Days of Wine and Rage

by Frank Moorhouse

  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)