Stunt Love Press Book
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Presented by South Australian Film Corporation, Adelaide Film Festival and Closer Productions Sales Contact Closer Productions Writer and Director Matthew Bate Producer Caroline Man Executive Producer Sophie Hyde Editor Karryn De Cinque Motion Graphics Raynor Pettge Original Music Benjamin Speed Sound Production Pete Best Scott Illingworth Cinematographer Nick Matthews USA Cinematographer Bryan Mason Executive Consultant John McGowan Documentary inspired by the book J.P. McGowan: Biography of a Hollywood Pioneer by John J. McGowan A Closer production www.closerproductions.com.au © Closer Productions Pty Ltd, South Australian Film Corporation and Adelaide Film Festival 2 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. 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 South Australia. He had been a sailor, stockman, a Boer war hero and an actor before he stumbled into the embryonic film industry in 1912. Jack was dubbed the ‘Railroad Man’ due to his specialization in producing railway themed films, 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 filmmaking. 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 (Mad Max 1 & 3) and modern daredevil Zoe Bell (Quentin Tarantino’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 3 Matthew Bate – Writer/ Director On love and Stunts! 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 actors 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.