Cinema Papers no. 23 September-October 1979 (2025)

OCR

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cover,

It follows a 25 day — 500 km.
horse ride through the Victorian
Alps.

The film crew, equipment and
film stock were transported by
four Wheel drive and horseback
into some of Victoria’s roughest
country.

For the film stock the norms
of refrigeration and ‘handle with
care’ were forgotten.

Yet Kodak’s 5247 still
delivered its high standard
of quality.

Capturing all the subtleties
of the midday alpine bush. The
splendour of mountain sunsets.
And the delicacy of an open
campfire.

For me, Kodak Eastman color
neg. 5247 made the inaccessible
— accessiblef’

Keith Wagstaff.
Director of Photography.

@

Motion Picture & Audiovisual Mar[...]ocation.
(Photography by Colin Beard.)

Film crew and equipment climbing MI. Bogong.

K7/9894

Following successful marketing campaigns of Australian films at the special film
week in Paris, at MIP-TV, the international film festival at Cannes and film week in
Tokyo, the Australian Film Commissi[...]The MIFED film market (15th-26th October) is one of the most important selling
arenas for the intemational film market.

The AF C’s Director of Marketing, Alan Wardrope, and United Kingdom and
European representative, Ray Atkinson, will be there, along with producers and
agents representing films for television, cinema, education, non-theatrical, home
video cassettes, pay and cable TV.

Alan Wardrope

Australian Film[...]

We have provided the artists with a[...]rate room, similarly outfitted, has been
provided for the production crew.

The sound stage measures 334 square
metres (3600 sq. ft.l, it is air conditioned
and has an adjacent food preparation area[...]‘

equipped with refrigerator, hotplate/griller
and hot and cold water so that food may be
prepared for "on camera" use.
One-hundred and eighty amps per phase of
lighting power is distributed throughout the

stu[...]e pin, single phase, 20
amp outlets at grid level and 6 x 3 phase,
30 amps per phase, outlets at floor level.
For scenery and props, there's a
construction and finishing area of 232
square metres (2500 sq. ft.) and a security
storage area.

We also offer a total post production
service, film color grading, cleaning and
film to tape transfer. CMX on-line or off-line
computerised editing; film sound scoring
and mixing. All under the one roof.

Our first produc[...]otton Productions’
‘Water Under The Bridge’ for the 0/10
Network.

If you'd like to find out more[...]5

(O3) 699 1844

Bookings are now being accepted for
March 1980 onwards.

It’s got the who, when,
where, what, why and how
ofworleing within this State.

Published by t[...]Film Corporation, it is the most
detailed listing of services, facilities, personnel, production
companies, state and federal law, distributors and exhibitors,
media, unions, guilds, location advice, useful contacts, etc., yet
compiled in this State.

For anyone currently working or interested in
Victoria’s film and television industry, this manual
should be compul[...]eet, Melbourne (03) 329 7033.
Price $3.00 (add $1 for postage)

AUSTRALIAN FILM COMMISSION

An average year for us at Film
Australia sees the production of
around 100 films and audio-
visuals.

As you can imagine, we

couldn't handle that volume

of work or maintain our high
standards without drawing upon
the wide range of film-making
talent available in the Australian
in[...]Directors, cameramen, grips,
writers, composers and artists -
in fact everybody who gets into
the act, both in front ofthe camera
and behind.

With the help of freelance Film

Australians, we've completed
impo[...]alloon Go, Who's
Handicapped?, Warwithout
Weapons and award winners
Hospitals Don’t Burn Down
and Leisure.

When you next view a Film
Australia production, remember
that it's also the production of
Australians who work in film.
Right across[...]

of the arts.

is

‘i__;%.

Comm unictionfl ihout[...]ause communication
without film just isn’t on.

For millions of people it is an
indispensable part of their daily lives.
Whether at the cinema. On tele[...]gfa-Gevaert is a film pioneer.
We grew up with it and we know its
possibilities. We also know
that whil[...]I’ AGFA-GEVAERTLIMITED

Perth 361 5399

SYSTEMS FOR PHOTOGRAPHY 0 MOTION PICTURES 0 GRAPHIC AR[...]

Keith Connolly

Articles and Interviews

Australian Women Filmmakers Part 4:
Jeni Thornley and Martha Ansara

Currents in Japanese Cinema: Nagisa
Oshima and Sachiko Hidari interviewed

Australian Television[...]aghan Morris, Barbara Alysen, Sue Adler 537
Guide for the Australian Film Producer:

ISSN 0311-3639

49[...]uction Survey 553
Production Report
The Sullivans and
The John Sullivan Story
The Sullivans D3V'd S*eVe[...]n Report: 547 Finn Reviews A Report: 530
The Last of the Knucklemen
Keith Connolly 563
My Brilliant Career
Brian McFar|ane 564
Days of Heaven
Meaghan Morris 565
Tim
Dorothy Hewett 587
My Survival as an Aboriginal and
Robin Campbell — Old Fellow Now
Bobbi Sykes 568[...]off Mayer 571
Book Reviews
The Australian Journal of Screen Theory
Nagisa Oshima Adrian Martin 573 Days Of Heaven
Interviewed: 500 “°fA:':f,y':°'R§°gf[...]ne, Tom Ryan, Basil Gilbert,
lan Baillieu. Design and Layout: Keith Robertson. Andrew Pecze. Business C[...]ian Film Commission.
Articles represent the views of their authors and not necessarilythose of the editors. While every
care is taken with manuscripts and materials supplied for this magazine, neither the Editors nor
the Publishers accept any liability for loss or damage which may arise. This magazine may[...]er. 1979.

Front cover: Tim Burstall’s The Last of the Knucklemen (see pp. 490 and 563).

Cinema Papers. September-October — 487

Shown in prime time, Prisoner was
seen by an audience of two million people,
representing a 25 per cent share of the
seven-station Los Angeles market.

In the U.S. for the premiere, the chairman
of the Grundy Organization, Reg Grundy,
said: ‘‘I am delighted for Australia, for the
actors and the people behind the scenes who
worked so hard on the show, and of course I
am delighted for the Grundy Organization,
too. Critics here have p[...]g Watson's script.

“The rating was sensational for the televi-
sion station, KTLA Channel 5. We beat NBC
and CBS networks, and all the other stations
in Los Angeles, with the exception of ABC
which is the top network station: even in that
case we were only beaten in the second half
by an episode of Charlie's Angels that had
Farrah Fawcett-Majors,[...]r. ABC Network phoned from New
York today to KTLA and said, ‘What did you
have on last night to get a[...]hey
couldn't believe the figures.”

The success of Prisoner coincides with
the announcement that Reg Grundy will
retire as president of the Grundy Organiza-
tion. The Organizations mana[...]esi-
dent, while Grundy will continue as chairman
of the Australian operation.

in the 19 years since[...]ndy Organization, Reg Grundy has been
responsible for production of some of the
most successful television variety shows and
series ever made in Australia, including the
game[...]brity Squares, Blankety Blanks;

the series Class of ’74, Glenview High, The
Young Doctors, The Restless Years, and
Prisoner; eight tele-features and numerous
documentaries. Another six feature films are
planned for 1980-81.

Lynda Keane and Gerard Magulre In
Prisoner, a hit in the U.S.

CANNES ’79

This year, for the second time, an
Australian film was selected[...]ic reception given to Fred
Schepisi‘s The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith
in 1978, combined with shrewd behind-the-
scenes lobbying by representatives of the
New South Wales Film Corporation, assured
Gillian Armstrong's My Brilliant Career of a
place in the Competition. it augurs well for
the selection of further Australian films at
future festivals, pro[...]continue to produce films that
appeal to festival and international ‘art
house’ audiences.

However, the value of the Cannes Film

'Festival —— which has become an annual

pilgrimage for many film producers — as a
marketplace for Australian films is doubtful;
particularly given the sorts of films now being
produced. The Festival certainly did not con-
tribute to the success of Mad Max in the
foreign market; it had already sold well
before Cannes. it is also debatable whether
some of the other more commercial Austra-
lian films at C[...]Child, Tim, The Odd Angry Shot,

Snapshot, Thirst and the Money Movers —

would not have been just as[...]Cannes, however, provided an excellent
showcase for My Brilliant Career, and un-
doubtedly assisted the sales of art-house-
oriented product like Kostaa, In Search of
Anna, and Palm Beach to smaller dis-
tributors. It also provided the opportunity for
producers to preview their films to the
organizers of many international film festivals
represented at Cannes.

There is no longer any doubt that the
number of Australians at the Cannes Festival
has reached a peak, and that many films are
over-represented. it would be far more cost-
effective for producers to spend a larger part
of their marketing budgets on promotional
materials and advertising, rather than on a
gaggle of assistants and hangers-on who do
little more than take in the Mediterranean air.

For most producers the Cannes ‘learning
period’ is certainly over, and with the exper-
tise now built by the Australian Film Commis-
sion and the NSWFC, it will be increasingly
difficult for inexperienced producers to get
the backing to go to Cannes in future years.

The AFC and the NSWFC again main-
tained offices at the Festi[...]past
four years the AFC has shifted the emphasis
of their activities from marketing to general
indust[...]perhaps a little over—zea|ous in
their handling of My Brilliant Career. The
controversy over the film involving producer
Margaret Fink and the NSWFC's represen-
tatives (widely reported in Australian news-
papers at the time) was unfortunate, and
although the fracas was, in part, the result of
a misunderstanding between the two parties,
it was detrimental to the overall promotion of
Australian films.

There was certainly no breakthrough for
Australian product at Cannes this year, and it
has become clear that dramatic increases in
the sales of Australian films can only occur if
the local indu[...]1 million or $2 million chalked up
from the sales of Australian films is insignifi-
cant compared to the $100 million turned
over by the Canadians. And although the
budgets of Canadian films are. on average,
much larger than[...]ernational
elements’ in their films.

A summary of the sales of Australian films
this year tells its own story. T[...]Cannes
by films entering the international market for
the first time:

Cathy’s Child: Lebanon, Greece[...]Ireland, South Africa, South-east Asia.

A number of other sales were made by
films represented at Cannes in previous
years, including: Dot and the Kangaroo, Let
the Balloon Go, The Picture Show Man, Pic-
nic at Hanging Rock and Patrick.

No details have yet been released by the
NSWFC for its four productions, but it is
known that My Brilliant Career sold to
France, Italy, Germany and Switzerland; and
Thirst sold to Latin America, South-east
Asia, Ireland, and the West Indies.

The details released by the AFC do not in-
dicate whether the films were sold outright,
or for advances with minimum guarantees;
nor whether the deals were for theatrical
release or television.

A I G

OZCARS

There are 146 entries in this year's Aus-
tralian Film Institute Awards to be held on
September 28. The entries include 16 feature
films eligible for awards in the following
categories:

Best Film;[...]ction Award;

Costume Design Award;

Sound Award; and

Best Original Music Score

The awards are decide[...]ction industry, with the AFI arranging
screenings of the 16 features in Adelaide,
Perth, Melbourne and Sydney. Directors,
editors, actors, etc. vote for the best achieve-
ment in each of their categories. Voters in all
categories combine with members of the AFI
to vote for Best Film.

Films receiving awards in the Short Fic-
tion, Documentary, Experimental and
Animation categories are pre-selected, then
judge[...]; Frank
Moorhouse, Eddie Moses, Don McLennan,

and Sophia Turklewicz (Short Fiction, Ex-
perimental and Animation).

The Jury panel — comprising Igor Auzins,
Susan Dermody, Joan Long, Bruce Moir and
Scott Murray —— selects films to receive Gold,
Silver and Bronze Awards, as well as
Honorable Mentions, two awards for
cinematography, and a special Jury Prize for
an innovative film.

The AFl‘s board of directors also selects a
film to receive the Raymond Longford Award
for a significant contribution to Australian
filmmaking. There are also $28,000 worth of
cash prizes donated by the film trade and
government film corporations.

GS

HANNA BARBERA[...]elevision.

The two companies who are responsible
for This Fabulous Century, have extended
the series at the request of the Seven
Network from 23 to 37 episodes. This
Fabulous Century has never been beaten in
ratings in Sydney, and has a Sunday night
audience of more than 700,000.

Peter Luck Productions and Hanna
Barbera are also planning three more series:
two for international release and one local.
The companies are not prepared to give
details of the productions at this stage;
however it is know[...]er is contem-
porary. Both are in pre-production, and
negotiations are underway with local televi-
sion stations and potential overseas
partners. Each will be 13, one-hour episodes
and will Involve a total investment of more
than $4 million.

Experienced film producer Hal McE|roy is
in charge of production of the new series,
and is being assisted by James McElroy.

Hanna Barbar[...]an
company, King Features, to produce eight
hours of Popeye for U.S. television. The
animation division, headed by Chris Cud-
dington, is committed to 18 hours of
animated product, and has just finished two
prime-time specials for U.S. networks.

PB

FILM IN CHINA

A market for Western film is slowly open-
ing up in China after a lapse of 30 years, ac-
cording to Gordon Carr, the Austral[...]in Peking.

China, is ripe to accept help, advice and
ideas from the West to aid in what is termed,
the[...]" — in agriculture,
industry, national defence, and science and
technology — and the Chinese freely
acknowledge that film can play[...]are interested in buying Australian
feature films and documentaries, and are
particularly impressed with the South Aus-
tralian Film Corporation’s Storm Boy.

Talks with Chao Wei and Hsu Wei Win
from the China Film Corporation, which con-
trols production, marketing, distribution. and
importation of feature films, were extremely
productive, according to Carr, and it is ex-
pected that purchases will soon be made[...]atures a year, produced in 11 studios in
Shanghai and Peking.

Although there are more than 5000
cinemas in China, there is little finance
available for feature film production. With
admission pr[...]

The Minister for Home Affairs, Mr Fl. J. Elli-
cott, whose portfolio includes responsibility
for the AFC, also visited Peking.

BC

CENSORSHIP

in the U.S., it is common for people to
cross state borders to see films in a l[...]ia, with Queens-
land viewers often driving south of the border
to catch films banned by Bjeike-Peters[...]broughtthis
about

To coincide with the launching of the Aus-
tralian edition of Penthouse. Channel 10 in
Sydney commissioned a do[...]o
You Went to be a Centrefold?, on girls pos-
ing for nude photo-spreads in Penthouse.
(Russian defector Lillian Gasinskaya is one
of the girls shown modelling for photo-
graphers.) Channei 10 broadcast the pro-
g[...]ecided on
August 17 that it wasn't “suitable” for broad-
cast. Presumably, Channel 0 executives
believe the moral values of the Melbourne
television audience to be different[...]station like Channel 0, which has shown
such sex and nudity-filled shows as The Box,
for issues of public morality.

in the April-May 1979 period, s[...]re refused registration. Two, Alice in
Wonderland and Falrytelea, were videotape
versions of films that had already been
released as “R" (after eliminations). Pre-
sumabiy the difficulty of making cuts in a
videotape led to the films being[...]appealed their classifications
to the Films Board of Review; all applica-
tions were, not surprisingly[...]idermen Strikes Back challenged its
"NRC" rating, and The Last of the Knuckle-
men and Over the Edge their "R" ratings.
Knucklemen presumably received an "R" for
indecent language, but its dialogue is no
stronge[...]lent scenes. Yet again, the Common-
wealth Censor and the Board of Review have
shown lack of contact with "prevailing com-
munity standards”.
SM

MARKETING POW-WOW

The director of marketing of the Aus-
tralian Film Commission, Alan Wardrope,[...]g
representatives recently to review the
progress of the AFC‘s overseas operations,
and plan strategies for the coming year. Pre-
sent were Jim Henry, the No[...]son, the European representative
based in London, and Gordon Carr, the
Asia/Pacific representative.

Du[...]ic at
Hanging Rock, The Picture Show Man,
Patrick and Newefront were all in release.

The Last Wave loo[...]all summer
at the Royal Theatre in Santa Monica, and
Picnic at Hanging Rock has opened well at
two Los[...]so making an impact in the U.S. The
smash success of Pi-honor in Los Angeles
had done more for Australian flim and televi-

sion than any other recent development. Let
the Balloon Go, and Dot and the Kangaroo
are playing on pay television in a number of
states, and The Odd Angry Shot has been
sold to Home Box-Office. The AFC has also
negotiated screenings for Film Australia's
The Russians and The Human Face of China
documentary series on the Public Broad-
cas[...]ding to Henry,
have created a situation in which, for the first
time, the U.S. commercial networks are ex-
pressing interest in Australian product. Pay
television and commercial television syn-
dictators are also ask[...]pe, however, is not so
bright. With the exception of a major sale of
The Sullivans to Greek television, there have
been few significant sales of Australian film
and television to European countries.

No doubt the A[...]uropean operation — par-
ticularly in the light of recent criticism over
the failure of the AFC to send representatives
to two major Euro[...]erlin
Film Festival were staggered by the absence
of an AFC representative, and found
themselves fielding questions from potentia[...], film commentator Bill
Collins denounced the AFC for failing to

represent Australian product.

Collins said he and the two other Aus-
traiians at Moscow were constantly ap-
proached by distributors anxious for
information about Australian films. He said
tthee FQFC had been invited, but declined to
a n .

PB

DAD AND DAVE RESTORED

A 41 year-old Australian feature. Dad and
Dave Come to Town, screened at this year's
Sydney[...]t film to be
restored by the film archive section of the
National Library of Australia.

The restored version. running for 88
minutes, is nine minutes shorter than the
orig[...]tage.

The original film was made by Keri G. Hall
for Cinesound Productions in 1938. it starred
Bert Bailey and Fred MacDonald, and is
notable for one of Peter Flnch's first screen
appearances.

Dad and Dave Come to Town was
restored by inter-cutting duplicate negatives
of the best surviving Australian print —whlch
had many scenes missing due to projection
damage — and of a shorter version which
was made for release in Britain. The sound-
track, which had t[...]ntercuttlng could begin, was re-
recorded because of its different levels and
varying quality.

Mr Keith Pardy, the Library's film techni-
cian, was responsible for the restoration
work.

LFI

COPYRIGHT REPORT

Aft[...]ustralian Film
Commission has published a summary of the
papers and discussion from a seminar,
“Aspects of the Law on Film — Copyright",
held at its Sydney offices on August 5 and 6,
1977 in conjunction with the Australian Copy-
right Council.

The contents of the report include “Making
the Film — Permissions and How to Get
Them" by Andrew Martin, "Distribution of
Australian Films" by Lloyd Hart, “Problems in
the Law" by David Catterns, “lnternationa|
Protection of Cinematograph Films" by
Adrian Sterling, and “Protection of ideas and
Titles" by Peter Banki. Discussion leaders in-
cluded Colin Marks, Ian Baillieu and Harry
Shore.

Some of the papers have been
reproduced as delivered; oth[...]ed, with com-
ments, by Peter Martin.

While some of the material is undated,
most of it remains relevant. Copies of the
report are available at the Australian Film
Commission, 8 West St, North Sydney, NSW,
2060, for $10.

IAKB

MERGER

The Australian Film institute and the
National Film Theatre of Australia, two
cultural, non-profit organizations[...]ger took effect from July 1, after
several months of discussion and planning
between the two organizations. The general
manager of the AFI, Mr John Foster, said: "i
have worked closely with the director of the
NFTA, Mr Rod Webb, in bringing this merger
in[...]ial support from the Govern-
ment, have a history of in-fighting and petty
jeaiousies, and we believe that it is a signifi-
cant achievement[...]long-term, broadly-based aims before ex-
pediency and territorial aspirations.“

The former NFTA company is in the
process of being wound up. its operations
have become a function of the AFI, with its
employees now with the AFI. How[...]will retain a separate identity, as a divi-
sion of the AFl, and its activities will continue
as before.

“The move is warmly supported by the
AFC and the Australian film industry general-
ly. it will lead to a more efficient utilization of
resources, and will clearly establish the in-
stitute as the one[...]d with film in Australia,” Foster
said.

“The institute's board of directors, chaired
by Mr Barry Jones, MHR, has be[...]ding up to the
merger. The Board will now resign, and an
election for a new Board will be held. This will
allow members and subscribers ot the
former NFTA, who join the AFI, to participate
in the election."

Dad and have come to Town: restored by the National Archive.

THE QUARTER

j_

The result of the elections for the seven

positions on the new AFI board will be[...]t task will be to appoint an ex-
ecutive director and financial controller.

AB

AFC GOES COMMERCIAL

According to the chairman of the Aus-

tralian Film Commission, Ken Watts, the[...]ather than encouraging
‘high risk’ ventures.

of Australian films and television

He told a parliamentary committee hearing

—— at which the AFC’s budget proposals for
1979-80 were outlined — that the
"developmental[...]nce.

“We will still be looking after the young and

developing filmmakers, but, at the same
time, we[...]rs.

“When we started we decided that the

base of the industry needed broadening. Not
many people had had opportunities, young
people coming on with lots of aspirations and
ability, and we created a lot of activity in do-
ing this."

The AFC has so far declined to comment

on Watts’ statements, and film producers are
anxious to ascertain what new[...]will be adopted by the AFC in
the implementation of its new policy.

While the AFC has, for some time now,

promoted itself as “Merchant ba[...]lm industry", it has taken risks in
backing films of doubtful commercial poten-
tial. However, the failures of the Australian
film industry cannot be placed on the
shoulders of younger, less-experienced film-
makers. While established directors have
received funds from the AFC time and time
again forfor some of the
major commercial — and critical — succes-
ses of the Australian film industry.

For example, Mad Max, Australia's most

recent commer[...]ng's first feature.

While the AFC is responsible for fostering

and developing a viable feature film industry,
and must function, in part, as a merchant
bank, it should be careful not to favor feature
film and television projects packaged by
more experienced producers at the expense
of younger, less experienced, but more in-
novative filmmakers, who are most likely to
produce the original and distinctive films that
the Australian industry ne[...]documentary filmmaker, Robert Flaherty. As

part of the seminar. outstanding documen-

tary filmmakers are invited to attend and pre-
sent their films.

This year, Essie Coffey h[...]al
woman to direct a film, won the Greater

Union and Rouben Mamoulian awards, atthe
1979 Sydney Film Festival for My Survival.
Her trip is being sponsored by the Aus-

tralian Film Commission and the Aboriginal
Arts Advisory Board.

My Survival[...]Alec

Morgan's Robin Campbell — Old Fellow
Now and Mike Edol’s Lalai Dreamtime, at the
Longford Cinema in Melbourne.

JK

ADDENDA AND CORRIGENDA

Issue 22

p. 415 The photograph of Bruce Petty was
taken by Philip Morris.

p.430 The original budget of Aibie Thorns’
Palm Beach was $80,000, not
$180,000.

p. 461 The photograph on this page is from
The Luck of the Draw, not Ride on
stranger.

Cinema Pa[...]

URSTALL

Tim Burstall is Australia’s most prolific film director, and probably its most controversial. In an industry where
reticence about issues, on and off the screen, is the rule, Burstall stands apart with his passion for confrontation
and energy at the centre of his films. Often accused of selling out to commercial interests, Burstall is,[...]he shares with Ken G. Hall that the true business of a filmmaker is to entertain his
audience — and make a profit.

Burstall has made eight features to date, including Stork, Alvin Purple, Eliza Fraser and The Last of the
Knucklemen. In all, he has confronted notions of Australian life, though often with a sense of humor. Burstall is
working on an adaptation of D. H. Lawrence's Kangaroo, a novel he feels “discusses the important issue of
whether Australia is a pre— or post-conscious society. That is, have we rejected the European notions of
sensibility and awareness?”

In the following interview, the fi[...]Scott Murray about his films, his role at Hexagon and his views on Australian cinema and life in the
the 1970s.

I began by wanting to[...]Great Australian Novel”. That was
when I was at university. In those
days, in the late l940s and early
l950s, the topic discussed at parties
was not a film, as it is these days,
but the latest novel. For instance,
we would have been excited by the
latest Saul Bellow, or Lucky Jim.
Film was certainly part of that era,
but the idea of becoming a film-
maker was regarded as being out-[...]nge. There were no Aus-
tralian films being made, and
getting a start in filmmaking just
didn’t seem possible.

Where did you go after university?

To the National Film Library. I
wasn’t especially hooked on film,
but it seemed one way of getting
into writing. The only organization
then making films in Australia was
the Commonwealth Film Unit, and
I felt I mi ht be able to make my
way there ‘mm the National Film
Library and get work as a script-
writer-.

The job (Film Officer Grade 1)
consisted of looking at documen-
taries for four hours every day —
“appraising” them, as it was called,
and deciding whom they should be
referred to. A diet of this sort

(From Wood Pulp to Newspaper,
Bolivian Arts and Crafts) ultimately
gave me a distaste for the whole
documentary scene. I then became
involved in scientific editing and
writing for the Antarctic Division.

When did you decide to try film-
maki[...]films. I was a friend ofpainters like
Arthur Boyd and John Perceval,
and it seemed easy and inexpensive
to make films on their work.

Seba[...].j______.__
You then made “Sebastian the Fox”
for the ABC . . .

Yes. The significant thing from a
technical point of view about
Sebastian was that he couldn’t
speak[...]s feelings by blinking his
eyes, lifting his tail and so on. No

attempt was made to disguise the
fact[...]om that he was a
loner.

The original title song, for which
George Dreyfus wrote the music
and I the lyrics, goes like this:

In the bush there is a creature and

he's got a bushy tail

He's not a kangaroo or a mongoose

or a snail

Oh he wears asuit and waistcoat and

the smartest shoes and socks

That's Sebastian, Sebastian,

Sebastian Fo[...]ox, etc.

Sebastian was a pure innocent.
In terms of psychology, he was the
id — naked spontaneity; one’s
wishes expressed directly along the
lines of the pleasure principle.
Sebastian was able to do delin-
quent things and still be loved by
children because his delinquenc[...]n to
people like Stork, who also was an
innocent, and Alvin, another inno-
cent. For me, Sebastian is one of
the first recessive Oz heroes.

Apparently you ra[...]brave little tailor could drop a
rock on the head of a giant in a
Grimm’s fairy tale, but wouldn’t
allow something similar in Sebas-
tian. They had a set of spinster
school teacher values, which meant
that[...]lmost nothing could happen.

There was an element of this atti-
tude at the Commonwealth Film
Unit as well. They were not so
much into stories as highbrow and
worthy public-spirited themes.

This puritanism exists today. Take,
for example, the often calvanistic
reaction to films like “Alvin Purple”
and “Petersen” . . .

Sure, but the purita[...]

Petersen does not represent the
views of the average person, or the
bureaucracies administ[...]whole. Sex was basically
unmentionable, violence and crime,
it was assured, didn't really happen
here, etc. But now, when every-
thing is permitted and one is free to
attack any subjects, censorship
co[...]community, but from
ideological pressure groups. And
these groups certainly have an
influence on the g[...]Burstall’s‘ first film.
Right: Adult villain and innocent puppet:
Burstall‘s Sebastian The Fox, a children's
series made for the ABC.

A bove:

First Attempts at a
Feature[...]n 1960. My
producer, Pat Ryan, took it to
Britain and showed it to British
Lion. They were not interested in
investing, but offered us money for
the screenplay. Then, a year later,
they brought out their own script on
Kelly, written by David Storey. Of
course, the Kelly story was in
public domain, so[...]aser. Three months
after we had arrived in London and
bashed our script around, another
one was being fielded (Michael
Luke’s The Domestication of Mrs
Fraser). This was subsequently sold
to Sandy[...]ser once
Sandy Howard had announced his
intention of going ahead with the
same story.

492 — Cinema[...]figure who escapes from the
French Island prison and finishes at

the motor races on Phillip Island.[...]nvolved with a
Portsea lady.

It was in the style of Rebel
Without a Cause, but it didn’t get
beyond[...]t
families in Australia. I then com-
piled a list of likely people to

bite. David Baker, who was then
working with me, and I would ring
somebody and say we had a film we
wanted to make and asked if we
could come and see them. I must
have been shown out of a hundred

different offices of tycoons of
various sorts. But some people did
put up money,[...]nt in those
days. On Man in Iron, we were
looking for £50,000, but we only
raised half. We gave back t[...]2000 Weeks

How did you finally get the money
for “2000 Weeks"?

When I returned from the U.S.,
where I had spent two years, Pat
Ryan and Ijoined up again. Eltham
Films. which was really[...]house in Melbourne — put in
around 45 per cent, and about 10
per cent came from Peter Lord at

Above:[...]ole,
other than putting money into Film
Australia and the ABC. Also, the
major distributors were unable to
return money on any of the few
films that had been made. They felt
local filmmaking was uneconomic,
and. of course, they were largely
correct.

The few Austr[...]bad image.
When we ran a test screening on
Stork. for instance, the results
indicated that while an aud[...]“Funny as
M*A*S*H". “Bawdier than Tom
Jones", and so on.

What was the deal you did with

Columbia on the distribution of
“2000 Weeks”?

We got the same deal Co[...]

People hostile to the distributors
said Columbia hung onto the film
for seven months before releasing
it. True, but Colum[...]ven months
after it had agreed to take the film;
and since Columbia doesn’t have its
own chain of cinemas, that doesn’t
surprise me. It was then put into the
Forum in Melbourne, which was a
bit of a cemetery for films. But it
was put in at Easter, a good time,
and everybody did their best for it.

The major problem was that it
was a festival-type film and it
needed the support, just like a
Padre Padrone, of critics like
Colin Bennett. Unfortunately,
though[...]Jeanie Drynan). 2000 Weeks.

Right: Jackie Weaver and Bruce Spence in
Stork, the film which marks for Burstall the
beginning of the renaissance.

enormous detail, everything wri[...]tle to do with 2000 Weeks itself.

Around the end of 1970 the
whole atmosphere seemed to
change. It ha[...]arrassed about hearing our-
selves speak. I think of the Austra-
lian film industry as starting in
I9[...]ork. 2000 Weeks came
before the change, though it and
The Naked Bunyip were important
stepping—stones.

I see this revival as growing out
of a theatrical renaissance, and it
was no accident the film industry
began in Melbourne. You had
Stork, which grew out of David
Williamson’s first play at La
Mama, and the Barry McKenzie
films, which grew out of the Edna
Everage figure Barry Humphries
had developed in Melbourne and
then taken to London. And you had
Alvin, which was a Melbourne film.

Anot[...]biz values. We
didn’t have the deadly tradition of

the ABC and Film Australia, which
Sydney did.

For a long time, conspiracy theories
were held about[...]distributor-
exhibitor interests as our enemies,
and I think much of my reputation
as a sold-out bastard emanated
from[...]experience, when
dealing with Village-Roadshow,

and with Colin Jones and Tom
Nicholas at Columbia, that the dis-
tributors were sympathetic to the

idea of an Australian film industry.
They were, in fact, keener to give it
a go than the critics and our so-
called custodians of film culture.
These people neither saw the possi-
bility of growth, nor that the Aus-
tralian audience might[...]seeing itself on film. I don’t
think the bulk of these critics were
sufficiently interested in th[...]. They
were spiritually far more at home in
Paris and London, not Melbourne
or Sydney.

How do you feel[...]eks” today?

I have a special place in my heart
for it, because it was my first
feature and in some ways autobio-
graphical. But I wince when I see it,
except for the few energy points
which are mainly in the flashbacks.

I think ofthe first l0 years of my
film work, up to and including 2000
Weeks, as my apprenticeship.
Stork exhibits much more control;
and the breakthrough with Stork
was that it had a script with plenty
of energy. I don’t believe the acting

in 2000 Weeks is bad, so much as a

question of actors being asked to

say unsayable things, and act

unactable things. It was too
attenuated, too deficient in energy
and too much of it was in an intel-
lectualized form, instead of action.

Stork

Well, soon after we had finished
the film Pat Ryan, David Bilcock,
Rob Copping and I pulled out of
Senior Films and formed Bilcock
and Copping. The idea was to make
commercials, which[...]finance features. We then started
off on a number of things; one of
them was the short, Hot Centre of
the Earth, which was done for the
Producers and Directors Guild of
Australia. This was the first time I
worked with John Powers [Last of
the Knucklemen] who wrote the
script.

After that[...]umentary on the
World Surf Championships. A
group of production houses,
including Filmhouse, Artransa and
Bilcock and Copping put up the
money when they heard that ABC[...]when the Experimental
Film Fund began, I applied for
money to make Filth. I had been
very amused by an[...]ased on what had happened to
Alex Buzo’s Norman and Ahmud
when it was first performed.

Romeril’s play had a group of
people swearing on stage, and then
the police would arrest them. The
detectives[...]Peter Cummins. One night,
however, when the cast and audi-
ence were leaving after a per-
formance, they were arrested in the
car park by real police and marched
down to the Carlton police station.

It seemed like a funny idea for a
film, which would have been a
cinema verite version of what had
happened. But once I started on it I
found all sorts of reticences from
the people involved, and had to give
it up. As I had already been given
$7500 by the EFF, I went back to
my assessor, Fred Schepisi, and
asked, “Can I go ahead and adapt a
play of Dave Williamson’s
instead?” It was called Stork. Fred
agreed and I started looking for
more money. I got a commitment
of $5000 from Bilcock and
Copping, and the rest I raised by
hocking some of my Arthur Boyd
pictures. We raised about $21,000,
and decided to forge ahead. In the
end, the film cos[...]ased it ourselves at the
Palais during Christmas, and
advertised it through John Single-
ton’s advert[...]at the Palais a reaction to
Columbia’s handling of “2000
Weeks”?

In one way, yes. It wasn’t t[...]ve to the distributors that there
was an audience for Australian
films. Of course, this is what John

Cinema Papers,[...]

This way we managed to[...]t still
nobody would take over the distri-
bution of the film. We then took it
to Sydney and four-walled it at
Mosman. It was only then that w[...]But Hoyts would only give
me a suburban release, and couldn’t
guarantee the film would recover
$30,0[...]o knocked
it back. I then returned to Mel-
bourne and decided to try Village
again. This time Graham Bu[...]y thought possible. It took
$224,000 in film hire and returned
to us about $150,000; this was on an
expenditure of only $60,000.

Was the decision to set up Hexagon
based on the success of “Stork”?

There were two factors: cer-

tainly the success of Stork
Village-Roadshow,

impressed

entered into a partnership with Bil-
cock and Copping, and my
company, Tim Burstall and
Associates. Bilcock and Copping
and I each had 25 per cent; Road-
show 50 per cent.[...]was how it worked
till Eliza Fraser, when Bilcock and
Copping pulled out because the
figures were getting too high for
them, If a film failed, we lost

money; ifit made[...]ing more films.

So, I was the producer, director
and financier (25 per cent) of my
own projects. This placed me in a
very differe[...]e in one
way, but hardly the cushy position a
lot of industry people saw me as
occupying.

Libido

Wh[...]you know, it was a portmanteau
feature consisting of four self-con-
tained stories by Craig McGregor,
Hal Porter, Thomas Keneally and
David Williamson. Chris Muir pro-
duced the project for the PDGA
with John Murray.

The Williamson story[...]s the mother in The Child, Bur-
stall’s episode of Libido.

Graham Burke in particular, but
equally important was the pressure
from the Tariff Board Inquiry offor and probably
would have done it had I not
worked with[...]ork on
ilm.

There has been much capital made
out of your changes to Porter’s
story. Why did you alt[...]reason was that it needed a_
stronger structure, and more

events. Another, though probably
unconsciou[...]h
called Windford. In those days one
had nannies, and rarely, in fact, saw
one’s parents. You never a[...]alled High Tea, when they would
sometimes come in and give you a
kiss. But the person you ran to, if
you fell over and hurt your leg, was
your nanny, not your mama.
Mama was the source of values,
and harsh repressive expectations.
So, there was a sp[...]that is, between one to whom you
owed allegiance, and the one who
was freely chosen. This element -
the[...]uenced by this up-
bringing.

What was the budget of “Libido”?

The PDGA received a grant of
about $25,000 from the Arts
Council. John Murray’s budget was
about $7000, as was David Baker’s
and Fred Schepisi’s. I went in for
special pleading on the grounds that
my episode w[...]ould have been closer
to $23,000.

All the actors and technicians
received some payment, except for
the Swinburne film students who
helped us out, while the directors
and producers deferred their entire
fees.

How has th[...]nto account.
The return so far is between
$60,000 and $75,000. Now, if we
sell it to 7 television for another
$50,000, we would be in the clear. It
has[...]r we finished Libido, I was
very keen on the idea of doing one
such film a year. It seemed the best
way of blooding young directors in
the feature business. After all, it
was Schepisi’s first film, and
Baker’s and Murray’s. In each
case, except for John who was most
ruthlessly savaged by the critics and
has since retired hurt, Libido was a
great help t[...]is
time we thought we had to connect
the stories, and each revolved round
a brass bed. A bed is a good[...]mething on which
one can be born, live, make love
and die.

One story was written by Alan
Marshall, whi[...]to direct; there was a
John Powers story written for
Simon Wincer; and a fourth by
Max Richards, which Rod Kinnear
was t[...]ibido exercise, curiously
enough, generated a lot of obstruc-
tiveness and jealousy, and it took a
long time to get another project
moving[...]party. They
said portmanteau films were
finished, and that while Libido was
fine in its day, the idea was no
longer viable. I think they were
quite wrong, and it was a great pity.

Alvin Purple

Next ca[...]n the
press, in which Al Finney, David
Williamson and I said we were
going to make a new film. Unfortu-[...]rking very
hard — he was still at Swinburne —
and couldn’t finish the screenplay
to meet Village—Roadshow’s
deadline. So, we began looking
round for other ideas.

At that time, Roadshow had had
a very successful run with Pasolini’s
Decameron, and there appeared to
be an opening for an Australian
Decameron. I went looking for
stories, visiting writers like Bob
Ellis, Frank Hardy, Williamson
and Barry Oakley. I had 26 stories
in all, and one ofthese was by Alan
Hopgood, called Alvin Pur[...]ious, but I thought I
could chop offthe front end and get
an amusing 20-minute episode out
of it. But as I bored further into all
the stories, the Decameron idea
seemed bitsy, and we decided it was
better to go with one idea. So I took
the Alvin Purple story and
developed it with Hopgood, aiming
at straight comedy. In the end, I
rewrote quite a lot of it — the
water-bed stuff, the chases, the
turning of the McBurney figure,
who was serious in the origi[...]n’s virginal girlfriend (Eli
McClure) a remnant of Hopgood’s
serious second half?

This relationship between Alvin
and the girl was actually developed

How successful w[...]my
figures,. it has taken about $4
million gross, of which about $2.4
million has been returned to the[...]th $1.1
million. Now take off the cost
($202,000) and you are left with
$900,000. It was then sold for

$40,000 to television, so the
September I977 tot[...]joint venture, so
Roadshow got $470,000, Bilcock
and Copping $230,000 and I

Above: Alvin (Graeme Blundell) and the

body painting girl (Kris McQuade) in Alvin

Purple. Right: Petersen (Jack Thompson)

and his mistress (Wendy Hughes), the uni-
versity tut[...]but I had to cut a lot out
during the fine cut.

For the sake of keeping up the level
of humor . . .

Yes. A lot ofjokes went as well,
just to keep the thing moving. After
Alvin and the body painting girl roll
around in paint on the water-bed,
for instance, there was a cut to him
looking at the canvas and saying,
“Not bad for a self-portrait.” Not
that it isn’t a funny line, but it des-
troyed the pace and had to go.

Ken Hall once said that the only

sur[...]e genres are better than others.
The track record of comedies in
Australia is probably the best, but I
suspect that comedies are not what
audiences are looking for at the
moment. The kind of comedy that
is working is that of Neil Simon
and Woody Allen, and we are not
likely to get anything on those lines,[...],000. The .Tax Department
then took 47.5 per cent and I was

I. Based on figures compiled by Mr Burstall
for his September I977 article in the
Bulletin. At th[...]over-
taken Alvin, Storm Boy has passed Cad-
die and Alvin Rides Again, and Mad Max
has overtaken them all, having already
netted $I.65 million. This is made up of
sales of $850,000 (world—wide) and
$800,000 (U.S. domestic). As well, there
will be[...]e figure
higher.

left with $120,000, the bulk of
which I put into Hexagon’s next
films. So, while it seems a lot of
money to make, you don’t see very
much.

Alvin[...]I was keen on doing next.

Given the performance of Alvin,
however, the Hexagon Board felt

there was[...]ed
his acting skills — he felt he was in
danger of being typecast.
Ultimately, I finished writing the
bulk of Alvin Rides Again with AI
Finney. We introduced t[...]rent roles: Alvin; a gangster
called Balls McGee; and Alvin pre-
tending to be Balls —- a role rich i[...]l failed to differen-
tiate between playing Balls and
playing Alvin pretending to be
Balls.

In my view, the film fails for pre-
cisely that reason: i.e., Alvin is lost.

Ho[...]fe with similar intentions
(above).

the casting, and I was close to the
editing. But it would be idiot[...]ccessful film.

There must have been a temptation
for Hexagon to keep the series
going . . .

There was, but the ABC then
entered the picture and that was the
end of that.

Petersen

Your next film was “Pet[...]urke felt
nobody would be interested in the
lives of university students. I said I
would make it outside H[...]

and approached the AFDC, which
also knocked it back.[...]is a very
quixotic man —— he changed his
mind and decided to support us.
Burkey, to be honest, like[...]y made about $70,000,
but after a televisiop sale and an
overseas sale it is doing nearly as
well as Al[...]rt (George
Mallaby) in End Play.

in that many of the elements are
similar . . .

That’s right. Petersen is really a
re-vamp of the earlier film, though
there is a class differe[...]Thompson)
is an electrician who aspires to go
to university. Will and Petersen
have two women — again a split
between the mistress and the wife.
In the case of Petersen, the mistress
represents an intellectual set of
values, someone to whom he
aspires, but who also grates on him,
and he on her, in terms of a whole
series of cultural clashes. He comes
from Moonee Ponds, and she from
the south side of the River.

In the case of 2000 Weeks, Will’s
wife is an emotional Rock of
Gibraltar figure, while the mistress
is a kind of romantic addition to his
life. It is a gratuitous love affair.

Then there is the question of
father-son relationships. The father
in 2000 Weeks is of the old puritan
sort, and there has been a total
breakdown in father-son re[...]er

adoptive one. David Williamson
wrote the role of Petersen speci-
fically for Jack Thompson, and, as
Jack was an adopted son, we
decided to explor[...]a middle-class back-
ground, but a whole line up of
working-class or lower-middle-
class connections.[...]true. I suppose you
have to look at my background for
an answer. My father and my

grandfather were professors, but in
a discipl[...]as representing. My atti-

tude to what we think of as the
humanities side of university is that

professors, lecturers and even
schoolteachers have become the
modern church. They don’t seem to
be a source of value any more. I
think, for instance, the entry of the
academic mind into an art form
like the novel[...]do any
damage to it, certainly signalled the
end of it as a key art form of the
20th Century.

Do you mean academics like Roland
Barthes?

No, much earlier. For instance,
there were no chairs of English
Literature until 1900. In other
words, by[...]tudying.
With film, I wish to fight off the
entry of the theorizers, culture
vultures and influence sniffers into
an area which I still think ofas free
— especially of the terrible burden
of bullshit that the academics are
now trying to pour over it. Most of
them are unresponsive, school-
teacherish, rule-of-thumb people.

Do you link the academic edifice[...]eavis says
somewhere that, “The only argu-
ment for Philistinism I ever felt had
any weight was the A[...]that
the larrikin Australian — relaxed,
healthy and with an anti-consci-
ousness view of life — had a few
things to be said for him. So, I
certainly think that to oppose the
view of a reductive, common-
sensical electrician to a university
professor was a productive thing to

do. _ _
I can remember a fight in

Woolloomooloo where a gang of
thugs removed the railings outside a
house and then moved in. The only
three people who opposed[...]a
journalist who happened to be a
violence freak, and a drop-out

neurotic. The party was composed
entirely of “varsity chaps,” who
were denying that anything was
happening. One ofof
Australian suburban life is
connected with a kind of under-
current of violence in all sorts_ of
places — an anarchic desire to
break the bloody[...]sided with him. I think the
male-bonding section of the
audience is with him earlier, but it
is not u[...]y have been put off by a lot ofhis
demonstrations of Australian
manhood. Of course, I knew there
were some things which the uni-
versity-educated, middle-class
person would resent and dislike
about Petersen, but I was prepared
to ris[...].

Yes. I wanted to get away from
ocker material, and I thought of
doing either a western, a musical
or a crime-thriller. Of these, End
Play was the easiest to mount. It
was just after Sleuth, andand so on.
We all felt we had to move into
something different, and widen the
scope.

Did you have a free hand in ada[...]This led
me to look at the sexual possi-
bilities of introducing a girl who
had been the girlfriend of one, and
then got off with the other — which
is what I d[...]tainly would have given more
energy to the middle of the film.

Many of the film's scenes were shot
on a set. What effect[...]’t get the
right man to build the exterior part
of the set and had to give the idea
away. There was, ther[...]

JENI THORNLEV and MARTHA llNSllRll

Barbara Alysen

Martha Ansara and Jeni Thornley are film-
makers whose work spans the history offeminist
film production in Australia, and incorporates
the varied styles that genre has encompassed.
Very little has happened in the past 10 years of
Australian feminist filmmaking in which at least
one of them has not been involved.

Thornley has acted in several films directed by
Ansara, and last year made her first film,
Maidens, which was judged Best Film in the
General Section of the Greater Union Awards,
and invited to the 1978 Flaherty Seminar in the
U.S.[...]; Prisoners
(made by the Prisoners Action Group); and two
films about Aboriginal Australians, Alec
Morgan’s Robin Campbell . . . Old Feller Now,
and Essie Coffey’s My Survival as an
Aboriginal?

Ansara and Thornley met in 1969 at the in-
augural meeting o[...]-
tion group. A year later they began making Film
for Discussion, a propaganda film that would, in
Ans[...]thers, Living Together (directed by Julie
Gibson, and narrated by Jeni Thornley),
Woman’s Day 20c (ma[...]x,
Virginia Coventry, Kaye Martyn, Robyn
Murphy), and Home (made by Robyn Murphy,
Susan Varga, Barbara Levy, and Leoni Cren-
nan) were already in distribution.

I[...]7, pp. 310-313.

2. Reviewed in this issue.

Film For Discussion was premiered in the
Womenvision Festi[...]ive in 1973. It turned out to be
a very sensitive and restrained film. Beginning
with a montage sequence, borrowed in style and
content from the work of Cuban filmmaker San-
tiago Alvarez, it shows Thornley at work and at
home questioning the limited roles offered to[...]a’s reservations about film
competitions, Film for Discussion was entered in
the 1974 Greater Union Awards. However, out-
side the cinema, she and other members of the
Sydney Women’s Film Group handed out
leafle[...]ed the Greater Union
Organization as “the thumb of the hand which is
strangling the development of a native film in-
dustry”. It added:

“Such a[...]ward

just a few more inches, with the production of

several features under way and a good number
of short films. How are we to judge their
value? Do[...]ee it, we

consider its context. Who was it meant for and

for what purpose?”

Graham Shirley’s A Day Like Tomorrow
(which covered similar ground to Film For
Discussion, but in a completely different style),[...]Day Like Tomorrow was a
“far more cogent piece of women’s lib.
propaganda than the mechanically turgid
and often ill-observed entry by the Sydney

Below: Ma[...]ot just an answer but a
solution, it over-reached and, at any rate in this
particular demi-chauvinist,[...]however,
that “they’re both thought-provoking and in that
they’re valuable?”

Film For Discussion, however, is one of the
most widely-screened Australian short films;[...]imates it has been seen by as many
people as some of the more successful feature
films. It has also found distributors in Britain
and North America — a rare achievement for a
short film.

In l974, Ansara and Jane Oehr co-ordinated
the Women’s Film Workshop, conducted with
funds from the Interim Training Program of the
Film and Television School; 20 women par-
ticipated[...]

feminism was not an entry requirement, many of
those who took part in the course had worked in
t[...]along collective lines, with everyone taking some
of the responsibility for its organization.
During the workshop Thornley ma[...]s), a short film
apout an artist’s model posing for an all-male
c ass:
“The Workshop was the first[...]erent from being the passive receiver.”

Above, and left: photographs from Jeni
Thornley‘s family a[...]te a script which I put up to the
Australian Film Institute‘. It was called Cup
of Tea and was about having an abortion in
the mid—l960s w[...]n; it explored the contrast
between the intensity of lovemaking and the
reality of getting an abortion when it was il-
legal.
“The intensity of that contrast was really
strong in my mind, but I[...]s with the idea ofa two-
week shoot, using actors and lights, and all the
other paraphernalia. Now that I have read and
thought more, seen more films, and worked
with more crews, I think my rejection of the
idea had to do with rejecting the form of
narrative cinema. It’s such a difficult area to[...]ed

4. The AFI was then administering the funding for the
Australian Film Commission’s Experimental F[...]September-October

to make a narrative film work, and I felt I
didn’t have that experience.
“In all[...]been an incredible disparity between
the content of the film and the way they have
been made. I couldn’t come to[...]rms with hav-
ing someone act out my experiences, and I
hadn’t removed them from me enough in the
script for Cup of Tea.
“I knew I wanted to make a film, but I did[...]t all the films I had ever acted in or
worked on, and after brooding over them
decided to change the concept for my film. I
then wrote to the AFI and advised them what
I wanted to do, and they gave their okay.”
While Maidens was evolving, Thornley
worked as a camera assistant, first for Jon
Rhodes at Film Australia and then, on Ansara’s
recommendation, for Tom Cowan on Journey
Among Women.
“From the ide[...]rs. During that time I tried to
enrol in the Film and Television School, but
each year I was rejected. The outline of
Maidens was one of the things I submitted in
my last application.
“One of the reasons it was such a struggle to
make was that I had to deal with my lack of
confidence. I had taken the rejection from the
Sc[...]they wouldn’t
admit me because my work was not of a suf-
ficiently high standard, and I began to believe
it. Perhaps there was some tru[...]formal training, I was
working without the skills and patterns one
develops when one has experience.”
Maidens evolved into a portrait of four
generations of Thornley’s maternal family, ex-
ploring the period between 1900 and 1977, draw-
ing on photographs found in family albums. It is
an intensely personal film, and a comment on
the development of all Australian families.
When the film previewed[...]ornley, which was
technically incompetent, boring and stupid. I
can only imagine that its evangelistic
lesbianism won it support from the claque of
anti-male fringe-dwellers in the women’s
moveme[...]ional Times, June 17, 1978, P. 47.

Jeni Thornley and her mother in Film for Discussion, pro-
duced by the Sydney Women’s Film Group.

by filmmakers Sandra Gross and Phil Noyce,
and Filmnews editor Tina Kaufman.

Noyce and Kaufman replied to the McGuin-
ness review, describing it as “lazy and offhand”.
Their letter didn’t arrive in time for the follow-
ing edition and was not published, but it said, in
part:

“There is a world-wide body of film apprecia-
tion which ignores the technical aspects of im-
ages and responds to the emotion com-
municated by the manipulation of these im-
ages. In these films, over-exposure, g[...]ssionistic tools to be used by the new
generation of filmmakers who, not bound by
traditional Hollywoo[...]ema
vocabulary. Jeni Thornley has done just this,
and we applaud her work.”

McGuinness had also ques[...]al counterparts (1979 being an excep-
tion). Part of his concern with parochialism,
however, must have[...]dens won a Gold Hugo at the Chicago Film
Festival and was invited to the Flaherty Seminar
in the U.S.

Commenting on the Awards and McGuin-
ness’ reaction to the film, Thornley said:

“Even getting into the finals of the Greater
Union Awards was a kind of vindication of
the criticisms that had been made about the
film and the Film School made about me. It
was even more of a vindication when the Film
School sent me a telegram of congratulations.
“Paddy‘s review disturbed me[...]it was published the film had been shown to
lots of people and other reactions were even
more disturbing. When I[...]in the full-
time program at the Australian Film and Televi-
sion School to study cinematograph[...]

At the School, Ansara studied under
cinematographer Brian Probyn, of whom she
said: “Everything I know I owe to him.[...]u if
you’re learning a craft. Youjust have cups of tea
with them andfor funds to make a documentary, My Survival
as an Ab[...]rew
that were acceptable to her.

“We had a bit of a talk about this and that

and agreed on certain political questions. I

learned[...]t will say all the things that had to be left
out of Backroads.’

“You know how you say those things, and the

next week you’ve forgotten them? Well, I

didn’t forget, and one day Ijust got on the

train to Dubbo and then on the bus to

Brewarrina — and there was Essie on the bus!

And so we discussed what the film should be

about. I[...]Survival as an Aboriginal was directed by
Coffey and photographed by Ansara; it won the
documentary section of the 1979 Greater Union
Awards and the Rouben Mamoulian Award.

Coffey could not att[...]shed
an article in Filmnews detailing the history of
the Greater Union Awards (which criticized
them for not exhibiting the winning films in their
cinemas, and for not increasing the prize money
in line with infla[...]eech to re-
mind the audience that poor nutrition and
government indifference were still destroying the[...]with $16,500
from the Creative Development Branch of the
AFC:

“We were very economical; everybody h[...]be a

bit longer. So we were careful with money,

and for only $1500 more we got a 50-min. film

— and an internegative too! I think we did

very well.

Essie Coffey (centre) during the shooting of My Survival as
an Aboriginal.

Alec Morgan's R[...]the best experience

I’ve ever had was working for the Prisoners

Action Group on Prisoners (winner of the

documentary section of the 1977 Greater

Union Awards). It was very inspiring because

Tony Green, who produced the film and also

appeared in it, knew so clearly what he wan[...]lm before

— you have to do exactly as they say and not

know better. Their weakness, which is ig-

n[...]ruin their strength.”

As well as making films and distributing
them, writing and looking after two children,
Ansara also works, from time to time, as an as-
sessor for the Creative Development Branch of
the AFC:

“One ofthe things that has been impor[...]it up — is that I went
to see films obsessively for many years before
I ever thought about making one.
“It’s extraordinary to me that so many of the
people who come to the AFC for money to
make films have hardly ever seen one. Th[...]yond that there has been so little explora-
tion, and so little thought.
“We have the problem, among filmmakers and
film journalists in this country, of an extreme-
ly underdeveloped film culture. Films are
made in a vacuum and discussed in a vacuum.
There is very little common purpose, or com-
mon sense of the function of film in this
society. Discussions of film are without any
goals or guidelines.
“Film[...]k in the industry are
often cynical or exhausted, and they work in
an alienated way. This is a severe problem,
and this is why many of the films are virtually
useless. They can be promoted easily, people
will watch them, and somebody may make
money out of them, but beyond that very few
of them seem to be lasting.”

When this interview was conducted, Ansara
was about to leave Australia for Cuba and the
U.S. to arrange distribution for her own and
other related films. My Survival as an Aboriginal
has been invited to the San Francisco Film
Festival, and she will meet Coffey there for the
screening.

When Ansara returns, she hopes to[...]She also hopes to study with
cameraman Ross Wood, for which she received
traineeship funding from the W[...]working on a compilation
documentary about women and work in
Australia, with Margot Oliver and Megan Mc-
Murchy. The research is being funded by[...]ex-

pansive ideas about what films can be used

for. I didn’t make Maidens to be used for
anything. It’s just as well I worked that out
with Maidens and not some other kind offilm.

But it had to be made; it was a process of

transformation within myself. I know it is

limi[...]’s accessible to a wide
audience.

“The women and work film is one that is

needed. The only Austra[...]istory film. We want to explore the
labor history of working women in Australia,
and the image of women in Australian films.

“By January we hope to have the equivalent of

a shooting script, all the copyright questions

worked out, the sound research completed,

and we will have resolved what gauge and
length the film is going to be.

“This film cou[...]minist historians like Anne Summers,

Sue Bellamy and Margaret Powell — work

that had come out of the womenls movement

and wasn’t around before.”

Ansara is one of the few women technicians
working in the Australian film industry; and she
has very strong views on the roles women should
fill in the industry, and how they should achieve
them:

“I can remember when I was 19 and I used to
tag along and carry things when people were
making films. I alw[...]very special who photographed
films. It was hard for me to realize that Alfred
Hitchcock didn’t phot[...]s very little
to do with technical considerations and a lot
to do with mental attitudes and expres-
siveness. I just wish more women knew this
and then they wouldn’t be so intimidated by
machine[...]to
be. People like Jan Kenny have opened the
way for women to do technical work.

“I think women are[...]lm industry. They don’t do it

with their hands and eyes; they do it from a

safe distance, and for me, directing is a safe

distance.

“Part of my reason for saying this is that I re-

ject the notion of a single person, the director,

being the creative force behind a film. There is

an adulation for directors in this society that I

don’t share. I would like to see film where a

great deal of preparation and thought and in-

spiration from all those involved go into th[...]tograph them. I also want to take

responsibility for films. For me, the making of
the film is the seeing of it; I can’t give that up

to anybody els[...]

Senses. Film Festival. attempts by the Japanese authorities to suppress
freedom of expression.

Do you think the obscenity charges
against you and the outcome of the
trial you are now involved in will
affect you[...]brought
against you? With such a long tra-
dition of pornography in Japan the
official attitude seems very incon-
sistent . . .

I think so, too; it is absolutely in-
consistent. As for the police, they
have no objective basis on which to
decide what is obscene and what is
not. When they occasionally set up
someone as a criminal, they just
make a scapegoat or example of
him: they think others will not
follow suit. In some way or other
they want to suppress our freedom
of expression. So they hit someone
in the public eye[...]incident involving the writer, Aki-
yuki Nosaka, and now the film-
maker Oshima.

When it came into the country,
Empire of the Senses had already
been cut by the censors, s[...]itself their
target. Therefore, they hit the book
of the film, and are using that to
teach us a lesson. That is the way
power works. Of course it is con-
tradictory.

Do you think the s[...]ety. Is
this because the conflict between
society and the individual can be
seen more sharply through t[...]definition arrived at by a society or
government of what asocial or
criminal behavior is, and what
creates a criminal?

I am very interested in the
criminal as such. As for the
criminal versus society, of course I
am very interested in this. But I am
more interested in the criminal for
his own sake than in the conflict
between the two[...]is
the suffering human being that con-
cerns me. And the criminal is some-

Nagisa Oshima’s first film, “A Town of Love and
Hope”, was made in 1959, but it wasn’t until[...]n the film received
led to the commercial release of “Death by Hanging”
(1968) and “Diary of a Shinjuki Thief” (1969) in
London. Since then[...]been shown at major
international film festivals, and many have been
released commercially in a number of countries.
Oshima’s work has been extensively reviewed, and he
has been universally acclaimed as one of the most
talented directors in Japan today.

Oshi[...]ontroversy. In 1960, his fourth feature, “Night and
Fog over Japan”, about the activities of a group of
militant students, was withdrawn from circulation and
suppressed. More recently, “Empire of the Senses”
(1976) has been banned in many countries because of
its sexual explicitness. Oshima is also involved[...]ng obscenity charges
arising from the publication of an illustrated book of
“Empire of the Senses”.

His latest film, “Empire of Passion”, premiered at
the 1978 Cannes Film Festival where it won the award
for best direction. It was shown, for the first time in
Australia, at this year’s Melbourne and Sydney Film
Festivals.

Oshima was interviewed in Tokyo recently for
Cinema Papers by independent filmmaker and
journalist Solrun Hoaas. He talks about the obscenity
charges against him, and the position of women in
contemporary Japan.

one who experiences[...]individual than with
the nationality. In the case of The
Ceremony, for instance, if you take
the structuralists’ view of it, their
reaction is so difficult to compre-
hend; not even I can understand it!

When I saw “Empire of the Senses”
at the Sydney Film Festival ——[...]s.

Do you see a connection between
your approach and the ‘ukiyoe’
woodblocks, or traditional Japan[...]nnection, but it is
not something I was conscious of.
It just came out that way in the pro-
cess.

I understand “Empire of the
Senses” was particularly popular
among wome[...]You once did a television program,

over a period of time, in which you
spoke to women about their prob-
lems — sexual, marital and so on —
and gave them advice. Did this affect
the making of the film?

Yes, it was related. Let me put it
thi[...]ng boy or a
youth. The typical crime, in the
case of the youth, was rape. In such
cases the woman would not be the
perpetrator of the crime, but only
the object of it. From a certain
period, with films like Empire of the
Senses and Empire of Passion, I
began to do the opposite, to make
women the central characters. The
focus of my interest shifted in this
way towards women, and I think
the television program where I
talked wit[...]gained in popularity
in Japan in the past couple of years,
perhaps partly because it is some-
thing that has come from the out-
side and become fashionable. Do
you have any opinion or co[...]s trend?

Yes. I feel I want to stand along-
side and fight with the women who
are putting up a serious[...]nts, there are those that have
come from overseas and just
become fashionable.

Basically, what was cal[...]began was very good. In Japan it
was at its best and was most vigor-
ous as a movement just before
Int[...]5. After that, it went in the
opposite direction, and while taking
on a liberal facade, it became reac-[...]nt in
Japan went hand in hand with class
struggle and socialism for a long
time. With the women’s lib. move-
ment it became clear for the first
time that the struggle had to deal
with[...]called feminism. This, I think, isled
by a group of elite women who are
asserting their rights while[...]n’t think
that’s the case with all feminists, of

Concluded on P. 579

Cinema Papers, Septe[...]

As an actress, I don’t like a scene
cut, and therefore, as a director, I
often use very long t[...]stop a scene I feel as if my breath is
cut short and the flow of human
emotion has stopped.

I have worked with many direc-
tors‘, and each has his own way
of drawing out an actor. The one
who impressed me most was Tomu
Uchida. He would direct according
to the needs of each actor.

Working with Hani on the other
hand meant using an all-amateur
team. She and He was difficult to
make for that reason. But the
experience was useful in the making
ofThe Far Road, because the union
members and workers in the film
were practically all amateurs. The
scenes ofdiscussions for instance —
particularly the meeting of the
workers’ wives — were all shot
using amateurs.

When you mix professional
actors and amateurs you get a dis-
crepancy in acting styles. To avoid
this halting effect, one has to try
and get the amateurs to portray
their own lives without being
conscious of it.

“The Far Road” focuses on a
worker’s wife, Satoko. This is un-
usual for a union film . . .

The average woman, as por-
trayed in the media, is of a rather
passive kind: she doesn’t set out to
c[...], by chance, I found myself
chatting with a group of railway
workers’ wives I had met on a train.
Th[...]e jobs they couldn’t make a
living.

Regardless of whether they liked
it or not, they had to work to[...]sbands’
incomes. They were very dissatis-
fied and felt they had to do some-
thing. They wanted to support their
husbands when they went on strike
for better wages.

What they told me affected me
greatly, and later I spoke to women
in factories, offices, and other work
places. Then, gradually, I began to
develop a story. I discussed it with
union officials and suggested it
would make a film.

I. The star of Kenji Mizoguchi’s The Life of

Oharu '~
2. Hidari’s husband until I977.

Sach[...]an (“The Far Road” — 1977), since the
death of actress Kinuyo Tanaka‘, who, between 1954 and
1962, directed six films.

“The Far Road” was seen for the first time in Australia
last year, at a travelling festival of Japanese films sponsored
by the Australia-Japan Foundation, and again this year at
screenings organized by the National Film Theatre of Aus-
tralia. Overseas, the film has been screened at the Berlin
Festival and in the New Directors’ series at the Museum of
Modern Art in New York.

Hidari not only directed and starred in “The Far Road”,
but also produced[...]orkers’ Union. It is based on her
original idea and scripted by the well-known Japanese
writer, Ken M[...]d to directing
after a long career as an actress, and has worked with some
of J apan’s leading directors. Her films give a vivid, although
varied picture of the post-war Japanese woman, with
emphasis on strength of will, independence, perseverance and
earthiness. Hidari’s two finest performances were in Shohei
Imamura’s “The Insect Woman” (1963), and Susumu
Hani’s‘ “She and He” (1963), which won her the best actress
awar[...]aas, Hidari dis-
cusses her career as an actress, and the making of “The Far
Road”. She begins by describing how[...]o directing.

Essentially, The Far Road is a
plea for a better life for railway
workers, and for all other people in
government-managed institutio[...]a pittance after
30 years on the job?

The lives of ordinary working
families are not portrayed in Japan-
ese films very often, and the image
of the working man is very weak.‘

Did the film ch[...]is is evident in the worker’s
gradual awareness of his right to strike
(something which has been denied nation-
alized company workers), and his refusal
to join: the typically Japanese system of
management unions, which exploit the
worker’s sense of loyalty to his particular
company over his allegi[...]ouldn’t with young actors who
had no experience of the workers’
lives. So I told them to go to the
railway workers and talk to them,
make up their dialogue, and ask
themselves questions like, “Why
does father work for such low
wages?”, or “Why should I follow
in his footsteps and become a rail-
way worker?.”

You remember that[...]ing the
son, “You should study hard, then
go to university .. .” and so on, I
wanted the mother to listen to what
her son had to say and hear what he
wanted to do. Therefore, I had the
b[...]the son
realized he had to choose his own
course, and then, by his own choice,
decided on the railway job. Here
was something in his father’s way
of living that had moved him.

Japan has become a co[...]disregard the children’s in-
dividual qualities and think only of
their progress from kindergarten
through to university. This is hor-
rendous: it was very much in mind
w[...]oad” is a very idealized . . .

There are a lot of women like
that in Japan: women who live a
simple life and learn to cope with
hardship when their husbands a[...]r-
ance has been made into a virtue.
But now more and more women
refuse to be bound by tradition;
they decide their lives for them-
selves. There are such women in
Japan. too,[...]he role I played in The Far
Road is a combination of many
women I have met. I created the
chara[...]

Post-Aquarian Apocalyp[...]Festival

With the hindsight achieved'by the
time of the closing-night awards, it
seemed appropriate t[...]d
with Milos Forman's Hair — as much an
autopsy of the Swinging '60s as a
celebration thereof. Not o[...]i,
Werner Herzog, Volker Schlondorff.
James Ivory and — arguably — Andre
Techine), it also revealed[...]ropean auteur abandon-
ing the quirky questioning of his smaller,
more personal cineprobes and ap-
parently expressing delight in his newly-
acq[...]to be harnessed to a
somewhat old-fashioned type of enter-
tainment filmmaking, which equates style
primarily with pace, glossy production
values and sheer volume.

For although Hair was the only film in
the main Festival program with the ex-
cuse of being a musical —— and a rock
musical at that — it was. sadly, not alone
in using excessively amplified sound as
an easy way of asserting its separateness

504 —— Cinema Papers, September-October

from the Oedipal medium of television.

At the risk of laboring the point, it
seems worth insisting that the
phenomenon of Hair symptomatically
resumes, on more levels than one, the
shifting trends and tendencies which
rnake for a re-definition of contemporary
cinema.

The Age of Aquarius, over which For-
man's film casts its retrospective eye,
was equated with a spirit of open-minded
experimentation, manifesting itself o[...]sive’, frequently involving the collective
use of sex and drug-induced visions as
part of an egocentric quest for a truth at
once cosmic and private.

On-screen, at least when tempered by
the disciplines imposed by a tight budget
and a realistic production schedule, the
Aquarian spi[...]to
reach its apogee: Herzog, with Kaspar
Hauser, and Eustache, with The Mother
and the Whore, were but two of the Euro-
pean Aquarians to be honored with
prizes at Cannes; while in the U.S., the
executives of multi-million dollar con-
glomerates sought desperately to
harness some new free spirits capable of
reproducing the economic miracle of
Dennis Hopper's Easy Rider.

It is. of course, one of the finer ironies
accompanying the present econom[...]y pushed to
its farthest limit. At the poorer end of the
market. most noticeably in Western
Europe, fo[...]t
towards ‘safe’. common-denominator
subjects and literary adaptations suitable
for prompt transmission on the smaller
screen. Of the major film-producing na-
tions, only the East[...]es
seem immune from these contradictory
pressures of the capitalist market place.

Indeed, the major o[...]o be generated by this year's Cannes
Festival was of the international film in-
dustry — engaged in an elaborate game
of musical chairs. On the basis of the
tendencies to emerge from the 1979
Festival, it appears (and exceptions to
this general rule were more than
gratefully received) that the U.S. is the
present stronghold of auteurist cinema;
that Eastern Europe is excelling in the
area of social and moral criticism; and
that Western Europe is floundering
aesthetically[...]cal chairs, besides involving a uni-
versal shift of positions, is also a game in
which the players are eliminated — one
by one.

To return finally, and concretely, to
Hair, Forman has ‘opened up’ t[...]l odyssey. Although Incor-
porating all but three of the original
songs, the story has been re-shaped.[...]g elegiac opening se-
quence shows the untroubled and un-
changing beauty of the farmlands from
which Claude (John Savage) has[...](at the time
active in Vietnam). His two-day stay of
grace in New York becomes his, and our,
initiation into the delights of tribal, drop-
out society. expressed less effecti[...]work in Central Park than
through the complacent and slightly op-
pressive charisma of the super drop-out,
Berger (Treat Williams), who assumes
the Ariadne task of guiding the novice
Claude through the labyrinthine joys of
the alternative society.

Berger demonstrably represents the
alternative society's fundamental
morality: and in practising the collectivist
doctrine he preaches to the point of
following his new friend across country to
his California boot camp and (albeit un-
intentionally) assuming his place in the
Army, he in fact also endorses that most
traditional of Hollywood virtues — male
camaraderie.

If, on t[...]man's '60s reconstruction allows
him little scope for the improvisation and
unplanned observation that dis-
tinguished his wo[...]dricek’s free-wheeling
camera produce the sense of raw
urgency which characterized the original
stag[...]psy-
chedelic ‘production numbers’ seem
born of a meeting between Ken Russell
and West Side Story — Forman's Hair
still has one p[...]show, not merely the charm but also the
fragility of the Aquarian Dream. The sub-
stance of the stage musical becomes
merely the central pane[...]which traces the thread connecting the
stability of the farmlands to the imperial
ambitions in South-[...]s Hair:
everyone involved is either hawk or dove.
And the penultimate sequence, in which
the flower-child Berger — now shaved,
shorn and uniformed — becomes one of
the anonymous army to be swallowed
into the belly of the jet transporter which
will take him to Vietnam and another
brutal, alternative___reality provides the
cinema with its most potent epitaph yet
for the optimism which was the ’60s.

Via Vietnam, the American optimism
of the '60s has yielded not merely to im-
potent despair, but also to a form of in-
sanity the more terrifying for being self-
aware. it, for the Czech emigre Forman,
Vietnam could be observed as a linear
stroke of destiny, for Francis Ford Cop-
pola, who, on his own admission, “knew
very little about the war”, its tales of
nightmare horror could only be ap-
proached through a form of identifica-
tion.

Where Forman sees the war as ter-
minating the hallucinogenic experience,
the script for Apocalypse Now, which
John Milius based, at Coppola's sugges-
tion, on Joseph Conrad's Heart of
Darkness, was received by Coppola as
“part zany[...]horror”. It focuses on the
universal nightmares of the war by
recording one man’s experiences of
them; at the same time, it questions the
horrors it records by presenting them
through the eyes of a protagonist who is
more observer than participant, and
whose own moral, or amoral, am-
bivalence prevent[...]re than partial, critical or tangential.

As film and protagonist make their in-
separable way up through the jungle and
towards the heart of darkness, the
filmgoer finds himself submerged in[...]lly inviting,
technologically sophisticated dance of
death and destruction, at the same time
denied any of the usual keys which would

simplify the task of deciphering its mean-
mg.

The protagonist, Willa[...]Officer — in
other words, a professional killer of
professional killers. In common with
many a uniformed soldier, he is sent on a
search-and-destroy mission; but the dif-
ference in his case is that the object of
his search is not an enemy outpost but
an individ[...]in sharp contrast to Deer Hunter,
where violence and a brutal enemy loom
in close-up whenever an American
citizen is faced with a moment of moral
choice, Apocalypse Now reduces ‘the
enemy‘ to abstraction and (except for the
bombing raid) to invisibility: the horror of
war emerges the more pronounced for
being merely part of an eerie, but
beautiful background. it is this
ba[...]his escalating retreat from
the established rules and values of
civilization, that gives the film its
sustained element of muted suspense.

Sheen's impassive, sweaty, in-
terrogative gaze suggests a process of
introspection at work: one finds oneself
wondering, as the film's style and pacing
become increasingly oneiric and in-
trospective, whether this process will
prove powerful enough to modify his
original sense of himself as a man with a
simple job to do. And at the end of the
film, Willard's mission accomplished, we
are[...]film

after the first shadow-darkened sighting,

of Marlon Brando's Kurtz is an anti-
climactic mess,[...]ed, proves no more visually exciting
than a glass of tomato juice. Coppola's
film, in many respects a[...]airborne Aguirre, is a journey to
the thresholds of moral choice, sanity
and the human soul: he can hardly be
reproached for failing to depict the inner
darkness as vividly as he does the ap-
proaches to it.

Coppola's incomparable and spec-
tacular achievement served to eclipse
the brightness of most of the other
American entries, or at least to have the
effect of turning them into period pieces
— which, indeed, several of them were.

The least exciting was Martin Fiitt's
Norma Rae, for which Sally Field, in the
title role, received th[...]onetheless dated in
its liberal-humanist optimism for being
set in the present day — of an aggres-

Linda Manz in Terence Maiick’s Days of Heaven: the tale of three incestuously-connected

‘A 5;: X -..‘[...]o help unionize
the cotton mill which employs her and
the rest of her home town in the
American South.

The film ha[...]in 1916 Texas.

V.’ _,s I g V __ ...._,

dance of death and destruction.

insofar as it shows its heroine putting
more energy into —— and deriving more
fulfilment from — her political activities
than her relationships with lover, hus-
band and children. Yet, in that it never
seriously shows her confronting more
than one facet of her life at a time, it re-
mains as fundamentally old-fashioned
and cliched as the perennially-smiling
Jewish union o[...]an.

Terence Malick’s ecstatically-praised
Days of Heaven was, for me, a disap-
pointment. Despite Nestor Aimendros’
photography, which endows the flat ex-
panses of the open prairies with an epic
dignity and a quivering fragility, the film's
pretensions to[...]the amplification through the
Dolby sound system of every rustle of
corn or snap of twig as in the Greek-
tragic aspirations of its tale of three
incestuously-connected characters
hurtling towards their nemesis in 1916
Texas — the core of the film is a banal
triangle of jealous passions which needs
to achieve the mythical status of a Gone
With the Wind if it is to avoid sinking into
the mire of the novelette.

Working from his own original
scr[...]tancing device he used in Badlands
(another story of expulsion from Eden in
which woman is temptress and man pays
the highest penalty for heeding her siren
song) by having his story narra[...]before the child's recollections begin is
worked, and over-worked, to lend a

Francis Ford Coppola's ep[...]scape; but the faux-naif effects from
which much of the tension should derive
(the gap between child perception and
adult passions) wears gratingly thin
before the holocaust of the final reel.

Visual beauty is also predominan[...]latest, Manhattan, a hymn
to the romantic skyline of a city, here
peopled only by lovers and culture-
lovers, photographed by Gordon Willis in
low-contrast black-and-white, and
serenaded by the old Gershwin tunes
that make up[...]len sticks
to his own, increasingly assured brand of
urban anthropocenirism: if love and
death remain his twin obsessions, the
emphasis still remains on their
manifestations in the here-and-now.

Casting himself in the central role — a
d[...]called lke Davis — Allen
laments the transience of his mortal un-
ions (“l‘ve never had a relati[...]an that lasted longer than the one
between Hitler and Eva Braun"), and
continues — in his quest to wrest a
lasting meaning from his passing fancies
— to worry most of his relationships into
the ground.

The story involves a series of overlap-
ping emotional triangles, and this time
the Allen character is allowed to get at
least one of the girls. The fact that he
dares to take himself[...]stumble are drawn
from the more affected echelons of the

Cinema Papers, September-October —— 505

Mariel Hemingway and Woody Allen in Manhattan: a perfectly proportioned minor work.

New York culture-vultures; and although
the irrepressible Diane Keaton again im-[...]rable neurotic,
despite the polysyllabic banality of her
up-market small talk, it's this latter which[...]ns between all
the characters, except Allen's Ike and his
schoolgirl girlfriend (Mariel Hemingway).

in this context, and even though the
characters’ common heritage of neurosis
provides a levelling and a leavening
agent, Allen's self-mockery renders h[...]imarily, it's the other people who
are the joke.

And though Allen, as director and
screen-persona, still has along way to go
before[...]ngerously thin line between the self-
deprecatory and the self-congratulatory:
the Allen style is now a[...]to suit the emotional mess that lies at the
heart of its subject matter.

While Manhattan belongs in the
category of perfectly-proportioned minor
works, there was one[...]even Apoca-
lypse Now could succeed in dwarfing.
And beside which James Bridges’ The
China Syndrome[...]at her most convincing yet) who
uncovers evidence of a lethal fault in a
nuclear power plant and starts waging a
doubly-doomed fight against the b[...]ests which control it —
recedes into the realms of the well-made
thriller.

At the age of 72, John Huston has, in
Wise Blood (shown out of competition)
created a film as uncompromisingly
modern in its tirelessly questioning spirit,
denial of answers and eccentric observa-
tion as it is ‘old-fashioned[...]nery
O'Connor, Wise Blood manages to run
its tale of a collection of misfits, in an ap-
proximately contemporary Georg[...]nema Papers, September-October

a haunting vision of American society
after the apocalypse.

The film starts almost conventionally
— and not without echoes of Huston's
own Fat City, which will, incidentally,[...]recur throughout the film,
somewhat in the manner of reflections in
a distorting mirror. Newly dischar[...]homeless orphan. (A tombstone cryp-
tically tells of a parent “gone to joining
the angels'’.)

Lik[...]o-getter before
him, Hazel sets out in a new suit and
giant hat (which he does with all the
reverential ceremony of a matador
preparing for the arena) to sample urban
life and to divest himself of his hell-fire
religious origins. His impersonation of an
atheistic swinger is not a success:
everyone,[...]latan ser-
monizer) soothsaying in the wilderness
of a curiously underpopulated city in
which each mov[...]n-
counters only characters who define
themselves and him in relation to a God
who, if present at all, would appear to
function primarily as a fount of commer-
cial enterprise. Enraged, Hazel attempts
to preach his own anti-religion, "the
Church of Christ without Christ”; and just
as we have grown to see him as conven-
tiona[...]ize that he is as sane
as the next man, that each of the
characters mirrors the others in his
separate but equal, and equally un-
heeding, insanity.

Individually, the characters struggle to
impose a meaning of lives long since
divested of any: whether they speak of
love or sin or redemption, they confront
the same yawning void of loneliness and
purposelessness, driven by the compul-
sion of their warped inner logic to at-
tempt to join wha[...], in a film which perfectly
balances the blackest of humor with the
bleakest of Greek-tragic visions, has
maimed and blinded himself in a con-
fused attempt to prove the non-
redemptive value of suffering, he re-
mains such stuff as lonely fema[...]prey on. His crusade to prove the
meaninglessness of existence lends him
the power of a holy man.

For me, only one of the European films
at Cannes achieved the same pa[...]neration, much
maligned by his fellow countrymen, and
which, in a style which recalls Godard’s
last a[...]eoccupations,
bombards its audience with multiple and
conflicting sounds and images, and a
barrage of technological gadgets, to
suggest the fundamental meaningless-
ness underlying a multiplicity of alter-
native meanings; and the extent to which

Rainer Werner Fassbinder'[...]Generation: bombarding the audience with multiple and
conflicting sounds and images.

machines take control of the men who in-
vented them. The idea of society as a
vast, many-headed Frankenstein
monst[...]which the scientist hero, working on the
creation of facsimile humans, found
himself to be no more tha[...]ntist's brain.

But science fiction is one thing, and
sensitive contemporary politics evidently
another[...]characters
are not robot-scientists, but members of
a terrorist cell whose biographical details
frequently appear to derive from those of
the Baader-Meinhof group. Terrorists,
especially[...]y acquired their own fixed place in
the mythology of contemporary politics.
And those who see them as demons
seem joined to those[...]it is precisely this status quo. this
receptacle of received ideas, this vast
machine for converting energy into un-
threatening cliche, which Fassbinder
takes as his target. And here he
challenges it as uncompromisingly as he
c[...]uld,
‘correctly’, be told.

While sharing all of their rage at a huis-
clos society, Fassbinder da[...]at their most risible in their
attempts to forge for themselves in-
dividual identities separate from[...]the one hand, the camped-up theatrical
posturings of his superstar guerrilla
group; hence, on the othe[...]‘safe house’,
revel in their lurid disguises and exotic
aliases, compete for the best property on
the Monopoly board, play-act at being
fugitives in a film, and discover
themselves caught up in a game in which[...]ent them". His
particular band are the brainchild of a
right-wing businessman (Eddie Constan-
tine) wh[...]s will
stimulate an increase in the falling sales
for his computerized security devices.
Their lives, w[...]re incestuously, inex-
tricably linked with those of the police
who pursue them through a society
governed as much by the law .of the
double-double-cross as by that of supply
and demand. Wheels within wheels,

When a series of ironic accidents
leads to their kidnapping the Co[...]on they
unwittingly are, they direct the shooting
of their home-movie ultimatum with all
the perfectionism of a von Sternberg.
The retake becomes a metaphor for the
human condition. And in suggesting that
society's ‘monsters’ are m[...]sbinder
probes indelicately at the endemic
nature of totalitarian attitudes within the
democratic stat[...]lutocracy's indulgence
in conspicuous consumption and in the
generation gap. The tycoon is
characterize[...]ough both
are surrounded by crude caricatures —
of wealth and malcontent respectively),
and an opportunistically ‘happy’ ending
suggests[...]storia impossible). Screened at a time
when tales of the violence produced by
petrol shortages in the[...]given it a topical edge, it vitiates its
portrait of civilization paralysed by an in-
terminable traffic jam through its deter-
mination to produce a star for every car
— creating the ultimately tedious effect
of a Grand Hotel on immobile wheels.

Another inscrutable fable about the
breakdown of civilization was Federico
Fellini's Orchestra Reh[...]Berlin
Film Festival. The political implications of
its (crudely post-synchronized) portrait
of an orchestra disintegrating into
anarchy, until their conductor reaffirms
the need for a ‘strong leader‘, have been
hotly disputed.[...]ed his film, even at its
modest television length of 70 minutes,

to a formal exercise in danger of becom-
ing a pretentious bore.

Surprisingly, it[...]ist Stopped at Eboli, allows the
desolate poverty of Lucania to speak for
itself, and attempts to demonstrate, with
nudgings or underlinings, the irrelevance
of national politics to a lifestyle virtually
untouched by the Industrial Revolution.

Rosi’s powers — of observation and
composition — are such that one might
reasonably have hoped for another
masterpiece in the manner of Ermanno
Olmi’s Clog Tree. Unfortunately, the
mute, amused and occasionally out-
raged humanism which Gian Maria
Volonte is required to register in the
central role of the exiled intellectual, in-
troduce a false note of sentimental
patronage. And with many a sequence
concluding with a close-up of the soulful-
looking dog who follows. Levi into e[...]ed the Festival with its most con-
centrated area of disappointment,
despite the confirmation, through[...]s; because he
is content to show, through the ebb-and-
flow of human relations, the mechanisms
by which people — sooner than confront
the yawning abysses of their own
solitude —— can accommodate
themselves to even the most irregular
forms of camaraderie.

The odd couple of La Drolesse are a
20 year-old mentally-retarded farmboy
and the practical 11 year-old girl whom
he kidnaps for company. Doillon creates
a domestic Badlands without any of
Malick's Biblical aspirations, showing the
preference of his misfits’ sequestered
domesticity to anythin[...]e, an over-
promising title placed at the service of a
silly rather than funny comedy-thril|er-
turned[...]temptress (Marie Trintignant) pushes a
twitching and overbearingly mannered
Patrick Dewaere towards a life of crime;
nor by Techine’s tedious Bronte Sisters,[...]vals. Techine was
determined to avoid the pitfall of putting
the literary process on the screen; but
s[...]cesco Rosi’s E:oli: underlining the irrelevance of national politics to a lifestyle untouched by
the Industrial Revolution.

were writing and dying, he is left with an
anthology of well-photographed death
scenes to help the nudgin[...]ne sense in which
great writers don't always make for the
greatest films. American James Ivory,
providi[...]airly
straightforward adaptation from Henry
James for farce and prettiness, leaving

the wit and subtlety of the original as
strained as the effects of pathos after
which Lee Remick strives in the role of an
unsuccessful European fortune-huntress
in 18505 New England.

The film is all the more of a disappoint-
ment, in that the same creative team's re-
cent television film, Hullabaloo over
Georgie and Bonnie’s Pictures (set in
contemporary India and screened in the
Market section at Cannes), had wi[...]Andre Techine’s Bronte Sisters: an anthology of well-photographed death scenes.

James |vory's Th[...]ala's straightforward adaptation
from Henry James for farce and prettiness.

Cinema Papers. September-Octo[...]

The French—Swiss ci[...]to fiction, but by using the
same means available forof
cinema in a country that has no
structure for it.

Do you mean structure in financial
terms?

Yes. Industrial structure. Studios
and technicians, etc., don’t exist
other than for television. This has
had a direct effect on the kinds of
cinema that have developed. The
financial and technical constraints
gave an intimate form to th[...]oken word with very few
characters — one thinks of films
like Bertrand von Effenterre’s Erica
Minor, or the films of Tanner and
Soutter.

The form of these films was also
influenced by their being shot on
l6mm, in black and white, and with
few actors. Many scenes would
often take place in one room and,
because of budgetary limitations,
there was rarely any shoot[...]erize them. Today, however, there
is a generation of Swiss film-
makers who are reacting to this
form; who want to open out their
cinema. The last films of Tanner
and Soutter are examples of this —
Messidor and so on. This cinema
also uses a more poetic language,
with humor and dialogue that
doesn’t deal directly with the social
and political content ofof several different events,
and while the officially-invited films in the Competition gain
most of the coverage in the popular press, often it is th[...]rately-budgeted Swiss feature, it tells the story of how the
life of Pipe, a 66 year-old farm-hand, is transformed after he
buys a motor-cycle.

While in Cannes for the screening ofof the difficulty of your moving from
documentaries into features?

It is true that the gestation of Les
petites fugues was very slow, but the
problem[...]ever, the slow gestation also
came from my method of work. I
work in a very artisanal way, and
two film collectives were used in
making the film[...]r together the
technical side — the technicians
and so on. They also have sound
studios, and editing and mixing
facilities. The filmmaker is the one
who actually pushes his project for-
ward. The state doesn’t subsidize
the collecti[...]re Film-
kollektiv in Zurich, German
Switzerland, and Film et Video
Collectif in Lausanne, French
Switz[...]t the film started through
the classical approach of finding an
established producer. This took a
year, and came to nothing. And,
during that time, the technicians
united to bring together all their
technical means, and to possess the
tools with which they work. Finally,
Robert Boner, who is a member of
the collective in Lausanne, became
the producer.[...]c-
tion in Switzerland. What is the
present level of funding, and is it
likely to continue?

It is essential if fil[...],000 Swiss francs
(A$1,458,035) is made available for
film production and culture — that
is, for absolutely everything to do
with film culture.

Does the[...]in 300,000 Swiss francs,
which is about one-fifth of the
budget. Equally important, how-
ever, is the financial involvement of
Swiss television. It is practically
impossible to make films of the
nature of Les petites fugues with-
out a co-production arrangement.

“Les petites fugues” also had the
involvement of French television . . .

Yes. There are three essential
things for Swiss films: government
subsidy, co-production with Swiss
television, and co-production with a
foreign country. The audienc[...]d from the pension fund. But
he was caught drunk, and the
motor-bike was taken by the police.
He died of the consequences of an
aborted suicide.

Claude Muret [co-writer] and I
decided to use this incident to
describe not only the life of an old
farm-hand, but also to make some
kind of fable. We kept the main
events and the setting, and added to
it ourselves.

The various stages of develop-
ment of the main character repre-
sent the symbolic stages which
correspond to our own reality: the
discovery of geographical auto-
nomy, the power over oneself and
others, the implication of the body
in an experience, a sense of escape,
the flight to somewhere else,

Michel Rob[...]Then the
repression that shocks you into a
state of complete destruction and
the impossibility of continuing on
the road to detachment. Finally,
slow reconstruction by means of
reflection; by the discovery of
others and your place among them,
and the power and potentiality of
loneliness.‘

I am interested in your use of the
motor-cycle as a catalyst, because
while it d[...]utonomy, a motor-cycle is
also a negative product of civiliza-
tion: it is noisy, polluting, causes the
landscape to be broken up with
roads and so on . . .

The means offered by modern
technolo[...]nly
because one is the master as well as
prisoner of it. Everything depends
on the way things are used. In the
case of Pipe, instead of being
prisoner of the motor-bike, he is
prepared to conquer it hims[...]ion on the farm is due to him
always being there, and the motor-
bike provides him with a way of
attaining liberty.

The scene where Pipe flies on[...]e only time the film
moves into fantasy. Was part of the
motivation of the scene to divorce
the film that little bit fr[...]litical things
directly?

Yes. The scene is a way of help-
ing to avoid imposing ideas on the
public w[...]public things that allows it two dif-
ferent ways of perceiving them. So,
while one can see Pipe as si[...]him. conducted in
March 1979 by Roland Cosandey, and
reprinted in the Les petites fugues press
book.

one’s personal and deeper experi-
ences.

Is this dealing with characters,
rather than ideas, indicative of
something wider than just a reac-
tion to the earlier films of Goretta
and Tanner?

Yes. It is an evolution that fol-
lowed the movements of 1968 — a
re-definition of what is “political”.
This re-definition of the politique is
something that comes essentially[...]ion on society
in general; it is a transformation of
the individual that one must attain.

Power is questioned because Pipe
questions himself, and through his
actions invites the audience to use
the same processes of self-ques-
tioning.

Yet Pipe doesn’t try to communi-
cate this process to his boss.
Because of this, he causes unneces-
sary friction . . .

Cor[...]to this point the boss has had
the responsibility of everybody on
the farm — or, at least, felt he h[...]t from the
moment a person takes responsi-
bility for himself, the power of the
boss is lessened. It is therefore
something t[...]oint where
self-responsibility has dawned on
each of the characters in different
ways. It is optimisti[...]t is called Kat-
mandu, which is about the search
for liberty, total and abstract, and
the second shows the limits of this
way of attaining liberty, and how,
ultimately, Pipe goes further than
that.

Pe[...]. I wanted to show how
society reacts to the sort of liberty
that Pipe is conquering.

Liberty goes fu[...]ipe at
the motorcross rally; he is not in
control of it. And it is usually at
this moment that society repri-[...]by re-defining his sur-
roundings, his complexes and his
rapport with himself, with others,
and with his work. He discovers
that there are two forms of work—
what he does for others, and what
he does for himself. In the scenes of
the Matterhorn, Pipe realizes that
the Katmandu movement is not a
finality for him. This mode of pro-
gression was valid at the begin-
ning, but now it is no longer suffi-
cient. And the only way to advance
further is to do so back[...]. . .

Yes. Pipe realizes that the
Matterhorn is, for him, a dream,
and only approachable by means
that he cannot control[...]terhorn; it is all
his fantasy, while the reality of the
Matterhorn is something he cannot
do a[...]

inevitably be that of government policy and

legislation. There are two reasons for this:

(a) Broadcasting uses limited air space and,
therefore, precludes free competition; and

(b) It reaches every member of the public who
can turn on a receiving set, there[...]ng some control.

This history, therefore, is one of government
action and reaction to the various vested inter-
ests involved in broadcasting.

In the early days of radio, when the system
was being established, these interests were
manufacturers and retailers, broadcasting com-
panies and the public. The successes and fail-
ures of these pressure groups on the government
of the day resulted in the dual system ofnational
broadcasting — the Australian Broadcasting
Commission and the commercial system —
which exists today.‘

The three factors which determined the struc-
ture of television were the existing dual system
of commercial and ABC radio, the federal
election of December 1949, and the economic
crisis in I951-52.

Dual System Esta[...]io moved out ofthe experimentation stage
in I923, and the first regulations introduced by
the Post Office were for a system of sealed sets.
They were the brainchild of Ernest Fisk,
managing director of AWA, which was one of
the leading manufacturers. Through the Post
Offic[...]the
broadcasting station they wished to receive, and
their sets were sealed to receive that channel
on[...]the Sydney Sun bought into the radio
station 2BL, and that was the beginning of news-
paper involvement in the ownership of broad-
casting.

The sealed set system was unpopular with
three of the four companies licensed to broad-
cast , the radio set retailers and the public, and
all pressured the Postmaster—General for an
alternative system. So, in 1924, the “A” and

I. As every government since 1942 has failed to examine
the structure, performance and role of the ABC in the
broadcasting system. this analysis has not attempted to
plot the history of the ABC, which has made very little
impact on broadcasting structure and control.

2. Curnow, R. An Administrative History ofthe Develop-
ment of Wireless Telegraphy and Broadcasting Until

1942. MA thesis, Sydney University, l96l-.

AUSTRALIAN T BLBVISION

Why it is the wa[...]io to the country areas,
however, as both methods of financing depended
on broadcasting to areas with large popula-
tions. As a result of public demand, the Royal
Commission on Wireless w[...]in 1927.
It heard considerable evidence in favor of the
BBC system, but did not recommend that
system because of the difficulty of compensat-
ing the existing companies.’ Instead[...]es to pool their resources, set up relay
stations and make greater use of interstate
relays; but the profit motive of the individual
companies mitigated against this c[...]1929, the Government decided to
acquire the plant and equipment of all the “A”
class stations. It paid £64,26l.l0.7d in
compensation and put the supply of programs to
these stations up for tender. The Australian
Broadcasting Company, a consortium of new
interests (none of the stations already broad-
casting were involved), won the contract for
three years, with a promise to meet the demands
of various public pressure groups interested in
education, music and the arts.

Throughout 1930 and 1931 the pressure from
public groups continued; many of them believed
that only a public corporation could provide a
high standard of programming on a national
basis. The Government w[...]ian
Broadcasting Company licence expired in 1932,
and the Australian Broadcasting Commission
Act was pa[...]ay.

The new ABC had problems in the first
decade of its existence: with new broadcasts,
publications and relations with the Govern-
ment. Over the same pe[...]s with the
Post Office in relation to regulation, and these
difficulties eventually led to the setting up of the
Joint Parliamentary Committee on Broadcast-
i[...]nly public inquiry to look at the
total operation of the ABC, and some time was
spent examining the method of control through
the general manager and the commissioners.

3. Australian Parliament. Report of Royal Commission on
Wireless.

4. Australian Parliament. Report and evidence of Joint
Parliamentary Committee on Wireless Broadca[...]commended, among other things,
the administration of commercial radio by
legislation and an end to its direct control by the
Post OfflCC.5 The Government concurred, and to
the existing legislation, which controlled the[...]ations. This new
Act became the substantial basis of the Broad-
casting and Television Act as it exists today.

Early Television Policy

The 1942 Act, of course, made no reference to
television; its hist[...]ralian Broadcasting Control Board (the
forerunner of the Australian Broadcasting Tri-
bunal) and excluded commercial television.‘

The government of the day was eager to set up
a national service in[...]ofthe population. It also
wanted to co—ordinate and control the technical
side of all broadcasting, including television, and
the programming and advertising side of com-
mercial radio. The debate in parliament
focused on the issue of control, rather than the
pros and cons of commercial television.’

The Australian Federation of Commercial
Broadcasters (the forerunner to the Federation
of Australian Radio Broadcasters) had, as early
as 1936, considered the advantages of a separate
board to prevent chaos of the airwaves. The
Federation was unhappy about th[...]st
Office had been regulating commercial stations
and allocating channels. However, the Federa-
tion fe[...]eral Opposition also strongly opposed the
concept of a board, claiming that it would be
“the first s[...]in March 1949
with three permanent Board members and a
staff recruited from the Post Office. The Labor
government regarded the Board as a champion
of the interests of the listeners, and the Board
recognized“ that its responsibilities[...]esent a novel development in the adminis-
tration of broadcasting”.

Within months of the Board’s inception it
ventured into the programming role and issued
its first order (Political Order No. l) which
defined the terms of availability of airtime for
political broadcasts, and required commercial
stations to transmit any addr[...]ole. B. The Australian Broadcasting Control Board
and the Regulation of Commercial Radio in Australia.

7. Commonwealth of Australia. Parliamentary Debate
I99.

8. A[...]

The Labor government called for tenders for
the supply of television transmitters and studio
equipment for a national service in each capital
city, but before work began the Liberal Party
gained power and Robert Menzies became
Prime Minister.

The new Go[...]uld develop gradually, with one
station in Sydney for the National Television
Service, which would expa[...]o commercial
television licences -- one in Sydney and one in
Melbourne — with others available to appli-
cants in any of the other capital cities who
showed they had the[...]This policy statement had serious implica-
tions for the ABC. Far from being given a
monopolistic control of television, which was a
possibility under the Labor government’s policy,
it was fighting for thejunior role in the develop-
ment of television. Moreover, it was left
uncertain of the future plans of the Government
which officially supported private enterprise and
had many members who were not fans of the
ABC. Charles Moses, general manager of the
ABC at the time, said many years later'‘’ that he
had suggested to Menzies that a national service
and commercial service should come under one
statutor[...]dmitted, however, that Menzies
was never in favor of the idea.

In August 1950, the Government set up a tele-
vision advisory committee, consisting of the
Director-General of Posts and Telegraphs, the
chairman of the ABC and the chairman of the
Australian Broadcasting Control Board.
Charles Moses went overseas on a fact-finding
mission for this Committee. He recalled" he was
concerned to[...]een made in radio — particularly the
separation of responsibility between program-
ming which was done by the ABC and the

9. ABCB. Annual Report, 1950.
10. Interview with Sir Charles Moses for Australian Film
and Television School, June 17, 1976.
ll. lbid.

Comp[...]leads the sing-along on
Sunny Side Up.

provision of technical facilities which were
supplied by the Post Office, Because of the cost
of setting up a national television service, Moses
w[...]where
statistics showed that an increasing number of
television sets were bought as more channels
went to air. He also said he was very conscious
of the cost of making television programs, and
that the cost of a national service might be too
much for the Australian economy to sustain. He
proposed, t[...]25 per cent ofits
programs.

The Economic Crisis of 1 952

By early 1952 the economic situation had
become serious, and in March the Government
announced that it had deferred the introduction
of television until the economy improved.” The
future of television was again problematic, but
early in 19[...]broadcasting legislation to
permit the licensing of commercial television
stations “on the same fun[...]s as has
been so remarkably successful in respect of
sound broadcasting”.” It also appointed a Roy[...]ABCB. Annual Report. 1953.

Filming an episode of Pacific Film’s The Terrible Ten.

512 -— Cin[...]t

Newton can be seen in the group at left.

Lady for a Day — day-time viewing at its best.

Commissi[...]chaired by Professor
G. W. Paton, vice-chancellor of Melbourne Uni-
versity, and including the chairman of the
Control Board, to determine how many tele-
vision stations there should be, and where they
should be located.

The Opposition was very critical of the
Government introducing legislation to provide
for commercial television before the Royal
Commission had reported, and for not allowing
the Commission to provide a basic philosophy
for the introduction of television, or even to
decide whether commercial television was
wanted.

Number of Channels

The Royal Commission took evidence from a
number of witnesses who felt that a television
service should be operated solely by a govern-
ment authority, and that commercial services
should not be permitted[...]e after the national service had
been established for some years.

In a personal submission, Richard Boyer, the
chairman of the ABC, revealed the real problem
inherent in a[...]:

“It is around this question ofthe limitation of
total television transmission that the real issue
is joined in the respective merit of com-
mercial and public operation of television. In
public operation there is no inher[...]more hours or more sessions than the
availability of material of quality and public
interest will permit. Commercially there is a
natural urge to fill all possible hours with
material of some sort for time is the product
sold. This inevitably leads to the inclusion ofa
vast amount of material which is of inferior
and sometimes distinctly harmful character.
When one considers the long preparation and
care devoted to the production of film for
theatre use because of the possibility of
screening into thousands of individual
audiences over a long period of time, it is
obvious that the filling of day—long television
programs on a multiplicity of stations must
result in a lowering of quality.”

Boyer then recommended a grad[...]

R
3.
1.
x
F.
t

Live recording of HSV-7's The Happy Show.

tical, or religious, whi[...]o be extrac-
ted in the future. He urged in favor of the Post
Office (erecting transmitters which it would
continue to own, to carry sponsored programs
and renting facilities to those commercial
organizations which wished to take advantage of
them. He continued:
“The many applicants, both (sic) com-
mercial, cultural and religious who may now
or in the future desire par[...]ir rights prejudiced by the present aliena-

tion of any frequency to any one or more did not recommen[...]petition

cannot by its nature be completely free and

unlimited due regard to community rights can
be achieved only through the sharing of the
community facility.”“

The Royal Commission, however, stated that
its terms of reference had restricted its function
to inquire[...]er which the
existing dual system should operate, and stated:

“Although the question whether commerc[...]which has caused great
concern to large sections of the community,
we have come to the conclusion that it is not
included in the matters referred to us, and we
do not therefore propose to offer any observa-[...]yal Commission recommen-
ded one national station and two commercial
licences in Sydney and Melbourne, favoring the
evidence from the commercial radio broad-
casters, newspaper proprietors and manufac-
turers which wanted to encourage the purchase
of television sets.

Television Licencces

The next significant event was the choosing of
the licensees. The Control Board conducted
public hearings into the granting of licences in
1955. Four applications were received for the
two Melbourne licences, and eight for the two in
Sydney. At the public hearings the Con[...]epresentation by counsel. The

14. Submissions and evidence to Royal Commission on
Television, 1953.[...]lso gave permission to the New
South Wales branch of the Returned Service-
men’s League, and Actors and Announcers
Equity to be heard as interested parties, and
Equity made a strong plea for an Australian
content quota.

The Control Board r[...]ing that the applications came from a narrow
area of press, broadcasting and theatre interests,
and recommended that the four licences be given
to the applications with substantial press and
broadcasting interests. It is interesting that th[...]ontrol Board’s recommenda-
tions in April 1955, and all four commercial
stations and the two ABC stations were on the
air by January 1957.

In 1957, the Government announced the
extension of the ABC and commercial tele-
vision services to the other fou[...]stated that it had made no decision on the
number of commercial licences to be granted in
each capital city, and would not do so until the
Control Board had made[...]the Control Board’s Report” on the Bris-
bane and Adelaide hearings it noted that much
of the evidence was devoted to the interest and
development of the existing stations in Sydney
and Melbourne, and that GTV’s evidence indica-
ted the station sho[...]sion in country areas through the establish-
ment of relay stations.

So, the Control Board addressed[...]issues: whether the existing
licensees in Sydney and Melbourne should be
allowed to exercise substantial influence in the
establishment of the new stations in Brisbane
and Adelaide; and to what extent newspapers,
which already had inte[...]casting stations in Sydney, Melbourne, Bris-
bane and Adelaide, should be allowed to exercise

16. ABCB. Report and Recommendations to the Post-
master-General pursuant to the Television Act of 1953
and the Television Regulations of Applications for
.Licences for Commercial Television Stations in the
Sydney area and the Melbourne area. 1955. Also printed
in the ABC[...]17. ABCB. Annual Report. 1958.

18. ABCB. Report and Recommendation to the Post-
master-General on Applications for Commercial Tele-
vision Licences for the Brisbane and Adelaide areas.
1958.

AUSTRALIAN TELEVISION

control over television stations in Brisbane and
Adelaide, if licences were granted to them.

The[...]should be
only one licence issued in either city and indica-
ted that a locally-owned company, not con[...]vernment, however, rejected these
recommendations and requested the Control
Board to choose two license[...]her blow to the independence ofthe Control
Board, and ensured that the existing Sydney and
Melbourne television licensees, with their
powerful radio, newspaper and magazine
interest groups, had a strong influence in the
Brisbane and Adelaide stations.

There was no difference of opinion in Perth
and Hobart. All applicants stated that only one
licence should be granted”, and TVW (in Perth)
and Tasmanian Television (in Hobart) were
recommended[...]3
country areas, which had been allocated one
ABC and one commercial television channel.
The Postmaster[...]asis that they were local independent com-
panies and not associated with the metropolitan
services. Two of these licences were in the large
conurbations adjoining Sydney in Newcastle and
Wollongong. The Sydney licensees attempted to
pre[...]stations took the Control
Board to the High Court and they succeeded.
However, when it became clear tha[...]nce would be allocated to the
four capital cities and a second licence for Perth.
This decision appears to have resulted from a
number of pressures: the advertising industry
wanted greater competition; other commercial
interests wanted a piece of what. appeared to be
the profitable television cake (between 1959 and
1961 net profits increased from $1.5 million to
$[...]ort to enforce regulations relating to the
amount of Australian content). Other pressures
included the[...]licence in Sydney,
had taken over GTV Melbourne) and the
Government’s concern that if Labor won the[...]however, was
that there was room in the airspace, and that
“great competition would result and benefit
residents and the development of the television
serviCe”."

There were nine applications for the Sydney
licence and six for Melbourne. GTV Melbourne
tried unsuccessfully to[...]d decide not to grant a
third licence in Brisbane and Adelaide, having
already granted a third in Sydney and Mel-
bourne. The Control Board disallowed their
a[...]y had not been

19. ABCB. Supplementary Report and Recommendation to
the Postmaster-General on Applications for Commer-
cial Television Licences for the Brisbane and Adelaide
areas.

20, ABCB. Report and Recommendation to the Post-
master-General on Applications for Commercial Televi-
sion Licences for the Perth and Hobart areas. 1958.

21. ABCB. Annual Repo[...]

able to show an interest, and recommended that
the third licences in the four c[...]nts with no newspaper interests.“

The granting of the 1963 licences is significant
because it broug[...]he
Melbourne licence but not the Brisbane licence
for which it also applied. The Board recom-
mended Un[...]ich had no
other commercial television interests, and
claimed that the stations would be run by
Queenslanders for Queenslanders. Ansett then
bought up the shares in Universal Telecasters
andof indoor recreation.”-‘

In recommending“ South Australian Tele-
casters Ltd for the licence in Adelaide, the
Control Board noted that the majority of shares
would be held in South Australia, except for
some held by Ansett. This station (SAS—l0) was
taken over by TVW Perth in I971, however, and
now the majority of shares are held in Western
Australia. In Perth, Ansett also had a small
number of shares in Swan Television, the
successful applicant for the second licence.

So, by July 1965, when the third stations in
Brisbane and Adelaide went on air (the last of
this group to do so), the structure was completed
in its present form, and what Richard Boyer
feared in 1953 had arrived —— endless hours of
airtime to be filled.

Standards

The major concern with the standards for
television has always been over the amount of
Australian-made programs (which is measur-
able),[...]the Royal Commission hearings, the case in
favor of Australian content was frequently
argued in terms of showing Australian culture,
and the need to employ Australians and develop
Australian talent.

A large number of submissions from parents
and teachers were concerned about the amount
of American programs which might be shown,

22. ABCB. Report and Recommendation to the Post-
master-General on Applications for a Licence for a
Commercial Television Station in Sydney and Mel-
bourne areas.

23. MacCallum. M. Ten Years of Television, Sun Books,
I968. The chapter by K. Davidson, “Profit and Loss”,
covers the 1958 and 1963 licence period.

24. ABCB. Report and Recommendation to the Post-
master-General on Applications for a Licence for_a
Commercial Television Station in the Brisbane area, in
the Adelaide area and in the Perth area.

Albert Namatjira being int[...]N9.

SI4 —— Cinema Papers, September-October

and the commercialism that went with them.
Other witnesses cited American research which
showed that the number of hours children spent
viewing television was begin[...]ision watching induced depressed mental
activity; and that the amount of violence on tele-
vision was having an effect on children.

Addressing himself to the quality of the
programs, Richard Boyer again made some
pertinent comments in his submission:

“The hours of telecasting and the number of

stations operating should be strictly related to

the availability of material ofgood quality. As

with radio, it is possible to put programs of a

sort at small cost on the T.V. screen. The

interests both of the public and of the prestige
of T.V. require limitation of hours to a point
where standards can be maintained.”

In the light of the subsequent development of
television it is interesting to note that Boyer
q[...]before our eyes. The medium is
heading hell bent for the rut of innocuity,
mediocrity and sameness that made a juke-
box of radio. What of the endless procession
of crime thrillers and of the panel shows with
the same faces appearing over and over again
with monotonous regularitv? And the
children’s programs‘? Is there no sure ca[...]s whereon the
younger generation sing the praises of cereals
and candy bars? Are these programs to be the
sole measure of the child inheritance, the
riches of the library and the treasure of the
arts? Television take heed! It is blindly and
short-sightedly selling its ultimate greatness
for a batch of synthetic popularity ratings that
are boring into[...]as
potential licensees favoring self-regulation; and
those who believed that self-regulation would
not be an “adequate means of maintaining stan-
dards”, because commercial pressures would
encourage mediocrity, and the paucity of Aus-
tralian talent would encourage the introduction
of cheap and inferior overseas programs to save
costs. The Commission recommended that:

“The most effective method of raising

standards is through the licensing system with

provision for a public hearing where the Aus-
tralian Broadcast[...]itself to blame if it fails to take advantage ‘of
the means provided for the expression of its
dissatisfaction. What is needed is a_ vocal
public which will offer constructive criticism
and refuse to be satisfied with inferior
programs. In the United Kingdom the public
and press are very active in expressing from
week to week opinions on each particular type
of program. In the United States, many
organizations have been set up with the sole
object of using public opinion as a means of
improving quality. An active policy of con-
structive public criticism is essential in A[...]s to reach the standard
desiredf’ _
The history of the Australian Broadcasting
Control Board’s regulation of television, until its
demise in 1976, indicates t[...]should set up an open hearing t_o
provide a forum for the public to voice their
comments on television programming.
Secondly, the result of the Government’s inter-
ference in the licensin[...]958 was that
the press, the other possible medium for a
critical voice, was not impartial.

Australian[...]e employment argument
has tended to swamp the one for high quality is a
clause introduced into the legislation in 1942,
and retained since. It requires the commercial
licensees, and the ABC, to “as far as possible use
the services of Australians”?

The Royal Commission Report in 1953 had
stated that Australian artistes should play a real
and steadily increasing part in Australian tele-
visi[...]ted that it was not possible
to recommend a quota of Australian content
until actual experience had been gained on the
amount of talent available.

At the public hearings for the granting of the
first licence in Sydney in 1955, Clive Evatt QC
appeared for Actors Equity and asked the
applicants what were their intentions in relation
to Australian programming and the employ-
ment of Australian artistes. He made a very
strong plea to the Board to require as a condi-
tion of the licence not less than 55 per cent pro-
gram hours of Australian content.

The Control Board stated, ho[...]s sure licensees would discharge the obliga-
tion of ensuring that best use was made of Aus-
tralian talent. It did recommend, however, that
the granting of licences should be on the con-
dition that the li[...]Australian content
quota during the first month of operation, there
were severe restrictions on the amount of over-
seas programming permitted because of the
shortage ofof which not more
than two—thirds could be spent in U.S. dollars.
This meant a lot of programming was local live
material (there were n[...]eleased
this restriction, despite public pressure for its
retention as an Australian content control
mechanism. It is significant that the percentage
of Australian content before the restriction was
lif[...]66 per cent; TCN: 45 per cent;
GTV: 61 per cent; and HSV: 45 per cent. By

25. Australian Parliament. Broadcasting and Television Act
1942. Clause H4.
26. ABCB.[...]

Public pressure for more Australian content
continued to grow, and in 1960 the Minister
introduced the first quota. ’He advised licensees
that the proportion of Australian programs tele-
vised by each station at the end of three years of
operation should be not less than 40 per cent,
and must include at least one hour a week,
between 7.30 p.m. and 9.30 p.m. However, the
annual report of the Control Board for June
I962 showed that neither of the Sydney com-
mercial stations had reached that[...]aster-General announced the
proposed introduction of a third channel in the
other four capital cities.

Throughout I962, and during the public
hearings for a third commercial licence in
Sydney and Melbourne, the Control Board
heard evidence from applicants about their plans
for Australian programs. In choosing the two
successful applicants for Sydney and Mel-
bourne the Control Board stated that it was
impressed with the Sydney applicant (United
Telecasters) and quoted from its submission: “A
real and persistent effort should be made to
bring a fresh, original and Australian approach
to all types of entertaining programming”.

The Board, in recom[...]importance to the nature ofthe
program proposals of this applicant. These
proposals included 24.5 hours of programs of
Australian origin, or 58 per cent in the first year
of operation, and a gradual increase in the se-
cond and third years. The company also sought
to create “a strong Australian image in its
programs”, and that “the content of the
program would also need to reflect an Aus-
tralian environment encouraging awareness of
the achievements of Australia and advance the
arts and crafts culture of the nation.”

The hearings for the third licence in Brisbane
and Adelaide, however, attracted considerable
evidenc[...]ard stated
in its Report that it recognized this, and that
there may be some reduction in the local pro-
duction of Australian programs, but the curtail-
ment would[...]erious
results. It stated that:

“Any reduction of the amount of Australian
programs produced locally would we consider
be largely offset by the use of some of the
increasing quantity ofgood quality Australian[...]will become available parti-
cularly as a result of the productions of the
new Sydney and Melbourne stations.”

To appease the growing pressure for more
Australian content from the unions, independ-
ent film producers, and the public, the
Government" set up the Select Committee on
the Encouragement of Australian Productions
for Television, chaired by Senator Vincent. It
took evidence in all states and generated a great
deal of interest and expectation, and reported to
the Government in 1963.” This committee was
very critical of the Control Board’s regulation of
commercial television and made a number of
recommendations, some of which are only now
coming into effect:

(a) That applications for a licence renewal
should be heard in public;
(b) That the renewal period for a television

27. ABCB. Annual Report. I958.[...]Report, I963.

29. Australian Parliament. Report of the Senate Select
Committee on the Encouragement of Australian Pro-
duction for Television I963 (Vincent Committee).

AUSTRALIAN TELEVISION

AUSTRALIAN QUOTA REQUIREMENTS FOR TELEV|SION*

Year Quota: All Programs

40 per cen[...]t five years;
(c) That tax reductions be allowed for com-
panies producing and investing in films;
(d) That the overall volume of programs
depicting crime, violence, horror and anti-
social behavior be considerably reduced;

(e) That there be a quota for Australian drama
programs of not less than 9 per cent of total
time devoted to programs of Australian
origin to be imposed progressively over the
next ensuing three years; and

(f) That an Australian Television Council be
responsible for planning and co-ordinating a
national research program.

The V[...]ecom-
mendations to encourage Australian programs
and filmmakin , which had never seen the light
of day. So, whifi: the recommendations were well
re[...]parliamentary debate on the Report in April
1964 and never returned to it.

Public Pressure

The Vincent Committee was the beginning of
the slow process of raising awareness to media
and film issues within industry organizations
and with the public. The Control Board could no
longe[...]arch into audience attitudes
to programming-‘", and gradually raised the
percentage quotas as the pre[...]w (see Table 1). However, it appeared in-
capable of strictly imposing these quotas.

The lack of media publicity for the Govern-
ment’s inaction gradually stimulated awareness
of the problems of media monopoly. Some un-
ions responded by demanding a break-up of
media control. The recommendations for

30. Australian Broadcasting Control Board. At[...]975. Australian Broadcasting
Tribunal, Television and the Public. Melbourne I977.

7.30p.m.-9.30p.m.

1[...]month 10 hours a month

funding the film industry and breaking up
distribution and exhibition monopolies led to
growing pressure fro[...]co seminar in 1968 on the pro-
fessional training of film and television script-
writers, producers and directors. From this came
the recommendations for the Australian Film
Development Corporation, the Experimental
Film Fund, and the Film and Television School.

.The Vincent Committee’s recommendations for

a national television council were taken over by[...]alian" campaign in I971. Media unions,
filmmakers and individuals working in the film
and television industry organized petitions in
marginal seats in Melbourne and Sydney. They
sought an inquiry into the structure of Aus-
tralian television and assistance for Australian
films. These petitions were presented to the
Senate and had two results: in August 1971, the
Senate Standing Committee on Education,
Science and the Arts was given the reference to
inquire into “all aspects of television and broad-
casting including Australian content of tele-
vision programs” under the chairmanship of
Senator Davidson; and, in March 1972, the
Minister for Trade and Industry requested the
Tariff Board to inquire into, and recommend on,
the assistance needed for production in Australia
of motion picture films and television programs.
These bodies took evidence throughout 1972
from the film and television industry.

The Tariff Board reported i[...]o assist Australian
film production, distribution and exhibition, in-
cluding the setting up of a government body to
invest in films, and a strategy for breaking up
the distribution and exhibition monopolies. The

Continued on P. 584[...]nference,
November I969. Convened by media unions and
ACSPA.

32. Tariff Board. Report on Tariff Revision Motion Picture
Films and Television Programs. June I973.

Cinema[...]

We did a lot of television while
the half-hour weekly series was still
popular. We knew how to work
economically, and, though we were
not making a fortune, we did quite
nicely. I was making The God-
fathers for $5600 an episode, yet
making money on it — that was
quite a neat trick. The margin was
$400 an episode and I calculated on
having to make 22 episodes to
bre[...]as the series financed?

That came about because of a
public challenge Clyde Packer
made with Bobby Limb, after Limb
had gone to the press and said that
television stations weren’t pre-
pare[...]ance, he could make a
half-hour television series for $5000
an episode. Clyde retaliated by
saying that if Limb could, he would
place an order then and there.
Finally, Limb backed off and Ijust
happened to run into Clyde at the
time. I offered to make a series for
$5600 an episode, and, as luck
would have it, we made a good pilot
and got the order.

As it turned out. the series was[...]ed to go round the
twist. So he wrote himself out and

ROBERT BIIUN IN G

As Australia’s feature film industry developed from the
revival of 1970, it was inevitable that the closely-related fields
of features and television would overlap. One area where this is[...]as by commercial
television stations.

A pioneer of the tele-feature is Robert Bruning, a producer
wh[...]a series which
Bruning began in 1971 on a budget of $5600 an episode, was a
courageous start. It was soon followed by a string of tele-
features, which includes “The Alternative”, “Mama’s Gone
a’Hunting” and “Is There Anybody There?”.

Bruning, who still alternates between producing and acting,
was recently in Melbourne working for Crawford Productions.
There he spoke to Peter Beilby and Scott Murray.

Robert.Bruning (second from left) and cast from The Godfathers.

wrote Harold Hopkins in. We

devised the idea of making tele-
continued with the show for

vision films back to back, but I

another two ye[...]doing the True
Blue Show, my first variety show,
and it was too much to bite off. It
died in the Christmas of 1973, and
in I974 I couldn’t even get arrested.
Fortunately, I got a role in Sunday
Too Far Away and Crawfords, who
had always been kind to me, offere[...]I

couldn’t convince anybody there
was a market for them. The
evidence was there because Spelling
Gol[...]75, I finally got an
order. It was from Channel 9 for a
terrible thing called Paradise. I
made it in Surfers Paradise, and.
although I would like to forget it, it
has been[...]e
on Is There Anybody There?, which
was the first of the true all-film tele-
features. I made that in 1976, and it
did very well. On the basis of it,
Channel 7 gave me my first back-
to-back orde[...]1977: Mama’s Gone a’
Hunting, The Alternative and Gone
to Ground. They all rated well, but I
came up against the combination of
things that happens to small
independent producer[...]you have
to keep your own end as low as
possible and you live on virtually
nothing; and so on. Obviously, I
didn’t starve to death, but[...]e necessary financial
resources to keep that sort of
structure going.

I then looked at the forecast and
it seemed that by the end of 1978 I
was going to be into various invest-
ors for more than $500,000. Now,
although I am not a particularly
pessimistic sort of person, I knew
that if I went bad at the age of 48,
there was no way I was going to be
able to pay that sort of money
back. As a production company, I
needed the umbrella of a bigger
organization.

I then spoke to Reg Grundy. Reg
was already a drama producer of
substance, but he wanted to widen
the range of his drama activities,
the upshot of which was that I sold
Gemini Productions to Reg, with a
contract to run it for him for two
years. That contract expired on
October 31, last year.

Gemini is now a wholly-owned
subsidiary of the Grundy Organi-
zation, and will remain so. My rela-
tionship with Reg is such, that when
they want to do a television feature,
and they feel I might be the right
kind of producer, I could be
brought in as a contract pro[...]ifference being that I had
much flasher offices, and

You said you evolved a technique of
making these features on very low
budgets. What d[...]The first thing is to have all the
scripts ready and locked-off before
the first day of pre-production.
Then. if you take on the right sort
of highly professional hardworking
production staff,[...]ilms might
not all be happening at once, but
bits of one film could be attended to
while another is shooting, and so
on.

We used to shoot the films in
three six-day weeks, with a week’s
lay-off in between for the crew to
collapse. In effect, we were offering
people three months work, with lots
of variety. All the films had urban
locations, so th[...]didn’t quite work out that
way, though, as some of the days
were quite long.

There were all sorts of economies
like that, which reduce your over-
head[...]f you have
any problems with script altera-
tions and so forth, then the whole
thing falls to pieces. A[...]ered last year, it all falls to pieces
with acts of God. Paul Eddey
became very ill while he was work-
ing on these projects and we were
forced to postpone one of them in
the middle. Now that is notjust the
postponement of a film, it is the
postponement of everything that
follows.

Your first three tele-f[...]Channel 7. Did they put
up the money?

Elaine Lee and Eric Oldfield in Gone to Ground, one of the three tele-features Bruning pro-

They bought them in advance;
Channel 7 bought the television
rights and the Australian Film
Commission put up the deficit.
Channel 7 also had a very modest
percentage of the films. They are
beautiful customers in the se[...]a little more.

What figure are we talking about
for a tele-feature?

It varied over the years. In 197[...]television
stations was somewhere between
$70,000 and $84,000, depending on
the length of format — i.e. 90
minutes or two hours. Now that
was against budgets of between
$105,000 and $125,000, so there is a
fairly heavy deficit, and you are not
going to make that up from your
advance from a distributor.

Did the financing of the tele-
features change when Grundy
became invo[...]any
investment in the projects, except by
virtue of their production company

I don’t think their total
contribution is reflected in the
budget; the provision of facilities
and so forth are only nominally
charged for in the budget. I would
say that Grundy’s contribution was
heavy, and, of course, in between
productions, he kept my staff and
me busy developing properties.
Now that’s a pun[...]has been appointed as
the American representative of the
Grundy Organization. As well, Bob
Kristal in Los Angeles does work forof
$ l00,000. That’s a lot of bread, and
one of the things a smaller producer
like myself can’t[...]es rated well. How was that
tested?

Wendy Hughes and Carla Hoogeveen in the critically-regarded[...]

It is more than ratings. There is
an area of television, which is not
often referred to, which I call the
area of “prestige”. It measures the
amount of kudos brought to a

station by the programs it sh[...]while rating
well, also brought their fair share of
public acclaim. Is There Anybody
There?, for example, took a
Penguin, and also a Sammy for the
best music. In the second year, the
two of my three films that have
been shown (Mama’s Gone a’
Hunting and The Alternative) took
eight awards between them.[...]ere?,
Mama’s Gone a’ Hunting, Gone to
Ground, and The Alternative were
all distributed by Paramount. The
deal was a substantial cash up-front
in return for the right to distribute
them for 15 years. That is a little
long in my opinion, bu[...]f the top to
start with.

Then come a whole range of
standard charges, like print costs
and so forth. These may be as high
as $25,000, and you are left with
$40,000. Off the top of that comes
the repayment of any advances —
say $25,000. So, out of the
$100,000 raised in sales, you are left
with a nett $14,000, which doesn’t
look too good forFor
example, if someone wanted to sell
My Fair Lady to Japan, they would
put 50 films with it, of which Is
There Anybody There? might be the
last card in the pack. Now, if the
sale is for a million dollars, you
don’t work out how much[...]films. My Fair Lady would
probably get $800,000, and the rest
would then be split up — probably
quite arbitrarily.

One of the areas I find most
unsatisfactory about the situation is
that the producer loses control of
where or for what his product will
be sold. So, while I am very
grateful to Paramount for getting
us into an international sphere, I
am les[...]ake
profitable tele-features in Australia?

Yes, and I believe everybody is
going to have a crack at i[...]ake the feature
business look a bit sick in terms of
total output.

What form will these tele-features
take?

The first thing everybody is
thinking about is of low-budget
cinema films with television legs
beyond that point. In a sense, I
believe that’s what Patrick and End
Play are. Patrick probably has
cinema legs ou[...]ly has television
legs. It is a first-class piece of tele-
vision product for the U.S. because
if you dub that track into
American, the film could easily be
thought to have come out of San
Francisco, New York, or New
Orleans. There are no cars in it, so
you don’t see what side of the road

Gerard Kennedy and Vince Martin in
Mama’s Gone a’ Hunting, Bruni[...]ddle-class people with present
day modern values; and so on. It’s
pretty international in its approac[...]though it was made
on a budget that was too high for its
day. It deserved a better run in the
local cinema, however, and its tele-
vision airing certainly proved
worthwhi[...]ng the deficit
out offinancing. You make the film
for, let’s say $300,000, andfor many, many years, though
American syndication is[...]make a step
towards them. It’s all little bits and
pieces.

Do you envisage a greater coming
together of the television and film
industries, and, if so, could that be a
way of making the industries more
viable?

Yes, though t[...]become more
viable. One is a correct application
of the new taxation laws. I don’t
think the television stations are
completely aware of what’s
possible.

If the television stations in[...]t groups, they could then
invest in feature films and at the
same time show substantial finan-
cial results in the form of taxation
relief. This would then mean they
could[...]han
they have in the past.

I have great sympathy for tele-
vision stations, however, because
every tim[...]ubscribe to that. They are in
the television game and they are
doing what we should be doing,
which is making money.

The important thing is for more
feature films to do well at the box-
office. I know one network, for
example, which over the past three
years has invested in 10 features,
only one of which made a profit.
Now, you can’t blame the boards of
directors, who are after all in the
television bu[...]at business you are in." It
is, after all, horses for courses. *

Cinema Papers, September-October — 519

With the advent of television, several tran-
scription houses planne[...]ade a half—hour television pilot The
Adventures of Al Munch (released in news-
reel theatrettes as I Found Joe Barton), and
Australasian Radio Productions in Melbourne
did a[...]only company to make the transition
successfully and, altogether, it has been in
drama production for nearly 35 years.

The company was founded by Hector
Crawford and his sister, Dorothy. Hector’s
background was in music and Dorothy’s in
music and drama. Not surprisingly, the
transcription house[...]s.

Hector Crawford was born in Melbourne in
1913 and was educated as a choirboy at St.
Paul’s Cathedral School and at the Melbourne
Conservatorium of Music. As a young man he
was actively involved with music: he was on
the staff of the Conservatorium, conducted a
number of Melbourne choirs, and, in 1938,
started the “Music For The People” outdoor
symphony concerts. Then, in 1940, he became
music and recording director of Broadcast
Exchange of Australia, a Melbourne-based
recording and radio production company.

Dorothy Crawford, after a scholarship
course in singing and pianoforte at the Conser-
vatorium, was a professional singer for several
years before switching to the theatre and

Opposite: Lorraine Bayly and Paul Cronin as Mrs and Mr
Sullivan in Crawfords’ The Sullivans.

A bri[...]Z

Crawfords even had two early television quiz

and production, before linking up with her 1 shows in Video Village and Wedding Day, and

brother to form Hector Crawford Productions.

Th[...]staff, who also
doubled as script editors, Hector and Dorothy,
and others with writing, acting or production
skills.[...]imes, these included
Roland Strong, Rube Sharlett and John
Ormiston—Reid.

The first program the comp[...]mond
who became Hector Crawford’s wife in
1950) and music was to be its early strength.
Later, its dr[...]tanding. Sales were as successful as its
programs and, unlike some of the other tran-
scription houses, Crawfords rarel[...]sales in 20 overseas
countries.

With the advent of television and the
general trend in radio to music formats, the
demand for recorded music slackened consid-
erably. The year[...]from other sources,
such as overseas sales, radio and television
commercials, and documentary film
production (especially the Expor[...]produced under an
arrangement with the Department of Trade).

TELEVISION DRAMA
OUTPUT

As at January 1[...]ivision 4

Matlock Police
Ryan

The Box

The Last Of The
Australians

Bluey

Solo One

The Bluestone B[...]rrently in production are The Sullivans, Cop
Shop and Skyways; Murder Squad and Young
Ramsey (a second 13 episode series) are in pre-
paration.

iin its offices, on the second floor of the
i Olderfleet Building at 475 Collins St, whe[...], an acting
1 workshop which was a further source of
l revenue. The breakthrough, however, came
1 when[...]Consider Your Verdict was a low-budget
adaptation of the radio program. On radio each
case had run as[...]n or glory, apart from a TV Week Logie

. in 1961 for Best Australian Drama; but for a
good part of that year it was the only local
drama series in production.

Against imported courtroom dramas of the
time, such as Perry Mason and Boyd Q.C.,
Consider Your Verdict looked distinctl[...]had
no regular characters, although a small group
of actors, such as Wyn Roberts, Roland
Strong, George Fairfax, Peter Aarnesson and
Robert Peach, recurred as counsel, and action
was confined to verbal interchanges between
witnesses and counsel. Audience involvement

was, therefore, ce[...]volvement
with lay people in any particular case, and in
the question of whether the accused was

RADIO OUTPUT[...]r Marriage 416 quarter--hour episodes
No Holiday

for Halliday 650 quarter- hour episodes
Opera For The People 50 half- hour episodes

252 hal[...]

From a production point of view, the format
was very economical. The early part of the
week was spent in writing and editing the
script, casting, set preparation and other stages
of pre-production. Most of the Thursday
rehearsal, held in Crawfords’ spac[...]Building, was given over to the
learning oflines and coaching of acting perfor-
mance, and, at the same time, working out
actors’ movements and sequencing shots.
Friday was spent in making necessary changes
to the script and giving actors extra rehearsals.

Tele-recording t[...]ning at the HSV Theatre in Collingwood,
converted for the morning into a television
studio. Before the introduction of videotape,
recording took place by filming the tr[...]our-long episode was
required to be shot in three and a half hours of
studio time; under the arrangement with HSV,
any[...]see fig. 3), the series was
important on a number of counts. Running to
over 160 episodes, it was the[...]ituation that was very much the rule in
the 1940s and 1950s when radio drama was
produced by the transcription houses, and
again today with television drama, but was
very much the exception in the early 19605.
For Crawfords, the success of Consider Your
Verdict helped consolidate its posi[...]elevision production industry.

Equally important for the company, the

program helped establish a pattern of

production which changed little until the early
1970s. The key figures in the develop-
ment of this pattern were Dorothy and
Ian Crawford, with Dorothy in charge ofdrama
prod[...]that she edited scripts, supervised the
casting, and wrote and drama-produced the
early episodes of the series. Gradually she
developed a small team that took over several
of these functions, but under her control. Phil
Free[...]pany in 1961, became script editor on the
series, and Sonia Borg, whojoined around the
same time and had a background in the
theatre, started as an acting coach, became
casting director for a time, wrote scripts and

The Homicide team as it was in 1974: Dennis Grosvenor
(left), Don Barker. Gary Day and Charles “Bud" Tmgwell.

522 ~ Cinema Papers. Se[...]n, who took over new projects after the
departure of Ian Jones in 1977.

was finally drama director on the later episodes
of Consider Your Verdict. Essentially, this
team was responsible for the dramatic values
of the series.

Ian Crawford was in charge of technical
production. On Consider Your Verdict th[...]locking in the Olderfleet
building in preparation for video directing in

Senior Detective Frank Banner[...]am (after Homicide) up to I972.

(Gerard Kennedy) and

Hector Crawford rehearses his orchestra before the taping
of a talent show.

the Collingwood studio. Crawford was also in
charge of post-production, supervising such
things as music and sound mixing. When, a
few years later and starting with Homicide,

film units were formed for outside location
work, Ian Crawford was placed in overall con-
trol ofthis area of production as well. The units
were mostly manned[...]Ryan, a series which centred on the adven-
tures of a private detective.

Qv . . - _ -.

departments.

This pattern of production had several impli-
cations. The division and specialization of
labor was such that it was difficult for any one
individual to guide an episode of a Crawford
series from conception to finished pro[...]ureurism was then structurally
impossible because of the pattern of organ-
ization: if anything, authorship on these early
programs was collective and anonymous. And
yet, paradoxically, while individual authorship
w[...]romoted in impor-
tance because it became a means of controlling
and focusing the efforts of various divisions
of the company while it passed through the
different stages of production. Thus, the area
of production given most importance was the
writing, with writers being the best paid and
most highly-regarded employees in the
company.

F[...]embers were unable to
supervise the finer details of production, they
could, through the teams they had developed,
retain overall guidance and control. The final
credit of a Crawford program in those years —
“A Crawford Production” — was a succinct
expression of the dominance of the family in
the company.

Late in 1963, Conside[...]rds had already developed a
new series, Homicide, and had sunk its own
money into a pilot episode, The Stunt, written
by Phil Freedman and Ian Jones. Although
HSV Channel 7 was interested,[...]hey were getting back less than the
program cost, and it was two years before
Homicide began to show a[...]It
started on Melbourne television in late 1964,
and in Sydney early in 1965', within months it
was am[...]he most
popular program on Australian television, and
only Division 4 came close to rivalling it.

Desp[...]was based on a recurring plot
situation (a murder and its investigation)
rather than on characterization. The homicide
squad did contain regular characters, but for
much of its run these were not the subject of
dramatic interest. Altogether there were 15
changes of police characters: the original team
was John Fegan, Terry McDermott and Lex
Mitchell; the final one was Charles Tingwell,
Don Barker, Gary Day and Dennis Grosvenor.

Like Consider Your Verdict, the stress was
on authenticity. The files of the Victorian
police department were available to[...]m the
radio days). Police advisers vetted scripts for
details and accuracy, and the department

CRAWFORD PRODUCTIONS

helped in such things as blocking offtraftic for
film shooting, allowing access to places like
Russell St and the Police Academy, and
providing megaphones, ambulances, etc.

The first 13 episodes of Homicide culmi-
nated in a courtroom trial along[...]erdict. In practical terms,
the trial saved money and time. These seg-
ments were shot on videotape.

However, it was in the use of filmed inserts
that Homicide broke with its predecessor. The
program started on a ratio of about one length
of film (about 16 minutes of screen time) to
two of videotape. This was gradually increased
until, just before it converted to all film and
color in 1972, film and videotape were ofabout
equal length.

Film enabled Homicide to move outdoors;
it saw the introduction of physical action,
chases and fights. It also saw the introduction
ofa side of a large Australian city with which
most viewers w[...]had not
been seen previously on local television. For
many of those working on the program this
was one of the chief reasons for its success, a
view echoed and supported by John C. Murray
in his 1973 article:

“In Homicide and Division 4 the dramatic
character, action and ethic are embedded in
a world we know — the sub-industrial land-
scape of narrow-gutted South Melbourne
timber cottages, Carlton back streets and
lanes, the Victoria docks, the Dynon road
railway[...]cation shooting makes the series good
to look at: andand
courtyards; the squalidness of his crime
shadowed by the squalidness of the
settings.”

For more than 10 years Homicide was to be
at the centre of Crawfords‘ operation. Its
success tended to confirm the company in a
certain line of thinking. After the cancellation
of Hunter, an ambitious attempt at a spy series
whic[...]ntinued, Crawfords fell back on the police
format for a new series it had begun preparing
in late 1968 for the Nine Network to replace
the spy series.

Originally titled Saints and Sinners and set
in the St. Kilda police station, it was changed to
Division 4 and relocated at Yarra Central after
claims that it cast a bad light on the area. By
way of varying the police format, the new
series concentrated on a suburban police sta-
tion, and included uniform police on the beat,
as well as plain-clothes detectives.

Because of the evident popularity of the
h0me—grown police series, ATV-O trie[...]

make its own variant of the genre. It commis-
sioned former Sydney radio[...]or ratings. The station then
approached Crawfords and Matlock Police
went to air the following year.

Even after its demise, Homicide still has an
obvious glow of attraction for stations, the
company and even its competitors. As one
executive at Crawfor[...]th Bluey, a series
that had only lukewarm ratings and after com-
pleting its 39—episode contract was[...]earlier grave.

Late in 1977, an obvious marriage of soap
opera and the police format took place when
Crawfords produced Cop Shop. Currently,
Crawfords and Grundys are preparing pilots
for new police series", Crawfords’ series is
tentat[...]spite this tendency to fall back on what is
known and successful, there have also been
conscious attemp[...]ion 4, Crawfords tried
to develop the personality of the individual
police. However, the different writers tended
to get out of step and the characters became
atemporal, like their count[...]cutive producer, the series successfully
deepened and developed the police characters.

Matlock Police, at first, also ran the risk of
duplicating Homicide. In later episodes,
however,[...]ut it was only in Solo One, a half-hour spin
off, and Young Ramsey, an hour series about
a veterinary s[...]ential is con-
tained in Matlock Police. Solo One and
Young Ramsey were produced by Henry
Crawford, one of the later producers of
Matlock Police.

Crawfords’ record outside the police format
has been patchier and less decisive. Ryan, a
series that attempted to g[...]s, was even less
successful than its predecessor. Of their three
comedy series, The Last of the Australians
did reasonably well, but The Bluestone Boys
and Bobby Dazzler were cancelled.

The Box was Crawfo[...]ney counterpart, it achieved reason-
able success and helped the company greatly in
a very difficult period.

Maurie Fields, Johnny Farnham and Terry Norris in one of
Crawfords’ few ventures into comedy, Bobby Dazz[...]Crawfords’ other serials have been Hotel
Story and The Sullivans. Hotel Story was
cancelled after eight episodes had been made,
and before any were put to air. As for The
Sullivans, a recent McNair survey listed it a[...]t to venture into more than one
series at a time, for fear of not being able to
attract sufficient competent writers and tech-
nicians, Crawfords had always been willing[...]ir — Homicide,
Division 4, Matlock Police, Ryan and The
Box — and was producing 6.5 hours of tele-
vision drama each week.

The company had al[...]o), as well as the company itself.
(The exteriors of the premises were myth-
ologized as Channel 12 in[...]lled in size, the family
strove to retain control of the direction of
growth. To the initial script editing and
production team of Phil Freedman and Sonia
Borg were added Ian Jones, Douglas Tainsh,
Terry Stapleton, Tom Hegarty and Howard
Griffiths. This group became an important
nucleus for the development of the different
series and around it were grouped younger,
less experienced writers. Through script
editing and production conferences, they gave
newcomers the s[...]eceived themselves

earlier.‘ . _ _
The nucleus of writers/script editors was

important to the comp[...]changed so that one person was in overall
control of a program, that person was more
likely to come from the pool of older writers
than anywhere else in the company.[...]group. A
former journalist with the Melbourne Sun and a
director at HSV Channel 7, he joined Crawfords in
1963 and became the first company director outside the
fam[...]creative space in which to move.
He was in charge of creative projects and wrote and/or
directed first episodes of Homicide, Hunter, Division
4, Matlock Police, The Box, The Bluestone Boys and
The Sullivans. When he left in 1977, Terry Stapleton,
the only one of this group by then still with the com-
pany, took[...]ects.

. as-
Clowning between takes on the set of The Bluestone Boys.

instituted the position of associate director of
the company — partly an honorary title in
recognition of contribution, but also an
attempt to open better lines of communication
between workers and management — ll ofthe
first 12 associate directors had been writers.
Nevertheless, close supervision and control
by the family became impossible as the
co[...]e to keep all five programs
under the same degree of close supervision.
Producers found that they might be left alone
for long periods to get on with their programs
only then to be subjected to a bout of sustained
scrutiny. Many staff developed split lo[...]their programs.

Homicide remained at the centre of
productions, but it too changed. Starting with
Hunter. Crawfords developed a policy of
starting newcomers on Homicide and moving
more experienced people into the new
progr[...]with new programs being
added in 1968, 1970, 1972 and 1973,
newcomers were spending less and less timein
apprenticeship and were absorbing much less
of the family’s way of doing things. In other
words, as Crawfords grew and more shows
went into production, the creative spa[...]mpany worked
expanded.

Homicide was the only one of the police
series to go over to an all-film forma[...]also produced on this
new system, but Division 4 and Matlock
Police stayed as film/tape integration up[...]riors as well as the exteriors, a decision
making for potentially greater visual and
dramatic coherence, but one at odds with the
company’s previous organization of pro-
duction.

This decision, which moved some of the
company’s programs out from under the
nominal control of the family, was reinforced
by the company’s agreement to change the
title ofthe positions of Henry Crawford (only a
distant cousin of the family and never on the
board of directors) and Don Battye on
Homicide and Division 4 from that of script
editors to executive producers. An executive
producer was given overall control of a pro-
gram, and writers, script editors and directors
were ultimately responsible to him. From this
time on, therefore, it is possible and fruitful to
search for authorial presences at this level in
Crawfords’ output.

The company may have agreed to institute
the new position because, by this stage, it was
p[...]rts chats with Bob Hawke in aascene from
The Last of the Australians.

Disaster[...]Whether
the cancellations were coincidental was, and is,
a matter of speculation in the industry. One
theory had it that the moves were an attempt
to cut Crawfords down to size, for by this time
the company was easily the most important
outside supplier of drama programs to the net-
works in Australia.

In addition, in the early years of the Labor
Government there was talk of taking away one
television station licence from a licensee. 0-10
seemed the most vulnerable network and,
after all, Crawfords had been an unsuccessful
st[...]d it that Crawfords was
covertly playing politics and several of the
most vocal elements in the “TV, make it
Aus[...]at Crawfords.
However, from the stations’ point of view, the
cancellations were justified by the dro[...]ns certainly cut down the
company. The years 1975 and 1976 were as
difficult for Crawfords as had been the period
between 1956 and 1961. Indeed, had it not
been for The Box, which continued in
production until 1977[...]ership. As it was, large
cutbacks had to be made, and by early 1976
staff was down to about 70. Production teams
were broken up, and senior and junior
employees were retrenched.

The years since have been a process of
cautious regrowth. Overseas sales have
developed and can cushion losses on the Aus-
tralian market. Three programs are on air, and
there are several projects in preparation. _ _

H[...]ydney, although it has toyed with the
idea. Parts of Hunter were shot there and it
was originally intended to base Bluey there.
The success this year of Prisoner, which
Grundy Productions, a Sydney-based com-
pany, is making for ATV-O in Melbourne IS an
ominous development. It[...]has always domi-
nated. *

Tony Bonner (left) and Bruce Barry in Crawfords‘ adult
soap-opera, Sky[...]TELEVISION PRODUCTIONS
MELBOURNE SCREENING DATES AND RATINGS*

One-hour Series

consider Your Verdict[...]ry

Young Ramsey
Cop Shop

Half-hour Series

Last of the Australians

Solo One
The Sullivans

Bobby Da[...]‘Compiled from a list prepared by Colin Jones of the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal

Cine[...]

How do you see the role of a direc-

tor on a series such as “Against the
Wind”?

No differently from that of being
a director of a feature. Basically, a

literature, in this case a script, and
turn it into a series ofimages. It’s a
kind of translation. You start with
a writer’s ideas, w[...]c.
Now, if a writer tries to force a
certain kind of shot on me, as a
director, I usually find the fi[...]“Against The Wind” there were
two directors, and the scripts were
controlled —— in some cases written
—— by Ian Jones and Bronwyn Binns.
Did this ever conflict with your
stamp of individualism?

I thin[...]ved that prob-
lem when they chose Simon Win-
cer and me as directors. Not only
are Simon and I close friends, we
have worked together for nearly 10
years, starting with Cash and Com-
pany. Our ideas on filmmaking
tend to agree, and Pegasus knew,
when they picked Simon and me,

director’s job is to take a piece of

George Miller checks the screenplay during the filming of the highly successful television
series, Against[...]evision directors await the day they can
move out of television into feature filmmaking, George
Miller is happiest where he is. A director of many of the
top-rating series Crawfords have produced, including
“Homicide”, “The SulIivans” and “Young Ramsey”,
Miller has also worked outside that company. With
Simon Wincer he directed “Cash and Company” and the
highly successful “Against the Wind”.

To[...]eld to
interview George Miller, who was preparing for the new
series of “Young Ramsey”.

Homestead Films, to produce Cash
and Company. I knew them fairly
well — I had worked with them on
some of their Crawfords’ projects
— and when they showed me some
of the scripts, I was really impres-
sed. So, it was a question of an
opportunity appearing and me leap-
ing at it.

I have always tried to chase
things I believe will make good tele-
vision, and that is why I have
moved away from Crawfords sev-[...]en I first
left Crawfords years ago. Russell
Hagg and Patrick Edgeworth were
starting an independent co[...]imon Wincer (with screenplay) during the shooting of Against the Wind. Wincer and Miller
shared the directing workload of the series.

they have very high standards in
what they do.

My specific reason for coming
back to Crawfords after Against
The Wind w[...]use I heard
they were doing another 13 epi-
sodes of Young Ramsay. This fills
me with joy, because I h[...]crew at Crawfords, which is in-
variably made up of young people.
When I first started working on
Homicide, for example, it used to
be a major logistical problem[...]a car licence. I can
also fondly recall the waves of
terror that used to break out among
the crew when[...]would be called up.

I owe Crawfords a great deal for
training me, and I believe that
training has kept me in work over[...]amily. Crawfords is the
place in which I grew up, and I have
had many good times there. But I
mu[...]

Do producers at Crawfords, such as
Hector and Ian Crawford, have
much say in how you shoot an epi-
sode?

They allow a lot of creative free-
dom — until you stuffit up. In t[...]they
say, “Here is a script, there is the
crew, and that’s the amount of time
we have to do it in. Now go away
and do it.”

Does that “creative freedom” in-
v[...]So much
work has been done on a script, that
most of the really horrific things
have been weeded out.[...]-
appointed if you suddenly rang in
from location and said, “It’s not
working, what will I do?”[...]ce any
major differences between working
on film and videotape? For example,
one tends to direct videotape via a
cont[...]lso a cooler medium,
where a performance, or bits of it,
may have to be done several times.
On videotape you look at a scene
played in its entirety and can do all
the cutting within a specific amount
of time. The pace and intensity of‘
performance, therefore, are fairly
fixed. With film, however, you can
adjust performances and pacing
when you edit the thing later.

Another no[...]iller shaves before an early start
during filming of High Country.

that with film you can shoot
th[...]ceive scenes in the
round — actor’s movements and so
on. On videotape you usually con-
ceive things in terms of 180 de-
grees, because on the other side of
that line are your cameras.

There is a compensat[...]’t on film. You can’t
make a continuity blue, for
example, because the continuity is
always there.[...]ton.

Do you primarily see yourself as a
director of film or of television?

My role is that of a commun-
icator, whatever the medium. Tele-
vision is the most effective means of
communication in the world today.
If a feature film is a tear-away
success in Australia, for example,
perhaps 200,000 people will have
seen it. Yet one episode of Against
the Wind reached nearly five
million peop[...]esale effectiveness, com-

pared with other forms of com-
munication. It is also an amazingly
voracious consumer of product,
which means it will always work in
respo[...]don’t watch a program, the station
will respond and that program
won‘t stay on the air. If it does[...]ay is to have another
series.

What is the status of the director in
the Australian industry?

Austral[...]. Programs also
have to be_produced at a fraction of
the cost of American television, and
because of that we all have to work
very efficiently.

Bronwyn Binns and Ian Jones plan-
ned “Against The Wind” as a 1[...]“The Sullivans” started as a 13-
week series and has been going ever
since. Do you think a series[...]?

Rather than saying The Sulli-
vans has gone on and on, I prefer to
think of it as having evolved. The
characters, for a start, are now
quite different to what they were
when they originally set out.

John Hargreaves, star of Young

ductions.

Ramsey,
which Miller is directing for Crawford Pro-

I[...]almost exclu-
sively on short-run series — Cash
and Company, Young Ramsay,
Against The Wind, and the new
series of Young Ramsay — so I
can’t speak with absolute know-
ledge of what it is like to work on a
program for a couple of years. I
have always slid out from under the
resp[...]ind up on
the screen. The ratings will then
drop, and the show will be can-
celled.

But there are situations which are
stultifying solely in terms of one’s
satisfaction with a series . . .

If you[...]is centre frame, holding the
orse.

very insular, and I can watch other
crews and directors at work. That is
very stimulating, and I come back
much fresher.

Shooting stills on features also
gives you a greater command of the
language of cinema. It is essential
to know about the focal length of
lenses and what light will do be-
cause this knowledge helps[...]other hand, directing is
what I have been doing, and I have
always seen myself as a director. I
enjoy[...]es in Aus-
tralia, so do the programs we make
— and with each program change
comes a rethink of your directing
methods. Originally, I was an
action director; now, due to Against
The Wind and The Sullivans, I am
seen as an historical drama
s[...]ing on a program unless
you really want to do it, and no
good directing anything unless you
believe you[...]hirst. Al-
though I was very happy at the
thought of being associated with
Tony, I didn’t feel I could make the
contribution needed for that script
to become a success. So, I turned it[...]lacking?

No, [just felt it would have been
wrong for me to direct something
which I didn’t feel high[...]bad script; simply, it wasn’t
the right script for me at the time.

Have you ever thought about mov-[...]tele-
vision. I consider myself a com-
municator, and, as I have said, tele-
vision is the most effective way of
communicating. There are some
subjects that are c[...]in the cinema, but those sub-
jects are very few and far between.

I find television exciting. It’s part
of my life, and something I never
want to give up. it

Tom Sullivan (Steven Tandy). Bert Duggan (Peter Hehir) and Norm Baker (Norman
Yemm) on the outskirts of Tobruk, January 194], in a scene from The[...]

The recent classification of children’s tele-
vision programs for transmission during the 4
p.m. to 5 pm. time slot[...]tee under attack from producers,
various sections of the media, and the Federa-
tion of Commercial Television Stations.

In the following article, the chairman of the
Tribunal’s Children’s Program Committee, Dr
Patricia Edgar, describes the evolution of the
guidelines for the classification of children’s pro-
grams, and outlines the philosophy behind them.

The Children’s Program Committee, an ad-
visory body of the Australian Broadcasting Tri-
bunal set up in 1978, was asked to prepare guide-
lines for children’s television, as well as classify
programs specifically designed for them. The
guidelines were also to set out the type of adver-
tising to be shown during the programs.

I[...]commended that a new classifica-
tion — ‘C’ for children — be instituted, and that

Shirley Strachan in HSV-7’s Shirl’s[...]l classified ‘C’ be televised between
4 p.m. and 5 p.m. on weekdays.

The Committee’s terms of reference were:

1. To assess public opinion and research with
a view to developing a consistent philo-
sophy upon which guidelines and classi-
fications for children’s programming may
be used.

2. To formulate guidelines for:

(a) programs to be televised during periods,
as[...]ribunal, when
only material specifically designed for
children may be presented;

(b) advertising and program promotions to
be televised during the ‘C’ classified
time zone; and

(c) pro-social messages to be televised dur-
ing kindergarten programs.

3. To classify, in terms of such guidelines:

(a) programs proposed for ‘C’ classifica-
tion;

(b) advertisements proposed for ‘C’ classi-
fication; and

The Tasmanian Film Corporation’s Fatty and George:
classified ‘C’.

(c) pro-social messages
kindergarten programs.

In view of the concern expressed by many
sources, the Commit[...]ssible.
Consequently, its most urgent task was to for-
mulate requirements for televising ‘C’ classified
programs after 4 p.m.

As a result of public inquiries by the Tri-
bunal, and the general interest in the subject,
there was a great deal of published material on
the expectations and criticisms of children’s pro-
gramming. The Committee, theref[...]d
to find out how it could help in the production of
worthwhile programs. It agreed that children’s
programs needed some kind of protection from
competitive programs, such as cartoons and
family-oriented imported material,. if the long-
term goals of the public and the producers were
to be realized.

It was also a[...]oducers would
welcome access to research material and advice
to help them refine their concepts and tech-
niques. It was clear that many inexperienced
producers would be entering this field in

proposed for

NSW-9’s Curiosity Show: classifie<L‘C’.

ren’s programs, and that such assistance would
be welcomed.

Because[...]o stages: firstly,
it decided on the requirements for the types of
programs needed, the minimum quantities to be
televised, and the times of presentation; second-
ly, lan Fairweather, one of Australia’s most suc-
cessful children’s prog[...]to compile a handbook on produc-
tion techniques, and Millicent Poole, of Mac-
quarie University, was engaged to evaluate
research material gathered in the U.S., andand George (Australia)
Gene Machine (Britain)

Golden Flowers (Australia)
Heads and Tails (Britain)

Heidi (ATN/API lntertei)

Here C[...]classified ‘C’.

Although the implementation of this strategy
was the Committee’s first priorit[...]-committee,
comprising Frank Meaney, Bruce Harris and
Sarah Guest, was set up to prepare guidelines for
advertisements to be shown during times allotted
for children’s programs.

The Committee forwarded its recommenda-
tions to the Tribunal on requirements for ‘C’
classified material on May 14, 1979. At that
time, as chairman of the Committee, I said:

“It has been a tribute to the sincerity and

goodwill of the members of the industry

within the Committee that such a high level of

amicable agreement in this sensitive and im-

Consolidated List of children’s Programs classified by the
Tribunal.[...]ve been rejected by the Committee as unacceptable for ‘C’ classification.

‘Reviewed on July 18.[...]s, the Com-
mittee avoided any recipe, or formula for child-
ren’s programs and stressed the need for the in-
dustry to support production with resources,
facilities, time, and genuine commitment, so
that the expertise needed[...]ograms could be developed.

The guidelines called for the production of
Australian drama, documentaries, magazine,
and information programs designed for child-
ren. They stressed that programs should not be
“didactic, instructional and overtly educa-
tional”, but must first be entertaining tele-
vision, and that programs “should be about sub-
jects which interest children and should be
designed and presented in such a way that they
can be readily understood and appreciated by
children”. To achieve these aims[...]television industries lobby group, the
Federation of Australian Commercial Tele-
vision Stations (FACT[...]itable” rather than
“specifically designed” for children, and that
there should be no restriction on the time w[...]a ma-
jority group in the audience between 4 p.m. and
5 p.m., and in effect it was undemocratic not to
cater for the other members of that audience
with general programming. FACTS als[...]stations were to invest in quality produc-
tions for children they should be able to pro-
gram them la[...]that
the programs should, therefore, be suitable for a
family audience rather than a child audience.
T[...]applied to any family pro-
gram, including sport, and that it would be diffi-
cult to argue that any of the programs shown in
the 4 p.m. to 5 p.m. time slot over the years were
not ‘suitable’ for children.

in addition, research shows that there is a
higher proportion of 6 to 13 year-olds in the 4
p.m. to 5 p.m. television audience than at any
other time, and that they have more chance to
control the set the[...]liberations, the Committee com-
missioned a study of the audience in the house
between 4 p.m. and 5 p.m. The results showed
that adults who were wa[...]that
time believed programs shown between 4 p.m.
and 5 pm. should be for children. Most adults
surveyed also said they were watching television
at that time for reasons unrelated to the pro-
gram — suc[...]

I IN SEARCH OF ANNA

I I<OSTAS

A THE LAST OF THE KNUCKLEMEN
‘ MAD MAX

A MONEY MOVERS

MY BR[...]or e 9:3

Keep Friday night, 28 September free for the

AUSTRALIAN FILM AWARDS
PRESENTATION

Telev[...]m.

E5 The Australian Film Awards are an activity of the Australian Film Institute.

FILMS REGISTERED WITHOUT
ELIMINATIONS

For General Exhibition (G)

Asya: Lenfilm Studio. U.S[...]o: Mostiim, U.S.S.R. (2645.00 m)

My Atlectlonate and Tender Beast: Mosliim. U.S.S.R.
(298700 rn)

My V[...]Studios. U.S.S.R. (1742.00 rn)

Peking — Cause of Anxiety tor Mankind: Central
Documentary Film Stu[...]kaz Lenllim Studio, U.S.S.R.
(21i0.00 m)

Soldier and Elephant: Arman Film Studios. U.S.S.R.
(2229.00 r[...]llm
Documentary Studio. U.S.S.R. (850.00 m)

Town for People (16 mm): Mostiim Documentary
Studio, U.S.S[...]rince) (16 mm):
Moustala. Egypt (153690 m)

Armed and Dangerous: Central Gorky Studio, U.S.S.R.
(2735.0[...]e (256570 in)

Le Desert Des Tartares (The Desert of the Tartars): J.
Perrin. France (3703.00 m)

Le s[...]To save the City: Mosliim. U.S.S.R. (2764.00 rn)

For Mature Audiences (M)

Bay Bars: K. Kan/Funda Fllm[...]ralian Government Publishing Service

The Last of the Knucklemen: the producer's appeal against an R rating was dismissed by the
Board of Review and the classification was upheld.

Trl (Three): Aval[...]ed ‘M' with ellrninatlons on August
1972 List.

For Restricted Exhibition (R)

Boulevard Nights: 8. B[...]ve Ali: G. Dlmitropoulls. Greece (267350 m)
Loves of a Nympho: Cine Cast/Vera Cine, Italy
(2432.00 rn)[...]0.99 m
(December 1978 List).