The Sydney Morning Herald from Sydney, New South Wales, Australia • Page 26

THE GUIDE 3 ROTfl A touch of stage fright and before he knew it Bryan Brown was producing a series of 12 darkly comic, twisted tales. JANE FREEMAN reports. Not a summer throwaway. Crocker, left, and Bruce Spence in Borrowing Bazza. Alfred Hitchcock and you get a lovely one hour," says Kris Noble.

Quite seriously. WATCHING BRIEF SHOW: Twisted Tales DAY: Monday TIME: 9.30 pm on Channel Nine PREVIEW: Page 15 programmer. Noble admits the show posed problems for John Stephens who could not see how it would comfortably sit with a sitcom or infotainment show. In the end Nine bought that old chestnut, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, to help ease the new show into people's lives. "Put Twisted Tales together with Coast to start fuming the feature film 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea with a palpable sense of freedom.

"There was definitely relief there when he had finished and he could go off and start acting again. Producing is really a difficult job and he worked bloody hard," Noble says. Almost as hard as the network swwt ill aft i commercial networks to make high-quality, interesting television. Noble says the films had to be made in the usual fashion to ensure they had the high production values that audiences now expect He points out how expensive the series is, 12 short films, all with individual set-ups, directors, writers, actors, production design, lavish costumes, a glamorous look, glossily well shot This is not some cheap little series being thrown away in summer. "In Australia our tradition is in soapies, we don't do a lot of short drama.

But in the UK and Europe they do a lot of these short movies, which they call tele-novellas," Noble says. "That was quite an attraction for us. We have never really done anything quite like this before. It's good to try something new and different, to take risks every now and then." Brown and Watts set out to find new writers, spreading the word through stories in the Herald and the Age. The result was 1,100 scripts, flooding in from writers ranging from the established (such as Louis Nowra) to the new.

The only constraint was that the script had to be shot in just four days. 809-811 PACIFIC HWY. CHATSWOOD (cnr Brown St) PARKING AVAILABLE dudme. ootA acnn fay qai i 97fH vr 111- jjv-r SONY CHRISTMAS GIFT IDEAS i FROM CHATSWOOD SONY CENTRE It's Christmas time at Chatswood Sony Centre and we have the largest range of exciting Sony gift ideas for the whole family, at the lowest prices in town. Remember, if it's a Sony you are alter tnis mnstmas, irs ai uiaiswooa aony v.enire.

CDCLOCK RADIO $199 OBLE says they found some exciting new talent in both 0 NOTETAKER $49 Lightweight notetaker with fast playback, one-touch recording, cue and review and edit function. writing and directing, including director writer Daniel THE Nine Network always figured that Bryan Brown was its trump card. If anyone could sell a series of teleplays to an audience, it had to be craggy Brown, man of the people, with a face so likably Uved-in that you can almost forgive him for doing FX and FXII. So when Brown went to the network with his idea of producing a series of mini black comedies, they jumped at it As long as Brown did a little introduction to each film And starred in one And put his wife and daughter in another In fact, the more Brown the better. And so he did.

Twisted Tales, which debuts tonight on Nine, is a collection of 30-minute films, all with the aforementioned twist in the tail of the tale, blended with anything from farcical comedy to The Twilight Zone and Roald DahL Kris Noble, Nine's director of drama and executive producer on Tales, admits that the linchpin was always Brown. "Having Bryan as the front man was obviously a huge bonus," he says. Helen Watts, who produced the series with Brown (as well as the feature film Dead Heart), admits this variegated series was never going to be easy to market "Nothing like this has ever been done before, not recently in Australia at least Each episode is extremely varied, so you might see one and think that's good, that's just my kind of television' and the next one might not be your cup of tea. "But these are really 12 small films, made- especially for television. Production-value wise they are fabulous.

They are all very exciting, very new and Originally Brown came up with the idea of doing live studio plays. It started when he was performing in a play and suffered from a bad yet exhilarating attack of stage fright For bizarre reasons best known to himself, he decided he wanted to get that anxious feeling back while working in television, and conceived the notion of live television plays. Over dinner with Nine chief David Leckie, Brown managed to convince Leckie that a series of live studio dramas was a great idea. Shortly afterwards, Brown says he had a midnight epiphany and realised he was a "bloody fool" and he should shoot the programs on film fike everyone else does. This decision got the green light when Twisted Tales was the first project to be approved for funding under the Creative Nation Commercial Television Production Fund, which provides money to Wake to the sounds of your favourite CD with this compact, stylish bedside clock radio featuring dual alarm and AMFM radio.

MANTEL RADIO $19 MY FIRST SONY $69 Exclusive to Chatswood Sony, My First Sony cassette player for the littlies featuring 3 position volume control and auto-off. AMFM portable radio measuring 210 125 65mm. A sensibje sized radio featuring great sound PORTABLE at a great price. CDGHETTO BLASTER $189 Digital sound on the go featuring 1 HI-FI $99 Portable hi-fi system featuring detachable speakers for Krige (the recent Australian Film, Television and Radio School graduate who wrote two stories, and directed and acted in one of them), Kate Dennis (script supervisor on Babe) and Samantha Lang (second director's assistant on Floating Life). There were also experienced directors Stephen Wallace (Turtle Beach), Michael Offer (Halifax f.p.) and Lewis Fitz-Gerald (Last Man Hanged).

"We are a commercial television station and our job is to make shows that rate," Noble says, "but we are very happy when we can to try to develop new writers and directors." He says the half-hour format also attracted excellent casts, in-demand actors who could afford to squeeze four days of work into their schedules. These included Claudia Karvan, Kate Fitzpatrick, Richard Roxburgh, Nadine Garner, Bruce Spence, Noni Hazlehurst, Dee Smart, Josephine Byrnes, Simon Westa-way, Steve Bastoni, Kimberley Davies, Kate Fischer, Marshall Napier and Geoffrey Rush. "People began to scramble to do Twisted Tales; it just got better and better," Noble says. Not that producing all this great talent was always easy. Noble says Brown headed off to the Gold your own Bit CD player.

preferred layout, AMFM stereo tuner, tape deck and sliding tone control. cassette deck with auto tape shut-off, AMFM stereo tuner and 40W pmpo. SONY DUTY FREE If you're travelling overseas these Christmas holidays remember, all these gift ideas and more are available from our Duty Free Department. WE WILL MEET ALL ADVERTISED PRICES-WHEN IT COMES TO SONY WE CANT BE BEATEN A SMH The Guide, December 2-8, 1996.