Making Priscilla (15 page)

Stephan arrives at the end of a dinner I am having with Alex Proyas and various colleagues and companions. Alex is on to the evening’s umpteenth expression of contempt for the vapid hysteria and compulsive insincerity of festival life, whereas
Stephan, just off the Cinergi yacht where Bruce Willis has been giving him the unsolicited benefit of his advice, is having the time of his life. It is an odd moment: two thirty-year-old Australian directors reacting in totally polarised ways to having money and attention thrown at them.

As we walk along the street afterwards, Stephan expresses his thanks for the first time since we began to work together eighteen months earlier. He tells me that he could not have done it without me, that I made an immense contribution both to the quality of the film and to the restoration of his self-confidence, and that he considers us a working team from now on. It is gratifying to hear, even if the moment (late, exhilarated, full of wine) does not encourage confidence in its gravity. When he disappears into a bar near the old port, I feel sure at least that he will have an interesting story in the morning.

He does, or at least he would if he were capable of connected speech. Piecing together a mosaic out of the madness, from its changing declensions and unfinished clauses, it appears that the night involved numerous people, a scary car ride at some speed and a long walk back to town after escaping across a golf course at dawn.

Recovering in time to attend the William Morris cocktail party — where his agent Bobbi Thompson, who wooed him so effectively a year earlier, finally has the opportunity to steer him around rooms almost distended by the concentration of wealth and prestige — he stays on to accompany her to
Pulp
Fiction,
directed by fellow Morris client Quentin Tarantino.

Afterwards, at a beach party in the middle of the night, like a regular at Helena’s in the ’80s, he finally gets to watch his agent dance, and having done so, joins her on the floor.

On the final day of Cannes — when the only people left are the disconsolate buyers and sellers who have failed to meet their targets, or expectant prize-winners and their retinues — we hear two things. One is that we have done over US$3million worth of business in minimum guaranteed payments from the film’s distributors — triple the estimated amount — to which we would certainly have added another US$2million from the American rights had we not chosen to favour improved terms from Gramercy over a substantial advance from somebody else. The other is that we have won the Prix du Publique. Initially nobody is quite sure what this is, but we are delighted to win any prize, particularly one we did not realise existed, so we find out. About twenty thousand local people who attend special pay-screenings of those movies shown in all official sections of the festival other than the competition vote for their favourite at the end. It is
Priscilla.

Once initiated, momentum gathers by itself. The more capricious the business — and films and records are more so than most — the greater its tendency to oscillate wildly between
catatonic inertia and deranged hyperactivity.

At the PolyGram managing directors’ conference in Vancouver, from where we receive congratulatory faxes from both Michael Kuhn and Stewart Till, the soundtrack album that nobody wanted appears to have become the coveted trophy in an internecine bidding war. In this inflated boys’ club of a setting, Polydor Australia has begun to take a strong proprietorial stance, prompted by the competitive interest of Island’s Chris Blackwell and Mother Records’ Paul McGuinness, whose own enthusiasm for the music was quickly broadcast after he saw the film in San Francisco. The clearances that appeared impossible to secure stray mysteriously into the realms of likelihood.

Faxes begin to fly around like heat-seeking missiles. Mother Records will originate and release the album on their label, distributed by Island in the U.S. and Polydor elsewhere, including Australia. Stephan and I favour choosing a couple of tracks and having them radically remixed as singles by a London-based dance producer. Polydor consider this unnecessarily expensive, favouring instead the kind of retro party album it will be anyway. They want Gloria Gaynor’s ‘I Will Survive’ as the first single; we favour Alicia Bridges’ ‘I Love the Nightlife’, particularly as a remixed reissue of Gaynor’s record has already been in the British top five a year earlier.

Finally, it is concluded with Mother: there
will
be remixes, which can also be added to the soundtrack album. We are very confused about precisely who is doing what, and unsympathetic towards the scheduling and manufacturing pressures engendered by the need to meet the film’s U.S. release date ten weeks away. Everyone has had six months to prepare for this. The gradually eroding timeframe has been disregarded because it was believed that the album would never materialise without a senior executive in the corporation willing to be the flag bearer,
which none were interested in being. In other words, until this point, there was a consensus of neglect.

Despite discussion of a major British release on October 14, no premiere is planned.

There is no question that vanity plays a significant part in the proclivity which most producers and directors have for the high-profile opening night. In our case — apart from having witnessed the remarkable boost it gave to the first weekend’s box office of
Four
Weddings
and
a
Funeral
in the UK just before Cannes — we are also convinced that
Priscilla
is the kind of movie which, on the evidence of its two festival screenings to date, generates tremendous media interest and word-of-mouth from crowded special events.

Notwithstanding the success of the
Four
Weddings
night, PolyGram claim that such openings are finally a waste of money. We feel that they are just trying to rationalise their innate fear of the potential for embarrassing misbehaviour which even the most sweet-natured drag queens carry around them like a flickering aura. As we begin to leave incisions in their ankles, they sense the need to throw us a bone and propose an opening at the MGM Trocadero. ‘But doesn’t that have a moving staircase leading to a small lobby?’ I ask. Nobody appears certain but it is agreed that probably it has. ‘You can’t have celebrities photographed going up an escalator, as if they had all bumped into each other in a department store,’ I exclaim in disbelief. ‘And what about all the frocks getting caught in the teeth?’ adds Stephan. ‘We don’t want our guests
eaten
before the film has even started.’

While PolyGram consider further, I return to my lodgings. Terence Stamp has lent me his apartment in Albany, a venerable
old building set back from the road next to the Royal Academy on Piccadilly, whose discreet positioning and profound quiet belie the fact that it occupies an entire block of completely central London. Terence has lived in the place for nearly thirty years, most of them in this particular flat, which looks up at the rooftop on Savile Row where the Beatles last performed live in 1969. It is not really an apartment, or a flat, or even a duplex, although it meets the requirement by occupying two floors: it is more like ‘rooms’ or ‘chambers’, redolent of academic or legal life when these professions had gravity. He has decorated it with his customary taste and precision, a combination of Eastern ascetism (large, minimally decorated Japanese bedroom and tubroom) and Western comfort (Aga cooker, wooden kitchen, capacious sofa).

In a climate of such harmony, only the collisions really register: a collection of highly masculine, rigorously maintained shoes and boots, all in trees or bags, with at their centre the pair of custom-made Anello and Davide high heels in which Terence practised his walk before coming to Australia; shoes so perfectly timeless they might have been worn by his idol Gene Tierney, whose autographed photo still sits propped up against a wall in his dressing room.

One of the residents of Albany is the former cabinet minister Alan Clark, whose published diaries, of which I am unaware at this time, reveal that some ten years earlier he had affairs with the wife of a judge and her two daughters. Amidst allegations of blackmail and indecent exposure, the judge, the wife and one of the daughters have arrived in London from South Africa to ‘horsewhip’ Mr Clark and sell their story to a newspaper. It appears that the judge’s wife continued their affair even after she had discovered that Mr Clark had been having sex with both her daughters.

I arrive outside the building late one night to find a car full of reporters and photographers waiting at the entrance to the yard. A blonde woman in a raincoat jumps out and comes running across to me. ‘Do you know Alan Clark?’ she asks breathlessly. I hear ‘Al.’ It is an irresistible moment. ‘Of course I do,’ I reply playfully, ‘I
am
him.’ For a fraction of a second she looks simultaneously exhilarated and deflated, as if unable to believe that a stake-out at Albany could ever be so easy. I fantasise that she is a PolyGram commando whose mission is to seduce me out of the idea of having a
Priscilla
premiere. ‘I have a feeling it’s not me you’re looking for,’ I say when the moment is over. ‘No,’ she replies despondently, walking back towards her colleagues, ready to shoot herself. ‘You’re the wrong Al Clark. The right one is probably still in Jersey.’

An hour after the plane touches down in Los Angeles, I am driving to another press screening of the film. It is one of those dreamy, balmy LA evenings in early summer, before the cumulative sting of the sun and smog have become disagreeable. I have not wearied of watching the movie with different audiences, always enjoying the immediacy of the response to this kind of picture. With a comedy, there is no need to wait in the lobby for reactions afterwards: people tell you what they feel as they watch.

Balloting by audience members has been completed at the San Francisco Film Festival and we have won the Starbucks Award for the most popular film. Newly invited to the Seattle Festival, and hoping to witness the moment that may lead to a hat-trick of festival audience awards, I fly there the next day. The movie receives a demonstrative response, with the applause and cheers extending over the three minutes of end titles and
beyond. When it is announced at the end of the festival that we have won the Golden Space Needle award for the best picture and Terence the best actor prize, I am finally confident that the reaction so far has been neither a fluke nor the outcome of some collusion.

While I want the movie to make money, it is the fact that it gives
pleasure
which excites me, a pleasure-giving that in any case will lead to money at the box office. PolyGram are already going to do very well out of the film as sales agents and distributors, but my concern is how much of that income will go into the recoupment pot, to be shared first between the investors, then among all the profit participants. We need to monitor expenses carefully in order to accelerate the moment when those profit participants begin to defy film folklore by seeing a return.

Stephan is renewing his American visa. There is a section on ‘inadmissible classes’. These include ‘aliens who are mentally retarded, insane, or have suffered one or more attacks of insanity; aliens afflicted with psychopathic personality, sexual deviation, mental defect, narcotic drug addiction, chronic alcoholism or any contagious disease; aliens who are paupers, professional beggars or vagrants; aliens who are polygamists or advocate polygamy’, and so on. It sounds like a chronicle of the people we have so far met in the United States.

Gramercy test two trailers to judge their effectiveness, or in survey-speak, their ‘interest-generating potential’. Both tests are conducted by ‘a personal intercept interviewing technique’ among two hundred ‘straight’ moviegoers and one hundred ‘gay, lesbian or bisexual’ moviegoers, groups equally male and female of 18- to 49-year-olds, in ‘four geographically dispersed urban markets’ — Atlanta, New York, Philadelphia and San Francisco.

The first is a teaser trailer, intended for immediate release. The setting up of the joke revolves around the idea of extraterrestrial invaders, the narrator’s delivery recalling the golden age of American communist paranoia. ‘If alien beings arrived in your town, how would they act… what would they say… and, most importantly, what would they wear?’ People still capable of speech after the personal intercept interviewing technique has taken effect, are asked about awareness of and curiosity in the movie by the title and stars alone, then shown the teaser and asked about their interest as a consequence of it.

The title and stars appear not to have much interest-generating potential at all. Straights register 14 per cent, gays 27 (against a norm of 45). After seeing the trailer, however, while the straights only go up to 36 per cent, gays increase to 77 (norm 65). Two weeks later, a second, longer trailer — less of a tease, with added story elements — is more effective among straights, who increase to 45 per cent, but less among gays, who decline to a still resilient 72.

For the poster, Gramercy finally favour the concept of silhouetting the rear view of the three drag queens against a sunset. Anticipating the effect that theatre-lobby poster-stall backlighting will have on it, I feel sure it will work but the colours need to be richer and more saturated than the proof suggests.

In addition to the post-production script we have already supplied as part of the delivery schedule, we are reminded by PolyGram that they also require a ‘spotting’ script, whose presence on the list of items I was sufficiently myopic to overlook. Where the final dialogue outlined in the post-production script is essential for dubbing purposes, a spotting script is a condensed version which conveys the essence of each section of dialogue. This enables subtitlers to disregard the nuances of what is being said in favour of the facile contraction.

We have also been asked for a glossary in which all the colloquialisms and abuse (in the case of our film, pretty much the same thing) are listed with their corresponding meaning. Among the seven pages of these which we supply are numerous highlights, beginning with the first words of the film. A heckler in the audience has thrown a beer can at Mitzi (Hugo Weaving), knocking her over, so Felicia takes the microphone: ‘That was fucking charming, you gutless pack of dickheads,’ she says. Our translator’s notes read: ‘That’s not very nice, you cowardly group of idiots’. When a few minutes into the film ‘Fuck off you silly queer’ becomes ‘Go away you silly homosexual’, we realise this is a document which will eventually be viewed as a seminal contribution to world understanding, or at least as a challenge to the skills of subtitlers everywhere: