COLIN exits. ELAINE enters at a cocktail party. Chatter and the clinking of glasses can be heard. ELAINE stands by herself with a glass in her hand. MIKE approaches her.
MIKE: Mike McCord.
ELAINE: [frostily] Oh, yes. You’re working with Colin.
MIKE: [nodding] Getting a few projects together.
ELAINE: Good.
MIKE: You?
ELAINE: Getting a few projects together too.
MIKE: Good.
There is an awkward pause. ELAINE doesn’t want to continue the conversation, but MIKE stands there doggedly.
Ned Wiseman’s film’s a disaster.
ELAINE: [interested despite herself] Really?
MIKE: They put it in the third house at the Hoyts complex and it only did seven thousand.
ELAINE: The first day?
MIKE: The first week.
ELAINE: That’s a disaster.
MIKE: Total. Have you seen it?
ELAINE: Bad?
MIKE: A character says, ‘I don’t know why we’re doing this’, and the audience yells, ‘Neither do we’.
ELAINE: [trying to hide her glee] How sad for Ned. I quite liked ‘Coastwatchers’.
MIKE: Could’ve been better.
ELAINE: It lacked momentum.
MIKE: [nodding] Right.
ELAINE: Second half was a little better.
MIKE: [nodding] A lot of that was mine.
ELAINE: You wrote the second half?
MIKE: We were both still in on it, but Colin ran out of steam.
ELAINE: The second half was quite strong. Emotionally.
MIKE: Had to fight for that. Emotion embarrasses Colin.
ELAINE: Yes, it does, doesn’t it?
MIKE: Prefers things clinical and distant. With me it’s emotion, emotion, emotion all the way. Colin’s a bit cold.
ELAINE: As a person?
MIKE: [nodding] Never seems to get stirred up by anything.
ELAINE: No, he doesn’t.
MIKE: Shows up in his writing.
ELAINE: I’ve never thought of it like that, but you could be right. The second half was a lot stronger emotionally.
MIKE: [shrugging, taking credit] Well, if you don’t know when to put the accelerator down, you shouldn’t be driving the car. Whenever I write a scene I ask myself one simple question: ‘What’s at stake? Who stands to lose, who stands to gain?’ Unless something’s at stake all you’ve got is two people chatting.
ELAINE: That makes a lot of sense, Ian.
MIKE: Mike.
ELAINE: Sorry. Mike.
MIKE: Those films you made with Colin. How much of the horsepower and the emotion came from you?
ELAINE: An enormous amount. An enormous amount. You can’t skirt around anguish and you can’t skirt around pain, and I made him take back those scripts and rewrite and rewrite until we got it.
MIKE: It shows.
ELAINE: Not that he’s ever thanked me for it. I’m not denying that he’s a very talented writer, but I had to ride shotgun over him to ensure we felt something.
MIKE: It shows.
ELAINE: Not that he ever thanked me for it. Did you ever see Days of Wine and Whitlam?
MIKE: [nodding] Good movie.
ELAINE: Do you remember how big Stewart Egan was then? International rock star—every producer in the country offering him roles and every one of them being turned down flat. I saw him seventeen times before he agreed to do it. Seventeen times, and he finally signed. It made that film and it made Colin. Now, can you believe this? Without a word of warning, Colin turned on me last year and launched an incredible tirade about how I’d compromised the film because Egan was a rock star. Can you believe that? Can you believe that?
MIKE: [shifting uneasily] Turned on you?
ELAINE: [gritting her teeth] I said to myself, ‘You ungrateful swine. You ungrateful bloody swine.’ And then he had the gall to tell me Scranton was the wrong choice of director.
MIKE: [uneasily] Really.
ELAINE: [gritting her teeth] I thought to myself, ‘You conceited young swine. You were damn lucky to get him. Damn lucky to get him.’
MIKE: Scranton names his own price in Hollywood these days.
ELAINE: I thought to myself, ‘Let’s see you have the guts to land in Los Angeles without a penny and make it to the top like Scranton’. It took years to talk Colin into coming as far as Sydney.
MIKE: Perhaps he knows he wouldn’t make it over there.
ELAINE: Exactly.
MIKE: If there’s one thing Hollywood demands, it’s emotion.
ELAINE: [grudgingly] He’s got talent.
MIKE: Sure.
ELAINE: But severe limitations.
MIKE: Yep.
ELAINE looks slightly ashamed of herself for having said so much.
ELAINE: Must go and meet this director. What is he, Yugoslav?
MIKE: Pole. Don’t bother.
ELAINE: You’ve seen his film?
MIKE nods.
A little slow?
MIKE: [nodding] Starts at a crawl and gallops to a standstill.
ELAINE smiles, turns to go away, then turns back.
ELAINE: Are you and Colin working on your projects full-time, or do you have some time to spare?
MIKE: Always got time to spare if the project’s good.
ELAINE: I’ve got a very good project. I should talk to you about it.
MIKE: I’ll give you a ring.
ELAINE exits.
[To the audience] I’d worked out by this time that collaborating with Colin was leading nowhere. He didn’t have a gut feel for the commercial and never would. I had my doubts about Elaine too. Pompous old chook, with more venom than the reptile house at the zoo, but she still had a reputation around the traps, and when the word got round that I was working on one of her projects, the real offers would start coming in.
MIKE exits. COLIN speaks to HELEN in another corner of the room. He’s consumed with desire and trying desperately to conceal it.
COLIN: I don’t normally come to these things.
HELEN: I have to. I’m organising the PR for this guy.
COLIN: Must be difficult to crank yourself up into a state of enthusiasm if you don’t really feel it.
HELEN: Can be, but this guy’s really nice. Have you met him?
COLIN: I haven’t seen his film yet, so I’m too embarrassed.
HELEN: It’s really good. I know I’m being paid to say that, but it really is.
COLIN: I must see it.
HELEN: [nodding] It’s about this guy who loves his wife like crazy—even though she’s a bit off, behaviour-wise. Manic depressive or something. She falls in love with a truck driver and goes off with him and feels really guilty about it, but it’s compulsive and she can’t really help herself—you know?
COLIN: [nodding] Right.
HELEN: The husband is absolutely devastated. There’s this one scene that would have to be one of the most moving scenes I’ve ever seen on film.
COLIN nods.
The husband just sits there crying for two minutes and the camera doesn’t move. I sat there bawling my eyes out. Can you imagine an Australian writer or director having the guts to do anything as sensitive as that?
COLIN: [melancholy] If an Australian writer scripted something like that it just wouldn’t get made. The distributors and merchant bankers and network execs who run this industry wouldn’t bother to read the script. All they want is money, lust, power, crime, fashion, intrigue, murder, jewellery and crocodiles.
HELEN: I know. I feel disloyal saying it, but I hate some of the Australian product I’ve had to promote.
COLIN: I hate it too, but Mike and I are writing one to exactly the same formula. It’s fine for the Poles. They don’t have to face commercial pressures.
HELEN: They have to face other kinds. The Ministry of Culture watches this guy like a hawk. He nearly went to prison after his last film because his main character was a corrupt party official.
&nbs
p; COLIN: Really?
HELEN: Colin, I’m going to say something to you I shouldn’t say.
COLIN: Please do.
HELEN: I don’t think your partnership with Mike is good for either of you.
COLIN: Why not?
HELEN: Mike’s at home with power, lust, murder and crocodiles and I’m not knocking him for it. We all have to earn a living. People in glass houses. But occasionally, when I’ve seen a film like that, I wish I lived in a better world where I could say what I felt and mean what I say, and you can write films like that and I think you should.
COLIN: Yes, I should. And you should be doing something better than selling people and products you don’t believe in.
HELEN: Yes, I should.
COLIN: I have to say this, and I don’t care how corny it sounds. You are one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen.
HELEN looks into his eyes. COLIN becomes nervous, manic.
[Talking rapidly] When you first walked into the room, I just stood there dumbstruck. Absolutely dumbstruck. You must have noticed.
HELEN: I did sense there was an extraordinary affinity between us. Right from the start.
COLIN: There was. An extraordinary affinity. And all I did was stand there, mouth agape. Instead of trusting the feeling that you were feeling what I was feeling, I began feeling that I might be wrong. Why is it that at the moment we should throw caution to the wind, we’re struck deaf mute with panic?
HELEN: Do you want to stay here long?
COLIN: I suppose you have to stick around here until the end?
HELEN: I should, but to hell with it. Let’s go and book into a hotel.
COLIN: Hotel? Yes. Hotel. What’s a good hotel on this side of the city?
HELEN: We’ll find one.
COLIN: Helen, this is crazy. This is really crazy.
HELEN: Crazy, but right.
COLIN: Did I bring the car? Yes, of course I did. Hotels. Where are we? North Sydney. Hotel. Jesus, my mind is a total blank. God, I didn’t bring the car. We’ll get a cab. There is quite a nice hotel somewhere over in Manly. God, no, that’s miles away. Artarmon! On the highway just down the road. Do you know the one I mean?
HELEN: No.
COLIN: No. It’s actually pretty appalling. No, there’s no way we’re going to go there.
HELEN: There must be dozens of places within a few miles of here. Let’s just get a cab and cruise.
COLIN: [suddenly pulling a set of car keys out of his pocket] Jesus, I did bring the car. I am going crazy. Can you believe that? I did bring the car.
HELEN: Great. Let’s go then.
COLIN: What about Mike?
HELEN: You go down first. I’ll think of an excuse, then follow.
COLIN hesitates.
Do you want to go, or don’t you?
COLIN: [to the audience] I couldn’t do it. In the seventies you could wreck marriages and traumatise kids and call it personal growth. In the eighties we realised that personal growth was a polite term for self-indulgence.
HELEN: [to the audience] What a bummer. Still, you can’t win ’em all.
COLIN: [to the audience, berating himself] Gutless, pathetic, pathologically timid! But it probably was just as well.
They stare at each other in the moonlight, nod, and finally part. They exit. Some time later COLIN walks into his living room, KATE sits there with an inscrutable look on her face. COLIN looks agitated and annoyed. As always, when worked up about something, COLIN patrols up and down gesticulating as he speaks.
KATE: What’s wrong?
COLIN: Kate, what am I doing with my life? I’ve just been to a Film Commission cocktail party and met a Polish director who works under daily threat and yet he makes masterpieces! I have every freedom in the world and I’m writing shit!
KATE: Not quite every freedom. The money men won’t look at anything that’s not sex, sadism or sensation.
COLIN: [at a peak of gesticulation] That’s the excuse I use to justify what I’m doing, but honestly, isn’t it just that? An excuse? A justification? Couldn’t I fight harder? Couldn’t I batter at the walls? Couldn’t I keep going back, bloody and wounded, until I found someone in this merciless money maze who asked what sort of film he was putting his money into, rather than the rate of return he thinks he’ll get? There must be rich men with the souls of artists out there and it’s my responsibility to find them. Why don’t I? Why don’t I try?
KATE: Apparently because you want money and power.
COLIN: I don’t want money and power!
KATE: You did yesterday.
COLIN: I don’t any longer.
KATE: Good. Want to know my news?
COLIN: What?
KATE: Black Rage’s been selected as a finalist in the Booker Prize.
COLIN: The Booker?
KATE: [nodding] Everyone in the office went berserk, and guess who was the first to congratulate me? Ian. The man who opposed it all the way.
COLIN: [dully] That’s great.
KATE: I’m being flown over there.
COLIN: To London?
KATE: [nodding] We’ve got to be represented in case we win.
COLIN: What about the author?
KATE: She’ll be there too. They’re flying us first class.
COLIN: First class? I’ve never flown anywhere first class in my life.
KATE: The Booker is big time, my dear. Big time. Just in being nominated will double our sales and there’ll be huge sales in the States if we win. Huge sales. When Tom Keneally won the Booker, Stephen Spielberg bought the film rights.
COLIN: [moral outrage sparked] Wait a minute? Hang on there! Wasn’t Black Rage going to be the book that was only going to sell a thousand or two but seep slowly into our consciousness? Stephen Spielberg? What kind of film will Stephen Spielberg make? Aliens descending in spaceships to take our downtrodden Aboriginals off to a loving, more equitable planet? Where are your ideals, woman? What’s happened to your ideals?
KATE: [defensively] Nothing!
COLIN picks up a brochure KATE has brought in with her. He reads it.
COLIN: Thai Airways? You’re going to be met at the doorway by an ‘elegant and courteous stewardess attired in traditional Thai dress, and offered your choice of French champagne or orange juice and delicious satay beef cubes and crab claws to nibble on’. How wonderful for you.
KATE: For once in my life I’m going to have a little bit of luxury and enjoy it.
COLIN: You’re living in a city in which thousands are homeless!
KATE: I can’t do anything about it in the short term, can I?
COLIN: Not when you’re thirty thousand feet up nibbling crabs’ claws, no.
KATE: I voted for the government that should be doing something about it. It’s not my fault that they aren’t.
COLIN: You found out that Sue Michaelis had flown first class, and asked her how she could ever justify the fact that the extra ten cubic feet of body space she had bought herself for twenty-four hours, would have kept eight families in Bangladesh alive for a year.
KATE: I was a little fanatical in those days.
COLIN: That was just last year.
KATE: Colin, whether I travel first class or not, the families in Bangladesh aren’t going to get any extra money.
COLIN: They would if you cashed in your first-class ticket, went tourist, and sent Freedom from Hunger the difference.
KATE: Colin, I’m feeling guilty enough already. Don’t make me feel any worse. The minute I have any success in my career you get nasty.
COLIN: I’m not getting nasty. I’m just pointing out that it only takes one first-class ticket and your ferocious moral standards take a nosedive.
KATE: Colin, this book has been one of my great triumphs. Can’t you be a little bit generous?
COLIN: Triumph? A mouldy little book in an overrated competition? I’m just about to become the first foreign producer ever to sell a series to prime-time television in the United States.
KATE: W
hat kind of an achievement is that? Prime-time television in America is to art what McDonald’s is to cooking.
COLIN: Which would you rather have a percentage of? Maxim’s or McDonald’s?
KATE: Colin, I think you’re coming apart at the seams. You came in here ranting with Polish-fired zeal, determined to make films of quality, and now you’re bursting with pride because you’re about to sell schlock to NBC. What’s going on in your head?
COLIN: [gesticulating wildly] I wish I knew! One minute I want to make a film that’s so beautiful and truthful and angry and funny that people in this country who still care about justice and truth and compassion will leave the cinema weeping, and the next minute my head is full of images of mansions on the waterfront. I know what I should do! Reject the false gods—but it’s not that easy! We live in a culture that worships wealth and worships power and gives artistic success no recognition or honour of any kind!
KATE: Colin, you’re being a little bit overdramatic.
COLIN: [overdramatically] Am I? Am I? What do you have at the end of your life to show for your artistic success? An old age pension, a one-bar radiator—if you can afford the fuel bills—and a few yellowing crits in a dusty scrapbook. It’s too demeaning, Kate. It’s too bloody demeaning! If I’ve got to choose between money and oblivion, I’ll take the money!
KATE exits. COLIN sits at Mike’s place. He dictates, or attempts to dictate, the script to MIKE as of old, but there’s a subtle change—MIKE is offering resistance.
Let’s have a close-up of him kickstarting the bike.
MIKE: Kickstart shots went out with Easy Rider.
MIKE taps out a few lines rapidly.
COLIN: [tersely] What was that you wrote?
MIKE: Just a thought I had.
COLIN: What?
MIKE: Catch up with it later.
COLIN: [quietly fuming] If kick shots went out with Easy Rider, what do you suggest?
MIKE: Zoom in on the helmet going on with a snap and pan down across his body to the exhaust pipe belching fumes.
COLIN: [considering this reluctantly] Alright. Write it.
MIKE: I’ve written it.
COLIN: [trying to regain control] Right, now before Grant rides off he should turn and say—
Emerald City Page 6
