Always the Bad Guy

by Shane Briant

  The ad, set on the Titanic as it went down, has been posted on YouTube because of its quality and popularity. As is the sequel, an advertisement shot on a wonderful replica of the Orient Express. Sitting in the train, you could easily imagine you were in the real thing.

  One of Pete's little secrets, and something that makes his commercials so special, is his attention to detail. For instance, before we shot the Colombian ads he chatted to every single extra in the carriage and gave them a 'story' – why they were in the train that particular day. And because they felt the director considered their performances important, they worked more happily, injecting just the right amount of creativity to their performance.

  "You are an old roué, married to an old bag, taking this delightfully young and beautiful girl to Venice to have your way with her," I heard Pete tell an elderly extra sitting at a table with a lovely young female extra. His performance in the background is a joy to watch.

  The coffee ads ran for about six years across America, and Paul Ibbetson once calculated that had I been on an American contract (with residuals) I would have earned around a hundred and sixty thousand dollars, rather than the fifteen I earned as a flat fee.

  Funnily enough, many years later I was in Los Angeles for the pilot season, and Pete cast me as the father of the bride in an 'I Can't Believe it isn't Butter' commercial. It's hard to recall exactly what my fee for the day was, but I think it was a matter of a few hundred dollars. It was a major campaign and the product was an important one, so the residuals would surely have amounted to six figures.

  But, damn it! The editor's scissors removed me from the final cut and so I had to make do with the few hundred dollars.

  In this way I missed out on the Colombian Coffee ad because I was on an Australian contract, and on the margarine ad because I was on an American contract. As 'Norma' says in 'The Naked Civil Servant,' 'c'est la vie, I 'spose.'

  It's the humourous advertisements I remember.

  I was in an hilarious Marlboro commercial where I played a MI6 big-shot about to take off in my private black chopper from a barge in Darling Harbour in Sydney when James Bond races to the helicopter to ask some last second question, but the MI6 hotshot is not listening. He pushes a button and the window slides up, trapping James Bond's cigarette in the window. Rather than give up his Marlboro, Bond clenches his teeth and is swept upwards into the sky. How much do we love our Marlboro?

  It's quite difficult to keep track of everyone that you've worked with. I usually remember a face but often forget names. I remember once a middle-aged woman came up to me at a gallery opening, all smiles.

  "Hello. It's Shane, isn't it," she said.

  "That's right," I replied, not knowing quite what was coming.

  "You played James Bond in that Seiko watch commercial!" she continued.

  I couldn't for the life of me put a name to the face, after all the Seiko ad was now almost twenty years old.

  "I was Lady Godiva!" she exploded.

  "Of course you were," I managed quickly, as a vision of the young naked girl I'd worked with all morning flashed through my mind. How could I have forgotten Lady Godiva!

  Not all commercials work out the way you hope. On one occasion I was up for a very lucrative commercial, and I knew the director very well indeed. In fact I'd given him a free option on my novel 'Graphic,' and we'd been working on the script for over a year by then. I thought the job had to be in the bag.

  Not so.

  When I arrived for the final recall, I saw my old friend Barry

  way of knowing the Kiwi director and I were best buddies and so he'd fix things for me. I was so certain about how things would turn out that I joked with Barry on the way out.

  "How about his, Barry. There's just you and me left in the mix. Why don't we agree to share the fee now, so that the worst scenario is sixteen grand?"

  Of course I wasn't serious, especially because I was certain the entire fee was mine anyway. I just thought the idea was an amusing one. If I'd landed the role, I'd have been a big pickle!

  Next day, Barry landed the role. I continued working with the Kiwi director for another year, at which stage he lost interest in my screenplay project and just walked into the sunset. A free option is never a good thing, unless you know the director isn't going to get bored after you've put in a year's work with six drafts. It's the old 'free lunch' thing.

  One last memorable commercial was one filmed for the Italian market starring Megan Gale – Australian supermodel – a girl who can no longer walk down any street in Italy without being swamped with fans. She has been Italy's reincarnated Sophia Loren for years now.

  In the commercial, for an Italian telecom company, Megan is my CIA operative. She arrives in a very cool, classic, open-topped American car, and stops atop a dusty hill somewhere very barren. Almost immediately, a jet-black chopper appears out of nowhere with me inside. Megan hurries over to the still-hovering chopper and I give her a plastic card, telling her to 'look after herself,' in Italian.

  Megan was very provocatively dressed in a low cut summer dress. She looked mouth-watering, while I looked like I'd been to hell and back with one glass eye and a scar that led from my forehead to my chin.

  Beautifully shot in Broken Hill by Pete Cherry, I had the fun of spending hours in the chopper with Gary Ticehurst – the best chopper pilot in Australia bar none. In between takes he'd take me on jaunts around the plain, looking for kangaroos, and generally swooping across the landscape. Amazing!

  The final shot was looking out towards the approaching chopper as it weaves in between the huge electricity pylons. Had I not had Gary sitting beside me I might have been obliged to change my trousers later, but as it turned out it was safe as houses and looked terrific. In August 2011, Gary, ABC journalist Paul Lockyer, and cameraman John Bean died in a freak accident near Lake Eyre. Over a thousand friends attended the memorial service.

  Gary Ticehurst on a Sony ad in the Phillipines.

  Big time CIA bad guy.

  The Bigpond DVD rental campaign, 'Come Home to a Movie,' was great to work on. The concept? An average family orders three

  DVD's and while they're out the three DVDs turn up in the house in person, and they have an armed standoff. One character is one of the Blues Brothers, another is one of the Men in Black and I was Harvey Keitel from Reservoir Dogs. We did a lot of pointing guns and shouting. Finally the family arrives home and one of us says, "Hey, we're the DVD's you ordered."

  We even had 'Frank the Pug,' a dog identical to the one in 'Men in Black.' The dog had the punch-line. Check it out on YouTube.

  At home, pretending to be Harvey Keitel in the Telstra commercial.

  Very occasionally a friend tells me he's seen me on some billboard in Bangkok. That's the time to get your agent to check it out.

  One last thing about commercials. One day you go to a casting where they're looking for a six foot, Caucasian, fair-haired actor with blue eyes, a BBC accent, experience in films and TV and you don't get the role – it goes to a woman, standing five feet nothing, with dark curly hair and a lisp. The next week, you think twice about turning up for an audition for the role of the ninety-year-old African American with a very strong Deep South accent, but you do just to please your agent. Guess which role you always seem to get and what you miss out on?

  Many years ago I went to see Peter Bogdanovic at Fox Studios. He was about to make a film about Robert Wagner and Natalie Wood.

  I'm not sure which role I was up for, but when I arrived in the outer office the producer, Richard Fischoff, took one look at me and called out loudly to Bogdanovich in the inner sanctum. "Hey, Peter! We've got Christopher Walken here!"

  Bogdanovich came through to check out what all the shouting was about. He smiled at me. "No shit, Richard. It's Walken. But who the hell are you really?"

  I introduced myself, adding, "I guess being Walken's good? In this film anyway."

  "'Fraid not, Shane. We want the twenty-five year old version. You lo
ok like," he looked me up and down, "Forty plus?"

  The reason I mention this incident with Bogdanovic is because in 2010 my agent called me about a commercial. It was for a Sunday newspaper that was giving away CDs of Michael Bublé singing Christmas songs. They wanted someone to dance wearing a cool custom-made Santa suit as Bublé sings his new song. But here was the thing – they were thinking of Chris Walken's performance in the 'Fat Boy Slim' music video that everyone's seen on YouTube.

  I was excited. This was good money, and people who knew me, such as Bogdanovic and Fischoff thought I was Walken's dead ringer. Not only that, but by pure chance I knew the video well and actually had a suit the same style and the same colour!

  I worked all morning on the moves and even put one down on video and uploaded it on YouTube to see if anyone thought I was any good. The reaction was super. Surely this was in the bag.

  I went to the casting and danced like a madman.

  Two days later I was put on hold for the commercial. I wasn't too surprised – I felt no one could look like Walken quite the way I did, nor dance. Wrong. The role went to an older actor with white hair who happened to have been a principal dancer with the Australian ballet. Months later I watched the ad. The red suit looked great, the actor's white hair was perfect. The dancing was fantastic. Of course he didn't look at all like Walken, but the client didn't give a damn. My advice is this. Look for the Amazonian pigmy roles if you want to be in with a chance.

  WEDDING in the snow.

  THE LONGEST ENGAGEMENT IN HISTORY?

  For many years prior to 2005 I'd considered various scenarios for the perfect marriage ceremony. I'd met Wendy in the summer of '76 on a tennic court in Battersea Park and for one reason or another we'd never tied the knot – neither of us thought the actual ceremony was something worth wasting large amounts of money on. As far as I was concerned I had a horror of church weddings with all the relatives, 'dressed up and looking in their prime', getting teary and drinking too much. So Wendy and I had put marriage on the back burner for twenty-nine years.

  In 2004 I had an idea for a very unusual wedding. We'd go skiing in Austria, as we had each year for some time, and I'd arrange a surprise wedding half way up a mountain. Wendy wouldn't know anything about it until the time came to tie the knot. We'd wake up one morning in our hotel, have a champagne breakfast, step into our skis and take the lift to the top of the mountain. Halfway down the mountain I'd arrange to have a celebrant, two witnesses and a lavish lunch ready in my favourite restaurant.

  Ultimately there were so many things I feared might not work on the day, that I knew I'd have to can the surprise element. It was only fair that Wendy be allowed to accept my formal proposal, rather than being offered a fait accompli. And what girl likes to be dressed in ski clothes on her wedding, clothes she hasn't bought especially for the occasion? And the make-up? And the hair? And the flowers? So many things to think about. So I ended up telling her my plans and she seemed to like the idea. It was the snow element, I think. I asked our great friend, hotelier Daniela Pfefferkorn, daughter of famous Austrian hoteliers, Franz and Gucky Pfefferkorn if we could be married on the deck of their fabulous hotel in Lech, the Alter Goldener Berg. We wanted a very simple affair; just the two of us, an Austrian celebrant and two witnesses. Franz and Daniela offered their serves in this regard – a big deal in Austria since witnesses at a marriage are in some sense responsible from that day on for the happiness of the bride and groom.

  The morning of our wedding day in Lech, Austria. Haus Melitta.

  We woke up in the Haus Melitta to a perfect day – blue skies and sun. It had recently snowed, so the piste conditions were perfect too. Frau Mathis served up a champagne breakfast I will remember forever, and we couldn't have been happier.

  Later in the morning, we walked into town and I bought Wendy's corsage. Then we headed up the mountain.

  Our good friend, Vietnamese/Australian-born clothes designer Alistair Trung had designed Wendy's wedding veil, many yards of beautiful fabric he wound around her white fur hat (no real animals involved!) in a fabulously original way in his showroom in Sydney. Wendy took the instructions so she'd know how to assemble it with hatpins in Austria later.

  It's really hard to swoosh down the mountainside in a wedding dress, so Wendy wore a white jacket, white pants and white skis and boots.

  At midday exactly Wendy and I were at the top of the mountain. I was to ski down to the hotel to let them know she'd be down in ten minutes. Wendy was to ski to another hotel where she'd stop to wrap her veil and make any final adjustments she wanted.

  I then skied down to meet with our celebrant, Stefan Jochum.

  Daniela had arranged a lovely table covered with traditional

  Austrian hearts made of twigs, dyed red, as well as other beautiful floral arrangements. There were four seats for the ceremony. I was introduced to Daniela's father Franz, who was freezing cold as I recall despite it being sunny. I think he was the only one of us who felt cold on the day. As I saw Wendy skiing down towards us, I was then amazed to see all the staff of the Alter Goldener Berg emerge, dressed in dirndls and lederhosen, forming up in a guard of honour leading from the ski slope to the wedding table. They were all carrying freshly cut long-stemmed red roses.

  When she reached the guard of honour I could see that Wendy was stunned. She took off her skis and walked forward, looking absolutely beautiful. Ahead of her a young girl carried a basket of rose petals that she scattered on the ground as she walked forward – a carpet for Wendy to walk over. It was bliss.

  Wendy with Daniela Pfefferkorn and her father Franz.

  I asked Stefan if he could read out my vows in German (just for old times sake, as I'd spent all those years as a child in Germany) and he agreed. Wendy glanced curiously at me when the German bit stated, as she didn't speak the language. Later I told her I had agreed to honour and obey till death parted us. Unless I changed my mind. (Not true).

  Half an hour later, after Stephan's very amusing speech – not in

  the least stuffy and formal – he pronounced us man and wife and Franz popped the bubbly. It was an exquisite moment.

  Lunch followed on the deck of the Alter Goldener Berg, the part of the modern hotel that dates back to 1430. It was magnificent. We ate a traditional Austrian cream soup of wild mushrooms, followed by crispy whole duck, and free-range game hens in wild mountain berry sauce, ending with a most beautiful wedding cake.

  Throughout, the sun shone down on us as though Mother Nature's Austrian representative was giving us his/her blessing.

  Before we skied down to the village we were invited into the smallest and loveliest of rooms in the hotel, lined with wood that dates back five hundred years, and we drank some very old schnapps from glasses that had two-foot stems.

  We skied down far too fast. But we made it. And guess what's the first thing we did when we took off our skis in the village of Lech? We headed for the nearest après ski bar and had a few more celebratory glasses of champagne. Everyone in the bar guessed we had just married because of our clothes – Wendy was all in white and I was wearing a silver ski jacket with a rose pinned to the lapel. We made many new Austrian friends that afternoon!

  Wendy wearing Alistair Trung's veil in a Lech après ski bar.

  I think this is the best way to get married. It doesn't have to be in the snow, it can be anywhere unusual. Of course, if you want a hundred people at your wedding and feel like spending many thousands of dollars, then be formal.

  As I lay awake in the Haus Melitta that night, I remember thinking how lucky I was. Wendy was a female Dorian Gray, the perfect companion, she shared my sense of humour and was incredibly supportive. And now I had second family – a mother-inlaw, Olive, and two sisters-in-law, Jilly and Robby.

  La Familia Lycett. I call them the Lycett Mafia.