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.
Saturday, February 7, 2009
Thursday, February 5, 2009
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.
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.
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
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.
> 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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
