Making Priscilla (10 page)

On the second day, we film the preceding montage: the climb itself. So we ascend the rock face under a pitiless sun and cloudless skies, carrying equipment as we go. By now we are sufficiently relaxed to have two journalists, a photographer and a television camera crew in tow. We are delivered lunch by the helicopter, which has already filmed Tim Chappel — sitting in for the climbing Guy Pearce — in the shoe on top of Bus Priscilla, a Verdi reprise that leaves a trail of pink and yellow smoke hanging in the outback air. As the light begins to fade over the canyon the safety officer decides that we will soon be stranded in the dark at high altitude. So he orders an emergency evacuation: eight trips by two helicopters to bring the cast and crew off the top of Kings Canyon and back to base camp, an airlift completed just before nightfall. One can almost hear ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ mixed in with the sound of chopper blades.

The third is a less exciting test of nerves: a hot, slow, monotonous day with a long road journey to make at the end. The sound mixing equipment is blown over by a gust of wind and a replacement will need to be sent to Alice Springs. When we finally finish shortly after six o’clock, I offer drivers the option of staying the night in Kings Canyon or driving through to Alice Springs, six hours away by truck, partly along the same dirt track on which the accident happened. If they have any doubts, I encourage them to stay. If they prefer to reach Alice that night, I encourage them to drive. On a location movie spanning three-and-a-half thousand kilometres, there is only one precept:
keep
moving.

My car has been appropriated by a group which left earlier, so I travel in the four-wheel-drive with Stephan, Brian and Lizzy. We take a short cut involving an even longer stretch of dirt track. It is a shocking mess and we have to stop to wipe mud off the windscreen after every flooded hole we pass through. To amuse ourselves, each of us relates some incident in our childhood that was particularly traumatic for ourselves or our parents. Lizzy — with her tales of a Shetland pony, a turtle on a rope and a baby kangaroo that died of diarrhoea after eating too many cornflakes — outshines us all, although it is Brian who leaves us all startled and silent in poignant contemplation: his father, exasperated that his son was still using a dummy at the age of four, took it out of his mouth, threw it up in the air and shot it to pieces.

Arriving famished in an Alice Springs restaurant where last orders are being taken, I am nearly lynched by a three-cornered alliance: those who set out early and have been worrying for hours about our welfare, those who have lost friends in road accidents after long shooting days, and those who have experienced for themselves the state of the particular track that we travelled on. There is a kind of suppressed hysteria in the air, but I am too weary and dusty to respond. I still feel that I made the correct decision, and both Stephan and Stuart Freeman have reinforced it. We are not children and nobody has been under obligation.

We take a table in the hotel bar adjacent to the front entrance and begin ticking off names. Terence arrives in a vehicle completely encased in mud after driving the flooded shorter route, his smile bespeaking an adventurer’s gratification. The trucks that decided to set out begin to trickle in and the luxury of the hotel, after our living conditions for the past four weeks, has an immediately palliative effect. A couple have called in to say they will pull over and sleep, completing their journey at sun-up. By three-thirty in the morning everyone who was expected has arrived.

We are filming by the following afternoon, already aware that we will require an additional day in the final week, which means that Bill Hunter — after a haircut, a shave and a change of wardrobe — will still be able to start work on
Muriel’s
Wedding
the following Monday. If, that is, we can find the condoms which have been performing as Bernadette’s breasts and are now missing. A call goes out. They are returned by the people who wanted to use them for sex and restored to their proper function.

After dark, we are working on the campfire scene in which the four travellers talk before Bernadette is left with Bob. The location is a dry creek bed outside Alice Springs and although there appears to be no people or traffic in the area, we can hear noise. The safety officer and unit assistants investigate the source and at the other end of the creek find a trio of rowdy locals with a utility full of shit, beer and guns. The shit they collect in country areas with no plumbing, the beer is to help them become even more drunk and the guns make them dangerous. They are also very large — dwarfing even the biggest of our platoon — and, in the case of one, completely naked. They have no idea that a couple of hundred yards away are a cross-dressed man (Terence Stamp) playing a cross-gendered one, an Australian national treasure (Bill Hunter) being romanced by him, and a lavender bus full of frocks. But they can see lights and the nude one starts to lurch towards them before being brought down by a rugby tackle. The explanation that we need quiet because we are shooting a film only confuses him more, since the word ‘shooting’ makes him think of the guns he has in his vehicle, which is stuck in the sand. At one point he decides he wants to have sex with our quietly spoken Bus Priscilla driver and starts to charge him rectally. For a while, it is like
Carry
On
Deliverance.

We must maintain a swift work rate during our week in Alice
Springs, but staying in a resort hotel is proving to be a restorative and the only really big scene to come is the staging of the main production number ‘Finally’ — four minutes of song, four costume and make-up changes — which we are filming over two days, the second an abbreviated one. I drive out to the airport to collect the choreographer. All the passengers on the same flight pass through the terminal and there is no sign of him. Then I see him, in the distance, hobbling towards me on crutches. At first I think it may be a joke, like a sound recordist turning up with a giant hearing aid, but he is conspicuously in difficulty and in pain. The actors are no less so at the sight of him: their big moment will be rehearsed under the guidance of a dance instructor who is no longer able to show them what to do.

Having postponed his wedding twice to accommodate our changing schedule, Guntis Sics the sound recordist has left to get married. We send him a telegram from Bus Priscilla, whose luggage compartment, sometimes doubling as Adam’s bedroom, was his base for sound recording while travelling. If a message could purr, this one does. ‘You spent so much time around me, beside me and inside me,’ it begins, ‘and you know all my secret places. No-one has ever got quite
that
sound out of me before.’ His replacement is going to experience a demanding couple of days constantly re-cueing the dance number, but the wardrobe and make-up department will have the most difficult time of all.

Lizzy and Tim have designed the four costumes to represent a kind of deranged cross-section of Australiana: flowers, emus, lizards and architecture. The last of these is represented by outfits that initially look like something Marie-Antoinette might wear to a kitchen tea but reveal themselves in the final frame to represent the Sydney Opera House. Owen Paterson has created a simple, extraordinarily effective backdrop, broadly evoking Aboriginal art, which is transformed by changes in colour.

As I am present on set every moment of the first day, pushing
the pace to complete the scene in the time allocated, I feel bound to co-operate when Stephan decides to do a shot from behind the trio on stage wearing their flowers outfits while the actors themselves are changing into emus. I stand in for Bernadette, Grant abandons the second unit to deputise as Mitzi and the choreographer’s boyfriend impersonates Felicia, and although the resultant shot ends up on screen for only a couple of seconds, it gives variety to the montage, demonstrates our enthusiastic dancing style and reveals again the legs that elicited all those compliments from PolyGram’s sales agents.

The next day is simpler in routines, more complicated in costuming. The lizard outfits have frill necks which have to materialise dramatically if it is to be worthwhile having them materialise at all. For longer than we can bear, they remain flaccid. The opera house outfits are full of fibreglass kite rods, and they too cause problems, but not as many as the extension cords coming out of the actor’s wigs, the lights in which are controlled manually by Lizzy. We finish only a few minutes over schedule. It is a colossal achievement.

After that everything feels like the end of term. We finally have the crew photo taken, in drag: blokes with facial hair and chest fur wearing dresses and wigs next to a lavender bus in the midday sun. Everybody knows that they will never have a team-spirit adventure like this again.

With all we have been through, the last shot — a bus interior, with several of us shaking the bus to simulate movement — is chronically anti-climactic. But we look up at the sky and there is one more. An enormous orange full moon — a Scorpio moon, says Terence — is rising over a nearby hill, and the second-unit cameraman, who has returned from an afternoon at the races in Alice Springs $1500 richer, is despatched at high speed towards it.

By the time he reaches it, it has gone white. But we use it anyway. This is a low-budget movie.

December 15. There is no experience to compare with flying into Los Angeles at night, but this morning the city in clear winter daylight has an extraordinary lustre.

Three days of torrential rain have washed away the smog, and the details within the limitless sweep and sprawl are thrown into startling relief from the air: the geometric configuration of roads, the snow-capped mountain ranges, the punctuating azure of swimming pools that resemble tiny windows in the earth. Jack Kerouac once likened LA to ‘a huge desert encampment’, which captures exactly its improbable amalgam of the epic and the primitive.

I have been travelling here three times each year for fifteen years — first across the Atlantic from London, then across the Pacific from Sydney — and each descent towards the city continues to prompt a slight quickening of the pulse.

Los Angeles remains an elusive realm of paradoxes, a
noir
place in the sun. It has some of the most distinguished twentieth-century architecture in the world, which is routinely demolished to be replaced by ersatz retro buildings. It is dominated
by Hispanic history, culture and language, yet few of the non-Latinos who still make up the majority of the population take any interest in it. (For many of those west of the Beverly Hills city boundary, their curiosity extends to little more than the dozen words they employ to communicate with their maids.) If it were to float away from the remainder of the United States it would be one of the richest countries in the world, but the poverty is palpable, the despair never more than a room away from a handgun.

In its unerring horizontality, it feels above all like a city of the future: a model for the way all cities will be in the next century. For much of the past one, it has axiomatically been the land of dreams, the place where people go to become somebody else. And while it is true that practically everyone here claims some remote connection with the movie business, it is always intriguing to discover the arcane nature of the link. On my first visit, the taxi driver on the ride in from the airport told me that he had been served his breakfast that morning by a waitress in the San Fernando Valley who claimed to have given James Mason a blow-job at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in 1953. His account, delivered in the impartial monotone of someone no longer capable of surprise, did not invite closer enquiry.

The
white
zone
is
for
the
immediate
loading
and
unloading
of
passengers
only.
It follows that the first words one hears on a tape loop outside the international terminal are also the first lines of a motion picture — the great joke movie
Airplane!
— and it somehow sets the tone for the surrealism of what is to come. Although there is a snap in the air, we rent convertibles, immediately identifying ourselves as both outsiders and idiots.

Stephan, Grant and I are here because we are obliged to show the ‘director’s cut’ of the film to Michael Kuhn, the president of PolyGram’s film division, and to Russell Schwartz, the
president of Gramercy Pictures, the PolyGram-owned (for a while with Universal) American film distributor. As we have transferred the film negative to tape to enable the picture to be edited by Sue Blainey on the rapid-access computerised Avid system, and as we have been unable to afford to print up the corresponding film footage, we are screening what might be mistaken for a poorly pirated video, with primitive sound and enough visual blemishes to suggest that the duplicating engineer ate a pizza on it. This is not the ideal introduction to our widescreen cross-dressing outback epic.

Considering the amount of blood on the walls of cutting rooms around the world, our editing process has been agreeably conclusive: it is clear to us what works and what does not. A couple of scenes are dropped because of length and because they are insufficiently funny. Otherwise, most of the discussion has been about the rhythm of the film as a whole.

We wait for Kuhn and Schwartz at the Aidikoff theatre in Beverly Hills, where there is a ‘video imaging unit’ which throws a larger image when projected on to a cinema screen. We play with colour, brightness, contrast, sound — anything that may enhance the limited effectiveness of what we have to show. It feels absurd to be ‘rehearsing’ a tape, but this is precisely what we are doing.

Stephan keeps us amused by telling us about his visit earlier in the day to the Disney studios, referred to by discontented writers a few years back as ‘Mouschwitz’. In obeisance to the corporate Christmas, the messengers on the lot were all wearing mouse ears, and Stephan walked into his pitch meeting in the main building under a frontage of seven columns, each presided over by one of the seven dwarfs. The discussion which followed could only be a disappointment. It was.

The arrival of Kuhn and Schwartz prompts the familiar hyperactive
banter with which people in the movie business try to conceal their unease with each other, and it is a relief when the film is under way, if only for a minute or so.

This is a vulnerable stage in a picture’s life, because although it is cut together in sequence it has no
density.
A film can only surprise and seduce when it is seen completed on the big screen. Right now, it looks and sounds quite dreadful. One is frequently being reassured by movie executives that they are accustomed to making the imaginative leap between a rough cut and a finished film. To believe this is to capitulate to a lifetime of disappointment. Here we are also up against an additional obstacle: the absence of any kind of scale. Even with the assistance of the ‘video imaging unit’, we are projecting
Florence
of
Arabia
onto an area not much larger than a lobby card, a problem we expect David Lean did not encounter when he showed his cut of
Lawrence
to Columbia over three decades earlier.

When the screening ends, the manner is cheerful but the body language is guarded, leaving us unsure of their reaction. Schwartz says that there are too many musical numbers, a disconcerting observation to make about a film musical with only four complete routines. He would cut the climactic Abba number. Kuhn tells us that he quite enjoyed the film, but that to assess it properly he will need to see it on a big screen, which I remind him that our post-production schedule will not give him an opportunity to do. Both say that they found the sequence in which the bus breaks down in the desert too long. As this has at its centre a montage which is the finest piece of pure moviemaking in the whole picture, I prepare to start arguing. Sensing the seeds of a confrontation, Stephan says it may feel that way because of the pacing of the scenes around it: he will look at it again closely, taking their comments into consideration. I am struck by the switch in our
traditional roles: it is the director who ritually protests changes to his cut, and the producer who adopts the conciliatory stance. Stephan has clearly taken to heart, or at least to head, the lessons learnt from
Frauds.

We walk around the corner for a drink at the Beverly Wilshire — once famed as the hotel where Warren Beatty kept a permanent suite, now better known as the capitalist fairytale castle in which Richard Gere holed up with Julia Roberts in
Pretty
Woman
— before driving to a staff Christmas party at Michael Kuhn’s house, up one of those serpentine streets behind the Beverly Hills Hotel. There is no other city on which it is considered so important to look
down,
not merely as part of the codification of wealth and power, but because the place really only makes sense when you can see it all. As we stand in the garden, the shimmering carpet of lights and the dozen planes one can see at any moment criss-crossing overhead against the night sky gives Los Angeles an unsettling resemblance to its portrayal in
Blade
Runner.

Kuhn is an amiable host to his staff, and to us. He puts on an Abba album in winking acknowledgement of our presence, and he punctuates repeated references to his diet by visits to the food table and refills of Coca-Cola. He shows us around the house, making jokes about its size as evidence that he is still above it all. His walk-around dressing closet is particularly striking — one could hold a small dance class in it — and he tells us it looked very odd when he had recently moved in and it contained only a couple of suits and a few shirts.

Leaving the party hungry, Stephan and I review the day at the Columbia Bar and Grill near Paramount, whose instant table availability and correspondingly wide-open spaces bespeak a restaurant whose scene as a location in
The
Player
was left on the cutting room floor. It closes a few months later.

There are two things on which one can always rely when arriving in London during the week before Christmas. One is that it will be raining. The other is that an IRA bomb scare, with which the city has been living with increasing familiarity for over two decades, will interrupt every journey made on public transport. (A third is that a ghastly record will be at the top of the charts in anticipation of Christmas week. This year it is the nauseating Mr Blobby, a large pink blow-up doll whose PR woman has officially become an item with Prince Edward — by doing so potentially sabotaging quite a good joke in the movie.)

Here our version of the film is to be shown to Stewart Till, the head of PolyGram’s international division, and to the people at Manifesto — which is about to change its name to the prosaic PolyGram Film International — whose support helped to keep the project buoyant when it was a floating anomaly in the corporate system, unattached to any of PolyGram’s wholly owned production companies.

There is no ‘video imaging unit’ in London, so we are screening the picture on three television monitors in a small preview theatre, which works with surprising effectiveness. The improved presentation and the increased audience numbers make us confident that the laughs will come more fluently, and that the movie will have a more perceptible overall impact.

This turns out to be the case, despite the absences of Michael Kuhn — at a board meeting, after promising to see the film again with his other colleagues present — and Aline Perry, who runs Manifesto but is in Paris on a family matter. We say nothing, but we are not happy. After flying halfway across the world to show people a version of the film we would prefer to keep to ourselves, we expect them to be present when we arrive.

We have lunch with Stewart Till afterwards in a large restaurant full of florid-faced businessman next door to PolyGram’s
head office. Till admits that he was an early opponent of the film, so it is gratifying to hear him enthuse about it so unequivocally. Even when we plant a potential criticism in his head (‘Do you not find all the swearing and abuse in the first half an hour a turn-off?’), he deflects it disarmingly (‘No, I think it helps us like the characters more when they soften in the second half’).

Although there are no paper hats in evidence, Christmas office parties are clearly raging around us, so we drink wine with lunch. This is not a good idea. We are peevish and testy at the subsequent meetings with PolyGram, a condition exacerbated by the British idea of central heating which is to turn all office buildings into Turkish baths.

Michael Kuhn walks into a discussion we are having about soundtrack album business. Although he is clearly not in a good mood either, we press him for more comments on the film. ‘We don’t know where we are,’ he says tetchily, alluding, we assume, to the city and country in which the movie begins. ‘Audiences need to know where they are. In
Schindler’s
List,
they tell you where you are all the time. This film should do that too.’

We add it to our list of comments and leave town.

We are back in Los Angeles, hoping to catch a plane that will land us in Sydney on Christmas Eve. Michael Kuhn and Aline Perry are seeing the picture in the late afternoon London time, and we are to have a conference call with them mid-morning LA time, in Russell Schwartz’s office at Gramercy. They are late (more rain, more bombs, city at a standstill, we speculate correctly), and as we wait Schwartz tells us he feels the Charlene song at the beginning should be cut. When the call finally comes through, Kuhn first reiterates the remarks he
made after the earlier screening: it is slow in the middle and he will be unable to pass judgement until he sees it on the big screen. He is perturbed by the fact that the ‘letter-boxing’ necessary to show films shot in anamorphic widescreen on a television monitor in the right ratio has further reduced the size of the image.

Irritated with us for shooting in ‘anabolic’, Kuhn makes a couple of other points. The first is that it is too long. At this stage, even with a modest running time of 109 minutes excluding end titles, nobody ever says a film is too short. (The shrunken attention spans of the MTV and video generations has engendered a horror of the leisurely moment, however dramatically charged. This is further aggravated by reports of young people in malls shouting ‘Fast forward!’ at the screen, as if stranded at home without the remote.) The second is that the flashback in which it is revealed that as a child one of the characters was molested by his uncle is not at all funny, a view reinforced more emphatically by Aline Perry, who wants the scene eliminated completely. ‘All that matters,’ says Kuhn, ‘is whether or not the film is funny. To find out, we need to test it’.

My response is that there is a kind of test screening intended to help the director reach decisions about how to cut certain scenes, and another to shape the marketing of the finished picture in the most effective way. The former is not of interest to us: we are confident it is already the film we want. The latter can be done after we deliver it.

In any case, it is not possible to test screen in the US until after the movie is completed in mid-April, by which time we will be preparing for May’s Cannes Film Festival, where we decided a year earlier to return with the film, if there was one.