Not Quite Hollywood: An Insider's Perspective

“Before the censor’s axe…
Before the critics’ attacks…
Before the Brazilian wax…”

Not Quite Hollywood is a wildly entertaining history of Australian cinema as you’ve never seen it before. These are the films that good taste forgot. There are no girls in white dresses or laconic heroes on horses. Instead, there are hairy sex-romps, crazy action sequences, blood, gore, and lots of bad language. Films like Alvin Purple, Razorback, Turkey Shoot and Mad Max. Fast paced, hilariously funny, and genuinely illuminating, Not Quite Hollywood is this year’s opening night film for the AFI Award Screenings – and a film that’s sure to bring the term ‘Ozploitation’ into common parlance.

Edited at a cracking pace, with hundreds of interviews and clips from the genre films of the 70s and early 80s, this is a feature documentary that promises to connect not only with the people who watched the films the first time round, but also with the Tarantino generation; those youngsters prepared to search for movie gold among the VHS trash-heaps.

Here, we interview Mark Hartley, Not Quite Hollywood’s young director, a former music video director and DVD featurette-maker, who’s single-handedly brought these forgotten ‘classics’ into the light.

We also get an insider’s perspective from two key players who made films in the period: the unashamedly commercial action-adventure director, and Quentin Tarantino’s personal hero, Brian Trenchard Smith (The Man from Hong Kong, BMX Bandits); and Deborah Gray, the scantily-clad blonde beauty in ‘70s films like Pacific Banana and television’s Number 96. Here’s a woman who thought she was part of a sexual revolution, but left the industry when the films turned from sexy and funny to nasty and violent. Still, she’s happy to have a wry laugh at the memory…But first, to the man who’s brought these (sometimes justly) neglected films back into the limelight.

MARK HARTLEY

AFI: Why did you want to make a feature documentary about these ‘Ozploitation’ films?

Mark Hartley: Well, I’d seen some of these films on television and on VHS when I was growing up and I was amazed that they were made by Australians and had Australian accents, yet they looked like the genre films we got from overseas. And then later, when I was working I made a lot of clips – I made about 150 music videos – that was how I made my living, and I was working with old school crews, and I’d known Richard Franklin (the director of films like Roadgames and Patrick). And I met a few other people, and they all had great stories. I just realised that these were stories I couldn’t read about in any books, they’d never been documented, and that this was a great untold story that should be out there. Also, as I watched these films, and met these filmmakers, I had a real sense that these guys were completely overlooked and neglected. Their achievements are all very different – and they’re not all great artistic achievements! But just the fact that it’s very hard to make a film – any kind of film – in Australia, and these guys had made six or seven films and hadn’t been acknowledged as having any kind of achievement. I thought it was time to shine a spotlight on these guys. I’m not saying we should take the spotlight away from the Weirs and the Beresfords, but I think a lot of these undervalued filmmakers were just as skilful but chose to work in different genres. They didn’t want to make period films.I also knew that there was enough crazy stuff in these films that could make it really entertaining to watch.

AFI: The editing of Not Quite Hollywood is quite amazing. There’s just so much material organised in a very frenetic and entertaining way. It must have been quite a job putting it all together.

MH: We shot about 150 hours of interviews and we had about 100 hours of archival material on top of that. So culling it down to 100 minutes was a mammoth undertaking. It was a constant push-pull thing of entertainment versus information, trying to get that balance right. It was a massive jigsaw puzzle. I’d been told that most Australian films have between 2000 and 2500 edits, and I think we’ve got 6000. So we’ve set some kind of record for what that’s worth.

AFI: It’s not very well known that a lot of these old genre films actually made money and had international success.

MH: I think that was something that was never really documented in Australia. We all heard about how our nostalgic, artistic films were playing and getting standing ovations at Cannes and cinemas in New York, but what we didn’t realise was that they were playing in one cinema in New York, and at the same time these genre films were playing in 20 cinemas. And they were just sold to every territory, and they would play in Grindhouses and drive-ins.

AFI: Why do you think we’ve largely forgotten these films?

MH: It’s quite strange, but Australia is possibly the only country where our art films were the ones that found widespread audience reception and our mainstream films were forgotten. There was a cultural stigma attached to them. Also, they weren’t overly patriotically Australian – they seemed very Australian to me as an Australian watching them – but they often had some kind of international element to them so that they were just seen as a car-chase movie or a horror film or a vampire film. They weren’t seen as and Australian vampire film.

AFI: You encountered some resistance when you tried to get the Film Finance Commission (FFC) to help you with funding this film didn’t you?

MH: After many many years of trying to get the project up we got Film Victoria on board, SBS on board, and Madman on board, but we couldn’t get the FFC to commit. We got a letter of intent from the FFC which said ‘you find a certain per cent of the funding and we’ll put in the rest,’ and we did that straight away. But we kept on going from board meeting to board meeting, four board meetings, which is the most for any film ever in the history of the FFC, because people on the board obviously didn’t like it as much as other people at the FFC, who were trying to push it through.

AFI: Do you have any idea why it was so hard?

MH: I honestly think there was the same kind of stigma about the documentary that there had been about the films. Why should we tell this story when there are much more ‘important’ stories to be told? In some ways I can understand that if you’re working for a cultural body and everything you’re doing is getting cross-checked by people above you, at some point people are going to say ‘why are we spending all this money on a documentary that is basically just people getting killed in car chases?’ It’s the same kind of thing that those filmmakers fought against back then. It’s much easier to forgive a well-meaning film that’s slightly boring, that’s not as tasteless as a bad action film. Of course nobody knew how it (NQH) was going to turn out. I was an unknown filmmaker, and all they knew was that we were going to interview crazy people and we were going to show crazy scenes. But hopefully they’re pleased with the result and can see that it’s maybe a bit more polished and entertaining than they though it was going to be. We got there, we finally finished it! And the good thing about being finished is that people can criticise the film for all they like, and I’m happy to listen to it, but I don’t have to change a frame, and that’s great.

AFI: Thank you for talking to us, and we look forward to seeing the film open our AFI Award Screenings this year.

BRIAN TRENCHARD-SMITH

An industry veteran with more than 37 films and 35 television episodes under his belt, Brian Trenchard-Smith is now based in LA. He began his career in Australia with his box office smashing karate-chopping debut The Man From Hong Kong. At the Australian premiere of Kill Bill Vol.1, in 2003, Quentin Tarantino stood up in front of a stunned local audience and dedicated the film to Trenchard-Smith, a man whose name isn’t mentioned too often in polite film society circles.

AFI: Do you have fond memories of those pioneering days making Australian films?

Brian Trenchard-Smith: Absolutely! Every film is a joy of some kind, firstly to make and then to recall. You form a unique club for a few intense months, where you’re working with some very talented people, and then you have great war stories to tell. I haven’t made very much in Australia in the last 18 years or so – some Time Trax episodes, some pilots, and something called Official Denial, which is an alien abduction film, and a remake of Sahara, a kind of Die Hard-on-a-train, with Antonio Sabato Jr and Kimberley Davies from Neighbours. I also did a film in New Zealand in 2005, called In Her Line of Fire, a kind of lesbian Rambo with Mariel Hemingway in the lead. The international version of that film had to be sanitised because of the horror of two women kissing, whereas the sustained slaughter of third world peoples is really of no concern. The splendid irony of our business isn’t it?!

AFI: Have you seen Not Quite Hollywood yet? The audience we saw it with found it quite hilarious.

BTS: No, I haven’t seen it yet, but I’m really looking forward to seeing how my crimes against cinema are portrayed. I’m so glad people are laughing. It should play as a comedy, and not just in big cities. I think it would make people laugh in Mt Isa or Broken Hill or woop-woop or whatever.

AFI: A lot of the genre films of the 1970s and early 80s were made without government funding, is that right?

BTS: I think that’s right. By the early 80s the government became involved a bit more. But the early ones, the trailblazers, shall we say, were done without it. I mean, we did have a quarter of the budget for The Man from Hong Kong from the Australian Film Development Corporation, but that was because I had a relationship with John Daniel, who was their sort of head of production, and the fact that I’d brought in the Greater Union organisation to invest in it, and 50 per cent of the budget came from private funding in Hong Kong. So how could they refuse? But it was not the kind of film they wanted to make. Most of them turned up their noses at it – ‘A Kung-Fu thing? What the hell is that all about?’ So I was enormously fortunate to be in the right place at the right time.

AFI: Why do you think these films are such a guilty secret in our film history books?

BTS: Well, there is a level of snobbery that existed in arts culture policy at that time. You know, my films were not exactly engines for social change. They are not socially redeeming! You do not bask in their limelight at dinner parties, and the basking perk was rather important in arts politics, which was rarely staffed by active commercially-minded filmmakers. Australian films, in their mind, to be worthy of funding, should tell Important Stories, and thus demonstrate the importance of the funding executive! So the fact that these genre films got funded, that they got released – they didn’t all prosper locally, but they didn’t cost very much to make, and when they sold across all those territories, well their financial success was perhaps considered a guilty secret. And frankly, some of these films have a life today, maybe as slightly dated cultural artefacts, but they have more of a life than some of those slow-moving well intentioned pieces that were boring as bat-shit. These remarks are not intended to make me popular with the cultural elite!

AFI: But perhaps things are changing, with a lot of young filmmakers coming through who have no problem making genre films that are also Australian, and no problem with checking out the old ones.

BTS: Yeah, I do think so. The young people, they get it. They see these films and they get the wry undertone, the slightly self-mocking quality that is in the high camp splatter movie Turkey Shoot or the Kung Fu meets James Bond of The Man from Hong Kong. They’re so cinema-literate, you see.

AFI: Someone like Quentin Tarantino, who appears in Not Quite Hollywood as such a champion of these films, is enormously useful in renovating their reputations and connecting the films with a younger audience, isn’t he?

BTS: Oh yes. Quentin’s been a great fan, not only of mine but of a great variety of Australian films that were sort of made without any great fanfare and have now become appreciated. He appreciated them when they came through the video store that he worked in back in the 80s. I love Quentin, and he is a walking, talking animated museum for forgotten cinema.

AFI: And what could young Australian filmmakers working now on very low budget genre films, learn from that period in our history?

BTS: They could learn from the pluses and minuses. My films were hardly perfect. They could have been better. To my regret I never really knocked the ball right out of the stadium. I certainly hit a boundary. But the man who really hit the ball out of the park was George Miller with Mad Max, because not only did he make a genre film that appealed to everybody across the world, but he honed his two hour first cut into a really lightning-fast 90 minutes that didn’t waste a minute, and had all the little Australian quirks that made it so different from Australian biker movies. So, the lessons from that are: Keep it moving. Don’t let the audience get ahead of the picture. Make sure you have a really strong hero and you subject him to really interesting dilemmas. And make sure there are universal themes that are relevant not just to an Australian audience but to an audience in Pakistan. Themes that anyone can relate to, like loyalty, sexual attraction, devotion to family, vengeance upon those that do you wrong.

AFI: Reading your blog The Genre Director I see that you are championing Kriv Stenders’ small Aussie film Boxing Day. It’s a very different kind of film to the ones you make.

BTS: I admire that film enormously. And I admire 10 Canoes enormously. We should be making films like that. I would not for one moment advocate that we should all rush out and make rude, crude and violent films. That is not what the Australian film industry should do. It should make a balanced diet – some highbrow, some lowbrow, and some middlebrow, I guess. But the middlebrow are kind of falling by the wayside at the moment. They’re fairly bland and every country can make their own television that way. You’ve got to come up with something unique. Audiences want to see a story in three acts where the hero overcomes the obstacles in his path, whether they be moral or physical. And you’ve got to do that with freshness, and no money at all. Easy!

AFI: Thanks for your time and we look forward to seeing you in Australia for MIFF (Melbourne International Film Festival) and BIFF (Brisbane International Film Festival) in July and August.

DEBORAH GRAY

After appearing in television’s risqué Number 96 and John Lamond’s cheeky romp Pacific Banana, Deborah Gray went on to reinvent herself as an international singer and a best-selling white witch author. She looks back on the 70s and early 80s with mixed feelings.

AFI: What was it like for you to see Not Quite Hollywood and relive that period in your life?

Deborah Gray: Well, it was bittersweet because it was such an amazing era in Australia in the 70s when I was a teenager. To be a normal girl, let alone to be involved in the film and TV industry at that time. I belly-laughed all the way through. What I really like about the film is that it finally puts to rest the ridiculous myth that I was actually the first one to do a nude scene in Australia.

AFI: Yes, that myth persists doesn’t it, and it’s still there on the Internet!

DG: Yes, I did that tiny little scene in Number 96 in 1977, and if you watch the documentary it’s clear that there were many others before me in the 60s and 70s – Jackie Weaver, Briony Behets, Helen Mirren, Susannah York. They were the groundbreakers. I would like to say I was a groundbreaker, but watching the documentary you can see I wasn’t. For instance Stork and Alvin Purple were full of nudity and they were way before me. The great thing about the documentary is that it’s incredibly well-researched. Mark has done such a great job and gone so deeply into it.

AFI: What did you think when Mark Hartley approached you to be in the film?

DG: I said to him, ‘I don’t know why you want me in it, because I got out of the industry in 1983 when the films started changing from that innocence and humour and kind of hippy thing in the 70s, to more violent and exploitative stuff.’ And I said to him, ‘if you want me in the film I’m going to be honest about how I feel about it.’ And he said ‘that’s fine, we want the light and shade, and the people who were happy, and the ones who were unhappy with it as well.’

AFI: There’s a kind of innocence to the way the nudity is depicted in those films in the 70s – the bodies are very real, along with tan lines, pubic hair and obviously real breasts. You don’t see that anymore in films today.

DG: Which is sad, isn’t it? That was a reflection of the times, and those actresses were so brave and were just reflecting what was going on down at the beach. That was what you saw. There’d be movie festivals where people would be skinny-dipping. Nobody was ashamed, and we weren’t so mannered and calculated about our bodies. I didn’t know anybody who went to the gym or worked out – including the guys. We didn’t wear sunscreen and nobody had boob jobs because the only boob jobs you could get gave you shocking scars. Everybody was natural, whether you were a natural beauty or not. Even if you weren’t a goddess you would be admired for being a free spirit.

AFI: You say in the film that nudity in film was almost an artistic or political statement at the start of the era.

DG: Yes, I think especially us girls thought that we were making a political statement, about the liberation movement, about getting rid of all of society’s inhibitions. And it was about saying, ‘I’m an independent woman. This is my sexual liberty, and as much of my right as equal pay.’ It was a very deep statement, and a bit of a spiritual thing. But it’s becoming clear that we were living in a fool’s paradise. We thought we were creating a utopian society of free spirits. But as you see from the comments from the men in the film, the guys didn’t see this at all. They just thought about diving in and having fun. The revolution was in our own minds!

AFI: Can you tell us about when the mood changed from the free love of the 70s to the darker spirit of the 80s?

DG: In 1983 or something I got offered a couple of roles – for Fair Game and Lady Stay Dead. I think Tarantino talks in the film about Fair Game, that scene where the girl is strapped to the front of the car with her top stripped off, and as he rightly says, being driven around the Australian outback like a hood ornament. He actually says, ‘Who in their right mind…what crazy bastards thought of that?!’. Well, when I saw the script I said the concept of a woman coming back and fighting the bad guys was great, but I wanted to take out that scene because it just doesn’t need to be there. It’s already horrific enough that she’s been raped, but this scene is actually sexualising the act of rape, making it titillating. And of course they thought I was mad. And I didn’t do the film. As you start to mature as a woman in the entertainment industry, you say, ‘wait a minute, what image of women am I depicting to the next generation?’ I made the decision that if they were the only roles being offered to me, then it was time for me to move on.

AFI: So what do you see as the value of this documentary?

DG: Well, all of this happened. It’s our history, and it’s a very important part of our history because it was a truly creative time, an exciting time, and I think that should be celebrated. It was like the beginning of Rock and Roll or something. These people took all the chances in the world, and had no fear. Half of the actors nearly killed themselves with the stunts. They’re lucky they’re still alive – some of them aren’t. It was a pretty outrageous time and it’s a story that shouldn’t be forgotten.