Sunday, 20 May 2007
So, what’s the big deal?
Apart from the presence of Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman, Baz Luhrmann, almost every big name in Australian film over the past decade (or at least it seems that way)....
For a start, we’ve got a big budget movie being filmed in the middle of a small country town in north-eastern Australia. On Wednesday I went for a walk from the movie set to a local newsagents in search of liquid refreshment. It was too early to take the shorter/closer alternative and walk into the Grandview....
It was like walking back seventy years and shifting a thousand kilometres in two hundred metres.
Down THERE (pointing to the Front Beach) it’s Darwin 1938. Right HERE (pointing to the ground at my feet outside the Coral Gem news agency) it’s Bowen 2007.
If they were making the film in Sydney, for example, a 400-strong film crew on a closed film set in a studio complex would hardly raise a ripple apart from the odd news report in the entertainment section of the media, together with the odd publicity shot when filming started. There would be the occasional story while filming went on, then the blaze of publicity around premiere time.
As the song says No one knows what goes on behind closed doors.
Here, although the set itself is closed to the public and the media, you can stand outside and see something of what’s actually going down in there. On Day One you could see a bloke on a horse twirling a parasol and apparently taking the mickey out of the aristocratic English gentlewoman under the white parasol.
There have been a goodly number of locals with time on their hands spending an hour or three standing outside the Grandview or on the other side of the toilet block at the Front Beach. Over the past week I doubt there’s been a time between eight-thirty and five-thirty when there haven’t been at east thirty people on the footpath outside the Grandview.
When shooting started on Monday, we had camera crews, reporters and photographers from all over the country looking for a story. I counted at least five TV crews that morning. In their quest for better pictures I gather that they made enough of a nuisance of themselves to be allowed on the set to film when the drew broke for lunch. That didn’t seem to be on the agenda when Mary Barltrop briefed the first lot of volunteers at five-forty-five on Monday morning.
And after that, there were still little groups of media people hanging around on Wednesday morning when I talked to one group who were figuring out how they were going to get pictures of the cattle run next week. Since you can stand on the edge of the set and see (more or less) what’s going on, all of those journos/photographers/whatever have been able to cover the shoot in ways that just wouldn’t happen on a closed set.
We’re told that the crew numbers something like four hundred people.
Four hundred people wouldn’t begin to put a dent in Sydney’s hotel accommodation, and would have absolutely no impact on the number of people in the city. Here, the film crew alone represents something like a 5% increase in the population.
Throw in the reporters, people from out of town who’ve landed an extras gig, assorted other interested parties and the influx of tourists who’ve heard about the shoot, and you’re looking at the same impact as you’d get by suddenly throwing, say, fifty or sixty thousand people into the middle of Sydney - the sort of impact you get with something like the Olympic Games. Doesn’t happen very often...
They’ve accommodated some of the crew and most of the stars in private homes and the rest of the accommodation in town is (predictably) booked out. They’ve apparently had problems with this weekend’s Bowen Open golf tournament because there’s nowhere for the golfers from out of town to stay...
The media coverage, of course, is all about the stars and the movie. If you’re looking for something along those lines, this might not be the best place to go - there are plenty of places where you can find that sort of stuff (once I’ve figured out how to do it I’ll have a few links to other sites where you can get that sort of info, assuming you haven’t done so already....
From now till the end of filming, what you’ll find here is more along the lines of the musings of someone who was inveigled into putting his name down as a Volunteer to let people know what’s going on on the movie set, explain some of the story line, point out relevant landmarks on the set, answer questions and, most importantly, promote the community.
The movie people will only be here for six weeks or so (not counting the eight weeks they’ve spent building the set). Much of the motivation for putting the volunteer program into place has been to ensure that there’s some long-term spinoff for the town....
The down side?
Not much, as far as I can see. You’re flat out finding a parking spot at that end of town during the day. A couple of businesses might be adversely affected when they close off the streets next week to run the cattle around the block. And you can’t walk along the Front Beach (as if we don’t have plenty of other beaches that are still open.
On the other hand when we went down to pick up a pizza from Franco last night we found the middle of town in semidarkness, street lights off and Franco explaining that he’d had to clear the shop at three o’clock that morning because he’d had enough and wanted to go home.
The cash flowing through the town has been something incredible. Not just the ten thousand or so that some people are picking up for renting a reasonably swisho house to someone from the movie for six weeks, the local petrol stations have been doing a roaring trade, with many of the people who were passing by but just dropped into town to see what was happening with the movie deciding to refuel here rather than at Guthalungra, Proserpine, Home Hill, Ayr or bloomsbury.
But a couple of other points:
The set at the bottom of Herbert Street is supposed to be the largest outdoor set of its kind in Australian film history (or something like that - I’m not all that into film trivia)...
The movie has the largest budget ever for an Australian movie (or so I’ve been told)...
To date, a volunteer program like this one has never been done on an Australian movie set. Which figures, since most films are made on a closed set behind the walls of a studio complex. Here they’re in the middle of town and will be for six weeks or so....
