In the ‘90s I arrived in Sydney with one goal: to become a famous scriptwriter. With a dog-eared suitcase and a copy of William Goldman’s Adventures in the Screen Trade tied together by string, I stepped off an Ansett flight from Perth and spent half my savings on a taxi to Kings Cross.
Cracking open my hostel room’s sash window, I peered down into an alley to admire colourful locals thoughtfully sharing a hypodermic needle.
Sneering at me, one character revealed a lack of dental hygiene rarely sighted outside a chimpanzee enclosure. “What the duck (I may have misheard) are youse lookin’ at, runt?” The insult, perhaps another misunderstanding on my part, seemed harsh given I stood six feet and a quarter inch in my Dunlop Volleys.
“Carry on, mate,” I called while struggling to push the window shut. I discovered later the only people in Sydney who called you “mate” were the police: “Put your hands on the bonnet, mate, and assume the position.”
Stretching out on a lumpy mattress which exuded the faint aroma of performing seals, I reached for Goldman’s opus. My bookmark – a faded black-and-white photo – fell out. The camera had captured my big sister Peta and I holding hands, with me kitted out in a schoolboy-sized pea coat on presumably Perth’s only cold day of the year. It was a talisman. Good luck lay just around the corner. Actually, Madame Fifi’s Palais de Hop lay just around the corner.
That evening I stood outside Fifi’s. Hey Big Spender was being beaten into submission by a live (up to a point) band. The bouncer, looking me up and down as if I’d broken wind, demanded an entry fee. I explained that, in WA, entertainment venues were simply happy to see you. Grasping my jacket’s lapels, he lifted me off the footpath. “Well, here you can duck off!” Two thoughts: should I get my hearing checked and would the stitching hold?
Inside the club and $5 lighter in the kick, I ordered a Reschs DA. After two sips I asked the barmaid, who must’ve been chilly in that see-through crop top, if she’d accidentally served me a schooner of dishwater. Her reaction wasn’t as solicitous as I’d hoped.
Fighting a gag reflex, I took another pull of the beer and watched the first act take the stage to give what appeared to be a history lesson. Two women of indeterminate age (although I’d charitably determine: their early 40s) began recreating scenes from the Third Reich, that’s if SS officers had worn peek-a-boo bras, black latex corsetry and thigh-high jack boots. To give them their due, and enthusiastic patrons did just that by thrusting folding money into the lasses’ knickers, the writhing performers were keen to test the strength of the holding screws on their poles.
Back in my room, with the dresser pushed against the door, I reminded myself of what William Goldman had written: “Nobody knows anything...... Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what's going to work.” But my breakthrough would be different. It’d be on Australian TV. There, everyone knew everything.
Light from an outdoor neon sign, reflecting in the room’s mirror, spelled out a-l-o-C – a-c-o-C. Smiling at the thought of my first scriptwriting meeting the following day, I drifted into a sleep only occasionally broken by screams and sirens.
Al Bundy Productions in Artarmon was tucked inside a dull office building that’d seen better days. Those days being circa 1960. Next store was a motel whose architect had possibly once dined in a Spanish restaurant. Both dominated a stretch of Pacific Highway noted for small businesses which closed within a month of opening.
A receptionist watched me enter the office foyer before standing, picking up a copy of Woman’s Day and heading to the Ladies. Waiting, I sat on a leatherette bench admiring upsized portraits of Bundy’s soap opera stars lining the walls. More money had been spent on teeth whitening than talent.
A door bounced open. A tall cove in a paisley shirt, tight trousers and a tighter pout sniffed: “You’re late.”
“Actually I was on time but your receptionist has, literally, pissed off.”
“What? You were waiting to be formally announced? This isn’t a Jane Austen novel. Real scriptwriters walk right in.”
Head writer Clint Barber had an office with faux timber walls, a melamine desk and an uninterrupted view of a brick wall. Leaning back in his chair, he expelled a heady mix of Aramis, Alpine cigarettes and smugness. “So, you’re the hack from Dunbuggeringup?”
“Perth.”
“Same, same … the point is: journalists rarely cut it in showbiz. If you hadn’t schmoozed Al Bundy during that interview for The West Australian, banging on about your scripting talent, you’d still be sitting on some beach spitting out sand blown by the Fremantle Nurse.”
“The Fremantle Doctor. It …”
“On the bright side, you won’t be wasting my time for long. I assume you’ve watched Sons and Lovers.”
“No need, I’m a big fan of D. H. Lawrence. His nuanced ...”
“Is he the drunk who wrote Number 96 and Skippy? No matter. Bundy’s Sons and Lovers is a TV soap about the real Australian suburbia: dry retching, dry humping and, for the wealthy few, dry cleaning. It’s stripped four nights a week on Nine. We need writers with a gift for stopping TV viewers reaching for the remote. You’re starting on dialogue. We give you an episode’s outline; you punch out the dialogue. Can you manage it or would you like to catch the next camel train back West?”
I screwed my baseball cap in my hands. “Wow, Clint, how can I ever thank you?”
“By coming back tomorrow with a final draft.” Leaning forward, he lit a cigarette with a Bic lighter, blew peppermint-scented smoke towards my face and said: “Off you go, Orson Welles.”
At seven o’clock, alone with a boxy TV set in the hostel’s communal lounge, I switched to Nine. Thirty one minutes later, with hands shaking, I was standing at Fifi’s bar ordering a Reschs with a Reschs chaser.
“Have you seen Sons and Lovers?” I asked the barmaid.
“I’m not keen on D. H. Lawrence,” she replied, lifting her shoulders back and her chest up. “I’m more a Graham Greene kinda gal.”
“Quite,” I said, finishing the first glass. “But the excuse for entertainment I watched tonight will snuff out the last creative embers of life in your soul.”
“My tip: improve your chat-up lines,” she said, turning away.
The hands on my watch crawled towards midnight. A sheet of pristine paper was rolled into my portable Remington.
The episode’s storyline was plausible enough. A light aircraft carrying four of the show’s more sexually active characters had crash-landed in a paddock of an abandoned sheep/cattle/check-what-the-hell-they-herd-in-that-area station outside Broken Hill (or Katoomba, depending on budgetary constraints). With a storm closing in and with barely enough food and barely enough strategically-torn clothing, the four must spend the night in an empty farmhouse. Empty save for two beds and a ghost.
The outline read:
FADE IN.
INT. CREEPY FARMHOUSE. DUSK.
Mikey, Roxy, Chikka and Babe enter. Mikey flicks a light switch. Nothing. The only sound is the wind signalling the coming storm. Babe hugs herself for warmth. Chikka opens the door of a rusty fridge and leaps backwards at what he sees. Roxy goes into a cobwebbed bathroom and begins unbuttoning her ripped blouse. Looking into a cracked mirror, she sights a ghostly shape looming behind her.
With two fingers, I began tapping:
ROXY
Screams.
Four-thirty p.m. Pacific Highway, Artarmon. Flipping my script’s pages, Clint Barber paused, lit a fresh cigarette off the stub of his old one and sighed: “Jesus wept.”
“Well?” I asked.
“I’ve never read anything like it.” He checked his watch, swore and punched the intercom button on his desk. “I’ve just received a late script. Get it to the rehearsal room stat. We’re almost out of time.”
“So, you’re going to use it?”
“Yes,” he said, massaging his temples with his fingertips. Strangely, I seemed to hear another “duck”.
Weeks later, a watery local beer in hand, I watched in primetime as Mikey, Roxy, Chikka and Babe mouthed my dialogue. At the close, the speeding credits even spelt my name correctly. The angst of that night and day in my room giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a cooked turkey of a TV show had been worth it. So I thought.
I never heard from Barber or Bundy again. The following month, a new, less-than-likeable character in Sons and Lovers was named after me. Fame of sorts. Then the series was cancelled.
* Based on a true story. Only the
names have been changed to protect the guilty.
Copyright 2020 GREG FLYNN
