by Philip Luker
But not all the memorable campaigns were for not-for-profit organisations. Every time Adams sees the Qantas slogan ‘Spirit of Australia’ he remembers giving birth to it; now he wants to take it back because he says Qantas doesn’t deserve it.
***
As global brands reached Australia and started to dominate sales, their advertising agencies bought local agencies and began to dominate billings, which made it harder for local agencies to pick up anything except the crumbs. About eighty per cent of ad bookings were taken by international agencies, which made MDA’s success and continued growth even more remarkable. The agency that had started in one room generated an extraordinary client list and opened offices not only in all Australian capital cities but also in London, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Hong Kong, Singapore and Auckland. Adams counteracted his feelings of guilt for working on commercial campaigns for global brands by planning social engineering campaigns against racism and smoking.
In 1974, when he was only 35 and still at MDA, he said in the first of two oral histories recorded by the National Library, ‘Advertising is a despicable, irritating, shallow sort of business, but I think its history will be interesting. I think it’s going to eventually be used as an educational force against consumption, against the very things it’s been used for in the past.
‘In a sense, what is advertising? It can be used to persuade people that racial prejudice is bad just as easily as to sell detergent. It can be used, as it is in America, to discourage consumption just as simply as it is used to encourage it. Sesame Street uses advertising technology for educational purposes — short spans of attention, lots of colour, and lots of technique as in television commercials — to keep people interested.’
Adams’ criticism of advertising must have made his partners and workmates squirm and point out that he made a lot of money from it. He continued in his oral history, ‘Advertising has to be cleaned up and the sooner the better. I’d like to see stringent government regulations not only on cigarettes but also on alcohol and some other products. I am against advertising being used in politics because it is dangerous. Although I’ve done a number of political campaigns, I’ve also lectured and written against applying advertising techniques to politics. I’d like to see Australian laws preventing political advertising, mainly because it makes parties so vulnerable to business interests funding the campaigns. It’s not the case in Britain, where there is televised free political program time but no such thing as televised political advertising. That approach should be followed here.’
By the early 1980s, Phillip was sick of the ad industry and exhausted not only from it but additionally from film-making, writing columns — even if he enjoyed the activity — and sitting on many Victorian and federal government bodies. In 1983, MDA’s partners floated the agency on the stock exchange, then bought Alan ‘Mo’ Morris and Allan ‘Jo’ Johnston’s Mojo agency, which had made the ads ‘Put Another Shrimp on the Barbie’, ‘C’mon Aussie, C’mon’, ‘I Feel Like a Toohey’s’ and Paul Hogan’s ‘Anyhow, have a Winfield’. In 1989, Mojo-MDA, with billings of $500 million, received a takeover offer from Chiat-Day of Madison Avenue, resulting in $A77 million being spread largely among the three partners.
Brian Monahan bought a cosmetics business. He thought it would be a simple marketing exercise to crank up the brand, Natural Glow. He didn’t understand the manufacturing, distribution and retailing problems but later found a CEO with industry knowledge and the brand, now called Natural Glamour, is sold in all Kmart and Priceline stores and several thousand chemist shops. Lyle Dayman bought a farm at Yea in Victoria and later returned to his home state of South Australia, where he has a house on the beach at Somerton Park. He paints landscapes and streetscapes for his own pleasure and his paintings are sold in local galleries.
Adams’ campaign, in columns and in the Labor Party, against televised political ads led to the Hawke Government (1983-91) banning any commercials of less than two minutes’ duration so that parties could not ‘hit and run’. The networks were also required to give free time during election campaigns. Adams and his supporters were pleased that they had actually changed the laws, but then the High Court overturned the laws on the grounds that they were against free speech.
Adams has maintained friendships he made in his thirty-five advertising years, particularly with Peter Best, Brian Monahan and Bruce Petty. Peter Best told me Adams wrote an email to him a little while ago that said, ‘Here we were, two old lefties who put a lot of time and energy into helping advertisers get richer — talk about supping with the Devil. But we had fun in advertising and when it ceased being fun, we both got out.’
Chapter Four:
Having Fun Making Films
Phillip Adams told me during one of our hour-long sessions at his office at Paddington in Sydney, ‘I bought a clockwork movie camera for sixty quid, but it was useless.’ We were discussing his first forays into film-making, which sprang from his experiences making commercials at the Melbourne advertising agency Briggs and James in the early 1960s. He and a colleague, Brian Robinson, wondered whether, if they could make commercials, could they make movies? A few loonies and brave souls were experimenting with film; why shouldn’t they join them? They had to put up their own money, of course — hence the sixty quid expenditure.
‘The camera ran for twenty seconds and then stopped,’ Adams continued. ‘So you could have no shot longer than twenty seconds. And we couldn’t record sound. We edited literally with scissors and sticky tape. We had no gear and when we needed light interiors, we would borrow emergency lighting from road gangs. And when I say “borrow”, I mean we borrowed it and took it back later, hoping no-one had noticed.’
With the most primitive equipment, Brian and Phillip started to make a feature film. It cost them six thousand dollars, took six years of their spare time and was the story of a love affair between a kindergarten teacher, Jill, and a bikie tow-truck driver, Jack — a story in nursery rhymes with a voiceover reading the rhyme.
It was launched in 1970 and called Jack and Jill: A Postscript. The proposition was that, simply by using nursery rhymes and stringing them together, they could make a feature film. It opened with a voiceover, Phillip’s then wife Rosemary, saying ‘Mary, Mary quite contrary’, and you saw a statue of the Virgin Mary. Then with ‘How does your garden grow?’ the camera zoomed out to reveal a cemetery. Every nursery rhyme told part of the story. Adams told me, ‘Bugger me, the film won the Grand Prix at an international film festival, a modest one, the Adelaide-Auckland Film Festival, but nevertheless a kosher film festival.’
Jack and Jill was the first feature film to win the Australian Film Institute Best Film award. Years later, in his oral history for the National Library, Adams called Jack and Jill ‘an abysmal thing, greatly embarrassing to look at in retrospect but with a lot of innovations, both in the way it was put together and the narrative style of using nursery rhymes.’
It was the first of fifteen feature films that Adams made or helped make in the sixties, seventies and early eighties, mostly as executive producer or producer. Amongst these films were The Naked Bunyip, Hearts and Minds, The Adventures of Barry McKenzie (released in 1972, directed by Bruce Beresford and the most successful Australian film up to that time), Don’s Party (1976); The Getting of Wisdom (1978); Lonely Hearts as executive producer (1982); We of the Never Never as executive producer; Grendel Grendel Grendel as producer (1981); and Fighting Back as executive producer (1982).
Many other people had tried in vain to revive the Australian film industry after its succession of booms and slumps since the 1906 Story of the Kelly Gang became the world’s first feature film. Adams saw a great opportunity when John Gorton became Liberal prime minister in 1968; Gorton was also the minister for the arts. Adams didn’t know Gorton, but his friend the quiz champion and then schoolteacher Barry Jones did, for the oddest reason. Jones had the first open-line radio program in Australia and also a low-rating program on Channel Seven called
Encounter. He managed to have Gorton appear on both programs and it gave Gorton’s role as prime minister a degree of credibility. One thing led to another: Gorton smiled on Barry Jones as his lucky rabbit’s foot and Jones’ reward was to be invited to The Lodge. Gorton loved American westerns, but he was also worried about foreign ownership and selling the farm, and Jones and Adams saw this as their way in.
So they pedalled John Gorton an argument that America was gobbling up Australia’s national identity, which indeed it was. Gorton bought it and also bought Jones’ and Adams’ idea that the government should forget financing opera houses or art galleries and instead help create an Australian film industry.
Gorton agreed to send Jones and Adams off on a six-week world trip in December 1969 to study film industries, with the Liberal MP Peter Coleman accompanying to keep an eye on them.
***
It was Adams’ first overseas trip. He and Jones went to Tokyo then Moscow, Warsaw, Berlin and Prague and met Peter Coleman in Stockholm. Peter had refused to visit any communist country as he thought his editorials in the right-wing magazine Quadrant had made him personal enemies with communists, although (Adams said in the oral history) it was actually because Coleman thought he might catch communism like a virus.
In Moscow they visited film schools accompanied by a Soviet-provided interpreter, Vladimir Schmidt, who spoke English with a US mid-western twang. He had learnt English from a mid-western woman who had developed an unrequited passion for Lenin in the 1920s; he said his ambition was to visit Minneapolis or Kansas City and ask, ‘Where’s the john, Mac?’ and not be detected as a foreigner. Senator Eugene McCarthy from Minnesota, who had challenged Lyndon Johnson for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1968, was also staying at the Hotel National in Moscow and was amazed at Vladimir’s accent. Vladimir revealed himself as a dissident who typed up poems by politically incorrect writers such as Pasternak and bound them. Jones and Adams wondered whether he was an agent provocateur trying to entice them into an anti-Soviet act.
One icy night Jones and Adams drove in a rented car to see the Bolshoi Ballet but they skidded on the ice and ran into the back of a taxi. A crowd gathered, the traffic police arrived and they were told to follow them to a police station to be interrogated. The prospect of seeing the Bolshoi faded as they waited and waited, until an officer in gold braid appeared and made a phone call to someone who probably had even more gold braid, repeating, ‘Touristi Avstraliski’. Barry Jones intervened and said, ‘Nyet touristi, apparatchiks!’ He thought ‘apparatchiks’ meant ‘bureaucrats’; instead it turned out to be a magic word, because apparently the police thought they were Communist Party officials. They were given broad smiles and coffee and allowed to go.
In Prague they made the serious mistake of wearing Russian fur hats as they trudged through the icy streets; it was just a year after Soviet tanks had crushed ‘the Prague spring’. As Jones recounts in his autobiography, A Thinking Reed (Allen & Unwin), a group of sullen youths closed in on them. They waved their passports and were allowed to continue. In Warsaw they met Jerzy Toeplitz, who had been dismissed as rector of the famous Polish Film School in Lodz. They regarded him as the best available candidate to run their proposed Australian film school. In those days of the communist secret police, he was worried about surveillance at Adams and Jones’ hotel and suggested they walk in the street. They walked at length and when they returned to the Hotel Bristol, Adams’ hotel key was not at the reception desk. They raced upstairs (said Jones in A Thinking Reed) and could hear a phone ringing in his room. They persuaded a housekeeper to open the door and found it had been ransacked. Probably the ringing phone had been a warning from the lobby to the thieves to clear out. Jones’ room was untouched. In a slow interrogation by the police, Adams had to answer questions on a document such as his mother’s name, date and place of birth, while the thieves escaped.
In Los Angeles, they had lunch twice at Ma Maison, where they were reliably told Orson Welles was an habitué. But their lunches were on his days off. Jones said in his book, ‘Welles was a talismanic figure for both of us — bearded, overweight, frequently frustrated but always aiming at the universal.’
In all, Adams and Jones visited nineteen film schools and Peter Coleman twelve. Jones and Peter Coleman had a blazing row for a time and wouldn’t talk to each other, so Adams would sit in a car with them and Jones would say, ‘Tell Coleman such and such’, and Coleman would say, ‘Tell Barry so and so’.
***
Adams and Barry returned with a proposition to put to Prime Minister and Arts Minister Gorton. Adams wrote the one-page report, which began with a piece of deliberate plagiarism from the American Declaration of Independence: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident. It is time for Australians to see their own landscapes, hear their own voices and dream their own dreams’, with the establishment of a small film industry to interpret the national identity, producing ten to fifteen feature films a year, intensely local and culturally specific. The resulting films turned out to be Strictly Ballroom and Priscilla Queen of the Desert — films that didn’t need studios or a lot of infrastructure but had a certain cheek and vibrancy about them. The report suggested that the government establish an experimental film fund for would-be young film-makers, a national film and television school, and a film bank.
The report asked Gorton for $100,000 and he agreed to provide it. But he was soon out of office, replaced by Billy McMahon and succeeded as arts minister by Peter Howson, who proceeded to de-Gortonise everything. On ABC Television’s This Day Tonight, Adams called Howson ‘a pain in the arts’ and noisily resigned from the advisory committee. It worked like magic. Billy McMahon, who had succeeded Gorton as prime minister, rang Adams the next morning, grovelled, said Sonia sent her love and similar rubbish and promised to restore the plan, which gave Adams and his supporters breathing space until Gough Whitlam was elected prime minister in 1972 and put a lot of money into reviving the film industry.
Reserve Bank Governor H C ‘Nugget’ Coombs taught Adams that if a prime minister or political leader is also made arts minister, the arts world has no trouble getting action and money, so Adams promoted that idea successfully to Gorton, Whitlam and others. Initially Whitlam planned to make Senator Doug McClelland minister for the media and arts, and McClelland told Adams he planned to dismantle structures that Adams had set up, such as the Australian Film Development Corporation, and would not set up a film school. He was also uncomfortably close to the Hollywood film industry.
Adams said, ‘Nugget and I begged Gough not to give Arts to Doug but to keep it for himself because it’s always better for the arts to be run by a prime minister or premier than by a junior minister — you get much more done.’
Adams wrote to Whitlam urging him to keep the arts ministry for himself. Whitlam did so and made McClelland media minister. Adams went on: ‘Doug never forgave me. But we had Gough in our corner, which meant we had the film school and all the other things we had talked about to John Gorton.’
While Whitlam was wondering what to do with the arts, Adams got a phone call from Peter Ward, an offsider to Don Dunstan, the then South Australian premier, asking Adams to come to Adelaide to talk about film. Adams went to Adelaide and was ushered into Dunstan’s huge office, with a conversation pit almost out of sight of the desk. Dunstan came swanning towards Adams dressed in a safari suit and held out his hand, on which was a huge turquoise ring. Adams didn’t know whether to kiss the hand or shake it. ‘It was offered in a cardinal sort of way,’ he told the National Library, ‘so I think I actually bobbed the knee and put lips to ring.’
Don Dunstan told Adams he wanted him to live in South Australia and develop a state film industry. Adams declined to move but suggested that Dunstan’s government form a state film corporation, have it look as if it was making documentaries for the government but actually make feature films. Dunstan thought it was a good idea and said he could get the funds approved, so the South Australian Film Corporati
on was born. Adams helped recruit some of the staff and soon the corporation made Sunday Too Far Away and Picnic at Hanging Rock.
So then other state governments had to have film corporations — NSW Premier Neville Wran in his state; Dick Hamer in Victoria; even Tasmania had one for a while; Queensland had one but the man who the premier, Joh Bjelke-Petersen, appointed to head it robbed the corporation blind and ended up in jail, along with his wife.
Despite such missteps, Australia went from being one of the hardest places in the world to make films to one of the easiest. For a few glorious years, several federal and state bodies were lavishing money on film-makers.
***
In the late 1960s Adams was given a few thousand dollars by the ex-racing driver and tyre magnate Bob Jane and made The Naked Bunyip, a film about Australian sexual mores, starring Graham Blundell. Blundell played a young reporter who rushed around Australia asking people about their sex lives. The film had contributions from such well-known people as Malcolm Muggeridge, Norman Lindsay, young Harry Miller and young Barry Jones. For the first time in Australia, interviews with prostitutes were shown in a film. The film included scenes of full frontal nudity, lesbians kissing, a topless woman, descriptions of backyard abortions, a gang rape and a doctor talking about anal and oral sex — a lot for Australians in 1960-70s to accept in a film.
It started off three and a half hours long, but the one-armed chief Commonwealth film censor, Russell Prowse, came to Adams’ aid ironically by insisting on many cuts, even a scene showing lesbians talking to each other, in spite of the fact that, at the same time, the Savoy Cinema in Melbourne was screening a film about lesbians. Adams pointed this out to the censor, who said, ‘They’re European lesbians. We’re not going to have that sort of thing here.’ It was great for publicity and Adams made the censor’s cuts as obvious as possible by showing an animated bunyip, drawn by Peter Russell-Clarke, dancing across the screen every time the censor had made a cut. Adams said, ‘In the 1960s in this wide, brown land, we had about the most repressive censorship in the Western world. So one of the reasons we made The Naked Bunyip was to stretch beliefs over sexuality, because it was starting to be debated, certainly in the Northern Hemisphere. There was another issue: The film industry was as dead as sexuality.’