The Never-Ending Suicide Note: 2) Virgin Beasts Fucked Over.

The Never-Ending Suicide Note: 2) Virgin Beasts Fucked Over.

This story has been burning a hole in MY heart for thirty years. To get it off my chest once and for all I'm telling it publicly so, if I should die tomorrow, I will leave a note behind, as if in a bottle, to tell anyone interested of the travails of an Australian artist who was not connected to any power-broker or from a private school.

Also this is an invitation to a rare show of my movie “Virgin Beasts” on July 31st 2021 at a warehouse called The Sky Palace in Alexandria, and I want to warm up anybody interested with the tale of how the film got made.

In 1982 I was refused entry to the National Arts School, going down the road I was accepted into the Communications Course at UTS where I majored in Writing and Text Studies. Back in the 1970s I did have an artist mentor who I apprenticed myself to, Murry "Latimer" Triggs, which for me is the traditional way of imbibing art, sitting at the feet of a Master.

I was privileged, as a trained palliative care nurse, to be with him as he died beside the Ganges River in the Himalayas in 1974, and I watched avidly as he drew pictures as good as Albrecht Durer and Diego Rivera, up until a week before he died. We threw his body into the Ganges, an honour reserved only for great yogis, and the only Australian ever to receive it. Thus I didn't exactly come from nowhere, I've been around, and through the mill a thousand times, and my art expresses this explosively.

I got it in my head, after the success of "The Thief of Sydney", that I was going to be in the movie business and possibly off to Hollywood. Always the naive fool, I just didn't get the facts of the game straight, movies required millions of dollars, only the elite with power-monger connections could participate, and a queer guttersnipe from social housing and government schooling such as me simply was not in the running, in fact I would be told, "Exit through the toilets!"

I wanted to make a feature film, anarchic, iconoclastic, subversive, thus I knew I would not be able to raise much money for such. I also wanted it to be science-fiction, a rock opera and musical burlesque, an animated fairy tale and a political drama. With all this lumped together the genre would have to be Trash, as I wouldn't be able to interest professional actors, the props would be tacky, the sets wobble and the cheap costumes scoured from thrift stores.

I had by then seen 5000 movies and, without realising it, had drunk in the art of editing, photography with lighting, narrative with dialogue and how the music soundtrack supported the story and action.

I dreamed up a fantastical story about a rich old arms dealer on his death bed who still thinks his money will allow him to live forever. As he's shot up with the best drugs he hallucinates his transmigration into a parallel universe where he is a dolphin in a post-apocalyptic, destroyed world. I saw it as a mash-up of myth and folklore, "Beauty meets the Beast at the Masque of the Red Death in Search of The Holy Grail to win Land Rights for Gay Whales." Much later when I thought about the various levels of meaning I changed the last part of the catch-phrase to "to Beat Brand Rights for Grey Males."

My literary references were: "Le Morte d'Arthur" (Sir Thomas Mallory); "Searching for the Feminine: The Women of the Holy Grail" (Teresa Marie Lopez); "Holy Blood Holy Grail" (Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, Henry Lincoln); The Feminine Mystique (Betty Friedan); "Masque of the Red Death" (Edgar Allen Poe); "Beauty and the Beast" (Charles Perrault); "Fathering the Unthinkable" (Brian Easlea); "The City of God" - ("Arion of Methymna, celebrated lute player, was thrown overboard and rescued on a dolphin's back and carried to shore" - Saint Augistine of Hippo); "Utopia" (Sir Thomas More); "The Alchemist" (Paul Coelho); "A Season in Hell" (Arthur Rimbaud.)

As a work in progress my script was first titled "No Love Lost" but that didn't seem to capture the gist of the story I was struggling towards. I was riding my bicycle one day thinking about "Beauty and the Beast", how the male beast himself remains an unfeeling virgin if he cannot provide sexual enjoyment for a woman, mainly because of the rough, uncaring way he "fucks", (as if fucking a piece of meat instead of a sensitive, aware woman), and never experiencing true orgasm because of it.

Also I thought about the holocaust the human race perpetrates against the animal kingdom, killing them cruelly for sport and food, maiming them out of sheer sadistic pleasure; and such animals are innocent, vulnerable, powerless, untouched by "civilisation" and thus are virgins as in virgin soil and virgin forests. So I changed my title to "Virgin Beasts", a kind of oxymoron of opposites fleshing out a holistic metaphor, as in Rimbaud's poetry.

I applied to the Australian Film Commission for script development with a rough, short story but they thought it too fanciful, and were dismayed by the sub-text of my last film, "The Thief of Sydney", and as one (American) assessor croaked, "We are not into funding subversives who want to burn the world down!" I replied, "Oh yeah, like Paul Newman setting the barn on fire at the end of 'The Long Hot Summer.' I'll make this movie over your dead body."

I continued working as a night nurse in the "homes" for the aged, witnessing death close up. Toiling from 10pm to 8am in the morning cleaning up shit and laying out bodies, in the wee hours when everyone was sleeping I drew my story board, kind of like a comic book revealing frame by frame the shots that would tell the story.

It contained costume designs, ideas for sets, animation effects and characters. My fellow staff members were nonplussed at my busy scribbling, especially as I disturbed them in their snoozing. When I told them I was going to be a great movie director they thought I was as demented as our senile "residents" and quite up myself.

After a year scrawling dolphin designs in the land of the dying my story-board lay-out of the movie was finished and I again approached the Australian Film Commission, this time to fund pre-production, all aspects covered in my submission. This involved interviewing and rehearsing actors, dancers and musicians; finding locations suitable for the drama; lining up the crew, director of photography, lighting, props-master, set dresser, assistant director, sound-recordist, costumer; where to rent equipment, camera, lights, cables; music recording studio, caterer, insurer; possible marketing and exhibition; building and decorating sets; animation desk and materials; editing facilities. All in all a mammoth task for me the producer and it needed funding to do a proper job.

But again, the assessors at the Film Commission couldn't envisage the story, theme or genre. They were certainly not interested in Trash cinema, they ever had their eye on "classic, high art" that would win international prizes, and I was a deviant Punk with a drug-fueled, hallucinatory vision and I was persona non grata to boot given my shenanigans with my last film, "The Thief", regardless that it had won Bronze at the most prestigious animation festival in the world, Krakow, Poland. They rejected the project for the second time.

These bureaucrats were paid big money to nurture and create interesting films both daring and of cultural significance. They should've put me with a producer and a script adviser as their job dictated, but no, they were too precious, nepotistic, (their acquaintances were definitely in with a chance), and deadhead towards wild creativity. That's why, in my mind, very few original movies get made in Australia, which is capable of so much more, (for $200 million, give $2 million each, without govt interference, to a hundred filmmakers and you'd assuredly get at least 50 interesting movies.)

But of course the scammers would rush in where there was already a plague of them. In a totalitarian State it's the way of most government bureaucrats to keep the money amongst their set, and play it safe, don't rock the boat and quash significant critique.

My determination was profound, I was 36, with unbounded energy and sharp wit. I went back to work as a night nurse and with the money I earned did the pre-production, lining up everything, sure that somehow I would make "Virgin Beasts." To fulfill one's dreams and achieve one's goals you have to be tenacious, hard working, single-pointed, extremely concentrated, studious, gregarious and not take "No!" for an answer. And allow nothing to distract you and waste your seed money, not drugs, chaos ( I was living in Pyrmont squats), beat-ups, sex, love or nay-saying powers, don't let anything get in your way, in my case ART was my addiction.

In 1987, with the production fully presented as a package, budget included, I approached the Film Commission yet again. For nobodies like me there is no alternative, no studio or production house that will back me, no private investment, no eager producer willing to carry half the burden, (they all had their own projects and kept their funding a closely guarded secret). No horde of dentists willing to invest some tooth-pulling money, only the government who say they back Australian stories but who in reality crush any political critique of the system, all must be jolly kitchen-sink melodramas.

Finally I got a sympathetic assessment panel, my "peers", a few of whom were impressed with "The Thief" and liked the rock music vision of the Beasts, seeing it as a possible cult favourite. I batted off every question like a champion cricketer and they agreed to give me $30,000 to get me to a rough cut that include the music recorded but not the animation painted and filmed. I was promised a further $30,000 down the track to complete the film, with animation, sound mix, final edit and print, all in 16mm film.

Of course I was very happy, my "Virgin Beasts" movie was now a strong possibility, all I needed to do was a vast amount of hard work with ingenuity, and parsimonious budgeting. A good thing I had grown up poor and knew how to live on the smell of an oily rag. I didn't want to buy a house, snort cocaine or rush off on a tour of Europe, I was resolved to make that damned movie.

I cut the finance into tiny slices, like Donald duck with one small sausage to eat among a gang of hungry hangers-on, and managed to pay EVERYONE; the cast and crew got union rates and they hired me their equipment cheaply; I found a low-rent tin shed to shoot most of the drama in, (The Slaughterhouse in Redfern); my costumer had a huge collection of rags she'd purloined from St.Vinnies; the insurer gave me a break; the props-master was a genius and created wonderful objects from rubbish; same goes for the sets, all discarded junk and left-over flats; I learned how to make rubber-latex objects, the masks for the mutant Beasts and the hearts for the heart swap surgery, lucky I lived in the squats and had no landlord to complain about the mess for I got paint and rubber-latex dripping from everything; Rachel Foster hospital rented me a proper hospital bed, and Sydney University lent me surgical equipment and an ECG machine.

I worked as a night-nurse right up to the one week's rehearsal and two week shoot, a good thing too as I was able to filch discarded appurtenances from the hospital's garbage dump for my heart surgery scene: catheters, drip bags and stands, old oxygen cylinders, a trolley, much of it dumped by the side of the road and which I snapped up as I drove out of the hospital every morning. I was working in the geriatric wards down the back of Callum Park and I noticed the ancient sandstone dungeons abandoned for a hundred years and was able to rent them for a few days for my torture-cell debacle.

After one weeks rehearsal we launched into the shoot. I had to do eight jobs as that's what my budget dictated. I was like an octopus, each arm dealing with a harried cast or crew member. I was director, producer, art director, choreographer, music director, writer, and actor. The set decorator couldn't set the table, I had to tell her where to put the salt and pepper shakers. The lead actress was a prima donna, she had to be driven to and fro like a human yo yo, taking up half the day with my precious production car. She also demanded several takes for her every move, when I could really only afford one take, we counted every inch of film stock and I fell behind with my daily ration.

We shot mostly at night to cut down on sound interference and disturbance but it caused most of my actors to fall asleep much of the time. And it was freezing cold so we set up a tin drum with an open fire in it to warm the cold storage shed, but it filled the studio with noxious smoke and everybody was coughing and blinded. I saw the film crew muttering together up the back and asked them what they were scowling about. They wanted to rebel, the smoke was too much, it was too cold, they demanded the whole production be moved to Paddington Town Hall video studios.

I said, "Oh yeah? Where's the money coming from to do it?" As the Producer/Director one has to be a bit of a martinet, strong about everything, for wimps bite the dust and no film gets made. They heard the determined captain's note in my voice and toed the line.

In the middle of filming a crew member rushed onto the set and wailed there was some strange woman in the garage having a drug-induced fit. I stopped the shoot and went to take a look. There she was, all scraggy-faced and hair awry, locked inside a car and screaming her tits off. Everybody ran around in a panic, like a stirred up ants nest. It was time for Nurse Ratshit to make an appearance.

I tapped on the car window and yelled, "Don't worry, dearie. We've called for an ambulance and they're on their way to give you a shot of Narcane. That will snap you out of it." She instantly went blank-faced and sat up straight. The car-door opened with alacrity and out she jumped. She gave me a smirk and growled, "No thanks! I'm outta here!" She quickly scampered out the garage door, never to be seen again. It turned out she was the caterer's girlfriend. Whew! Easily handled. Cecil B. de Mille took over and shouted, "The movie must go on!"

We continued our tawdry artistry, the sets did indeed wobble when we touched them, the rubber hearts refused to beat, the acting was wooden, one of my "pigs" whipped a slave too strenuously and I had to get him to do it in slow motion, softly.

In the Callum Park hospital dungeons everybody swore the horror-house was haunted and refused to stay there long enough for me to get the decent shots I required. The props-master flipped out from fatigue and frustration because the props, such as whips, rubber-heart trolley and blinking Christmas lights were all falling to bits. He ran around smashing everything he could lay his hands on and I had to make him go home and sleep. Luckily a good friend of mine, David Grove, very clever with his hands, took over the props department and got everything working beautifully.

Just as things were kind of limping along satisfactorily and we were about to take our midnight dinner break, the caterer/chef passed out from sniffing the whipped-cream cans and we really did have to send for an ambulance. I took over and served up the cold soup, much to the crowd's grumbling. That's show-biz for you.

Finally it was over, I vaguely had a very trashy movie in the can(s) with only a few missing pieces that I hoped I could do in pick-ups in post-production. With a thousand strips of celluloid film hanging from various racks I edited together a rough cut of 80 minutes, with dialogue and music soundtrack, just managing to to be able to call it a short feature.

With that rough-cut I went back to the Film Commission to get the last promised $30,000 to finish my grand movie. Somehow with that small amount of money I was going to do about thirty minutes of animation, creating 20,000 acetate cells, fifty backgrounds, film them a frame at a time under the camera Eddie had built for me, and get the film developed. I then had to do a sound mix, a final edit and a print of the finished film, including opticals, (superimpositions and dissolves), and credits rolling at the end to their own piece of music, kindly supplied by a hot band, "Monroes Fur." It was a task for Rumplestiltskin but with my eager, naive youth I felt up to it.

I again had to face an assessment panel but this time they stared at me glumly, they just couldn't see how the story unfolded, what it was about, the trash genre didn't impress them at all. Of course it was hard to envisage, there was no animation yet to connect the storyline, even though it was fully drawn and explained in the story board. It was now 1989, feminism had been the ruling political cause celebre, and all power to it, my own mother had been terribly brutalised and I very much wanted equality, freedom and advancement for women.

The Film Commission was mostly run by women, if your film was about women's issues you were in with a hope. But if you were a bloke, a queer, working class, punk anarchist, well lets' just say you were not flavour of the month. In fact, to the dyke mafia that controlled the AFC at the time, I was not a person of interest.

I was refused any further funding, my project was to be disbanded, I was banished to my squat-hovel to rot amid my film cans stacked to the crumbling ceiling. I was so depressed I considered suicide. Then I was told by a female friend who had applied for funding at the same time as me that she'd gotten the money for her now forgotten project because she'd fucked one of the lesbians on her assessment panel. I swear this was what she told me, I was furious, for this is how this damned world turns, on nepotism, money and sex. (I can hear the mafia hissing like Medusa now.)

One day not long after hearing the gossip from my girlfriend, I saw the boss of the Creative Development Branch, Ms. McMuffin, sitting in a cafe and I couldn't resist storming in and telling her of the outrageous corruption involved in the assessment process. All I got from the great feminist savior was a shocked, dumb stare. She herself had, while in the job, arranged funding for her next project, then left the job and six months later was given a million and a half dollars to make her high-art mistress-piece, "Pissing Under Water", about travelling into a woman's unconscious, her dream-world, via animation. Where had I heard that before?

Again, I support the women's struggle, I've been arrested protesting women's right to abortion, a blot on my criminal record, part of the ruination of my life, a stance she'd never taken, and here she was fucking with my future prospects just like the pigs had done.

For all of 1989 I went to every floor of the Australian Film Commission, all 7 of them, each floor responsible for a different department of filmmaking, and I begged the 7 managers, all women, to please continue the funding of my film as it was a terrible fate to have it destroyed halfway through production. Every one of the hard as nails bureaucrats refused to help me, word was out, "fuck him off."

I didn't give up, hope burned eternal in my heart, I was absolutely confident I was going to be a movie star, it was my destiny, every Hollywood movie assured me of this, the happy ending where the ingenue in rags gets the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. In the meantime I line-rehearsed my dolphin characters, drawing them and the whales over and over until I had instilled some character into them, much as Mickey Mouse finally got a personality after much drawing. But no one in power would help me, I was condemned to ignominy and death without a ripple in the social pond. Sydney is like that.

Then in 1990 I heard the AFC had got a new boss, Peter Sainesbury, a man brought in from the British Film industry to shake the joint up as the nepotism had gotten out of hand, millions had been given away to "friends" and not enough interesting films had gotten made. I rang his secretary but, like all dragons on the door, she told me he was busy and didn't have time for a nobody like me.

Somehow I got the phone number to his inner office and rang it. The man himself answered and in one minute I gave him a pitch about myself and my film and he invited me up for an interview. Remember, my motto is "Never Take No For An answer!"

I took him my rough-cut print and my story-board, told him my vision of animation with rock'n roll and he "got it." He asked me how much I needed to finish "Virgin Beasts." I'd already worked out a rough budget that would pay me and two other artists for a year to do all the animation, $104, 000. He said, "Are you sure that's enough?" I was shocked, I'm a poor boy from a very poor background, I'm not a businessman nor do I live to make a grab at as much money as I can get, so I hesitantly said, "$110, 000?" Now honestly, I could've said $150,000 and he would've given it to me, he knew my treatment had been unfair, my guardian angels hovering somewhere nearby had whispered the truth to him,(a few of the female bureaucrats were sympathetic friends and gave me a recommendation.)

Perhaps I could've got a 35mm print at the end of it with that extra money, but I knew it would end up on video so 16mm was sufficient and more easily handled. I'm not greedy, like Ms. McMuffin, and was satisfied he was giving me an amount I knew I could finish my movie on. I punched the air in victory as I walked away from him.

I toiled throughout 1990 and into 1991, painted and shot the animation myself with my new animation desk in my new Housing department flat, having been moved out of Pyrmont Squats. I paid a good artist friend to paint most of the cells, I drew everything and did a hunk of the painting, and I paid Eddie van der Madden to help with the backgrounds and the special effects which he created on an Amiga 500. I sat under hot lights and meticulously shot the thirty minutes of animation, frame by frame, many thousands of them, sliding backgrounds with two levels of cells, for hundreds of hours.

The AFC insisted I cut it down from 80 minutes to sixty minutes and I paid an editor to cut it to 67 minutes. I paid another friend to do the sound mix out at the Film and Television School, he got carried away and mixed his sound effects into the foreground and put the dialogue and music into the background which mightily disappointed me as it was a rock opera. Later on Troma of New York, who took on distribution, fixed the sound, improving the music, so I was somewhat mollified.

I can say, with all the various fuck-ups that fell upon the film, it ended up like swiss cheese with lots of holes, yet as I'd set out to make it absolutely in Trash style, it all worked perfectly and I had achieved that long held dream from childhood, to make a feature film and be the star of it. I arranged to show Peter the finished product at a cinema in North Sydney quite near the AFC building and every bureaucrat on every floor was invited, those very departments I had begged so earnestly for help, and not one, NOT ONE of the fuckers came to see what I had achieved, they were egregiously peeved, possibly jealous, that I had dared achieve it.

Peter laughed throughout the screening, much to my gratification as it is a comedy, and he shook my hand at the end of it, happy that I had lived up to my promise, which would've been a punch in the eye to all those brain-dead bureaucrats who had negated me, and him.

A few years later I met a few of those grey bureaucrats outside the Orpheum Cinema and they hissed at the mention of Peter's name. Of course they had ganged up and eventually gotten rid of him, and they snarled what a bastard he was, never taking their advice and never supporting their recommendations. I spat in a fury, "You lot have a nerve, you gave money to your friends for projects that were either bad or didn't eventuate at all, while I got fucked over by your fellow worker ants and your dear friend McMuffin. You all left me to rot among my stack of film cans to the point of considering suicide. He is a great guy and Australia needs more like him, maybe then we’d get some better films made." They politely shat their pants, they'd never been told off by a Punk before and coming from me it surprised them. That's the kind of nerve these dickheads have, they enable you getting fucked over and you're expected to bow down and say, "Fuck me some more, please!" Ha, not where I come from.

"Virgin Beasts" never did get accepted by conservative, gronk Australia but it did go on to be voted Best Trash Movie, along with a fantastic Japanese film, at Freakzone, the First International Festival of Trash, 1996, Lille, France. They flew me there for the Trash extravaganza and the French Punks went wild for the story, the animation and the rock'n roll and for 7 nano-seconds I was the IN thing. But that's another story to be told in the future, suffice it to say that it has shown all around the world, on television, cable, in festivals, in cinemas, on DVD and streaming.

But Australia slammed the door in my face; I applied to have it shown at the Sydney LGBTQI Mardi Gras, half the actors were queer, half the crew was queer, I was quintessentially QUEER, the film reeked of queer sensibility, but no, it wasn't about a GAY tearing out his hair and squawking about being gay, so it got rejected.

Even the fashionistas who ostensibly say they adore trash cinema have eschewed it, in 35 years I have never been invited to show it anywhere, perhaps it's too radical, too trashy, too outre, or I'm too declasse, deadbeat, queer, Punk. I think the tall poppy syndrome operated against me as it always does in Australia, and all those talentless, trend-followers are jealous that I, from the gutter, achieved what they never could.

I've had to go beg to get it shown, or put on the show myself, underground, which suits me fine, I prefer going under the radar, who wants to be public property anyway? But it would be nice for it to get some recognition. Oh well, Freaks like it. It's getting a rare outing in a Warehouse called The Sky Palace in Alexandria on Saturday July 31st 2021, if COVID allows.

I've done an act for many years, starting in 1978 at a squat in Darlinghurst called Side F/X, showing my animated films above me while I sing and tell stories, accompanied by musicians. Mostly I team up with a genius electric slide-guitar player, Paul Vassallo. I call us Deadbeat and Gronky and I call this show we're doing soon, "How to Become a Movie Star or Stunt Your Growth Trying." In it I tell the story of the making of "Virgin Beasts" and why I'm no longer a virgin, because I got FUCKED OVER!

Starring: Goose Pressley, Simon Reptile, Mathew Cooke, Mark Easton, Chris Donovan, Michele Granieri, Toby Zoates and Tex Perkins.

Music by: Box the Jesuit, Monroes Fur, Candy Harlots, Thug (Peter Reid and Tex Perkins), The Oasis Mob (Dorian Dowse), The Gunnery (Paul Vassallo and Peter Hartley), Toby Zoates.