Out of Tune (25 page)

There are many scenes in
Shine
that portray David’s close relationships with Pritchard and with his music professor Cecil Parkes; so much so that the two
of them assume quasiparental roles in David’s life. This has the effect of making my father and mother appear neglectful and
unloving as parents.

Parkes is portrayed as warm and fatherlike. In the film (though not in the screenplay) Parkes says to David, “Come on, my
boy,” and takes him out to visit what appears to be a museum, pointing things out to him in a fatherly way—in much the same
manner, in fact, as my father actually did. Parkes and David sing a duet together as they walk along merrily.

At one point David even addresses Parkes as “Daddy.” In scene 121, Parkes sits next to David at the piano and looks genuinely
concerned. He asks: “What on earth is the problem?” David says: “If you do something wrong can you be punished for the rest
of your life?” (alluding to my father’s entirely fictional “I won’t let anyone destroy this family” speech). Parkes says:
“David, listen to me,” and David replies: “Yes, Daddy, sorry. Mustn’t make you angry, not another angry lion.”

In the screenplay, the scenes with Parkes have stage directions such as “Light pours in” (scene 112). Hicks has even put my
real-life father’s own words about music into Parkes’s mouth. In scene 123, Parkes says to David: “Once you’ve done it [music]
no one can ever take it away from you.”

As well as falsely depicting my father as a tyrant and a bully,
Shine
totally negates my mother’s role in David’s life. If Cecil Parkes is a quasifather figure, then Katherine Pritchard is a
quasimother. David plays for Pritchard, sits next to her, and engages in mother/sonlike dialogue. For example, in scene 63,
he says: “Tell me a story, Katherine. What story is it today?”

In the film version, Pritchard has a framed photo of the teenage David on her mantelpiece; her house is warm and comforting,
in sharp contrast to the cold and loveless atmosphere with which my parents’ house is shrouded. Later on, David is shown sending
tapes from London to Pritchard, but not to his own mother. Pritchard kisses and cuddles David. At one point, David asks her
(scene 75) what her father was like, thus inviting comparison between families. In scene 72, Pritchard listens to David playing
“the Rach 3,” and then she looks at his photo and says, “Bravo, David.”

Why doesn’t Hicks have my mother saying “Bravo, David”? Why doesn’t he show my mother reading David stories, as she did so
often when he was young?

Katherine Pritchard’s caring, motherly qualities are contrasted with my mother’s sullen appearances at the kitchen sink. In
the film, my mother is constantly grimy and involved in some household chore. She virtually ignores her children, and practically
the only communication between her and my father is when they snap at each other. This is the complete opposite of my mother’s
true disposition. In reality, she and David have always been close.

A few months ago, Marta Kaczmarek, the actress who plays my mother in
Shine
, stumbled across Leslie performing the violin in a Perth market. She approached him and actually apologized profusely for
the hurt and harm that have been caused to him by what she now knows to have been an utterly fictitious piece of cinema.

It is not only my poor mother who is portrayed as drab and unloving. The whole Helfgott home is painted with dull colors and
the mood is always somber, transmitting a feeling of pervading darkness with little communication among its occupants. The
action that takes place in the house is accompanied by doom-laden music and fearful glances, especially when my father enters—quite
the opposite of how it really was. In the essay printed at the end of the screenplay, Hicks talks of the lighting in the film.
He says: “We had to take the film into some very dark places, and chart the character’s journey through that darkness, and
out into the light again. And we agreed—let’s not be frightened by shadows, dark corners, and corridors.”

In addition to more direct methods of character definition, visual imagery is much used in
Shine
. It is often raining in the scenes involving my father or scenes when David has been abandoned. This is in spite of the fact
that in reality Perth has a very sunny climate.

After the false scene in which David collapses upon completing “the Rach 3,” the film moves straight into showing David receiving
ECT treatment. (“His glasses are put on a metal tray. Electrodes are placed on his temples. The ECT dial is turned up.”) To
the best of my knowledge, David never actually received ECT. The film then shows a pale and gaunt David calling my father
from a phone booth. When I saw the film in a theater in Perth, the scene in which Peter puts the phone down on David without
replying after David says, “Daddy, I’m home. Daddy, hello, Daddy,” induced a member of the audience to shout out “bastard.”
Peter then draws the blinds down sharply, symbolizing his rejection of his son. As I have explained, in reality we had no
phone, David moved straight back home and actually wrote to all kinds of people, such as Professor Callaway. Many of them
would have talked to Hicks to confirm this.

But Hicks isn’t done with my father yet. He continues to insult him even after he is dead. I have already discussed the offensive
graveyard scene in Chapter 13, when David says he feels “nothing.” In the screenplay, this scene (194) ends with Gillian saying
“Bravo” and then “laughing” before the joyous singing of “Funiculi, Funicula” in the background. All this, of course, contrasts
starkly with the tribute David actually paid his father in the local newspaper, in letters, at the funeral, and in person
to myself and others.

There is a further point I would like to make on behalf of my former sister-in-law, Claire. One of the malicious things said
about her in Gillian’s book is that she stole the medal David won in London. This is complete nonsense—David himself told
us when he arrived back in Perth almost a year before he married Claire that he left the medal in London. But in the film,
there is an unexplained and surreal scene in which my father visits David one last time, after David has already started playing
at Riccardo’s/ Moby’s. The real David began performing there in 1983, eight years after my father’s death. In the film, “Dad”
places a gold medal around David’s neck (scene 184), before he walks away, a lonely figure swallowed up by the night. This
not only falsely suggests that we still had the medal, but also implies that my father had been alive all this time and had
not visited David, who has previously been referred to as a “stray dog.”

There are further scenes in the screenplay, which don’t appear in the film, that reinforce the idea that David didn’t care
for his father. In scene 193, David says he can’t shed “any tears for the man of steel” (which is how my father is referred
to earlier in the screenplay). In scene 190, David is dreaming, then sees his father and wakes up “in a sweat.”

Another scene that appears in the screenplay (scene 48) but not in the film, shows Peter smashing a milk bottle before hitting
my mother. In real life, there was an incident in Suzie’s youth when she dropped a milk bottle and it smashed, and another
occasion, outlined in Chapter 3, where I used a milk bottle to put out the fire I accidentally caused in our Melbourne flat.
Is Hicks playing around with the facts of our lives to create his own little fantasies? And then passing off these fantasies
as the truth, regardless of whose lives are damaged in the process?

A
lthough
Shine
is ostensibly a film about music, family relationships, and the struggle against mental illness, the Holocaust lurks in the
background like a dark shadow. For those sensitive to it, the references to the Nazi genocide of European Jews that Hicks
and his screenwriter, Jan Sardi, have embedded in the film are unmistakable. My parents lost family members in the Holocaust
and this aspect of the film has affected me very deeply.

There is one particularly appalling remark in
Shine
that relates to me personally. Shortly after one of my father’s fictional beatings of my brother, my character, Margaret,
says: “This house is like a concentration camp” (scene 54). Although cut from the film, it remains in the published screenplay.
Even Hicks and Sardi appear to have had last-minute jitters about putting it on screen—no doubt fearing that it might cause
me to take out an injunction against the film. Yet they have had no such compunction about leaving it in the screenplay to
be analyzed and devoured by unwitting students of film, drama, and Holocaust studies throughout the world. The notion that
anyone who lost relatives in the Holocaust, or who has relatives who are concentration camp survivors, would say such a thing
is repugnant.

I spoke about this to Professor Yehuda Bauer of the Hebrew University and of the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum and Memorial
in Jerusalem, who is arguably the world’s leading expert on the Holocaust. In his words: “Anyone who could write such a line,
who could make such a comparison to a normal or even to a seminormal household, obviously has no idea what a concentration
camp is.”

To make it clear just what an odious comparison was put into my mouth, and to demonstrate the vileness of the way in which
Hicks and Sardi play with the Holocaust at many other points in
Shine
, I want to explain a little of the background of what did happen to my family in Czestochowa, Poland. Jews have lived in
Poland for almost a thousand years and made an enormous contribution to the development of industry, commerce, and the arts
throughout the country, as well as establishing social, educational, and charitable institutions. Czestochowa, with its flourishing
Jewish community, was no exception.

When World War II broke out, on September 1, 1939, there were 28,486 Jewish men, women, and children living in Czestochowa.
Two days later, on September 3, the German army entered the town and the very next day—later referred to as “Bloody Monday”—a
pogrom was organized, in which many hundreds of Jews were brutally murdered. A second pogrom was carried out on Christmas
Day 1939, and Czestochowa’s great synagogue was set ablaze. But worse was to follow for the town’s Jews. In August 1940, about
1,000 young men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five were sent to a forced labor camp in Cieszanow, near Lublin. Practically
all of them perished. Many Jews from other parts of western Poland were uprooted from their communities and forced by the
Nazis to move—temporarily—to Czestochowa, and the city’s Jewish population swelled by several thousand. On April 9, 1941,
the Nazis established a ghetto in the town, an area into which all the Jews were herded. On August 23, after it was filled
to bursting point, it was sealed off and the population was left inside to endure starvation and disease.

In 1942, Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement and the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, fell on September 22. The Germans
chose this day to launch a large-scale “
aktion
” against the ghetto. By October 5, around 39,000 Jews had been deported to Treblinka concentration camp, fifty miles northeast
of Warsaw, where they were murdered in gas chambers.

Originally built as a forced labor camp for political prisoners, Treblinka had been rebuilt in June 1942 and fully equipped
with gas chambers and crematoria in preparation for its role in the genocide. In Treblinka, the Jews of Czestochowa joined
Jews transported from all over Poland and Nazi-occupied Europe. Upon arrival in this hellhole, the vast majority were stripped
naked and gassed. By August the following year, when a mass escape took place in which inmates overpowered and killed their
SS guards, about 900,000 Jews had been killed at Treblinka. After Auschwitz, Treblinka is the second largest site of mass
murder in history. Following the uprising, there were severe reprisals and the camp was dismantled in October 1943. Today
the only trace that remains of Treblinka are thousands of shards of broken stone that lie on the spot where the camp once
stood.

The Jews remaining in the camp at the time of its dissolution were moved to other camps where most were killed by shooting,
gassing, hanging, electrocution, and lethal injection, or simply left to rot through disease and exhaustion. Others were used
as slave labor, or subjected to sadistic torture dressed up as “medical experimentation.”

Most people nowadays have some idea of the Holocaust from books and films such as Steven Spielberg’s
Schindler’s List
. But even Spielberg’s film fails truly to convey the depths of depravity of the crimes perpetrated against the Jews. As one
of the survivors of the real Schindler transports said of the film: “
Schindler’s List
had no hangings. The dogs wore muzzles; audiences didn’t see them gnawing men’s genitals and women’s breasts. Spielberg’s
storm troopers refrained from swinging infants by their feet into brick walls, smashing their skulls like melons.”