Hector Crawford Memorial Lecture
Firstly, I want to say that I am very honoured to be here. I grew up with the institution of Crawford's, loving the work of the great army of Australian actors who found a place there.
My very first job outside of Geelong-based theatre for schools company, The Wooley Jumpers was on Crawford’s seminal TV movie, The Feds. Despite no one here remembering a single frame of it (not the least my self), I was chuffed with the fine company such a debut was keeping. It buoyed my confidence in knowing that if there was a place for my gawky, spikey, anti-ingenue in the screen world of Crawfords’, there was perhaps a place for me beyond.
I’ve read the last ten years of these keynotes and it's somewhat difficult for me to justify my presence - I until recently, was just an actor. I know, historically in this country, the word 'actor' still means people who steal the cab charges, try to have sex with the background artists and screw you for producer profit percentages. I don't you really mind that, though because we both know we’ll never see them (the producer profits).
The Hector Crawford Memorial Lecture was an overwhelming task for someone used to aspiring to brilliance, while relying almost entirely on other people’s IQ. So, I am going to apologise and say, with complete respect to Hector Crawford, that I’m going to debase this address, swear a lot, 'femmo-rant', 'white-womansplain', show some pretty graphic content and use some audience participation. So, if any of that offends, feel free to leave. Now. Fair warning.
I do promise however no full-frontal gratuitous nudity. Crown are particularly sensitive to my doing that. I was also called out for that recently on Total Control. I think they only call it gratuitous, by the way, if you're not having sex; if you are just a woman being a woman, doing the things that we do, as women, without men - like getting dressed and listening to a barrage of misogyny on morning radio - totally shocking and inappropriate! Maggie sucking eight inches of fake, prosthetic cock in a phone booth is absolutely 'not' gratuitous - she's a sex worker and we need to see her take the full shaft and swallow!
Good. I’m glad we have cleared up the ground rules. Shall we consider this a safe working environment? Now I promise I am going to focus on the positive with this keynote and hopefully generate some take away points because my Googling has revealed that it's my job.
A New Age of Disruption – 2019
My presence here can only be justified for my having, just recently, endured the ritual hazing of a producer's opening weekend. I now understand thatthere is no one as lonely as a producer clicking open their 'Numero Box Office Summary' on their opening Saturday morning or waking on Monday to their debut show’s numbers on the public shaming platform of Twitter. So, it's with fresh scars and many bruises, that I can now call myself a real-life, actual producing lady.
I now realise you (producers) live lives of mostly unrewarded pain in the hope of having your stories land for the mythical lost tribes of audience, without taking a hit by critics, who posture on the fringes of creative frustration, as they massacre your content’s Rotten Tomato rating thus derailing your international sales targets. You do all this while somehow paying down your second mortgages, keeping your marriages together and parenting your feral children.
With that in mind I would like to start the audience participation part of today. If I could start with a kind of a group hug; an acknowledgment of the courage, conviction, risk, arduous, relentless, shit-handling you take from all directions, usually the one in which you are not facing. #DarrenWeir. As you still endeavour to make stories that matter and bring them to our screens, big and small.
Come on, a group hug. We are brave. And repeat. We are awesome.
Okay now - quick survey. Show of hands. Could I see who here is a producer or producer / director? Who is also a writer? Who is also an actor? Who, like a unicorn, is an all-talented being now known as a Flea Bag? Great! Keep your hands up for a minute so the producers in the room can hit you up for content tonight at drinks.
Who here believes that collaboration is the key in realising their creative dreams? Who has spent more time assembling Ikea furniture than actually thinking about how you can get better at collaboration? Or indeed how to know who's the right collaborator? Clearly we can all think about this a bit more.
Not an Expert
Hey, I’m no expert. I have so much to learn here and will die, still ignorant. I speak as a woman with a career of unwanted opinions, who has navigated the business for twenty-five years and have shared, with female actors, many challenges in the process. Things like wishing we had intimacy coaches to help handle confronting material that we felt we had no voice in and aching for the language that we are 'woke'; to now to describe the otherness we feel when alienated by and imprisoned in poor representations of our human and our female experience.
I’ve also used lawyers, run from bad-faith collaborators, had corporate- coaches to help deal with sociopaths, used Valium as an anxiety crutch in conflict-ridden meetings and I’ve gotten out of hotel rooms, just in time...
In the words of Helen Mirren, I wish I had said ‘fuck off’ a lot more. I'll get back to that later in the speech - why ‘fuck off we are done’ is okay to say.
I’m also privileged to be working with and still being mentored by colleagues that I began this journey with, decades ago. Then, to be extending recent collaborations with Blackfella Films and with my director attachment on Ride Like A Girl, Mads Dyer, an actor/ filmmaker with ideas and opinions - someone that I call a sister 'zeitgeist hunter'.
It is like being a tornado chaser but it's harder because you can’t actually see a zeitgeist on the horizon - you can only feel it like a poltergeist. You find it by listening. It has a special frequency - and it's shy. The zeitgeist is something that independent producers need to wake to and realise that the collaborators they chose to work with will bring them closer to it.
This zeitgeist? To catch it, one must read/listen to twenty news media outlets a day or consume Reese Witherspoon's 'six books a week', listen to podcasts, watch web series, stay in touch with content creators at the very grass roots working in less-expensive mediums, go to independent theatre and one person shows, talk to young people, go watch stand-up comedians and listen very hard at the hairdressers. Yeah, nothing says 'zeitgeist' like taking the temperature of comedy and hearing the bitching at the salon. I’m not joking. Hollywood has long been 'woke' to that one. Hiring Jon Peters to run Sony was not nearly as random as it looked.
In these times of disruption, who we play with and how we do this are of critical importance because we are all in stormy waters. Its lifeboat theory. Those working optimally with the 'right others' have the best chance of adapting to the challenges facing us and finding new horizons. There is a dichotomy here because despite this or because of this uncertainty it is an imperative to feel and project clarity.
It's never been so important for those bringing stories to the big and small screens to be clear in our purpose, unique in our branding and increasingly inclusive in our stories. It's not just to about meeting BAFTA quotas, gender matter initiatives, SBS charters, catering to a 'Times Up' moment, PC box ticking or virtue signalling - it's because diversity is both an existential imperative and a natural fertiliser of creative innovation.
In an international streaming-market, generic trope, lazy points of view - an 'absence of thesis' or 'funny but lame' cannot rise to the surface. The networks are facing some big challenges here. Their perilous position must be acknowledged; embattled by a a unique local market who’s domestic successes do not always sell internationally and more profoundly, an un-level playing field,in regards to meeting quotas against the international cabals of a double-Dutch Irish sandwich-eating non-tax-paying entities, feasting on their business model like zombies at a drive in. We know they are scared but there are really two choices - die with your ageing white audience or embrace diversity.
Think of it like chemo. It feels wrong to introduce anything foreign into you blood and, yes, it's a shock when it first hits your veins but after a while you feel okay. There's that small moment when you’ll look in the mirror and freak out because you don’t recognise yourself with no hair and then, BAM! you've got a new mop and you’re cancer free. If chemo sounds too scary, put some more diversity in your boardroom…I know there are some guys from networks who rather would take the chemo option but a collaborative mindset starts upstairs.
So, dark times for some right now. I know the white guys are feeling 'embattled' but you are still winning. #TheJoker and #Cherobyl. If there is a single reason not to write off the white guys it’s that show. But I am, at the moment inspired by seeing adaptive majors and independents open to new kinds and different models of collaborations, working hard to bring unique voices into our screen worlds. I believe it's really worth us all watching and learning from what works because a lot of what used to work just isn't ultimately finding enough people who care to watch it now. I think our 'siloed' mentality has finally reached it's used by date. We have much to learn from each other.
It can feel like we have no map at this moment in which to move forward but we have been here before. This cycle of established formulated entertainment universes, with its decay and fall, chaos then experimentation and innovation. Then, in comes the money - a new consolidation and reorganising of power paradigms into traditional hierarchical labor structures. Storytelling gets formulated, creativity stifled - creatives get screwed then get pissed. Anti-trust laws, or technological innovation occurs - new disruptions. Chaos, courage and creativity prevails. Repeat.
Disruption has always been with us even before Nero gave the thumbs-down to the epic work of Invictus Andronicus and flooded the Colloseum, financing the very first blockbusters – Naval Christian Snuff Battles. The was an actual genre and it was huge! The sequels went for a century. See, even this tension between thought-provoking humanist works of power (independent auteur filmmaking), and shallow muscle displays, along with human sacrifice, is still playing out today in Ninja Warrior and The Bachelorette and I'm sad to see that. Like, really, wake up people! Christians are, in fact, still dying! Ugh!
It struck me, as I Googled myself into a rabbit hole of pain for this address, thinking about what I might speak to, that the singular theme that has marked the biggest moments of disruption (Nero aside) is the return to the performer as a content engine. I’d like us to think about how we, in this country, can throw off the residue of colonial/corporate structures of actors being managed-down sock puppets. I believe we will all be so much stronger for its dismantling and have so much to learn from what comes of this.
Hollywood has always understood the value of the actor, as purpose-driven content makers. Before the studio monopolies, the backlots of Hollywood hummed with one hundred studios. It is a hundred years, in fact, since newly incorporated 'United Artists' hung its shingle, created by three actors, including Mary Pickford. She wasn't just America's sweetheart but a producer with a killer instinct for talent and story. The money wasn’t serious so no-one cared that the lunatics were running amok.
But Wall Street soon woke up to the sound of The Jazz Singers’ cash registers. They bought in. Big studios bought out small ones and put their talent on contracts. They bought up the cinemas which locked out independents producers while Jack Warner and Co. settled in to a great age of cinema, albeit radically erasing women from the Boulevard’s history.
As the big five became star factories, the mentality of 'We make them, we own them' prevailed. Female artists particularly had little choice over their work. The casting couch of Thalberg makes the infamous BH peninsular penthouse look like a petting zoo. Yep, the actor was told to put their legs up and shut up, denied their agency, passion and sensitivity for material.
After the talkies, the patriarchy reigned supreme, reinforced by the newly minted 'Production Code', which killed the double entendre and shut down all the fun. Gay Hollywood scurried into their walk-in closets and Mae West was gagged and shoved unceremoniously into a very small box. Harmony and twin beds prevailed, disrupted only by the post-war uptake in TV.
Now, TV totally fucked the studio's vertically-integrated business model and they must have felt like the networks do today. It is a moment though as that exemplifies the adaptive mentality of the performer.
This new medium, hungry for talent, took the best of radio stars loved by already loyal audiences, who followed them to the small screen. The comedians, the wise-crackers and teams of players, who had been doing their own writing on serials, leapt into the medium. It was into this fulcrum that CBS approached Lucille Ball to develop a show based on her hit radio show My Favourite Husband.
The title change to I Love Lucy showed that the network knew who the real star was even if Lucy was desperately trying to help Desi keep his manhood. After the divorce, in 1962, Lucy became the first female to run a studio and, as I was shocked to Wiki-find, produced The Untouchables and, wait for it, Star Trek! This chick was goof-balling around in her apron while secretly ruling the world.
This Desi-Lucy story is also a standout example of the history of the performers 'proving their concept' across mediums. Having written the pilot, CBS remained unconvinced until Lucille and Desi, under their own steam, took the show on the road, vaudeville style, to wild success and raucous laughter. When CBS bought the show, in a pioneering TV first, they brought the live audience too - a concept acknowledging that the audience itself is also a key collaborator in all of our art.
I think the producer inclination to rely on hit literary properties is still bearing fruit. We see this in Gone Girl to The Dressmaker in the movies. In TV, with very successful appropriation of decades of diligent development, imbedded in the 'novel' series - Game of Thrones, True Blood, Darkly Dreaming Dexter - all brought by showrunners directly to networks. Though, engagement with talent in these works is an after thought here with the exception of Big Little Lies, which was driven by it.
It’s also hard for independent producers to compete in this market against studios on proven literary assets. Independents pick up the crumbs using story rights like Ride Like A Girl, podcasts to series like Unbelievable and long form articles with Hustlers. I just don’t know how hard producers in this country are looking and valuing performer generated content and here is really fertile ground to be harvested out there. Groups of double and triple threats making their own content cheaply in a collaborative interdependent way, without commissioner and network input.
Screen Australia’s funding of this part of our ecosystem is really fantastic. By growing their audience through social media and web platforms, these younger creatives refine their own brand. They have a better chance of communicating their vision because it's a concrete thing, one they're experiencing firsthand. When they do get a deal to go legit, they are getting a lot more control at that 'transfer moment' because they have won the trust of their financial backers, those who care not only 'Is it good?' but also 'Is there an audience for it?'. Portlandia and Two Broke Girls have merged out of this. Little Acorns from Trudy Hellier and Maria Theodorakis, which I'm an Executive Producer on locally, will be moving from web to Channel Seven next year.
Beyond the digital sphere, one woman shows, featured at Edinburgh, have become Fleabag, Emmy juggernauts and, for Leah Purcell, her many years honing The Drover's Wife as a piece of theatre, will now come to our big screen. Leah will be acting, directing and producing this feminist and Indigenous perspective shift across the colonially-lensed, out-of-copyright classic.
I want to note a couple of other notable collaborations of the last year or so, that speak to the new types of 'working outside traditional paradigms'.
Matchbox Pictures partnering with Back to Back theatre company for a pilot last year is really important. With Team Chocolate, the award-winning Dutch series hit and the Sundance break out, The Peanut Butter Falcon, making a serious stab at breakthroughs for true inclusivity internationally. This is an exciting local development.
The purpose-driven generator of Back to Back is an outstanding example of fluid and innovative collaboration between artists of all abilities, making cutting edge content for a decade under Bruce Gladwin's extraordinary skills. More importantly, to work with the actors of Back to Back or the cast of Team Chocolate and the lead actor in Falcon, we have to really pause and interrogate the traditional writer-reliant process. Where should we begin? How do we work together in a way that supports people who think and process differently?
Mainstream arts perspectives particularly within our cultural hierarchies have, for too long, marginalised such companies as community-purposed and 'second-tier', lacking a certain professionalism and broad appeal. In fact, many traditionally marginalised companies have long histories of exploring challenging ideas and experimenting with practices that we could learn from and 'the outsider' is fast becoming the trend de jour.
I'd like to mention Rose Myers at Windmill Theatre in Adelaide. Theatre for young people has also, I believe, held a second-class status within our ecosystem. Windmill is aspiring to bring its repertoire of assets, developed co-operatively with and for young audiences to the screen.
Rose's brilliant debut feature film, Girl Asleep, was the first roll-out of this new strategy. This expansion has been initiated and driven by Rose and the company itself, but it's a long overdue medium leap that should surely have been shepherded by producers, decades ago, looking to get a cut of the in-demand quality international TV product for a younger age group. These companies know their young audiences like no other creatives in this country.
Historically, it would be amiss of me not to mention the stage-to-screen stand outs for this country — The Sapphires and Strictly Ballroom. The development and success of these shows gave their producers and financiers courage to empower two first-time directors, (both of whom started as actors), with profoundly exciting and new visions about what Australian films could look like and how they could kill it internationally.
Why Should You Want to Work More Closely with Performers?
Well, the upside of harnessing talent is that it will help producers in the current, peak TV, arms-race to to do what the CFO of Screen Australia says is one of the most difficult challenges to contemporary producing - to secure and hold onto talent. Producers can also capitalise on their purpose-led passion to excite commissioners, secure offshore financing and, perhaps, even take lower upfront fees for back-end rewards.
Matchbox's, Stateless is great example of a show coming out of conversations between Cate Blanchett and Elise McCredie over an issue they were both passionate about. They brought the pitch to Matchbox and both creatives were in the first conversations with commissioners. Now, this is challenging content so the engagement of Cate early was really important in getting it financed. She also, no doubt, used her 'star leverage' to protect their vision of the project through commissioning stages.
Performers are also uniquely positioned to bring projects to the market place. In lieu of neither of my two leads being available for our Ride Like a Girl press junket (and that is a hazard of the talent bottleneck at the moment), Transmission were able to secure more than 180 outlets for me to message the film. I’m in no doubt that the regional three-week press blitz was an impactful part of us getting to our current culm of $11 million plus.
Another reason to engage with performers is that we also have great instincts for identifying other talent. The impressive slates of Amy Poehler, Elizabeth Banks, Oprah and Reese Witherspoon speak to this. We can pick up the phone and call talent directly. Those, at the pointy end, can call top talent agents. We are passionate and able to excite the money and are often purpose-led in what we do. Most importantly, I think actors are intrinsic collaborators.
Our first exercise in drama school is 'YES'. You sit with someone and they ask you anything and you have to say 'yes', even if it's - ‘Are you racist?’ or ‘Have you ever farted in an elevator…on purpose?’. The other exercise we do, like, 'day one drama school', is where you just have to fall back and hope the other clowns that got into the school like you enough to catch you - which is by how we feel on the first day of every job - 'Here we go, I hope these fucking clowns will catch me'!
I think our job, essentially, as actors is to play with others. It's not surprising to me that, in a time where audiences for cinema releases are getting increasingly challenging, that actor-directed content is punching above its weight at the box office because performers have unique sensitise that we develop by being a the 'coal face' of the final content delivery.
To that point, beginning with feature films in 2019, it should be noted, here, that the top performing Australian films of this year were directed by two women and an Indigenous man, all of whom are, or have been, actors. While diverse in their genres, they found two to three quadrant cinema audiences in films that played well regionally. Miranda Tapsell, myself and Bryan also producing and being a critical part of the material’s inception, development and financing, highly motivated us to bring our content to market. I can tell you, most of the time, we 'actors' hope we are busy working somewhere other than where a film is releasing so as to sidestep this taxing, unpaid and exposing necessity.
I’d like to note here that Baz Luhrmann was an acting graduate from NIDA, Simon Baker, Mel Gibson and Russell Crowe's films were also box office standouts in Oz. The American list is so extensive, but Greta Gerwig's $78 million box office and Taika's $1 billion Thor should also be noted as two of the most successful triple threats ever. Taika incidentally didn't go to film school and he honed his symbiotic audience sensitivities with years of touring, through the nether regions of New Zealand.
We 'actors' don’t always make the coolest movies, well, except Taika. In fact, they are often marked for their warmth because, in the end, the actor wants an audience and wants to please them - it's in our DNA. We understand the philosophical question - ‘If no one saw it did it happen?'. We want our stories to be seen. Now, I'm not saying all auteur filmmakers don’t but Jesus I have sat in theatres wondering - 'Why the fuck did you just do that to me?'. The answer is usually because you thought it was cool and we are thinking...yeah, nah.
I'm going to show you one video that pretty much sums up why actors are great at collaboration. Roll it.
Thank you, Amy Schumer. Yes, yes, yes. Thank you for working us all up. That video illustrates two things - what open thinkers we are and why so many of the world's leading female actors are so driven and so successfully running their own content engines. We are ambitious for ourselves as artists and we deeply care about female lives being represented in a way that is authentic to our experience.
Girls was one of the first shows to break through this authenticity gap, but Better Things, Orange is the New Black, Black-ish and Grown-ish, and my new favourite - the Elizabeth Banks-backed, Shrill! They all speak to the power of the passion of talent developing material and changing representations.
What works? Why does it work? How can we foster more close engagements between our branches of story making?
Performers pairing with producers have critical benefits for the performer – mentorship on the business side, for one. Bruna Papandrea, an Australian film and TV producer, pairing up with Reese Witherspoon is a great example of a union coalesced around being ambitious for authentic representations of female experience worthy of A-list talent while leveraging Reese's star power and sensibilities into delivering award-wining content for female audiences.
Reese, herself, found her own business feet, no doubt, with Bruna's famously good 'people skills' in managing all aspects of her business. Now with her new company, Hello Sunshine, Reese is further developing her online reach and base of ten million like-minded, mostly middle class readers, into other daily weekly monthly and big feature content.
Now, I don't know how Bruna and Reese set up shop. I think one of the reasons this type of actor/producer collaboration is normal is because it is well lubricated by the involvement of agent's packaging shows by putting their clients together. My US agents talk about me as a 'content maker' and say 'hey, you should take a meeting with this person, they are cool'. I do think we could take more of these open ended meetings to see if we click, if we find common purpose or shared interest in certain material.
To do this, producers need to be open to a new way of coming together with performers and how we choose each-other for a positive experience. Now, it's true that we 'actors' carry a lot of the child in us. In this country, I think that's created a suspicion that we are not ready for the 'grown up table'. Rather, I think that kids, like actors, really get what playing with others and working with others is meant to feel like, it should feel like play and not too much like work. I ran this idea by my son when I was preparation for a speech on the topic of playing with others for The New Zealand Big Screen Symposium in 2015.
My son, Banjo, was eleven at the time and I asked him this - ‘Let's say you have to choose someone in your class to work with on a project – whats’ your criteria?’ (this speaks to the recruitment part of what we do).
Banjo replied, ‘What kind of project? Coz if it's maths, I would just pick the Asian kids’.
My first reaction back then was, ’Well, let's say it's not maths, just a research project and you can't racially discriminate; race cannot be a criteria’.
However, now having co-created Total Control for ABC with Blackfella Films, I'd say race is absolutely a criteria. That show was one I could not have, in any universe, made without their purpose-led content conviction and authorship of Indigenous experience. So what kind of project you are ideating could absolutely make race a criteria. More importantly, if you are not having conversations with storytellers from diverse backgrounds, the projects that occur to you will be mostly informed by the limitations of your experience.
This planet's leading ‘woke’ brand Disney/Marvel is hoovering up the world’s most talented (and diverse) imagineers like Taika Waititi and Black Panther’s Ryan Coogler, creatives of African American backgrounds, women and LGBTQI+ skewing folk, marked by specificity in their point of view. This shows that 'the who' we make work with and 'the who’s points of view' we choose to listen to will have the biggest impact on what our content looks and sounds like. It can find us either bigger audiences and build unique niche brands or leave us in the twilight zone of irrelevance. So, the project is absolutely influenced by the backgrounds of our collaborators.
From there, what Banjo articulated should be taught in every film school. Really helpful, life-long, usable and doable things. There are so many things we can’t control in our business. However, there are many things you can be in control of, as far as yourself and choosing your collaborative partners. So, this last part of my speech will speak to recruitment and playing with others.
Banjo’s Criteria for Choosing Someone to Work With
1) Someone not annoying as shit.
2) Someone who is easy to talk to.
3) Someone who doesn't get too in to it and go like ….weird.
4) Someone who knows what they are doing.
Let's start with the first point -
1) Someone not annoying as shit
Note, he doesn't say the coolest, or hottest, or funniest. And he didn’t rule out annoying. You can be annoying. Just not 'annoying as shit'.
I asked to him to compare this to, say, a baseball team - would he chose a really annoying as shit player for his baseball team? He said they would have to guarantee success, like a ninety-five percent guarantee.
All of the producers I've spoken to agreed that they would probably put up with someone who was as annoying as shit for a ninety percent guarantee of success, meaning the person would have to be a genius and if the project was a perfect fit, which I guess means there probably wouldn't be too much unforeseen communication required regarding the core vision of the project.
The problem is they also agreed there were far fewer geniuses than annoying shits and that most people, who think they are a genius, are actually often just annoying shits. I recounted Banjo's criteria to Tony Ayers, who told me that Matchbox was built on the manifesto ‘never hire anyone you don't want to have dinner with’.
Now, one failed collaboration in our business that has always intrigued me is that of True Detective. Rumours of a power struggle between Pizzolatto and Fukunaga (who directed all eight episodes of the first season), gripped us all as soon production got underway. They grew more intense when we heard Fukunaga would not be back for season two.
Pizzolatto, by unchaining season two from his key season one collaborators, seemed to be pioneering a new model of television which says to the audience that there is only one star here, there is only one true voice – me! The author (not the director and not the actors) I am the continuing thread - I am the True Detective! The problem is - we stopped watching.
These two guys had like one hundred million reasons to work out their stuff. They had a projected season two success rate set at, like ninety-nine percent but someone said, 'fuck off I'm done' for a reason because someone was 'most def' an annoying shit.
I want to contrast this with this beautiful tribute I read from Peter Jackson after his Andrew Lesnie died so tragically young. It really struck me.
‘Being an only child, I grew up wondering what it would be like to have a brother. It wasn’t until today, in trying to deal with the terrible news of Andrew’s passing, that I came to realise how much he had become that person for me — someone I could intrinsically love and trust — who is up for all the good and the bad. He only ever served what he believed in — he was his own artist, separate from me, but always working generously to make what we were trying to create together better,’ Jackson wrote.
I do believe the most enduring creative partnerships are fuelled by themes expressed here - generous praise, working generously, respecting each other's unique skill sets, brotherhood, being up for the good and the bad, and that key word being trust.
What are the lessons with True Detective season two and three?
Success clearly does not protect us from failure of process. I feel what we do is ten percent in the ideation and ninety percent process through to delivery. The Lego Movie taught me this. I mean, come on, Lego - the movie? Literally, the worst idea ever. A movie? It's frickin’ genius because of the rigour of its character arc led and thesis. Glue is bad.
I think, as creative people, we need to differentiate failure of process with failure of product. To do this, you need the right voices to critically interrogate the primary idea, through a taste, purpose, story and general zeitgeist meter. I have been amazed at how often I have meetings for projects and I'm thinking 'who the fuck is going to see this?'. Literally, no one cares.
Then again, to circle back to Chernobyl, I think this was a risky proposition. Am I really going to stay in my PJs for a whole Sunday watching how people behave under a nuclear meltdown? You bet your ass I did! We just didn't know why until we watched it. What a brilliant thesis about truth and what superb collaboration between showrunner writer/producer and director/producer.
Back to Banjo's next point –
2) Someone Easy to Talk to
Now, that's really interesting. I think he means someone who is fluent in the process of negotiation, someone who might even be helpful or better than he is at it. Perhaps someone who is lubricating. I definitely think he means someone who is an open system thinker.
The smartest people, the most creative people, are often the most open and collaborative. Closed system thinkers are most frustrating, simply inflexible and not articulate defenders of their point of view. To be an 'open systems thinker' you have to be able to, first, be a listener.
A producer I talked with on this subject says she looks for someone with confidence - a person who can listen to contradictory opinion and let it see if it gets you into a better place. It's a bonus if you can bring an intensity of opinion, even if you piss each other off and find it hard to concede. It's normally the challenge that takes your idea into a more solid place – this very rigour of interrogating it. This goes back to this central idea that collaboration is a testing of ideas on the journey to make them better. Fragile people make that difficult. The ideas that win do so out of exhaustion of all ideas.
Now many many auteurs are just not easy to talk to. I think it really is something that those of us on some intensity/spectrum really need to work on. I recommend coaching and mentoring in these areas. To elaborate, I feel the open discussion of our skills matrix is often missing in our business. It's important going into a process that we do understand what strengths we are bringing in, what weakness we have and that we are generous to them. People who have the verbal fluency are really lucky in this process but I believe it's an area we can always get better at.
Esther Perel is an amazing sex and relationship therapist who has just done a podcast called How's Work?. She talks about how communication doesn't just mean talking and saying things but that it's defined by your ability to accept different opinions and not run everything into a black and white, right and wrong situation.
A Kiwi producer said something similar, ‘Something I had learned relatively young was fighting that sense of 'OMG my idea is better' and fighting for it longer than was useful and getting irritated that it was not being embraced. Maturity,’ she says, ‘taught me to go - I don't care that there is no smell of me in this, I just care that it is really good’.
I think the thing that really helps is to have this sense of the common vision. The first thing is to find out what the common ground is. Most difficult conversations come from the realisation that two people are on two very different wavelengths.
As each partner comes in from financier to distributor to actor, that core vision of the project needs to be both held and fleshed out. I have really found there is not enough engagement from top to bottom and sideways of what are we making here, in TV and Film.
Team building and leadership camps and all this other stuff the corporate sector do needs to come over to us. The corporate sector knows that if everyone knows what is being made they will likely -
a) be more motivated;
b) share that vision;
c) contribute to it more effectively; and
d) be more likely to defer financial gains for a common good or a back end outcome.
So, what if it's not working and the communication required is too conflict ridden or resulting in stand offs?
Sometimes the best answer is to break up. It really is okay at some point to walk away. I say, 'do it clean and do it early', if you get the sense that common ground will not be found or common values of collaboration cannot be realised. A great screenwriter says breaking up is not always a sign of failure but one of maturity. Walking away is a really important part of collaboration and I think it should be done more often.
What if it's not break up time but it's really tense and you really want to stay together? Sometimes you need to remember the Mercy Fuck. You know in marriages you don’t feel like it, you're tired, you're overwhelmed with all the multi-tasking, you're a little pissed over some huge thing like 'who put the red sock in the white wash' but you know it’s going to let off the pressure valve and reset things, so you do it. The Mercy Fuck. I do wonder if the relationship broke down between Fukunaga and Pizzaletto because no one would take it on the chin and just do the Mercy Fuck thing.
Now, I'm still figuring out what a platonic, collaborative version of a Mercy Fuck looks like but publicly crediting your collaborator would go a long way. You know, at the Emmys with True Detective season one? Fukunaga didn't thank Pizzolatto in his Best Director acceptance speech. Raise your hand if you think Pizzolatto has forgotten that? I think it's sometimes telling someone what they need to hear. It's about transcending your ego and knowing when to concede but obviously not if this is onerous to your core compass.
In the end, he is right. It's just a project or just a movie or just a a show and no one needs to be shamed or belittled or told that the world is going to end and you are going to go to hell for a scene not working or a project falling short of its ambitions.
We all know the drive it takes, how much passion one needs to fuel the fire to get anything off the ground, the absolutely messianic vision one needs in the pitch room to breathe life into the story to make it live in the minds to others. It can be challenging to be really open to everyone piling in without being afraid.
Television was recently described by a successful showrunner as 'piss soup' - it's what's left when everyone has pissed in it. I think that's true at its worst but at its best it’s bigger than its sum of parts. It’s a popular culture-martini that takes in the best ideas, in the zeitgeist and in the room, and through the gin-worthy distillation of key co-creatives to produce a perfectly balanced martini that we just can’t drink enough of. Like we hammer the good stuff, right? To avoid the piss soup and the nervous breakdowns that follow the most successful television companies this is essentially based on respectful symbiotic skills between critical collaborators.
Honestly, Total Control had everyone pissing all over the place. It was a white girl's feminist pitch to an Indigenous content engine creative, Darren Dale, who convinced Rachel Griffiths (the actor) to also star, so he could pitch it to Keshet who thought Black Bitch totes noisy, so they put a bunch of US dollars on the table and said 'stay daring!'. Sally Riley, Penny Smallacombe and Kelrick Martin all sprayed in it and in the rigour of arguing for what they were aspiring for, the story totes got better! And we are all still talking?!
Miranda Deer was also a major pisser - steadily slogging in the writer's room to land a high-concept story with grounded, believable character arcs with four writers (two Indigenous, one anglo-female and one single politically obsessed white boy brain beast, co-creator Stuart Page) threading the through lines like a master weaver.
Then, Rachel Perkins pissed all over it, overwriting where she felt the script did not match her deep understanding of Indigenous grassroots politics while adding her huge experience as an Indigenous woman who has grown up at the coalface of intersectionality. I joined the party, pissing for moments of content I’d dreamed a lifetime for, all the while taking early morning, on-set calls on speaker to me and Rachel Perkins, as pissed off, power-ladies were spilling on the Oz poll spills.
Sounds like a nightmare? It was the greatest joy of my career and we are all gunning to do it again.
I’d say Total Control was just pissed in, to perfection - brought to the cohesion and emotional, gut-punching thing of beauty under the auteur, Rachel Perkins. who is both an exceptional director and a collaborator of the highest order and a top pisser.
It was selected by Toronto International Film Festival out of 400 TV submissions and is currently on our screens to universal acclaim.
To Banjos next point -
3) Someone Who Doesn’t Get Too into it and Go Weird
When playing with those that are actually going to make it with you, not getting too into it and going weird means a couple of things. What Banjo maybe means is taking the Tootsie out out of it. You know that scene in Tootsie where Dustin gets fired for standing up for his idea of tomato - 'a tomato wouldn't sit down!' So, the commercial runs half a day late.
His agent laments to him, "‘No one will hire you! Come on!’
Hoffman, ‘But I bust my ass doing that show.’
His agent, exasperated, ‘Yeah but do you have to bust everyone else's ass too?’
Other top points of weirdness -
Fail to share responsibility and blame rather than an open growth-focused mindset keeping in mind the desired sustainability of enduring relationships.
Taking credit for things that you didn't do.
Sulking and withdrawing.
Failure to a have compassion and accept modes for reviewing failure points.
Failure to keep a perspective and manage your anxiety.
These are all major buzz kills people!
Banjo’s last point -
4) Someone Who Knows What They're Doing
Now we are in a world where, if we are to maintain relevance in the industry, hiring someone cannot just be just based on 'proof of past deliverables'. If all you needed to make a great show or film was to find the most experienced people and put them together then we would all be gazillionares! The truth is sometimes you hire the person you 'hope' can do the job.
I do think that risks are exciting. The producer's instincts are so critical here. Before she joined Six Feet Under, Jill Solloway hadn't really done much on screen. She created a Chicago theatre show with her sister, called The Real Brady Bunch which toured the country for, like, three years. But she had also famously penned this essay that had been handed around 'cool' Hollywood. It was called Courtney Cox's Asshole. Now, I never read the piece and it was not actually mean about Courtney Cox and was not saying that she was an asshole but was apparently a really clever, sassy chick-lit piece with a 'zeitgeisty zest'. Alan Ball thought - I want some of that flavour in my show! He also wanted more LGBTQI+ and female provocative voices illuminating both queer America and the actual ethnic texture of los Angeles.
I do think there could be more mentoring like this here in Australia around creating fail-safe, supportive structures to further the inclusion of original voices. Things that may encourage actors on multi-season shows to step up and direct as they do in the US. Other cross pollinations – cinematographers, editors and script supervisors into new roles. Kate Dennis is a good proof of concept here.
Conclusion
So, in summary. It would bear great fruit I believe if producers had more conversations with talent to see if we might find common purposes/develop and excite performers/double and triple threats who have strong distinct voices keeping and keeping you in the zeitgeist.
Producers! Please take general meetings with talent and ask the question. Is there something you care about?
To all you double and triple threats, badger to meet with producers and send them material and make your existence known!
Be rigorous with your recruiting. Ensure you share common values and purpose, especially in regard to annoying shits.
Listen to Esther Perel's podcast, How's Work?
Let's see each other as equals in our collaborations.
Last but not least - remember Banjo's take-aways because if you don’t when he is grown up and making content, he won’t chose you for his project!
