Phillip Adams (6 page)

So they pedalled John Gorton an argument that America was gobbling up Australia's national identity, which indeed it was. Gorton bought it and also bought Jones' and Adams' idea that the government should forget financing opera houses or art galleries and instead help create an Australian film industry.

Gorton agreed to send Jones and Adams off on a six-week world trip in December 1969 to study film industries, with the Liberal MP Peter Coleman accompanying to keep an eye on them.

***

It was Adams' first overseas trip. He and Jones went to Tokyo then Moscow, Warsaw, Berlin and Prague and met Peter Coleman in Stockholm. Peter had refused to visit any communist country as he thought his editorials in the right-wing magazine
Quadrant
had made him personal enemies with communists, although (Adams said in the oral history) it was actually because Coleman thought he might catch communism like a virus.

In Moscow they visited film schools accompanied by a Soviet-provided interpreter, Vladimir Schmidt, who spoke English with a US mid-western twang. He had learnt English from a mid-western woman who had developed an unrequited passion for Lenin in the 1920s; he said his ambition was to visit Minneapolis or Kansas City and ask, ‘Where's the john, Mac?' and not be detected as a foreigner. Senator Eugene McCarthy from Minnesota, who had challenged Lyndon Johnson for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1968, was also staying at the Hotel National in Moscow and was amazed at Vladimir's accent. Vladimir revealed himself as a dissident who typed up poems by politically incorrect writers such as Pasternak and bound them. Jones and Adams wondered whether he was an agent provocateur trying to entice them into an anti-Soviet act.

One icy night Jones and Adams drove in a rented car to see the Bolshoi Ballet but they skidded on the ice and ran into the back of a taxi. A crowd gathered, the traffic police arrived and they were told to follow them to a police station to be interrogated. The prospect of seeing the Bolshoi faded as they waited and waited, until an officer in gold braid appeared and made a phone call to someone who probably had even more gold braid, repeating, ‘Touristi Avstraliski'. Barry Jones intervened and said, ‘Nyet touristi, apparatchiks!' He thought ‘apparatchiks' meant ‘bureaucrats'; instead it turned out to be a magic word, because apparently the police thought they were Communist Party officials. They were given broad smiles and coffee and allowed to go.

In Prague they made the serious mistake of wearing Russian fur hats as they trudged through the icy streets; it was just a year after Soviet tanks had crushed ‘the Prague spring'. As Jones recounts in his autobiography,
A Thinking Reed
(Allen & Unwin), a group of sullen youths closed in on them. They waved their passports and were allowed to continue. In Warsaw they met Jerzy Toeplitz, who had been dismissed as rector of the famous Polish Film School in Lodz. They regarded him as the best available candidate to run their proposed Australian film school. In those days of the communist secret police, he was worried about surveillance at Adams and Jones' hotel and suggested they walk in the street. They walked at length and when they returned to the Hotel Bristol, Adams' hotel key was not at the reception desk. They raced upstairs (said Jones in
A Thinking Reed
) and could hear a phone ringing in his room. They persuaded a housekeeper to open the door and found it had been ransacked. Probably the ringing phone had been a warning from the lobby to the thieves to clear out. Jones' room was untouched. In a slow interrogation by the police, Adams had to answer questions on a document such as his mother's name, date and place of birth, while the thieves escaped.

In Los Angeles, they had lunch twice at Ma Maison, where they were reliably told Orson Welles was an habitué. But their lunches were on his days off. Jones said in his book, ‘Welles was a talismanic figure for both of us — bearded, overweight, frequently frustrated but always aiming at the universal.'

In all, Adams and Jones visited nineteen film schools and Peter Coleman twelve. Jones and Peter Coleman had a blazing row for a time and wouldn't talk to each other, so Adams would sit in a car with them and Jones would say, ‘Tell Coleman such and such', and Coleman would say, ‘Tell Barry so and so'.

***

Adams and Barry returned with a proposition to put to Prime Minister and Arts Minister Gorton. Adams wrote the one-page report, which began with a piece of deliberate plagiarism from the American Declaration of Independence: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident. It is time for Australians to see their own landscapes, hear their own voices and dream their own dreams', with the establishment of a small film industry to interpret the national identity, producing ten to fifteen feature films a year, intensely local and culturally specific. The resulting films turned out to be
Strictly Ballroom
and
Priscilla Queen of the Desert
— films that didn't need studios or a lot of infrastructure but had a certain cheek and vibrancy about them. The report suggested that the government establish an experimental film fund for would-be young film-makers, a national film and television school, and a film bank.

The report asked Gorton for $100,000 and he agreed to provide it. But he was soon out of office, replaced by Billy McMahon and succeeded as arts minister by Peter Howson, who proceeded to de-Gortonise everything. On ABC Television's
This Day Tonight
, Adams called Howson ‘a pain in the arts' and noisily resigned from the advisory committee. It worked like magic. Billy McMahon, who had succeeded Gorton as prime minister, rang Adams the next morning, grovelled, said Sonia sent her love and similar rubbish and promised to restore the plan, which gave Adams and his supporters breathing space until Gough Whitlam was elected prime minister in 1972 and put a lot of money into reviving the film industry.

Reserve Bank Governor H C ‘Nugget' Coombs taught Adams that if a prime minister or political leader is also made arts minister, the arts world has no trouble getting action and money, so Adams promoted that idea successfully to Gorton, Whitlam and others. Initially Whitlam planned to make Senator Doug McClelland minister for the media and arts, and McClelland told Adams he planned to dismantle structures that Adams had set up, such as the Australian Film Development Corporation, and would not set up a film school. He was also uncomfortably close to the Hollywood film industry.

Adams said, ‘Nugget and I begged Gough not to give Arts to Doug but to keep it for himself because it's always better for the arts to be run by a prime minister or premier than by a junior minister — you get much more done.'

Adams wrote to Whitlam urging him to keep the arts ministry for himself. Whitlam did so and made McClelland media minister. Adams went on: ‘Doug never forgave me. But we had Gough in our corner, which meant we had the film school and all the other things we had talked about to John Gorton.'

While Whitlam was wondering what to do with the arts, Adams got a phone call from Peter Ward, an offsider to Don Dunstan, the then South Australian premier, asking Adams to come to Adelaide to talk about film. Adams went to Adelaide and was ushered into Dunstan's huge office, with a conversation pit almost out of sight of the desk. Dunstan came swanning towards Adams dressed in a safari suit and held out his hand, on which was a huge turquoise ring. Adams didn't know whether to kiss the hand or shake it. ‘It was offered in a cardinal sort of way,' he told the National Library, ‘so I think I actually bobbed the knee and put lips to ring.'

Don Dunstan told Adams he wanted him to live in South Australia and develop a state film industry. Adams declined to move but suggested that Dunstan's government form a state film corporation, have it look as if it was making documentaries for the government but actually make feature films. Dunstan thought it was a good idea and said he could get the funds approved, so the South Australian Film Corporation was born. Adams helped recruit some of the staff and soon the corporation made
Sunday Too Far Away
and
Picnic at Hanging Rock.

So then other state governments had to have film corporations — NSW Premier Neville Wran in his state; Dick Hamer in Victoria; even Tasmania had one for a while; Queensland had one but the man who the premier, Joh Bjelke-Petersen, appointed to head it robbed the corporation blind and ended up in jail, along with his wife.

Despite such missteps, Australia went from being one of the hardest places in the world to make films to one of the easiest. For a few glorious years, several federal and state bodies were lavishing money on film-makers.

***

In the late 1960s Adams was given a few thousand dollars by the ex-racing driver and tyre magnate Bob Jane and made
The Naked Bunyip
, a film about Australian sexual mores, starring Graham Blundell. Blundell played a young reporter who rushed around Australia asking people about their sex lives. The film had contributions from such well-known people as Malcolm Muggeridge, Norman Lindsay, young Harry Miller and young Barry Jones. For the first time in Australia, interviews with prostitutes were shown in a film. The film included scenes of full frontal nudity, lesbians kissing, a topless woman, descriptions of backyard abortions, a gang rape and a doctor talking about anal and oral sex — a lot for Australians in 1960-70s to accept in a film.

It started off three and a half hours long, but the one-armed chief Commonwealth film censor, Russell Prowse, came to Adams' aid ironically by insisting on many cuts, even a scene showing lesbians talking to each other, in spite of the fact that, at the same time, the Savoy Cinema in Melbourne was screening a film about lesbians. Adams pointed this out to the censor, who said, ‘They're European lesbians. We're not going to have that sort of thing here.' It was great for publicity and Adams made the censor's cuts as obvious as possible by showing an animated bunyip, drawn by Peter Russell-Clarke, dancing across the screen every time the censor had made a cut. Adams said, ‘In the 1960s in this wide, brown land, we had about the most repressive censorship in the Western world. So one of the reasons we made
The Naked Bunyip
was to stretch beliefs over sexuality, because it was starting to be debated, certainly in the Northern Hemisphere. There was another issue: The film industry was as dead as sexuality.'

In 1970, Adams screened
The Naked Bunyip
— now reduced by 45 minutes and the recipient of lashings of publicity generated by the censor — to great applause in halls and theatres, for example, the Palais, in cities and towns because the cinema chains had no faith in Australian movies. The film opened at the Palais Theatre in Melbourne, the biggest cinema in the country. It was packed to the rafters. The most popular parts of the film were the missing parts. The censor was off his face about it. He became very, very angry and threatened Adams and his friends with all sorts of legal problems. Barry Humphries decided to hold a press conference to cash in on the situation more. He told the press that the censor would have given his right arm to have been there — perhaps he had lost his arm through over-zealous film cutting. ‘These were not the kind of comments that would endear us to Mr Prowse,' said Adams. ‘We couldn't afford to promote the film but Mr Prowse came to its aid by banning a lot of it.' Adams and Barry Humphries made the best of the publicity and the showdown accelerated the collapse of film censorship.

The censor again helped Adams and his backers to get publicity when in 1972 they screened
The Adventures of Barry McKenzie,
and Barry Humphries (who, as Edna Everage, starred in the film with Barry Crocker) poured petrol on the fire by again making speeches saying ‘… the chief censor told me straight from the shoulder …'

Adams tried to get the film screened by Hoyts or Greater Union cinema chains, both of them foreign-owned and avoiding Australian films like poison, and suffered the same fate as he had with
The Naked Bunyip
. So Adams and company screened
Barry McKenzie
in public halls and independent cinemas starved of films by the distributors. Barry Humphries and he again had a wonderful time organising the publicity and the film took off like a rocket — it was the first Australian film to gross a million dollars, the first commercially successful Australian film for thirty years and the first to be seen as a success overseas since World War II. In the film, produced by Adams and directed by Bruce Beresford, Barry McKenzie (Barry Crocker), the extreme embodiment of Ockerism, sets off to England accompanied by a small inheritance and Aunt Edna (Barry Humphries) to get a cultural education. Aunt Edna, of course, later became Dame Edna Everage and is still going strong. Barry McKenzie is fond of beer, Bondi and beautiful sheilas, and gets drunk and vomits (often), is ripped off (more often) and insulted by effete Englishmen (constantly). He is exploited by record producers, religious charlatans and the BBC.

Adams believes that if it hadn't been for the interest
Barry McKenzie
created, many Australian film classics would never have been made. In London,
Barry McKenzie
took off as audiences understood the anti-ocker humour, although it failed in the provinces. In Adelaide, where Adams had hired a cinema to screen
Barry McKenzie
, he and Barry Humphries arrived to find a hundred ockers dressed as Barry McKenzie forming a wedding-type arch of beer spray from a hundred cans. Adams invented a character called Carlo, who claimed to be an earnest film buff and wrote letters to
The Age
attacking the character Barry McKenzie and saying he was an insult to proper film-making.