The Many Flavours of Suburban Theatre

I'm making a lot of calls and sending more than the usual billion emails this week, trying to secure venues for BULLET: A Superhero Comedy. We're going to tour the show to outer-city suburbs like Melton, Cranbourne and Whittlesea. The differences in expectations and interaction are interestingly varied.

The joyful calls are when the venue manager gets very excited about the project. The idea of a show for youth, where otherwise there is none, really gets them revved up. An original idea (not a re-staging of a licensed show) that started in the city but is delighted to come out to the 'burbs gets these venue managers going on how much more they'd love to see out their way. They love the cultural injection, the family friendly nature of the show, and how easy our show is to run. They're all too happy to make accommodations for our ticketing system (trybooking.com) and their venue prices are reasonable. They're also happy to have a hire! These managers are warm, encouraging and really care about giving their community events to enjoy.

Then there's the 'insiders only' groups. They see anyone beyond their shire or council as outsiders. It's an odd kind of reluctance, or more an indifference to what we're doing. All venues in the area are booked up by local amateur theatre groups, no, sorry, there's no leeway to squeeze in between rehearsals. The managers aren't interested in giving me alternative locations, and the Events and Facilities co-ordinators in the councils find my enquiries a tiring hassle. Probably the worst offenders in these groups are the ones that simply don't return my calls. I give up on these areas with a sour taste in my mouth.

Third are the prohibitively expensive, charging over $1000 for a 100-200 seat venue with minimum use times of 4-8 hours. These places are flat out unfeasible, usually none too keen to negotiate, and in some cases, snobby. They must be getting regular concert or high-end productions and don't need our little radio play. I hope so, otherwise that's a lot of expensive, empty space.

Last are the really sweet, lovely people and places who just can't accommodate our needs or costs for perfectly legitimate reasons, like, "Our chairs are erected by a nice old man who has to be paid more than you can afford" or "Oh, we don't have a PA system, you'd need to bring your own."

It's a strange and varied mix out there. Costs range from $50 per hour to $2000 with a minimum of 8 hours only. Some demand we use and pay their front of house, an usher, a stage manager and a techie, each with a minimum 4 hour call, with $5 per ticket going to their booking fees. Some ask only for a techie. Some just ask for a bond and that you don't smash the windows. Some of the managers are great people, happy to chat and keen to have original, interesting theatre. Some couldn't give a toss and find the whole concept of a phone conversation the most gall inducing thing they've ever encountered.

Good luck out there, Producers! If you find a good venue, stick with them.

An Auto-Eligible Health Care Card For Chronic Illness Is Crucial

$422.15. That's how much the bill for my last batch of medicines is. I opened a box delivered to me today and yelled when I saw the price. This is for three months worth of medication, and doesn't even cover all the medication I take over that period. If we added them all, including my pancreatic ezyme supplement Creon (I use about 18 tubs in a month) and Pulmozyme, a gene therapy treatment, we'd be at about $1000 every three months. $4000 a year. $108,000 over the course of my life so far.

With a health care card, currently supplied at bare minimum via a mobility allowance ($80 per fortnight) from Centrelink, that $422.15 would become about $50. I can afford $50.

We need Centrelink to create or change their rules so that certain chronic illnesses are automatically eligible for a health card card. Currently, you must be approved for a certain allowance or benefit - a cash payment - in order to get the card. Centrelink, or the Dept of Human Services, are constantly changing their rules to become more confusing, but last I looked into it, there's no way to simply get a health care card on its own.

Here's the dumb bit. Say you have CF or Down's Syndrome. Your illness isn't going anywhere. You have it for life. However, every year, you'll be sent a fairly exhaustive, 20 or so page form that asks you, essentially, to confirm you still have your illness.

"Yes, I still have my genetic mutation, the one I had at birth, of which there is no cure."

If you don't get that form in on time? Suspended. Payments cut off. Pharmacy no longer recognises your health care card. Miss the next 14 day deadline? Cancelled. You have to start again. Do you think Centrelink can just dip into your existing file, see the past form that state you have CF or Down's and say, "Oh, right, well, let's reinstate him?" NOPE! You have to tell them the same info all over again!

Without going into my suspicions that Centrelink's ethos is to establish a series of impediments, designed to frustrate claimants in a war of attrition, here's what we can do to fix it:
http://goo.gl/gLQjT - A GetUp campaign suggestion from Samantha Durrant (CF patient and receiver of double lung transplant), titled
'EVERYONE WHO HAS A CHRONIC ILLNESS SHOULD HAVE A HEALTH CARE CARD'.

Go on in and vote for this to move up the chain. You can do it via your Facebook or Google account. Write to your member for Health and Caring. As I commented on the site:

I have cystic fibrosis. I was born with it, I'll have it until I die. WIthout a healthcare card i would be looking at about $1000 every three months for my ongoing drugs. I can't have saved up for this "rainy day" because I wasn't born yet. Similarly, my parents couldn't have saved up, as they'd have had to have saved $108,000 so far, just for my meds. This doesn't cover 3 monthly specialist check ups, surgery (I've had 7 on my bowels alone), equipment and the various other joys of a chronic illness.
The current system is ridiculous. Centrelink are constantly throwing up roadblocks that result in recurrent reviews and changes, the ability to keep up with which would require superhuman bodyparts, not just a regularly working body. For certain diseases and illnesses that the sufferer will have to tend to for their entire lives, it just makes sense that they should be given a simple health care card, even if it is without any sort of money or stipend, just to keep the costs of living manageable.
When Cystic Fibrosis Victoria can't afford to keep essential services running, as is the case right now, then who else can we turn to when the broken health car card system is constantly waging a war of attrition against those who need a card.

48 Hour Film Project - Melbourne

I just saw the 48 Hour Film Project, Melbourne awards night. The twelve best films, each made in 48 hours. Participating teams were given a prop (earrings), a line (I never thought I'd say this) and a character (Jenny the Pharmacist), and an individually drawn genre (ranging from horror to musical to film de femme).

It was immediately apparent that the event was by filmmakers, for filmmakers, when the opening video was a showcase of the RED 4k playback device, using references to 2001: A Space Odyssey. I felt bad for the people in the audience who weren't filmmakers, as they'd have no interest - then I realized that was maybe five people. My frustration is that these events don't really help us get any closer to building an industry based on audience appeal and commercial success. To put it bluntly, it felt like one big circle jerk. The category-sweeping winner was a meta-film that crunched eight different genres into a story about a writer who is living a delusion of his own script and has to be as random and convention-crossing as possible. Yup. As Shirley says in Community, "That sounds very appealing to filmmakers."

I was there hoping to see some of this new anti-auteur, pro-commercial aspiration filmmaking we're apparently starting to see more of in this country, that Screen Australia's new head is all about.

For me, the stand outs of the night were:
Touched, a webcam dating site video with a great pace that held one shot. I loved this (full disclosure: Ben McEwing and Hannah Moon are good friends of mine, but that wouldn't stop me tearing it apart) because the team spent some 80% of their time on story and concept, so that they could create a script that really worked. There was a good rhythm to the jokes, and attention paid to the interplay between anxious sincerity for a final pay-off punch line. The AWG bang on about how important a script is as the fundamental base for any project. The team of Touched took this on with admirable strength. For once, it was great to watch an Aussie film that didn't spend all it's time wanking off over cameras, lenses and cinematography, and just let acting and story star. A lot of the audience as I moved about were muttering how great the performance was, with the lady beside me exclaiming her glee to me immediately after.

The One Up was a sexy, slick short about a group of girls who ensure women have the upper hand in relationships by faking the male's adultery. The idea is the guilt will always keep the guy in check, while the girl knows nothing ever happened. The plot got a little convoluted, but the gags were sharp and the pace was quick. The acting again strong, and although there were some character idiosyncrasies that didn't hit the mark, there was a confidence and sexiness that an adult audience could appreciate.

It's The 90s was a sitcom set in 90s Australia, with a trio of boof head twentysomethings riffing on nostalgia. This one was a little loose, but it had a bit of a punk Young Ones vibe, in that the cast didn't give much of a shit, they were just having fun. That came through. The camera work was a little off, but that seems to be the trade-off for good concept. It felt like if the writers were given more than 48 hours, they'd polish up a great script. Apparently YouTube is already serving that purpose.

Last, I liked Two Minutes, a straight up comedy of errors about a guy at the edge of sex, who needs to journey to find a condom. It was easily the roughest, with lots of out of focus shots and some pretty messy audio, but it had heart, goddamnit. A cross dressing prostitute with more status than the protagonist showed me they weren't after too cheap a laugh. And the visual humour, relying on no words, showed they had some sophistication as far as applying comedy to film.

These four were films that audiences outside of the little theatre at Palace Kino might like. Incidentally, they also received the least amount of kudos from the judges. Based on the feedback we heard from the judges, it seems the gatekeepers are just as clueless as the rest of the industry. I hope the filmmakers of my four picks show their work to a broader audience, and that the teams spend some proper time on some more scripts.

As for the event, you could really tell that almost everyone in the room knew all the teams and that it was a very filmmaker-heavy event. It was a soft, easy audience. Great for them, not good for the rest of us.