As I am a heart attack waiting to happen, I want to write a set of tales relating my brilliant non-career in the movie business, like testimony from a deathbed, to tell the truth of my travails, successes and failures, and curse my detractors. For 21 years I slogged away at it, “in the gutter looking at the stars”, but being a working-class fag I received little respect and had no connections, I didn’t go to a good school nor belonged to any powerful clique, so I was definitely “pushing shit up hill” wanting to be in movies in the bureau-aristocracy that prevails in Auz. The following stories are my truth, believe what you will, I swear by them.
Recently a mate of mine was shooting a movie on Kings Cross called “X” and he’d given me a small part in it, I play an old skeeze night clerk at a seedy motel and I drool over a teenage prostitute for 15 nano-seconds of screen-time.
At last my star-turn had come! I have spent much of my life hiding in the dark in cinemas, living out endless fantasies, my fondest being the rags to riches variety, guttersnipe makes big in Hollywood as a movie star. So from childhood on I was possessed with the idea that I would somehow get discovered and become a luminous star, and I did kind of, only it was a mon-star I became, which is awful, but a catalogue of injustices made me so.
As a kid I’d stand outside the Princess Theatre in Melbourne waiting for the bus, while inside a grand musical like “My Fair Lady” was being played, and I’d sing my heart out in a high castrato voice, hoping a great Maestro like Diaghilev would stumble from the stage door and discover me, and like Judy Garland I’d sing on the silver screen “somewhere over the rainbow”. It was across the road at the Comedy Theatre that the great Marlene Dietrich fell off the stage and broke her leg, drunk from the angst of being so broke she had to wearily strut her stuff in a hick backwater such as Melbourne. So much for superstardom!
When I was sixteen Mick Jagger came to town to star in Tony Richardson’s movie, “Ned Kelly”, shot on location on the outskirts of the city. I fantasized crashing the casting agent and scoring a bit part as a wild colonial lad, in one stroke participating in iconic movie-making and getting palsy with my masturbatory pop idol, Mick. Only real life doesn’t have sunny Hollywood endings, proletarian poofs like me couldn’t possibly put a foot in Movieland, that abode of demi-gods, I was a little nobody from the Olympic Village Housing ghetto in West Heidelberg, destined for toe-jam to grease the Beast’s machine, at best maybe dress dummies in the window of Myers Department Store. And I had no stage-mother to push me, no encouragement at all, so I chickened out of even trying.
In my teens I did amateur theatre in suburban halls then I fled to India and pranced about in Goa with a group of musicians warbling silly sci-fi rock operas. As I grew into adulthood I figured the best way of becoming a film star was to make my own movies and put myself in them. Little did I realise the can of worms I was entering into when I cracked the backdoor of the Auz Movie-house. As I sat at the Piccolo Café waiting for my call to attend the shoot for the Kings Cross sleazebag epic “X” I thought about all the twists and turns that brought me here, the open-minded, kind souls who helped me and the smiling vampires, soulless artsholes and talentless dicks who fucked me every time I tried to realize a brilliant idea. I am a mangy old alley-cat squalling from my dumpster at the injustices of the world, those who ripped me will say it’s all a paranoid, dyspeptic bastard’s crap, who gives a shit, the telling of it will be fun.
The first of my grand film projects was called “My Survival as a…Deviant?!” By 1978 I had grown cynical and rebellious, anarchic and surrealist, I was a punk and reveled in anti-cinema via the underground, at pubs and rock clubs. A good friend by the name of Glen Lewis put a super 8 camera in my hand and I stumbled around Sydney shooting willy-nilly, interviewing all the city’s deviant and lunatic fringe types, swinging a hand-held camera about, the frame shaky, out of focus, the mike attached to the camera with the wind ripping up the soundtrack, very punk and cinema-verite. I had overheard two sharp politicos discussing the social relevance of “deviance”, I flashed it was a fitting through-line for all the claptrap I’d captured on Super 8, all the misfits finding their space and fighting for it, all good signs of a quasi-democracy in pursuit of happiness.
I’d been told there was a fair dinkum cool chap in the Creative Development Branch of the Australian Film Commissar, and while loath to be co-opted by Government handouts, I needed a few thousand dollars to put the raw material together for a complete final print, uncouth though it was. I tippie-toed into the functional, concrete building in North Sydney and up to the Film Commissar’s offices, and was lucky that the first person I ever met in the rambunctious, cut-throat world of the Australian film industry was the rare one in seven who will help a hot artist rather than hinder him. Chris Tillum was indeed a sweet, cool dude who, on sight of the footage and the script, recommended I be assisted as best as possible to help complete the project.
By 1979 I had shot many hours of shaky home movies showing how I lived in those times, broke and harried, at the Pyrmont squats where I lived with misfits attempting Utopia but constantly under attack, and the deviant types I came across blabbing their dispossessed souls out, pot smokers, anarchists, a gay aborigine, a feminist stripper, a stream of cranks and renegades, and me the iconoclastic artist wandering in and out of frame, pasting up my scurrilous posters upon the walls of the city. This “Survival” film was very bad and almost unwatchable, but so was the life I lived, unslick, and what do you expect for three thousand dollars anyway, “Godfather Part 7”?
I guess the toughest part of the shoot was outside the rock club “Rags” on Goulburn Street, while I was filming deviant teenage past-times a gang of rednecks attacked a group of Punks who all ran back into the club leaving one little fellow to bravely fight off all the thugs. Without hesitation I placed my camera on the ground and ran to the melee, throwing punches at all the morons’ heads, breaking the mob apart in their surprise. I picked the Punk up from the road and dragged him back into the club before the fuckwits realized we had escaped. Up until then I was the fag outsider, now I was told I was the only guy with any guts and welcomed into the Punk fold. This was just the beginning of all the battles that would ensue in trying to make it in the elitist field that’s called ART. (I know, the Big Hero, but that's how I grew up, punching it out with everyone.)
To be anarchically outrageous, I premiered this Super 8 monstrosity at a benefit for the notorious criminal, Ray Denning, at Garibaldi’s Restaurant, to raise money for his various legal challenges, he’d had such a hard life and I was suckered into his claims of prison-guard brutality, and it seemed to fit with my theme of deviancy. (I was a member of ‘The Prisoner’s Action Group’, we protested the brutality of prison guards and managed to reform the gaols considerably, but in this particular instance Ray was lying, wanting revenge against the System badly.) I designed a fleuro poster of a giant cartoon Santa Claus, with half-demonic face and horns, descending upon my squat to crush us squatters pictured in photos in the bricks of my dockworker’s cottage. “My Survival as a Deviant?!” was a graphic title that grabbed the oddball crowd’s attention and the night was a rollicking success, most of the punters liked the film and thought it captured ‘deviance’ in the raw.
As the interviewer in this documentary I had put myself in centre-frame but in case I felt too cocky I got wine thrown in my face by a gang of grumpy feminist dykes who accused me of using a deadly serious, political cause for the furtherance of my bullshit, artistic career. My eyes stung mercilessly, the “I am a camera” maestro blinded on his first big opening. I knew there was a bucket of sloppy mop-water in the loo and I badly wanted to tip it over their ugly mugs but for once in my life I took the punishment and smiled bitterly. I had, after all, finally arrived on the Scene. I would’ve bet the association with the much maligned Ray Denning would tarnish rather than brighten my reputation with the world at large, and as I was from the gutter I knew I was going nowhere except back to the gutter, for all my delusions of grandeur.
By 1980 I’d shown the film in many rock’n’roll venues, squats, pubs, coffee lounges, wherever they’d let me, the travelling presentation all part of my performance art. The Daily Terror newspaper miraculously gave me my one and only good notice ever by reporting that the Creative Development bureaucrats had cracked a bottle of champagne on the film being passed by the Censor, declaring it had artistic merit, all to my amused befuddlement. I tried to get it distributed by an independent agent, but to my dismay the only renters were government offices like the Department of Mental Health, who used it as a treatise on psychiatric aberration.
Yet all this attention whipped up the movie mogul in me and I schemed to make bigger and better films, politically incisive, only with a fantastic edge of science fiction because I wanted to throw some colour onto the squalidness of social realism. Dreary real life had lots of fantasy in it to soften the hard edges, or so the confabulist in me felt, and so I worked hard to learn animation to use as special effects for my next big film project, “The Thief of Sydney”.
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anarcho-queer, rock and roll punter and mystic adventurer in Australia and India
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