure of cheering or clap­ ping the names on the screen — the actors, the cinematographer, the composer, the editor, all doing jobs to which the students aspired. As Cimino's name came up, however the auditorium erupted into boos: Cimino had blown the gaff on their hopes. He had failed to play the game according to the rules, and now there was a very real chance that none of them would get to bat.

What makes Bach’s book so good is the fact that he writes wittily and fluently, has almost total recall, and that his account is fiercely and un­ ashamedly first-person, not the mish-mash of quotes and recollec­ tions which marred David McClintock’s otherwise fascinating account of modern Hollywood, Indecent Exposure. His facts appear welldocumented and beyond dispute (at least, most of those concerned have accepted them). But what of his con­ clusions? Expecting Bach to be wholly objective about Heaven's Gate is a little like commissioning a biography of Cori Aquino from Ferdinand Marcos.

At his best, Bach is making valiant efforts to be fair; at his worst, there is a dancing-on-the-grave glee about his account. This is especially true once the film has opened, and the pretense at equanimity is dropped.

Cimino emerges as a devious mega­ lomaniac, liable to promise one thing one day, and have his lawyers deliver a contrary injunction the next.

And Cimino's friend and producer, Jo Ann Carelli, comes across as a scatter-brained incompetent, unable to hold Cimino in check (or do much of anything else, for that matter).

Right at the end, when Bach's boss and idol, Andy Albeck, has been toppled from the presidency of UA, Bach allows himself some fun at the expense of his successor, Norbert Auerbach. There is an especially wicked little vignette of his new boss’s unreciprocated fascination with Barbra Streisand, who was then trying (as she would for another couple of years) to sell Yentl to UA. But, entertaining as this is, none of it is really to the point. By the account of those who worked with or near him, Cimino behaved insuffer­ ably on Heaven's Gate. But he also came up with a near-masterpiece, at any rate in this writer’s view. It is not unusual for these two things — the insufferable and the brilliant — to go

On the rink: part o f the original publicity fo r Heaven’s Gate. hand in hand, least of all in Holly­ wood. The great unanswered question about Heaven’s Gate, therefore, is how a studio with the streamlined budgeting and control mechanisms that UA possessed, and the experienced executives to run them, allowed the production to get out of control. That UA was in Hollywood and Cimino in Kalispell, Montana, is not much of an excuse in the late twentieth century.

Bach offers the beginnings of an explanation, in his lengthy intro­ ductory history of United Artists, which had never been set up as a production house, and which had suffered a massive loss of kudos when its guiding lights of a quarter of a century, Arthur Krim and Robert Benjamin, left to found Orion in 1978. But Bach doesn’t follow through.

The true key to the situation is hidden in the text of Final Cut — in Bach’s references to the swings and roundabouts of executive change, with new production chiefs brought in from almost anywhere but film production, and in the author’s enthusiastic account of the perfect deal with which he almost prevented Woody Allen leaving UA for Orion.

Under Albeck and Bach, UA was a deal machine which somehow neglected the deal it gave Cimino.

And, for all the detail and the 400-plus pages of Final Cut, it seems clear that Cimino did what he was hired to do — make an epic — and that UA reneged on its side of the bargain: to supervise the pro­ duction.

This is not offered in defence of Cimino’s behaviour, merely to point out that American producers and production executives are (very) well paid, not just to get screen credit, but to do specific jobs. In a word, to produce.

Right at the end of Final Cut, Bach quotes Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times: “ the moral of Heaven’s Gate seems to be that the then-executives at United Artists poured bad judgement after bad judgement in a futile effort to make the earlier judgements look less bad” . The context of the quotation suggests Bach feels the remark to be unfair. But nothing in Final Cut contradicts what Champlin has to say.

Nick Roddick

Left fielder ONE MAN’S WAY by Cecil Holmes (Penguin, 1986, ISBN 0-14-007651-4, $9.95). “ The game’s stacked all along the line. The little bloke just can’t win,” says a cab driver in the third section of Cecil Holmes’s 1956 feature, Three in One. And it’s a theme that is frequently reiterated in One Man’s Way, the autobiographical mis­ cellany of writings by this New Zealand-born filmmaker and journa­ list for whom life and politics have always been inseparable.

Not that Holmes is either a proselytizer or a socialist theorist.

For, though capitalism encourages creativity while planned societies stifle it, the cost to art in tfne West is its resulting evaluation almost solely as a commodity. Holmes acknow­ ledges the irony (he’s a great man for that).

It may not be a name he quotes, but there’s a lot of Brecht in Holmes.

They take the same pleasure in the backwaters of the world and the seedier side of cities (Holmes, for instance, writes well of New York’s First Avenue, its bars and whores).

And both do a nice line in sarcasm about the film industry. “ Every morning, to earn my bread,” the exiled Brecht snarled in his tart poem, ‘Hollywood’, "I go to the market where they buy lies.” For his part, Holmes reproduces here an imaginary report he wrote in 1957, after every Australian distributor, despite the film’s critical and com­ mercial success overseas, had refused to screen Three in One, finally releasing only one of its three sections as the support to, of all things, a revival of Alfred Hitch­ cock’s Rebecca.

Holmes imagines the premiere at Sydney’s State Theatre of a film made from Power Without Glory, the novel by Frank Hardy, who partfinanced Three in One. Norman Rydge, then head of Greater Union, and the Minister for Trade are described as welcoming the film and praising the thriving Australian film industry. The terms used tend to be interchangeable with those actually employed by GUO’s David Williams and Arts Minister Barry Cohen in recent years as they launched some new Australian production. And, as

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a matter of fact, Pow er Without Glory did finally reach the screen, albeit as a TV series and not as a feature.

Everything, Holmes might reflect, comes to those who wait.

O ne M a n ’s Way darts spiritedly from descriptions of Holmes’s first awakening to the possibilities of film (a double bill of The Thirty-Nine Steps and N ight M ail , which any one of us might envy), through his war years in the Royal Navy, to postwar employment directing documen­ taries for the New Zealand National Film Unit — and his almost instant loss of the job because of com­ munist sympathies too pointedly expressed in some union corres­ pondence. Pursued by a growing radical reputation, Holmes departed for Australia.

His description of the local film scene in the fifties and sixties is priceless stuff: malicious about the exhibitors (who were in thrall to British and American studio owners) and contemptuous of the few government documentarists (who existed in perpetual fear of rockets from Canberra). Richard Mason, later head of production for the Commonwealth Film Unit (now Film Australia), vainly interceded on Holmes’s behalf with the CFU’s im­ placably conservative producer-in­ chief, Stanley Hawes. When Hawes refused him work, Holmes took a factory-floor job with Goodyear Rubber, writing for the ABC’s The P o e t’s Tongue on the side.

These were low years. Holmes was even briefly jailed by his first wife for non-payment of mainten­ ance, and bailed out by Mason, who

mortgaged his house to raise the surety. Not for the first time, he was to find help and solace in the free­ masonry of socialism.

Mason finally slipped Holmes into the CFU over the objections of Hawes and his deputy, Denys Brown, an ex-Rhodesian whom Holmes characterizes as “ the son of a rich tobacco farmer, an Oxford graduate, a one-time officer in the Royal Artillery and a pal of Ian Smith’s” .

O ne M a n ’s Way offers only minimal detail of Holmes’s two features, C a p ta in T h u n d e rb o lt (1951) and Three in O n e , and passes over in a few sentences his work on the script of Donald Crombie’s The Killing of A n gel Street (1981). His heart has always been in documentary — not so much in the making of them as in the research and the wandering which provide the material and fuel the resolve.

Attempts to film Joseph Conrad’s The Planter of M alata and the story of 'Chinese’ Morrison have taken him to the Solomons and China, both of which he describes with the vivid style of the good journalist. One even wonders whether the films themselves could have lived up to this evocation of their putative settings.

He's been happier producing documentaries on the Aboriginals of Arnhem Land, recording their rituals in a number of ethnographic films.

Holmes may pine for New York; but, he confesses, “ my country, I suppose, is the far tip of eastern Arnhem Land, Melville Bay, Yirrkala village. Thus, every few years, since

1960, for reasons mostly forgotten, I seem to return.” While old collabora­ tors like Ross Wood, Roger Mirams and Richard Mason have gone to earth as businessmen, Holmes has remained the wanderer, drawn, like Graham Greene, to dangerous and remote places. For the others, film was the point; for Holmes, it has always been a by-product.

Sadly, Penguin have done a dismal job of editing O ne M an 's Way. Readers will be introduced to "Gaby Hayes” and “ Fidel Castrol” , not to mention an almost unrecog­ nizable version of the last line of The G reat Gatsby. One M an 's Way also lacks an index, indispensable in such a fragmented book. Maybe the lot of the 'little bloke’ has been improved by hard-nosed cam­ paigners like Holmes; but the writer is as defenceless as ever.

John Baxter

Books received NB. Inclusion of a title in this list does not preclude a future review.

HEATH HARRIS’ MOVIE HORSES DOWN UNDER by Suzy Jarratt, a v a i l a b l e f r om Hor s e Talk Enterprises, P.O. Box 252, Turramurra, NSW 2074, 1985, ISBN 0 9589520 0 0, $24.95.

An almost unbelievably sumptuous, large-format paperback about just what the title says: the on-screen

work of Australia’s most colourful horse trainer. The colour illustrations are stunning, though the text is fairly anecdotal.

THE BRITISH BOARD OF FILM CENSORS: FILM CENSORSHIP IN BRITAIN, 1896-1950 by James C. Robertson, Croom Helm Australia Pty Ltd, 1985, ISBN 0-7099-2270-1, $42.50.

If the above-mentioned horse book is sumptuous, this one can only be described as drab: the text is in un­ justified typescript, and the illustra­ tions are captioned only as Plates 1-8. But the text is a different matter: it examines the BBFC’s ‘silent’ period, during which all decisions were taken behind decisively closed doors. For that, and for the methodical density of the argument, Robertson's book is essential reading for anyone interested in the wondrous ways of the world’s film censors.

RICHARD ATTENBOROUGH’S CHORUS LINE compiled by Diana Carter, The Bodley Head/The Aus­ tralasian Publishing Company, 1985, ISBN 0-370-30702-X, $9.95.

A glossy paperback picturebook, of the sort usually devoted to Great Wines of the World or The Dogs of Australia. Attenborough gives a brief intro, then each chorus member gets a couple of pages to talk about the part, after which Attenborough has more to say. The pictures are nice.

A boss offer to readers of Cinema Papers!!

Cinema Papers, in conjunction with Century-Hutchinson, is giving away five copies of Robert Hilburn’s magnificently illustrated biography of Bruce Springsteen.

Just answer these three rock movie questions: (1) Which American director is currently preparing a movie inspired by Springsteen’s ‘Born in the USA’, and what is the (current) title?

(2) Which American director is now making a film with a title taken from a Buddy Holly song, and what is the title?

(3) Which Australian rock star began shooting his first feature film in Melbourne in March, and what is the title?

Send your answer in an envelope marked Bom in the USA to: Cinema Papers, 644 Victoria Street, North Melbourne, Victoria 3051.

Closing date is 2 June. All entries received by that date will be put into a hat, and the first five correct entries drawn will get the free books.

Be sure to include your name and address!

The answers (and the winners) will be announced in the July issue.

94 — May CINEMA PAPERS

Soundtrack Albums N ew and unusual soundtrack recordings from our large range King Solom on’s Mines L egen d O utland Swann in Love Oberst Redl Benvenuto La Pirate (Sarde) Sunday in th e C ountry Star Trek Star Trek Obsession Under Fire B ro adw ay D anny Rose Zed a n d Two Noughts N ightm are on Elm Street Part li Y ear of th e D ragon Doctor No Live a n d Let Die Original London Oast Album Les M iserables

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Mail Order: P.O. Box 434, South Yarra, Vic. 3141.

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“ATRIUMPH... VIGOROUS, FUNNY AND STIRRING...

-D a v id Denby, NEW Y O R K M A G A ZIN E

“★ ★ ★ ★

A MASTERPIECE...

Sheer literate perfection. Exquisite’.’

—Richard Freedman, n e w h o u s e n e w s p a p e r s

“SIMPLY SMASHING”

c r . . m u CI.......

fcLfc.o/\IN 1LY rU JN iN Y ...

A Room With A View’ is like a holiday out of time.

Splendidly acted...quite an achievement’.’

-V in c e n t Canby, N Y. TIM E S

Kathleen Carroll. DAILY NKWS

“ONE OF THE FUNNIEST FILMS OF THE YEAR” Andrew Sarris. VILLAGE VOICE

“LUMINOUS” Jack Kroll, NEWSWEEK

“DELIGHTFUL” Richard Schickel. TIME MAGAZINE

“ELEGANTLY FUNNY” Vincent Canby. NEW YORK TIMES

“SHIMMERS LIKE A PRECIOUS GEM ” LOS ANGELES DAILY NEWS

‘GLORIOUS, FIRST CLASS” Sheila Benson, LOS ANGELES TIMES

A Room wt\) a View

MERCHANT IVORY PRODUCTIONS for GOLDCREST presents A ROOM WITH A VIEW based on the novel by E.M. Forster

Proudly released throughout Australia b y

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CINEMA

____________

BACK ISSUES Number 1 (January 1974): David William­ son, Ray Harryhausen, Peter Weir, Antony Ginnane, Gillian Armstrong, Ken G. Hall, The Cars That Ate Paris.

Number 2 (April 1974): Censorship, Frank Moorhouse, Nicolas Roeg, Sandy Harbutt, Film under Allende, Between the Wars, Alvin Purple.

Number 3 (July 1974): Richard Brennan, John Papadopolous, Willis O ’Brien, William Friedkin, The True Story of Eskimo Nell.

Number 10 (September-October 1976): Nagisa Oshima, Philippe Mora, Krzysztof Zanussi, Marco Ferreri, Marco Bellochio, gay cinema.

Number 11 (January 1977): Emile de Antonio, Jill Robb, Samuel Z. Arkoff, Roman Polanski, Saul Bass, The Picture Show Man. Number 12 (April 1977): Ken Loach, Tom Haydon, Donald Sutherland, Bert Deling, Piero Tosi, John Dankworth, John Scott, Days of Hope, The Getting of Wisdom.

Number 13 (July 1977): Louis Malle, Paul Cox, John Power, Jeannine Seawell, Peter Sykes, Bernardo Bertolucci, In Search of Anna.

Number 14 (October 1977): Phil Noyce, Matt Carroll, Eric Rohmer, Terry Jackman, John Huston, Luke's Kingdom, The Last Wave, Blue Fire Lady.

Number 15 (January 1978): Tom Cowan, Francois Truffaut, Joh n Faulkner, Stephen Wallace, the Taviani brothers, Sri Lankan cinema, The Irishman, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith.

Number 16 (April-June 1978): Gunnel Lindblom, John Duigan, Steven Spiel­ berg, Tom Jeffrey, The Africa Project, Swedish Cinema, Dawn!, Patrick.

Number 17 (August-September 1978): Bill Bain, Isabelle Huppert, Brian May, Polish cinema, Newsfront, The Night the Prowler.

Number 18 (October-November 1978): John Lamond, Sonia Borg, Alain Tanner, Indian cinema, Dimboola, Cathy's Child.

Number 19 (January-February 1979): Antony Ginnane, Stanley Hawes, Jeremy Thomas, Andrew Sarris, sponsored documentaries, Blue Fin. Number 20 (March-April 1979): Ken Cameron, Claude Lelouch, Jim Sharman, French cinema, My Brilliant Career. .Number 22 (July-August 1979): Bruce Petty, Luciana Arrighi, Albie Thoms, Stax, Alison’s Birthday.

Number 24 (December 1979-January 1980): Brian Trenchard-Sm ith, Ian Holmes, Arthur Hiller, Jerzy Toeplitz, Brazilian cinema, Harlequin.

Number 26 (April-May 1980): Charles H. Joffe, Jerome Heilman, Malcolm Smith, Australian nationalism, Japanese cinema, Peter Weir, Water Under the Bridge.

Number 27 (June-July 1980): Randal Kleiser, Peter Yeldham, Donald Richie, Richard Franklin’s obituary of Alfred Hitchcock, the New Zealand film industry, Grendel Grendel Grendel.

Number 28 (August-September 1980): Bob Godfrey, Diane Kurys, Tim Burns, John O ’Shea, Bruce Beresford, Bad Timing, Roadgames.

Number 29 (October-November 1980): Bob Ellis, Uri Windt, Edward Woodward, Lino Brocka, Stephen Wallace, Philippine cinema, Cruising, The Last Outlaw.

Number 36 (February 1982): Kevin Dobson, Brian Kearney, Sonia Hofmann,

Number 25 (February-March 1980): David Puttnam, Janet Strickland, Everett de Roche, Peter Faiman, Chain Reaction, Stir.

Michael Rubbo, Blow Out, Breaker Morant, Body Heat, The Man from Snowy River.

Number 37 (April 1982): Stephen MacLean, Jacki Weaver, Carlos Saura, Peter Ustinov, women in drama, Monkey Grip.

Number 38 (June 1982): Geoff Burrowes, George Miller, James Ivory, Phil Noyce, Joan Fontaine, Tony Williams, law and insurance, Far East.

Number 39 (August 1982): Helen Morse, Richard Millikan,

Mason, Anja Breien, David Derek Granger, Norwegian

cinema, National Film Archive, We of the Never Never.

Number 40 (October 1982): Henri Safran, Michael Ritchie, Pauline Kael, Wendy Hughes, Ray Barrett, My Dinner with Andre, The Return of Captain Invincible.

Number 41 (December 1982): Igor Auzins, Paul Schrader, Peter Tammer, Liliana Cavani, Colin Higgins, The Year of Living Dangerously.

Number 42 (March 1983): Mel Gibson, John Waters, Ian Pringle, Agnès Varda, copyright, Strikebound, The Man from Snowy River.

Number 43 (May-June 1983): Sydney Pollack, Denny Lawrence, Graeme Clifford, The Dismissal, Careful He Might Hear You.

Number 44-45 (April 1984): David Stevens, Simon Wincer, Susan Lambert, Street Kids, a personal history of Cinema Papers.

Number 46 (July

1984): Paul Cox, Russell Mulcahy, Alan J. Pakula, Robert Duvall, Jeremy Irons, Eureka Stockade, Waterfront, The Boy in the Bush, The Woman Suffers, Street Hero.

Number 47 (August 1984): Richard Lowenstein, Wim Wenders, David Brad­ bury, Sophia Turkiewicz, Hugh Hudson, Robbery Under Arms.

Number 48 (October-November 1984): Ken Cameron, Michael Pattinson, Jan Sardi, Yoram Gross, Bodyline, The Slim Dusty Movie.

Number 49 (December 1984): Alain Resnais, Brian McKenzie, Angela Punch M cGregor, Ennio M orricone, Jane Campion, horror films, Niel Lynne.

Number 50 (February-March 1985): Stephen Wallace, Ian Pringle, Walerian Borowczyk, Peter Schreck, Bill Conti, Brian May, The Last Bastion, Bliss.

Number 51 (May 1985): Lino Brocka, Harrison Ford, Noni Hazlehurst, Dusan Makavejev, Emoh Ruo, Winners, The Naked Country, Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, Robbery Under Arms.

Number 52 (July 1985): John Schlesinger, Gillian Armstrong, Alan Parker, soap operas, TV news, film advertising, Don't Call Me Girlie, For Love Alone, Double Sculls.

Number 53 (September 1985): Bryan Brown, Nicolas Roeg, Vincent Ward, Hector Crawford, Emir Kusturica, New Zealand film and television, Return to Eden.

Number 54 (November 1985): Graeme Clifford, Bob Weis, John Boorman, Menahem Golan, Wills and Burke, The Great Bookie Robbery, The Lancaster Miller Affair, rock videos.

Number 55 (January 1986): James Stewart, Debbie Byrne, Brian Thompson, Paul Verhoeven, Derek Meddings, The Riqht-Hand Man, Birdsville, tie-in market­ ing.

Number 56 (March 1986): Fred Schepisi, Dennis O'Rourke, Brian Trenchard-Smith, J o h n H a rg re a v e s , stun ts, sm oke machines, Dead-End Drive-In, The More Things Change, Kangaroo, Tracy.

□ The Australian Motion Picture Yearbook 1980 $15 (Overseas: $30 surface, $40 air mail).

Other Publications

□ The Australian Motion Picture Yearbook 1981/82. $15 (Overseas: $30 surface, $40 air mail).

□ The Australian Motion Picture Yearbook 1983. $25 (Overseas: $35 surface, $45 air mail).

□ The New Australian Cinema edited by Scott Murray. $14.95 (Overseas: $20 surface, $26 air mail).

□ The 1986 Cinema Papers Aus­ tralasian Production Yearbook.

With nearly 6,000 listings, full credits and every fact checked and doublechecked, the Production Year­ book is the one directory no film or television maker can afford to be without. $25 (Overseas: $35 surface, $45 air mail).

96 — May CINEMA PAPERS

□ The Documentary Film in Australia edited by Ross Lansell and Peter Beilby. $12.95 (Overseas: $18 surface, $24 air mail). □ Australian Movies to the World: The International Success of Australian Films since 1970 by David White. $12.95 (Overseas: $18 surface, $24 air mail).

□ Word and Images by Brian McFarlane. $12.95 (Overseas: $18 surface, $24 air mail).

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