I have been writing a suicide note for many years consisting of thousands of pages in Blogs, novels, comics, letters, posters, flyers and stories shouted into the void. One day I will come to some conclusion and then, with a last breath of satisfaction I will off myself, this deleterious life will be over and I can leave the planet and all the tumult behind.
I experience ongoing dread and exhilaration like two entwined snakes and the fight between the two wears me down. The dread of being homeless and penniless, of losing my work and my lover, of getting cancer or a death in the family. Then there's dancing ecstatic and abandoned, music to cause my heart to fly high, books to bring tears to my eyes, a golden crescent moon hanging on the horizon as seen from a mountain top, and sex, luscious sex in the arms of an angel, all so fleeting and I am so tired.
The gist of my disappointment is BETRAYAL, by friends, acquaintances, strangers, even myself, but mostly my competitors in a competition I was naively not aware of. Yes there were times of exquisite joy, but my travails suffered too many depredations, hard labour, cruel beatings and mean spirited exclusions, and the perpetrators got away with it, so with my last breath I will indict them, with my truth. Until I decide when IT'S OVER I will keep on writing for I must tell my story, before some arsehole attempts to bowdlerize it.
Part One : The Thief of Sydney Ripped Off.
After reading 1000 books and watching 3000 movies; after being the charge nurse in many hospital wards; after living for four years in India and sleeping on the streets of Delhi and Mumbai, and dancing naked on the beaches of Goa; after hitching around Australia and the world, surviving rapists, bashings and serial killers, earthquakes, hurricanes and riots; crash landing in Sydney in 1977 I looked around me and said, "Yes, this is where I will base myself, this is where I will create my life's work,"
I decided to write a story and make a short animated film called "The Thief of Sydney." Its literary sources were: "The Time Machine" (H.G.Wells); "On the Beach" (Neville Shute); "Logan's Run" (William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson); "The 1001 Arabian Nights - The Thief of Baghdad" (Anonymous Sufis); "The Thief's Journal" (Jean Genet); "Huckleberry Finn" (Mark Twain); "The Hero's Journey" (Joseph Campbell.)
I began studying animation in 1978 under a Dutch master, Eddie van der Madden. He had built an animation-camera desk and taught me several techniques, cut-outs, stop frame models and acetate cells. I also attended a short course in animation in 1979 at the Australian Film and Television School. My story involved a dance competition in the future called "sound surfing" and I wanted naturalistic movement instead of the quaint loping-style of walking of traditional cartoon characters.
I was shown a short film by a Canadian filmmaker of an animated pair of legs walking realistically and told the process was called "rotoscoping." It involved the live action filming of a person walking, then inserted into an overhead projector and frame by frame beamed down onto a desk-top where each frame was traced onto an acetate cell that was fitted onto a registration bar. Then the collection of drawings, coloured in, was shot in sequence, again using a registration bar, frame by frame under a camera, until on film one had the exact same naturalistic movement only now drawn as a cartoon.
I did two experimental short pieces to use as examples of what I was hoping to achieve, close-up of real live-action of a woman's head eating a hamburger and smoking a cigarette which dissolved to a cartoon head eating and smoking, then consumer items flew out of her ears and rotated around her head as if she were hallucinating.
I also shot a girl dancing which I then rotoscoped and shot under the animation camera, only now she was drawn wearing a futuristic costume and dancing on a sound wave. The sequences were quite impressive in their realistic movements and I showed them, with a story board, to my assessment panel when I applied for money from the Creative Development Branch of the Australian Film Commission. After explaining how I was going to achieve a futuristic dance competition with this rotoscoping technique I was given $7000 to start the project and promised another $6000 later on to finish it.
In my first year of doing the live-action filming of this project I happened to go to a party and there met a vampire named Julie Cuntham. She asked me what I was doing and, instead of playing my cards close to my chest and keeping my production secret, I blabbed, "I'm making an animated cartoon." "Oh!' she chortled, "I'm very interested in animating, can I come and look?" The thing about vampires is they only get to bite you on the neck after you invite them in, this was a hard lesson for me to learn and I regretted it for the rest of my life.
She came to Eddie's studio and, without permission, brought two hungry, bug eyed guys with her, Jon "Hobart" Spews and Bruce Cold Curry, graduating arts school drongos. I stupidly told them everything about my project, the cut-out cartooning technique, the use of acetate cells, and rotoscoping which they'd never heard of. I even showed them my test footage of my dreamed up cartoon characters.
What a fool, wanting to help and encourage, it never entered my head that they were inexperienced dopes who were yet to experience life and didn't have a clue about the infinite potential of animation. They licked their chops as they avidly gazed upon the camera desk and before I knew it, within days, had talked me and Eddie into forming an "animation co-op" with them and a few other arts school wankers as the coordinators.
Now I was entrapped within a coven of deadhead, avaricious, ambitious vampires and I could only swoon as I got my wild inspiration sucked of its originality. They quickly snaffled the camera-desk away into another location, to become their private toy and fame machine. At an evening show of the "co-ops" happening production, at which only my test footage was shown, all their eyeballs popped. One of them, a trendy cow named Lucinda Clusterfuck, quickly made a short rotoscoped cartoon of... a girl dancing on a sound wave, for which she got some notoriety and money to make her next masterpiece. Duh! WTF... I started to get a hint of what I was dealing with in these dicks, copycat morons.
After getting the final $6000 instalment because I had shown the Film Commission what I'd achieved with the liver-action shoot, I took 4 more years to alone paint, photograph and edit twenty thousand cells and fifty backgrounds for a thirteen minute film. Spews and Cold Curry together made a 3 minute part-animated clip of the band in a few months, using rotoscope to dissolve between the live action and the musicians prancing about. To add insult to injury the plagiarists actually copied my very design, even though they could've done a zillion other amazing effects, they did a design of a head eating shit food, using that fuckwit clown Flacco instead of a woman to act the part, and they had crap fly out his ears and circle around his head. He probably knew it was stolen from me as they were a tight-knit gang of wannabes who knew everything about each other; such is the hunger for fame there is no dastardly deed fools won't pull. Many of those NAS graduates are self-entitled brats, that's what the school teaches them in the main, and how to stab in the back or fuck up any competition, no dirty trick is below them
For example, in the midst of carrying on about an "animation co-op" Hobart Spews found out the AGNSW was asking for submissions to an exhibit they wanted to hold showing the latest in Australian animations. Spews must've got the info from his NSA contacts and entered a piece of his inane crap but didn't tell the rest of us about it. I only found out after submissions closed, this is the kind of cooperation this asshole was into.
They were so hopeless and lazy I had to tell them where they could buy acetate animation cells, (Hannah Barbera Studio in Camperdown); what factory to go to to buy the cheapest tubs of acrylic paints, including fluros; and I had to buy for them the all-important registration bars to place the acetate cells upon, (I had scoured the whole city of Sydney and eventually found a man who made the in a shed in his backyard.) One day I came home to my squat studio to discover my own registration bar was missing, someone had broken in and took it, right in the middle of my own production of "The Thief". My intuition zeroed in on one perp, that dummy Cuntham and I rushed over to her studio and asked her about it. "Oh yes," she admitted, "I sent a guy over to break in and get it. I needed it for my own film." I was furious and snatched it off her desk. This was the kind of uncaring, self-entitled no-hoper they all were in this animation "cooperative."
Th is was the early '80s, a pandemic was raging through the gay community, and the callous het supremacists were probably hoping I'd die of HIV so I wouldn't tell the story of their betrayal, little did they realise I'd live till my seventies and finally tell the truth of what happened, and even prove that I'm not a one hit wonder, as I've produced a lot of hot art over the years.
When showing him my film I told Spews that I used animation to depict the thoughts and hallucinations my characters were experiencing, and years later I read an interview in an arse-wipe magazine where he said, "I and Cuntham started a cartoon co-op together in 1981, (no mention of me and Eddie), and I used animation to depict my characters' thoughts and hallucinations." My blood boiled!
Spews and Curry got some fame for this clip, eventually scoring well-paying jobs for life, and the band got further artistic "kudos." What they didn't have were literary stories, cutting ideas, meaningful themes, their stuff was inane, vacuous crap, all packaging and no content. With determination and hard work I finished my "Thief of Sydney" in late 1984, and got it shown for a few weeks on the big screen at the Academy Twin Theatre where on opening night it got thunderous applause that nearly brought the roof down. It has since shown on television, in theatres all around the world and on cable, and sold on DVDs, though I hardly got a penny.
I was nominated for Best Animation in 1985 by the Australian Film Institute and at the nominations dinner at The Ritz Hotel I was seated next to Dickie Lowenstein, as if we had something in common. Each nominated filmmaker got an excerpt from his/her film projected up upon a wall for all the elite diners, sitting at their Cinderella tables, to scope. My piece pictured my protagonist, Singood, graffitiing "KRAP!' on the wall under a giant video monitor upon which the Emperor of Sydney, the Turd Doc, makes a portentous announcement, "You too can join the Elite.". The audience's collective jaw dropped. I was dressed in a sequined matador's jacket, my hair gelled up into two Luciferian spikes, and I stood out like cat's balls. All the nominated artists were asked to stand up so everyone could stare at them, I felt like a whore on an auction block so instead of springing to my feet I sank very low into my chair, and thus I pissed the elite off with my intransigence. Dickie Lowenstein wouldn't talk to me and turned his back on me for the rest of the dinner.
In Melbourne for the awards, after the celebratory dinner at the Ritz, each of us was supposed to be picked up by a limousine and whisked off to the Victorian Arts Centre where they were going to present the tacky trophies. I stood out the front of the hotel with my girlfriend Sylvia but as all the limousines sped past I realised there was to be no silver chariot for me. All the elite sniggered from their windows as they made me eat their exhaust, on and on I waited forlornly for the ride that never came. Honestly, it was one of the most embarrassing experiences of my entire life. Car after car rushed by and I felt like a fucking idiot. Suddenly a limmo pulled up and the door swung open, Alessandro and Marianne, up for the best documentary award, waved for me and Sylvia to get in, they had come to my rescue and were sharing their limousine ride with a Punk persona non grata, it was so cool and democratic of them I will love them forever.
You can't keep a good story down, it is still alive here in 2021 and I sometimes get stopped on the street by young enthusiasts and told how much they love "The Thief" and that it inspires them wonderfully, for its main theme is about a young, unemployed man who dreams he will get a future and succeed at something, no matter what disasters may befall him. I was vindicated on the world stage when I won The Gold Dragon, for script, at the 1985 International Animation Festival, Krakow, Poland.
In 1982 I applied to get into the National Art School using my "Thief of Sydney" story board as an example of my art and I was knocked back cold. They did me a favour as, in my view, they're only interested in "corporate art", art that will hang in boardrooms and foyers of multi-national corporations. I went down the street and applied to do Communications at the University of Technology, using the same story board as my admission ticket, and they snapped me up to do their amazing, "mind-feeding" course. I majored in Writing and Text Studies and this has been the foundation of my story-telling, though I know many would say, "whining."
The three vampires didn't really do much of note for the rest of their careers. Oh, the two guys each won Best Animation with inane cut-out crap at the Australian Film Institute awards, a renowned conservative fuck-fest, and their films were never seen again. The mob of AFI culture-vultures who had ignored my cartoon gave the 1985 prize to an innocuous, "nice", safe piece of fluff about some goody-two-shoes and her quaint uncle, which also has hardly seen the light of day since. I'm proud to say the lone Australian prize that "The Thief of Sydney" did win was the "Children's Panel of the Australian Teachers of Media Awards"; the uptight teachers who ran the show had tried hard to get the kids to vote for something else but they adamantly stood their ground and swore my "Thief" was the best animated film in 1985. How I love those kids!
The lust for fame, and of course the money that goes with it, makes soulless creeps willing to sell their grandmothers to the glue factory to get a piece of it. What happened to that scarecrow Julie Cuntham? She got a job doing some special effect on a film of a good friend of mine, which he told me she fucked up totally. As he drove her home he asked her if she knew me and she had the nerve to say, "I taught him everything he knows about animation." My mate said, "Toby will be surprised to hear that," for he knew my story and he watched her grimace in dismay. This was a woman who couldn't even press the button that shot one frame of film under the animation camera, she constantly had to have the boys show her what to do.
What really pissed me off was she couldn't dream up an original design for her one piece of animation that managed to get some notice. She desperately wanted notoriety in a field that is infinite in potential, such as a speeding car turning into a Pegasus and flying away into the heavens. But no, she didn't have an original idea in her flaccid brain, she did a realist head dissolving into an animated head, just like in my test reel, for a short film called "Arseholes From Woollongong." I eventually placed my animated dissolve of a woman's head into my Super 8 music documentary "Darling It Hurtz!" which I didn't finish until 1987.
A major theme of "The Thief of Sydney" is a gladiator dance contest fought out above the Opera House, each contestant knocking the others off their sound wave to splatter upon the pristine white tiles below, blood flowing freely down those famous curves. This is how I saw life in many workplaces of Australia, nasty dicks killing off their fellows and putting themselves forward.
At the beginning of my project in 1980 I had to show every bureaucrat in the Film Commission my story-board revealing every shot I hoped to make to communicate the tale of "The Thief of Sydney." I also had to show the many interested parties I hoped to get involved, the actors, the film crew, the insurance brokers, the costume and props makers, the musicians and sound recordists. As I shot each piece of film many workers in the development lab, Atlab, got to see what I was making, right from the start of the nuclear explosion which I shot first under the animation camera.
Sydney was a small town then with a very small arts community, it's obvious word of my project must have gotten around. A few years later I saw the cover of Peter Carrot's album, "Dead Snails in the Sunset" which he says he got an artist in Japan to create in 1984, the same year I finished "The Thief". It's exactly the same as my design of an empty Sydney harbor, a nuclear bomb having gone off in the middle of it, the Harbor bridge in ruins.
Are you telling me it's a coincidence that exactly the same design idea can be created in the same year, 1984? Considering Carrot's pathetic history of supposedly being anti-nuclear then in future opening uranium mines when he was Environment minister for Labor, I don't doubt that turncoat would be all ears to a hot idea he heard in some flake's whispered gossip. Oh shock horror, not our dickhead hero Peter, who am I to question his politically astute reverence?
Though I'm from a very poor, working class family, am queer and anarchic, with no boy's club from a private religious school to rely on and no powerful connections to give me a leg up, I still managed to make world class art, In actual fact, "The Thief of Sydney had its world premiere in the backyard of Pyrmont Squats, projected onto a stained bed-sheet, with a mob of anarchists and punks drinking home brew beer, smoking joints and cheering. I've had a marvelous, adventurous life, of boons and abasement, wondrous highs and devastating lows; and I don't give a damn what spoilt shits and fascist power-mongers do to push their flaky careers, or what jealous, mean-spirited untruths they can make up about me.
This is my truth, my story, for what it's worth. Those creeps I've indicted will lie, they'll squawk, "That's not what happened, TZ's a loser, mad and deluded, he's a nobody, a whining little poofter, and he got his karma by being relegated to the gutter and ignominy." But the gutter can be where the punchy art gets created, such as
"The Thief of Sydney Ripped Off.
