Still Riding on the Storm

by Robert G. Barrett

  I said, ‘What?’

  He said, ‘Sorry, ocker, the Fokker’s chocka.’

  ‘There’s no room?’

  ‘That’s what I said, ocker.’

  I looked around the departure lounge of Dubbo airport — it had all the atmosphere of KGB headquarters in Moscow. If I’d been stuck in there until 5 p.m. I would have ended up hanging myself in the shithouse. I told him I’d wait around just in case something turned up.

  It turned out there was one seat left over but either I got it or this old blind man who wanted to get to Sydney as it was his last chance to see his son who was terminally ill in the cancer ward at St Vincent’s hospital. What could I do? I smashed a chair over the old bastard’s head and took the seat.

  Don Rickles took my bags and ticket and the next thing I knew I was winging my way back to the old ‘steak and kidney’.

  If you’ve been on one domestic flight in NSW you’ve been on the lot. Uncomfortable seats, surly stewardesses, lukewarm tea and biscuits guaranteed to give you indigestion for 24 hours. Fortunately the trip only took about 90 minutes and before I knew it I’d picked up my bags and was in a taxi heading for Gore Hill, which was when I knew I was back in civilisation. The cab driver was a living breathing ethnic — the first one I’d seen in four days. It was good to be back.

  So if you want to be a movie star, go for your life. Like I said, there’s all those lurks and perks. You get to travel to exotic places like Trangie and Narromine. There’s free drink. You finish up with a stomach on you like a walrus and a 90 per cent chance of ending your days in a ward for alcoholics. You get instant fame and recognition: drunks want to fight you everywhere you go.

  Above all, there’s the money. By the time the Taxation Department, Actors’ Equity and my agent got their whack out of my fee for Mail Order Bride, I had enough left over for petrol to get me to the local pawnbroker so I could hock the last of my furniture and check out the boards at the CES.

  THE EMPTY STOMACH

  (or how Bryan Brown beat me up)

  So there I was again, sitting on my fat arse out the front of my house at Terrigal contemplating my brilliant showbiz career and how wonderful everything had turned out since I left the Sydney rat-race and moved to the tranquil friendliness of the Central Coast. Talk about being broke! I owed that much money they nick-named me Jack ‘I owe everybody’ Davey. My house got burgled twice and both times they left me a food parcel. Even the moths in my wardrobe threw in last winter and knitted me a jumper. Things were going that bad I don’t think I would have got a kick up the bum if I’d have fallen into a cattle stampede.

  Take my illustrious acting and modelling career. Naturally enough the ABC completely brushed me because of an article I wrote in June ’84’s Australian Playboy, ‘So, You Want to Be in Movies?’. There’s no way they’re going to have a self-confessed pot freak appearing in any of Auntie’s movies, brilliant and all as he is.

  Then my last agent got the shits because I refer to various people in the articles I write as poofs, which is a bit of a no-no in the big bronzed Aussie movie scene. But he wasn’t getting me any work anyway so I had to get myself another agent.

  Moving to the Central Coast was a good idea too. They’re not a bad bunch here. There’s only two things they don’t like: xenophobia and strangers. A week after I moved into my home the coppers came and arrested me for not paying parking fines and I had to spend a week in Gosford jail sleeping on a wrestling mat, eating TV dinners and picking lice out of my hair. And Gosford nick makes Midnight Express look like a week on Brampton Island. A few weeks later another two wallopers in a booze bus got me coming home from work one night. I was just over, so I did my licence for three months. And I live on a hill that would kill a mountain-goat.

  Four locals, Midnight Oil fans, tried to give me a kicking outside a disco I was working at one night because I said Peter Garrett’s head looks like his neck’s blowing bubble gum, and when I got my Eddie Banks special out of the car to hit a few home runs on their pointy heads the heroes tried to get me on an assault charge. They got me the sack, I know that.

  Then there’s the concerned citizens next door — fair dinkum, you ought to see these two. If they ran a funeral parlour people would stop dying. They were concerned because every time they peered over my back fence my tomato plants seemed to get taller but there were no tomatoes. So naturally enough, being concerned citizens, they called the police and I got busted. Eight of the best plants you ever saw in your life — I bet somebody got a fortune for them.

  My life wasn’t a complete disaster even though financially I was making about as much headway as a snake trying to root a stock-whip. I’d managed to write a book, and even found a publisher willing to give it a punt. In fact at one stage I was quite elated. When I signed the contract they took me out and let me have a businessman’s lunch. The lunch was beautiful, the businessman wasn’t real happy though. Still, they must think the book’s going to go all right because for the first time they didn’t treat me like shit. They only treated me like mud.

  Anyway, there I was, sitting out the front of my digs wondering what I should do. I could mow the front lawn — the grass was getting that long all the frogs had hernias.

  Suddenly — to use an old cliche — the phone rang. It was the new man with the big cigar, Martin Bedford.

  ‘Hello, Bob. What are you doing?’

  ‘Not much, Martin. Just sitting here counting my money and my blessings.’

  ‘Can you be at Sydney Showground by 6.30?’ It was almost five.

  ‘In the Kingswood? I doubt it. Why?’

  ‘Well, I just might have a job for someone with a big boofhead like yours.’

  It seemed they were making a movie called The Empty Beach, based on the Peter Corris story of the same name about a private eye named Cliff Hardy. It was being shot mainly around Bondi (my old home town) and starred international heart-throb Bryan Brown, veteran actor Ray Barrett, various other Australian mummers, a few self-opinionated NIDA graduates and several Sydney North Shore window-dressers who had done a six-week drama course at their local high-school. They were stuck for a bloke to play the part of ‘Johnno’, a big mutton-headed wombat who’s a heavy for one of the mobs. Evidently the window-dresser who had been playing Johnno had told them to shove it. They needed a Wally in a hurry. Was I interested? It was a possible five days’ work. Was I ever! Five days on a contract was a dead set earn. All I had to do was be in the film company office at Sydney Showground by 6.30, front the stunt co-ordinator and do my best not to stuff things up. I said I’d give it a lash and hung up.

  I didn’t have any money for petrol so I siphoned half a tank out of the hotted-up Falcon belonging to the kid next door, shot that, plus two tabs of acid and a squirt of adrenalin, into the Kingswood and headed for Sydney, keener than a greyhound that’s just been given a kill.

  When I got there, there was no way I could miss the stunt co-ordinator. He was wearing a stuntman jacket, a stuntman belt buckle, a stuntman peaked cap, a stuntman ring and he had a stuntman overnight bag. I’ll bet he wore stuntman aftershave lotion and used stuntman toothpaste. If that wasn’t enough he was wearing sunglasses and — yes, you guessed it — a black skivvy. He introduced himself and told me he wanted to try a scene where Johnno creeps up on Hardy, raps him over the scone with a cosh and bundles him into the back seat of a car. Could I handle it? You’re kidding — like a Friday night outside The Bondi with a piece of lead-pipe wrapped in the Daily Telegraph.

  ‘Let’s go, me old son,’ I said gleefully.

  I let the stunt co-ordinator get a few steps in front, caught up with him, belted him over the head with the cosh, grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and the seat of his pants and speared him over some chairs and tables; then kicked him up the arse and jumped on his stomach.

  ‘How was that, mate?’ I said. ‘All right?’

  The stunt co-ordinator looked up from under the chairs and tables. ‘Very … convincing,’ he said. �
��We’ll be in touch.’

  Yeah, I’ll bet, I thought. I felt like giving him another one for luck. But I pissed off instead. At least I had a chance to have a few drinks with some old mates.

  Anyway, I’m sitting at home on Sunday, tap-tap-tapping away on my book when the phone rings. It was Martin again. I’d got the part. All I had to do was collect my script from the same office at the showground and my first shoots were at Bondi Pavilion at 6 p.m. on Monday.

  The next day I picked up the script and went back to a good mate’s garret at Tamarama, where I was staying, and read my part. You certainly didn’t have to be Lord Olivier to play Johnno: he’d be flat out if he said more than three words. But then again, my mere presence on screen is enough so it suited me. I had a bit of a snooze, then it was time to go down to Bondi Pavilion and play movie stars.

  Happily, the first bloke I recognised when I arrived on set was an old mate, Steve Rackman, the ex-wrestler, who was playing Rex, one of the heavies for the other mob in the film. Steve’s built like a Russian tank, almost as wide and just as hard, and if you reckon I’ve got a rough head you ought to see Steve’s. He looks like when he was born, God gave him the worst head he could find, then backed a front-end loader over it. But then again if I’d fought as many blokes as Steve my head would look like five miles of dirt road too. It’s always best to have a good rapport with someone like Steve, otherwise you finish up with your head on back to front and looking like you’ve just slept in a box of razor-blades,

  It was pouring bloody rain and there wasn’t a great deal doing on the movie set. In fact I’d no sooner changed into my Johnno outfit and practised a few grrs and snarls in the mirror than the assistant director told me I was wrapped and I could piss off — good timing too, I’d just missed tea. Tuesday was the same, so I headed back to Terrigal, being told to take a weather check for Wednesday. So I don’t suppose I could complain. I was two days up and I hadn’t done a thing; but don’t get it into your head that the film game is like the public service and you sit around on your arse all the time and get paid for it. It does have its demanding moments.

  Wednesday dawned bright and clear and I was back at Bondi for the scene where the two mobs of baddies confront each other, the leaders bite the dust in a hail of blanks and sound effects, and Cliff Hardy gets away by the skin of his teeth. It was a pretty quick shoot. It only took us till five in the morning. Anyway I put on my Johnno outfit, the make-up lady gave me the worst hair-do you’ve ever seen (I looked like an overweight Sid Vicious minus the pimples), they gave me a .38 revolver and we all ran around the front of the pavilion, one mob in a Rolls, the other in a Cadillac, firing blanks at each other and playing pretends. ‘Bang, bang you’re dead.’ Pretty heavy stuff.

  We got the first scenes done and then it was time for tea — and that’s when Steve nicknamed it ‘The Empty Stomach’. No one could eat the food. Now I’m not bad on the tooth and Steve Rackman would eat the crotch out of a rag-doll, but you wouldn’t have eaten this if you were in a lifeboat. If our government had sent it to Ethiopia the Ethiopians would have recalled their ambassador and shut down the embassy.

  I had indigestion so bad I felt like the Japanese had been using me for bayonet practice and if Johnno’s got a mean look on his face in this movie you know why. Needless to say we were a very sick and tired lot of baddies when they wrapped us at five the following morning and I was absolutely buggered when I crawled on to my half-inch strip of foam rubber on my mate’s loungeroom floor to go to sleep. I was even more buggered when his flat-mate got up and put the radio on full bore at 7 a.m. on his way to work.

  I hung round like a zombie all day Thursday, then at six I went back down to Bondi Pavilion to shoot some more cinematic masterpieces. Thursday was pretty much the same as the night before. All running around in a frenzy like a mob of kids who have just been given a book of McDonald’s vouchers, firing blanks at each other and doing a few pickups on the previous night’s filming. They could have wrapped half of us at 11 but they kept us sitting around like a lot of battery hens till 5 a.m. instead. The catering mob put on some sort of soup, French Onion I think it was. It tasted like they boiled up some of Steve Rackman’s old wrestling trunks. Needless to say I was tired, hungry and shitty when I hit the floor mat at six. I was a lot tireder and shittier when I copped the radio again at seven.

  But Friday night was the big one. The giant shoot-out with the SWAT team, cars being blown up, machine guns and M16s blazing, baddies biting the dust everywhere before truth and justice triumph over evil and Cliff Hardy wins to fight another day.

  Word must have got round about the filming because by 8 p.m. there was a huge crowd outside the pavilion, all breaking their necks to see what was going on. Which meant a chance for me to act the star and maybe chat up a few babes; not that it would have made any difference to yours truly, the way they had me looking it could have rained fannies and I would have got hit by an arsehole and had to pay for it.

  As I was standing there, the stunt co-ordinator swanned over and told me in a very matter-of-fact voice that when the panel-van went up in flames I was going to run towards it, turn around, get shot, then somersault backwards over it into the flames. I said of course I’ll have asbestos gear and all that? No. But somebody would be standing there with a car fire-extinguisher. I thought, yeah, I know who’s going to go over that burning car and with that fire-extinguisher for a suppository.

  Before they set this scene up, they did one where Ray Barrett goes after Bryan Brown with a sub-machine-gun. So they set up the cameras and Ray comes charging out of the Cadillac waving his Carl-Gustaf around. He squeezes the trigger and as about 20 shots burst out, Ray’s finger jams in the bolt mechanism and gets all chopped up. Fair dinkum, it was the TV blooper of the decade, except after Ray had finished telling Jesus Christ and the rest of Australia all about it you could have cut the air with a knife. But trouper that he is, he still carried on; with the help of a little anaesthetic he managed to find in his caravan.

  Anyway, they finally get the main scene set up and it takes them nearly three hours, four cameras, three sound men, film crew everywhere, a cast of about 60 and hundreds of spectators crammed against the barriers. This is where my gang boss gets it with a shot-gun, the killer gets machine-gunned, the car blows up, the Bondi Pavilion gets shot to pieces, and goodies and baddies go down all over the place.

  As there was going to be a fire and an explosion the police and a couple of firemen were on hand for safety measures. And who should the fireman in charge be but my old mate ‘Oigles’ from the Bondi Icebergs. The first thing he said when he saw me was, ‘G’day, Bob. Where’s all the piss?’ Over the past 20 years Oigles has retained enough Tooheys New to fill an Olympic pool and half a dozen water-beds.

  Anyway, they get this huge, involved scene set up with the crowd under control, cameras, sound and everybody in their place. Then it’s lights, camera, roll film, roll sound and … action. Bang — everybody runs around right on cue, the guns are blazing, the panel-van goes up in a great ball of flame, and as soon as it does Oigles staggers over in front of the cameras, turns on his firehose and puts the bloody thing out.

  The director nearly had a stroke. Three hours and about 15 grand went straight down the gurgler: if there had been any real bullets around he would have put one straight through Oigles. The rest of the film crew were screaming their heads off as well and to make things worse, a mob of wags amongst the spectators started singing, ‘Come on, baby, light my fire.’ The rest of us just groaned because it meant we were going to be there another three hours. Finally they got it all set up again, only this time with two guys standing next to Oigles with a baseball bat each, ready to break both legs if he went near the panel-van before it was time. But everything went according to plan this time; in fact the arrests and the police work looked so realistic the two guys playing the detectives ended up getting a sling off someone. Luckily for me, the shoot being two hours behind, I didn’t have to get shot going
over the blazing car, I just got arrested, handcuffed and beaten up in the back of a Commodore instead.

  I got wrapped about five and rather than spend another night on the floor mat making my chiropractor rich I split straight for Terrigal, took a sleeping pill and woke up just in time to do my money on the last race at Rosehill.

  My next call was for 7.30 Thursday — the original scene I auditioned for. I had to stalk Hardy, belt him over the head with the cosh and throw him in the back of a Mercedes. Easy as shit. Just like a Saturday night at The Astra before they closed it. They shot it outside the old Crown Street Women’s Hospital, which they’d done up as a police station, daubing such choice things as ‘Fuck off filth,’ ‘Today’s pigs are tomorrow’s bacon’ and ‘Stop police verbals’ all over the walls. I got there just as tea was being served, which I declined on humanitarian grounds.

  Now this was a fairly simple scene but because we’re all perfectionists in showbusiness we decided a few rehearsals wouldn’t go amiss.

  So we did 20 rehearsals of me belting Hardy over the head with the cosh and spearing him into the car. Of course all stars have stand-ins and it was the stand-in I was using for target practice. You should have seen the poor bludger after the 15th rehearsal: he was talking like Fozzy Bear and getting around like one of Jimmy Sharman’s tent fighters.

  Finally Bryan Brown arrived and being the trump was able to get things sorted out. We got the scene done in two takes even with the constant heckling from a group of beefy, crew-cutted young ladies wearing overalls and glugging schooners outside the pub on the corner.

  All we had to do then was drive up and down George Street with me pistol-whipping a sandbag on the back seat which was supposed to be Hardy’s leg. Actually this was the most difficult part of the movie for me. This was where I really earned my money, where the film company really gets what they were paying me for. This was where I got to say my big line, when I see Hardy trying to kick open the door of the car. ‘Hey, Hardy’ comma ‘what do you think you’re doing’ question mark. And baby, I did it in one go! Didn’t even have to use an idiot board once. Though it was there just in case. I was wrapped at 10 and down the pub swallowing schooners at 10.30.