DON DUNSTAN FOUNDATION 1 DON DUNSTAN ORAL HISTORY PROJECT Phillip ADAMS This is George Lewkowicz for the Don Dunstan Foundation’s Don Dunstan Oral History Project interviewing Phillip Adams on the 1st May 2008 at Phillip Adams’s residence. The topic of interest is the film industry, Phillip’s advice to Don Dunstan on the setting up of the film industry in South Australia and Don and the arts more generally. Phillip, thanks very much for being willing to do this interview. Can you, just for the record, talk briefly about yourself and how you became interested in the film industry? (clock chimes) Well, by the time I got the phone call from Don I’d spent some years persuading, cajoling, bullying, flattering a rapid succession of prime ministers into doing things. My interest in the film industry was simply as a member of an audience for most of my life and it seemed no-one ever considered it remotely possible that Australia make films. We were an audience for films – leaving aside our extraordinary history of film production, which went back to the dawn of time, which none of us knew about; we didn’t know, for example, we’d made 500 films during the Silent Era alone – so, anyway, nothing was happening. The only film productions in Australia were a couple of very boring industrial docos. But once 1956 arrived with television we had to start doing a few things of our own, and long before I started getting fundamental changes in policy and support mechanisms a law was passed. (telephone rings, break in recording) This is something that people don’t know about, and it’s really quite important: a law was passed, by whom I’ve never been able to establish, making it illegal to show foreign television commercials in Australia, and that was really the trigger. It meant that Coca-Cola and the mighty corporations couldn’t dump their commercials on the air – they can now, but they couldn’t then – and so you had to have little production companies to make television commercials; and out of that, in due course, would come many of the great names still extant in our film industry half a century later. So you had little companies making commercials and that was pretty much it: and I was making commercials as a young advertising bloke along with people like Fred Schepisi and Peter Carey and others from the middle ’50s. ADAMS_PHILLIP_draftCleared.doc DON DUNSTAN FOUNDATION 2 DON DUNSTAN ORAL HISTORY PROJECT Phillip ADAMS Then some of us started to fantasise that we could make films ourselves: underground filmmakers started to pop up in Melbourne and Sydney, there were clusterings around film cooperatives and some of us made our little infantile efforts at feature films without any help from anybody. We didn’t know what we were doing, we just made it up as we went along. And I could spend a week telling you about that. But, in any case, I made a feature film myself, I made it with a clockwork camera, and it won the Grand Prix at the Adelaide–Auckland Film Festival, the first Australian ever to win the Grand Prix at any film festival, let alone a modest international one. Now, as I’d made that film – and I did everything, my friend and I were the entire crew – I thought, ‘Well, if we can do it, anyone can do it’. What was the title of that? It was called Jack and Jill: the postscript. It was also the first feature film to win the AFI1 Awards. The AFI Awards had been in existence for a long time but they’d never had a feature film to give a prize to. So Adelaide, in a strange way, (laughs) had an influence on my life, because of giving me this nice little statue. So then I decided that it was time to get something happening formally. Barry Jones and I managed to get very close personal access to John Gorton, we got John interested, John sent Barry and I around the world looking at ideas for a film industry; I didn’t need to make the trip because I’d already worked out the entire plan, but I’d never been overseas and got a nice free trip. I came back and I wrote a one-page report, one sheet of paper, to Gorton and said, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident’. That was a little bit of an in-joke. ‘It is time to hear our own voices, see our own landscapes and dream our own dreams’. And I set up a three-sequence argument: an experimental film fund, where we would just give money, scatter bread upon the waters for very young filmmakers to try anything; out of that we would take the talented and we’d put them in a hypothetical film school; in that film school they would form working relationships, and when they graduated you would 1 AFI – Australian Film Institute. DON DUNSTAN FOUNDATION 3 DON DUNSTAN ORAL HISTORY PROJECT Phillip ADAMS fund them through a film bank. One, two, three. Gorton accepted it, but was only around long enough to implement stage one, which was the experimental film fund. Then we had rapidly a couple of other prime ministers but I kept on the case and – bingo! – those three things were put into place. Then, then I get a call from South Australia, from Peter Ward, the Svengali, Don’s Svengali – Yes. – asking me to go to South Australia because Don wanted to have a chat to me, and I was well aware of Dunstan, who even then I was describing as the Pierre Trudeau of Australia, and I was fascinated to meet him. So Peter picks me up at the airport, I’m going to Don’s office, and the first thing that happened was and I tell the story how he sort of walked towards me across this vast expanse of carpet holding out his hand with this huge ring, the turquoise ring, and I wasn’t sure whether I was meant to shake the hand or kiss the ring. (laughter) I think I did both. And we sat in a conversation pit underneath the obligatory Australian landscape – I think it might have been an Arthur Boyd. But he did a very odd thing: he went over and turned on a very large radio which was sitting on the other side of his office, very loudly. And I said, ‘Why have you done that, Mr Premier?’ He said, ‘Because the Permanent Head is listening’. He was the permanent head of his own department, who was Sir Tommy Playford – – –. Yes; John White I think it was. On the other side of the wall, with a glass to the wall. Really? So he could listen in on what Dunstan was saying. So clearly the radio was a technique that Dunstan used frequently so he could have something approaching private conversations. Given that we had to shout at each other (laughter) I’m not sure how efficacious it was. So what happened then was very quick. Don said, ‘I want to get into the film industry. I know what you’re doing federally. How can I get into it?’ And he said, before I could make a suggestion, ‘I’ve got a very good DON DUNSTAN FOUNDATION 4 DON DUNSTAN ORAL HISTORY PROJECT Phillip ADAMS idea’. He said, ‘This is what I want to do: I want to open a film laboratory here. I’ve talked to Fuji in Japan and they’re willing to set up a film lab so that all the film work that’s starting to happen in Melbourne and Sydney, Adelaide can be a part of it’. I said, or shouted, ‘It won’t work, Don. They’re known as “rushes” and they need to be rushed. By the time we send stuff over to South Australia on aeroplanes it’s just not going to work. It’s not the way to go, it’s bullshit’. And then – I mean I didn’t know why I was there, I had no idea – I said, ‘But on the other hand we could set up a local industry. Forget processing, there’s something else we can do’. And I asked him, I said, ‘Can you find out how much filmmaking is going on in South Australia now within the Government?’ Because I guessed there’d be a bit. And so he checked, and what we discovered was every other government department had a film crew and they were making dreadful documentaries on public roads or road safety and they were all over the place. So Don and I came up with a conspiracy, and this is what it was. He didn’t want to be seen publicly to be pushing for a film industry because he thought he might be seen as slightly mad. And so I said, ‘This is what we’re going to do: we’re going to put all this film activity together in one body. All those cameramen, all the Moviolas, the Arriflexes, all this scattered activity, we’ll put together into a sort of Film Australia model’ – it was the Commonwealth Film Unit model – ‘and that will be a front for what our real plan is, which is to make feature films’. So this is what we argued. We’d bring all the stuff together, get rid of – most of it was hopeless, most of them were useless, untalented, timeserving dills making really, really bad films – so ‘We’ll get rid of that, but this will give us an initial way of funding a bit of film, and you just do it covertly rather than overtly’.