I find that I’m more attracted to documentaries now than I ever was before. It seems that whenever I check out what films might be coming soon in theaters or at festivals, I am most excited about the documentary fare over the more traditional narrative films. I’ve tried to explore why that might be, but I think, at worst, when a documentary goes bad you still have the potential to learn something interesting, while when a narrative goes South it has the potential to feel like you’ve wasted a significant chunk of your life (relatively speaking, of course).
That said, I am enormously attracted to documentaries that educate me on the history of cinema, or find a dark corner of the art form that I was unaware of. Couple that education with a tight pace, gorgeous look and a sense of fun, and you have one of the most recent documentary joys I’ve gotten to experience, Mark Hartley’s NOT QUITE HOLLYWOOD.
“Most genres have been documented before, but here you can walk away from this documentary with a great sense of discovery about this whole movement that you didn’t know existed and hopefully you’ll want to seek some of them out,” responds director Hartley during a recent interview I was fortunate enough to conduct.
NOT QUITE HOLLYWOOD focuses on the Australian exploitation, or Ozploitation as it is referred to in the film’s marketing material, genre cinema of the ’70s and early ’80s; an era of Aussie cinema punctuated by rampant nudity and general vulgarity, violent horror and some of the most insane action-adventure stunt pieces ever to grace a screen (often at the personal injury expense of at least someone in the cast or crew). Films like George Miller’s MAD MAX (1979) gets its due attention, but so does a number of films you may have never heard of, such ROADGAMES (1981), THE LONG WEEKEND (1979), TURKEY SHOOT (1982), PATRICK (1978) and ALVIN PURPLE (1973). Thanks to NOT QUITE HOLLYWOOD, and its upcoming theatrical release in the United States, your cinematic ignorance does not have to last.
“We never thought,” states director Hartley, “when we were making this documentary on Australian obscure exploitation titles, that someone in America would be even vaguely interested in going to see it in a cinema, but obviously, they are.”
The bigger question to Hartley is why he felt these obscure exploitation titles would be interesting enough for a documentary at all. Why these films? Why now?
“I had seen these films when I was a kid or had seen a few of them and I had gone to read about them in books about Australian film, and they were very rarely listed. They’re lucky if they got a footnote,” explains Hartley. “And then I met the director Richard Franklin who made both ROADGAMES and PATRICK, and at that point he had just directed PSYCHO II (1983), and I invited him to come talk to the school where I was at; the high school which he actually had attended as a student. And I went to research Richard as well, and he wasn’t in any of the books. So I kind of knew early on that there was this whole undocumented history of Australian cinema that had just been totally dismissed, and when I was making clips I made about 150 music videos I worked with a lot of old-school crews who worked on those films and they all just had amazing stories. And I thought I should try to do something and I was always working on other projects at the same time and this was just the one that just so happen to, you know, get up, eventually.”
But why was such a large chunk of Aussie cinema history ignored?
“It’s hard in Australia because filmmaking is government subsidized,” answers Hartley. “The cultural bodies are the ones deciding on what films get made ultimately. They want to make films that are worthy. And so that was kind of the backlash to these films, you know, ‘What message are we sending to the rest of the world about Australia.’ We’d rather them see PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK (1975) or MY BRILLIANT CAREER (1979) than, you know, girls strapped to monster trucks and driven through the outback nude”
Of course, if you were alive back then, you actually may have seen these films in the local drive-in or grindhouse too… they just might not have been called by their original titles. Quite often these Aussie films were Americanized via title changes or dubbing, in an attempt to eliminate any overtly Aussie characteristics that may potentially turn American, or UK, audiences off.
As director Hartley elaborates, “MAD MAX was released over here dubbed. Up until recently it was only the new DVD release here that had the Australian dialogue on it. It was dubbed with American accents. I was in Brussels recently for a festival over there and they just struck a brand-new print of MAD MAX, first time a print had been struck in a long time, and they played it and it still had the American language on it. It’s incredible to think that that’s what it was like back then. People were just trying to fool people into thinking it was just a generic drive-in biker movie.”
It wouldn’t surprise me that US and UK audiences watching NOT QUITE HOLLYWOOD might be presented with clips of films they remember seeing, but perhaps don’t remember seeing quite like this. Of course, now we get the back story, and the proper perspective, for understanding where this Aussie cinema came from. However, as educational as the documentary could be considered, it is never boring. Fast-paced and madcap, NOT QUITE HOLLYWOOD is perfectly in tune with the cinema it celebrates.
“A lot of people were saying, ‘Who’s going to narrate it? Who’s going to narrate it?’ and I kept saying, ‘Well, we’ve got 90 people narrating it; why do we need any more?” explains Hartley. “The cut was full on, as you can imagine, we had about 350 hours of material we had to call down to 100 minutes. So I think that’s part of the reason for the pace. Because I just knew if we didn’t get anything in, it just wouldn’t be seen. But I have a music video background and I just wanted to bring a real rock ‘n roll sensibility to it. I don’t have a documentary background at all so it was more that I knew that it had to reflect the films it was celebrating and it couldn’t be… if you put the brakes on for too long people would just, you know, it wouldn’t do justice to the crazy films it was profiling.”
Of course, the documentary more than does the films profiled justice. Flashy and exhibiting the same level of high-energy insanity as the overall genre they’re being used to complement, everything about the documentary excels, from the opening credits (“I remember seeing the credits for the first time and just going ‘God, now the rest of the film has to be this good’”) to the clips themselves (“I made a point when we did NOT QUITE HOLLYWOOD, I wanted… ‘Look,’ I said, ‘we need the money to go back and grade these films from the original negs,’ so we really tried to get the stuff looking as good as possible”). As Hartley further states of the film clips, and I have to agree, “…the way that they are being seen in NOT QUITE HOLLYWOOD is sometimes better than they’ve ever looked before. It’s great that we could actually find that material and do that.”
But it’s not just fancy graphic design and amazing film clips that make the doc worth seeing, it’s also the conversation engaged in throughout. The cast and crews of the various films give up the goods, sharing all the dirty details and anecdotes about their films while the film clips entice you further (film clips that are as full of violence and action as they full-frontal nudity; before internet porn, there was softcore Ozploitation). And lest you think the directors profiled herein had their day and moved, on some, like Brian Trenchard-Smith, are still working quite gainfully in film.
“Obviously, George Miller really was the one that found international fame because of MAD MAX, but I think that without Brian’s pioneering work with stuntmen, and you know, THE MAN FROM HONG KONG (1975), the skill wouldn’t have been there to put the stuff on screen that George wanted for MAD MAX. And Brian’s still working. Brian just shot a new PORKY’S movie. PORKY’S: THE COLLEGE YEARS. The great thing about NOT QUITE HOLLYWOOD is that it reunited Brian and the producer of TURKEY SHOOT, Antony Ginnane, and Brian’s just headed off to Tasmania in Australia to make a end of the world disaster kind of weather gone wrong kind of movie.”
If you think hearing about Aussie cinema from Aussies is too inside-baseball for your liking, however, the film also includes the insight of the biggest geek-fan of genre film in the history of the world, Quentin Tarantino (INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS), sharing his thoughts and excitement about the films right next to them. And his excitement is infectious. Seeing a clip is one thing, hearing Quentin praise the same clip as if it’s the greatest piece of filmmaking ever truly elevates the experience. Sometimes I think the true gift to film isn’t Tarantino as filmmaker, but Tarantino as passionate film fan who, by his success as a filmmaker, gets to share his opinion with the masses more readily than he would’ve been able to had he never made a name for himself.
And Hartley can’t stop singing Tarantino’s praises either: “We got Quentin before we had even gotten the finance. He actually helped us ultimately secure finance because the American and English distributors came on board because obviously they realized that with Quentin they could have some way to sell this internationally. And it would sort of it would help make it appeal to international audiences. So Quentin was really important, and it was also important for me to have someone like Quentin who is someone who could comment on seeing these films outside of Australia, and the reaction to them outside of Australia. It was great. One thing that I never realized, which I learned in this documentary talking to Quentin, is a lot of these films were made trying to fool the rest of the world into thinking that they were made in America; were made in England. And Quentin said, ‘You know, when we were sitting in these drive-ins or whatever grindhouses where we saw these films in America, even though, you know, they had American actors in them, whatever, we knew that there was something very Australian about them; they had an Australian sensibility that we picked up on.’ And we couldn’t see that in Australia. In Australia, the backlash towards these films was ‘Why are we making these American films? We should be making Australian films.’ We couldn’t see that they had something that was distinctly Australian about them, whether it was the way we shot our automobiles or the way the bush was used as a backdrop to storytelling, but obviously he picked up on that stuff.”
Watching NOT QUITE HOLLYWOOD, particularly a sequence focused on Australian car stunts, you can also see how the genre could influence a filmmaker like Tarantino, especially if you’ve seen his half of the GRINDHOUSE (2007) double-feature experience, DEATH PROOF (2007).
“The one thing he should’ve learned, though, is ‘less talk, more action,’” jokes Hartley. “Those Australian car chase movies; there’s not a lot of dialogue going on in between screeching wheels.”
It’s not all roses, lest you also feel, based on my glowing assessment of the film, that there’s no true perspective on the “quality” of the films.
“We don’t mince words in Australia, and I think it is a pretty irreverent and honest documentary and people, you know, we call a spade a spade,” understates Hartley. “It was good to have people, if they didn’t like someone they tell you it, and, you know, if they didn’t like a film, they tell you and ‘let’s not check with the lawyers, let’s just stick it in the movie.’”
And the negative criticism in the film is particularly brutal, of a curmudgeon-esque magnitude I’ve never seen in reality. One critic in particular…
“Bob Ellis, who was the particularly nasty, mean-spirited critic in the documentary,” states Hartley, “obviously when we were interviewing Bob, Bob knew that he was the villain and he was happy to run with it, thankfully, but I remember he turned up for one of the premieres we had, one of the screenings in Sydney, and I thought he was going to punch me. And thankfully he liked the film very much and I said, ’so come on, Bob, after seeing the documentary now you must realize that ROADGAMES is a good film?’ ‘No, it’s not!’ ‘Well, then you must realize that LONG WEEKEND is a good film?’ ‘No it’s not! They’re all crap!’ So it was good to know that these people are still very… they’re pretty set in their ways.”
One of the dangers of a retrospective documentary on obscure cinema is the possibility for the audience build-up throughout the film followed by the subsequent letdown when the audience realizes all the films they’ve just seen clips from are practically impossible to hunt down and watch themselves. Not to worry in this case, however.
“When I was researching the film,” explains Hartley, “part of the research, I was thinking ‘I should get paid for it’ as well, so I worked for a DVD company in Australia and we put a large majority of the stuff out. So I guess if you’ve got in all-regions player you can certainly find the large stuff on the Australian webpages. Stuff is slowly but surely coming out in America. All your high-profile titles like LONG WEEKEND and ROADGAMES and PATRICK; THIRST (1979) and STONE (1974). They’ve all come out in the States through various companies like Synapse and Severn, and also Code Red is about to do STUNT ROCK so, yeah, I think people can add a few titles to their Netflix list. That’s the great thing about the doc, actually the most rewarding thing, is people are coming out of it with a list of films that they want to track down. If that’s the case then I kind of feel like I did my job in some small way.”
So what is the future, if any, for Ozploitation cinema?
“As we speak George Miller is ramping up for MAD MAX 4: FURY ROAD. Which, from what I understand, is going to be shot live-action 3-D. Now that could be the greatest cinematic experience of all time. So let’s hope that… as we mentioned in the documentary it was always strange to me that after MAD MAX, Australia just didn’t continue making fantastic car chase movies. Genre has been reinvented in Australia, but only in the horror; we only really made low-budget horror films lately and it would be great to get a big budget car movie finally made again in Australia and really show the world that, when it comes to that kind of stuff, we’re second to none. Because the stuff we made in the ’70s was just insane. The stuff we put on the screen in terms of car stuff… you watch that stuff now and you go well I can understand how someone got killed but why not a lot more people?”
And what is in the filmmaking future for director Mark Hartley?
“To tell you the truth, I never really wanted to be a documentary filmmaker; I didn’t plan to be. I just really liked the films and liked the filmmakers and wanted to tell their story. I’ve got that out of my system now. I’m working with Tony Ginnane, also, and we’re working on a remake of PATRICK; trying to get that up. Retaking it much more along a spooky kind of ORPHANAGE-style route, so hopefully that’ll happen. And I’ve been trying to get narrative films up for a long time; hopefully people will be able to look at NOT QUITE HOLLYWOOD and see some sense of storytelling there somewhere and give me a shot. We’ll see.”
NOT QUITE HOLLYWOOD opens theatrically in New York and Los Angeles on July 31st, 2009
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