Making Priscilla (4 page)

Coober Pedy is opal country, where the mines in and around the town are not the only subterranean universe. There is another, stranger one which includes underground houses, an underground church and an underground hotel, the only place any of us have ever stayed without ever having the slightest idea what time of day it is.

Roland, who has been recommended to us as someone who understands the dynamics of the town, is a Swiss chef living in a ‘dugout’, as underground houses are called in Coober Pedy. He is one of the few people who is not here to mine opals but to feed the gourmet tourists that pass through the town in ever increasing numbers, and those locals who have developed a taste for focaccia and cappuccino. Despite a magnificent desert sunset outside, Roland is in his dugout sounding like Ingmar Bergman on a rainy day in Stockholm. I make a joke about the flies and the ‘dragnets’ we have been obliged to hang over our faces to prevent insects from making kamikaze dives into our mouths. ‘I will not wear one,’ he declares with sombre finality. ‘I cannot look at the world through a net.’

Just outside the town we find three locations which perfectly reflect our idea of making the Australian desert resemble the topography of a bizarre planet. The Moon Plain — on which one can look in any direction and see no horizon, nothing but the sparkle of gypsum — is where we will shoot the sequence in which the young drag queen performs an aria perched in a giant silver shoe on the roof of the bus. Equally lunar in a different way is the Olympic mine, where we can film a campfire scene at night and the following morning’s departure, its configuration of earth mounds by each mining shaft giving it an eerily galactic quality. Most arresting of all are the Breakaways, which, seen at dawn, look sublimely like the islands in the sea they once were. The middle section of the film — the aftermath of the bus breakdown — will be shot there. To compensate for their lack of star power, independent films must have at least one unforgettable sequence which everyone talks about.
Priscilla,
I feel confident, will have several.

Driving north again, we discuss the music in the film. As well as the Shirley Bassey references, there are also Kylie Minogue jokes and a finale which involves her, or at least an impersonation of her. Because she is one of those figures whose
topicality fluctuates according to whether or not she has recently reinvented herself, I feel that a pop act whose tacky qualities are more timeless would be better. When Abba emerge as one of these, I tell Stephan a story I once heard about an Abba fan on a cruise boat who entered a toilet that Agnetha was leaving and, finding one of her stools at the bottom of the bowl, bottled it and took it home. I also play Charlene’s ‘I’ve Never Been To Me’, which I first heard driving across Arizona with Andrena and nearly had to stop the car. We repeat it several times because the lyrics defy belief at a single hearing. (‘Me’ is a sort of comfort station of stabilising banality, to which one returns after having too much fun.) It is the kind of song which tends to be performed towards the end of wedding receptions by singers so enraptured by their own queasy sincerity that they practically fellate the microphone. It also represents a genre of goofy melodrama that is raw meat to a drag queen. It is perfect, except it is on Motown Records and almost certainly unaffordable to us.

We also play movie scores, and the three of us have a competition to establish if we are able to hum the analogous main themes of Maurice Jarre’s
Lawrence
of
Arabia
and John Barry’s
Born
Free
scores in sequence without transposing any notes between melody lines. At a madhouse by the turn-off to the Painted Desert, we are having breakfast at a window table when we see a Japanese motorcyclist approaching a petrol pump. Despite the heat, he is wearing a large quilted jumpsuit, which makes him look like an oriental Michelin Man, and there is hardly an inch of him that is not covered in logos. He must be the first of a new species: the sponsored traveller. We name him Logoman and decide that he is probably working for Bond-villain Mario, helping to track his transmitter-implanted eagles around the country.

Since their residents are captives after sunset, none of the hotels are cheap at the resort village created to provide a base for Uluru tourists. We stay at the cheapest, the one with the communal showers and bathrooms. The rock is a remarkable place — the Olgas, the neighbouring formation, even more so — and the red tint from its rusting iron oxide is spectacular at sunset. But I have seen it before, and I am mostly interested in returning with a film crew. We ask the resort manager whether it will be possible to film the rock on a long lens from one of the resort look-outs, which we could then match up with close-ups shot elsewhere. He says that it is, but that he has no wish to upset the good relationship which the resort enjoys with the local Aborigines and the Community Park Liaison Officer who protects their interests.

Following the earlier correspondence and rejection, we have drinks with the Community Park Liaison Officer, who brings along a member of the Mutitjulu Community and a civil servant from Melbourne. As the resort rooms are posted with notices from Aboriginal leaders requesting visitors not to supply alcohol to their people, I am a little surprised to find the one at our table drinking rum. He remains silent throughout the discussion. It turns out that the Community Park Liaison Officer knows quite a lot about Sydney drag queens, and mentions several of them by name, but he is politely, firmly resolute: we will not film there. Stephan is aggrieved, says so and leaves the table. There is really no more to be added.

Driving away from the rock towards Alice Springs, we are given the keys to the land surrounding Mount Connor by its owner. More overwhelming than the rock from a distance — Mount Connor truly resembles the ‘helipad of the gods’ which UFO enthusiasts have called Uluru — it is less impressive close up and, crucially, it would be impossible for a film crew to climb.

In our exploration of Alice Springs and its outlying areas, we review numerous gaps and gorges, and — in a giant open-air version of a stage farce — collide with the Swedish backpackers from William Creek, Logoman (forced by the heat into a lightweight version of the jumpsuit with duplicate logos) and Roland, who has mysteriously driven all the way from Coober Pedy to have dinner.

As the film is to be announced at the forthcoming Cannes Film Festival, we have decided that the most effective way of selling the movie, of capturing its tone, its essential joke of three people hilariously and tragically at odds with their environment, is through a single picture. In the absence of a cast, we have packed two dresses and a sequined swimsuit and brought them along with us with the idea of, somewhere along the way, slipping into the outfits, setting up the photograph and persuading a passing stranger to press the shutter. Finally, Stephan, Brian and I are struggling into our drag on a windy hill west of Alice Springs, looking out towards the horizon with the MacDonnell Ranges in the background. Stephan, in the simplest outfit, is enjoying himself tremendously; I am having a few difficulties with my heels and fishnet stockings; and Brian just looks like a cameraman in a wedding dress. A bewildered but fascinated backpacker friend of Roland’s captures the moment.

Andrena, who has discovered that she is pregnant, meets us when we arrive at Sydney Airport. The four of us sit on the beach at Watsons Bay as the sun sets, eating fish and chips and drinking champagne. We hope that the movie materialises, but in the meantime we are having the time of our lives.

May 1993. We are leaving for the Cannes Film Festival to launch the picture — or at least to announce the prospect of its existence — without a single member of the cast in place. This means that we are straying close to the edge of the precipice, but there is a confidence in our stride which may keep us from falling over it.

If the role of the middle-aged transsexual Bernadette is to be played by the one permitted foreigner, our first choice is Tony Curtis, an engaging comic actor in the ’50s and ’60s, whose declining popularity and escalating substance abuse left him navigating a path through what turned out to be two-and-a-half decades of mediocrity. With the exception of Elia Kazan’s
The
Last
Tycoon
and Nicolas Roeg’s
Insignificance
— directors who knew how to exploit Curtis’s ingratiating edginess — he has somehow managed to avoid appearing in an entirely watchable film since his spellbinding but short-lived change of gear as
The
Boston
Strangler
in 1968. (Reaching rock bottom in the early ’80s, Curtis played Iago in a contemporary adaptation of
Othello,
‘based on the drama by William Shakespeare’,
called
Othello
the
Black
Commando,
written and directed by, and starring Max H Boulois. While acknowledging the competition presented by several of the works of Ed Wood, this has the distinction of being perhaps the worst film ever made.)

Yet Curtis remains a star, an indelible memory, an exhilarating echo to anyone dreaming up a drag movie who has seen — as they must surely have —
Some
Like
It
Hot,
still one of the quintessential film comedies. Our picture would enable him to go a stage further by playing a woman, rather than a reluctant transvestite with a weakness for Marilyn Monroe’s body and Cary Grant’s affectations.

The first exchange with a newly remarried Curtis has left Stephan completely infatuated. Weary of actors who not only require persuasion to wear dresses but reassurance that they will be permitted to project an air of competence in the film’s musical numbers, he is relieved that Curtis cracked the code immediately. ‘The thing I love about these guys,’ said Curtis of the drag queens after reading the script, ‘is that they have absolutely no talent.’

Unintimidated by the prospect of making a movie in the Australian desert as he approaches his sixty-eighth birthday, all he asks is not to be expected to sleep in a tent. He also has a winning way of concluding a conversation. As if possessed by the combined spirits of all the screenwriters of his much ridiculed early costume pictures, he lapses effortlessly into archaism. ‘Excuse me Stephan,’ he exclaims before hanging up, ‘I must leave you now and return to my beautiful bride.’

There is an enthusiasm and complicity about his manner which continues in a series of calls and faxes — signed ‘Hugs and Kisses, T.C.’ — as he visits various American cities on his honeymoon. Then, mysteriously, we are unable to reach him. One senses a failure of nerve, as one often does with actors. He
becomes a diminishing prospect, if not yet a completely lost one. He has gone to Europe, and his assistant makes familiarly evasive noises about whether our picture can now be made to fit his schedule. He really wants to do it, she says. Of course.

Stephan has finished a new draft of the script minutes before our departure from Sydney. I read it on the flight to Los Angeles. It is not particularly different from the old draft, but there are a number of additional jokes and characters inspired by our location survey.

I make some notes while he sleeps, mostly identifying what I consider to be banal or redundant lines. The script as a whole reads well. Unusually witty and unremittingly foul-mouthed, it has retained the originality of what made it worth making in the first place. There is something fundamentally mechanical about many screenplays because most of them are written to satisfy some threadbare, hand-me-down notion of what the marketplace wants.
Priscilla
just jumped out of Stephan’s head, which is why neither the concept nor the characters have had a chance to be emasculated before they reached the page.

In the departure lounge at Los Angeles airport, waiting to board the connecting flight to London, we discuss — far too loudly for some of our fellow passengers — whether or not one of the drag queens should threaten to rip off another’s head and shit in her neck. The line stays, for the time being.

With the casting of Bernadette left in suspended animation, we concentrate on finding actors to play the other two leading roles. On arrival in London we decide to re-approach Rupert Everett — who has retained a commendably ironic perspective on an earlier misunderstanding — for Tick. As he is already staying in the south of France, we arrange to meet him in Cannes later that week.

To play Adam, we pursue an idea we had about Jason Donovan,
with whom we arrange to have lunch the following day. We are not sure if he is a sufficiently experienced actor to make Adam more than a mincing pastiche, but it will make intriguingly provocative casting in view of his recent history of litigation. He in turn can be conciliatory towards an audience which largely forsook him when he took legal action, and won, against the magazine
The
Face
for suggesting he was gay.

We have another thought for Bernadette: John Cleese. A call is made to his agent: he is not interested.

So that there are no misunderstandings later — with PolyGram realising that the soundtrack to a picture they are half financing is being released by a rival record company (the terms of which agreement they would in any case need to approve) — I outline to various PolyGram executives and lawyers the deal we have with PWL Records. It is a pleasant but inconclusive encounter, and the two people present from the music division appear perceptibly underwhelmed by what I delude myself is the persuasive vigour of my pitch.

When we meet Jason Donovan and his manager at II Siciliano, the kind of old-fashioned Soho Italian restaurant where it is a matter of policy not to take any notice of the famous, I realise that this is the third time I have approached him about appearing in a film. (I flew to the Gold Coast during the 1989 Australian pilots’ strike to see him about
The
Crossing
— when he felt unable to cancel a week of European record promotion to complete our mandatory ensemble rehearsal schedule — and to London in 1991 with the same director, George Ogilvie, to discuss another movie.) He is as charming as ever — equal parts surf yob and gracious young man — and he insists he is enthusiastic about playing the role, particularly as
his appearance in
Rough
Diamond
as, claims its synopsis, ‘a cattle rancher and a superb guitarist’ seems to have fallen through. (The film is later made.)

Towards the end of the meal, at around the time he is telling us that he has never seen
Some
Like
It
Hot,
a tall black woman runs into the restaurant, kisses him and rushes out. Suspecting a stunt, we speculate without success on where she came from and at whose prompting. We conclude that she was probably a drag queen spontaneously auditioning for the movie. By now, we are on drag queen alert: as far as we are concerned, any big-boned woman with a vocal register lower than alto could be one.

We invite Jason to join us in Cannes, where
Frauds
is screening in competition, and where he can also meet his possible co-star Rupert Everett and witness the process that makes the picture come together. It is beginning to look promising.

In the departure lounge at Heathrow, one can identify the various European nationalities by how they choose to kill time. The French and Italian talk among themselves. The Germans drink beer. The British read newspapers.

By the time we stand shuffling around the luggage carousel in Nice, the British have loosened up sufficiently to make small talk, punctuated by a kind of braying, mirthless laughter designed to obfuscate the steely resolve with which they are entering the Cannes Film Festival. It is my tenth visit to Cannes and the first on which a car is scheduled to meet me at the airport. Inevitably, it is nowhere to be seen. After telephone calls to the publicists DDA — who represent
Priscilla’s
sales agents, Manifesto — to JAC, the publicists who are handling
Frauds,
and to the festival office itself, nobody is prepared to
accept responsibility for the car’s absence. We take the bus.

As I frequently do on the first day, I have lunch on the beach with the producer Hercules Bellville, who is staying at the same hotel and whose unyielding (some would say insufferable) precision exceeds even my own. He also knows how to orchestrate an interesting social and business life more effectively than anybody else I have met. While envying his skill, and the fluency of his routine, I sometimes feel he has eliminated the possibility of the unexpected which those of us obliged to live more by our wits at Cannes encounter constantly. But I love the amused, rather patrician manner he and his colleagues like Jeremy Thomas and Bernardo Bertolucci project here, which once prompted Alan Parker to remark that when approaching their lunch table he always felt like the taxi driver who had come to collect them.

Our first meeting is with DDA and Manifesto on the terrace of the Grand Hotel. It is about publicity, which provides the pulsebeat of Cannes: everything is to do with how one is perceived, and publicists are the architects of that perception. Unlike film markets — events rooted in traditional commerce which people attend to buy and sell movies rather than to admire them — Cannes’s main currency is prestige, not wealth. If you are considered important, and your self-esteem is unassailably resilient, the Byzantine layers of the place drop away along with its obstacles. People disregard your worst behaviour and sanctify your best.

We see the artwork for the announcement ad that Manifesto will take in the daily trade magazines. It is the photograph of Stephan, Brian and me on the hill outside Alice Springs, looking like Martians in frocks. I notice that my love handles have been airbrushed out by the designer, and I am complimented several times on my shapely legs.

The credits which accompany the photo are appropriately sparse. By the standards of festivals, where the promiscuous announcement of names rarely has much to do with reality, they are quite minimal. In being part of the official selection in competition with his first feature film, Stephan has been comprehensively ratified as an
auteur
(at Cannes, one hears of a film only in the context of who directed it), so it is original of him not to have proposed the now routine vanity credit ‘A Stephan Elliott Film’ above the title of
Priscilla.
This deplorable usurpation of the contributions by the other creative collaborators on a movie has spread like a bad rash in recent years, and doubtless Stephan’s ego will eventually compel him to capitulate, but by then he may have earned his
auteur-
ship
.

Once, it was precisely that: something that people like Capra, Hitchcock and Hawks
earned,
and it became part of the marketing of the movies of a few truly distinctive directors. Hence, one does not begrudge Spielberg, Scorsese and De Palma a possessory credit (which they did not take on their early films) because their pictures are so emphatically their own creations, but now every idiot with delusions and a combative agent demands it and, through the lap-dog acquiescence of studio executives, they have rendered it meaningless. In view of this, it is revealing to enumerate those filmmakers who remain content to take simple directing credits: Francis Coppola, Woody Allen, Clint Eastwood, Robert Benton, (Dr) George Miller, Bruce Beresford, Phillip Noyce, Joel Coen, Joe Dante, Steven Soderbergh, John Sayles, Jim McBride, Jonathan Kaplan, Steve Kloves. (Beresford once asked the Directors Guild of America if he could have the line ‘a film by Bruce Beresford’, which he had not requested, removed from the Sunset Strip billboard for
Crimes
of
the
Heart.
Their response was that he was an unappreciative bastard for whom they had fought wars.)

After approving the
Priscilla
ad, we discuss the press release, which I propose to rewrite — the tone is too ingratiating, where I favour a kind of subtly aggrandising self-deprecation — and review the guest list for our launch lunch on Sunday at the Manifesto villa, which we will have an opportunity to inspect when we attend a party there later that day.

As the meeting ends, we notice that about two hundred yards off the Carlton Beach there is a giant inflatable Arnold Schwarzenegger, secured to a pontoon and holding what resembles a flaccid cucumber. We decide that it would be fun, and good publicity for the film, to swim out during the night and put an enormous dress on him.

Other than photographers — in whom Cannes brings out the pack-hunting predator — people tend to feign indifference to the famous before twilight. In the daytime, expressions of recognition are confined to the eyes. Rarely do heads actually turn, except to acknowledge the presence of a national idol like Alain Delon, or a global colossus like the inflatable Arnold Schwarzenegger, or a particularly striking woman dressed to emphasise, as Robert Mitchum once put it, her anatomical salients.

Or Rupert Everett. As he approaches our table on the Grand terrace, heads turn. It may be his height, or his angularity, or his biker boots catching the morning light like some slow-motion reverie from Kenneth Anger’s
Scorpio
Rising.
It may even be because several films he has appeared in over the years have been in one or other festival category. Perhaps it is just the winning accessory of the very large dog that walks beside him. In any case, our quiet confidential chat is clearly going to be under review.

As he settles into his chair, Rupert — who has been told that he knows Stephan but is unable to remember from where — is relieved when he is given his bearings. In 1986 he appeared in the Australian film
The
Right
Hand
Man
with Hugo Weaving, who is arriving in Cannes a few days later for the screening of
Frauds,
and who is interested in the same part as Rupert in
Priscilla.
Stephan was the second assistant director of
The
Right
Hand
Man,
and Rupert is both amused and embarrassed by the prospect of being directed by someone from below stairs who may already have witnessed some of his worst behaviour.