by Philip Luker
In 1970, Adams screened The Naked Bunyip — now reduced by 45 minutes and the recipient of lashings of publicity generated by the censor — to great applause in halls and theatres, for example, the Palais, in cities and towns because the cinema chains had no faith in Australian movies. The film opened at the Palais Theatre in Melbourne, the biggest cinema in the country. It was packed to the rafters. The most popular parts of the film were the missing parts. The censor was off his face about it. He became very, very angry and threatened Adams and his friends with all sorts of legal problems. Barry Humphries decided to hold a press conference to cash in on the situation more. He told the press that the censor would have given his right arm to have been there — perhaps he had lost his arm through over-zealous film cutting. ‘These were not the kind of comments that would endear us to Mr Prowse,’ said Adams. ‘We couldn’t afford to promote the film but Mr Prowse came to its aid by banning a lot of it.’ Adams and Barry Humphries made the best of the publicity and the showdown accelerated the collapse of film censorship.
The censor again helped Adams and his backers to get publicity when in 1972 they screened The Adventures of Barry McKenzie, and Barry Humphries (who, as Edna Everage, starred in the film with Barry Crocker) poured petrol on the fire by again making speeches saying ‘… the chief censor told me straight from the shoulder …’
Adams tried to get the film screened by Hoyts or Greater Union cinema chains, both of them foreign-owned and avoiding Australian films like poison, and suffered the same fate as he had with The Naked Bunyip. So Adams and company screened Barry McKenzie in public halls and independent cinemas starved of films by the distributors. Barry Humphries and he again had a wonderful time organising the publicity and the film took off like a rocket — it was the first Australian film to gross a million dollars, the first commercially successful Australian film for thirty years and the first to be seen as a success overseas since World War II. In the film, produced by Adams and directed by Bruce Beresford, Barry McKenzie (Barry Crocker), the extreme embodiment of Ockerism, sets off to England accompanied by a small inheritance and Aunt Edna (Barry Humphries) to get a cultural education. Aunt Edna, of course, later became Dame Edna Everage and is still going strong. Barry McKenzie is fond of beer, Bondi and beautiful sheilas, and gets drunk and vomits (often), is ripped off (more often) and insulted by effete Englishmen (constantly). He is exploited by record producers, religious charlatans and the BBC.
Adams believes that if it hadn’t been for the interest Barry McKenzie created, many Australian film classics would never have been made. In London, Barry McKenzie took off as audiences understood the anti-ocker humour, although it failed in the provinces. In Adelaide, where Adams had hired a cinema to screen Barry McKenzie, he and Barry Humphries arrived to find a hundred ockers dressed as Barry McKenzie forming a wedding-type arch of beer spray from a hundred cans. Adams invented a character called Carlo, who claimed to be an earnest film buff and wrote letters to The Age attacking the character Barry McKenzie and saying he was an insult to proper film-making.
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‘They were funny days,’ Peter Best said when I met with him at my home. He had met Adams when Best was writing advertising jingles at Monahan Dayman Adams; he wrote the music for Jack and Jill and Barry McKenzie. From ad jingles to films was a steep learning curve for both of them. Best later wrote the music for Muriel’s Wedding and Crocodile Dundee. Crocodile Dundee made a lot of money for him.
He said that for twenty years Adams had been suggesting they go and live alone on a tropical island with no phones and write a musical together. Well, perhaps there would be just a few phones.
‘I knew he’d never have time to live on a tropical island and even if he did, he’d spend most of his time on the phone sorting out someone else’s problems,’ Peter said. ‘So we’ve never written a musical. It’s a pity.’
Best described the birth of Barry McKenzie: ‘I was at Sydney University and Bruce Beresford was there also. I went to London in 1970 and ran into Bruce at a party and he told me he was trying to get the McKenzie film up. He was going to go back to Australia to try to get some funds. I told him to talk to Adams because he was a whiz at that sort of thing. So Bruce and Phillip got together, Phillip got the money and asked me to write the music. Bruce and Barry Humphries both wanted someone with a lot of experience. Phillip kept pushing for me. I’d written the song, The Adventures of Barry McKenzie, which became a hit in the end.
‘Phillip rang me and said, “Barry’s having dinner at your place tonight.”
‘I said, “Is he?”
‘He said, “You’d better go out and get some food.”
‘So Barry came to my place on Port Phillip Bay, where there’s a lot of smelly seaweed. Barry came in and said, “There’s a terrible smell in here.”
‘I said, “There was no smell until you arrived.”
‘Then I played him my song and he was really excited. Barry rang Bruce and said, “Peter Best has to do the music.” I also did the music for the sequel, Barry McKenzie Holds His Own.’
Peter Best said Adams’ contribution to Australian films was bringing people together, raising funds from governments and corporations, producing ideas and suggesting things for people to discuss.
‘He’s an amazing facilitator,’ Best told me. ‘I’ve never known anyone who spends so much time and energy trying to help people. He finds it hard to say “no” to people who ask him to launch a book or join a committee. But he also finds it hard to follow through because he’s always trying to do too much. I’ve never known anyone who works so hard. He never has any time off. I’d go crazy. In films, he also had an extraordinary amount of trust. He didn’t interfere with me at all. Some producers are not only hands on but also lips on and teeth on. Phillip saw his job as choosing a team, then letting it go.
‘Some people in the film business have become quite bitter because Phillip has promised to help them and has tried to help, but because he hasn’t come up with what they wanted, they have become cross with him. His family life was so bad when he was a kid that he turned inwards on himself. I went to boarding school from age seven to ten and that turned me inwards, too. I’ve known Phillip for forty years and we’re good friends, but we don’t live in each other’s pockets.
‘At the time when Phillip went to Kerry Packer and asked for some money to make The Getting of Wisdom, a lot of people were doing disgusting things over tax concessions, such as being paid $5 million in producer’s fees for a film with a budget of $8 million. Phillip could see it would wreck all the things and the people he stood for. He cared for the people who wanted to make films, not for the people who wanted just to make money. If the film industry was a car factory, the federal government would come up with an impressive lot of money to support it,’ Best told me.
‘If you look at a film like Crocodile Dundee, you couldn’t calculate how much money it has made for Australia. The French Government charges a fee for every ticket sold and uses that money to support its own industry. If we added twenty cents to every ticket sold, we’d have a lot more money to make films with. Also, if you look at the statistics for French, American or British films, they have more failures than successes, just as we do. Our problem is that, for a country with a serious film industry, we have the smallest audience.’
After his conversation with me, Peter Best went to have lunch at Adams’ house in Paddington, Sydney. Not knowing what lunch Adams would come up with, he took his own loaf of bread with him.
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Peter Faiman is another of Adams’ friends who first met him in the 1960s. He was a junior director at Channel Nine Melbourne and Adams used to come in with his Monahan Dayman Adams partners to watch the agency’s commercials being made.
‘Phillip was very affable, curious, supportive, approachable and respectful of me,’ said Faiman when I interviewed him at my Sydney home. ‘He was a kid trying to do his best. He was the creative communicator of MDA. His main contribution to Australian fil
ms was his “can-do” attitude and total support for the creative people and the stimulation he gave everyone. He created the idea from the ground up, touted it, brought people together as producer, encouraged them, gave them the vision and the can-do, and promoted it all from nothing to realisation. It was his inspiration that drove the films.’
Peter Faiman later rose through the Nine Network ranks, directed the Paul Hogan and Don Lane shows, directed Crocodile Dundee, started the FX TV network for Rupert Murdoch in New York and directed the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games.
‘Phillip encouraged me throughout my career,’ said Faiman, ‘including Crocodile Dundee.’ With an $8 million budget, it took $45 million in Australia and A$400 million in the United States in its first year (1986), more than any other Australian film, before or since.
‘He always gave me his point of view and feedback on my shows,’ Faiman continued. ‘That’s very important in the creative process because you get slammed so often. It’s so intense and so public. It’s always been a tremendous factor in our friendship to have him giving me insightful understanding of what I’m doing and stimulate my mind. In return I’ve clued him into a lot of insider information on the film and television industries because his curiosity makes him want to know the information and the trends, why things work or don’t work and what the public is thinking.’
Despite Faiman’s glowing review of Adams’ skills, not everything Adams touched worked out the way he planned. In the 1970s he had a passion for bringing three-dimensional (3D) television to Australia. Adams told me, ‘Ranald McDonald, managing director of the Melbourne Age, and I used Kerry Packer’s money to do experiments for weeks. We had a creative, exciting time and 3D TV worked on a technical level. The next hurdle was to get it to work on a cultural level. There needed to be 3D goggles in every Australian home and we felt this was possible. But the main problem was that Kerry Packer couldn’t see the 3D effect because one of his eyes had been damaged by polio when he was a boy. So he backed off and 3D television didn’t eventuate in Australia at that time.’
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In 1976, four years after Barry McKenzie was launched, Adams was the producer and Bruce Beresford the director of Don’s Party, the film adaption of the David Williamson play of the same name, about a Labor cheer-squad celebrating before a 1969 federal election victory that didn’t eventuate.
In his oral history for the National Library in Canberra, Adams said Beresford told him that there are probably no more than twenty film actors in the world who are bankable (including several Australians) and every producer tried to sign up at least one. It was the same with other film crew. Don McAlpine, the cinematographer for Barry McKenzie, has since shot fifty other Australian and American films, including Moulin Rouge, Mrs Doubtfire, Down and Out in Beverly Hills, Puberty Blues, The Club, Breaker Morant and My Brilliant Career. Adams’ point is that Australian films struggle but Australia’s contribution to American films is vast. Australians are happy to see Australian actors doing American accents in major US films. Adams has always dreaded Australia becoming the Hollywood back lot that it has become: sequels of Star Wars and Superman being made in Australia — films which otherwise have nothing to do with Australia.
Australians have always loved seeing themselves on television but are diffident about seeing themselves on a big screen. Television is like looking in a mirror and seeing yourself reflected but film is a big window and Australians have always preferred a big American window. They are ‘iffy’ about their own industry and have to be cajoled into seeing Australian films apart from those that say flattering things about us, such as the mystical Picnic at Hanging Rock or the patriotic Gallipoli. They don’t like films that criticise their own country. They like films about people winning, not losing, as do the characters in many Australian films. Just as Barry McKenzie kicked down the door for other Australian films, film did the same for other arts, such as theatre — the number of Australian plays professionally produced has multiplied.
Adams believes the film driving force is not the writers or film-makers but the Sidney Nolans, Arthur Boyds and other Australian painters who showed there was an Australian look, light and energy. But in spite of the gains, only 3.8 per cent of Australian cinema takings in 2008 came from Australian films, down from 4.0 per cent in 2007 and 4.6 per cent in 2006.
America has one anti-hero, Woody Allen. That’s his job. Australia produces dozens of Woody Allens in wry, oblique and offbeat films. Australia has made film after film about innocent country boys like Barry McKenzie going to the big smoke, either Sydney, London or New York. Australian films are pro-life — exuberant and happy. But these days the films that people enjoy are highly energetic, powerfully visual, often quite vulgar, naive and very likeable, said Adams. Australia is also one of the great documentary nations. America doesn’t make many of them. If you look at pay television in Australia, some docos are Australian with American voice tracks.
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Phillip Adams was chairman of the Australian Film Institute, the Film and Television Board of the Australia Council, the Australian Film Commission and Film Australia. More than anyone else, he revived the Australian film industry in the 1970s. His biggest regret was the damage that the 10BA tax concessions did to Australian films. The concession, introduced in 1981, allowed investors to claim a 150 per cent tax concession and to pay tax on only half of any film income. Adams said in his oral history it didn’t matter if the film was ever shown, so long as it was actually made, the investors got their tax cut. ‘Australian films will not survive without a government subsidy of one sort or another, preferably straight subsidies, not corrupting tax concessions.
‘We have, de facto, a nationalised film industry,’ he said. ‘But apart from America and India, every film industry in the world requires heavy government subsidies. The difference in film-making is that the subsidy is more democratically applied. The money that subsidises a seat at the opera, ballet or theatre in Australia is quite staggering. For a much more modest investment, film reaches an infinitely greater number of people here and overseas.’
Adams told me, ‘Paul Keating was the last prime minister to promote the arts, not because he was arts minister but because of his personal interest. Australian films have always been a creature of government because of our small market — basically, they need the help. They didn’t regain prominence after the seventies because there was no great pressure from either the government, the industry or the community for it to happen. In fact, while the worst things overseas film-makers say about each other’s products is that they are “interesting”, Australian film-makers have a mean-spirited mentality and like to knock each other’s work.’
The main problems Australian films face are Australians’ preference for American films, lack of finance, and scant access to film screens: Hoyts, Greater Union and Village Roadshow operate about 90 per cent of Australian screens and keep 70 per cent of total takings, the remaining 30 per cent being shared by film-makers and distributors. Australian films not backed by Hollywood studios are screened in only about 10 per cent of Australian cinemas. The only way Adams got distribution of Barry McKenzie and Don’s Party after the cinema chains had knocked them back was by hiring town halls or even buying independent cinemas with federal money, when Gough Whitlam was prime minister.
Adams devoted twenty years to Australian films and these days is disgruntled that most Australians still prefer American films and do not demand good Australian ones but often denigrate the oily-rag ones they see.
‘Jesus,’ he told me, ‘ninety-nine per cent of American films are appalling.’
‘Australians don’t buy Arthur Boyd paintings of American landscapes but never hesitate to patronise Hollywood films — often acted in or photographed by Australians and made in Australia.’ He said Australian film-making peaked in the Whitlam era, after Barry Jones and he persuaded Gorton to press the right buttons. Adams used to tell federal governments that Australian
films would increase tourism and trade, and they did. When the government found out that Australian exports of rutile to Venezuela had skyrocketed, it found the reason was that the importer had seen Picnic at Hanging Rock.
The last films Adams produced were Lonely Hearts and We of the Never Never in 1982 and Abra Cadabra in 1983. He acted as a radio announcer in Dallas Doll (1994) and as the voice of God in Road to Nhill in 1997. But after that he walked away; he had done his dash.
Chapter Five:
The Phillip Adams Enigma"
Phillip Adams is perhaps the most remarkable person in Australia — a man remarkable for his brain and for his achievements, a chaotic man who masks his robust, well-deserved egotism behind a humble front and his massive knowledge behind earthy Australian lingo. He denies he has an ego, even though everyone has, but he doesn’t want to admit it.
Adams only very rarely introduces himself on his Late Night Live program five nights a week on ABC Radio National and the reason is probably because he expects everyone to know. Once in 2008, he said on-air that the ABC had asked him to say his name on-air so he would do so, twice a year. He said it then, ‘This is Phillip Adams,’ but it was the last time he did so that year. There seems to be quite a struggle between the ABC and Adams. Early in 2009, the ABC inserted an introduction to Late Night Live in which an announcer says, ‘This is Late Night Live with Phillip Adams — ideas and opinions from around the world.’ A few evenings later, ‘with Phillip Adams’ disappeared, I suspect at Adams’ instigation, although he won’t talk about it. At the start of almost every program since then, Adams has had cracks at the anonymous announcer and nicknamed him ‘Horace’ until in January 2011 Adams said on-air that Horace had left the building in disgrace after a scandal and been replaced by his twin sister ‘Doris’.