Monday, 18 June 2007
Week 5: They burned down the church five times...
The things you have to do to get bombed these days....
It used to be so simple. Take a loaded wallet, put on your falling down gear (as one of my cricket coaching acquaintances observed What’s the use of getting all dressed up if all you’re going to do is fall over?) and head off to the nearest licensed water hole, and several hours later, there you were...
It’s much more complicated than that these days, especially if you’re making a movie....
After the Queens Birthday long weekend things were pretty quiet when I arrived for Volunteer duty on Tuesday afternoon. There were a few structural adjustments going on at Carney’s Corner and piles of dirt in assorted colours lying in the middle of the street.
I imagined someone from the set design crew going shopping at the local earth moving contractor...
We’ll have two metres of that one, three metres of the greyer one over there, one and a half metres of that one....
As the afternoon wore on, it was obvious the facade that had been used to conceal the Queensland Transport office on Carney’s Corner was being moved outwards. Some of the artwork on the display boards provided by the movie’s art department depicts Carney’s Corner on fire, so it seemed reasonably likely that the Fisheries Patrol were not in favour of seeing their office space go up in flames along with the facade...
When the cranes started to move a couple of wrecked Army vehicles into position in the bomb craters and the bobcat started spreading the soil, it was obvious we would end up looking at a scene of considerable devastation.
Which seems hardly surprising, given that the raids dropped more bombs on Darwin than were used in the attack on Pearl Harbour. And the town came under attack another sixty-three times after 19 February 1942.
A bit of basic research suggests that most of those raids occurred during the day, but since burning buildings look better at night time, that’s the way the filming has gone this week.
Back on the Volunteer orientation day it was pointed out to us that the set contained things that were actually on the ground in Darwin and Broome between the mid-thirties and the early-forties, and that things were there because they fitted into the story line and that the chronology might not be totally accurate.
For example, The Pearl movie theatre, which is based on the outdoor theatre in Broome rather than anything in Darwin, is showing The Wizard of Oz despite the fact that the film had not been released in Australia at that time.....
So if night time bombing is going to work better on screen, night time bombing is the way to go...
For anyone lucky enough to live on a hillside overlooking the set, night time shooting provides some interesting viewing. On Tuesday afternoon I was informed that the church down on Mission Island had gone up in flames no less than five times, and that the cross on top presented quite a spectacle each time it went up in flames.
Not that any of that is visible from the Little House of Concrete. Vacant hillside allotments were way outside the budget when I was in the market for somewhere to build ten years ago. So we have (to paraphrase Elvis Costello) a very fashionable hovel snuggled cosily into a hollow rather than the mansion on the hill (Thank you Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen).
By the end of the week, despite the devastation around the set, the police station, from what I can tell, has remained more or less unharmed. The reason? Unlike the rest of the set, where buildings are (more or less) a shell, there’s a real building underneath there...
And with the night time shooting, there’s not all that much to see during the day, at least from a local’s point of view, though the crowds of out-of-town visitors have continued more or less unabated.
A week’s worth of overcast days with threatened or actual drizzle has helped to keep the locals indoors as well, though the suggestion that southern visitors like ex-AFL footballer Dermot Brereton brought it with them seemed to be wearing thin when I made it on Friday morning.
To me, the lack of fuss when Mr Brereton arrived, film crew in tow, to film a closing report for the Channel Nine Getaway program was pretty typical of the way the presence of out-of-town celebrities has been treated over the past five weeks. A few nudges in the ribs, the odd whispered aside, and leave them alone (more or less) to do their thing.
Of course, if the opportunity presents itself, it’s possible to go a little further. As we moved away from Media Tart Central on Sunday afternoon, Warbo recounted his encounter with Hugh Jackman at the gym. An observation that Mr Jackman’s personal trainer was trying to kill him was apparently met with the suggestion that he wasn’t too far off succeeding...
The same way, when former Queensland Reds rugby player Steve Kefu was sighted at the Bowen State School Big Baz-aar on Saturday, there was a conspicuous lack of fuss...
And if the presence of Queensland Premier Peter Beattie in town on Sunday hadn’t been preceded by a request to meet the Volunteer group he might have managed to avoid some of the media spotlight.
That, however, would probably have been totally out of character for a self-confessed media tart.
Unfortunately, the presence of a large number of anti-local-government amalgamation protesters at McKenna Hall meant that Mayor Brunker, who’s no slouch himself when it comes to attracting the spotlight, was unable to be there when the Premier met the Volunteer group’s Number One Media Tart at the inevitable photo opportunity with the Volunteer group.
As I left the Grand View after lunch Cristian explained his position in the middle of the front row with a shrug of the shoulders. Well, you heard them. They called for short people to go to the front....
Yeah, I retorted. And if we had someone else in a wheelchair we could have used the two of you to bookend the shot rather than having someone hogging the limelight again.
The shrug I received in reply seemed to suggest that such, indeed, is life...
