So I was wondering about the Homicide scriptwriters and did a search on Phil Freedman, there was a great article about him in the Green Guide in May '79 by John Teerds. Teerds was, oddly from our perspective now perhaps, more interested in Freedman's earlier work as a radio scriptwriter but Freedman's preference for TV busts out. Freedman was 64 when the article was written so I guess he was born in 1915 and now he's around 107. He started work in 1933 doing short stories for various magazines eg New Idea and I gather from another article that he had a short story in a collection in the late, um, I think 1930s. Interesting tidbit - Freedman lived in Walhalla in the late 1940s but who knows why! That was when Maurice West of all people persuaded him to write for radio.
The direct quotes about Homicide are the most interesting to me though. He says of the show, 'We had a lot of criticism. It was a lack of slickness that was criticised by some. It might have been phrased differently but that's what it was - a lack of polish.
'People complained about the Australian accent and critics were unkind.
'I felt there was a lack of sympathy to the effort because we were teaching ourselves. There was very little encouragement.
'But the public loved it. They were obviously hungry for Australian stuff and they loved seeing things like the trams.
'Oddly enough, when it was shown to the people Metro Goldwyn Mayer they liked it too.
'They liked the sort of homespun look about it.'
I must say I am still getting a huge amount out of watching these shows, not only historically in terms of the built environment, or social attitudes, or seeing actors who later became huge or were just very interesting and unusual actors, but also because often the stories are pretty good - at very least, tightly scripted and economically and imaginatively executed, and at best, compelling drama. I was watching one today I think called 'The Black Book' though now I come to think of it I can't imagine why it would be called that, with Sonia Borg and Leonard Teale on a pier at Black Rock and it was very early Polanski, and I was thinking, well we really missed out in many ways from this talent not having the opportunity to thrive in great film drama etc, at least a lot of it didn't have that opportunity, that didn't come until the 70s. But then many of these people were obviously often very versatile and apparently in constant theatre, radio, television work - it was surely a pretty satisfying life for many of them.
The other great thing about Crawfords in the 60s (and beyond?) was their willingness to take on non-Anglo actors - they did this a lot - and people like Sonia Borg who was at least a triple threat if not more, acting and working as a scriptwriter and I think a kind of commissioning editor for the show. I see she later wrote the script for Storm Boy.
I could ramble on. Obviously.
No comments:
Post a Comment