‘Oh God,’ I said, ‘it looks like Terms of Endearment in here.’
Pip blinked at me and didn’t respond.
What? Why did I blurt that out?
Then she smiled. ‘Maybe,’ she said, ‘but unlike Debra Winger in that movie, I’m going to beat this.’
She looked healthy and her hair was glossy. She was only twenty-five. Her whole life was ahead of her.
‘No negativity, no tears,’ she said.
‘Absolutely,’ I agreed.
Greg was now living in inner-city Abbotsford, in a house he had bought with his delightful long-term girlfriend, Helen Saniga. They worked together at a Mexican restaurant in Collingwood, Helen as a waitress and Greg as the chef. PJ and I stayed with them for the first couple of weeks. Every day I would catch three trams and then walk a mile to my new job at Crawford Productions in the outer suburb of Box Hill. While I was busy learning how to be a Crawfords script editor, Helen helped PJ look for somewhere for us to live. They found a tiny first-floor flat in Toorak, right on Toorak Road. We could just afford it on my pay cheque. Mum and Dad gave us a loan for the bond and the first month’s rent. Trams rattled past every five minutes from early in the morning until late at night. We loved out little flat.
Crawford Productions was a successful TV production company, run by the same charismatic Hector Crawford whose flamboyant conducting skills had so impressed me as a child. Now he was a TV legend. Half the shows on Australian TV were made by his company, which he had started in the 1940s with his sister Dorothy. They had gone from producing musical concerts, to radio programs, and finally such iconic Australian TV shows as Division Four, Homicide and The Sullivans. I got a script-editing position on a new show called Prime Time, a series drama involving a group of television investigative journalists.
Part of my job was to come up with a handful of ideas to pitch to the story team in the weekly meetings. I was also the official note-taker. I would write down every story and character detail decided upon in the writers’ meetings. After that I structured the storylines into scene breakdowns. These would be sent to the writers. When the first drafts came in, the script-editing team would finesse them into shootable second drafts. I learned a lot about structure and storytelling.
One day Hector Crawford invited us all to his home, so he could meet the whole story team and discuss future ideas for Prime Time. I was very nervous about meeting the man himself. We sat at a long dining table, Hector at the head, our white-haired leader. His gracious wife, Glenda, an elegant woman in her early sixties, who had been an opera singer, offered us coffee. I asked her if I could use the toilet. Glenda showed me to the guest bathroom. A few minutes later, when I tried to open the door, it wouldn’t budge. I could hear the meeting proceeding without me, as I tried desperately to unlock the door. Finally there was a knock.
‘Jocelyn?’ said Glenda. ‘Are you all right?’
‘I’m stuck!’ I exclaimed, embarrassed but relieved.
‘Oh dear,’ said Glenda. ‘This happens sometimes. It’s an old lock.’
Glenda informed the assembled meeting that Jocelyn was stuck in the toilet. ‘No, not in the actual toilet!’ I heard her tell Hector. ‘The door won’t open.’ More embarrassment.
Then I heard someone fiddling with the lock, and the door swung open dramatically. There was Hector himself. Hector Crawford, my childhood idol, the white-maned king of Australian television, had rescued me from the bathroom. I am sure my face was scarlet. I never met him again, but I did see a comment of his scrawled across the first script I wrote for Prime Time: ‘Why didn’t you give this episode to someone who can actually write comedy?’ Hector was never one to mince his words.
On the weekends, PJ and I would drive down to see Mum and Dad at their farm. In 1980, they had moved to a stunning hundred-acre property in East Gippsland. Mum transported her herd of donkeys and added a few more. She also bought some Hereford cows. Sometimes we would meet Greg and Kathy at the farm. By now, Kathy had married her high-school sweetheart, Geoff. I had been both bridesmaid and wedding videographer. Kathy has a picture of me in my turquoise bridesmaid dress, lugging an enormous video camera on my shoulder.
Geoff had gone to Rusden too, and was now a drama teacher. Kathy was working at a big law firm in South Yarra. She hated the sexual politics she had to navigate every day, with her mostly older, male colleagues. Her long-term dream was to start her own practice. Her immediate dream was to see the world. She and Geoff saved up for the airfares and, within months of my returning to Melbourne, flew off on a year-long trek through Europe.
In 1986, Miranda Bain, one of the mysterious producers who had talked to PJ at the AFI awards, reappeared and made him an offer to make an espionage thriller, based very loosely on a 1982 political scandal, the Combe-Ivanov affair. The budget for the movie had been raised without a screenplay, just a treatment and a ‘sizzle reel’. Miranda told PJ he had six weeks to write a shooting draft, then six weeks to direct the movie. PJ jumped at the opportunity to make a feature-length film and asked Karl Zwicky, a friend from film school, to co-write the script with him. Karl, a wild, hilarious and clever young man, flew down from Sydney and stayed in our flat with us, while he and PJ tried to knock up story ideas on their electric typewriters—all night, every night, as they drank ridiculous amounts of coffee.
They finished the script in five weeks. Karl flew back to Sydney and PJ went straight into pre-production. The movie was to be called The Humpty Dumpty Man. The story included spies, blackmail, murder and one creepy assassin with a silencer on his pistol. PJ asked my brother Greg to play the assassin. A fitness fanatic, Greg had a chiselled physique and a haircut resembling that of the odd actor Jack Nance in the seminal David Lynch film Eraserhead. It was a popular haircut in the mid 1980s. It was the perfect look for the assassin, who never speaks in the film. Melbourne actor Frank Gallacher was cast as the main character, Jerry Shadlow. Once again, we found a role for Frankie J. Holden, who had become a good friend by now. Most of the film was shot in Melbourne, but we spent two weeks in Canberra for the scenes set in and around Parliament House.
When we arrived in Canberra, construction on the new Parliament House was in full swing. We were shooting scenes in what had been known for fifty years as ‘the Provisional Parliament House’, but was now being referred to as Old Parliament House. Halfway through the shoot, PJ collapsed in agony on the front steps of Old Parliament House, on the same spot where Gough Whitlam had made his historic ‘Nothing will save the Governor-General!’ speech after being sacked by Sir John Kerr in 1975. I arrived on location after PJ had been carted downstairs to be examined by Miranda’s husband, who was a doctor.
I was scared. PJ was only twenty-four. What dire illness could cause him this much pain? Minutes later he walked out of Parliament House, completely fine again. He explained that Miranda’s husband had diagnosed an inguinal hernia, a hereditary condition, and simply shoved it back through the opening between his scrotum and his abdominal wall. Although he said it was a painful and bizarre experience, he managed to laugh about it.
‘One minute I’m directing Frank Gallacher as he is besieged by the press, the next minute I’ve got Miranda’s husband holding my balls. Bit of a surprise.’
When we returned to Melbourne after the shoot, I went to see Pip, who was back at home with her family in Mooroolbark. She was weak, sallow and thin. Happy to see me, she asked about PJ’s film and my work at Crawfords. At one point she pulled up her T-shirt and showed me her swollen belly. She patted it fondly. ‘It looks like I’m pregnant,’ she said. With tears in her eyes she whispered she had always hoped she would become a mother one day. I told her not to talk about dying. She said no, it was okay to talk about dying. I didn’t know what to say. I was sad and scared. Young women with beauty, talent, love and a whole life ahead of them weren’t supposed to die.
The Humpty Dumpty Man got taken away from PJ in post-production. We never found out why, exactly. Possibly PJ was over-schedule, t
aking too long in the producers’ opinion, but to be suddenly locked out of the cutting room and sacked was a big shock for PJ. It was upsetting for us both. The film never got a theatrical release; a few years later it was released to home video. PJ got a copy of the video and made me take a photo of him pretending to drop it down a toilet. It was a disappointing end to what PJ had hoped would be his first film released in a theatre. On the plus side, we had met and became friends with Frank Gallacher and the cinematographer Martin McGrath. Greg turned out to be a brilliant movie assassin, but acting didn’t interest him. He decided to remain a chef instead.
PJ and I finally had enough money to finish The Siege of the Bartons’ Bathroom. I asked John McAll to write some music for the film. What he wrote was brilliant. I got some VHS copies made, so I could enter it into film festivals, and held a screening in Melbourne. I invited Pip and Kate McAll and their mum, Evie, as well as my friends from Rusden, Mary Sdraulig and Cristina Pozzan. I was shocked when I saw Pip: she needed help from her mum and Kate to walk. Afterwards she told me she was proud of me and loved my film. I kissed her goodbye and watched those beautiful McAll women walk away.
The only festival that invited The Siege of the Bartons’ Bathroom to screen was the Melbourne Children’s Film festival, run by Mary Sdraulig. I went along to watch it with two hundred children. They adored it, and I smiled as I listened to them laughing. The other VHS tapes of my film were returned to me by the various festivals I had entered. When I heard about a new drama series being developed at the ABC, I sent one of the tapes to an executive there. I never heard back. When I called asking to get my tape back, they had lost it. Our careers were not looking good.
I still had my job at Crawfords. We usually had enough money to get through the week, although sometimes the phone or the electricity would get disconnected. PJ refused to ask his or my parents for help. He preferred to do without the phone or electricity for a few days. We could survive on baked beans and tinned tuna, or raid the back of the couch for coins and splurge on a cappuccino each. I once paid the phone bill by emptying out a jar of twenty-cent pieces on the counter at the post office. I remember the clerk rolling his eyes.
‘It’s still real money,’ I said with as much dignity as I could muster, and started counting out the coins in front of him.
Otherwise life was fine. We had an old fold-out card table to write at and eat on. We had a small TV. We had a mattress on the floor in our bedroom, the Trak cinema down the road, and the city was a ten-minute tram ride away.
One day in 1987, I got a call from Mum. She was crying. Pip had died. All I could say was ‘No’.
Greg and I drove to the funeral at a Catholic church in Lilydale. Kate read out an entry from Pip’s diary, where she had written that she was at peace with dying and felt as if she was growing closer to the universe. She wrote something about a tree outside her bedroom window, its branches reaching for the sky. I was only half-listening because I was so sad and Greg was sobbing beside me.
At the cemetery we watched Pip’s coffin go into the ground, covered in flowers. Pip had told her mother that she wanted all the flowers to come from people’s gardens, not from a shop. All I could bring were the geraniums from my two pot plants, just a handful of red petals.
When the burial was over, people started to walk off. I couldn’t, not right away. My thoughts were racing: I couldn’t leave Pip all alone like that. I should have spent more time with her. I should have sat with her more, talked to her, listened to her, watched TV with her, done nothing at all with her and just sat there. Been a friend. I kept putting off visiting her. I always thought ‘next weekend’, or ‘after I have finished this script’. I didn’t think she would really die. Or maybe the truth is that I didn’t want to think she would die. I had looked away because the truth was too scary, too painful.
I saw John at the wake. There were a million things I wanted to say to him, but I couldn’t find the words to start. He was in pain and I couldn’t help. I said I was so sorry about Pip. He nodded. Then I left.
PJ’s hernia symptoms reappeared in late 1987. He went to see a doctor, who recommended surgery as soon as possible. Somehow PJ mentioned to him that we slept on a mattress on the floor. The doctor said he would not be able to recuperate properly without a proper bed. I rushed out and bought one. I had to build it from scratch, our first actual double bed! When PJ came home, he was in a lot of pain. I was his nurse until he got better. He was so touched by my devotion that he proposed to me.
Kathy offered to make my dress and the bridesmaids’ dresses. Greg and Helen offered to do the catering. Mum and Dad found an adorable old church hall on a dirt road near their farm. They cleaned out the cobwebs and rodents and got the power switched back on. All their country friends donated flowers from their gardens to decorate the hall. Greg and Helen and Mum and Dad also spent the day before the wedding gathering wildflowers. There was a little stage in the hall, so I asked for a bush band. I wanted square-dancing at the reception. PJ’s mum and dad wanted us to have a Catholic wedding, so Mum tracked down the local Catholic priest, Father McCartan.
PJ’s dad, Tom, caught a plane from Coolangatta to Melbourne. His mum, Shan, and his six siblings caught a bus. It took them twenty-seven hours to get from the Gold Coast to East Gippsland. Frankie J. Holden and Martin McGrath came, as well as Angela and my Rusden friends. Frankie somehow managed to cut his hand and smear blood on the backs of all the women he dosidoed with during the square dancing. It was a gorgeous, home-made wedding. Barbara Bishop, my script-editor friend, commented that it was like the wedding scene from The Deer Hunter. I took that as a compliment.
A few weeks later, I got a call from Noel Price, a producer at the ABC. He had somehow managed to see my long-lost tape of The Siege of the Bartons’ Bathroom. ‘I love it,’ he said, ‘How would you like to develop a twelve-part kids’ series based on your film?’ I said yes, of course. Noel wanted me to start straightaway, and he wanted me to write every episode. I told him I had to resign from Crawford Productions first. I hung up from that call wondering if I had hallucinated it.
It was intimidating, the thought of writing twelve episodes, six hours of screen time. The longest script I had written so far, for Prime Time, was forty minutes long. I suggested PJ write half the series with me. Noel and his co-producer, Jenny Hooks, had seen and liked Getting Wet, and said yes.
Then PJ surprised me by saying no. He was working on a screenplay for Fred Schepisi, It’s Now or Never. Fred had also seen Getting Wet and wanted to mentor PJ. This was all very exciting, but I was freaking out! I told PJ I was desperate. I couldn’t write the whole thing myself. Couldn’t he write a few episodes? I kept crying and begging until he agreed. I ended up writing six episodes and editing the others. PJ wrote three episodes and we brought on two other writers for the remaining three. The series was called C/o The Bartons.
PJ and I mined our separate childhoods for anecdotes and merged them. I named the brother characters Paul, Anthony and Douglas in honour of the film students I used to live with in our share house. I gave eleven-year-old Elly, still the main character, a best friend, a redhead called Anita, based on my childhood friend. Noel and Jenny did not allow PJ or me to direct any episodes. Those jobs went to ABC staff directors. Frankie J. Holden got cast again in the role as the father but the rest of the cast were new.
One young boy stood out in the auditions—a hilarious fourteen-year-old whose name was Matt Day. When he was older, we cast him in PJ’s film Muriel’s Wedding. That one did get a theatrical release.
10
A mother’s body remembers her babies—the folds of soft flesh, the softly furred scalp against her nose. Each child has its own entreaties to body and soul.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER
I became a mother and a director of a feature-length film in the same twelve-month period: from late 1989 to 1990. I remain both a mother and a director and I cherish these roles. Mothers are not born. We evolve as we pass important milestones
alongside our children. Each child I have been lucky enough to bring into the world has taught me so much about how to live, and how to love.
Every movie I make is a love story. I don’t mean the storyline of the film, but the story behind the film. As a filmmaker, I cannot commit myself to a project unless I fall in love with it. I have to nurture the project, be devoted to it, find the beauty in it and invest years of passion in it. The bond between a director and her movie is an emotional one. And the love remains years after the film is finished and sits on a shelf or in cyberspace. Even if the film bombed, or wasn’t as good as I wanted, I still remember the hope, and the blood, sweat and tears that went into trying to make the best film possible. I don’t forget the people I worked with or the intense friendships we formed.
When I was working on Prime Time at Crawford Productions, I came across a few lines in a newspaper about a photographer who had been blind since birth. There was a picture of him standing by a fountain, holding his camera. I kept mulling it over. Why would person without sight want to take photographs? Could I make a short film based on this man? How could a camera be important to someone who cannot see? The more I thought about it, the more I understood how we each have our own reality, based on what we experience, or don’t experience, through our senses. I tried to put myself inside the mind of a blind person. What would it be like if I never saw anything, but everybody around me had this thing called sight. How could I form a concept of what it means to see? I imagined I would want to try to find a way to understand sight, or at least have some kind of connection to whatever sight was.
Yes, I thought, photography is related to sight, but it is also about documenting things. Photos can be a kind of evidence—proof that something happened. If you show a photograph to someone who was not there when it was taken, they can see a version of the same thing that you saw. You have proof that the moment really happened, and that such a thing as sight exists. I began to dwell on what sort of a human being the blind man might be. I don’t mean the man in the newspaper article, but the character forming in my mind. I called him Martin. I decided that Martin was mistrustful. If he found it hard to believe in sight, perhaps he didn’t believe in love, or that people were telling him the truth. He might assume people lied to him simply because they had that power over him. So Martin may not have a good opinion of other human beings. The whole idea of my movie Proof grew from there.
Unconditional Love Page 9