The A to Z of Australian and New Zealand Cinema

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HALL, KEN G. (1901–1994). Hall was Australian cinema’s most commercially successful filmmaker before the revival. Born in Sydney in 1901, he worked briefly in journalism and as a theater manager before becoming national publicity director for Union Theatres and Australasian Films (see GREATER UNION ORGANISATION). From 1924 to 1929, Hall was publicity director for the Australian branch of First National Pictures. In this role, he traveled to Hollywood in 1925 to acquire a fuller understanding of production and marketing. The former was to prove especially useful to his subsequent career. In 1928, for example, he directed new sequences of Australians for First National’s The Exploits of the Emden (1928). Its commercial success impressed Union Theatres’ managing director Stuart Doyle. Hall rejoined the company as Doyle’s personal assistant. When, in 1931, Doyle reorganized the company’s production arm as Cinesound, he put Hall in charge. Hall’s bent as showman now came to the fore as he both managed the company and also produced a string of features over the next decade. Under his stewardship, Cinesound failed only once—with Strike Me Lucky (1934)—to make a profit on the 16 feature films that he was to direct. His first film was On Our Selection (1932) and its success saw Hall continue making one or two features each year to be screened in Greater Union cinemas across the country. Thereupon followed The Squatter’s Daughter (1933), The Silence of Dean Maitland (1934), Strike Me Lucky, Grandad Rudd (1935), Orphan of the Wilderness (1936), Thoroughbred (1936), Lovers and Luggage (1937), Tall Timbers (1937), It Isn’t Done (1937), Let George Do It (1938), The Broken Melody (1938), Dad and Dave Come to Town (1938), Gone to the Dogs (1939), Mr. Chedworth Steps Out (1939), Come up Smiling (1939), and Dad Rudd, M.P. (1940). Hall produced all of these and with the exception of Come Up Smiling also directed them. His style was unremarkable and unobtrusive, very much in the Hollywood classical tradition. Many of his most popular films were comedies but he also succeeded in other genres including melodrama, action/adventure, and even one musical. In 1942, the Cinesound Review newsreel special Kokoda Front Line, edited under his supervision, won an Academy Award.

Hall’s biography of pioneering aviator Charles Kingsford Smith—Smithy (1946)—was a box-office success, and was modeled on the Hollywood biopic. The fact that it was his final feature would be an increasingly sore point, since he had expected Greater Union to resume regular feature production after the war. But he spent another decade making documentaries and steering the fortunes of Cinesound Review, the company he had started in 1931. In 1956, he quit Cinesound to join the first commercial television station in the country, TCN9 Sydney. Here, as general manager, he ran a smooth operation that combined business and entertainment to the satisfaction of the station’s owner, Frank Packer. Although there was little commissioning and even less screening of independent films, nevertheless in this period, he was able to encourage some independent directors (commissioning the Project series of documentaries, buying and screening films of Cecil Holmes and Bruce Beresford). Indeed after his retirement in 1966, Hall became very much the “Grand Old Man” of Australian film. At first a fierce critic of government film-funding, he later modified this stance and saw such funding as encouraging writers and producers. Championing the work of directors such as Dr. George Miller and Peter Weir, he advised Phillip Noyce on the making of Newsfront (1978). Later, Noyce had him direct a sequence in the television miniseries Cowra Breakout (1984). This proved to be his last venture behind the camera, as the veteran died in 1994.

HARBUTT, SANDY (1941– ). In the annals of the Australian film industry, Sandy Harbutt is unique. He is the only person to have made a very popular, commercially successful film with the backing of the state-funded bureaucracy at the time—the Australian Film Development Corporation, then the Australian Film Commission (AFC)—and then not to have been offered work again in the industry. He was certainly and inexplicably ignored by the industry, even though he had appeared in television and film before Stone (1974).

Harbutt cowrote, directed, produced, and played a lead role in the first Australian biker film Stone. Before this he worked in the Ensemble Theatre in Sydney as a gifted stage actor, and had roles in the television series You Can’t See Round Corners (1967), The Long Arm (1970), and in two little-known films Color Me Dead (1969) and Squeeze a Flower (1970). Stone was his first film, and although it has weaknesses, it has stood the test of time, and remains popular. His cooperative style of working was both a feature of the film’s making, and its culture. In the face of disdain from the AFC, Harbutt was dedicated to making a success of the film, re-editing it significantly and marketing it independently in Cannes in competition with the AFC screenings.

He appeared in the documentary Stone Forever (1999), about the Stone Memorial Run and the saga of the original film.

HAWES, STANLEY (1905–1991). Born in England, Stanley Hawes joined John Grierson in documentary filmmaking in the 1930s and 1940s. After a stint with the National Film Board of Canada, he had come to Australia in 1947 as producer-in-chief at what was to become Film Australia, guiding this body until his retirement in 1970.

HEXAGON PRODUCTIONS. This company represented a concerted attempt by Melbourne-based distributor Roadshow to be a significant player in the production arena in the newly revived Australian cinema of the 1970s (see REVIVAL). Bringing together the considerable business and artistic abilities of former Melbourne cineastes, Alan Finney and Tim Burstall, Hexagon made a considerable profit on its early films only to see these dry up in the second half of the 1970s. Linked to such artistic developments as the Melbourne University’s interest in auteur cinema and to the theatrical scene at the Pram Factory, Finney and Burstall were in agreement in seeking to marry commercial success with popular genres. Burstall achieved such success with Stork, a broad comedy based on a play, which was released through Village Roadshow in 1972. Thereupon, Roadshow proceeded to invest heavily in the newly created Hexagon.

The company embarked on a full slate of films with a broad appeal for audiences. First cab off the rank was Alvin Purple (1973), a sex comedy, which proved immensely successful at the box office even if most critics felt it unworthy of subsidy from the public purse. Many of the production personnel—several of them recruited from Crawford television productions including Homicide—who worked on this and Stork were to appear on many of Hexagon’s other films over the next six years. This roll call includes editors Edward McQueen-Mason and David Bilcock, photographer Robin Copping, art director Les Binns, and sound recordist Peter Fenton. The sequel, Alvin Rides Again (1974), was directed by Copping and Bilcock although it proved not nearly as popular as its predecessor. Meanwhile, Burstall was particularly involved with Hexagon’s output directing five more films. He also acted as producer on several others including Alvin Rides Again, The Love Epidemic (1975), and High Rolling (1977), the last two directed by Brian Trenchard Smith and Igor Auzins, respectively. Finney, too, was immensely busy with his name appearing on all films either as associate or executive producer. By this time, Hexagon was well into its stride. The Burstall-directed Petersen (1974) was an interesting attempt to engage with more serious adult subject along the lines of his earlier 2000 Weeks (1969). However, in 1975–1976, it embarked on its most ambitiously budgeted film, Eliza Fraser. A kind of female version of Tom Jones, this comic historical piece, directed by Burstall, used expensive imports Trevor Howard and Susannah York. It also featured well-known Melbourne television and theater personality Noel Ferrier as the heroine’s cuckolded and unfortunate husband. However, the film was less comic than expected and failed to deliver the strong box office result expected.

Although the company fulfilled its slate over the next several years, the writing was on the wall. Hexagon’s last release was The Last of the Knucklemen (1979), a tough male-centered film set in a remote mining camp in the desert. Although it received good critical notices, the film was only mildly successful with the public. As a result, Hexagon wound down and Finney and Burstall went their separate ways. As a result, Hexagon soon became inactive.

HICKS, SCOTT (1953– ). Hicks is living proof of the nursery role that an Australian state film corporation could provide in the past. Born in Uganda in 1953, Hicks undertook a degree in drama and cinema at Flinders University in Adelaide. While a student, he first appeared on screen in David Stocker’s Ten Minutes (1973) before working as director with writer Kim McKenzie on The Wanderer (1974) and Down The Wind (1975). From there, he began to gain regular work at the South Australian Film Corporation (SAFC). Apprentice films made there in the very late 1970s and early 1980s include You Can’t Always Tell (1979), Bert Flugelman: Public Sculpture (1979), The First Ninety Days (1980), Women Artists of Australia (1980), Attitudinal Behaviour (1980), The Hall of Mirrors (1982), and One Last Chance (1983). Meanwhile, Hicks was also finding work on feature films in an assistant capacity including Storm Boy (1977), The Last Wave (1977), The Irishman (1978), Harvest of Hate (1978), The Money Movers (1979), Dawn! (1979), Final Cut (1980), and The Club (1980).

Finally, in 1982, he got his first chance to direct a feature, the SAFC’s Freedom. The latter was a road movie, which, although it began well, soon fell away. It excited neither critics nor public and Hicks’ talents still went unrecognized. For over a dozen years, his career limped along with his name attaching to such works as different as Call Me Mr. Brown (1986), Sebastian and the Sparrow (1989), and a television film The Space Shuttle (1994). Finally, his luck broke with the astonishing national and international success, both commercially and critically, of the feature Shine in 1996. Hicks was nominated for various awards—including two Oscars, two British Academy for the Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) awards, and a Golden Globe—and won the best director award from the Australian Film Institute in 1996. The film paved his way to Hollywood where he has worked ever since, as writer and director of Snow Falling on Cedars (1999) and as director of Hearts in Atlantis (2001).

HISTORY. Various elements contend for the central spotlight under this heading. However, the most significant is that to do with the history of Australian film production considered both in terms of the key structures and developments, and in terms of just how that history itself has been written. In other words, what has been looked at and who has done the looking. Broadly speaking, Australian film history consists of two entirely different trajectories. These two cinemas are in effect completely different having only two things in common. The first of these is the name “Australian film.” The second is a recurring cyclical pattern in the events of its narrative, familiarly known as “boom and bust.” Otherwise, this cinema falls into two major epochs: an earlier commercial feature film production sector and a later, state-supported commercial industry.

The early period runs from before the turn of the century down to the 1950s and early 1960s and follows the general trajectory of “boom and bust.” The story is a familiar one in world cinema and is that of a local production sector that at first dominates its local market but is increasingly displaced by the advent of imported films from the United States. Comparative research on the advance of the latter has shown that even before World War I, US interests had come to dominate local film distribution and exhibition. Australia was one of the first overseas countries to capitulate to US film interests, but that is a story that would be repeated globally. The increasing effect of this dominance was that Australian film directors and producers found it increasingly more difficult to obtain distribution that, in turn, directly affected their ability to produce films. This situation grew worse by the 1920s when the federal government set up a Royal Commission (in 1927) to examine the industry and to look at what measures it might enact to assist the industry. However, by then the situation was largely irretrievable especially given the fact that the film sector was a commercial industry where distribution/exhibition and production interests did not see eye to eye about either problems or solutions. Although two state governments did enact some measures of protection, these were ineffective so that the decline in feature production continued. Although some new parties entered the field of filmmaking in the 1950s, the production sector had expired almost completely by around 1960.

This and the interregnum that followed set the scene for the revival. Claiming itself to be a continuation of an already existing film industry, a new infrastructure came into being as an effect of the federal government subsidization of feature production beginning around 1970. The new industry was to be a hybrid. Unlike its predecessor it was to be oriented to both commerce and culture, encouraging the making of films that would make money and develop and record a national identity. Effectively, this is the film industry that is still in place at the beginning of the new millennium. Unlike its predecessor it has not followed an overall pattern of “bust.” This is not to say, however, that this trend is not found at a more micro level. For, indeed, it is. Despite the hopes that the cinema of the revival would become financially independent, it has not reached this goal and shows no signs of doing so. Thus, although many films funded through state support have been very successful at the box office, overall Australian feature films of the revival period, the period stretching from 1970 to the present, have lost millions of taxpayers’ dollars. That is, obviously, not the end of the story however, and any financial audit must be balanced by a far more positive account of particular films and film careers. Obviously, these triumphs must be followed up elsewhere.

However, if one steps back from these details of loss and profit to a brief consideration about how these historical facts have been treated by Australian film historians, then, it is clear that some obvious strategies and explanatory schema have been employed to make further sense of the pattern. Overall, the basic model employed by Australian film historians is chronological. The premodern epoch before the revival, usually labeled as the early period, is frequently periodized both around decades and major historical events. Hence, for example, World War I, the 1920s, the coming of sound, the Great Depression, and so on. In turn, stitched into this are individual stories of particular companies and isolated producers and directors working within an ever constricting industry: Eftee Productions, Raymond Longford, Cinesound, Ken Hall, Charles Chauvel, and so on. Meanwhile, in case the ledger seems perilously thin, Australian film is defined expansively so that it includes any feature film made inside the country. In other words, the productions of overseas British and American companies can, and are, included in the archive.

Dealing with the revival period, historians have adopted a different explanatory method. Here, feature films have been periodized in terms of a linked bipart schema: the particular government agency or subsidy arrangement in place at the time of a particular group of films’ production and some of the dominant formal and stylistic features apparent in the films themselves. Accordingly, for example, some critics have delineated one cycle in the revival as the “AFC (Australian Film Commission) film,” in place between 1976 and 1983. Meanwhile, a second strategy that was briefly begun but seems to have fallen into abeyance is one oriented around the identification of Australian directorial auteurs. Peter Weir and Bruce Beresford have been singled out for this kind of attention. However, with the increasing critical bypassing of this approach in film studies generally, other would-be filmmaking Australian geniuses have gone unrecognized. Both these approaches seem increasingly unsustainable in terms of an ever-expanding feature film production output that is increasingly both sui generis and a part of international cinema. In other words, the near future will see new patterns become apparent in Australian film history and this, in turn, will hasten a revised understanding of the history of this trajectory. See also GLOBALIZATION.

HOGAN, PAUL (1939– ). Paul Hogan was born in a small, opal-mining town in the northwest of New South Wales, called Lightning Ridge, on 8 October 1939. His life was decidedly uneventful in terms of his later career. He was a scaffolder on the Sydney Harbour Bridge when he appeared on television at the age of 31, appearing on a talent quest show, “New Faces,” with an act that brutally satirized that show. Yet it created the character most associated with Hogan: popular, working-class, laconic, unassuming, and unpretentious. He appeared on various other shows, most notably as a regular comic commentator on the nightly news magazine show, “A Current Affair.” John Cornell, Hogan’s partner in business, production, and scriptwriting (and comic foil as “Strop” in “The Paul Hogan Show”) was the producer for “A Current Affair.” In 1977, the Paul Hogan Show cemented his Australian character, which in turn became one of the most successful marketing icons for the cigarette brand Winfield, Fosters beer, and US tourism to Australia. This marketing success proved to Hogan and Cornell that a film like Crocodile Dundee (1986) would be a success, which it was, of course. It remains the most successful Australian film ever made. Ignored by the local intelligentsia and industry film groups (Dundee was not even nominated for any awards by the Australian Film Institute, although international awards were more forthcoming), the character of Crocodile Dundee became a legend, used by the Australian prime minister and others. Crocodile Dundee changed other elements of Hogan’s life as well. He married Linda Kozlowski, his costar, after divorcing his wife of 30 years, Noelene.

For Hogan though, that level of success did not continue. Crocodile Dundee II (1988) was an interesting and quite successful sequel to the original, but Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles (2001) was a failed attempt to resurrect a lifeless manikin. The character of Dundee had palled. Hogan’s other films, Almost an Angel (1990) and Lightning Jack (1994) portrayed Hogan as a different character, but it was not one that audiences were attracted to. However, it is worth noting, as Hogan himself once said, that the unsuccessful Jack has made more money at the US box office than Muriel’s Wedding (1994), which Australian critics rate much more highly. Financial success, then, is a relative criterion in the world of the box office. Without a doubt, Paul Hogan changed the perception of Australia and Australians in the United States, and foregrounded the positive elements of the Australian character(s).

Other films include Fatty Finn (1980), Flipper (1996), and Floating Away (1998).

HOGAN, P.J. (1962– ). Very much a product of the latest wave of Australian feature films, P.J. Hogan first developed his talent as a writer and started directing in the late 1980s. Among his first films were The Humpty Dumpty Man (1986) as writer/director and Vicious (1987), which he wrote. However, these were less than successful and his career marked time. Married to Jocelyn Moorhouse, he worked as second unit director on her debut feature, Proof (1991). Finally, Hogan struck gold with Muriel’s Wedding (1994). Not only did he direct but he also wrote the screenplay, basing it on a short story that he had written earlier. The film’s success at the box office and also with critics propelled him to Hollywood where his first film was My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997). Both these latter films demonstrate that Hogan has a particular flair for black comedy and knows how to pace a narrative to keep his action humorous and thus please his audience. Further work in Hollywood included Unconditional Love (2002) and Peter Pan (2003), both of which he wrote and directed.

HOLLYWOOD. Hollywood forms one of the permanent corners of Australian cinema, just as Australia constitutes one of the peripheral hubs of the movie colony and the movie industry. In other words, the intersection of these two entities is a complex, shifting site with various different fault lines. This overlap can be considered both in the past before the Australian revival and in the more recent present of New Hollywood.

First is the physical fact of film, the material presence of Hollywood in Australia, which is an element of distribution rather than of production. Australia has the dubious honor of being one of the first countries to fall under the control of US film distributors, a situation that developed as early as 1911. So, one of the first elements of the Hollywood influence has to do with the reconfiguration of film exhibition in early Australian theaters, a new system whose thoroughness ran from matters of management down to the provision and marketing of such foodstuffs as ice cream and popcorn in the theater foyer. Early film exhibitor and distributor Millard Johnson began his career in the fledgling Australian exhibition and production industry, then in 1913 went to work for Adolph Zukor of Famous Players, becoming one of the very many show business figures that constitute the burgeoning film trade in the United States. In turn, Johnson was succeeded by many others who made the journey to the new production and business mecca in Los Angeles; some settled there but others learned their craft and returned to Australia to apply Hollywood lessons. One such representative figure was Ken Hall who began his Australian film career in exhibition and marketing but learned the craft of filmmaking and advertising in Hollywood, then returned to Australia. Again, Hall is not alone in this regard and Australian film scholarship requires well-researched career biographies of the Australian heads of the various distribution arms of the Hollywood majors—such as Herb McIntyre—who acted as important gatekeepers in the economic and cultural traffic between the two places.

One other element of this pattern also deserves mention. This has to do with a surprisingly large number of Australians who made their way to the world’s film capital in other capacities. Some such as the woman who married Stan Laurel of Laurel and Hardy fame never appeared before the camera. But others including Errol Flynn, Cecil Holloway, Louise Lovely, Michael Pate, Ann Richards, Rod Taylor, and Frank Thring Sr. are only the tip of an iceberg. These are matters of history and their individual impact and contribution has been documented.

Other aspects of the connection still await more thorough analysis. One of these is the social place of going to the “pictures” in a country like Australia in the sound era from the early 1930s to the coming of television. Almost invariably what was on screen came from Hollywood. What was the social place of cinema-going? Who went, when, and why? How were these films watched and absorbed by the population? What was the more general impact of Hollywood on the Australian population and upon the Australian imagination? These are significant and inviting questions whose answers will shed as much light on Australian society and character as they will on Hollywood.

Of course, not all films made in Hollywood had to do with the United States. Indeed, on some rare occasions, Hollywood could offer to the world, including Australia, representations of the Australian experience. How otherwise to understand a film such as The Kangaroo Kid (1950), a B Hollywood film that recast its Western hero, Jock Mahoney, in an Australian setting? The Twentieth Century Fox feature of the D.H. Lawrence novel Kangaroo (1952) should be regarded as a similar kind of enterprise, a recasting of the action/adventure genre in an Australian setting. At least this film was actually filmed on location in South Australia, which was not the case with such costume melodramas as Botany Bay (1953) and Alfred Hitchcock’s Under Capricorn (1949). However, by the 1960s, Hollywood, for its own internal reasons, was much more inclined toward “runaway” productions such that features like On the Beach (1959), Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (1959), and The Sundowners (1960) were all filmed and produced in Australia.

The more recent period of New Hollywood and the Australian revival has seen a reconfiguration of the pieces on the board. Hollywood continues to be a dominant, overweening presence at the Australian film and video box office. However, Hollywood is itself transformed in such a way as to call into question any easy cultural and economic assumptions about a “them” and “us.” Two Australian film trilogies are especially important in this transition, the Mad Max and Crocodile Dundee trilogies. With the exception of the last in the second series, all these films (distributed by Warner Brothers) were immensely popular at the international box office. Both cycles also recovered two of Hollywood’s most cherished and venerable genres, the action melodrama and the comedy, although an equally strong argument can be mounted that these are international genres rather than ones unique to Hollywood. In any case, these and other films from Australia helped give Australians useful “calling cards” when it came to relocating their work to Los Angeles. Some of the more famous actors who have permanently crossed the Pacific include Mel Gibson, Guy Pearce, Russell Crowe, Nicole Kidman, Cate Blanchett, and Naomi Watts. These are complemented by such directors as Peter Weir, Fred Schepsi, Gillian Armstrong, and Phillip Noyce and cameramen such as Dean Semler and Russell Boyd. This confluence creates real problems not only for film researchers but also for funding bodies and agencies when it comes to deciding whether such films as Green Card (1990) and Evil Angels (also A Cry in the Dark) (1988) are American, Australian, or both. However, this blurring is symptomatic of a more general convergence across cultural industries, including that of cinema, in the era of globalization. By way of example is the case of the Australian-born Rupert Murdoch who became an American citizen to pursue his international media interests, acquiring the Twentieth Century Fox Studios, branching into a new Fox television network, and opening Fox Studios including one in Sydney, Australia.

All of which goes to show that Hollywood is not somewhere else but has rather been at the heart of the Australian experience and imagination for the best part of the last century.

HOLMES, CECIL (1921–1994). Born in New Zealand in 1921, Holmes managed to get a job at the newly established New Zealand Film Unit in 1945. Initially, he worked as an editor on newsreels and soon began directing. One of his more worthy projects at this stage was The Coaster (1947). However, as a left-wing activist, he soon fell under the baleful eye of authority and was sacked. Holmes fought back and a strike at the Unit led to his being awarded a year’s back pay. But the writing was on the wall and he moved to Australia in 1948. However, his reputation preceded him and he found it difficult to get work apart from that on the documentary The Food Machine released by the Shell Film Unit in 1952. Astonishingly, Holmes next project was the feature film Captain Thunderbolt released in 1953. Starring Grant Taylor and Charles Tingwell, this uneven film featured political drama, action/adventure, and social realism. His next feature film project came about through an association with socialist writer Frank Hardy. The two collaborated on a short film based on the latter’s “The Load of Wood.” Faced with the difficulties of gaining a theatrical release, they decided to make this the basis of a trilogy that was released in 1957 under the title Three in One.

The 1950s were especially difficult for a man of the left and most of Holmes’ energy went into simply surviving (see HISTORY). The next decade was to see a marked improvement in his fortunes so far as work continuity was concerned. From 1960, he was involved in over 20 different film projects. By then, ABC Television had instigated a film pool and Holmes’ work there included I the Aboriginal (1960) and An Airman Remembers (1963). At the Commonwealth Film Unit, he made The Islanders (1968) and Gentle Strangers (1973). For the Institute of Aboriginal Studies he directed Return to the Dreaming (1971). He even directed and produced films for the Methodist Overseas Missions including Lotu (1962) and Faces in the Sun (1965). However, the revival had little space for the stormy petrel of Australian cinema and his last years were spent working on various projects that did not come to fruition. Holmes died in Brisbane in 1994.

HORLER, SACHA (1971– ). The daughter of the founders of Sydney’s legendary—but now extinct—Nimrod Theatre, Sacha Horler studied at a Sydney clown school as a teenager and then the National Institute of Dramatic Art. Her first film appearance was in Billy’s Holiday (1995), followed by a role as the teacher in Blackrock (1997), a story about the code of silence in the surfing culture following the rape and murder of a young schoolgirl. She played the lead role of the sex-, weight-, and drug-obsessed Cynthia in the slice-of-life, left-leaning drama Praise (1998), before a small part as the voice of the night nurse in Babe: Pig in the City (1998), and then as Nadia, one of the three sisters returned home to nurse their dying mother, in Soft Fruit (1999). The role of Margaret, an upper-middle class mother of two, who enjoys commanding others, in Mark Lamprell’s My Mother Frank (2000), followed. As the girlfriend Bonita of the lead character Coco in Walk the Talk (2000), she once again showed her ability in the face of a tired script. In the romantic comedy Russian Doll (2001), she played Liza, then moved to the small screen for roles in the miniseries “Changi” (2001) and other television films. In 2003, she starred as Bronwyn White in Kathryn Millard’s Travelling Light (2003), a one-eyed tale of the alleged conservatism of the city of Adelaide in the 1970s. Horler is the wife of a man who does not allow her to go to work, preferring that she stay at home, even though she is a qualified teacher.

HOYTS CINEMAS. Hoyts Cinemas is one arm of the Hoyts Corporation, and is one of three film exhibition and distribution companies in Australia. The company is one of the oldest film-related companies in the world, beginning in 1909 when Melbourne dentist Dr. Arthur Russell leased a hall in Bourke Street, Melbourne, and started showing short films on Saturday nights. Emboldened by the success of this exhibition, Russell formed Hoyts Pictures, which had expanded into Melbourne and its suburbs and Sydney by the time of Russell’s death in 1915. In 1926, Hoyts Pictures, Electric Theaters, and Associated Theaters (owned by George Tallis and Frank Thring Sr.) merged to become Hoyts Theatres, and by 1932, in an early example of the global nature of the industry, the US-owned Fox Film Corporation had bought a major shareholding in the company. This expanded capital base funded further expansion, including the building of Regent theaters in the cities, and smaller copies of these comfortable theaters in regional towns and cities.

The 1930s Depression saw a forced merger between Hoyts and their only national competitor, Greater Union Theatres, but this merger was never complete and the two firms parted company again in 1937, and remained the two major players in film exhibition until joined by the third player, the Village Theatre chain, in the 1950s. Hoyts were responsible for the first drive-in theater chain in that decade, and while “ozoners” or drive-ins were one element in the face-off with television, technical innovations were another. Cinerama and Todd-AO delineated the difference between cinema and television. However, as the baby boomers of the postwar generation had children, their interest in ozoners declined, and these closed throughout the 1960s, as much a victim of technology as of maturing generations. The ozoners could not compete with the new sound and other technologies being installed in cinemas, nor with the multiplexes pioneered by Hoyts in 1976 in Sydney, that were themselves the product of new film-projecting technologies. These technologies allowed one or two operators to control the operation of a bank of projectors, from one projection room.

Hoyts entered production in 1978, partly as a result of the 1973 Tariff Board report that resulted in the film revival in Australia. In 1978, the corporation backed the making of The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith, and continued supporting filmmaking as Hoyts Productions in 1987. This venture was not as successful as executives and owners may have wished. In a kind of reverse process to the vertical integration prohibited by the 1947 Paramount Decree in the United States, Hoyts entered the distribution sector in 1979, releasing, as Hoyts Distribution, the two box-office hits, The Man from Snowy River (1982) and Crocodile Dundee (1986).

After five decades of ownership by Twentieth Century Fox, control returned to Australia when four Melbourne businessmen bought out Fox in 1982. One of the four, Leon Fink, bought out the other partners in 1985, merging his own substantial entertainment interests with Hoyts to form Hoyts Corporation, of which Hoyts Cinemas was but one component. As well as distribution, exhibition, and production interests, the corporation had interests in television and cinema advertising though the Val Morgan company. The new ownership encouraged new creative talent to manifest within the organization: one manifestation was the public listing of two of the companies in the corporation, Hoyts Media and Hoyts Entertainment, on the Australian Stock Exchange in 1987.

Another manifestation was the internationalization of the organization, not through ownership of the company by overseas interests, but by the building and purchasing of cinemas in New Zealand, the United States, and South America. Many of these were multiplexes, built in cooperation with the exhibition subsidiary of Paramount and Universal, Cinema International Corporation. Within Australia, new multiplexes were built in major shopping centers, and new screens were added to older multiplexes in an expansion that accurately predicted the rise in attendances, and turned these shopping complexes into small “inner-cities,” with bustling, after-hours activity of wining and dining. During this time, shares in the company were sold to interests outside the Fink family with the purpose of raising capital for this expansion. As a result of this expansion and building program, by 1994, Hoyts had become the 10th biggest cinema company in the world, and was once again a globalized company: an American investment company, Hellman and Friedman, held 47 percent of the shares; the directors and senior management held 21 percent; and the Australian company Lend Lease Corporation held 10 percent.

Following other companies in the corporation, Hoyts Cinemas was floated in 1996, but this public ownership did not last long. The Packer family, through their company Consolidated Press Holdings, purchased the last parcel of shares from Hellman and Friedman in 1999, and is now the private owner of Hoyts Cinemas. Consolidated Press Holdings is second only to the Murdoch group in ownership of media interests in Australia. At that time, Hoyts Cinemas was still in the top ten in the world exhibition market, with 1,500 screens in Australia, the United States, Mexico, Europe, and New Zealand. Hoyts withdrew from the European market, selling cinemas in Poland in 1999 and the United Kingdom in 2000. In 2003, Consolidated Press Holdings sold a 60 percent interest in the US operation of Hoyts (554 screens) to Regal Entertainment Group, the largest US cinema chain, although the deal included C.P.H. obtaining an interest in Regal. See also REVIVAL.

HUNTER, BILL (1940– ). Bill Hunter’s film career started at the beginning of the revival, and has continued to develop and grow through the various changes in genres and—consequentially—roles that have occurred in that time. He has appeared in many more films than many stars of the Australian cinema, often just one step away from the leading role, but always offering suitable and compelling foils for the leading characters to play off, and through which their own characters become more clearly defined. He has had roles in some 70 features and television films and series. He first appeared as a police officer in Ned Kelly (1970), and as the barman in Stone (1974). Since then, there have been only a few years where he has not acted in at least one film. He was nominated for a 1977 Australian Film Institute (AFI) award for best supporting actor for the role of Sergeant Smith in Mad Dog Morgan (1976).

A significant role occurred with Phillip Noyce’s statement about the culpability of non-Aboriginal Australians in the poverty and destitution of Aboriginal “fringe dwellers,” Backroads (1977). Hunter played the lead of Jack, the drifter who teams up with a militant Aborigine, Gary, and tears around western New South Wales in a stolen car. Hunter’s fine performance established him as an actor with finesse in the portrayal of difficult characters. He teamed up with Noyce again in Newsfront (1978), where he played Cinetone cameraman Len Maguire, fighting to keep both his company afloat against competition from the television industry, and his life in some kind of order in the wake of failed relationships. The role met with critical acclaim, and Hunter won another AFI award for best actor in a lead role. Further critical plaudits greeted his portrayal of Major Barton in Peter Weir’s Gallipoli (1981), with the AFI awarding him the prize for best actor in a supporting role. In the final scene, knowing that his men would be decimated, he followed orders and led them into the Turkish machine guns, in what would prove to be the model for trench warfare for the next four years of World War I. Hunter worked with Noyce and Judy Davis again in Heatwave (1982), and played Walker in John Duigan’s Casablanca-inspired Far East in the same year, with Bryan Brown and Helen Morse.

For the 10 years that followed, Hunter’s career seemed to be on hold, in film at least. He made many films, but with few memorable performances. His television roles continued apace, both in films and series. This changed in 1992, when he played the farcical Australian Dance Federation President Barry Fife, intent on maintaining his petty autocracy, in Baz Lurhmann’s romantic comedy Strictly Ballroom. This was followed immediately by another strong performance as Beth’s father in Gillian Armstrong’s The Last Days of Chez Nous (1982), winning Hunter another nomination for an AFI best supporting actor award. He then played the sensitive outback man Bob, who accompanies the drag queens and transexual after repairing their bus, in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994). As Bill Heslop, the father of Muriel in P.J. Hogan’s Muriel’s Wedding (1994), he was at once the small-town greedy businessman and failed politician, as well as Muriel’s father. He led the band of old lawn bowls players in the battle against the “pokies” in the comedy Crackerjack (2002), which was Paul Moloney’s second directing stint in feature films—the first was in 1985—after a 25-year career directing for television.

Other films include 27A (1974), The Man from Hong Kong (1975), Eliza Fraser (1976), Weekend of Shadows (1978), In Search of Anna (1978), . . . Maybe This Time (1980), Hard Knocks (1980), Dead Man’s Float (1980), The Return of Captain Invincible (1983), Street Hero (1984), The Hit (1984), An Indecent Obsession (1985), Rebel (1985), Sky Pirates (1986), Death of a Soldier (1986), Call Me Mr. Brown (1986), Rikky and Pete (1988), Fever (1988), Mull (1989), Deadly (1991), Broken Highway (1993), Shotgun Wedding (1993), The Custodian (1993), Everynight . . . Everynight (1994), Race the Sun (1996), River Street (1996), Road to Nhill (1997), Crackerjack (2002), Kangaroo Jack (2003), Horseplay (2003), the voice of the dentist in Finding Nemo (2003), and Bad Eggs (2003).

HURLEY, FRANK (1888–1962). Almost the Robert Flaherty of early Australian cinema, Frank Hurley was not only a photographer, a cinematographer, producer, and director of feature films and, especially, documentary films but also a showman, explorer, traveler, soldier, and adventurer. His early career in particular emphasizes the links between adventure and colonialism on the one hand and photography and cinema on the other. Born in 1888, Hurley soon became a nature photographer whose works eventually would be shown in galleries, books, newspapers and magazines, and even in films. From this passion, he moved into recording moving images. He accompanied the Mawson expedition to the Antarctic in 1911 and his edited record was given theatrical release as Home of the Blizzard in 1913.

He toured with this as he would with his later films, exhibiting it throughout Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States, acting as both showman and narrator. Like Flaherty and Murnau, he was also attracted to warmer climes. His record of a journey through the tropical north of Australia with Francis Birtles was released as Into Australia’s Unknown (1915). Almost immediately, he was traveling back to the Antarctic, this time as part of the expedition led by Ernest Shackleton, the cinematic diary released as In the Grip of the Polar Ice (1917). War briefly interrupted this cycle. From June 1917, armed with the title of Captain, Hurley was Australia’s first official cameraman.

Then it was back to further cinematography associated with exploration and expeditions beginning with The Ross Smith Flight (1920) and continuing to Papua New Guinea. The documentary outcomes of the latter stay were Pearls and Savages (1921) and With the Headhunters in Unknown Papua (1923).

Hurley was very busy in the 1930s shooting several of the Cinesound features, including The Squatter’s Daughter (1933), The Silence of Dean Maitland (1934), Strike Me Lucky (1934), Grandad Rudd (1935), and Lovers and Luggers (1937), the last two with George Heath. Cinesound also employed Hurley on commission to produce documentaries sponsored by government and private companies. A large output included Symphony In Steel (1933), Treasures of Katoomba (1936), and A Nation Is Built (1938). He also undertook some second-unit work for Chauvel’s Forty Thousand Horsemen (1940), and was again an official cameraman during World War II. After 1945, he confined himself to photography and published several books. Hurley died in 1962 whereupon in 1973 came Anthony Buckley’s filmic memorial Snow, Sand and Savages.