RAIDERS OF THE LOST DOG KENNEL
I WAS A PRIMARY-SCHOOL BOY sitting on a plank of wood on the muddy sideline and didn’t realise it at the time, but I first gazed upon Murray Ball one winter’s afternoon in 1959 at the Palmerston North showgrounds when the Junior All Black and son of an All Black marked the great, snorting, prancing British and Irish Lions winger Tony O’Reilly, who was half man, half racehorse.
‘Mostly O’Reilly beat me with sheer pace on the outside,’ sighed Murray years later, when I reminded him of the thumping Manawatū received. ‘Other times he sidestepped inside me. And then, when he got bored with that, he just ran over the top of me.’
Most rugby players get better and better in fond recall, but not Murray. Typically his nostalgia trod a fine line between lacerating honesty and mocking self-deprecation.
I remember still the exhilaration I felt when I stumbled across Murray’s early editorial cartoons in the now long-extinct Manawatu Times. They were nothing like the stolid, insipid, reactionary offerings in other newspapers. They burst off the page with a rude energy and undeniable humanity. Imagine a Giles cartoon if Giles had dropped acid. And they were drawn by somebody from my hometown! If you wanted to be a rock star back then it was a hopeless cause unless you came from Liverpool. Actually, if you wanted to be anything, coming from Feilding made everything a hopeless cause, until quite literally at the stroke of a pen, Murray opened up possibilities.
Those possibilities expanded exponentially when strips by Murray began surfacing in British publications. Stanley the Palaeolithic Hero, who graced the pages of Punch magazine for many years, was clearly the work of someone of astonishing wit and fierce intelligence. The black shearer’s-singlet-wearing Bruce the Barbarian, who appeared in a left-wing journal, was clearly the work of someone fiercely egalitarian. If it is possible to be too egalitarian, Murray most certainly was. Injustice and unfairness burned him, and as a consequence the fruits of his success always made him uncomfortable. When the imperfections of the real world bore down on him he departed England and retreated to a remote and beautiful part of New Zealand where he created a perfect world of his own, ‘Footrot Flats’.
Mike Robson, the editor of the Evening Post, saw the strip’s potential and snapped it up. Other newspapers followed suit. Seemingly overnight the strip was enjoying phenomenal popularity across New Zealand and Australia. A transplanted Northern Irishman, Pat Cox, a former newsreel cameraman and film editor, running his own production company making snazzy commercials in Wellington, fell hopelessly in love with the strip and the world it captured and approached Murray about making ‘Footrot Flats’ into a full-length animated feature film.
Murray had never written a film script before and recommended to Pat that I co-write the screenplay. I had only written one television play, Inside Every Thin Girl, but in Murray’s eyes that made me a veteran.
In truth it was a Victorian marriage. We were both innocents. We shared a rural Manawatū background. We both knew the sound sheep make when they cough at night, and the creak macrocarpas make in the wind. We’d heard weka call each other at dusk, roosters crow at the break of dawn and chained dogs howl at the moon. And we knew each other.
A friendship based on mutual respect and trust deepened over the next two years. Money was never mentioned. It was a passion project. We both had families to support and other paying jobs demanding our attention, but together and separately we devoted all of our spare time to the task. Sometimes Murray came to work with me in my attic office in Wadestown or I went to stay on Mikos, Murray and Pam’s slice of paradise just over the hill from Gisborne. One summer we met halfway and worked in a Palmerston North motel.
No matter the location, Murray insisted on breaking the day up with a sporting contest of some sort, usually involving eye–hand coordination, like golf, ping pong, squash or tennis—which put me at a huge disadvantage. To make the tennis interesting, we would play five sets, starting with me leading two sets to love and five games to love in the third set. Despite this seemingly unbeatable advantage Murray would chase me down and win three sets to two, barely breaking a sweat. Long before Dean Barker was caught from behind and humiliated by Jimmy Spithill in the 2013 America’s Cup, Murray was doing it to me on a regular basis. His teasing was merciless. I don’t think I have ever laughed as much. He had a genius for including my children in games and making them great fun. Dear little Shaun burst into tears when a game of backyard cricket in Palmerston North had to be called off because it was pitch black and we could barely see each other, let alone the ball.
It took a year just to plot a rough storyline. Murray was astonishingly fecund. With every new plot suggestion he would sketch out on the spot more sight gags than we could possibly use. I soon realised that my major role would be to pare back the flood of material accumulating each scripting session and keep the storyline moving forward. I suggested ransacking his brilliant back catalogue for gags, but ever honourable and never one for short-cuts Murray insisted on all new material. He wanted the screenplay to remain absolutely faithful to the ‘Footrot Flats’ world, but he also accepted the need to introduce some external menace to sustain a feature-length plot. He came up with a new character, Vernon the Vermin, the King of the Rats, and during one weekend session he worked on the crocopigs overnight, arriving the next morning with the characters fully developed, fully rendered, lurking in the muddy waters of the script as if they had always been there. Remembering the terrifying wild boar in Battersby’s bush, I loved the idea. It was my suggestion to include the storm and flooding, and consistent with my fear of water I was the instigator of the Dog and Horse being washed out to sea at the film’s climax.
Pat gave us extensive notes on pacing and structure and we toiled away for the best part of another year completing a storyline to everyone’s satisfaction. I remember the exciting moment in my attic when I finally wound a sheet of A4 paper into my small portable typewriter and typed in the magic words:
RAIDERS OF THE LOST DOG KENNEL
A dog’s life, 1st draft
Murray and I were just kidding with the title, but it can’t have been too far off the mark. As I was going I would read it out loud to the kids. Cute little Ned listened enthralled and squealed, ‘This is more exciting than Raiders of the Lost Ark!’
I still have that manuscript. It’s huge. Including Murray’s attached cartoons to clarify the action and copious quantities of my white-out, it is bulky enough to derail a train. I am particularly fond of one scene that Murray, for all his brilliance, could never have written. With his superb aerobic capacity it would just never have occurred to him. It needed to come from me. It required someone with negative buoyancy:
EXTERIOR, DAY. RUGBY GROUND.
It is half-time and the two teams are huddled at either end of the muddy paddock. The grandstand crowd is stretching and standing up. The scoreboard still reads 12 to 0. At one end Irish Murphy is berating the Mill team.
MURPHY: Geezzz what are ya? Playing with the wind and only twelve points up against that pack of girls! You should be murdering the sods. I wanna see some effort this half. I wanna see some driving! I wanna see some sweat! I wanna see some blood! I wanna see some guts! I wanna see a priest being called onto the field to administer the last rites. Is that clear? Yeah and do that Footrot joker, he’s getting on my nerves!
At the other end it is Wal’s turn.
WAL: The trouble … (choke) with you lot … (gasp) is … (gasp) … you’re … not (gasp) fit.
When the project stalled at the lights, Pat brought Wellington film producer John Barnett on board and together they got it funded and made—never easy with an animated film. Dave Dobbyn backed by Herbs launched the film with the magical song ‘Slice of Heaven’ and the movie was a box-office triumph on both sides of the Tasman.
John was to come to my rescue on two more of my dramas: the television mini-series Fallout that I wrote with Greg McGee, which John rescued when he became head of South Pacific Pictures, and Separation City, which only got New Zealand Film Commission funding after his gutsy intervention on our behalf after what he considered unfair treatment.
John let slip once that his dad won the Military Medal for bravery at Ruweisat Ridge in North Africa in World War Two. There is no question in my mind that John inherited all of his father’s chromosomes for courage. He is an articulate, relentless campaigner for causes he believes in. It is wonderful having him in your corner in a fight. It is much less fun being on the receiving end of a scolding, which I have been from time to time. He is a good mate. I owe him a lot. And Pat Cox is a wise and trusted confidante.
I owe Murray even more. Being invited to co-write Footrot Flats was an honour in itself and to have it succeed beyond all expectation gave me the courage to write feature screenplays and stage plays of my own. I’m proud to have known him. Through all weathers, in all seasons and over time, in ‘Footrot Flats’ Murray created a world every bit as delicate and true as a Katherine Mansfield short story, every bit as visceral and unsentimental as a Ronald Hugh Morrieson or Barry Crump novel, every bit as whimsical and nonsensical as a John Clarke or Billy T. James comedy routine (both of whom appeared in his film), and visually every bit as arresting and instantly recognisable as a Rita Angus or Toss Woollaston painting. To borrow from Dave Dobbyn, Murray gave us a slice of heaven.