MAKING MOVIES
Film of the Decade
‘Mouth to Mouth’
The consensus of friends and film people is that Mouth to Mouth by John Duigan was the most significant Australian film of the seventies. Australians made more than eighty feature films during this time, many very very good. I think Michael Thornhill’s FJ Holden probably came in number two. Mouth to Mouth was not a perfect film but it displayed great talent. It worked with youth unemployment and youth culture with dazzling insight.
Of the four young actors in the film, Kim Krejus and Ian Gilmour had previous acting experience and Sergio Frazzetto and Sonia Peat had none. Ian went on to work in the industry, Kim went to the Drama Centre in London but, ironically, Sergio and Sonia at the end of the seventies had found no employment since the film.
John Duigan was born in England in 1949 but moved to Geelong while a child. He did an honours degree in arts at Melbourne University while involving himself heavily in theatre around La Mama and the university theatre group. He acted, directed and wrote. He also did street theatre during the moratorium and on environmental issues.
Typical of the directors of the seventies, he had no formal training as a film director but had already made two films before Mouth to Mouth, both of which went without much notice.
After the very positive reviews of Mouth to Mouth, he crashed critically with Dimboola (1979), based on the highly successful play by Jack Hibberd.
Jack and John failed to find a happy working arrangement on the film and both felt the script suffered from this lack of rapport.
Interview with John Duigan
Scott Murray
(from Cinema Papers, April 1978)
John Duigan’s Mouth to Mouth is the story of two girls who escape from a youth training centre and live in a disused warehouse with two boys. This striking film, made for $129 000 and on 16mm, is notable for its technical proficiency and, most importantly, the excellent performances from the mostly teenage cast.
Mouth to Mouth is Duigan’s third feature, and follows The Firm Man and The Trespassers. In the following interview, conducted by Scott Murray while Duigan was preparing for his next project, Dimboola, Duigan begins by discussing the origins of his screenplay.
Q. Is Mouth to Mouth an original screenplay?
A. Yes. It began with the idea of four teenagers spending a night on the town, and just extended from that. I decided to try and make a film that would involve a fairly wide-ranging audience in the experiences of four sympathetic characters who are battling to get some kind of life going at the lower end of society. Characters whom the middle-class audience generally reads about as numbers in the unemployment figures, or kids in the juvenile courts. In all, I did fourteen drafts of the screenplay.
Q. Why was that?
A. Almost all the assessments I received were very positive, but the assessors at the Australian Film Commission felt that, while it was a good script, it had limited financial potential. I think the film was knocked back three times on those grounds.
The Victorian Film Corporation, on the other hand, was very helpful; I had several long and useful discussions with people there.
The material I write probably needs a lot of rewriting, and I believe The Trespassers could have done with another rewrite.
Q. Do you feel a corporation is within its rights in pressuring a writer into reworking a script?
A. Obviously there are many dangers. If a film body starts to suggest or impose some of its own concepts on the screenplay, a writer could be dislodged from his own personal vision and end up writing something else. If comments are directed towards clarifying the writer’s vision, then it can be useful.
Q. One criticism that has been voiced against Mouth to Mouth is that it is too determinist …
A. I don’t accept that as a criticism. One of the most important qualities of the four characters is their terrific vitality and imagination. Given their environment, there aren’t many options, and they certainly don’t ever perceive themselves as having many. Yet, they do come out with some ingenious ways of solving their problems – the way they steal, for example. As well, the places that they go to on the spur of the moment are quite exciting and unusual.
But one of the feelings I was after was a real sense of inexorability in the way the action unfolds – the environment creates it. From the moment they escape from the youth training centre, it is inevitable that the girls will be arrested again. That is the pattern in reality.
On the other hand, the two guys are on the dole. I worked on a radio program for six months in which young unemployed people talked about their experiences. One of the overwhelming impressions was the feeling of pessimism and of a basic lack of options. And the longer they were unemployed, the more entrenched these feelings were. It seemed important to get that kind of feeling with Serge and Tim – a growing sense of frustration.
Q. Yet, one senses in the characters’ actions a partial transcending of the limitations. The film is, therefore, very optimistic …A. I certainly hope people will perceive the optimism, which is crucial to the film. I wanted to generate a lot of warmth between the characters, and while at the finish one of the four characters becomes separated from the other three, even she is not really beaten. But the world is making her very hard.
The other three we see still together in the last series of images, and it is clear that they have found a real solidarity among themselves. They care a lot about each other.
Q. This theme reminds me of The Trespassers, where the strongest scenes are those about the relationship between the girls …
A. I agree. One of the things I wanted to do in that film was suggest the dichotomy in people who have very respectable and sophisticated political views, but whose personal lives are a mess. Also, to explore the implications of rationality, or over-intellectualisation, on spontaneity and emotional honesty.
Q. The characters in Mouth to Mouth have that honesty …
A. Yes, the four of them are very direct, particularly the girls. It is a characteristic I like very much.
Q. In Mouth to Mouth you highlight the characters’ progression by subtly detaching them from the violence and noise of the soundtrack …
A. The soundtrack is very important, and I think Tony Paterson, the editor, has done a superb job in helping create that ugly sound environment.
The four live in a warehouse near a shunting yard, and there is constantly the jarring sounds of trains and carriages jolting into one another, or rushing past. Then there is the pub situation with the grinding music in the background, and layers of loud pub ambience.
The ways in which a soundtrack can enrich an image are becoming clearer to me. In general, Australian films have not widely explored the possibilities.
Q. In Bresson’s book Notes on Cinematography there is the much-quoted line: ‘If you can ever replace an image with a sound, do so’…
A. That is a good quote. An example of this is when Carrie, the girl who becomes isolated from the other three, walks into the park. She sits on a bench, near the Carlton football ground, and there is the sound of people cheering wafting over the park. It mirrors the position of the individual in Carrie’s isolation against a huge kind of social animal. The force of the image comes from the incredible noise.
Also, there is the cut to Carrie coming into the warehouse before the above scene, which is done on a scream from Jeannie. When one of the boys hits a policeman, she cries out and this sound blurs into a train whistle. Again, this has resonances linked with the use of trains and machines throughout the film, a world inhabited by generally anonymous people and machines.
Q. In one scene, Carrie is picked up off the railway tracks by an old hobo. How do you see his role in the film?
A. Fred is a very important character. Earlier in the film, after the girls have escaped from the youth training centre, they are in a car with a group of guys. They drive past a derelict old man and the guys scream out abuse; this anticipates later events.
Carrie, by far, is the most desperate of the four, and senses in Fred the way she is heading. So she shuns him. One night he finds her in the railway yards, curled up and drunk. He helps her home, and subsequently she is much warmer towards him. Later he is beaten up by Tony, with whom Carrie has had a very self-destructive relationship.
The violence of this act finally makes her see the sort of person Tony is and she breaks away from this obsessive relationship. Incidentally, Tony likewise is a kind of social derelict, and knows it. When the old man calls him a dero it’s the worst possible insult.
Q. In dealing with feminist issues, and difficult ones like prostitution, did you ever find yourself in the situation of being false to yourself in order to avoid exposing a flank to criticism?
A. Not as far as I am aware. A friend of mine worked in a massage parlour for six months: I talked to her a lot about her experiences, and I suppose the events in the film have been coloured by this.
In no way was I attempting to make value judgement points on prostitution – I wouldn’t want to. The events that occur in the film, and the characters’ reactions in them, are generated by the momentum of the characters as I saw them.
Q. One of the striking features about Mouth to Mouth is the performance of the four lead actors. How did you go about casting them?
A. I have come to think that casting is as important as the screenplay. I was looking for actors for these roles for about a year and did some fairly exhaustive testing. I spotted Sonia Peat (Jeannie) in a Sydney pub. She knew most of the people there and was buzzing around with this endless, speedy energy – she seemed just right for the part. On closing time I found out she was living in a nurses’ home. Without using the line ‘Do you want to be in a film?’, I contacted her the next time I was in Sydney and we did a bit of testing.
Q. What did this entail?
A. Mainly reading scripts. I would listen to her and then make some suggestions.
For me, the most important thing in testing an actor is finding whether he or she can establish a rapport with others, and if he or she can get anything out of the suggestions that I make about delivery and character.
Sergio Frazzetto, who plays Serge, was working at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology as a van driver; he had never done any acting, but has great vitality, like the others, which was one of the prime things I was looking for. I thought I would try and get that onto film.
The other two people came from agencies and they had some acting experience. Ian Gilmour (Tim) had done a television series nine months before and has done bits and pieces since. Kim Krejus, who plays Carrie, did a year at the National Institute of Dramatic Arts and is now doing some television work. They have impressive futures.
So, it was a combination of two totally inexperienced actors and two with some experience. They were great to work with and worked very hard. We had a two-week rehearsal period, and during the first week we went down the coast, to get to know one another. We worked intensively in the quiet, and it was very useful. I believe all four performances are really terrific.
Q. You worked with more experienced actors on The Trespassers. Did you have to change your directing style on Mouth to Mouth, such as doing more takes?
A. To an extent one works differently with each actor. I value rehearsals very highly. I would prefer to over-rehearse people and find ways of recapturing the freshness, than try to get what I want for the first time in front of the camera. So we didn’t need to shoot many takes on either film – we couldn’t afford to anyway.
As to shooting styles, the camera movements in The Trespassers were often long, fluid, tracking shots complementing the long passages of dialogue. Mouth to Mouth was very economical with a lot more jarring movement and close-up work.
Q. Also, a faster cutting pattern …
A. Yes, it is a lot more manic – as is implied by the speedier lifestyle of the characters.
Q. You had planned to make the film on 35mm and not 16mm. Did the changeover affect the size of the crew or use of equipment?
A. I don’t think we would have used a bigger crew, apart from one more on camera. We would have used a 35BL, so the size of the camera would have been very much the same, and we would have shot at a similar speed.
I am very keen on working with crews of the size we had on Mouth to Mouth, which was a little smaller than that on The Trespassers.
Q. How many were on location?
A. Eleven, as opposed to thirteen on The Trespassers.
Q. Did the Victorian Film Corporation have any feelings about the size of the crew?
A. No, other than suggesting that it would be more appropriate to employ sixteen.
At this stage I haven’t seen the blow-up to 35mm, so I don’t know whether spending an extra $25 000 to do it on 35mm would have been justified. It doesn’t seem very much money, but it is a lot when you are speaking of a budget of $129 000.
Q. That is the final budget …
A. Yes, but $44 000 of that is deferments. In terms of straight cash, the film took $85 000 to make – and that includes the blow-up.
It would have been nice to have had $150 000, and the film I want to do after Dimboola will probably have a budget of around $185 000. The only reason it will cost an extra $35 000 is because it needs a French or German actress.
For a hell of a lot of film subjects $150 000 seems an appropriate budget; there is no need to have much more than that.
Q. Was it for economic reasons that you shot on 16mm?
A. Yes, I couldn’t find any more money at that time, though I could probably find it now with the contacts I have. But I had all the people lined up for the film and, because of their availability, it was essential to shoot when we did.
Q. Do you think your difficulty in raising money was influenced by the lack of commercial success of The Trespassers?
A. Yes, I am sure it was. If The Trespassers had made a fortune, the people who had invested in that would have been delighted to invest in Mouth to Mouth. So I hope Mouth to Mouth makes a lot of money; it will certainly make it easier the next time around.
Q. Mouth to Mouth is one of the few films made on a budget of between $130 000 and $150 000, and the corporations, apart from the NSW Corporation with its special division for low-budget films, haven’t expended much effort or money in that area …
A. I think it is a very exciting innovation by the NSW Corporation to set up their fund, because budgets of that kind seem to be much more in line with market expectations of Australia. If the film is good and is made for $200 000 or under, then in many cases you can get your money back in Australia. Don’t you agree?
Q. Perhaps, though isn’t it sufficient justification that this type of film-making may produce films of an aesthetic calibre not achieved by more expensive features?
A. Provided that a film is competently made, and its story doesn’t demand a lot of money, it doesn’t matter how much it cost. Audiences are not looking for hairs in the gate, nor do they notice that there are only six extras in a pub scene instead of fifty. A good subject will carry them along.
Q. Your next project is Dimboola, which playwright Jack Hibberd has considerably rewritten for the film …
A. It would be impossible to recreate on film some of what the play achieves as a live event. The audience as guests at a wedding reception are automatically implicated in the action; they can get drunk and dance, shout and so on, and it’s all part of the show.
The screenplay covers three days, leading up to and including the wedding and reception: the play was simply the reception. It is a much more complex subject – an opportunity to celebrate a country town and its people.
Q. Dimboola has been a projected film for a long time. When did you become involved?
A. I was brought in to direct the film at the end of last year. Max Gillies and John Timlin were appointed administrators of Pram Factory Productions, which is the film-making arm of the Pram Factory. It has been their role to get the film off the ground and they are now functioning as associate-producers. John Weiley will produce.
As for the script, Jack wrote the first new drafts, and subsequently it has passed through a number of further drafts after discussions Jack has had with Max Gillies, myself and John Weiley.
Q. What market is the film aiming at? Presumably, the theatre-going audience wouldn’t be sufficient in itself?
A. In terms of the number of people who have seen it, Dimboola is probably the most successful theatrical event in Australia’s history. I understand it has been seen by more than 350 000 people. Because it’s been so universally well-liked, I think a large number of people who have seen the play will want to see the film. This is a good start. Obviously we want everyone else to see it too.
Q. Isn’t there a danger that they will be expecting a film version of the play?
A. They probably will, and in publicising the film we will have to indicate that it is going to be very different to the play. Basically it is comedy, and if it works it should have very wide appeal. However, I would also like to capture some of the feeling of films, like for example Amacord and The Fireman’s Ball, and the play Under Milk Wood – although a bit more roistering than these. I see the film as having much broader possibilities than simply a Bazza-style ocker comedy, which some people seem to be expecting.
In the city, people associate generally in groups of their own kind. In a country town, the population is too small for this and there is generally a greater mixing. I would like to try and capture this diversity of types – in a heightened reality certainly, but one that doesn’t lose touch with its naturalistic roots. I hope we can create a good deal of warmth and energy – as we tried to in Mouth to Mouth.
Q. Are you shooting on location?
A. Yes, it will be filmed entirely in Dimboola. We have been up there looking around the place and the town is excited at the idea. Dimboola, the play, was taken there a couple of years ago and played three sold-out nights. Everyone liked it, and looks forward to the film putting Dimboola on the globe.
Q. Have you finalised a budget for the film?
A. Yes, $350 000 – which is a lot of money. It is very difficult to pare it below that, simply because of the size of the cast and the associated expenses of accommodating, transporting and feeding that number of people. There are more than thirty large speaking parts, and a lot of extras.
Q. Have you raised all of the money?
A. Most of it; there is still some private money to chase.
Q. Will the crew be of a similar size to that on Mouth to Mouth?
A. A bit larger in the art department/costumes/props area, but a number of the same people: Tom Cowan will be shooting it, Lloyd Carrick will do the sound, Vicki Molloy will be production manager.
Probably seven or eight people from Mouth to Mouth will be working on it – the crew on Mouth was very good. I was delighted to work with Tom again – we had worked together once on Bonjour Balwyn in 1970.
‘Dimboola’: Play To Film
Jack Hibberd
(from Theatre Australia, November 1978)
It has more than once been pithily observed that Hollywood is a graveyard of good writers, that cinema, because it is also an industry, tends too readily to assume all the characteristics of an intellectual snakepit or a board room of highly expedient and nervous retailers. Gore Vidal, beloved by all cineastes, defined his experience of screen writing as a form of indoor sport.
I must promptly record that my experiences in the long evolution of the Dimboola screenplay were precisely the opposite – that is, up until the rejection of my third draft by the Australian Film Commission, when the creative ball-game and its tacit rules appeared suddenly to change … to a degree that could only cause some concern in a writer previously used to almost total control of his material.
These changes seemed partly a response to a drastic practical situation, partly the growing manifestation of a relative lack of faith in my capacity to write wholly a comedy screenplay that would both work and attract funds (they are not necessarily the same), partly an investment of new faith in the director to achieve both these sometimes conflicting aims. I might add that the production company, Pram Factory Productions, and its film company, was actually acting within its formal rights in these matters, merely exercising proper judgement.
The importance of a film’s screenplay is self-evident, but it should always be seen as a variable factor in the film-making process – far more so, for instance, than in stage drama. (Keith Connolly)
I commenced work on Dimboola the film in early 1976 with the execution of a synopsis and character litany for the AFC. On the basis of this, Pram Factory Productions received and administered a script development grant to enable me to elaborate a screenplay.
The real labours started in May 1976. Right from the beginning I was determined not to base the screenplay simply and directly on the play, which I strongly felt relied too distinctly on the physically confined, social occasion, audience participation and purely theatrical rituals for feasible filmic translation.
The first draft was completed later that year and dispatched to the AFC. It was not greeted with applause. Understandably so, for it was overlong, without special style, dramatically diffuse, narratively feeble, and cruellest of all, not terribly funny. It was a mistake to send it off. No one has ever clapped eyes on the first draft of one of my plays.
This draft was, in retrospect, the first long leg in a journey away from the play. I had to gradually and painstakingly get it out of my system. Initially I did this by expanding in time, by depicting events leading up to the reception and some immediately after it, by inventing a new society of characters and even eradicating some from the play (e.g. Mavis, the wife of Horrie, who is now a forlorn widower and intended as an ironic counterpoint to the central couple).
Unlike jam manufacturers or codgers who make a crust organising conventions for run-down paint salesmen in Albury, you are on about intangible dreams. (David Baker)
In January of 1977 I returned to the desk, gnashed my creative teeth and had a sceptical geek at it all. After some weeks of rumination I came up with the simple kernel idea of an outsider, an entirely fresh outsider, an Englishman, an anthropologist and Oxford don, who I contrived to be on his first visit here with the purpose of observing and recording in a tome the idiosyncratic customs and life of the local folk. His very first experience, substantial sustained experience of Australia, was to be a few days in my imaginary Dimboola.
Intrinsic to the conception, substance and life of Vivian Worcestershire-Jones was the notion that he would actively, in his Englishness, contrast comically and dramatically with the Australianness of the town; that his sometimes amused, sometimes stunned, sometimes appalled responses to the individuals and events would render the community fresh and unique, imbue it even with a droll anthropological perspective.
To the forefront of my mind was an intense desire to avoid all the mundane naturalistic conventions of a Bellbird interlarded and sprinkled with token comic events, gratuitous gags, and idiot one-liners. I wanted an integrated comic vision of an agrarian world where nonconformity and eccentricity surprisingly flourish in the firm context of conforming social forces.
Once inflamed by the personage of Worcestershire-Jones, his comic nature and dramatic function, the second draft flowed more felicitously. Characters assumed a more distinct life, the action tightened, there was a more coherent and rooted intermingling of comedy, gravity and lunacy. Though still a little too long and at times dramatically maladroit or narratively creaky, Pram Factory Productions felt confident enough to call for directors.
The response was not overwhelming. It had been decided to appoint the director on formal and informal responses to the screenplay at this stage. Some directors seemed to feel this an insulting tactic, that he or she should have ineluctably been chosen as the right one. The rationale for this procedure was simply that recent Australian cinema seemed to lack a little in the comic department, that it was imperative to talk to a range of possible directors and respond to their ideas, or lack of them.
The Producers and Directors Guild of Australia in Melbourne at one of its monthly dinner meetings recently debated the question of content and its bias: human enrichment or commercial considerations? It was not much of a success. (David Baker)
We cracked two directors, John Duigan was presented with the golden gong, despite his utter lack of experience as a director or engenderer of comedy. He spoke keenly, persuasively, cogently, of approaches to filming the script, and won the day, even if his proclivities were finally to the side of sobriety and naturalism.
It was then decided that we – myself, the director, and Max Gillies (associate producer) – sit down and do some further work on the script. In consort we shortened it, tethered it together a bit more, excised redundancies, overlapped and telescoped scenes, incorporated expert cinematic advice. The result of these toils, though not absolutely final, was more than acceptable in spirit and direction to all those involved. Only the director at this stage seemed perturbed by instance of comedy extremis, e.g., the leitmotiv of a trotter flagellated by a midget reinsman, a death scene, an impossibly ubiquitous telegram boy, a vagabond peeing on a leg of a lamb and his mate innocently devouring it with relish much later on, a race scene in which a draught horse flagellated by a female jockey wins a sprint. Some of these were compromised on and decently diluted.
The resultant third draft was sent off to the AFC, not with a lot of confidence, as there was a general aura of disquiet about the fate of comedy at the AFC, a fear that they would reflexly slot it into the category of crude and distasteful ‘ocker’ comedy. Our fears were vindicated. Two of the ‘assessments’ were merely strident diatribes, full of snobbish fury and humourless platitudes, delivered by people patently incapable of or above handling comedy. It was felt that, if made, Dimboola would set back the Australian Film Juggernaut by four or five years, that it would besmirch Australia’s image if it ever leaked overseas. The third assessment was favourable, felt that the script needed shortening and further cinematic refinement before being ready for production. One out of three is not enough, and the AFC rejected Dimboola as an uncommercial proposition.
I believe directors should be committed to a script and sufficiently committed to change it – if they think it is the right thing to do. (Tim Burstall)
The views of the AFC were generally held to be preposterous. An air of gloom, temporary paralysis and even panic, prevailed. The ramifications of the AFC decision of the subsequent fate of the script were substantial and fairly immediate; that decision, for good or for bad, in effect eroded and undermined my position as writer central to the project. Instead of resolutely following the advice of the third assessment, it was felt that something more radical, even additive, was required.
Crucial characters, characters who to me were essential to the drive, pith and amplitude of the film, now came under threat. The life of Worcestershire-Jones now hung in the exigent balance. Should he be expunged or amalgamated with Shovel (streetsweeper, band conductor and composer, local historian, loner and cyclist, intended as a weird soulmate and Australian character-contrast to the Englishman), who could be returning to Dimboola after some ten years’ absence or even a film-maker there for the weekend? Mutton and Bayonet (possible father of the groom), two ribald vagabonds and parasites, as well as DDT Delancy (uncle of the bride and dipsomaniacal crop-duster) also came under threat. The purpose of these three characters, who maniacally zoom in on Dimboola over the first few days, was to be a centripetal dynamic force and to make Dimboola the centre of a comic cosmos. The arguments against this were that their mad gleeful journeys on motorbike and in plane didn’t conform with naturalistic tenets and that punctuating the film with shots of them was uncinematic.
This period of discussion and negotiation continued for a while, some sub-plots and counterpoints became weakened or token, while some were fruitfully dissected out and strengthened. These strengthenings, while important in themselves, did however go hand in hand with curtailments and rationalisations of the original broad comic world of the film.
The ‘Auteur’ argument I used in the Symposium discussion (i.e. that the director is responsible for everything that goes into a film, including the script) is, I’m sure, a red rag to most writers. (Tim Burstall)
Somewhere around this time Greater Union offered substantial support for the project, based on the third draft, I believe, and representations by the producer John Weiley. Also around this time the director, unopposed by the producer-complex, began to re-write, re-structure, re-scissor and add new written material of his own to the screenplay. These versions, not mere launderings angled towards the acquisition of funds, were largely what the director wanted to write and shoot. Two of these versions gained funding from the VFC and NSWFC. From a position of relative impotence, I replied with versions of my own, in an absurd game of ping-pong in which one of the bats was loaded.
In a final script session, of my own arrangement, I argued successfully for the reinstatement of some things that had been lost, won compromises on others, and bargained away others again. The cinema as art, trade and power. Not the sort of business for the sensitive artist, particularly if the trading balances and the majority of fiscal corporations are against you.
I had always intended to be actively, positively, involved up until the shooting script stage, then to leave the director, editor etc., to their own creative filmic bents and devices. I was fortunate enough, however, in the Dimboola project to be allowed to take a part in casting and to attend as much of the ‘shoot’ as I wished. Needless to say, the general reluctance of the film industry to encourage the attendance of a writer at filming is one of the more philistine and precious bigotries operating in the art. How else can the writer acquire a working knowledge of those unique cinematic qualities which are so often used in argument against him? Unless of course there is a lot of defensive and territorial bulldust thrown around. Antonioni opined that you really only needed to know two or three thumb-rules to make a film. I just know that someone is going to say that his films show it.
The film was shot in a remarkable five weeks, with the invaluable and generous drive of an enthusiastic film and production crew, with the unstinting open support of the Dimboola townspeople, in the face of unrelenting grey days and a wet winter. The responses to open sessions of rushes were generally exhilarating, lab reports consistently confirmed fine quality.
At the time of writing (early September) the editor, director and producer ensemble are daily huddled over the Moviola, chortling, I believe, then snipping and glueing in a gay frenzy, such is the abundance and range of material. Positive reports leak out. Let’s hope they are vindicated on the magically flickering screen, for the process, especially in the last half, was a bewildering, contradictory and often painful one for this particular writer.
To lose a scene in your script, I know, Jack, is like losing a limb or a child … I have never known a writer yet who has been happy in his role in a film … (John Weiley)
Today I’d be tougher. If a film were to be made of something of mine I’d be boringly and maddeningly underfoot protecting the home product so that it wasn’t deformed, decorated, blown up, pruned, ‘interpreted’ by some mechanic and his gang of mechanics. (Hal Porter)
It is easy to achieve proficiency and professionalism at a technical level – we’ve done that for years in our television commercials – but to make significant films you need content. (Phillip Adams, quoted by Keith Connolly)
(All the quotes in this article, except those of John Weiley, are taken from ‘Tension on the Reel’, Overland No. 71)
Going to the Fair
Thomas Keneally
(from Playboy Australia, December 1979)
Phil Carey came to Cannes, not in a limousine, but in the little red bus that takes Air France passengers from Nice along the littoral of Alpes Maritimes to that former fishing village and focus of European decadence and moviemania called Cannes. The bus was full of what you’d call average French people on their way home to their apartments on the slopes high above the madness of the Cannes waterfront. Tonight, while a movie culled from one of Carey’s novels played at the Palais des Festivals, they would sit at their kitchen tables, eating onion soup and complaining to their spouses about the crowds of movie phonies cluttering Nice airport and driving prices up in Cannes. The look of them reinforced in Carey a dread of the coming evening, and made him speculate again on what amalgam of ego, friendship and contradictory fear had caused him to come here.
He got down from this red bus in the middle of Cannes itself, at a corner where a furniture store advertised bedroom suites. He walked a kilometre in a narrow street, straight toward the cube of Mediterranean he could see glittering fair ahead.
The air felt familiar. It was the air of Whale or Palm beach on the first benign days of summer. He swung his little green canvas bag, travelling light in a town of wonders. A fresh shirt, a novel manuscript he would not get a chance to glance at, underwear, socks and medicines were all his freight.
So he came out of the alley into the wide vistas of la Croisette. The side street had been quiet, the butcheries and groceries doing a slow business with the permanent inhabitants. La Croisette was a berserk promenade crowded with obvious transients. The young and beautiful, shirts unbuttoned to the waist, strolled here in their legions. They paused at streetside café tables to talk with friends. They displayed that genuine European indolence, older than Caesar’s Gallic wars, which even the Americans can only imitate. Among this glorious olive mob, buttoned-down and suited film accountants and movie middlemen jinked and side-stepped, no indolence in them. Their cases, Carey could tell, carried mint-new draft contracts, or scripts in need of a banker.
In the hectic traffic, among the palm trees, a limousine cruised along carrying a naked punk-rock queen on its roof. On her brown hair she wore a crown. Her breasts dragged a little. She was too old to be a punk, too old to be pleading for the world’s love.
Beyond her crowned head, out in the bay, an immense cruising yacht sat at anchor. The message was: you’re in Cannes, mate, and yachts you’ll never see on Pittwater find haven here.
A big London PR company was marketing the filmic pup Carey’s friend McNiell had taken from one of Carey’s novels. The company had taken apartments – for the duration of the festival – at an address called Palais d’Orsay. Carey had imagined chandeliers and rococo panelling but the Palais was a modern building. Its door was plate glass like that of a city bank. When Carey rang, he saw a tenebral image of himself show up on a screen high up in the lobby, and close to the bell a woman appeared on another screen and asked what he wanted.
Carey answered her in his 1950s Christian Brothers’ French. He was un ami de M. Andy McNiell, le directeur du film The Cut-Rate Kingdom. Carey said he was also un ami de M. Derek Anderson, the promoteur distingué des films. Carey was l’auteur de la roman de la movie. Would she give him entrée so that he could confer with his amis?
The great glass door sighed open, sighed closed again. The lobby remained dark, and the screens had gone blank. She’d said something about the first floor, and he found a dark stairwell and pushed his way up it. He found a glowing nameplate on a door. It said Viscomte de Bessières-Midi. The name was the only point of light in the darkness, so he hammered on the door, bracing himself to face the Viscomte’s contempt.
The door was opened by a pretty girl Carey could tell was English. ‘Oh, you’re Phil Carey,’ she said. ‘Welcome to Cannes.’ She admitted him to an apartment which was full of posters. Englishmen wandered about with graphics and expense forms and press releases in their hands. Sunlight swept in across the room off the sea and made Carey blink. He felt delivered now from the strangeness of Cannes. An immense photograph of Albie Toombs, the black actor and lead in the movie, hung on the wall to make him welcome. On a settee nearby sat three Sydney journalists, assigned to cover this night’s triumph for Aust. Cin. Beyond the balcony door, Carey could see the lean Andy McNiell and his sweet-apple wife, Maureen, talking to someone. The frowns, the directness of their talk, their good complexions, had all travelled well. It was wonderful to see them there against that different sea. It was, Carey supposed, like seeing something tribal, Vegemite say, in the window of NSW House in the Strand.
From the balcony, Andy McNiell came raging towards Carey. ‘G’day, you mad Irish git,’ he yelled.
‘Bloody Presbyterian streak of misery,’ Carey replied. He could see beyond Andy that one of the journalists was writing down all these half-aggressive greetings. If Andy became one of those cult names tonight, became a Bergman or a Bogdanovich, such greetings would be news.
McNiell placed a hand on Carey’s shoulder, Carey on McNiell’s. Maureen embraced Carey from the side. ‘Come to see yourself made into a household name, eh?’ she asked.
Carey ran his hand over her smooth, slightly sun-freckled neck. He felt heartened by the easy way she expected a triumphal evening. ‘Reckon your old man can make pictures, do you?’
‘Better than any other bugger,’ said Maureen.
The three journalists had all stood and drawn in to the congenial circle. One of them said: ‘Susannah York’s coming to the party.’
‘Party?’
‘Our party,’ said Maureen.
‘Where is it?’
‘Café Ondine. On the beach.’
The newspaperman said: ‘There’s a party on a yacht for Jon Voight. But Susannah York wouldn’t miss ours.’
‘Well,’ said Maureen, ‘Voight’s is just another one of these average-born and predictable American movies. Whereas everyone can tell we’ve got something utterly fresh.’
And they all laughed, the six of them, as if moguls and maidens who spent the evening on Voight’s yacht would hold themselves accursed tomorrow morning that they had not read the drift of history and had missed out on the Café Ondine and the McNiells and Susannah and the gang.
Andy introduced Carey to a small dark man, neatly made as a jockey, who was Derek Anderson. Anderson said: ‘I’ve got half a dozen movies here this year. But this is the one we’re most committed to. It’s also the only one we have that’s in official competition. A really important movie …’
Across the room Carey saw a woman turn her head and glance in the direction of Anderson’s voice. She nodded to Carey. He recognised her as a producer from Sydney. He supposed that, having just heard the movie she’d just placed with Anderson described as inferior by the man himself, she felt pretty cool towards the lot of them.
‘Bring a dinner suit?’ Maureen asked him.
‘No.’ Carey indicated his small green canvas bag.
‘You’ll need one. You can’t go to the movies here without one.’
‘Oh,’ said one of the journalists, ‘you can go to ordinary movies. Not to those at the Palais des Festivals …’
‘… chosen for showing in competition,’ said Maureen.
‘But everyone’s half-naked out there,’ said Carey. ‘I saw a punk queen sitting up nude on top of a car …’
‘Ah,’ said Andy McNiell. ‘I knew my little mate wouldn’t miss that. Crook tits, eh?’
Maureen was frowning. ‘You’ve got to have a dicky suit.’
‘What size are you?’ said Anderson. ‘Four and a half, I’d say. Come with me.’
He led Carey deeper into the apartment and knocked on a door. Entering, they found a middle-aged man blinking in bed.
‘Phil Carey, this’s my press man, Allan. You going to Kingdom tonight, Allan? No? Which one? The Voight movie round in les Ambassades? Bloody traitor! Give Phil your suit, will you?’
The tired man rose, poured scotch for the three of them and, with the greatest good humour, found Carey a suit and cufflinks and a collar. Carey tried on the jacket for fit, and they agreed, by hanging the trousers from his waist, that they’d do all right.
Andy gave Carey the keys to the flat he’d rented for himself and Maureen in Rue d’Antibes, and the pretty English girl who had admitted him to the Viscomte’s apartment showed him down to the dark lobby and into the street. As Carey left her she put a folder in his hand – it was full of graphics of the movie and large slabs of those reviews that Andy had gathered from renowned critics by giving them sneak showings of his film.
The girl said: ‘We put one of those in every hotel room in Cannes. And wherever any big movie nob was staying, one was sent there, and – if we could – we put it right in his plump little hand. You should be very proud.’
Carey set off for the flat. He felt more as if he were a citizen of Cannes now. It was Maureen who’d inducted him, and he threw her mental tributes above the delicious and rotten crowd.
All at once Terry Parker’s face, glowing and olive, was at his side. He got that feeling again, from the familiarity of the features, that now Cannes really would throw off its disguise and prove itself to be the beer garden of the Newport Arms.
‘Listen, got time for a beer?’ Terry Parker asked him. ‘We’re all up there on the Carlton terrace.’
He pointed up to a table on the crowded terrace of the hotel. Carey saw faces he knew, Sydney actors, half the cast of Cut-Rate Kingdom, drinking beer there. Blue-faced bottles of Löwenbräu stood over the table.
He let Terry Parker, himself an actor, lead him up into the crowd. They all wanted to explain at length how Cannes wasn’t a place for an actor. Not even for Jon Voight. No producer casts his movies from looking round the terrace of the Carlton. ‘The place is full of movie middlemen,’ one of the actors said. ‘Bloody movie grocers who would be just as happy selling cars.’
‘Or bloody toothpaste,’ said Terry.
‘But we’re all having a bloody marvellous time out at the villa. Bit crowded. But Jesus! Fantastic girls.’
A commotion arose at the front steps of the Carlton, where a wine-red limousine had drawn up. Whoever was the passenger inside it managed to escape the car, but from then on was hidden by a close-fitting mob of press and other people. Carey had never seen a crowd move with such unity, all of them a-flutter, talking at once, moving their hands. It was like watching the crowd of bees who bustled the queen around the hive, partly her servants, partly her bullies. The whole mass advanced up the stairs and disappeared into the foyer of the hotel.
‘That’s Jane Fonda,’ said one of the actors. Carey recognised in the man’s voice the wonder, the mixture of admiration and resentment which occurs in writers too when they spot the lucky ones, the ones whose success they cannot imitate or explain.
At Carey’s left ear, Terry said: ‘Did you know Denise and I have split up?’
Carey said he had heard it.
‘Got a lovely girl here,’ said Terry. He dropped his voice lower still. ‘An Alsatian girl,’ he whispered. Perhaps not wanting his friends to make the usual jokes – ‘Woof, woof!’
Carey was there an hour and drank a lot. It was hard to capture a waiter on the Carlton terrace using the accepted European or American methods of attracting attention. The Antipodean method, however, worked well for this little group of actors. They would rise in their places and detain the waiter with a semi-caress, semi-rugby tackle. So they were served regularly and, by the time the tide of conversation turned against Andy, Carey was full of the mellowness of the sun and three and a half bottles of Löwenbräu.
‘Joycelin Daly’s pretty upset,’ one of the actors began to tell Carey. Joycelin Daly was the woman in the Viscomte’s flat, the producer with the non-committal nod. ‘Mean, she’s paying 25 000 quid sterling to get Anderson to handle her movie. The same price as Andy’s paying him. But Andy cops all this special push.’
Another said: ‘You know why. Anderson’s done his nuts over Maureen.’
Carey chose to laugh over that. He said: ‘It could be because Andy’s is a better movie than Joycelin Daly’s.’
‘Yeah, yeah, true enough. But 25 000 quid is 25 000 quid. Fee for bloody service, you know. Anderson’s such a bloody squirt; all Maureen’s got to do is trail one of her big lovely norks at him and the bugger dashes off another one of his press releases.’
Another said, not with any clear malice: ‘Well, you know how it is with Maureen. She thinks that Andy’s the greatest thing since Eisenstein.’
Terry Parker whispered to Carey: ‘I wish someone thought I was.’
Carey said: ‘Anderson’s got lovely girls all over his office. He doesn’t need to lust after Maureen.’
One of the older actors sucked at a Gauloise and looked out over the crowd of multi-racial hustlers on the terrace. ‘The more sated these blokes are,’ he told everyone, ‘the more likely they are to revert to a grand bloody passion. In the old style. You know.’
Carey had already stood up to leave when yet another complaint came up. ‘What I can’t understand is, why didn’t he bring Albie Toombs?’
It was clear that most people at the table thought Albie Toombs should have been flown over by McNiell.
‘Like Bennelong at the court of George III?’ asked Carey satirically.
Albie Toombs was a young tribal Aborigine from Yirrkala, the star of The Cut-Rate Kingdom. Maureen had first seen him in a department store in Melbourne while he was finishing off training as a mining driller at the Melbourne Tech. More or less on the spot she had decided he was right for the role.
Carey said: ‘You’ve got to be fair. All this would have been far too much for Albie.’
For Albie, Melbourne had been too much. He’d been dazed by the sudden money. On disco floors, he would grab city girls who had never seen an Aborigine and yell in their sweet empty faces: ‘Hey, I’m going to be a star.’
Carey said: ‘Albie couldn’t even take Melbourne.’
Someone said: ‘How bloody paternal can you get? This is too much for me and you. But no one bothered to protect us from it. Thank Christ.’
Carey found the building where Andy had his flat in Rue d’Antibes. It too resembled the glass-fronted bank, but Carey was used to the process of entering buildings in Cannes now.
He found Andy’s apartment on the first floor. It took three keys and a lot of experimentation to open the door. In the living room, dressed in a slip, a glowing set of Carmen curlers by her left hand, a bottle of Cutex before her, sat a young blonde actress from The Cut-Rate Kingdom.
‘Hello,’ she said. ‘I knew you’d be here. Good flight? Crowded, I suppose. You’re not going dressed like that are you? Have a scotch. You should’ve been here for the Film Corporation lunch. Look at that.’ She nodded towards a photograph pinned to the apartment wall. There she was, nestling her golden hair in under Michael Caine’s left armpit. ‘You’re my escort for the night,’ she told Carey.
She stayed there for another half hour, painting her extremities, drying them in the breeze from the Mediterranean, doing her hair, uncritically delighted with herself. Her sentences, like a child’s, came out unrelated. ‘They serve up buckets of Veuve Clicquot. You know there’re drinks before the showing tonight? A lovely room at the Carlton. And then the party afterwards. Susannah York’s coming. I’m glad I’m not staying out at la Napoule with all those Aussie oafs. By the way, I met the head of Rank the other day at the EMI party. Did you know the PM sent Andy a telegram? Rip it into ’em, cobber – you know the sort of thing. David Carradine wants to see one of my tapes. Clothing here costs the earth. And booze too. Have another scotch.’
When Andy and Maureen turned up, the four of them dressed more or less communally, trying out the effect on each other of various oddments of clothing. ‘How’s the coat? Pants too long? Cop the frilly shirt!’ The women displayed themselves in their seamless black gowns, then in their jewellery. Andy McNiell and Carey, two of the nation’s foulest dressers, turned from the mirror like Crosby and Hope, yelling ‘Da-da!’, then flashing their black ties at the girls, who thought it was all grotesque and clapped them.
They left the apartment and headed for the Carlton. The women were easy in their glad rags, but Carey felt a little foolish. As they turned into la Croisette, they showed the naked-to-the-navel strollers there that the Film Festival had its standards.
At the base of a golden staircase at the Carlton, two twenty-year-old Frenchmen bustled up to Carey’s blonde companion and begged her autograph. Radiant, she bestowed it. This was what was known in Australia as international acclaim; she would remember this more than the applause of 2000 of her countrymen.
Finished with the autographs, she encased her writing arm in her black wrap as they all proceeded up the stairs. Everywhere, on the stairs, in the corridors, people walked fast, doing a year’s business in the Festival’s fortnight. The roofs were tall, the panelling gilt, the sideboards Louis XIV.
At last, ennobled for an afternoon, Carey walked with a beautiful empty woman beneath the chandeliers. He should have enjoyed it, but it wasn’t believable; Carey wasn’t a credible inhabitant of such a whisky advertisement. And there was, in any case, a fear of the moment when the projectors would begin rolling in the Palais des Festivals and present him with the images of a book he’d written long ago.
At the entrance to the chamber where drinks would be taken, Andy and Carey stood back to let Maureen and the actress go first. Andy took the chance to take Carey by the elbow.
‘Listen, cobber, my aunt and uncle are here. On a Jet-Away tour. Just come up from Italy. Very impressed with the Pope.’
‘Had an audience, did they?’
‘Saw him at a distant bloody window. What d’you think they are? President of the ACTU? My uncle’s the postmaster from Warwick. Just retired. Don’t let on, though, that’s all I ask. You know, that there’s anything wrong between Maureen and me.’
‘I didn’t know that there was anything wrong,’ said Carey.
‘Oh,’ said Andy, waving his hand in dismissal. ‘A girl on Anderson’s staff. Jesus, a man’s only bloody human.’ He mimicked a girl’s voice. ‘I really want to be done over by one of the great directors, Mr McNiell.’
Carey laughed.
Andy said: ‘I don’t want Maureen’s great hulking brothers arriving.’ Her brothers were husky fellows who’d both played for Richmond and ran an advertising agency in Melbourne.
Carey and McNiell, author and director in apparent harmony, walked through into the day’s first party. Waiters uncorked and poured Veuve Clicquot. Beyond the panoramic windows, the Niarchos yacht flashed sunlight from its super-structure. Andy and Maureen were subject to an immediate ambush, and Carey would identify the aunt and uncle in the ruck – a large sunburned man with two sun-cancers on his balding head, and the aunt, a solid little brick-red woman. Once the party settled down, these two sought Carey out.
‘We saw the Pope in St Peter’s the other day,’ said the aunt.
‘A wonderful bloody place,’ said her husband.
‘You can’t help being impressed. It’s something more important than whether you’re a Catholic or not. Sometimes I envy you Catholics.’
Carey had not been to Mass since he was seventeen, but he let it pass. The uncle took one gulp of the champagne and made a face. ‘Don’t you like it, love?’ his wife asked.
He did not answer, but grabbed a passing waiter. The boy was neat and dark. Half his ancestors, you could bet, were from Algeria. ‘Listen, François,’ said the uncle, ‘this stuff doesn’t agree with my tummy. D’you think you could get me a beer, eh? Mind you, cold, froid. Froid.’
He pronounced the French word so that it sounded like the renowned Viennese psychiatrist.
‘Une bouteille de bier pour le monsieur, s’il vous plaît!’ said the little red aunt in dazzling French.
She said to Carey, ‘You know they banned your book from schools in Queensland. Because of the bad words! You’d think none of them had ever been in a pub or shearing shed.’
The waiter sashayed back in, a Löewenbräu and a glass on a silver salver held wide of his body. He poured the beer into the tall-stemmed glass and then pushed the salver towards monsieur. The uncle didn’t give a damn for all that mannered contempt. It was results that told. He drank half the glass in one long swallow.
The aunt said: ‘I learned French by the Linguaphone method.’ And Carey imagined a tranquil post office, the only noise the breeze and the fall of pepper-tree pods on the iron roof. And the Linguaphone records running.
She said: ‘What a shame Andy’s parents couldn’t see this. We wanted to tell you we’re so proud to be here …’
Uncle Frank took up the speech at the point where honest tears had suddenly disabled his wife. ‘So bloody incredible. Me and the wife. I mean I wouldn’t in a million years expect to end up in a place like this, I mean … it’ll be bloody hard to settle down in the bush again. We wish you all the best, son. You jokers are more important than Test cricketers or anything like that. I mean, this is a country’s bloody culture …’
‘Garçon. Une autre bier pour ma mari, s’il vous plaît.’
When the beer was delivered, the couple moved on. Carey chatted with Maureen and drank the expensive distillations of the sunlight which waiters kept putting in his hand. Carey found himself kissing her, half-fraternally. Together they watched Carey’s blonde companion darting around, talking in a fast voice to the worldly men and women who might decide to deliver her from being just an Australian actress, listening ecstatically in return to Europe’s fast talkers putting forward proposals for co-productions. The feelings of distaste that Carey had felt on the bus, but two hours and an era ago, were sedated now, and he began to tell Maureen how he should have gone to any expense to bring his wife.
‘Too bloody right, you should’ve.’
Carey explained how he’d asked her to come, but the kids had to get to school each day; that had to be attended to.
‘Rubbish,’ said Maureen.
As if at a signal, she led Carey out of the gorgeous room into the corridor where Andy and the blonde actress were waiting for them.
‘It’s time,’ said Andy.
‘What for?’ Carey asked.
‘There’s a limousine waiting here now,’ said Maureen.
‘To drive us to the Palais des Festivals,’ said the actress.
They did not go to the front door of the hotel but to a side entrance, where the car waited for them. Andy and the two women sat on the back seat; Carey pulled down the dicky seat and sat like a mafia bodyguard facing them. The car speeded out into sunlight. An immediate rush of faces appeared beyond the glass at the car windows. The eyes peering in showed a sort of calculating fever; the features wore an assumption of ownership of whatever was inside the vehicle. This crowd surveyed the faces of the two men and two women, noted that none of them was Jane Fonda, and then drifted back to the pavement again.
‘God!’ exclaimed Carey, genuinely shaken, appalled at the frenzy and ruthlessness of those faces.
Maureen said: ‘There’s nothing that stands between a star and his fans. No reserve. No protection.’
Carey began to laugh. ‘Thank God we’re nobodies.’
The blonde smiled and said nothing. Both she and Andy were thinking: tonight we’re somebody, and tomorrow the world will know us.
Traffic on la Croisette was slow. By the time they reached the Palais, the foyer was crowded with people who seemed to be, at least in part, the guests they’d just left behind at the Carlton. Everyone was dressed to the limit. ‘Ladies’ night at the Masonic Lodge,’ said Maureen.
They climbed the great red staircase. People speculated on who they were. Those in the know about Andy’s existence and talents passed the word to those who were speculating. Treading the red carpet, Carey’s companion wore a beatific smile.
The seating arrangement in the front row of the dress circle was: Maureen and Andy, the aunt and the uncle, the blonde actress and Carey. For some reason the order was then altered, for beside Carey sat Terry Parker, and next to Terry a sublime girl. Terry introduced her. Her name was Rosemarie Melsner. She was his Alsatian. She spoke English as if born to it, and had then gone to some finishing school to pick up an overlay of Gallic accent. ‘Oh,’ Carey whispered to Terry when they’d sat. ‘Oh!’
‘She’s a lovely girl,’ Terry said to him gravely.
‘Sounds like a human being, too,’ Carey said, nodding secretly towards his blonde companion, so that Parker would know he meant the darker side of the comment to apply to her.
‘Mate,’ Terry said. ‘I know what you mean. I’ve seen her in operation.’
The lights dimmed. A basso voice announced that the International Jury of the Cannes Film Festival took pride in presenting an Australian film by Andrew McNiell. The theatre went dark. Carey found that his eyes were near closed. The trouble was he’d written this book in a past that seemed as remote to him as another historical era. He had never re-read it since the day of its publication. He was half embarrassed by the memory of it, as a person would be by an old love letter. Through his lowered eyelids, he saw that there were, all at once on the screen, primeval mountains. A strange music, of Aboriginal gods calling from the crevices of the rock, sounded out. Carey muttered in sheer panic: ‘The Yanks won’t understand this.’
Terry Parker came into view on the screen, a young squatter politician electioneering in the wilderness. At the sight of him, a small gush of breath escaped Rosemarie Melsner. Albie Toombs could then be seen, challenging the Terry Parker character. Light, bouncing from Albie Toombs’s head and shoulders, hurt the Terry character’s eyes. Then aggression broke out in the crowd. Half the people turned on the black man, and tall outback police moved in. Albie Toombs was dragged away, the opening credits rolling over his bowed head, over the primeval hills, basking lizards and wheeling galahs.
‘The music is brilliant,’ Carey told his companion. ‘Shhhhh!’ she told him. Ten minutes of the film flickered before him. Carey didn’t like the tone of it. His eyes remained half closed. It was probably the fault of the book. In being faithful to the novel, Andy might have committed a filmic sin. Yet there was also a raucous voice in Carey, as well as the reasoning one, and that voice said: ‘The bugger four seats up has violated your novel.’
Meanwhile, Carey became aware of some problems of design on the screen. Graffiti on a great boulder looked as if they had been painted there half an hour before filming, without being aged or weathered. Some of the interiors lacked conviction. But the apex of his torment was the two scenes in which he played a government clerk arguing with Albie Toombs. Carey’s participation had been the result of his own vanity in thinking himself, for a brief season, an actor, and also of Andy McNiell’s in thinking that he could handle amateurs.
‘How do you think it’s going?’ Carey asked the blonde actress after close on an hour of the movie.
‘Shhhhh!’ she said yet again, taking in the movie with an abominable fixity.
The film grew episodic in the second hour. I should never have sold the bloody thing, Carey counselled himself, and hunched further into his seat. Not to anyone. It was, for one thing, written before the essential date, before 1972, the watershed year when Carey’s wife and he had ceased to torment each other and learned to live in union.
All pre-1972 Carey novels were dark and savage documents, the work of a tormented young man. All novels since then had been increasingly light and compassionate. Critics disliked the change, but Carey was delighted with it. The Cut-Rate Kingdom dated from before that watershed. And here it was, rising in images in this foreign movie house. And bringing with it the torment of pre-1972.
Like a life, it raced towards the end. There was a blackness as the Albie Toombs character died. Then closing credits, music and the primeval hills again. After the film ended, the crowd kept their silence for two seconds. Then they commenced to applaud and stand, first in the stalls, next in the circle. Everyone stood, even Maureen and then Carey, adding his ambiguous contribution to the rising noise of the clapping. Carey’s companion glanced not once at him, but smiled steadily up at the rows of filmgoers who were applauding behind them.
Andy began to move up the steps; he looked back, wanting to include Carey. But Carey pretended to be caught up with Terry Parker and his sweet girl from Alsace. So the crowd swept Andy up the steps and then on to the landing, where there was more applause from people standing below in the Palais foyer.
Uncle Frank wept at Carey’s side. The blonde actress had disappeared, probably to kiss Andy in congratulation while there was still a pressman about to capture it all. Uncle Frank put his arm around Carey. ‘A bloody great night for Australia, Phil. I mean, I saw Dawn Fraser at the ’56 Olympics. But you expect Australians to win gold medals at that sort of stuff. This … this sort of thing … is something absolutely bloody new.’
On the steps, the beautiful Alsatian asked Carey if he was happy with the film of his novel. Carey shook his head, pretending the experience had swamped him. ‘I can’t sort out my ideas yet, love …’ He stumbled in a half-real, half-feigned way as they descended to the foyer.
Maureen and Terry, Andy and the actress were posing for photographs as Rosemarie Melsner and Carey slid out of the door and on to the pavement. ‘Well?’ she said, and looked at Carey with the same smile, spotting the author’s dismay.
‘No,’ said Carey. ‘It isn’t that I didn’t like it.’
‘No?’ she said, laughing. ‘Never mind. You can clear out from all this in a day or so. Get back to innocent old Australia again.’
‘Tomorrow,’ Carey said. ‘I’m going to leave tomorrow.’
‘Don’t sound so anxious to leave us,’ she said.
They walked down among the palm trees of la Croisette in a sublime purple evening. A genial traffic jam let them cross the motor lanes when they chose. Two expensive-looking Americans and their wives, ahead of Rosemarie and Carey, began talking about the movie.
‘Think it could have a future in the art cinemas,’ one of them said. ‘Go down well on the college circuits,’ said another. ‘The violence is a problem.’
The Alsatian overheard all this too and smiled at Carey again, as if the Americans were figures of fun.
Carey said: ‘What Andy wants is perfectly reasonable. He wants to be an Australian culture-hero. He wants to be the object of an inter national cult as well. And to have his movie on in every sizeable town in the US, Great Britain and Western Europe.’
‘A perfectly reasonable ambition,’ said Rosemarie Melsner. ‘For a boy from Melbourne.’
The Café Ondine was a restaurant on the beach, the sort of place which on a windy day would get sand across the carpet. There indeed stood Susannah York, shining in a doorway. And Alan Bates. And the Polish director who had just run them in tandem in a movie. Somehow, the sight of the two of them standing there made Carey feel like running away.
At the far corner table he had found, journalists came up to him and asked him for his reaction. He said he couldn’t expect to give a clear answer. The experience had been overpowering. Going to the bar for some Kronenberg beer, he met Andy and Maureen, embraced them, told them the half truths he’d told the journalists. He was over come, he said. He would have to speak to them in the morning. He knew he was sounding enthusiastic to the extent of misleading them.
He could sense that the guests entering the Ondine were divided in their feelings for the movie. All night long they came up to him, muttering under their voices. Those who’d liked the movie drank and sang and touched each other’s flesh. But Carey’s share of the party were the snipers, the grudge-holders and the disapprovers.
‘You should’ve written the script.’
‘Andy offered it … I refused.’
‘Did he give you right of approval of the script?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you approved that script?’
‘No. Well, not in that form. Andy changes the script as he shoots. He rewrites it during tea breaks, or at lunchtime, before every take. I wish he didn’t do it that way. But there’s no bloody malice to it. It’s just the way that he works.’
‘You’re very forgiving.’
The accusation of virtue angered Carey. ‘No. He bought the film rights, fair and square. I wrote a book, that’s all, and he bought it.’
‘Oh … oh, mate. And a great book it was …’
‘No book written before 1972 was any bloody good,’ said Carey as an axiom. He took giant swallows of beer. ‘All literature begins in 1972,’ he announced drunkenly.
‘What about Homer?’
A dozen times that night, in his corner, he said: ‘I don’t think it’s one of those books you can easily film. In a novel you can deal with motivation inside the bloke’s head. In a movie you can only show it through the use of external symbols.’
‘Bullshit.’ They would pat Carey’s arm. ‘He buggered it up on you and you know it. But never mind. There must be a few more good novels left in you.’ The weariness of thinking of that future heap of as-yet unwritten Carey novels rose before him like an intimidating tower. He lowered his brow to the table. The Alsatian girl, so generous in her ways, smoothed the hair at the back of his neck.
Many times that night he returned to Andy and Maureen to say loud and indefinite things. On his last clearheaded approach, he was alarmed to see Andy staring at him through wine-bleared eyes with a sobriety that arose from the man’s core. Andy could see, beyond Carey’s own wine-bleared eyes, his friend’s dissent from what the movie had done with the novel. In that second, Carey would later believe, the friendship was cruelled forever. He and Andy McNiell became all of a sudden acquaintances with half-bitter anecdotes to tell about each other.
At last, some of the party staggered on to the beach. A middle-aged Belgian had joined Carey and Terry Parker and the girl, and beside the Belgian sat a whore whose blouse exposed her breasts in the manner of the garments of the French revolution. She was a striking and beautiful woman, about as old as the Belgian himself. Both of them seemed happy enough to end the night listening to Carey and Terry Parker rant about the burdens of being Australian. Carey lay with his head in Rosemarie Melsner’s lap, looking up at her perfect face. ‘When I studied Alsace-Lorraine at the Christian Brothers,’ he told her, ‘and how the Huns and the Frogs squabbled over it, I didn’t think of it as the habitat of a sweet girl like you, Rosemarie. Rosemarie, Rosemarie …’
Somehow they all got home. And in the morning there was no time to confide in Andy. The alarm clock was late in going off. Maureen and the actress raged around the apartment making Andy his breakfast, for he was due to appear on French television at 9.30. He might be back to see Carey before Carey caught the red bus going back to Nice.
Carey spent the morning on the Carlton terrace, listening to argumentation about the film.
‘Where is Rosemarie?’ he asked Terry Parker.
Terry looked out across the ocean. ‘Had to go to work.’
A drinking group of producers and actors gathered. One of them said: ‘You can’t make an art movie of that size and expect not to have to use an international lead.’
The remark initiated a debate. ‘Why pander to the buggers?’ Carey asked with a gesture of the hand that indicated the wide world. ‘We take what they dish up. Let them take a bit of us!’
‘That’s all bloody well,’ explained a producer, ‘unless your market is a country of 14 million. In a country of 14 million you shouldn’t make movies that have crowd scenes and in which there isn’t an inter national lead.’
Carey laughed. ‘It is a revelation. To write two easy paragraphs in a book. Then they come to film those two paragraphs, and it costs $35 000.’
When Terry Parker went off to the lavatory, one of the crew told Carey: ‘Don’t ask him about where that girl of his is. She’s a hooker. If she didn’t like Terry a bit he wouldn’t be able to afford to have her.’
With something close to authentic gratitude, Carey watched the clock creak towards his time of departure. Then, on his way back to the furniture store to catch the little red bus to Nice, he saw Andy across two lanes of traffic. The producer-director-writer of The Cut-Rate Kingdom was on his way back to the apartment for lunch. Andy looked at Carey across the roofs of Fiats. There was a weary knowing ness in his face.
Someone on French television – so Carey would find out later – had asked him that no-win question: why he hadn’t brought his Aboriginal actor with him? But the French critics who had written of the movie this morning had praised it. So Carey supposed that McNiell was already balancing up win against loss.
The two of them yelled greetings. ‘I’m going back to London,’ Carey called out. Would Andy be there? ‘I’m going on to the US on Monday to do ten days’ research. Flying over on one of those new standby tickets.’ Would Andy be in the United States?
‘Coming to the Melbourne premiere?’ Andy yelled.
‘I’ll try to,’ cried Carey. At the premiere with the Premier. ‘I hope I’ll be back in Sydney in about two weeks,’ he screamed, holding up two fingers to indicate the time he’d be absent. And so, gratefully, he loped off.
Late that night, on a friend’s phone in London, Carey called his wife and told her he couldn’t come back till the Melbourne corroboree had taken place. ‘I can’t sit through it again,’ he told her. Nor could he face resenting what McNiell had done to his novel.
And Mrs Carey agreed to go in her husband’s place. For she was, like Maureen McNiell, what is called a ‘supportive’ woman.
Kitsch
At the stage of the gouda, jatz & french bread
now the party is darker & limp,
the plump girl elbows pensively
from patio to lounge room with
languid semblance, having read
‘11.30 – Movie – Adventure – Set
in the French Revolution’
in TV Times, & being
– perhaps in some interior
espionage against the march
of academe – secretly
an expert on minutiae
in the 1930s film
Kneeling in an armchair she explains
the when the why the which
the where the wear of it,
& I reluctantly admire
again its svelte convention:
Apart from the sails, which must
be present first & last: their great
lissom fable tautened
by the moon & flight: it begins
with the rumble of the tumbril
in the cul de sac below
a lady,
dresden & creamy, her form
petalled like a wedding cake
(‘100 yards of tulle & satin
stitched by Edith Head
by hand’);
lips drawling in a lacquered sulk
the eros of mistrust against
the husband or the hero, safe ‘away’
but really
spying with the best of them
to gull the guillotine & save
her head for his shoulder beneath
that silky last minute of sails
The girl at last, relievedly
disenthralled, puffs at
badly blended hash & sips
sour White, declaring that
the long finesse of kitsch is still
a question of consistency:
‘The hero’s eyebrow always
arching at the coarseness of
the knife against his throat,
the way
the heroine faints backwards
into someone-handy’s arms
not forward to dash brain out on
those blood-encrusted flags …’
She shrugs into her poncho, leaves
with me, but driving home
past beaches of neon & tidewrack, small
poniards in her eyes will be
glancing at the frosty sea
& waiting for sails, prepared.