director, with one assistant, will be the entire art department, from finding a bus and redesigning it completely to decorating a country pub in the middle of the night before a shooting day. A confident and well-spoken drag queen called Strykermeyer offers to help create the drag make-up for each character, so we offer him two weeks’ work and the title Executive Drag Consultant.
We are not, however, making any progress with the casting. As Hutchence and Mercurio recede into the oblivion of wishful thinking, we ask Bryan Brown, finding irresistible the prospect of one of Australia’s quintessential ‘blokes’ in a frock, but he quickly turns down the offer. Stephan has a long conversation in Melbourne with the young actor Aden Young, who has a terrific screen presence but no apparent appetite or aptitude for comedy. A casting session for real drag queens results in such a notable number of no-shows that we call it off after a short time.
At this point we decide that finding the landscapes will help to prompt new ideas about who could most effectively drive a bus through them. So we go to look for them.
2
The Location Survey
As Brian Breheny, Stephan and I approach the tiny aircraft which will fly us to Broken Hill, they are changing a tyre not much larger than that of a toy. It is an unpropitious start to a location survey which, with a few detours, will follow the route of the drag queens in the film. As well as giving us a measure of what is practicable, it will also benefit Stephan, who has written his outback epic without ever having travelled west of the last vineyard in New South Wales.
Broken Hill is an outback mining town just over eleven hundred kilometres (687 miles) from Sydney. From the air it looks like an extended village of tin houses grouped around moribund silver, lead and zinc mines, but one of the reasons it has proved to be such a popular base for films over the past fifteen years — playing host to, among others, George Miller’s Mad Max 2 (The Road Warrior) and Russell Mulcahy’s Razorback — is the great diversity of landscapes within driving distance. There are some signs of encroaching gentrification — art galleries, craft centres, a bad-pun hairdressing salon (Curl Up and Dye), a restaurant of the kind that lists mixed seafood dishes under titles like Neptune’s Catch — but it remains mainly a good-natured, down-to-earthborder town, the last stop in western New South Wales before it gives way to the untamed heartland. Right now, after weeks of heavy summer rains, the surrounding countryside resembles a giant golf course, a rolling green Axminster carpet where there was once parched red earth.
Initially the Broken Hill Tourist Association, who provide transport and a succession of helpful guides, are the only people who know that the main characters in our movie are drag queens. With everybody else we confine ourselves to explaining that we are researching a film, and from the looks that Stephan’s shorts attract in one of the first pubs we enter, it is probably just as well.
I also hint at the ambiguous sexuality of our protagonists to Mario, the Italian owner of the town’s most extravagantly baroque hotel, Mario’s Palace, a marvellous, hallucinatory, three-storey collision of kitsch which we want to use as a location. When I tell him that in the movie ‘the wrong people wear the dresses’ and that his hotel is ‘drag queen heaven,’ he smiles omnisciently, giving a persuasive impersonation of a man who has seen it all.
Mario is not popular in the town — it is said that his seventieth birthday party attracted very few guests — but we take to him immediately, and this is reinforced when we hear that the local health inspector has fined him for keeping a dead eagle in his fridge. His appeal that it was merely awaiting stuffing did not carry much weight after its proximity to the bacon rashers had been established.
While we find the perfect inland lake we need at
We are not, however, making any progress with the casting. As Hutchence and Mercurio recede into the oblivion of wishful thinking, we ask Bryan Brown, finding irresistible the prospect of one of Australia’s quintessential ‘blokes’ in a frock, but he quickly turns down the offer. Stephan has a long conversation in Melbourne with the young actor Aden Young, who has a terrific screen presence but no apparent appetite or aptitude for comedy. A casting session for real drag queens results in such a notable number of no-shows that we call it off after a short time.
At this point we decide that finding the landscapes will help to prompt new ideas about who could most effectively drive a bus through them. So we go to look for them.
2
The Location Survey
As Brian Breheny, Stephan and I approach the tiny aircraft which will fly us to Broken Hill, they are changing a tyre not much larger than that of a toy. It is an unpropitious start to a location survey which, with a few detours, will follow the route of the drag queens in the film. As well as giving us a measure of what is practicable, it will also benefit Stephan, who has written his outback epic without ever having travelled west of the last vineyard in New South Wales.
Broken Hill is an outback mining town just over eleven hundred kilometres (687 miles) from Sydney. From the air it looks like an extended village of tin houses grouped around moribund silver, lead and zinc mines, but one of the reasons it has proved to be such a popular base for films over the past fifteen years — playing host to, among others, George Miller’s Mad Max 2 (The Road Warrior) and Russell Mulcahy’s Razorback — is the great diversity of landscapes within driving distance. There are some signs of encroaching gentrification — art galleries, craft centres, a bad-pun hairdressing salon (Curl Up and Dye), a restaurant of the kind that lists mixed seafood dishes under titles like Neptune’s Catch — but it remains mainly a good-natured, down-to-earthborder town, the last stop in western New South Wales before it gives way to the untamed heartland. Right now, after weeks of heavy summer rains, the surrounding countryside resembles a giant golf course, a rolling green Axminster carpet where there was once parched red earth.
Initially the Broken Hill Tourist Association, who provide transport and a succession of helpful guides, are the only people who know that the main characters in our movie are drag queens. With everybody else we confine ourselves to explaining that we are researching a film, and from the looks that Stephan’s shorts attract in one of the first pubs we enter, it is probably just as well.
I also hint at the ambiguous sexuality of our protagonists to Mario, the Italian owner of the town’s most extravagantly baroque hotel, Mario’s Palace, a marvellous, hallucinatory, three-storey collision of kitsch which we want to use as a location. When I tell him that in the movie ‘the wrong people wear the dresses’ and that his hotel is ‘drag queen heaven,’ he smiles omnisciently, giving a persuasive impersonation of a man who has seen it all.
Mario is not popular in the town — it is said that his seventieth birthday party attracted very few guests — but we take to him immediately, and this is reinforced when we hear that the local health inspector has fined him for keeping a dead eagle in his fridge. His appeal that it was merely awaiting stuffing did not carry much weight after its proximity to the bacon rashers had been established.
While we find the perfect inland lake we need at
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