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Writer and Director Matthew Bate Producer Caroline Man Editor Karryn De Cinque Motion Graphics Raynor Pettge Original Music Sound Production Pete Best Scott Illingworth Nick Matthews USA Cinematographer Bryan Mason Executive Consultant John McGowan

Documentary inspired by the book J.P. McGowan: Biography of a Pioneer by John J. McGowan

A Closer production

www.closerproductions.com.au

© Closer Productions Pty Ltd, South Australian Film Corporation and

2 Synopsis

The story of ’s J.P ‘Jack’ McGowan plays like a Hollywood script. An epic romance set against the birth of cinema featuring high adventure, war, fame and great love won and lost. J.P was one of Hollywood’s first directors, who with his wife and on-screen daredevil Helen Holmes, paved the way for the action-adventure blockbusters we know today. Long before ‘Brangelina’ it was Jack and Helen who ruled Hollywood’s silver screens. Longer Synopsis

The story of Australia’s J.P ‘Jack’ McGowan plays like a Hollywood script. An epic romance set against the birth of cinema featuring high adventure, war, fame and great love won and lost. J.P was one of Hollywood’s first stunt directors, who with his wife and on-screen daredevil Helen Holmes, paved the way for the action-adventure blockbusters we know today. Long before ‘Brangelina’ it was Jack and Helen who ruled Hollywood’s silver screens.

Jack McGowan was born in the small railway town of Terowie in . He had been a sailor, stockman, a Boer war hero and an before he stumbled into the embryonic in 1912. Jack was dubbed the ‘Railroad Man’ due to his specialization in producing railway themed , which set the conventions of the action- blockbuster genre. His career holds a mirror up to a time when the movies were growing- up, when the language and cinema was being written and when rules had yet to be fixed.

At the heart of Stunt Love is of course a love story. Jack’s life in the movies was founded on his relationship with wife and ‘leading lady’ Helen Holmes. Jack’s creative zenith was at its peak during his 13-year relationship with this equally dynamic woman. As Hollywood’s first stuntwoman Helen was brave and tough, a collaborator willing to risk life and limb to get the best stunt scene. The couple formed a creative partnership like no other in film history. It was a relationship based around extreme danger and relentless .

As a director Jack was a pioneer of technology, of editing and sequence construction. He forged new rules and created cinema iconography such as the damsel tied to the railway line. And Helen Holmes broke new ground as a modern woman, leaping from trains, fist- fighting bad guys and righting wrongs. She became one of the most famous icons of early-serialized cinema. They were not necessarily ‘artists’, they were experts in a brand new industry that made studio bosses vast sums of money and entertained millions of people around the world.

Stunt Love is told against the backdrop of a colorful social and historical background, spanning the Boer War, the birth of ‘Hollywood’, the Depression, World Wars and the transition from silent to ‘talkie’ cinema. Using silent-era techniques with contemporary film and animation, this film blends Jack’s technical palette with the modern. Featuring interviews with legendary stuntman Grant Page ( 1 & 3) and modern daredevil Zoe Bell (’s Death Proof) Stunt Love tells the story of Jack and Helen, their creative and personal partnership and the birth of an industry and art form that now dominates world culture.

Technical information Running time: 27 mins 30 secs Format: HD, Colour and B&W Ratio: 1.78 Sound: Dolby Digital Stereo Language: ENGLISH

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Matthew Bate – Writer/ Director On love and !

I have always been interested in the legends and stories of cinema and film history. And although I was familiar with the big names in silent films and even the image of the girl tied to the railway line, I had never come across the name J.P McGowan. It was something of a shock to learn about him, that he was born in South Australia and had forged this incredible career at the very birth of cinema.

I’d had a similar Eureka moment with another film called What the Future Sounded Like, when I heard that composer Tristram Cary was living near me in Adelaide. He had forged new ground in the field of electronic music, and had scored films like the Ladykillers and Dr Who. I find it incredibly rewarding uncovering these lost characters in art and history. Each film I make like this is an obsession for me, a learning experience I want to share with the audience.

Jack McGowan’s life was just like a movie script. He lived in an era when the world was still a place where you could sail to exotic lands, fight in wars, make your fortune and become a hero. The fact he did all this and then somehow found his way to becoming a pioneer during the birth of cinema is really incredible. I was also particularly attracted to the character of Helen Holmes, who seems every bit as daring as J.P. Their relationship seemed to me to be at the foundation of J.P’s work and it is something I have used to create the film’s dramatic narrative. Every Hollywood film needs a great love story!

The story of Jack’s life is also the story of the movie business, the evolution of film language and of Hollywood. It is a perfect vehicle to glimpse a kind of filmmaking that is long gone – a fast and furious style, of one take wonders and entire films shot and delivered within a week. Jack and Helen’s life was lived as fast as their filmmaking and was thrilling and dangerous. It is the kind of Hollywood love story that could never be replicated. It was this willingness to risk life and limb to get the best shots that sets their relationship apart. What Director now would risk his Star wife’s life by placing her in deadly situations week in week out to get a stunt sequence?

The film lent itself perfectly to my style of collaged filmmaking. Given the participants were long dead and we only had access to their surviving films and photographs, I knew we would have to create some unique ways of telling the story. I spent a day at the Margaret Herrick library in L.A researching and sourcing images of J.P and Helen and articles from original material, which we have then manipulated in various ways. Old magazine articles burst into life, photographs are given 3-D effects, and various archival films are re- contextualized by us.

To bring the characters of Helen and Jack to life we also used to voice dialogue taken from interviews from magazines such as Motion Picture World and Photoplay. We hear the voices of journalists and friends of Jack and Helen as we build the texture of their

4 lives. The music score also contemporizes the film, sampling original Nickleodeon scores and reshaping to create a new sound.

We interviewed a number of J.P ‘experts’ to help us tell the story. John McGowan is J.P’s biographer and the chief storyteller of Jack’s life. Geoff Mayer is a silent era expert and Professor at La Trove University and Richard Maltby is head of Screen Studies at Flinders University. They were shot on green-screen backgrounds and then composited into old films and images so that they seem weaved into the fabric of the silent era cinema.

We interviewed the contemporary stunt-woman Zoe Bell in L.A. Zoe is a New Zealander who has become one of Hollywood’s most sought after stunt women, starring in Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof. We were able to get Zoe to look at some of Helen’s stunts and talk about them from her perspective. We use footage from Death Proof in the film, cutting between the stunts of Helen in 1914 and Zoe in 2007. It is great to hear from a contemporary professional just how dangerous and daring the stunts Helen was performing almost a hundred years ago were.

Stunt Love also features an interview with legendary stuntman Grant Page. Grant has become an icon of Australian film, stunt acting most famously in Mad Max 1 & 2. Grant is a great admirer of J.P McGowan’s pioneering spirit, a fellow Australian who forged an international film career. A former physics teacher Grant is well aware of the Newtonian laws at play in McGowan’s stunts, when he is playing with thousands of tonnes of steaming locomotive. As Page say’s: J.P was working at a time before CGI special effects, stunt wires and green-screens. What he was doing is absolutely real.

It’s quite a privilege to get the chance to tell Jack’s story. I do feel like I am helping to colour in a lost chapter in a shared American and Australian cinema history. I’ve come to know these people through making the film, and I think I would have really enjoyed being on their film sets. Their dedication and obsession to their craft is something I understand and respect. I think it’s important that we celebrate characters like J.P McGowan in our cinema history and hope this film contributes in some way to his legacy.

Caroline Man – Producer On The Stunt Love Rollicking Adventure!

To discover the spirit of Hollywood’s First Australian - J.P. (Jack) McGowan, the actor, stuntman, director and producer - has been inspirational. Jack, born in 1880 in Terowie, country South Australia, was a “big Australian”, says one of our experts, David Donaldson. He was also a hard and focused worker whose life was full of adventure. To then delve further into the love story between Jack and his dare devil wife Helen Holmes, who fell from horses and jumped from high heights saving the day in those early Hollywood silent films was telling about the trust in her partnership with Jack.

Initially it was a daunting task to source J.P. McGowan’s many films and production stills, some of which were shot over ninety years ago. Having assistance from experts around Australia and the Academy of Motion Picture, Margaret Herrick archival library, we managed to gather a selection of Jack’s work from throughout his career. Jack has a strong place in American cinema history since his career spanned from the beginning of the silent melodrama era to the 1950s.

The director, Matthew Bate, and I discussed at the beginning of creating this documentary that it would be ideal if we could not only interview experts of cinema history but also contemporary stunt actors who are working in the field now and get them all to comment in the film. We are really happy with the mix of guests that appear in Stunt Love. We 5 have a biographer, a collector, history authors and experts. I was also fortunate to be able to contact and gain the support from Zoe Bell, contemporary stuntwoman and actor, and her New Zealand agent Karen Kay Management Ltd. Matt and Bryan Mason (Cinematographer), who were in America at the time, captured a beautiful interview with Zoe.

To also gain Grant Page’s support to comment on Jack and Helen’s work gives the audience another perspective on the importance of their careers. Grant, an Australian stunt icon whose work has spanned from the 1970s to today, was able to share his philosophies on stunt work and on life and examine the influence of JPs work on the history of stunts up to the current time. Grant has also hosted the companion website, www.stuntlove.com, that’s an explosion of action and history of Australian stunts - full of fire, falls, racing and dangerous animals - and is educational and a lot of fun.

To complete the film we invited the locals of Jack’s birthplace to a screening of two of his iconic films. Terowie is a small and haunting town and an amazingly cinematic place to film. There is a feeling as you stand on the abandoned railway line that the town used to be a significant crossroads in the lower north of South Australia. The locals are generous and hard working people themselves who are trying to preserve the memory of Jack and their railway town home.

The creative team have created a collage of images and music that revisits the rollicking ride adventure that was Jack’s life and career. Ben Speed, the composer, and Raynor Pettge, motion graphics, have bought back to life Jack McGowan’s pioneering energy. The two Nick Matthews and Bryan Mason have done a great job capturing interviews and landscapes from around Australia and America, and Karryn De Cinque has selected and edited together the archival and contemporary footage seamlessly.

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Production Notes (By Dashing Director, Matthew Bate)

SMASHING CRASHING TEAMWORK! Railroad Man is the third film I have directed for the ABC’s ARTSCAPE program. In all three films I have teamed with Editor Karryn De Cinque and motion graphics artist Raynor Pettge. Given the nature of the style of filmmaking (heavy use of motion graphics and manipulated imagery) we have fine-tuned the way we work as a team. We operate out of two rooms – one an edit suite with Kaz cutting the story and next door is Raynor, creating the motion graphics and animation. I float between, feeding ideas and images to both of them.

DASHING SHOOT IN THE U.S.A.!

Making the kinds of films we make involves a lot of research. I was in the U.S making another film but diverted off on a number of Stunt Love interview and research missions. In L.A we visited the amazing Forest Lawn cemetery where both Helen and J.P are buried. It was somewhat of a needle in a haystack job to find their headstones amongst the thousands that exist. I also spent a day at the Margaret Herrick Library, a specialist collection of cinema related material. Here I went through a number of original photographs and magazines from the era, choosing the best material that could be manipulated by us later on.

A highlight of the trip was meeting stunt actor Zoe Bell. It was quite a coup getting an interview with her. She lives near Venice Beach in L.A and as we turned up to meet her she was moving into a new house. Whether by design or not Zoe recruited our small team to help her move the latest trailer load of gear into her new home. It was entirely worth the hernias as she proved to be a funny and open interview subject. She was genuinely impressed seeing Helen Holmes perform these death-defying stunts a hundred years ago.

It was great to hear a modern perspective on the stuntwork of J.P and Helen who were working in an era long before Occ-health and safety and massive insurance premiums. Rarely is a star in Hollywood allowed to perform their own stunts given the insurance premiums, so for Zoe to see Helen the leading lady jumping off trains and riding horses down embankments was a revelation. We use a great scene from Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof in the film, intercutting Zoe’s infamous “Ships-Mast” car bonnet stunt with Helen Holmes jumping from a car onto a moving train. It’s fantastic to see that although a hundred years separates them, the basic daredevil attitude and physical ability needs to be present for any person to perform a film stunt.

7 BURNING LOVE IN JP’s HOMETOWN!

One of the last locations we shot in was Terowie in South Australia’s North. Terowie is the home-town of J.P McGowan. A famous Railhead town, Terowie was a major stop along the tracks into Adelaide. MacArthur gave his famous ‘I Will return’ speech from the back of a train there during WW2. Today Terowie is a ghost town, a shadow of its former self, with the train tracks overgrown and the main drag sitting off the major highway. Nevertheless it was a fantastic location to shoot in. The eerie atmosphere lends itself to beautiful cinematography. We had organized for two local projectionists to screen a couple of J.P films at the local town hall. It turned out to be a great night, with over 70 locals turning up and some local ladies making plates of fine home baked goods. We screened Roaring Six Guns and Hurricane Express – one of J.P’s later Westerns and it seemed to go down incredibly well and made for a great end to our documentary. J.P comes full circle, leaving Terowie in 1902 and returning via the film.

BURNING GRANT PAGE!

Towards the end of making our film we came in contact with Grant Page who was working in SA on the new SBS series Danger 5. We immediately recruited Grant to host the accompanying website to this project as well as securing an interview in the film. Grant is a wonderful storyteller and a legend of the stunt game. Grant’s views on J.P’s stunts, intercut with footage of his own work from the film Danger Freaks, gives our film fantastic cross generational insight.

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The Stunt Love Players

Zoe Bell Zoë Bell was born in New Zealand and has a background in gymnastics and . She began working as a stuntwoman when she doubled Lucy Lawless on the cult favorite TV series Xena (1995). Zoë then became for Uma Thurman in Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003) and Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (2004). Zoë also doubled for Sharon Stone in Catwoman (2004). With Zoë’s already famous stunt skills, she debuted her acting career with Tarantino’s Death Proof, and quickly followed with Drew Barrymore’s Whip It. Zoe also appeared in the documentary Double Dare (2004), Zoë along with legendary stuntwoman Jeannie Epper. Zoë is now a well established and talented stunt double and actress who lives in .

Grant Page

Working within three parameters of “Nobody gets hurt, the stunt must look as the film requires, and the stunt must be within budget” Grant Page has gained well over 600 credits as during 40 plus years in the Australian and international film industry as a stunt man and/ or . During this period, he has established an enviable reputation for having one of the best safety records in the business. Among Grant’s credits are some of the most action-packed productions filmed anywhere in the world, including Mad Max I & II and the classic, Stunt Rock.

John J. McGowan

Adelaide-based John J. McGowan is a journalist, TV documentary producer/director and biographer of Hollywood movie trailblazer J. P. (John Paterson) McGowan (1880-1952). While working as a Senior Producer with ABC TV John McGowan was awarded the inaugural Australian Human Rights Commission Media Award as producer/director of Six (1984) a six-part documentary series about contemporary Aborigines. John McGowan’s critically-acclaimed book J. P. McGowan: Biography of a Hollywood Pioneer (2005) was the result of research spanning 20 years during which he pieced together the extraordinary life story of the forgotten Australian-born soldier-of-fortune who became a respected actor, director, producer and industrial advocate.

9 David Donaldson

David Donaldson fell into films at University with The Last Laugh, Lorentz’s The River and The Long Voyage Home, became a lifelong devotee of John Ford and an instant activist for film showing outside the mainstream. He was the inaugural director of the Sydney Film Festival. David also does niche non-theatrical distribution as Filmart Associates and has been involved in adult education in Armidale NSW, Papua New Guinea and Adelaide, always promoting film societies. He has advocated for J.P. McGowan since 2000 via the Terowie Days of Rail and Screen. Currently, He also collects vintage glass slides and celluloid film and McGowaniana.

Dr Geoff Mayer

Reader and Associate Professor and Head of the School of Communication, Arts & Critical Enquiry, La Trobe University. Book publications include – “The New Australian Cinema” (1992), “The Oxford Companion to Australian Film”, (co-editor, 1999), “Guide to British Cinema” (2003), “Roy Ward Baker” (2004), “The Cinema of Australia and New Zealand”(2007), “Encyclopedia of Film Noir”(2007) and, forthcoming, “The Historical Dictionary of Crime Film”.

RICHARD MATLBY

Richard Maltby is Professor of Screen Studies and Executive Dean of the Faculty of Education, Humanities and Law at Flinders University, South Australia. He is a leading international authority on the social and cultural history of American cinema and its audiences. His book Hollywood Cinema provides an innovative analysis of Hollywood as a cultural and commercial institution, and is widely used as a university text on the history and aesthetics of mainstream American cinema; a second edition was published in 2003, and a Chinese edition in 2005.

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The Stunt Love Pictographic Makers

Matthew Bate – Writer / Director Biography

Director Matthew Bate has created a number of films dealing with similarly unique artistic personalities, and which use a collage style that fuses animation, found footage and re-creations with traditional documentary techniques. STUNT LOVE is Matt’s third film made for the ABC’s ARTSCAPE program, which have included his 2006 film What The Future Sounded Like, a visually and sonically experimental exploration into the genesis of electronic music. In 2007 Matt directed the first documentary co-production between SBS Australia and Al Jazeera and in 2008 completed Connected By Light, a film about world-renowned new media artist Lynette Wallworth for ABC Artscape.

Recently, Matt directed The Mystery of Flying Kicks, a film exploring what relationship sneakers on telephone wires have with murder, drugs, sex and politics. The film was made entirely from contributions of imagery and phone message bank stories from the global online public. It premiered at the 2010 SXSW Festival and was in selection at Edinburgh, CPH:DOX, Sheffield DocFest and won Best Documentary Short at 2010 International Film Festival. Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure is Matt’s debut and will premier at Sundance 2011. Matt is currently developing a film about the great foot-fetish photographer Elmer Batters.

Matt Bate is a co-director of Adelaide-based, Closer Productions.

Caroline Man – Producer Biography

Caroline began her Production career at the ABC working on Children’s TV, cooking shows, news and Arts programs. Caroline then stepped out and worked in a variety of crew roles on feature films and TV mini-series such as December Boys and Rain Shadow.

Being passionate about real stories Caroline then concentrated on producing documentaries. She has now produced documentaries and series for SBS Australia, National Indigenous Television, Channel 9 and the ABC. Bittersweet Freedom, 52 min. was an episode in the four part series Destination Australia for SBS, Dodger’s Heart an indigenous doco-drama was frequently played on NIT TV, and Out of the Ordinary is a Channel 9 series that Caroline has segment directed and produced for 3 years.

11 Sophie Hyde – Executive Producer Biography

Australian filmmaker Sophie Hyde is one of the founders and co- directors of Closer Productions, based in Adelaide, South Australia. In the past, Sophie has primarily only produced the work she’s directed but this has changed with her executive producing STUNT LOVE, and producing Closer Productions’ first feature documentary Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure, premiering at Sundance 2011. Sophie has previously produced and directed documentaries Ok, Let’s Talk About Me (2005), short drama Elephantiasis, which premiered at the 2010 Melbourne Int’l Film Festival; and Necessary Games, three short dance films with Restless Dance Theatre, that continues to screen internationally and has won Best Experimental at 2009 Melbourne Int’l Film Festival & Brooklyn Int’l Film Festival 2010, and was awarded Best Work at ReelDance Awards 2010. Her short drama, My Last Ten Hours With You (2007) has screened successfully at festivals internationally, including Uppsala and Palm Springs, and has won numerous awards. Sophie’s next films will be as producer and co-director on the documentary Life in Movement, premiering at Adelaide Film Festival 2011 and is in development on another SAFC FilmLab feature, the drama 52 Tuesdays, which will begin shooting in 2011 and continue for 52 weeks.

Benjamin Speed – Original Music Biography

Starting out in The New Pollutants, a fun loving, experimental and darkly zany hip- hop/electro band influenced by 8-bit computer games and 1950's pop, (Mister) Benjamin Speed spent his formative musical years as a singer/rapper, hard working song writer and extreme stunts live performer playing such places as The and Falls Festivals. After graduating with a music degree from the Adelaide Conservatorium in 2004, The New Pollutants composed and performed a highly successful new score for the 1927 silent film Metropolis, which premiered at the 2005 Adelaide Film Festival and has since played at the Commonwealth Games and The Opera House. Moving to Sydney in 2006, Benjamin attended the prestigious AFTRS Film School and graduated with a Masters Degree in Screen Composition. In 2007 he released his critically acclaimed debut album ‘The Dreamer’ and in 2008 worked on the AFI award winning feature documentary ‘A Northern Town’. In 2009 Benjamin composed for the animated film 'The Cat Piano' starring , which has since won numerous Australian and international awards. In 2010 he composed for feature documentary ‘The Snowman’, which won the Australian Documentary Prize and was nominated for the AFI Award. www.benjaminspeed.com

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Karryn De Cinque – Editor Biography

In 1993, Karryn De Cinque realised the fastest way to get her break as an editor, was to apply for funding to direct a ... and then hire herself to cut it! Michelle’s Third Novel was selected to open the New York Film Festival, screening before the US premiere of Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. Karryn has since edited more than 20 short films and as many music videos.

In 1999, Karryn completed her Masters degree at the Australian Film Television and Radio School (AFTRS) specialising in editing. She graduated with the Frameworks editing prize for Half Mongrel, which went on to receive the “Tomorrow’s Cinema” award in Belgium.

Karryn has worked primarily in documentary for the past decade, her credits include The Man who Saved a Million Brains, which she also co-wrote, winning a 2006 Atom award, and Matthew Bate’s What the Future Sounded Like (2006) and Connected by Light (2008). Karryn’s first feature-length documentary A Northern Town, was shortlisted for a Grierson Award for Innovation at the 2008 British Documentary Awards.

Raynor Pettge – Motion Graphics Biography

Raynor Pettge has worked for over five years as editor, designer, and creator, first at Plexus Films and currently at Closer Productions. Cutting his teeth on TVCs and corporates, Raynor has since provided effects and graphics for a number of visually rich documentary productions including What The Future Sounded Like, and Connected by Light, as well as series such as SBS' Risking It All and mY Generation. He has also worked as a compositor on the People's Republic of Animation's Oscar- nominated short film The Cat Piano.

Raynor is currently working on the feature documentary Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure

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Contact:

Closer Productions

54A High Street, Kensington SA, 5068, Australia

[email protected]

www.closerproductions.com.au

Ph: +61 8 8361 3933

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