Tutti Fruitti and all that

I got up and carefully placed all the props that would be needed for the morning's shoot by the door. The crew were shooting at Tutti Fruitti, a little fruit shop cum cafe all on its own in a field of fruit trees and vines, just a little up the road from Madison's. (Kylie and I had scoped out this place over a year ago and got permission to film there). Hot and cold breakfast was well underway - I got the sense of a juggernaut having started rolling - nothing I could do to halt it or even control it from now on - and that's OK! I went into the kitchen: Neil and Shirley-Anne were hard at work. Shirley-Anne is our other marvelous NZ friend who agreed to cook. She let Neil go with me for the getting of the minivan.

We drove down the mountain and found Freeman's Reach, a typical little Hawkesbury town, and the garage, run by a cheerful Indian couple who confessed they watched Bollywood movies but turned the sound off when the songs came along - and they wanted to make movies in Australia too! The minivan was actually pretty big - a 14 seater. Neil and Rose drove my car back while I drove it back to Tutti Fruitti where shooting was well underway. The scenes were on different days in the script, which meant that the shop had to be completely redressed between takes. One scenario calls for an almost bare and gloomy shop pre-Yowie hoax - and the other has the shop filled with cheerful Yowie merchandise once the hoax has got underway. So the art department and I had to work overtime. Our art department were very professional and photographed everything beforehand so they could replace every thing when we left. A very chic journo turned up from The Hawkesbury Gazette and snapped away at everything. We gave her a press release - can't wait to read the article.

After lunch back at Madison's we started to film in the caravan; hauled to the site on a flatbed truck by Kylie's uncle. Its wheels were kaput - we could not move it at all. The windows were blacked out and 'Bill' got to reminisce in there with a bottle of whiskey (the director preferred the art department's fake bourbon to my bright red bottle of 'Get Younger' Nigerian scotch). Then we moved to a huge sloping area of rock out beyond the Boer goat paddock. Here we filmed scene one (the dream - not a flashback) where Bill 'sees' Marge. Marie had been dragooned into playing Marge and stood on the rock looking wistful. Then we had a scene where Kevin/Chewbacca screams in frustration at Bill. This went spectacularly well as a storm was brewing and the late afternoon golden light contrasted well with the darkening sky and low angle shots. With the last light I had to get into the Yowie suit and throw the Chewbacca head around as I leap up the rocks (final scene). I couldn't see a thing as the eyes fogged up. It was also the first time for years that I'd worn contact lenses! It was virtually dark, and the suit split every time I moved up the rock. I hoped it looked good on film cause it sure didn't feel good in there. The last of the packing up was done in complete darkness; the crew coming up through the bush to a little track where the cars were parked. I was parked up in the paddock beyond the gate and stayed there with my headlights shining into the back of the lighting truck as the boys packed it all up.

Dinner was a marvel of Italian and Greek dishes, salads and desserts (Shirley-Anne's husband is Greek). Everyone was tired but elated. Next day was going to be huge. I left, though many of the others stayed and partied; meantime I spent several hours repairing the Yowie and Chewbacca suits before bed. Marie, Neil and Shirley Anne cleaned up the common room and kitchen.

The gathering...

I woke at five and ate the rest of the airline biscuits in the little basket by the kettle. Probably I should have brought up some food! At 7.30 Callan the DOP came and got me. Back into the bush in the director's 4WD: we sorted out a few more locations. The heat and the general logistics of getting the cast and crew to some of these glades and slopes was starting to really worry me, but the director and AD were onto it: they had alternatives for everything, which is always a good idea. Film-making is contingent on so many things: weather, time, people's schedules (one of out main actors had to leave at 3.30pm every day as he was taking part in 'Taming of the Shrew' down in the Sydney Botanic gardens); the needs of various proprietors (the resort wanted us out on Thursday night; which meant shooting all Friday in their bush property was now out - playing havoc with the schedule) and the shop we were going to shoot in could only give us a few hours. And so on.

The bush is really quite dangerous: between the trees in the more wooded areas the sandy soil is covered is a deep litter of leaves, bark and sharp branches. Going through there in bare feet is completely out of the question. On the slopes there are small bluffs of sandstone about five metres high which run along the contour line, each separated from the next one below by a an intervening strip of steep bush. Everywhere you look - and you've got to look! - there are biting ants and other creepies, including snakes (we saw two). One thing is for sure, there is no way a real yowie would have long fur, as it's just impossible to push your way through thick NSW bush without it getting caught on everything and festooned with gum leaves, bits of bracken and stray bark. Then there are the pests that seem magnetically attracted to fur - ants, spiders and flies!

We popped out of the bush on one of the many tracks and went to find a good coffee. A little cafe place near Madison's resort run by a genial older man and his bevy of female helpers supplied this, as well as a large bottle of ice-cold local apple juice, which I took with us. We drove down to the pub and checked out the verandah. We returned to the cafe and got meat pies. People started to arrive in the afternoon. Neil (a friend from NZ who had agreed to be one half of the chef team) and Marie and the girls arrived late it the afternoon, with my trailer piled high with food and other goods. Neil had built a sort of wall round the trailer with bits of blue board and this created a deep box in which to pack things. He prepared a vast spread in the early evening while the actors, J and I did a read-through in the gazebo above the dam. This went well - the actors all gel together well. Later on in the big common room J gave a little speech - minimal, as it should be. I looked around: there were about 22 people there, most of whom I didn't know! Assistants to assistants, friends and hangers on maybe: I will discover their functions in the next day or so. They all seem very young. Filming starts at 0730 tomorrow!

Still very hot at 10 at night. Didn't dare open the gauze doors though for fear of mozzies. An anaemic fan stirred the air weakly (expect Peter Lorre behind the potted palm). Our cabin is scattered with bags and boxes of props - each labelled for scene numbers. Neil is crashing on the sofa bed. I set the alarm for early as i had to get down the hill to Freeman's Reach, a village near the Hawkesbury where I was due to pick up a minivan the next day at 0700.

The filming

On 5.12.2009 I was up at 0530. I had a helluva day ahead, and was planning to use my wife's small car so she could come up later with my bigger car and the trailer, jammed with food for cast and crew, children, chef and various props. Loaded to the roof, I finally left Canberra at around nine. I carefully covered the two crossbow props, as I had found out they were illegal (yes, even replica's with no function) in all of Australia except.. Queensland! I drove straight through to Castle Cove, with near disastrous effects on my bladder. Got there at 1pm. In Castle Cove is Mal Green Sound studio, a basement recording studio in the home of Mal Green, who was drummer for Split Enz for ten years. He'd just returned from the UK, with a heavy cold! We laid down the tracks in double quick time, and I got out of there at 3.30pm. I wanted to get over the bridge before the traffic started getting bad.

Got to R and K's home in Tamarama and had a few drinks with them before R walked me to his favourite hole-in-the-wall Italian restaurant in Bondi beach. A pizza and a large bowl of mussels were washed down with a good red wine. I hardly slept that night and took off quite early to get back to Mal Green's, where he'd laid down the tracks onto 16-bit CD for me. From there I had to strike out across country to get to route 40 which was the road to Windsor and the Blue Mountains. The north shore's certainly got busier since I lived there more than a decade ago. I made it across to Lane Cove Road and then to route 40. Then I headed west, though no longer a young man.

Got to Madison's resort in the Blue Mountains quite early: a well-laid out series of cabins on long lawn, with a central common room and indoor pool. I found J the director in the cabin next door, frazzled from his busy job, and storyboarding like crazy into several large children's sketch pads. I left him to it, but not before showing him some props and playing the 2 songs to him. I checked out the alpaca herd and the rickety jetty into the dam. I phoned home: a dog had killed one of the chooks. I went round the cabins and met D the first AD, and C the DOP. We all went on a recce trip into the bush. The road was a 4WD track. I was sceptical: how much time were we going to take getting the big camera truck around these sites? It was nearly 40 degrees also - my mind was boggling thinking about the water needed to keep everyone hydrated. Spectacular country though. The film will look good.

Later we all went to the Kurrajong hotel. five of us: J, me, C, D and his partner N (script supervisor and continuity) all chose the Fisherman's Basket! A giant pile of batter and stuff that may once have come from the sea. Bed to a chorus of frogs and bright Orion overhead. Tomorrow things will really get going. Money's pouring out of my pockets like water. Not as if it's easy come, either! Still, 'the film's the thing, wherein to catch the conscience of the Yowie.' Take care of the art and the pennies will take wing of themselves. Note to self: stop mangling idioms.

Raising the steaks

Last day of work, so tonight (Friday) I'll have to pack like a maniac and get everything in my wife's tiny car. I leave tomorrow for Sydney, where I'll spend Saturday afternoon in a recording studio doing two songs for the production. My wife will follow later in the big car with the trailer full of food for the cast and crew, who now number about 30! Everyone, it seems, has an assistant or two - I think the Yowie should get an assistant, just a small one, who could attend to her wardrobe and catering needs ('I'll just have a banana, thanks - Oh, and did you get the carpet shampoo?'). Scheduling hiccups have been more or less ironed out, though one of the days will be 12 long hours on set. The cast did a read-through last night and it all seemed to go well - or at least so I'm told, because I haven't actually met any of them yet. My friend N from New Zealand is flying over tomorrow to help with catering. A small newspaper in the Blue Mountains has heard of the project and wants to do an article. We'll have to keep the Yowie away from them though, as we don't want to reveal her in her full glory. Except on this blog, of course, oh lucky readers. I think we have all the props. A couple of scenes may be a bit spartan; the art department asked if I had had a newspaper printed up, a faked, complete newspaper, so Bill can 'read it' on camera without copyright issues. I'd never thought of such a thing and anyway it would be far too expensive. I suggested a 1956 Illustrated London News instead - being more than 50 years old no-one can complain about copyright - blow me down when I opened the 1956 ILN I just happened to have and there was a full article on 'Candidates for the Yeti' with pictures and all: a bear, a langur, and so on. Bill reading this with interest would really fit well with the story. We have primed a few extras to turn up in the pub at 8am and pretend it's a jolly evening - they've got to have Yowie Tshirts, cameras.. and zinc on their noses. A wonderful friend of ours who owns a limo company has agreed to take people up and down the mountain - talk about arriving in style! Not me though, just the writer, folks, ignore me please and get on with your important business - realising the vision.

The skin of our teeth

We have been talking to some experts in the industry, and according to them we probably do not have to conform with the onerous demands of a big production because we are under 15 minutes. We had been told we needed all sorts of documentation and contracts and so on. Anyway, it now feels like a threshold has been crossed and the rest is a done deal. Though we still haven't cast our major Aboriginal Actress - she's a pivotal part so we're getting worried. I went up Red Hill with my daughter Rose today looking for a kangaroo carcase to pose the Yowie over for a new Youtube video. Saw live roo's but no dead ones. As we came off the hill a security guard gave us a hard look because we had parked at the back of Telstra - so we gave him a little wave. Made a fake bottle of Yowie oil ('the good oil') today for a funny new montage that J the director has come up with. At least the coffee cups, Tshirts, hats, costumes, crossbows, whiskey bottles, (and so on) are all done. I am exhausted. But of course I can't afford to be; nothing's happened yet! There are some creative tensions which are quite understandable. Naturally the visual people want the most spectacular golden vista's imaginable - the dramatic types want darkness and tension - the producers want everything set in concrete and time-limited - the director and writer are still tweaking the script - and so on. Watch this space.

UPDATE: We've cast our Geraldine character. This is a breakthrough. And everyone's now fixed up for insurances, we think. Accommodation is more or less arranged and food is allocated for a week. My friend N is flying over form NZ to help with the vittles. He'll be ably assisted by another NZ friend and by my wife and daughters. My daughters originally had speaking parts in the movie and were each going to be clutching a toy. That was several years ago, and the eldest is now a teenager. So much for toys and the passage of time!

Bigger than Ben who?

I started by trying to get a few good people together to make this movie. They in turn have attracted their friends, and suddenly there's a crack team to take this project to a very high level indeed. I'm not exactly sidelined but I've definitely been given my own little niche - which suits me fine - and let the knowledgeable people do their thing. For weeks it was: F900 or Red camera? do we have the budget for Red? probably not - OK, whose arm can we twist? leg can we pull? back can we scratch? (strange how these are all anatomic terms!) - to get the best deal on the best gear. Various favours and friends are called upon, and suddenly it's all done - we have the Red camera and the award winning team clustered around it. Super. Now what? Well, it's more production meetings and tying up of loose ends. Accommodation is arranged and sandwiches galore are planned, along with barbecues and salads. A beer sponsor is on the counter - yippee! and even a wine sponsor. Most people have waived their fees, which is great - all for the love of film and a week in the Blue mountains spinning yarns over a few red wines.

In the last few weeks I have made: two crossbows, about 15 Tshirts; ten coffee cups; three facial wounds; an orbital contusion (an early black eye), various envelopes, cards and photo's, and refined two monkey suits. Next week I'm going to get contact lenses - Yowies generally don't wear glasses. I saw a wonderful Yeti suit by Weta studios (check out 'NZ rescue yeti' on Youtube) and asked if I could hire it - a mere $15000 a week. I said thanks, I'll do my own. So far the Yowie suit's cost me about $1000.

Deejax voox, mes amis

Summer has rolled around again - we are promised thunderstorms this evening but it's absolutely cloudless right now in Canberra. Packed up my studio today - slight feelings of regret, but its purpose as far as Yowie goes is over - I've used it to do all of 'Kevin's artwork'. I was sent an art props spreadsheet by Kylie and looking at it I realise I still have a lot to get done - tomorrow I will go searching the Kingston markets from an old cricket bat and transistor radio. These are getting hard to find! Today the producer, production manager, DOP and Director are all going in a car together up the Blue Mountains to do location scouting. Hmm, hasn't this sort of thing happened before?? About a year ago!? Anyway, hope they don't fight! Marie paid the deposit on the accommodation today; a grand's worth, so the whole thing better not fall over again. Producers and directors seem to have radically different personalities. This evening I will go with my children up Red Hill and do another fake Yowie video - we'll see if we can find a kangaroo carcase and do a 'vicious Yowie eats innocent kangaroo' scenario - then put it on Youtube. I am afraid it will be extremely hot when we film; with me in a yowie suit now heavily padded with extra fur to make it look more convincing. Probably we'll do it early in the morning, and I think the yowie scenes can all be done in one day.

The script is now tighter and more inclusive - every character gets a payoff, including the poor female Yowie, and the whole thing is now 14 minutes. Considering it was once 47 minutes I think I've done pretty well, though the audience will have to pay attention to get every segue and nuance, whereas before it was quite leisurely. Too leisurely. A lot of people have rallied round and offered cheap deals or free work on the raw footage, which is very generous of them. Last week I met with the head of screen australia ACT division, and she suggested we may be able to get money from the government for post-production marketing. We'll see. I'm not holding my breath, having had no help from government ever, for anything. In fact you have to really successful before they give you any money - when in fact you don't need support any more. Still, she was very positive and energetic and something good might happen this time.

I had a brief look at their website. As an example take 'permission for shooting on location.' For this you need to approach three groups right off the bat: the land owner, the local council and the ACT government. Then of course there are fees, deposits, local council officer on the shoot, traffic management plan, waste management plan, health and safety plan, evidence of vast public liability insurance, etc, etc. This is before you actually get permission, which is always conditional. It's enough to drive you mad. This is why there are only two kinds of films: crappy short films (needing no permission 'cause they're filmed on a rainy afternoon in your granny's bedroom) and features, in which a vast army of people within your film company's structure can take on the vast army of bureaucrats opposing them. Nothing in between. Very sad. Mustn't harp on (I always say that after I've been harping on). But we're closer than ever now: actors, DOP, accommodation, some permissions, props and script. What more could a first-time filmmaker want? Footage in the can, that's what.

the knife edge

Today I think I finished the script. That is, I listened to the director's comments this morning on the phone and immediately made the suggested changes. I always do this - probably because I like to react to comments by changing the script before I forget my thoughts! Producer is upset because director has lagged behind with assessment and comment on the script. Fair enough. He's a busy bloke. I still regard this project as being on a knife edge, and I feel pretty awful for my faithful sponsors (shareholders!) because they've been waiting three years or more to see this thing done. If it's not done by end of 2009 I'm going to give the money back. I'm sick of being let down.

I've redone the headgear - doesn't actually look that different but it's a lot cooler to wear and fits more tightly. We are going to computer graphic (CG) in some eyes and maybe some other stuff to make the Yowie look better. I've finalised the Tshirt and the coffee cup designs: lots of work for me but every dollar saved means better production value on the digital stock itself. So I'm making a lot of the props myself. Now I have to make a convincing looking crossbow! We're ramping up every element; bad guys more badder; monkey more monkier; funky more funkier.

The author of the definitive book on Yowies, Tony Healy, is coming round tomorrow to check out the costume. Hope he's pleased. We have had to come clean on youtube and admit that our little video's are faked. There are heaps of fake Bigfoot, Yeti and Yowie vids on Youtube - some of them pretty convincing and others just plain laughable.

Meanwhile, as usual, I'm advancing on all fronts slowly. My third kids' book is in press and I'm thinking of pitching them as an animation series to producers.

yowie rising

I am cautiously optimistic - like a duck on the last day of the hunting season. I added two (natch) large breasts to the Yowie costume a few days ago. Splendid they look, if a little yellow. Nipples are of liquorice. Moreover, I found some wonderful furry foxtails in a leather shop in Bungendore and had to have one for the yowie costume. Mounted low down it gives the illusion of really short legs and a long back in true anthropoid fashion. Not happy with the head though. It still looks essentially like Chewbacca in overall shape and the flowing mullet hairdo (though the face is now truly terrifying). I might just ditch the hair and make a sort of gorilla crewcut instead in salty grey. This would look really authentic and unique. I am enjoying working with fur (Hmm, does that say something about me?). I am inspired to make other costumes and am getting the inklings of some interesting designs. I really was not looking forward to being the Yowie in the heat of December - but my wife suggested we get instead a young friend of ours (same height as me but about 30kg lighter!) who wants to break into movies. Ok, so ya' wanna' break into moviesh, eh? Well, put on the monkey suit and let's see whatya got, kid! And so it goes.

Not shaped for sportive tricks

Well, another disaster averted - or postponed. J the director wanted to recce in Sept and film in January 2010; which would make it eight years since writing the script. We wrote and said not acceptable - so the dates are now: filming in December (the hottest time of the year - exactly when I did not want to be prancing around in the bush wearing a Yowie costume) and pre and post production either side of that. Well it must be, then. Es muss sein. I found an interesting thing on the internet: Vincent Van Gogh's letter of July, 1890 (just before he shot himself - wonder why) mentions an Australian artist named Walpole Brooke with whom he would go out - whether painting or not Vincent doesn't say, though we can infer it was probably painting, as Walpole Brooke was an artist.

Vincent thinks he has potential and mentions that he was brought up in Japan. Intrigued, I google further. In Van Gogh's sketchbook no. 7 is found a visiting card: E Walpole Brooke. Aha. I google E W Brooke in Australian webpages only and come up with an entry saying that not much is known about him (they didn't know of the Vincent connection) but that he did exhibit in Yokohama and study in Europe. Also that he was the son of a minister of lands in the Victorian state government. More Aha. I googled the MP's in the government archive and found the father: John Henry Brooke, MP for Geelong in 1956, who went to Yokohama of all places in 1867 and set up the first foreign language newspaper there: the Japan Daily Herald. Further fascinating things on the internet from the Japan Daily Herald - which in its day was very influential. So I'm on the track on E Walpole Brown, another forgotten artist. On a personal note - I have resigned from the military doctor's post I held - this will leave me more time for creative work. The number of times I've tried this sort of thing before is upwards of five or six. And every time I've been driven back into the arms of general practice by the need to pay the bills. Sigh. I'm getting tired of this process. Still, in a week I'll be freer than I've been for years. Watch this space - but no breath-holding, you might just die... laughing.

This resonates with me...

Walter Pater wrote (The Renaissance):
"At first sight experience seems to bury us under a flood of external objects, pressing upon us with a sharp and importunate reality, calling us out of ourselves in a thousand forms of action. But when reflexion begins to play upon these objects they are dissipated under its influence; the cohesive force seems suspended like some trick of magic; each object is loosed into a group of impressions—colour, odour, texture—in the mind of the observer. And if we continue to dwell in thought on this world, not of objects in the solidity with which language invests them, but of impressions, unstable, flickering, inconsistent, which burn and are extinguished with our consciousness of them, it contracts still further: the whole scope of observation is dwarfed into the narrow chamber of the individual mind. Experience, already reduced to a group of impressions, is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that which we can only conjecture to be without. Every one of those impressions is the impression of the individual in his isolation, each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world."

This is like the process of creativity: an impression from without or within leads to a time of reflection - without effort the whole entity is passed through the massive filter of the personality and a new being springs up. Then this new thing must come forth: I disagree with Pater's last sentence - the creation is not kept as a prisoner but displayed. Does it sing, is it both familiar and strange - does it augment the world? If yes, it might be worth something. Films, paintings, poems and other writing - they all fall into this category. I am gearing up for the final acceleration into the period of preproduction on this project. I will keep you posted...

And all the clouds...

Bad news then good news. J the director emailed to say he'd suddenly lost his job - probably a victim of the world economic downturn. Very abrupt. Companies treat their employees in such an inhuman fashion these days - clear your desk and bugger off - no notice needed 'cause you're a subcontractor (for which read: we've made sure you're not an employee so we will have absolutely no obligation towards you). I was devastated, for him as well as for me - he probably wouldn't want to do Yowie now. I facebooked him cautiously. After a couple of days there came a response - yes, I'm on for the Yowie, was a bit down - nothing that a beer wouldn't fix. I replied: Have one for me. Prosit.

I decided to tell J the new director absolutely nothing about the previous director, so that any ideas for the script that J came up with could not in any way be claimed by the previous director as being his ideas. He'd already claimed that he had put significant numbers of ideas into the old script - Kylie and I had then gone carefully through and expunged completely anything that could possibly have been contributed by him - in fact they were few and trivial. Anyway, we'll see what J comes up with in the new Yowie era.

The Winter of my content

Autumn in Canberra is spectacular. Crisp days and trees aflame with colour. Things finally seem set for the making of The Yowie in September. Yippee. I feel so tired of the whole process that it will be an anticlimax. At least that's how I feel now - probably when the camera finally rolls I'll feel great.

Was discussing the whole dreary voyage to realisation that most creatives have to go through with a friend yesterday: what we agreed on was this: in the old days (ah the good old days when everything was in fact pretty stinky) there was no barrier between creatives and the public - creatives did their thing and presented the result to the public - and got booed or cheered. These days the creative offers their pathetic scrap to a whole swag of middle-people: editors and script jockeys, government officials and various failed creatives turned bureaucrats. Look what happens next: the faceless comformists making up this middle earth then pull the work to pieces: is it politically correct? correctly formatted? recycled paper? tick the right boxes? does it offend any one of a huge number of aggrieved minorities? Etc. Assuming it gets the nod, the next step is called 'wearing down the artist.' After a depressing length of time a dismissive approach is made to the artist: Dear X, we have assessed your work "The pathetic scrap" and one of our junior editors would like to discuss it with you. She/He will shortly be writing at sometime in the future a 1000 page critique of your work and sending it to you. You then have fourteen seconds to reply with a new draft of your, ahem, work. Please bear in mind we receive 13 thousand similar such scraps every day and we may never actually proceed to the next stage, while reserving the right to plagiarise your work and, if not plagiarise, then bowlderize, homogenize, destroy, multilate, obfuscate, and other reduce your pathetic scrap to an even more pathetic scrap that may or may not ever get in front of an audience. Yrs, etc. PS, then there is the issue of funding. Ha Ha Ha.

And so it goes. Sigh. Nothing original about all this - I just had to have a rave.

MOVES AFOOT: THE YOWIE EXPERIENCE

Bad news. The director had been agitating with Kylie to get money we'd never conceived he'd be entitled to - percentages of grants for crew accommodation and so on. She had a stand-off with him, and asked me to get involved. I emailed him a few times and got no response. Basically I offered him what I'd always offered - the standard deal: 8% of budget. I phoned him (together with my wife - the iron fist in the velvet glove) and we got fairly assertive - he said this should be coming from the producer. I said no, in this case I'd got all the money together so I do the hard negotiations - I am exec producer. Anyway, after a few circlings the vultures descended - things were said: I decided enough was enough: I said we could no longer work with him; he wanted some money for his efforts to date which i agreed to - in all fairness he had put some time into the piece and come up with a few suggestions which helped the script. There were a few others which were way, way off and were ignored, but be that as it may, I was happy to pay him off. He has another project on which sounds tremendous and I honestly hope he does well with it. So where did that leave us? Without a director. However Kylie said she knows a few young directors and will try and rustle one up in the next week.

But it's time for a bit of review here: I wrote the script in 2002 - it's now seven long years since, trying again and again to get some little money together, find a team that doesn't fragment whenever there's an excuse to do so; trying to get government support, the list goes on. What the hell is wrong with this country? Or is it me? Note I didn't say is it just me - because it isn't just me; I know several young and not so young people who have all had good filmic ideas and have had the devil's own job trying to get them flying - like wee ragged kites they flutter hopefully and ascend above the poppy field, only to be cut down by the outrageous winds of fortune before they get anywhere. We are a nation of mockers: it's what we do best and most of our films celebrate mockery in one form or another. But sadly, in the end mockery is hollow, a paper tiger, unless it delivers the thing to think about; unless it gives the heart a genuine lift; unless it connects at a level deeper than the belly laugh. I am a farmer of sour grapes, but one thing's for sure - I do not give up on something i believe in, and I believe in in this little Yowie. If everything falls over i will sigh and retreat before advancing again into the compromised world that is the Aussie filmmaker's experience. Till I succeed.

WORKING IT: YOWIE MOVES

Summer ripened into weeks of blistering heat - I was amazed at the stamina of the players in the tennis open on TV. Tar melted, baby birds fell out of their arid little nests. Kylie emailed me and said are you on for late January? I was on. I applied to my jobs (two of them - to pay for the film) for some time off. 28th and 29th january it was. Unfortunately the director told us at the last moment that he couldn't make it. I got up at 4am on the morning of the 28th and left the house at 5. Got to windsor at 830am and felt a little surreal wandering round the little Hawkesbury town as it woke up. Kylie arrived on the train and we went to the farmhouse of her friend Naomi the scriptwriter, who'd helped edit the Yowie. Naomi is energetic and sensitive to every mood - she gave us Cokes in her lounge area, then took us down into the bush woodland, which was static with heat and screaming with cicada's. Rocks and trees galore, and also snakes. A black wallaby stood up and pounded off. Perfect Yowie country. Almost as good: Naomi's mother's house is right there too and it has a swimming pool! It must have been around 40 celsius. Naomi then took us along to her friends compound in the bush: about ten old cars resting quietly amid grazing horses in several acres of grass. The whole lot enfolded in some of the wildest and best Yowie country I've seen: boulders, steep slopes, creeks and ferns. Sweating fluidly, I declared my satisfaction with the country. We trundled up the hill to Bilpin: apple country on the ridge - and much cooler up here. Strung out along the highway, this little place is picturesque enough but because of its linear layout seems to have no heart. We got permission to film in a fabulous isolated flower stall and shop called tutti fruitti. Locals abound in facial hair. Lunch at the Kurrajong hotel - ask for the small size and you get a country helping you can hardly see over - my kind of tucker. That arvo we dropped back down the ridge and i found myself on various unknown roads, but keeping the sun on my Right and behind me i knew I was heading fro the sea. In fact we ended up on the North shore and went through the Lane Cove Tunnel; I dropped Kylie off in Kings cross and went to the home of my friends in Coogee. Fred is a professor of neuropsychology and Fiona assesses gifted children: they gave me Dom's room: a teen cave with a mattress on the floor. I crashed after a pizza in a film of sweat. In the middle of the night a speaker fell off the wall and scared me awake. Next morning back out: this time to Lawson - the other end of the blue mountains. Lawson is being transformed - at the moment it looks wonderfully shabby - perfect for the film. We got permission from a hotel and the local cafe owner and council member named David, but missed my friend Rick, who had been in his country shop all the time though I only got an answerphone message. Driving out along a little winding road we thought it might do for the Yowie-crosses-the-road-scenes. Mission accomplished; we went back down into Sydney and debriefed at a little cafe near Victoria st - scene of my earliest meeting with Richard Shepherd at least five years earlier! No-one can say I'm not persistent. I hit the road about three and took ten minutes to go the one kilometer onto South Dowling Street - must be an accident ahead - I thought, but no, it just the same old Sydney jam session. Got into Canberra at 7pm and had a full day at the practice next day.

in the next week Kylie began to send me headshots of potential actors - seems impossible to find Aboriginal women actors, though there is a great oversupply of white guys - strange that. SE Australia is still on fire, literally and figuratively, temps in the late 30's - I only pray the weather will be cooler when we film in late March.

YOWIE BLOG EPISODE ONE: SCENE FROM A WRITER’S
> WISH-FULFILMENT DIARY… by Laurence de B.ANDERSON

It’s misty in the Australian bush, and ghostly shapes of native vegetation surround us like strangers. Suddenly through the bluish haze the Yowie looms up, gives a ferocious roar, then fades back into the vegetation. And… ‘Cut!’ yells Richard Shepherd. You’re sitting in a fold-out leather chair marked ‘Writer’ and some gopher has brought you a steaming coffee. The director turns to you. ‘How was that? Think we should do it again?’ You nod casually. It’s been a dream ride: the script, casually tossed off six months ago, immediately attracted an agent, a producer and a large chunk of government funding - in that order. Now here we are on the set of… The Yowie.

ARE YOU INSANE??? This is not how it happens! Why is it that the public naively expects, when they see some first-time writer or director being interviewed, that somehow it all just happened in the last few months? That this person just emerged from anonymity with a full-blown product and is now headed for the top? It’s almost never the case. Most creatives work away for years or even decades before their work gets noticed in any serious way. There’s nothing easy about it…I started writing film scripts in 2000. At the time I had the usual dreams - write a first-time blockbuster feature that would cannon me to stardom and Hollywood.

The first script I ever wrote required several 18th century ships, two continents, a colony of Quakers and the Ohio river. And the French Revolution. It was a biopic of the great American wildlife artist John Audubon (John who?). I tried to portray him as the first environmentalist, but in fact he shot everything in sight. The script got nowhere, but I did get ripped off by a company in Hollywood that promised to improve your script - for a fee - till it was so good the studios would be beating down your door. It didn’t happen.

I bought a book called ’Teach yourself screenwriting’ by Ray Frensham, which I still regard as an excellent starting point. This time, I thought, a few shorter scripts would help me hone my craft. At the time I was a GP in a small beachside village in the middle of the Royal National Park south of Sydney. Small villages are never what they appear, and Bundeena had every type of conflict going on beneath its pretty surface. The ferry shuttles back and forth across the blue Port Hacking, the beach is a perfect smile when seen from the air, and the houses nestle in the bush like gumnut babies. But there are strange things happening there, both in town and in the bush.

As the only GP for quite some time, I was in the position of knowing far too many little secrets, and as a result I was very fond of the town and its surroundings.What if, I thought, two of the town’s ‘characters’ created a hoax to lure people into Bundeena’s few businesses? I needed someone who would be both desperate and daring, and yet not far-sighted enough to realise that such a scam would probably go horribly wrong. Knowing that two people can egg each other on to do things that a single person would never dare, I decided to cement this ’folie a deux’ by making my protagonists father and son. To increase the newsagent father’s 'personal motivations' I had his shop failing and himself in mid-life crisis, his wife just having left him for the Gold Coast, and his son of 22 both dependent and naive. Bill, the father, concocts a scheme using - or rather exploiting - compliant Kevin, his son, to fake a Yowie in the National Park.

This will draw visitors to Bundeena and Bill’s newsagency, where he will of course have piles of Yowie Tshirts, coffee mugs and greeting cards ready and waiting. I wrote it as a farce, with lots of visual gags. The characters were stock figures of fun. The main joke involved their antics in the park attracting a real and very female Yowie, who is delighted to have at last found a mate. A close encounter with her in the bush leaves Kevin shaken, stirred, and possibly no longer a virgin. In running away from her Kevin gets run over by Bill’s car and ends up in hospital. Bill’s wife returns home from the Gold Coast to save the family as the media swarm around the hospital bed.

The idea was funny enough, maybe, but did not have a lot of depth beyond that. It would probably never get made - where would I find the $10000 and months off my paying job necessary to film it? I finished the script in 2002 and shelved it, along with my other dreams. Still, at least I had written the piece - I saw it as an exercise in upskilling myself for the real thing one day. Several time that year, after long hours in the practice, I drove into town to attend night and weekend courses at Metro Film School in Paddington. There, in shabby basement premises, myself and a variety of other interested people were taken through basic courses in editing, video production, directing and sound. The surroundings were crap but the energy of the teachers was unmistakeable - they enjoyed what they were doing and it was infectious. Getting back to Bundeena well after midnight I was always exhausted, but I felt exhilarated that I was learning the basics of the craft. I kept writing scripts, and signed up for the Metro weekly email, which always had a list of interesting offers such as assisting on movie sets or being an unpaid extra somewhere.

One night I was browsing through it when an advert caught my eye. It was to the point: ’short film scripts wanted’ it said, and gave some details, including an email address. It seemed hard to believe; the world is knee-deep in unproduced scripts, why would anyone actually solicit them from an underground film school. (Anyone who knows Metro will know this is literally true). But the item was quite clear: ‘I’ve made five shortfilms, ‘ it said, ‘and I’m looking for a sixth. Send me your scripts by email. Richard Shepherd.’ I hunted out The Yowie from folder within folder on my old blue iMac and hurriedly sent it off into cyberspace. Every day I checked my inbox. For six weeks there was nothing. Oh well, I thought, it’s gone the way of nearly every piece of writing I’ve ever sent to a publisher or literary agent. (First task of the writer is to learn to handle rejection). I got on with my life and my next script. Then suddenly a reply: ’sorry I haven’t got back to you - just been in Palm Springs with my latest film - got back to find 50 scripts in my inbox - yours is the only one I like - can we get together? Richard Shepherd.’ I was amazed. I sent him an email by return saying I would meet him anywhere and virtually any time.

EPISODE TWO: REALITY BITES

‘$10000? No way - $100000, more like!’ This was Richard’s cheery response to my naive projection for the budget of The Yowie. We had met in one of Victoria Street’s famous cafes one evening in early summer. Richard is a cheery young Brit who worked in a legal recruitment firm doing something obscure and made films on the side. It was October, 2003. “Look, I like the script but I have issues with it’ said Richard. I was alarmed - did this mean rejection of my work? Not at all, it meant that he wanted changes. ‘There’s a real story here’ he said, ‘not just the farceyou wrote origianally. Here’s a warm-hearted father and son story. Let’s respect the characters - at the moment you’re just making fun of them.’‘It’s true’ I said, ‘because I wrote it as a little comedy - a farce, yes,or an exercise in quick plotting.’ But he saw something else entirely. He saw a drama, with real people feeling real pain and groping towards real change. It looked like we had the key ingredients of a good story. I went away with mixed feelings.

Every writer believes their work is just fine and needs little change if any. But what I was being asked for was a major re-write - a recasting of character and outcomes, let alone the action line, which also needed modifying to cope with the new seriousness of the vision. But I was fired up to do it - if this is what a director expects then I would play the game. I re-wrote it in record time. Richard’s comments,scribbled in red pen all over the hard copy, were harsh and uncompromising - Yowie was still too farcical, I was laughing at the situation instead ofbeing a sympathetic observer the writing was ‘on the nose’ and too obvious, there was too much talk and not enough action, etc. All over the script werethe ominous letters CDB, which is Richard’s little shorthand for ‘Could do Better.’ It sounded like I was being told off by my teacher. Well, Richard was schooled in England, I told myself and settled down to another rewrite. He was still not happy. I went away for a long think.There was also the issue of funding. With a bit of a scrape-around I could probably come up with $5000 after several months of saving hard. So could Richard. But what would the production value be on a 25 minute film whenshot on a $10000 shoestring? Pretty poor, probably.

What about the government? I had once applied for a grant to make a children’s animation set in Africa. I thought it was a done deal - I had all the graphics and the script ready, and damn fine it looked too. I asked for some small sum, and got in reply about 30 pages of forms to fill out. The majority of these pages consisted of an intimidating budget document. I replied that I had no need of this level of detail: would they accept a one page summary of my minimal costs? I got nowhere. Government funding tends to be inflexible and onerous. Generally they seem to fund projects with serious social consciencebut little prospect of being commercially succesful. (Perhaps this is why they get funded by government - cause noone else will. It seems to me to be the wrong way of looking at things). Anyway, Richard and I decided to put in a full application for government funding. We were in the ’short drama less than 30 minutes’ category. In about July 2004 we decided to go for the November funding round. I prepared some visuals of the Yowie in charcoal. Richard found some excellent co-workers in the photography and designing roles and a producer whodeclared herself ready and willing to help out. By this time I was at about draft number six. There were no more hospital scenes (too expensive and would take us to too many locations), one character was no longer to appear (Marge, the mother, was going to stay up on the Gold Coast), and severalother elements had seen serious change as well. On the positive side the story was more ‘real’ now and the Yowie monster - who had featured prominently - had been relegated to the ’suggested in fragments but neveractually seen’ category of monster. We decided to get as many letters of support as possible.

I worked my butt off getting letters from prominent Bundeena citizens: artists and others; from the Progress Association, and lastly from the local Aboriginal Land Council (at La Perouse). We were worried they would haveissues with the script, but apart from suggesting we mention the fact that the Yowie is called the Dooligarl in this part of NSW they felt it was fine.I called in a lot of favours from friends in Bundeena and also contacted others who could help out - mostly ex-patients - who were all eager to be involved. It was looking good, till we submitted the script to aprofessional script evaluator, ironically a Bundeena resident, who had some suggestions for major changes. We decided to pull out of the November funding round and work hard on the script.

We had produced a pile of paperwork, including visuals, budget, writer’s and director’s statements, endorsements from the local Aboriginal land council, local residents, local progress association, prominent artists, and so on. At last we submitted our application for funding. Our category was ‘short drama less than 30 minutes.’ Anxiously we waited, and meanwhile we keptworking on the script. Richard had got a brilliant team together, including Nick Dare as art director, Linda Micsko as producer (under the auspices ofPorchlight, her regular employer), and several other equally talented folk whose names I cannot now remember. I raced about in Bundeena canvassing support and promises of accommodation, food and the use of cars. Eventually the funding body released their choices for funding – the Yowie was not funded. Not one red cent. There were two projects that were funded: if I remember rightly one was about someone so upset with John Howard’s policies that she commits suicide and the other was about autism. The ‘socially earnest’ features of these projects no doubt made them more fundable but in my eyes they were irrelevant to most of us, depressing and probably unwatchable. Sour grapes no doubt. We were depressed, anyway!

Linda got another gig which took her away: the successful “Home Song Stories.” She wished us luck and has continued to support us from afar. Nick went back into theatre design. Never mind, said Richard, we just need another producer. I’ll find one. You keep working on the script. I was up to draft 15, I think. Actually I had just tweaked it 15 times, the true changes in the script made it really about draft 4 or 5 only. A couple of weeks later Richard called me. I’ve got another producer. This lady runs her own production company. Aha.

We met in a hotel in the middle of Sydney one rainy afternoon. She seemed interested in the project, though not particularly keen on raising the money. With producers not wanting to raise money and the government handing out dollars to unwatchable rubbish I decided to set up a film production company of my own. This is the spirit of early Hollywood, I told Richard, believe in your product and get out there and make it into a business. The new producer was good enough to come down to Bundeena and put on an evening in the school hall showing some of her work and a short ‘teaser’ Richard had cobbled together of how bits of the Yowie might look. Everyone in the audience was enthusiastic. A week or so later I tried to get the producer to commit to a starting date for pre-production; the process of preparing a shoot – typically three to six weeks. She was non-committal. The Yowie was just one of a number of projects she was looking at. I said I needed a firm commitment and a date. No can do, she said, and pulled out. But Richard was still keen to shoot - in April, 07.

I have a friend who’s a financial genius. I told him my problems and he wanted to help. He researched the whole thing for me and set up a company which could sell a limited number of shares. All I had to do was sign someforms. Richard’s wife was expecting their first child and so this pushed the project out to September, 2007. We advertised in Metro’s e-zine for a producer. Another young lady called us. She worked for an advertising company but wanted to ‘get out and do more artistic and independent projects’. Maybe her background in advertising made her less forgiving of artistic types, but she was very
severe with the script. I got more frustrated. Having had the opinion of many people over many years – each one having a new slant and inspiring me to chop and change – I thought it was up to scratch, and down from 47 to 27 minutes, by the way. But every time someone new popped up they saw the script with fresh eyes and had a whole lot of critique – as though it had just been written. Then I met some people in the film industry – people very high up indeed – can’t say who they were, but they encouraged me to just go ahead and makethe damn thing. I agreed. It’s not Citizen Kane, I said to Richard, it’s a half hour short: a one line joke, two sympathetic characters, a cool monster, ha, ha, will recommmend that one to friends, let’s go home. But no, we had to agonise over every word, every motivation. Every possible 'redundance' had to be eradicated. The problem with this approach (anything halfway obvious is not permitted) is that it turns script writing into an exercise in gratuitous minimalism. The bald truth is that people do sometimes state the obvious, stare into space, repeat themselves; use clichés and rabbit on in a confused way – but not, apparently, in script land.

It’s hard to describe what script-writing is like. I have written successful medical books, poetry, articles and even drafted a couple of novels, but this was something else altogether. Writing a script is like building a stage set. You want a somber mood: OK, let’s put a stormy sky in the background. No, that’s too obvious. Let’s have a cliff and a hanged man in a tree. No, that won’t work. How about a plain wooden fence and a burnt-out house? Well, now we’re getting somewhere. Except you use words. And so it goes. I was now the CEO of a film production company. I set about trying to convince family and friends to buy shares at $5000 each. Some had claimed to be interested in the film and to want to chip in, but when I put the hard word on them they withdrew. However, to their great credit and my surprise, some did not – they actually put their hand in their pocket and bought shares! In my little film! I promised them: a Tshirt, a coffee mug, that they could be extra’s, come to the set, come to the premiere and get advance copies of the DVD. As well as their name in the run-off credits of course. History is in the making, I told them.But the new producer was not happy with the script. Said she wanted the whole thing tossed out. Another writer, a friend of hers, would re-write it. I didn’t even have to be involved. She, a young woman in her mid-twenties (I am guessing her age) wrote me a letter telling me that the 'midlife crisis theme' might be attractive to people in the 35-50 age bracket. I lost it at that point. I replied telling her allabout the midlife crisis, that no-one had bothered even to pay me a singledollar for an option on the script, and that no-one had ever bothered tothink about ways to raise money for the piece except myself. That meant one of two things: either the script was truly no good or that these producers could not be bothered and had better things to do. Well, either way, I would now produce it myself. That way I could be blamed if it was a disaster. I withdrew all rights to the script from her and went away to lick my wounds. Again. Richard was ever optimistic. Another producer! We tried a friend of his (Luke Eve of MoreSauce Productions) who liked the script but had too much else on – he offered to help out in any way he could and in fact has been very helpful in many ways.

Then disaster struck. A member of Richard’s family got very ill back in the UK and he moved back there, virtually overnight. It was late 2007.

EPISODE FOUR: NIGHT (AND DAY) MOVES

In mid-2008 we decided to move out of Sydney. Our eldest had reached high school age and we just didn’t like the schools on offer in the eastern suburbs. Not so much their curriculae but their atmosphere. The Sydney traffic was getting horrendous; your etag chirps like a demented budgie as you traverse the spaghetti freeways; and to get out of the traffic you actually have to park your vehicle – an act that will nearly bankrupt you, either from the tariffs of the parking meters or the horrendous fines tossed yourway like confetti. I was sick of the whole deal. We put together a lot of criteria and only Canberra ticked all the boxes. So we moved. This might have put an end to thoughts of the Yowie. But I was not giving up. I emailedTim TheYowieMan, who was very supportive and suggested filming it near Canberra. I did some scouting and came up with Tharwa or Captain’s Flat, two picturesque rural settlements. Nice spots, but horrendous logistical problems – mainly how to transport and house about ten crew and cast for aweek. On a budget of around $50000 it could not be done without serious compromise of the production quality of the film. Anyway, I had no producer, no director and only a vague idea about who to go to in Canberra to find such people. But I was determined to succeed. I got on the internet and found the 'deluxe Chewbacca suit'. I ordered one and cut the face out. I wouldmake my own face: Chewbacca was too recognizable and anyway I didn’t want copyright problems with George Lucas! My own knowledge of anatomy and making things with sponge foam and paint was enough to allow me to make a suitably horrible Yowie face. Encouraged by the result I ordered a gorilla suit. When you gots the monkey suits you gotta make the movie. So now I was sitting in Canberra with two monkey suits and a script. And some money. It all seemed too hard – I’d done my bit by writing the script; surely someone else should do the organizing for me?

Then I thought of Bollywood. My financial friend helped me out by emailing the Aussie trade commission in Chennai. Soon we had several quotes from Indian film companies to do the film: now recast as‘The Yeti’ and to be filmed in the Himalayan foothills. The Australian embassy even had a guesthouse there. I liked the Indian attitude: no bullshit, we’ll just make the thing. So refreshing after what I’d been through. At the time the Aussie dollar was 96 US cents. I felt like Spielberg. Then our dollar crashed. I asked the film company I had chosen to re-quote and also to sign a document saying they would not have more than a 20% costover-run. This they would not do – the last thing I wanted was to be in a foreign country with no support and some film company demanding more money of me. I canned the idea of India. It was back to good old Australia. But where to find the team? I remembered an ex-patient, let's call him X, a known director who had done ten years with the ABC and ten years of TV in the UK. He had even worked with Benny Hill. I asked him if he’d like to direct Yowie. Sure, he said, but what about a producer? I had tried advertising through Metro for the Indian venture and got several interested replies from young producers of varying experience. But one by one they fell away when I said the production had come back to Australia, funding was meager, and the team was not assembled yet. All I have is a script and a director – and a little money. In desperation I suggested to X that I produce it myself. After all, how hard could it be? Very bloody hard, he replied. It seemed like I had come to the end of my options.

Then I remembered that my daughter had acted in a brief advert through a casting director. Was this lady also a producer? She was! I sent her the script and she was keen! A friend who I had not seen for ten years came to stay with us in Canberra. I told him the story. Also told him that there were potential problems filming in Bundeena: a lawyer had told me that any ex-patient seeing themselves in my film could sue me! Well, consider the Blue Mountains where I live, he said. It’s pretty and has stacks of old stores to film in as well as lots of bush. Perfect. He said he’d be my ‘man on the ground’ and find locations, smooth the way, show us around, etc. Excellent. A few emails later and he was sounding disheartened. The Hawkesbury towns had had far too much filming in them, he said. The councils were reluctant, the parks authorities wanted three months to process applications (as well as all sorts of onerous insurances and so on) shopkeepers were grudging, too busy, greedy, or all three – the negativity went on. Then some nutter he’d never heard of starting phoning him and demanding money for a film made on the nutter’s premises years earlier, for which the nutter had never been paid. Scalded like the proverbial possum, my friend asked, quite reasonably, to be excused from helping me any longer. I have encountered these small-town attitudes several times before – it;s as if there's a general, cunning conspiracy not to allow anyone to make a film of any kind without hindering them in every way possible, while siphoning off any money the film team may have.

It’s different in the third world – they’reactually keen to have filmmakers there and welcome the slight inconvenience such types may cause. Sigh – and we wonder why the Aussie film industry isin trouble. Meanwhile the new producer and director asked to meet me in Sydney. A friend was going to Noosa for a week and lent us his waterfront pad in Tamarama to meet in. Producer and director turned up: it was a hot early summer’s Sunday; we were there for mutual sussing-out and commitment. We agreed on a shoot week: late in March, 2009, and a location scouting trip the day after Boxing day, 2008. I was very happy. Kylie the producer then emailed me and said she’d like to postpone the recce to the Blue Mountains till contracts were in place. Show me where to sign, I said. Everyone took a Xmas break.