LOVE or hate Judy Davis, chances are you’ve seen one of her acerbic, riveting onscreen meltdowns – they’re synonymous with the media-shy Australian actress who’s long been preceded by an offscreen ‘difficult’ tag.
Already a staple in period dramas by the time of Charles Sturridge’s 1991 production of E.M. Forster’s debut novel Where Angels Fear to Tread, Davis had breathed life into array of heroines on the brink of brave new worlds, and used a decidedly English voice to do so.
“Davis levelled the F-word at the director, and she hit a sore point.”
Her debut in Gillian Armstrong’s My Brilliant Career saw Davis as Sybilla Melvin quite matter-of-factly assert to her suitors that she will never marry. Her Adela Quested, when pressed on Doctor Aziz’s crime in David Lean’s A Passage to India, eventually and quite calmly enunciates the truth.
Perhaps it was Sturridge who saw something more in Davis than polite colonial girls when he cast her as the boorish Harriet Harriton, one of Forster’s best-drawn wowsers who will not be broken down by Italy’s disarming romantic freedom.
DON’T JUDGE JUDY Davis in Woody Allen’s Deconstructing Harry (Photo: John Clifford).
After admonishing the cheering crowd at the local opera as “babies”; banging around the pensione in tears and rage, and delivering the final devastation of Forster’s story, with this Harriet Harriton, 1991 became the year the Judy Davis ‘volcano’ was finally able to erupt on the screen.
She moved on to a comic romance as 19th century French author George Sand in James Lapine’s Impromptu. The best scenes are those in which Sand verbally explodes, elucidating how it might have felt to be a woman in the period without the filmmaker having to resort to all the usual corset-tightening symbolism.
But the shrewish screen potential of this actress was fully realised when Davis appeared in Woody Allen’s Husbands and Wives as the woman who finds true love by losing it, literally…
DRESSED TO SERVE Cinema ushers enjoy some of the more stylish uniforms ever created.
A Writer’s next day job.
DAY jobs come and go. If they’re good, they’re well paid, they don’t take up too much time, and don’t leave you feeling like you’ve reached the pinnacle of your employability. If they’re not good, they place heavy demands on all your time for little return, leaving no space for creativity, and you end up disappearing into career no-mans’ land until you resign.
After leaving full-time employment in The Corporates behind me, hoping that I’d become a much-sought-after freelancer, I landed back in London after a trip across the Continent without any source of income and a round of rejection letters, with that pesky rent still to pay, so I needed a day job.
I’d moved south of the Thames to Greenwich. Like Stratford-upon-Avon, this famous quarter of the city keeps its best face on for tourists, which made it an enjoyable, up-beat place to live.
Houses were affordable, particularly if you shared one, and the parklands between the river and the heights of Blackheath were a great escape from the rat-race.
I still felt hopeful that somehow writing and freelancing would see me break into the production industry, so while I kept trying that on all fronts, I approached the small cinema where I’d seen The Piano and Jurassic Park the year before.
The pay was pretty dismal, and the promise of shifts was not great, but they wanted someone to start straight away. As soon as I’d been allocated my two hot pink polo shirts, a striped green apron (for manning the pick-and-mix stands) and a cap, I was ready to fill the shoes of fully fledged cinema usher.
First Clue – if you wear a weird, brightly coloured uniform, it’s a day job.
Cue the movies! I can recall them all, since I saw them multiple times, from forgettable flops like The Colour of Night, to the excellent The Madness of King George. Seated on the small flip-down seats at the rear of the auditorium I took-in the films of the next twelve months in greater detail than I ever thought possible.
The flip-side of all that free entertainment was having to make countless sacks of popcorn and up-selling terrible hot dogs, before cleaning the cinema’s ‘kitchen’ after every shift. But in return for all the free new-release movies I could possibly take in (and the free popcorn), it was a pretty fair deal.
Second Clue – if you have to weigh-up the pay against the free food, it’s a day job.
After about a fortnight of all the free popcorn I could eat, I didn’t feel like eating any more. As the new guy I went through all the usual wariness from colleagues. For a few days there was the potential to be branded a racist because I refused to pick up the slack for one woman who decided that I had to keep doing the crap work because I was new. The big guns were pulled-out in the form of the largest, scariest guy on staff, who confronted me in the locker room, sizing me up to see if I was indeed the ‘nazi’ I’d been described as.
ALL YOU CAN EAT Until you can’t eat anymore. Popcorn, the great cinematic profit margin.
I think my smile disarmed him. I’ve been tall since I was fifteen, and that helped, but when he realised I refused to compensate for all lazy people no matter what their colour or creed, we were on the same page, in fact I scored plenty of respect.
Third Clue – if you get confronted by a big guy and management doesn’t care, it’s a day job.
Whatever the day job, I have found that what makes all the difference is having fun colleagues to while-away the long, underpaid hours with.
At this cinema we very often staged the Ushers’ Olympics, which involved staircase time trials. I was well-placed in this having legs long enough to leap whole flights.
There was a long-term challenge which involved getting customers to enter the ground floor cinema by first walking to the top floor, and then catching the lift down to the floor where they started, without realizing they were back where they showed their tickets. As far as I know I was the only usher to win that particular challenge, and it took all the guts I could muster as an actor to pull-off. The weird part was that my winning couple were not phased by seeing another whole street outside when they emerged from the lift, which was ostensibly ‘underground’ given the way they ended up getting there.
The funniest thing I ever saw was a random Sunday afternoon challenge, in which I dared one colleague to wave to a customer from within the popcorn bin, the large ones with the glass front slightly below eye-level, through which customers can salivate over their buttered or sugared popcorn choices.
Except on this occasion, Leo greeted them, lying on his side waving through the glass, in a priceless, puerile moment cooked-up by two bored creatives. I was so amused and in awe of Leo’s bravado that I really don’t remember the customers’ reaction!
Fourth Clue – if you’ve got time to muck around, it’s a day job.
Seeing audiences come and go throughout major movie seasons was an eye-opener about which ones really strike a chord with their audience. This was the dawn of the ‘opening weekend’ era, and countless big budget titles came and went with great expectations, often very fast.
MY WATERLOO Seeing films over and over is a great way to understand how they’re put together (Photo: Robert McFarlane).
Other films became perennial favourites with crowds, who poured-in week after week, and had extended lives in the smaller screen of the three at this cinema. Muriel’s Wedding, The Lion King, Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle – these were all titles which had long runs on the big screen in Greenwich.
Watching movies relentlessly is a great way to see how scenes are constructed, and you end-up seeing all the errors that one viewing won’t reveal – continuity mistakes, actors looking for their marks, and microphone booms in shot. All the grave no-no’s of film school fifty feet high on the ‘professional’ screen. It can be a validating experience for an emerging filmmaker.
Fifth Clue – sometimes a day job can teach you something about your profession.
Quite often, while cleaning the kitchen or sweeping popcorn, one of us would say out loud: “Don’t worry guys, at least we can say we work in the movies!”, and we’d all laugh, forgetting for a moment how far we were from the other side of the silver screen.
So I religiously job-searched through all the usual channels, and in those pre-internet days that involved plenty of footwork.
Every week I’d go to the media and entertainment industry hubs where jobs were posted on notice boards watched-over by office staff jaded from listening to every up-and-coming industry professional in the city. I’d also trawl through industry magazines at the news stand, and then head to my office – a phone booth on Charing Cross Road.
I managed to land a few meetings and interviews with television networks, agents, and production offices, but meetings were as far as these opportunities ever went.
Eventually I was offered a position as a Production Assistant at a small television studio in West London, primarily to work on corporate videos.
‘The Corporates’ dance to a different drum, all very ideas-driven and upbeat. In reality, it’s an industry which relies on making the most boring subjects seem incredibly interesting.
To achieve that, corporations need artists willing to sell their souls for a little while, and with London’s infamous cost-of-living on the increase, and the rent still to pay, I dubiously accepted the invitation.
One of the first things to learn is how to speak Corporate language – a meeting is ‘face time’; giving something a try is ‘running it up the flag pole’; and discussing the fine details over coffee is ‘stirring some sugar over it’.
Just about everything is underscored, literally, with motivational (‘Movin’ on up’) stock music to leave even the most pessimistic participant humming with new-found enthusiasm.
One of the most famous corporate videos ever produced was the management training series presented by John Cleese which cashed-in on his Basil Fawlty notoriety. These set the benchmark in many-a corporate video meeting I attended over the next few years.
My soul has blocked-out most of the utterly boring products, concepts and sales-pitches I made videos about, but there was one project which was so forward-thinking it was impossible to not get genuinely excited about.
This was a drama-documentary produced by an inspiring scientist, Professor Robert (‘Bob’) Spence, of London’s Imperial College of Technology.
Bob had interviewed eminent design engineers about what they imagined human-computer interaction might be like in the year 2020, and he wanted these ideas realised in an ‘envisionment’ of social interaction 25 years into the future. This was my kind of corporate video.
We set about producing what became known as Translations, and it was my role to put a team together to create a drama-style production.
My eye for great locations had fallen on a property owned by the college in Berkshire, a wonderfully out-of-the-way place called Silwood Park House. Once a private home designed by Alfred Waterhouse (1830–1905), this place had all the trimmings that made it perfect for a timeless feel.
Now, thanks to one of the core ideas envisaged in Bob’s project – the internet – I was able to watch Translations again via YouTube.
We had very non-John Cleese resources (you’re only allowed to laugh with us, not at us!), but what is amazing about watching this production now is how many of the concepts have become realities – touch screens, flat screens, video conferencing, Intelligent Person Assistants … and there is still plenty of time for the rest of the ideas to see the light of day before 2020.
Student films aside, Translations was my first real crack at a complete production which relied on my skills as a director realising a vision onscreen. I saw it as a warm-up for things to come – working with skilled friends, on location in old homes and gardens, bringing ground-breaking screenplays to the screen.
If only life were so wonderfully linear.
Further work was in short supply (here come the days jobs!), but I did spend most of that summer polishing my second screenplay, Menace, which I developed into a one-hour format for a television production application. Inspired and deeply moved by the homelessness in London, and the impact of Thatcherite policies on Britain in the 1990s, this polemic little piece was full of gritty realities which Other Kingdom lacked, and remains one of my first works not to hit the rubbish bin.
I think the reason it survives is the rejection letter I received, a kind note which appealed to me on two counts – (a), to believe that not everyone was getting such a letter, and (b), that I should not give up writing.
I threw the letter away because I wasn’t sure (a) was true, but almost 20 years on, technology might have changed dramatically, but (b), I am still writing.
Michael Burge Media 