Making Priscilla

Wigs, dresses, bust sizes, penises, drugs, nightclubs, and bloody Abba!

Al Clark, producer of
The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert,
describes in hilarious detail the follies of the movie business, how this outrageous and enduring film came to be made, how it could so easily have gone wrong, and how it became the international phenomenon it remains over two decades later. 

One of the most successful Australian films of all time, it is now also a stage musical which has been performed in a dozen countries – and on one cruise ship.

“
Humour and panache … the flavour of William Goldman's classic
Adventures in the Screen Trade
”
 –
Australian Book Review

“
Witty and absorbing
”
–
Film Review

“
Funny and revealing
”
–
Time Out

“
Deft and intelligent … riveting
”
–
The Observer

“
Clark is a natural writer who knows and loves movies and has helped make one of the finest Australian films of recent times. Stories like this need to be told, and Clark is savvy enough to make sure it is spiced
”
–
Cinema Papers

“
It's the way Clark lets his mind wander that gives the book an enthralling depth under the colourfully honest descriptions … a laugh a minute
”
–
Encore

In the ten years I have known him Al Clark has never failed,  at any hour, to speak with wit and searching eloquence of what has happened to him lately — or to me, or to others present — in sentences not precrafted but
sifted
out of many other alternative sentences available to him, editing as he speaks. A consummate conversationalist — yet never, like Samuel Johnson or E.G. Whitlam, an ego-swollen soliloquist — he does not impose on the table what is to be the topic but responds to what is offered with humour and warmth and civility, and shapes and ices and (as it were) blow-dries it as it passes through his mind and the refining mill of his language. He is one of my favourite people and I see too little of him, perhaps because I am horrible company. But enough of me.

Al is a Scot raised in provincial Spain (he speaks a disarming rough-peasant version of that dramatic language to startled Iberian throngs at festivals) and in a Scottish boarding school of which he does not like to speak, and an English university, Birmingham, where he graduated, with an appealing dogged circularity, in Spanish. His Englishness, Scottishness and Spanishness form a continuing tension in him I think, each one held in check with difficulty by the others, each one secretly planning to take over his inner world and being nightly beaten back in battle by wave after wave of blood-stained mental infantry, back into
proportion,
told to heel, sit, calm down, good 
dog,
stay,
good dog.

The English part of him is a supreme observer, one of those ‘desert-loving English’ that Prince Feisal with justice moaned about in
Lawrence
of
Arabia.
Such Englishmen, ‘handy at a dance, and invaluable in a shipwreck’, manage crisis with a coolness born of the knowledge that nothing that might happen could be worse than boarding school, which makes them ideal film producers and production managers and stunt men in the filthy outposts of empire in time of monsoon, sandstorm, earthquake and the arrival of the completion guarantor. The Scottish part of him is an intrepid jigsaw constructor able, as was the nation that gave us the Tay Bridge and television and the
Titanic
, to put together money and music and rights and legals and lenses and cameras and wigs and false bosoms and star names from across the known world, yet keep the movie exactly what it should be, nationally and culturally and musically. The Spanish part of him hungers (of course) for the dramatic, for foreign adventure and flamboyant complication, to be rowing up the Amazon at night unsure of the size of bird, or the lethalness of serpent, that will drop down upon him next in a squawk or a hissing or a slimy tangling later to be recalled in calm over caffe latte in a restaurant on Bondi Beach, if he survives the encounter, as of course he might not. To live in the present tense, yet always taking notes for the future, with a stifled wild rumour of glad carnage and romance in his heart, is Al’s preferred way I think, but he would of course deny this for fear of alarming his investors.

In
Priscilla
he found the project that suited all his ethnic tendencies and, in the sweet and sumptuous bawdy chronicle of its making, fit canvas for his talent, both as adjutant general and cool reviewing Suetonius. This elegant commemorative tapestry of hectic adventure in three continents and rather more
genders is a certain small classic (along with
Picture
and
Final
Cut
and the journals of Simon Gray and Richard E. Grant, and Mrs Coppola’s crisp annulment valentine
Notes
On
the
Mak
ing
of
Apocalypse
Now
) in the literature of heady and hellish times remembered when the world was young, laddie, comrade, kid, about six months ago.

Al, of course, would deny this ability to maintain a decorous distance during his ever-more-gothic adventures, an ability akin to imagining a python roasted and under glass while the snake is alive and coming at you with fangs and forking tongue. ‘Experience and observation,’ he says mildly, ‘it’s all the same thing, isn’t it?’ The unfazed prim clarity with which he recalls, like the dimmer heroes of Evelyn Waugh, a malignant universe out to get him and most other things with a pulse, is therefore pretty beguiling I think; or disquieting, or alarming, as you choose.

For here in one short book are gothic horrors enough to glut any soused and chundering Petronius time-travelling on the Santa Monica freeway in a toga stained with Australian red and Californian sperm and wind-blown desert sand. Uluru and the Big Apple. The worst Los Angeles earthquake. Hollywood moguls and Hollywood rough cuts and Hollywood previews and coarse American crowds in the cinema darkness howling ‘Fast forward! Fast forward!’ French film festival multitudes and noisome critics and red carpets and searchlights and the yachts of the rich and ego trips with hard landings of the mentally bruised and the stark mad. Macho British film stars in high heels and stockings. A tidal wave of San Francisco drag queens uprearing in rouged and pouting and somehow murderous approval. Tony Curtis and Michael Hutchence and Liberace. Vaginal ping-pong balls and inflated condoms that serve as breasts. The preserved turds of Abba. And the mateship,
and friendship, and comradeship, that makes all even.  

… And, oh yes, the desert, and the desert sunset, and panoramas gorgeously twilit enough to please even David Lean, and Aboriginal quarrels over secret ritual and sacred site, and the unmixed mysteries of the night, deep night among sandhills, with good companions, beneath a gibbous moon. To read it is to experience it, as in all good travel and novel writing, and this is prose that would not disgrace Bruce Chatwin or Robert Byron or Mark Twain, or those different British public-school men Lytton Strachey and Raymond Chandler, or those vivider Americans Hunter S. Thompson and P.J. O’Rourke, or that master-monster of memorious travelling venom, Evelyn Waugh, who once said memorably that a book may be many things but in the final reckoning is one thing only, an adventure in language. Al makes this our adventure too, and I would kill a few of my relatives, particularly those of Murwillumbah, to be able to write like this, with such charged and virgin plainness on the page — to bestride in one paragraph the enormities of human existence while picking out with golden eagle eyes the tiny particularities down there miles beneath: the bits of glitter and human struggle that escape less caring eyes. I would kill a few of my editors too, and most of my producers but Al, who understands what it is in the end a writer goes through. For he has been there, and is there, always deftly, searchingly, limpidly, finding the right word.

No diaries, I am staggered to report, went into this wonderful book; only memory.  

And now the memory is ours.  

October, I998

 Left to right, Brian Breheny, Al Clark and
Stephan Elliott prepare for Cannes.
[Image credit: Al Clark]

It is one-thirty in the morning when the call comes through.

In the part of the imagination where dread lives, these calls only occur in the middle of the night, and on more occasions over the years than I wish I could remember I have stumbled, numb and dazed, in the dark towards the telephone to find that it is just somebody from another country who has no idea what time it is in Sydney. Nobody ever knows what time it is in Sydney, except for those who live there, and they know far too well.

The caller, from London, has been given my number by the only person in Sydney or anywhere else who knows where I am staying that night. He has woken the manager of a motel on the main street of Cottonwood, Arizona, a sepulchrally quiet western town full of tumbleweed and old ghosts, and the manager has walked down to his office and switched through the call.

It begins with the four words every child with a developed sense of loss grows up to fear the most: your father is dead.

The daughter of the British actor Patrick Magee, who died in 1982, once told me that soon after his demise she met the
daughter of Patrick Macnee, who was in
The
A
vengers.
On the day that Patrick Magee died, Patrick Macnee’s daughter was staying at her father’s house in Palm Springs while he was away appearing in a stage play in Australia. A reporter from one of the American tabloids called to ask how she felt about her father’s death. ‘But he can’t be dead,’ she protested. ‘He’s in Australia. I spoke to him on the phone half an hour ago.’ The reporter would not be overridden. ‘Oh, he’s dead,’ he reassured her. ‘It’s the time difference.’

October 1992. I am in America for two reasons. One is that my wife Andrena Finlay, who has produced a film called
Frauds,
is in Los Angeles with its writer-director Stephan Elliott, engaged in what began as a co-operative venture but is deteriorating into a war of wills. After viewing the director’s cut of the movie on tape, the US co-financiers Live Entertainment, a video distribution company allied to the high-rolling Carolco Pictures, have made it a condition of their acceptance (and consequent payment of the substantial sum due on delivery) that the picture is re-edited under their supervision and at their expense. The understanding is that this will be done in consultation with, and with the participation of, the writer-director, but his increasing exasperation with what they are doing to the film — particularly the first two reels — is making him a combative collaborator, and it is being made clear in various ways that he is not welcome in the cutting room except when called in to review edited sequences.

The other reason for being here — heightened by the disappointed incomprehension which Sydney people involuntarily display to somebody who has forgone his status as a glamorous outsider — is that I feel increasingly isolated living in Australia,
where I moved because of marriage, because my birthday is a national holiday there, and because it is the only country in the world to have lost a prime minister surfing.

As a resourceful film producer and executive who also speaks fluent Spanish, it seems appropriate that I should consider moving to a Spanish-speaking city which is also the centre of the movie business. I have an encyclopaedic knowledge of film history, which may be a distinction in a place where the majority of executives think of
Saturday
Night
Fever
as an old movie, and I do my own reading, which might make me unique.

Coverage — the synopsis and reader’s assessment prepared when a novel or a screenplay arrives in the offices of a film production company — is virtually a trading currency in Hollywood. If one’s ‘material’ receives positive coverage, word travels and so does the coverage, which becomes a kind of talisman. Negative coverage, on the other hand, can kill a good screenplay because it means that only the defiantly curious will bother to read it.

Most coverage is itself practically unreadable, saturated with the arcane vernacular of assessors, with their beats, turning points and throughlines. It is also, by its very nature, highly unreliable. (A studio head who had skimmed the coverage finally read the script when a project, ready to start shooting, came to him for final approval. ‘The guy’s a loser,’ he complained about the main character before pulling the plug on the picture. ‘It didn’t say
that
in the coverage.’) Perhaps the most devastatingly sparse coverage of all was provided by Gore Vidal to a producer who approached him with a screenplay which required, the producer claimed, ‘a polish’. Vidal read it. ‘You think the script needs a polish,’ he replied. ‘I think it needs a trip to Lourdes.’

In addition to visiting the people I know already, I arrange
to see a few I have never met. Apart from a desire to challenge the odds by dreaming up a genuinely original game show, I do not have much interest in television, which, to paraphrase Quentin Crisp, both diminishes and domesticates the scale of our fantasies. But I have never come across an American TV executive before, and I feel it is time that I did, just in case the game show materialises.

A man at NBC informs me that their mini-series and telemovies are ‘concept driven’. Are there any concepts, I ask, that they have no interest in driving? ‘Satanism, abortion, homosexuality. We don’t do those. And,’ he adds archly, ‘the disease of the week is currently in remission.’ So at whom were these shows aimed? ‘Our demographic is eighteen to forty-nine,’ he replies. A pause. ‘Which you could say isn’t really a demographic at all.’

Although neither is the Latino link I could be looking for, I meet two interesting Mexicans within a few hours. An actor from Ensenada, catching his breath in the lobby of the cable network Showtime, following a five-hour drive to deliver in person an audition showreel for Jim McBride’s
The
Wrong
Man,
which he stayed up all night preparing with two video players linked up in his living room; and a video distributor who tells me about a friend in Mexico City, the theatrical distributor of the film
Alligator
2,
who calls an exhibitor to enquire about the first day’s results at the box office. The exhibitor tells him that there has been no business. The distributor, conceding that the picture is not a blockbuster, asks how much money it took. ‘I said no business,’ replies the exhibitor, ‘I mean not a single dollar,
not
a
ticket
sold
’.

I enjoy the freewheeling, but around the time that I find myself discussing with a senior executive at Universal whether he should take a deli sandwich or a falafel to the baseball game
that evening it occurs to me that perhaps what I should be pitching to people here — the home of the sporting metaphor in business — is something a little more specific than the ability to give an epigrammatic shape to a random thought.

The pitch is a crucial kick-start to the labyrinthine process of getting a movie made, and while there are no unconditional laws, the shorter it is the more likely it is to be effective. The story should take no longer than two minutes, the high concept summary — which invariably will include the title of a recent hit movie — about five seconds. As
Die
Hard
epitomises the successful action-thriller franchise which everybody seeks to emulate,
Under
Siege
would almost certainly have been pitched as
Die
Hard
on a battleship, and
Speed
as
Die
Hard
on a bus, although I cherish the idea of
Die
Hard
at a wedding, or
Die
Hard
at a bar mitzvah. The two best pitches I have heard of were both made at the same studio, Universal. The director Ivan Reitman is reported to have settled in the president’s office, waited for silence, said ‘Schwarzenegger. De Vito.
Twins’
and then got up to leave. The producer David Permut was even briefer. He entered escorting Dan Aykroyd, sat him in an armchair and stood behind it pointing at Aykroyd’s head while humming the first four notes of the
Dragnet
theme.

At the 1991 Cannes Film Festival seventeen months earlier, while waiting for Phil Collins’ vacillating commitment to star in
Frauds
to trigger the film’s funding, Stephan and Andrena went around pitching a musical comedy about two drag queens and a transsexual driving across Australia in a bus. It was called
The
Adventures
of Priscilla,
Queen
of
the
Desert,
which Stephan had written a couple of weeks before the festival, so that he would have something else to talk about while he was there.

His verbal pitch to a series of increasingly bewildered distributors
was absolutely hilarious, but his attempts at ‘director’s notes’, full of bad grammar and flaccid hyperbole, were comical for a different reason. Invoking Dusan Makavejev and Bill Bennett — the only two directors with whom he had worked as an assistant who were known to Cannes regulars — he described a drag queen as ‘an extremely amusing and very much neglected member of today’s society,’ then added, with a perfunctory sting for the international marketplace, that ‘they exist, enthral, amuse and entertain people of all races in all corners of the globe’.

After Cannes he wrote another ‘director’s note’: ‘Nobody could anticipate the reaction. The recording and newly formed film production giant PolyGram International snapped up the concept within hours. Before I could draw a breath, England’s unstoppable ‘hit factory’ Stock/Aitken/Waterman agreed to produce all the music for the film’s production numbers and allow us access to their artists for cameos. A very major international star has expressed keen interest in playing the leading drag queen’.

In the long interlude since then,
Frauds
has been made and
Priscilla,
which threatened to become trapped in the congested corporate arteries of PolyGram, has been navigated through them, first by Sarah Radclyffe at the subsidiary Working Title; then, after her departure from the company, by Michael Hamlyn, a producer developing projects there and a friend of INXS singer Michael Hutchence, ‘the very major international star’ to whom Stephan alluded in his boast. Meanwhile, Andrena has brought in the Australian funding body the Film Finance Corporation (FFC), and a deal has been agreed in principle, subject to many conditions still to be negotiated, the cardinal one being casting.

Even in its still incomplete state,
Frauds
strikes me as one of
the most confident first films I have seen, and one of the most original. If there is a presiding spirit, it is that of a more bad-tempered Tim Burton. It is not a traditional comedy (though it has many comic elements, black and otherwise) or an orthodox thriller (despite moments when it masquerades as one), and Phil Collins’ affable image takes a darkly malevolent turn. Above all, it is a film full of bold strokes and colours, not a
beige
picture or one of those festival movies, ponderous yet entirely without gravity, that could easily have been directed by a social worker. Some have complained about its gleeful cruelty, about its lack of compassion towards its characters, but despite its flaws it is the most idiosyncratic first feature from an antipodean director since Jane Campion’s
Sweetie.

The script of
Priscilla
is more broadly comedic in tone, as well as being, in its latter stages, quite touching, a quality intensified by the total absence of ingratiation employed to achieve it. It is inhabited by people with a recognisable ‘voice’, developed individuals who do not exist solely to propel the needs of the narrative. As Jonathan Demme did in his ’80s comedies, particularly
Something
Wild,
Stephan transcends the preoccupation with having characters merely be funny: he also creates a funny world for them to drift through, trying to find their bearings.

He gave me a copy to read at the time he first wrote it, and apart from a middle act — subsequently revised — that lost its pulse beat and momentum, lapsing too often into dreary caricature, it felt remarkably complete, with a consistently high standard of abuse exchanged by the bickering protagonists.

If the directors I have worked with have had anything in common other than their distinctiveness, it is that they aspired to be — in some cases already were — real movie makers, in love with the medium, intoxicated with exploiting it and incapable
of confusing it with any other. When I produced films in the UK, its cinema was largely suffocated by literary emphasis, subdued emotions, visual restraint. It was rarely surreal, playful or sexually charged. At its worst, watching it was rather like downing a magnum of chloroform. While many Australian pictures of the period were equally soporific and middlebrow, one felt at least an impatient energy at work behind the decorum, even if the cringing fear of making a mess on the carpet was still predominant.

It is evident that Stephan does want to make a mess on the carpet, and preferably to spread it around the house as well. He certainly has talent, although I am not yet sure that it is matched by judgement. Perhaps that is what I am supposed to contribute. When he and Andrena propose that I replace her as the producer of
Priscilla,
I am excited by the challenge.

Other than dreary expediency, there are many complex and overlapping reasons for wanting to make a particular film. Because it takes so long, is sometimes so poorly paid and is frequently the incubator of so much conflict, it requires a tonic which gives buoyancy to the banality of the process, a sense of mission which keeps one in a state of resolute enchantment through the sheer drudgery required to make the movie happen.

For me, the key is always a haunting image, the axis around which the picture will revolve. In the case of
Priscilla,
it is a series of images, which will eventually become the film’s central montage: one drag queen rehearses a musical number in solitude against a surreal desert backdrop, while another applies a coat of lavender paint over graffiti on their broken-down bus, and the third walks across the outback to find help.