Mug Shots

by Barry Oakley

  Since one can’t wear the same shirt every day, a lot of bluffing was required. Film’s a technical minefield, and the possibilities for solecism were endless. At a lunch with my boss, the small and sharp Richard Thomas, he complains that the production people have been slow in replacing video with film, and I give a knowing nod. At a table with a group of students sitting reverentially around the famous English director Lindsay Anderson, one of them praised his ‘great tank work’. (Had he done war movies?)

  ‘What’s the noise?’ I ask my assistant Chris Fitchett (who knew far more about film than I did—he’d even made one).

  ‘Tape hiss.’

  ‘Of course—very annoying sometimes.’ Richard Thomas, who by now was getting suspicious, sat in the chair opposite my desk, looked at me hard, wondered whether students should start off with a day using the Portapak—or would a Super Eight be better?

  ‘Good question. I’ll have to think about that.’

  The AFTS was generously endowed by the federal government, so the students were taught in small groups—tutorials rather than classes. The one-year screenwriting group was more tolerant of me, since I’d been on the panel that chose them. Under their guidance I worked hard to catch up, reading about narrative structures, plot points, montage and back stories, and watching films they recommended in the school’s theatrette.

  The three-year students were another matter. These were worryingly talented people who found it hard to conceal their puzzlement that I had the job. (I agreed with them.) They included Jane Campion, who submitted a screenplay with a large phallus as a frontispiece, Paul Hogan (soon to re-style himself, for understandable reasons, P.J. Hogan), and Ian David, later to make a name in television.

  In my second year, still hanging on, the pinkness of my shirt fading fast, the Film School scores a coup. Linda Agran, big-wheel London TV producer and script editor of Minder, has agreed to be In Residence for a few weeks. First Class, thanks. Her reasoning is pithy: ‘If you think I would even consider spending twenty-seven hours with my knees around my ears paying for drinks and picking at trays of mystery meat, you’ve got the wrong bloke. Also, I love flying like I love dieting and Margaret Thatcher, so if I am going to die I am going to do it at the front end, wearing my little free socks, pissed as a parrot.’

  Three weeks later she arrived, pushing expensive matched suitcases. She was short and dark and wore large sunglasses. She’s taken to the Sebel Town House. Considering the temptations of first class she seems quite sober, and immediately calls for two bottles of champagne. Principle one of TV production, she says—hold your liquor. She fronts up to a dinner at a Greek restaurant the following night, all make-up and blazing eyes, and soon has the one-year trio—Chris Lee, Steve Wright and Billy Marshall—in thrall.

  The commercial TV channels court her. The head of one offers to collect her from the school in the company helicopter. The head of programming of another invites her to his mansion for the weekend. It has a suit of armour on the stairs, she tells us later, that lights up as you pass, a tennis court, and a swimming pool that can change colour.

  Agran closets herself with her trio of admirers and says, ‘We are going to create a TV series, and we’re going to get it to air.’ I pick up some of what she says from the next room: ‘The English language is a millstone around a writer’s neck. It makes them think of dialogue, and not structure. Don’t go from script to visuals. Visualise the scene first, then write it.’ (Why haven’t I thought of that?)

  One day, while they were huddled over their project, I took a phone call in my office. ‘Is that Mr Marshall?’ a voice barked. I told the voice I’d get him. Billy picked up the phone and seemed to quiver. Fred Schepisi, he scribbles on my notepad. ‘Yes, Fred. No, Fred. Yes, Fred.’ If Fred likes Billy’s screenplay about Lasseter and the golden reef somewhere in central Australia, he’s made.

  ‘It’s a definite maybe,’ says Billy afterwards, still quivering. I told him not to get too excited—in the seventies, Schepisi had a habit of taking novelists to lunch, intoxicating them with wine and promises, and nothing would happen. He did it to John Hooker, who arrived at our place so drunk he could barely stand. ‘Fred’s going to do Jacob’s Season,’ he managed, before collapsing on the couch. And he did it to another novelist, who also collapsed on the couch. ‘Who was that?’ asked Billy. ‘Me.’

  Billy went back to his huddle, and a TV series did in fact emerge. It was called Stringer, about, inevitably, an alcoholic journalist who reeled from crisis to crisis and filed irregularly. With Agran’s backing, a commercial channel picked it up. It made little impression—and, according to Billy, the English lead actor was ‘a pain in the ass’, but it was made, a feat unheard of from three one-year screenwriting students.

  Then Linda Agran had to go. In return for the hospitality she’d received, she gave the school the original Minder submission—the story outlines and the characters that George Cole and Denis Waterman would bring to life. For the school library, it was like The Book of Kells. Then she struggled into her tracksuit (‘Christ, I’m as fat as a goose’) put on her sunglasses and flew away.

  My time was running out too. After eighteen months of bluffing, I decided to take my incompetence elsewhere. I was getting older, and job opportunities diminishing. But before I risked the next step into the unknown, my CV suddenly improved. A man from Foreign Affairs with the oxymoronic name of Bruce le Compte rang to say I’d won the Canada/Australia Award.

  As seen on TV

  The Canada/Australia Award gives the recipient a modest sum and the opportunity to eat, drink and read one’s way from one end of the country to the other (in alternate years, it enables a Canadian writer to do the same here).

  Since my visit coincided with the grandly titled Harbour­front International Festival of Authors in Toronto, I started off there, where one does one’s best to appear to take for granted the presence of famous writers, while at the same time having furtive peeps at them. I try hard not to look at Salman Rushdie, who sits in a corner of the Hilton Hotel Reception Suite, aloof, five o’clock-shadowed, heavy-lidded, like a Mughal prince.

  At dinner, a reunion with Elizabeth Jolley, who tells the company she’d had to ring the housemaid to find out how to use the bathroom tap. Elizabeth, always playing the naif, confused and out of place, maddeningly humble and apologetic, lost in the big world.

  Rushdie lets us know what’s happening up in the dome of the pantheon: ‘I was having lunch with Calvino when we learned that Garcia Marquez had won the Nobel. Italo (Italo!) thought it outrageous it hadn’t gone to Borges, who’d invented magic realism in the first place.’

  It was whispered that it was still possible that the blind, all-seeing Borges might come, but it’s a no-show—the supremely important don’t bother to descend at all. Still, there was Ted Hughes, forelock over forehead and prognathous of jaw, and J.P. Donleavy, white-haired and layered in Irish country-squire greys, with the comic novelist’s inevitable air of loss. And wasn’t that Derek Walcott over there?

  Rushdie dazzles us with his talk. The provost of Cambridge when he was there was an innocent old bachelor, who told the students at the beginning of the year: ‘You may think you’ll learn a lot in the lecture room. But the most important work will be in each other’s rooms at night, fertilising each other.’

  The readings over and the crowds (700 to every performance) gone home, in poor shape (Seagrams, a sponsor, had left a bottle of whiskey in each writer’s room) I started out on my cross-Canada tour. At Halifax, the last leg of my flight to Newfoundland is cancelled because of crosswinds at St John’s airport. But Eastern Provincial announces that if anyone’s interested, they’re still going in. A few take up the offer—most do not.

  ‘These guys,’ says a flight attendant to a woman even more nervous than me, ‘they’re bush pilots. Crazy guys. Fly when no one else does.’

  Thinly overcoated in Newfoundland.

  To calm us, they hand out free drinks. But it’s tricky. The a
ttendants are smiling as we come in to land, but they’re hanging on to their straps, white-knuckled and tense. It’s close—I can see the wing dip dangerously low as we touch down, and when we make it the pilot gets applause.

  It wasn’t hard to be a celebrity in treeless, rocky St John’s, so I was invited out to their breakfast TV program. It was hosted by a silver-haired smoothie named Broph, who was, as my escort put it, ‘kinda slow’. He had one of my books—the plays launched by Bernard Hickey in Brisbane—and opened it at one titled Marsupials. The native creatures it dealt with were publishers and writers. Broph thought it was about kangaroos.

  ‘Tell us about these animals in your play,’ he said. I explained that these animals were involved in alcohol and adultery.

  ‘We get enough of that here. Kangaroos, where’s the kangaroos?’

  ‘There aren’t any.’

  ‘Tell us about them,’ persisted Broph, refusing to give up.

  ‘They hop and they eat grass, and that’s about it.’ Broph wound the interview up with, ‘That was the visiting Australian writer Barry Oakley, and his Marpusials.’

  At Halifax—on the way back now—wartime convoys used to gather in the harbour, I was told, before crossing the Atlantic. I was taken to St Paul’s church where one can see ‘the silhouette of a clergyman imprinted on a window by the great 1917 harbour explosion, when munitions ships blew up, resulting in the biggest man-made explosion until the atom bomb’.

  There was Montreal, there was Ottawa (a painfully stuffy lunch put on for me by the Australian High Commissioner, who hadn’t the slightest interest in writers from his own country or anywhere else), and then Calgary, which, as the novelist Mordecai Richler once noted, looks as if it’s just been uncrated. I gave the usual reading to the usual dutiful crowd, saw an enormously fat Siberian tiger at the zoo, and, at the museum, tins from Sir John Franklin’s expedition to find a Northwest Passage (it was the lead poisoning from the tins that killed them). Then something even sadder: a subdued group of Sarcee Indians being shown their own traditional ­artefacts—magnificent headdresses, a huge tepee like a basilica of animal skins—by a white guide, telling them about their own lost culture.

  Then over the Rockies on the Canadian Pacific to Vancouver, where the local writers told me it was no use going out to Dollarton to pay my respects to Malcolm Lowry (Under the Volcano) because his beachfront shack had burned down and there was nothing left to see. Finally Vancouver Island, the warmest place in Canada, which had been brought to life for me by the novelist Jack Hodgins, then San Francisco, and then, with my foie somewhat gras, home.

  The entire instrumentarium

  ‘Writer/Producer—ABC Radio Drama and Features.’ That sounded promising, though I had doubts about the producing side. Since my old one had gone the same colour as my hair, I got myself another pink Airline Pilot shirt. If I combined its man-of-action map pockets with the Canada/Australia Award and the fact my radio play The Great God Mogadon was that year’s ABC entry for the Prix Italia, I was in with a chance.

  I glowed, I deprecated, I joked. (‘What is it about this ­position that attracts you?’ ‘I’d be able to walk to work.’) I got the job. On my first day in the excrement-coloured building in William Street, where Drama and Features occupied a floor, I was put on display at a staff meeting, then led to a bare office.

  Shan Benson, a friendly, rubicund man in green shirt and cravat, came in soon after and gave me something called the Lewis Packer file, which contained a series of letters of increasing vehemence from a man who hadn’t liked the way his radio play had been edited. ‘Step carefully with freelance writers,’ he said, and left me with the file. The letters started with the producer, worked their way up the bureaucracy to Leonie Kramer of the ABC board, then went down again, with threats like the following: ‘Matters of breach of contract will be pursued with your legal department, although that department seems to believe the ABC to be so sacrosanct that a mere writer must accept ex cathedra claims of mortmain.’

  Ron Blair, ringing for the deputy head of the department, Julie Ann Ford, but getting me, tried to calm my apprehension about the technicalities of radio production. ‘All you have to do is make sure the actors don’t pop—just keep an ear out for their plosives.’

  But the following day I went into one of the control rooms to watch the technically gifted Andrew McLennan. He sat at a jumbo-jet control panel directing a group of actors below us in the studio like a Qantas pilot. The play was a typically complex drama by David Foster which required orchestrating a ­dizzying variety of sound effects. It was as if I were to learn how to play piano by watching Glenn Gould play Bach.

  I continued to sit in my office, working on a play about the painter Danila Vassilieff, who built a house of massive stone blocks at bohemian Eltham, on the outskirts of Melbourne—but I can’t be the writer and not the producer indefinitely. Dick Connolly, head of Drama and Features, calls in on me (perhaps to see if I’m still alive) and creates slight alarm, by saying I’ll have to take over the high-culture Radio Helicon program, his pride and joy, later in the year. Dick’s a great language man, a lover of Latin, and asks whether I’ve read the new Seneca translation. Not as yet, no. Did I know that there’s a Latin word for the opposite of apotheosis, translatable as pumpkinification? (Maybe it’s happening to me.)

  Early in May, on the day our son Kieran has to go into ­hospital to relieve the pressure on the graft on his arm from his scalding accident eleven years before, I have to attend a radio seminar at the Goethe Institute. Kieran is now thirteen, and we’ve given him a Walkman as a treat. He’s very grown up, and says he’s not scared as Carmel takes him to hospital. She tells me later than he even managed a joke as he was trolleyed into the theatre—‘Will I see pink elephants?’ We go back in the evening to see him, bandaged and brave, his arm zippered with fifty stitches. He begs for a Cherry Ripe, and we say not yet. But he has to have it, and then vomits it up over the sheet.

  The cultural anschluss (my second after Kallista) is run by a German acoustic maestro called Peter Leonhard Braun, who would be happy to give advice to those brave enough to play their tapes for him (I still didn’t have any).

  First up was the maddeningly confident Tim Bowden, who had the office next to mine and whose door carried the following souvenired notice: ‘Grand Hotel Cairo. Will Guests Requiring of Partners for Sleeping Purposes Male or Female Please Most Kindly Request the Desk of Reception.’ Bowden played one of his tapes of interviews with prisoners of war of the Japanese—a series of moving and beautifully edited stories, with one elderly Australian voice seamlessly coming in after another.

  Stories like these: ‘McLusky, a terrible talker, finally died, one of hundreds. As we were lowering him into a grave his body bends, and there’s this explosion of breath from where the head is. “Christ almighty,” said one of the burial party, “you can’t shut the bugger up even when he’s dead.”’

  Who couldn’t be moved? Who couldn’t laugh? Radio’s von Karajan pondered and then pronounced: ‘Your narrator’s voice is too cold for the subject.’ Cold? What on earth could he mean? ‘I vill prove my point.’ He plays a tape about an appalling World War I battle at Armagnac, which he says is still remembered all over Germany. There’s a memorable sequence in which one of the men who tend the graves was digging a well, and comes across, six feet down, a soldier, intact, sitting with his rifle between his knees. But Braun’s narrator’s voice is too dominant. Speak up and say so? No.

  Who’ll be the next victim? Kevin McGrath, of ABC Education, plays his tape about the notorious actress Susannah Cibber, against a background of the conflict between classical Italian and English ballad opera in the eighteenth century. Sounds okay to me, but the maestro is shaking his head. ‘Zat is transport radio. You are trundling the information from A to B. It is museum radio, it is dead radio.’ Kevin, a diminutive man, seems to shrink further in front of us. ‘I cannot accept it. Though I admit your copulations (he means links) were effective.’ />
  Back in the office, Tim Bowden was encouraging me. ‘Sooner or later you’re going to stop writing scripts and start producing them. There’s nothing to it.’ So finally I had to come out, cross the road to Forbes Street, enter a control room, and look down through the glass at the actors awaiting their instructions in the vast space below. They were going to do one of my own scripts, about the aeronautical pioneer Lawrence Hargrave, with Neil Fitzpatrick playing the part.

  When the technical operator asked where I wanted the microphones, and I said ‘the usual’, he nodded knowingly, briefly bluffed by my shoulder straps and map pockets (I was winging it in my Airline Pilot shirt)—this chap can’t be ­bothered with technicalities—and off he went.

  When Hargrave had to demonstrate his rubber-band-­powered flapping-wing model flying machine, the sound effects girl scraped a piece of fibreglass rhythmically with a stick, and it sounded exactly like fibreglass being scraped with a stick. Later, when Hargrave is supposed to be levitated by his box kite, Fitzpatrick got up on a ladder and yelled his lines over a tape of wind, and it sounded like an actor up on a ladder doing just that. Lawrence Hargrave never flew, and neither did my first radio production, and if the ABC ever decide on a re-run, don’t miss it.

  I’m put in charge of scripts. Complaints about some of Shan Benson’s rejections now went to me. Harry Reade, the shorts-and-thongs rough diamond who drank at breakfast at playwrights’ conferences, was particularly irate. ‘Who’s the fool who rejected it?’ he roared down the phone from a superbly Queensland address (83 Caladium Street, Gumdale). ‘I know why. It’s about Aborigines. I grew up with fucking blacks in shacks in Shepparton and I’ll write about them how I fucking well want.’