Category Archives: Media and Entertainment

Down Under the Radar

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I’ve written before about the cultural phenomenon that I had no idea existed until I arrived here.  Aussies hate their own films.  Not only that, Australia tends to produce more money pits per year than it produces money making commercial films per decade.  I really had no idea.  But recently I’ve been able to connect myself with more people in the Australian film industry, experienced veterans, young hopefuls and a handful of people in between, and I’m starting to understand why these box office blunders seem to hop out of the outback.

There are a lot of theories as to why this trend exists; that the films coming out of Australia tend to be underdeveloped, don’t appeal to a large audience and are marketed poorly.  Another theory points to the quirky nature of Australian films.  Indeed, all of the films I have worked on since moving here have an element of what I’d call “fantastic reality” to them.  But if anything I think quirkiness helps sell a film because it generates a buzz.  Think about the Aussie films that you probably saw in a theater, Strictly Ballroom, Muriel’s Wedding, Babe (should have won the Oscar that year), Priscilla Queen of the Desert and Moulin Rouge.  Pretty quirky, hey?  And I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the final number in Priscilla is to drag queens what the final number in Center Stage is to dancers, or what the Pamchenko twist in The Cutting Edge is to figure skaters; physically impossible but oh so deliciously fun.  We all love a little fantasy, so I doubt that’s the problem.

Even though my filmmaking experiences in Oz thus far has been limited and I’ve no knowledge of the marketplace on a professional level, I’ve developed some different theories of my own.  The first is that Aussies, and particularly Australian film makers, suffer from a crippling case of self deprecating humor.  It exists in the best of us.  Anyone with a modicum of humility makes fun of themselves and those of us with artistic talent tend to do it lot.  But Australians in entertainment do this so much that even American TV star Johnny Galecki, in his recent trip to Oz, felt surprised by how prevalent it was.  And he attended the Logie Awards (the Australian Emmys) an event intended to praise the great talent on Australian television.  You’d think that perhaps this applies only to the old hats, the vets of the industry who have probably done a few things worthy of making fun, but I find it amongst the fresh-faced hopefuls too.  I’ve already read three scripts by Aussies that each contained jokes about the hopeless state of the Oz industry.  Apparently they’ve never heard of self fulfilling prophecies.

But I think the main reason Australian films tend to fail in the US (the ultimate money spending target audience for most international fare) is because Americans don’t know a damn thing about Australia.  Bill Bryson said it best in his book In a Sunburned Country, “We pay shamefully scant attention to our dear cousins down under.”  Before I got here everything I knew about Australia I either learned from Steve Irwin or remembered from a brief Australian Renaissance in the 1980s thanks to Crocodile Dundee and Men at Work.  It was very little and hardly representative.  I have yet to see The Castle, a film that’s a cornerstone of Australian comedy.  And why is that?  Because it’s very Australian.  I probably wouldn’t have understood half the jokes in the film before I had moved here.  I’ve since been loaned a copy and I will see how many I understand now.  And with a great percentage of the film industry in Oz supported by government grants (a luxury for indy filmmakers if you ask me) many films coming out of the country are bound to be very Australian.  With plots, places, characters and jokes heavily colored by Aussies unique culture, those films are going to be mis-understood by international audiences.  Just imagine trying to explain Aussie rules football or, better yet cricket, to a Giants fan.  It just wouldn’t translate.

I’m not suggesting Australians write American stories and make American films.  If anything, we have too many of those already and the Hollywood machine is churning out more sequels then there are popcorn kernels consumed while watching them.  What I suggest instead is that Aussies spend a little more time advertising not just their movies but themselves.  They could stand to learn a little from their loud, self-important cousins to the north.  If we knew more about Australia, its history, its people, its traditions, its music, its fashion, its pop-culture, its slang, its lazy Sunday activities, its drinking games, its knock-knock jokes and everything else that comprises a unique culture, then when we see a preview for an Australian movie we’d be able to say “yeah, I get that.”  Stop making fun of yourselves and start telling the world how awesome you are.  Chances are, we will listen.  After all, in America everyone gets their 15 minutes, including a lot of people who shouldn’t.  Separate yourselves from the tabloid darlings with your talents and you might even get a whole 45.  Just don’t expect us to ever understand why you eat Vegemite.

My E-Life or How I learned to stop worrying and love Facebook

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This may not seem like a topic related to life in Oz, but it is related to moving so far away from your home town that you’re not just a time zone away but almost an entire day ahead.  All forms of e-communication connect me to my life outside of Sydney.  I do not, in fact, love facebook and I probably would never have signed up for an account if hadn’t known I was going to be living in another hemisphere.  Nonetheless, facebook and all those other ways to keep 24-7 tabs on hundreds of people in one neatly aggregated news feed, have added an interesting wrinkle to my daily life.

With friends on both coasts in the US, e-mail had already become a quite a trusted friend of mine.  And then G-chat was just the icing on the cake.  Most of my online communication was still in fairly real time with friends I would have happily called and had the same conversations with (only you can G-chat topics at work that you probably wouldn’t say out loud, at least not in front of your boss).  But now the e-mails get sent with less regularity and I only have so many hours to chat before everyone I know in the US goes to sleep.  Afternoons online are quite quiet indeed.

But because of facebook, I can now not only keep tabs on those same friends but also on my childhood friends, friends of friends, classmates, business associates, former professors, bosses, and relatives I might have otherwise never knew I had.  What a weird and wonderful world we live in that I can see pictures from a wedding I would have attended had I been in the States, alongside photos of a former professors newborn son whom I’ll probably never meet.  Being on facebook is like attending a reunion of every institution and family you have ever been associated with.  But unlike the one on one conversations over cocktails that you might get at a real reunion, facebook is one where every guests grabs the mic and gives a speech at the same time.  It can be very hard to have a decent conversation over all that noise.

I love you guys, but I don’t need to see every video that amused you during your otherwise dull work week.  We probably know each other because of some common interest that we share, but that doesn’t mean I read the same extreme political columnists or listen to the same bands you do.  And it’s because I care about you that I have to tell you, the amount of time you spend playing farmville is just sad.  And don’t even get me started on those of you who complain about facebook on facebook.  If you hate it so much then just stop using it for f*^%$# sake!

What people seem to forget when they are using short form, instant e-communication, is to consider what they wouldn’t say if they were broadcasting on a different forum.  Over the phone, you might tell your friend about an interesting thing you saw on TV that week, or whinge a bit about how you’re feeling sick.  But would you call the same friend every five minutes to give them an update on the latest topic that was running through your mind?  Probably not.  So does your ex-boyfriend’s, co-worker’s, roomate’s cousin really care how many avocados you ate on Tuesday?  Probably not.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, the internet has blessed my life with Skype.  I may be drinking my coffee while my friends are sipping glasses of wine, but we are still having a conversation over drinks just like we would in person, rude gestures and facials expressions included.   I not only get to have my weekly conversations with the parents but I can also see that they’ve never fixed the clock on the stereo in the living room.  Those little things add such a pleasant touch of home.  And no one on Skype bothers to tell me how many times they went to Starbucks that week.  They know that would be a waste of bandwidth.

So when communicating through the wonderful interwebs, that has blessed our life with such an abundance of information both exciting and mundane, interesting and dull, relevant and very much not, stop to consider this; does my friend living on the other side of the world, having her breakfast a full calendar day ahead of me, really care about what I’m about to post?  Or, would she perhaps like to hear about that crazy blind date I went on last week, that promotion I got at work, that I’m getting married, having a baby, getting a sex change or any number of other things that cannot be communicated in 200 characters or less and probably shouldn’t be broadcast to 300 people at the same time.  Maybe, just maybe, since she’s such good friend that I have her e-mail address, skype name, phone number, home address and enough information about her personal life to keep her from ever running for public office, I should have a chat with her instead.  Yeah, she’d probably like that.

Through the Silver Screen

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Now that I’m well settled into Oz and my Aussie lifestyle, I’ve finally been able to reconnect myself with one of my favorite pastimes; getting up insanely early on a weekend so I can do a lot of physical labor for no more pay than a few stale muffins and some bad sandwiches, and then stand around quietly for hours in less than comfortable and often quite hot circumstances, surrounded by other people who all wish they had put on more deodorant that morning.  I am referring of course to making independent films.  It’s a desire that not everyone understands, especially since the less than ideal circumstances under which most of them are filmed tend to make people see cubicles and steady eight hour days as a pot of gold, but I love (or at least have a masochistic addiction to) every second of it.

So, naturally I was happy to find some like minded souls to endure the process with, and to find out that the permit issues, schedule setbacks, budget constraints and general insanity of the filmmaking process seems to be international.  This is a language I speak fluently.   But in Oz I do run into something new; a general question that even if not asked out loud I can see in people’s eyes when I explain where my accent came from.  “What are you doing here?”  True, I was born and raised in LA, the world capitol of filmmaking and I just spent ten years in NY, its not-so-little sister in “the industry.”  So yes, all of my connections (if you can call them that) are back in NY and all of the kids I grew up with who didn’t become lawyers found positions in the business that is Hollywood.  Most of the filmmakers I meet here are trying to get over there, so they can’t really fathom why I went the other direction.

I could write an entire dissertation about the many reasons I came all the way to Oz, life experience being chief amongst them, but everyone already understands those.  What I can’t seem to get people out here to see, is what an amazing filmmaking resource they have right here on their native soil.  The big studios set up shop in Hollywood because California offered almost every environment imaginable within one state and surrounded by a nice temperate climate.  Australia has that!  So what else do films require?  Money, for one, and there isn’t much of that in California or even NY these days.  But Australia has that!  Out here I’ve seen more opportunities for grants from each state and from the entire country than there are people to snatch them up (at least for a worthy film).  And what about a solid source of acting talent?  Hmm, well since a surprising amount of Hollywood’s biggest starts are Australian, and received their training in Australia at one of the most acclaimed acting schools in the world, I think it’s safe to say that Australia has that too!

So why isn’t the country crawling with wanna be directors and people who just happen to have a copy of their latest screenplay in the trunk of their car?  Why are the few people who dream in 16:9 trying to slap their storyboards down onto the overcrowded conference tables on Wilshire Boulevard?  It probably doesn’t help that, generally speaking, Australians tend to hate their own films.  I have yet to figure out why this is, but I’ve read several articles about how badly the home grown films do out here as opposed to when they are overseas.  And the filmmakers I recently met all seemed to agree.  They don’t like those “same old gritty stories.”  Aussie’s also have a lukewarm relationship with their biggest stars.  There are always current favorites and tabloid darlings, but Russell Crow’s and Nicole Kidman’s heydays have long past.  Gee, I’d still give them leading roles.  I just hope nobody badmouths any of Baz Luhrmann’s films around me, I might just deck them.

But if any of my fellow Aussie filmmakers were to ask for advice from someone with a little experience begging for jobs in the other hemisphere, I would tell them to ignore those snooty know-it-all American’s for a while.  The world does not need another cop drama set in NYC, another show about the spoiled and vapid in LA (think about what you have done to yourselves Los Angelinos!) any more reality TV stars, another heart-felt drama about a middle class American family, or any more parts that would be just perfect for George Clooney (Do you ever take a break, man?).  Take a page out of my favorite Australian’s book, and make your own movie, your own way.  Grab some of that money your country is so desperate for you to use to make them look good, take your camera out into the middle of nowhere (it won’t take long for you to get there) and film some of that great undiscovered talent that is going to sweep the Oscars one day.  You have everything you need right here, so use it!  I know you can do much better than re-making Mad Max (remember, that was a snooty American’s idea).

Hmm, maybe I ought to take my own advice.