Authors: Al Clark
Stephan has never been to a drag show outside of Australia, so I take him to one. There is a club in Los Angeles called The Plaza, which I first visited because someone told me it was full
of Mexican men in gingham dresses lip-synching to songs from
Oklahoma.
It turns out to be family night, which means it is simultaneously more sedate and more surreal, with several generations in attendance witnessing the subversion of south-of-the-border standards by blokes with five o’clock shadows dressed up like Carmen Miranda. One drag queen has decided to play to the Anglo gallery. Precision miming to Dionne Warwick’s shamelessly diva-ish ‘I Know I’ll Never Love This Way Again,’ she uses the pause before the triumphant final chorus to whisper ‘thank you’, then launches into the exhilarating coda. It really brings the
hacienda
down.
The day after my father’s funeral in Scotland — a poignant end on a cold windswept hill under bruised Ayrshire skies, a galaxy away from drag — I fly back to Australia, determined to make
Priscilla
materialise.
*
We have A$2.7 million and six weeks in which to make a road movie with several elaborate musical production numbers. It is the budget and schedule of a chamber drama set in the smallest chamber of the house, but it is all we have and we are going to make the most of it. Stephan and I are working for a rock-bottom A$50 000 each, as is Michael Hamlyn, who will represent PolyGram’s interests on the production. Rebel Penfold-Russell receives five thousand dollars less as executive producer, and her company Latent Image — which has, with a small contribution from the New South Wales Film and Television Office (NSWFTO), supported the development of the picture to date — is allocated a modest overhead as well as recovering its out-of-pocket costs.
There is so little money to pay the crew that the only way we can afford to employ the people we want is to offer key personnel
participation in the film’s profits as compensation for their low salaries. Although we do not plan to start principal photography until the end of April — after the outback temperatures have become more tolerable, but before the approach of winter diminishes the length of the shooting day — we have a great deal to do in the intervening six months, and it is important to build a solid team that will make itself available at the time.
Only a few crew positions are filled in advance. The director of photography will be Brian Breheny, who shot Stephan’s calling-card shorts
Fast
and
The
Agreement,
and was to do
Frauds
until the FFC would not accept a new cinematographer working with a first-time feature director; and Grant Lee, a long-time friend of Stephan’s who worked in the art department of
Frauds,
will learn about producing films by working as my assistant, without pay until the start of pre-production. Provided they are people we can afford, Brian will also choose the gaffer and grip: apart from his small camera crew, they are the people who will most affect his contribution to the film.
To design the costumes, Stephan wants Lizzy Gardiner and Tim Chappel, who are working on the television show
E
Street,
because they know how to make a modest wardrobe budget — for a film such as this, an absurdly minimal one — go a long way, and because they understand contemporary drag. There is a realm of transvestism which is still entrenched in the world of ball gowns, Barbra Streisand and Shirley Bassey, with whom one of the characters in this draft of the script is besotted. But increasingly drag has become much more a confrontational performance art, with costumes that correspondingly take it into another dimension.
Stephan was once infatuated with Lizzy, who spurned him for another man, so our meeting begins with a cathartic tirade on the subject, rising to an intensity which leaves her, Tim and me
open-mouthed in astonished silence. When it is over, we talk about costumes. Tim has just designed the clothes for a trio of lissom poppets called The Teen Queens, whose launch as a singing act was an appearance on
E
Street.
On the same day that I see them perform under the noon sun in the courtyard of the Bondi Pavilion, they turn up six hours later lip-synching (same act, change of outfits) in the amphitheatre at Darling Harbour outside a wedding reception I am attending. Inside, after the cutting of the cake, I invite a man I have never met before who is sitting at the same table to join me on stage for a karaoke duet of ‘I Say a Little Prayer’. I am unable to remember which one of us sings the deathless couplet ‘Back-combing my hair now/and wondering what dress to wear now’, but the ease of my performance is prompting some concern that I may be approaching my new duties a little too enthusiastically.
We interview production managers, assistant directors, editors, production designers, and we laugh constantly. The whole thing is an amusement, we have decided, to be approached with a complete disregard for obstacles. If anybody looks perturbed when we mention money, we go on to the next person. We tell everybody that we will be making the movie like a guerilla operation working its way across country — shoot and move on. One prospective production designer, misunderstanding it to be a gorilla movie, tells us we are going to find it difficult making a picture about three apes in dresses driving across the desert.
Although we have many frivolous casting ideas — which mostly involve getting particular media celebrities, chat show hosts and folk heroes to make sequined fools of themselves — we have one serious one. The only bankable young actor in Australia at this moment is Paul Mercurio, the star of
Strictly
Ballroom,
and although Mercurio has recently started a dance
company to which he is giving most of his attention, we know that he will soon be looking for another film role. Stephan and he have lunch during a break in dance rehearsals, and Stephan returns with the impression that — despite Mercurio’s obvious anxiety about playing a drag queen in his second film after playing a dancer in his first — he is sufficiently fascinated to give us a realistic chance of securing him. If Michael Hutchence is to play Tick, the thirtysomething borderline straight with the wife and child, Mercurio could play the young bitchy scene-queen Adam. To have Australia’s pre-eminent pop star and actor appearing together on screen would certainly be an achievement for a movie whose production company is surrendering most of its eventual profits to get it made at all.
At this stage, the only location that we must have is Ayers Rock — Australia’s counterpart of, say, Stonehenge or Monument Valley — which is climbed by the protagonists in full drag at the climax of the movie. It is the Northern Territory office of the Australian National Parks and Wildlife Service (ANPWS) that issues the guidelines and, when inclined, grants the permissions, but it is the Aboriginal Mutitjulu Community — always referred to with deferential solemnity as ‘the traditional owners’ — which makes the decisions, and it is someone called the Community Park Liaison Officer who acts as a go-between.
I write to him and enclose a copy of the script. Even a delirious optimist would find it difficult to view our chances as remotely promising. A glance through the guidelines reveals that shooting from the air, within a certain radius and altitude, is not permitted, so there can be no triumphant helicopter shot at the end of the climb. And I note that Aboriginal traditions applied to the rock distinguish between sites which men alone are permitted to see, and those restricted to women only. In the context of this, three drag queens would certainly prompt a
confused reaction.
With a location survey planned for the week before Christmas, my letter begins by pre-empting what I think their first reaction will be: ‘We are well aware that you probably don’t get many requests to film men in dresses climbing the rock’. Then I ramble a little about how, in addition to being funny and benevolent, our script has an important message about acceptance between people generally, and between minorities in particular. This is the truth, but the leaden sanctimony of it makes me feel slightly nauseated.
Two weeks later our request is rejected. Many people appear to have discussed it — the chairman and other members of the Mutitjulu Community, the chairman of the Uluru Board of Management, the Uluru National Park Manager, the director of ANPWS Northern Operations — and their consensus view is that we do not fit the bill, outlining criteria which only a documentary could fulfil. The only movie in the past decade to have received permission to film around the rock was
Evil
Angels
(known outside Australia as
A
Cry
in
the
Dark
) and that was rumoured to have required intervention from circles as high as the Prime Minister’s office.
For a film of our budget to obtain the Australian certification necessary to release FFC funds, we are allowed only one foreign actor in the event that our Australian stars do not materialise. On the flight to Los Angeles, where Stephan is supervising the sound preparation for
Frauds,
I have what I consider a brilliant casting idea: David Bowie. I knew Bowie in the mid ’80s — when we discussed the possibility of him writing the score for
Nineteen Eighty-Four
, and he appeared briefly but winningly in another film with which I was involved,
Absolute Beginners
— but I did not see him again until late 1989, when he played me some songs he was recording in Sydney at the
time, and gave me one to use over the end titles of
The
Cross
ing,
the picture I was then working on. He is a wonderful man but difficult to track down. His manager tells me he is finishing his first solo album for over five years and that it would be better not to distract him for a while.
Although I am on the way to London to see Michael Hamlyn, PolyGram’s film-sales arm Manifesto and PWL Records about
Priscilla,
my airline ticket and expenses are being paid for by a television company. The deal is that I have to make small talk on a sofa with Michael Parkinson, which I have always wanted to do anyway, during several minutes of prime-time TV on the pilot of a show called
Surprise
Party
— a rowdier variation on
This
Is
Your
Life,
with champagne and paper hats — the subject of whose first surprise party was my employer for thirteen years, Richard Branson. I am not sure that I want to spend the rest of my life appearing in the computer files of television researchers as an ‘expert’ on Richard Branson’s early years in the record business, but I suppose there are worse places to be.
My hotel is just around the corner from his house, so during the day before the recording I do everything short of adopting a beard and dark glasses to avoid identification, only to find myself seated at the same table as him at a wedding reception. It is difficult to say which of us is more surprised to see the other, and I am relieved that there is no karaoke machine to distract us. I tell him I am in London to finalise some business in connection with a movie I am producing about drag queens driving across the Australian desert in a bus, and he nods at me distractedly as if the long time we spent together was just an apprenticeship for me losing my marbles.
After the recording itself, when Branson ritually pours champagne all over me as if he has not already ruined enough of my clothes in the past, I am chatting to John Hurt, whom I have
not seen since the Cannes premiere of
Aria
in 1987. It occurs to me that he might be an appropriate Bernadette, the older transsexual, but seconds before I am about to mention it I remember that he has just finished playing a role in drag in Gus Van Sant’s
Even
Cowgirls
Get
The
Blues,
so we confine ourselves to the kind of drunken reminiscing which is more appropriate to the event.
While some of the matters that I need to resolve with Hamlyn and PolyGram are routine — which of their companies is to be the contracting party and funding entity, can the money be cash-flowed in Australian dollars, and so on — others require more discussion. We are absolutely resolute that whichever party sells the Australian distribution rights should not take a commission, and there is the question of what is a fair premium on PolyGram’s investment, if taking a premium on a low-budget film on which one also has sales rights can be said to be fair at all. The FFC, who would prefer not to charge a premium at all, will take whatever PolyGram do. Sales commissions, expenses, distribution fees, premiums: these, and the accounting procedures which reinforce them, are the hidden enemies of a film ever going into profit, which is why stars and directors who are in a position to jump the queue insist on gross points from first dollar, thereby eroding net profits — which Eddie Murphy once called ‘monkey points’ — even further.
I visit David Howells at PWL and we try to move the soundtrack deal along. The principles are that PWL will pay all the synchronisation fees due to the artist, recording company and publisher of any song used in the film; that they will pay the costs of remixes and rerecordings for the movie and corresponding soundtrack album; that they will pay us a royalty after recoupment of costs; and that we will pay them a percentage of the film’s profits. It is almost revolutionary in its simplicity,
and only the high costs being quoted are debated. I ask if it is possible for the soundtrack album to be released through PolyGram: it is not, as PWL has a worldwide distribution deal with Warner. This increases pressure on me to secure good terms. Our principal investors have a music division which is not getting the soundtrack rights, so if I am unable to conclude an outside deal that is attractive to them as film financiers, it makes it more difficult to convince them that their record company should not have it.
I fly back to Los Angeles, where the final sound mix of
Frauds
is nearly completed. I am perturbed by how little progress we have made with casting, and I am keen to move past the dithering of Hutchence and Mercurio to somebody who is going to commit. I bump into Alan Parker — whom I once tried to persuade to direct a musical version of
Wuthering
Heights
called
Total
Eclipse
of
the
Heart
— doing some Christmas shopping at the Beverly Centre. I remark how difficult it is going to be to find a male actor with enough nerve to play a woman. ‘Never mind nerve,’ he scoffs, ‘the difficulty will be finding an actor with enough
acting
ability
to play a woman.’