Making Priscilla (17 page)

In Los Angeles, Gramercy are having a few bus problems of their own. They have rented a Metropolitan Transport Authority bus — which follows the same Santa Monica-Downtown route as the vehicle in
Speed
— wrapped it in
Priscilla
advertising equally arresting to passengers and passers-by, and have found themselves immobilised by a transport strike, which fortunately looks like being resolved.

The bus will be taken off the road for a couple of hours on the night of our premiere, which I am reminded takes place on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the gruesome slaughter in Benedict Canyon of Sharon Tate and four visitors to her house by members of the Charles Manson gang. (One of the victims was the hairdresser Jay Sebring who, according to the
Los
Angeles
Times,
had among his clients David Geffen. Geffen Records recently released a Guns N’ Roses album containing a song written by Manson). Manson is now viewed in some circles as a criminal anti-hero. Certainly nobody has more profoundly changed the social climate of a city, sending the famous scurrying behind locked doors and security patrols, turning handguns into routine bedside companions and bringing an end for some time to celebrities smoking joints under the fairy lights with long-haired strangers.

(The quarter-century memorial of the Manson killings is the only story that takes O.J. Simpson off the front pages of newspapers that week as America’s fascination with its fallen hero continues. Another story concerns a chocolate maker in the
San Fernando Valley who was approached by a mysterious friend of Michael Jackson’s family and asked to make one thousand chocolate bars about the size of a business card, with raised letters spelling out ‘Lisa Marie and Michael’ next to a heart and a musical note. They were then delivered to two Jackson family addresses, Graceland and the Trump Tower. Having sold the exclusive days earlier to the television program
Hard
Copy,
the chocolate maker says, ‘It’s a fun story. It’s not like I’m showing a picture of them on their honeymoon.’)

It is also the twenty-fifth anniversary of Woodstock, occasionally referred to in the press as ‘Woodstock 90210’, bespeaking its yuppified conversion from a piece of muddy spontaneity to a highly regulated pay-per-view television event on which PolyGram Diversified Ventures (a cousin of our investor PolyGram Filmed Entertainment) is gambling thirty million dollars.

I have wanted to have a premiere at the Cinerama Dome in Los Angeles since I first started producing movies, which was four years after seeing
Apocalypse
Now
there in 1979. With its eccentric, custom-built ‘theme building’ shape, its enormous curved screen and extraordinary acoustics, it is a cinema which always increases the size of a big-looking picture and diminishes that of a small-looking one. Accordingly I saw
The
Untouchables
there in 1987, but skipped
Honeymoon
in
Vegas
in 1992, preferring to wait until it arrived in its natural habitat, the multiplex.

It is a real premiere in a great movie theatre, not one of those Hollywood ‘previews’ where everyone goes in clutching their little Evian bottles like liquid comfort blankets. Several
members of the crew have flown in from Australia, and we gather in the car park behind the cinema in the softening twilight to see numerous drag queens, Terence, Guy and Stephan on to the bus which will deliver them to the crowd gathered around the front. It is a wonderful moment which passes without comment.

As the bus needs to be sufficiently full to ensure its arrival outside the theatre is not anti-climactic, there are over twenty drag queens packed into it. For a man whose life for the past few weeks has consisted of little more than travelling, talking and having his picture taken with the different drag queens who materialise in each town, Terence is holding up well. Sitting next to him during the screening, I have to pinch myself: our small film really is filling the huge Dome screen.

At the party afterwards, an early copy of Janet Maslin’s rave in the following morning’s
New
York
Times
(‘Flamboyantly colourful, sweetly old fashioned’) is already circulating, joined later by Kenneth Turan’s less committed but largely positive review (‘comic pizazz, bawdy dazzle’) in the
Los Angeles Times
. Both praise Terence’s performance, and the following day most of the other critics will also single him out, usually alluding to a potential Oscar nomination as well as to the actresses he purportedly resembles on screen: to the existing gallery are added Dorothy Malone and Vivien Leigh.

At the bar, Paul Rosenfeld treats me to his opinion of a town where the picture will eventually play if we go wider than the main cities. ‘It’s a shit-hole of a place,’ he declares peremptorily. ‘It’s where they plug the enema tube into America.’ In the lobby I am introduced to some of the gay aristocracy of LA. We have a completely ritualised conversation: they refuse to believe that Guy Pearce is straight, and I assure them he is.

I ask my driver for the night to take home a couple of weary
friends with babysitting problems and return to collect me. In the meantime, the party closes down with such haste that it leaves the sybaritic Australian contingent stranded in mid-revel. Undeterred and in convoy, they move on to somewhere else. While I wait for the car to show up on a now deserted Vine Street, I lose my appetite for the extended party. It does not arrive during the ten minutes of endurance I have left. I hail what may be the only passing taxi in all of Los Angeles and go home.

We open in Australia four weeks later on September 8, then start rolling out across Europe, with Spain, Italy and all Scandinavia starting on September 30, the UK on October 14, and so on until the end of the year. The only territories in which the distributor prefers to wait until 1995 are France and Japan, where the availability of the right screens for what they consider an art house picture with crossover potential is always a problem.

Everybody seems to love the film. Everybody, that is, apart from Nathan Sanders, the publisher and editor of the U.S. Abba Club fanzine. Mysteriously, he is deeply offended by the film’s portrayal of Abba, which we consider benevolent in the extreme. Less mysteriously, given his chronic absence of irony, he dislikes the Abba fan represented by Guy Pearce, and he has written to Gramercy to tell them this. As part of the nationwide boycott of the movie that he is organising, he claims, he will contact over one million fan club members via fax, computer bulletin announcements, mailing lists and newsletters, and he will instruct them not to see it.

There is one element in particular which disturbs him. ‘I find it a real stretch,’ he writes, ‘that this character, who can’t
be any older than twenty-five or twenty-six, saw Abba in concert and stole this “turd” out of the toilet that Agnetha Faltskog sat on. Abba’s only live performance in Australia was in 1977. Was this character four years old when this event took place? Please! Don’t insult our intelligence!’ (Actually, the character would have been ten. Not that it matters. We would never allow plausibility to interfere with a good joke.) His sign-off is a classic of this kind of correspondence: ‘This won’t be the last you will hear from Abba fans on this matter’.

He also calls Liz Smith, the
New
York Newsday
columnist, who quotes him as saying that he found the picture ‘disappointing and disgusting … particularly the &%$!-in-the-toilet business’. Liz is unable to bring herself to tell us what &%$! is. ‘We’d rather not explain this,’ she writes demurely. ‘Go see the film if you must know.’ After all the acceptance it has received, it is reassuring to know that there is something in the movie which can still get up people’s noses.

Just before I leave Los Angeles to return to Sydney, with the first week’s American box-office figures still buoyant in my system, I hear that one of the Sag Harbor drag queens got so trashed at the Amazon Deck party that she went back to her hotel, fell asleep and pissed all over the mattress. We have been sent a bill for the replacement.

After millions of dollars, thousands of miles, hundreds of hurdles, dozens of screenings, it is as if the drag queens who failed to show up for the casting sessions have finally demanded an absurd metaphor to bring the whole thing to a conclusion: a sodden mattress, for which somebody else must pay.

Perfect. Just perfect.

Thanks to all those who participated in the unremittingly surreal adventure. This account of it still ends with the film’s US premiere: the rest of the story, in many respects, is in the appendices.

I am particularly grateful to the core group — Brian Breheny, Tim Chappel, Lizzy Gardiner, Colin Gibson and Grant Lee — whose allegiance began long before they could be paid; to my wife Andrena Finlay, who helped create the foundations on which we built; to my colleagues Michael Hamlyn and Rebel Penfold-Russell; to Bob Sessions and Kathy Hope, for navigating the original publication; to Phillip Adams, a benevolent catalyst; finally, to Stephan Elliott, the sheer scale of whose folly made all of ours flourish.

A.C.

The film was banned in South Korea, where it had been sold to a local distributor, on the grounds that it might encourage homosexuality.

Al Clark was born and raised in Huelva, Spain.

He has produced films for the past thirty years, first in the UK – where his credits include
Nineteen Eighty-Four, Absolute Beginners
and
Gothic
– then in Australia. His Australian films – which have been selected for most major film festivals and distributed worldwide – include
The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, Chopper, Siam Sunset, The Hard Word, Razzle Dazzle, Blessed
and
Red Hill.
The recipient of the 2013 Australian Academy (AACTA) Raymond Longford Award for lifetime achievement, he is also the author of two books,
Raymond Chandler in Hollywood
and
Making Priscilla.