Man of Film

At the outset I believe should declare my own interest. Bob Ellis and I have been friends since we were introduced by Quadrant’s current literary editor, Les Murray, in 1970 just after I was appointed foundation lecturer in film at Mitchell College of Advanced Education and Ellis was reviewing films for Nation Review. With anyone else, Les’s introduction would have been enough to start a lifelong feud: “Neil thinks your reviews are really emotional autobiography.”

“Not so much lately,” Ellis responded; and so began nearly forty years of conversation about movies.

In the 1980s Bob became a regular visiting lecturer in my courses on Australian film at Mitchell College in Bathurst. He was unfailingly helpful to the students and ruthlessly honest about his own work. The lectures were also great fun. Bob would have a half-full cup of coffee beside him which he would top up from a bottle of Jim Beam—seminars in film tended to be rather informal in those days—but the discussions were always of a very high standard. Perhaps Ellis’s most valuable contribution was to provide a unique insight into the collaborative nature of film making.

A tour de force was his hilarious account of writing the dialogue for Paul Cox’s Man of Flowers the weekend before the film was to start shooting. As Ellis tells it, Cox wasn’t even there most of the time. “He went off to carouse all night and break glasses and dance on table tops then returned hung-over the next morning.” My students and I suspected that the “mad Dutchman” (Ellis’s description) might have known exactly what he was doing.

Man of Flowers was filmed in a portentous art-house style with elegantly lit interiors, compositions based on painters like Magritte and a wonderfully multilayered performance by Norman Kaye in the title role. He plays “a good man” who in the opening scene is found paying a girl to strip for him accompanied by Lucia di Lammermoor on a record player before he goes off to play the organ in the local church. All of which is sent up mercilessly in Ellis’s dialogue. “It was as though the writer was defacing the pictures in an art gallery,” one of my students observed. And of course it was this counterpointing between the irreverent dialogue and the lush visuals that is one of the reasons the film works as well as it does. A joint seminar with Ellis and Cox to discuss not just Man of Flowers but also their other collaborations, Cactus and My First Wife, proved impossible to schedule, although Cox was more than generous in making copies of his work available.

Ellis made a point of bringing his co-writer Stephen Ramsey with him when he came to Bathurst to discuss the mini-series True Believers literally days after it had been broadcast on the ABC. Stephen was no stranger—he’d been with Bob the year before when they had combined some lectures for me with research on Ben Chifley. I had showed them the great man’s cottage and drove them down to Katoomba where we sat in the booth at the Paragon Cafe that Chifley regularly occupied when he brought his driver in for a cup of tea on their way to Bathurst. (We also discovered to our delight that Ben didn’t buy his wife Old Gold sweets as we feared, but the expensive handmade Paragon chocolates.) In the discussion about the series with my students Ellis did his best to explain not just how he and Ramsey had worked together, but how they had collaborated with the ABC’s directors and producers.

This involvement with Bathurst and Ben Chifley has since had a fascinating sequel. In 2004 Ellis wrote A Local Man, a one-man play about Ben Chifley starring Tony Barry, who had been Ellis’s original choice for the role in True Believers. The ABC preferred expatriate actor Ed Devereaux—who did a good job, but at the time Bob believed Barry would have been better. Some two decades later his opinion was vindicated, twice over! Barry gave a superb performance in the stage play; then was equally good as Chifley in the docu-drama An Infamous Victory with Ellis again co-writing the screenplay.

Naturally Bob Ellis’s screenwriting needs to be researched more fully using the drafts of his collaborators, not to mention his own files. Unfortunately vital material was lost in the 1994 fire that destroyed the Ellises’ Palm Beach home; but there is more out there and this needs to be collected as soon as possible. Our discussions in the 1980s were largely based on oral history, although Bob did let us make multiple copies of his Newsfront draft. I was able to give him one of our copies when the original was lost in the fire. This was Ellis’s first draft, which made this copy vitally important to Australian film history. Newsfront (1978) is still the most famous film he has scripted and is recognised now as an Australian classic.

The idea of making a film built around the newsreels of the 1940s and 1950s was producer David Elfick’s. Ellis decided to link the various plots and sub-plots surrounding the coverage of events like bushfires, floods, the Redex trials and the Melbourne Olympics by building the narrative around the careers of two brothers, “Len and Frank McGuire” (Bill Hunter and Gerard Kennedy), working in the newsreel and film industry, based very loosely on real-life cameramen Ross and Syd Wood. He also skilfully incorporates the experiences of “Chris Hewitt”, another younger cameraman played in the film by Chris Haywood.

This information came almost entirely from Howard Rubie, who Bob had met in 1959 when Rubie was still working as a newsreel cameraman at Cinesound. He was the source of most of the material about the Maitland floods, except that Howard, unlike the character in the movie who is killed, only nearly drowned. Rubie, as Ellis understood it, was also to direct. This was the real reason Bob was so difficult about cuts to the screenplay when Phil Noyce took over as director.

The confrontation between Ellis as screenwriter on the one hand and producer, David Elfick and director (and subsequently co-writer) Phil Noyce, on the other, has become part of Australian film legend. What’s more, the best stories are true. Elfick really did bring down Ellis in a flying tackle when Bob rushed off with the script. (This was confirmed to me by both Elfick and Ellis himself.) Bob did have his name removed from the titles only to demand that it be restored when he realised how good the film was. It was all handled with Ellis’s usual eccentric panache but he was fully justified in claiming his credit and did have a legitimate grievance.

In 1983 Phil Noyce told me that there was never any question about the quality of Bob’s writing—“It just had to be shortened”—and he attributed much of the film’s success to the script. His and Elfick’s only major change was to reverse Ellis’s two final scenes to give Newsfront a more upbeat ending. Recently Noyce has done his best to make amends, admitting in his autobiography that he “stole the film from Howard Rubie”.

Ellis’s work as director has been almost as distinguished as his writing. Wisely, his first film was virtually a two-hander. Some critics found Unfinished Business (1985) “slow” but for me the measured pace and subdued lighting were essential for this melancholy but strangely heartwarming tale of former lovers (John Clayton and Michelle Fawden) who meet to conceive a child when the woman’s husband proves sterile. During the course of the night we learn they had aborted their own baby and this is a kind of reparation. Ellis was able to get his actors to achieve a real intimacy during the shoot. The lovemaking is never choreography. It is always real people coming together and thus believably erotic. And of course Clayton was a handsome man and Fawden very beautiful.

Ellis was not above playing mind games on his cast when they had to play their first nude scenes together. A horrified John Clayton described to me how Bob turned up in a policeman’s helmet waving a whiskey bottle, sat on the bed and in an excellent imitation of Frank Thring said, “Now I want you to imagine I am not here.” It was actually a ruse so they would forget to be embarrassed—although for a moment Clayton wondered if he was going to have to direct the film himself!

Warm Nights on a Slow Moving Train (1988), Bob’s next film, was the kind of disaster that bedevils directors all over the world. The theatrical release was re-cut by the producer in spite of Ellis’s vehement objections. Then there was a major scandal when Bob started to show his director’s cut at private screenings in Sydney. When I found out about this I invited Ellis to show his cut to my students. It was much better than the version I’d seen at the AFI screening and the students enjoyed what we all agreed was a very fine film. The materials on which this “long version” was based are now missing—a great loss, as it seemed to all of us back in 1988 that this was a classic case of the money men getting it wrong, and that Warm Nights was eventually going to be a prime candidate for a reconstruction by the film scholars guided, of course, by Ellis—“Don’t you change a frame!”

The Nostradamus Kid (1992) was much more successful. The film is unerring in its recreation of life as it was lived in and around Sydney University in the early 1960s. Even though I was not in the literary crowd it is easy to recognise the thinly disguised portrait of Michael Kirby and that “McAlister”, the hero’s sometime flat-mate, is a composite of Les Murray and Richard Brennan. (Brennan himself appears as an extra in one of the crowd scenes.) Noah Taylor’s “Ken Elkin” is of course a self-portrait of Ellis.

The plot is built around one of Bob’s most famous escapades. Convinced there was going to be a nuclear exchange when the Russian and American ships confronted each other during the Cuban missile crisis, he persuaded one of his girlfriends to drive up to Katoomba so they would escape the atomic blast when Sydney was bombed. Understandably enough her father, a prominent newspaper editor, called the police and tried to charge Ellis with kidnapping. In the film Bob interweaves this story with an earlier incident when, while attending a Seventh Day Adventist camp, he and a boyhood friend became convinced the world was going to end.

Given this sort of material many Australian film-makers would have turned the film into a bitter anti-religious satire. In Ellis’s hands The Nostradamus Kid becomes a gentle witty coming-of-age story. Inevitably a lot of the movie is about sex. But even though many of the scenes are quite explicit, the youngsters’ fumblings are always treated compassionately, and, as in so much of his autobiographical writing, Ellis is ruthlessly critical of his younger self.

The Seventh Day Adventism against which Bob rebelled is treated with good-humoured affection, even though at the time the restrictions must have been infuriating. My one criticism is that occasionally the cast have difficulty coping with the script’s at times very literary dialogue. Here, I suspect, the fault is less with Ellis as writer/director than the actors’ training; and indeed you can see them improving in the course of the film. We really did speak like that back then—at least sometimes—and if more films are going to be set in the mid to early twentieth century, and we all hope they will, younger actors are going to have to work on their diction.

In describing Bob Ellis’s film writing and directing I have avoided discussing his many books of political and social commentary even though I have read most of his work over the years and consider him to be among our best prose writers. The problem for those of us who admire his screen writing and directing is that these weighty tomes keep him from film-making. Still his fascination with politics helped to shape True Believers and An Infamous Victory. Reportedly there has also been a fine documentary, Goodbye Parliament House. This could not be located when I was researching this article but we are still looking. Once again there could be a preservation problem.

Ellis has been a major figure in the Australian film and television industry for nearly forty years and made a major contribution to the success of what David Stratton has called Australia’s last new wave. Moreover his script writing is a continuing story. Catalonia, Bob’s adaptation of George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, is slated to start shooting in February next year. Colin Firth has been cast as Orwell and Kevin Spacey is to play Kopp, Orwell’s commanding officer. Hugh Hudson (who directed Chariots of Fire) is to direct and the producer is Al Clark, who co-produced the latest version of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Neil McDonald writes: If anyone knows where a copy of the cut footage from Warm Nights on a Slow Moving Train can be found, or the location of Goodbye Parliament House, please contact me at Quadrant. The finder can be assured of a hero’s welcome.