BOB ELLIS AND NEWSFRONT: IN MEMORIAM

I have to say that, until he died, I hadn't realised Bob Ellis had written Newsfront, one of my favourite movies, and one of the best of the Australian New Wave in the late 70s. It holds a special place for me because it's set among the world of newsreel cameramen in the late Forties and early Fifties, and the great Bill Hunter plays a cameraman committed to his craft, to loyalty, and to fairness. It's set in changing times, as newsreels are being squeezed aside by the growing presence of television, and Hunter's commitment is being challenged by his more upwardly-mobile brother (played by Gerard Kennedy).  The film ends at the Melbourne Olympics in 1956, where Hunter happens to be the only camera at the water polo match between the Soviets and Hungary; this literal bloodbath has become legendary in Olympic history.

The movie resonated with me because I was working for UPITN, one of the television news agencies, which was a direct descendant of the Fox Movietone News newsreel agency. Many of our execs, cameramen around the world, and staff had worked for newsreels, and the news gathering ethos was the same. The competition, in our case with the BBC-run Visnews, was almost as cut-throat as that in Newsfront; I can't count the number of exclusives stolen by 'accident' or false claims by our more influential rival over the years.

Hunter's attitude represented a certain kind of Australian egalitarianism which I could even then recognise, and it was overtly Labour, and it's made easy to follow because Hunter's often instructing his assistant, an English emigre played well by Chris Haywood, and the conflicts also play out with his wife, whom he's married because his colleague whom he loves (Wendy Hughes) is more taken with his brother. It mixes the personal with parallels in social commentary, and it does it well.

I didn't know about Bob Ellis. Mostly because I doubt his name was on the credits of the movie when I saw it in London; it had been cut considerably by director Philip Noyce and producer David Elfeck, and he'd had himself removed from the credits (he was later restored). Reading his obits, he was a notorious over-writer, wanting to include lots of detail and what was described as polemic. When he won a Writers Guild award for the script for the mini-series True Believers, he clutched the statue and told the producer '' you turned War and Peace into Peyton Place'.'

He also wrote I can't claim much knowledge about Ellis' career; was a playwright, film director, political writer, and critic, but I recommend reading his obituaries, because he's is exactly the kind of wonderful combination of charm, wit, inappropriateness, and belligerence we often associate with Aussies, and he grew into a gruff but loveable sort of curmudgeonly elder statesman status. He predicted the rise of Tony Abbott, and lost a slander suit brought by Abbott and his treasurer Peter Costello, in a wondering throwaway line about them and their wives. So he couldn't be all bad. He's irresistible in Not Quite Hollywood, a documentary about that boom in Australian cinema, all slash and kill and take no prisoners. That was a great era in Australia, which I appreciated from London; not least because Ellis' contemporaries at Sydney University, like Clive James and Germaine Greer, were over here making waves (Les Murray was another there at that time).

I always think of Aussies in two categories: those who rort and those who use the same energies to attack those who do. Ellis strikes me as one in the latter category. I'll probably delve further into his career, even if he did say 'Americans are scum' but maybe he was talking only about Hollywood.

In the meantime, try to see Newsfront. It's a brilliant picture. RIP Bob Ellis

BILL HUNTER AND NEWSFRONT: IN MEMORIAM

Whenever film critics seemed to 'discover' Australian cinema, Bill Hunter always seemed to be right there in the middle of the films they were discovering. He was, in some ways, the Australian everyman; the guy who could play the everyday Aussie and bring out all his virtues and some of his weaknesses too, and do it convincingly. He's also, to me, the kind of guy who, were he not on the wrong side of the world, would have made a great Scandinavian detective. The Aussie cinema boom that received the most attention was the early and mid 1990s, with the success of films like Strictly Ballroom, Muriel's Wedding, and Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, in all of which Hunter played a major part. In fact, his performance in Priscilla, as Bob, does to Guy Pearce, Terrence Stamp, and Hugo Weaving exactly what Jack Nicholson did to Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda in Easy Rider.

But an earlier explosion in Aussie cinema began in the mid-70s, and although Hunter's success in Peter Weir's Gallipoli was widely noted, his best work, to me, was two movies he made with Philip Noyce: Heatwave (1982) with Judy Davis and Chris Haywood, which to me is a seriously underrated thriller, and one of my favourite 'small' movies of all-time, Newsfront (1978).

Hunter gives a standout performance as a newsreel cameraman who refuses to bend with the times and sell out to television. Noyce does a brilliant job of mixing in years of post-war Aussie history and the conflict between Hunter (as Len Maguire) and Gerard Kennedy as his more adaptable brother. Haywood is there too, as his assistant. It's about changing times in Australia, and in the news industry, and it ends with Hunter and his newsfilm camera being the only person covering the infamous USSR vs Hungary water-polo match at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, a match which took place after the Russians had put down the Hungarian uprising. But what it's really about is staying true to old-fashioned ideals, to a sense of Australian mateyness which seemed to be fast disappearing, if it had really existed when it mattered, which may have been the point of Gallipoli too.

Part of the reason I was drawn to the film was that I was working at the time for UPITN, a television newsfilm agency, which had evolved from Fox Movietone news (in fact, just two weeks ago, Reece Schoenfeld, who had started with Movietone, headed UPITN, and left to found CNN for Ted Turner, died, and I couldn't get British papers interested--but he personified the same news ethos that Hunter does in Newsfront) and we covered the world on 16mm film, which was shipped to London, edited, scripted, and then shipped (and later satellited) around the world. I was doing the scripting and the sending, and I could empathise with Hunter's predicament, trying to hang onto news values in a faster-moving world that wants more entertainment. Sound familiar today? It's a fine film, and I recommend it without reservations.

Looking through his credits I see a couple of television mini-series that interest me, a 2000 remake of On The Beach, in which Hunter plays the PM, and 1995's Blue Murder, an Aussie police thriller. I'll look forward to catching up with Bill Hunter.