ScreenWize

If you’re Australian and watched Australian movies of the 1970’s and 1980’s, chances are you’ll remember Picnic At Hanging Rock, Breaker Morant, and My Brilliant Career. They’re all classy period pieces, finely crafted films that won awards and acclaim at home and across the world. But the chances are that you won’t remember a whole swag of other Australian films made at the same time, films with names like Fantasm, Stone, Patrick, Felicity, or Plugg. These are just a few of the films that director Mark Hartley wraps up in the delicious category of ‘Ozploitation’ and exposes for all to see in his new film Not Quite Hollywood. They are genre films full of gore, sex and action like you’ve never seen, films just as finely crafted as their art-house counterparts, but made by Australians for overseas audiences who were better able to appreciate the raw larrikin - and very Australian - spirit at work on the screen.

Hartley recalls being jolted by these kinds of films as a child. “When I was a kid growing up in Melbourne, I remember seeing Patrick, Snapshot and The Man From Hong Kong on television,” he says. “What fascinated me about these films was that they seemed like American stories, but they had Australian locations that I could relate to, Australian actors in them, and Australian accents on screen. I’d been taken to see Picnic At Hanging Rock and films like it - and that was all I really knew about Australian film. When I saw these other films on television, it was obvious that they were very different.”

Indeed they were. Snapshot is a horror film from 1979 with a sometimes-topless Sigrid Thornton being pursued by an evil Mr. Whippy van. It was released in the USA with the name The Day After Halloween, although it had nothing to do with that particular American holiday. It was – in true exploitation style - cashing in on the huge success of the movie Halloween, John Carpenter’s now celebrated low budget horror film that had been released the year before and which took more than US$50 million at the box-office. The Man From Hong Kong was a huge budget, martial arts, action film made in 1975 starring George Lazenby - Australia’s own James Bond, and Yu Wang – then the most famous martial arts actor and director in the world. It’s full of kung fu fighting, crazy stunts and exploding cars. Australian martial arts action films? You better believe it. More prolific, though, was Australian horror. Patrick, directed in 1978 by Richard Franklin, tells the story of a man in a coma who uses telekinesis to create murder and mayhem. The only movement that the central character Patrick can make is to spit. The film was so popular in Italy that an unauthorized Italian sequel was made soon after its release. The Australian producer decided not to sue. The film was so popular with Quentin Tarantino that he paid homage to it in Kill Bill. Uma Thurman’s character - The Bride - lies in a coma for four years until one day she spits in the face of the Sheriff as he leans over her. With Tarantino the self confessed uber-fan of trash cinema, Kill Bill’s rip-off of the story moment from Patrick is the equivalent of a gold medal for Australia in exploitation cinema – just twenty five years late.

Tarantino plays an important role in Not Quite Hollywood. Besides the colourful and deeply insightful comments that he makes about many of the films featured in the documentary, he helped Hartley get the film into production, concluding his interview with a passionate to-camera pitch for funding. “Tarantino is a tastemaker and there are a lot of people who hang off his every word about what films to watch,’ says Hartley. “It’s fantastic for our industry to have Tarantino endorsing Australia films with such energy. But more importantly for the documentary, we could demonstrate that these films played overseas, found enthusiastic audiences, and were inspirational to other filmmakers.

Whilst films like Dead-End Drive In, Thirst, Deathcheaters and The Long Weekend were inspiring future film directors in America, they were marginalized by both audiences and critics back home. This was despite success with some of the Ocker sex-comedies in the early 1970’s. Hartley explains the industry dynamics going on at the time. “Barry McKenzie started the backlash. Even though the film found an audience, pretty much all of the reviews of the film were scathing. People didn’t see the satire in the film.” Not Quite Hollywood explains that it became an embarrassment for funding agencies that Australians were celebrating the behaviour on screen that writers Bruce Beresford and Barry Humphries were parodying. Hartley sees this as a trigger for what has become a bizarre paradox. “Australia is one of the few countries in the world that embraced art-house films as main-stream, and considered the films that would have been mainstream in any other country as B-movies. It is really strange because our so-called B-movies had bigger budgets and were trying to find a wider audience. They just didn’t connect because we were being told to embrace our historical films. It was clearly important at the time to start putting our culture on screen, but the Australian tastemakers and cultural bodies decided that these genre films weren’t the right message to be sending to the rest of the world.”

A handful of directors and producers felt otherwise and privately raised the finance they needed to make their genre films. Amongst those interviewed for the film is producer Antony Ginnane, who made a vault of horror films – good and bad – including the aptly named Turkey Shoot, a Sci-Fi thriller that sees society’s deviants hunted (and of course killed in gruesome ways) as sport. Then there’s Brian Trenchard-Smith who directed, amongst a long list of films, Stunt Rock in which an Australian stunt man helps out a magical rock band in Los Angeles. There’s also the inimitable John Lammond who directed Australia After Dark, a lowbrow mockumentary about what goes on in Australia when the lights and the censors are turned off. These and numerous interviews with actors who bared all and who risked getting blown up, burnt, eaten by rats, or hits by bits of exploding car, reveal a huge warmth for the era and the style of filmmaking. “It was fascinating talking with people who were involved,” says Hartley. “I got a sense that no one had ever spoken to them before, and that they really wanted to tell these stories to someone. They were important times for most of the people involved, and it was an era when there was a sense of camaraderie and fun, with people saying ‘let’s just get out there and put this crazy stuff on film.’ I don’t think people feel like that any more.”

There are some surprising names who pop up in the film – Dennis Hopper and Jamie Lee Curtis are both interviewed, stars brought to Australia to appear in genre films that would be sold back to the USA. “You do wonder why you are watching people like Dennis Hopper or Jamie Lee Curtis in a documentary about Australian film,” says Hartley, “but they’re just part of the amazing story that was happening at the time.”

With Hartley’s background in editing and as a music video director, Not Quite Hollywood, sets a cracking pace and re-defines how documentary filmmaking can be made. “I really wanted the film to have a rock and roll sensibility, and to be a bit of a rollercoaster ride’” he says. “The documentaries that I revisited for style were Once In a Lifetime and Inside Deep Throat because they both just moved. They were a starting point for our animation, but we ended up with our own style,” he says. “The good think is that people who’ve seen the film now come out saying that they don’t feel like they’ve sat down and watched a documentary.”

Above all else, the ten-year experience of researching and making Not Quite Hollywood has left Hartley with an abiding respect for the filmmakers from the era. “I really thought that these were guys who were doing it the hardest way possible,” he says. “They were inventing Australian cinema from the ground up again. They were putting images up on screen that haven’t been surpassed in the thirty years since they’ve been made, and they were taking on the world. And because they chose to work in genre, they were neglected and forgotten about. It seemed to me that it needed someone to shine the spotlight on them, and I had the very great honour of doing that.”

Filed Under: Interviews by Simon