The Age from Melbourne, Victoria, Australia • Page 35

IBdnnimdl f-tlt Jacfe Thompson and Greta Scacchi star as ill-fated lovers drawn together by power, politics and murder. On Monday night viewers will see the first episode off the eagerly-awaited mini-series 'Waterfront'. BARBARA HOOKS spcalis to the stars in front and behind the cameras. 2 Heartbreaker, Bob Weis said: "At its best, a film industry is the mirror of a society and how people see themselves and each other. We have had a rash of convict period pieces, now it is relevant to talk about what can happen when factions tear a society apart rather than seek concensus, the approach I see Australian politics taking in the 80s.

"Waterfront shows a period of history that we haven't seen or examined before in much detail. This has to be the value of having our own industry, otherwise we may as well keep importing foreign stuff and forget about being Australians." Mac Gudgeon also believes Waterfront coincides with a new political maturity and an awareness that we must cut our British and American apron strings. "It's ludicrous that there is still a Queen of Australia and that people jump up and down when a kindergarten teacher and a helicopter pilot come here for a visit because that's all they really are," he said. "The wharfies were fighting for independence from Britain, which controlled our shipping. Now we have transferred our subjugation to America and instead of shipping monopolies we have media monopolies.

In 1928, racism was directed tdwards Italians, now it's directed towards the Vietnamese and Cambodians. The Victorian Labor Premier of the day, Ned Hogan, was tipped out of Government in a similar fashion to Whitlam and this country has a tradition of bashing unions and that hasn't changed. So there are many parallels you can draw without being sued." And as story has it, Channel 10 executives wanted to cut the series' Italian (subtitled) dialogue, which Mac Gudgeon comments wryly was more a case of cultural cringe than a misunderstanding about the bi-lingual format "Television in this country plays it very safe," he said. "The networks here underestimate the intelligence of their viewers but frankly I think the Italian community deserves more than English spoken with THE LAST piece Mac Gudgeon remembers writing was an essay for his HSC exams. He can't recall what it was about, only that he passed.

On Monday night Mac Gudgeon will sit down quietly in front of The Box at home in Brunswick, just with his wife and daughter, to watch not only his first script come to life on the screen, but a $2.5 million, six-hour epic story hailed by producer Bob Weis and veteran actor Jack Thompson as "one of the best, if not the best" they have worked with. It is, of course, Network 10's Waterfront an impossible love story set against a backdrop of violent political and social events which, in 1928, brought Melbourne's striking waterside workers, politicians and immigrant scab labor into bloody conflict, a conflict which was not to be resolved, in this city at least, for 20 years. It was a period which saw families kill their pet dogs because they had nothing else to put in the pot and women go on "the game" to buy bread for the table, but without reproach or contempt from their communities. This was survival. The year .1928 saw men steal sheep from freight cars passing through the railway yards and others claiming a 10-shilling spotter's fee for finding bodies floating in the river not a few of them some, Italians mostly, murdered and thrown there for the price.

The mini-series stars Jack Thompson as Maxey Woodbury, an apolitical, easygoing wharfie who is forced to assume the mantle of union leadership during the resulting waterside lock-out He becomes involved with Anna Chieri (Greta Scacchi of Heat And Dust), an Italian immigrant whose family falls victim to the confused and tragic consequences of the labor war. Both characters are com-, pilations of people, not only who lived then but who, like Maxey particularly, are your average Joe today, more interested in a jar and a jaw with the mates than in serious politics. The series, which also stars Ray Barrett and Chris Haywood and Warren Mitchell and Noni Hazlehurst as a couple of vaudevillian characters of the day, (the theatre element was included because Gudgeon's mother was "an old hoofer when Mo was on at the involved 250 speaking parts, 700 extras, 4000 hours of filming and extensive use of authentic locations, including the top of Bourke Street, closed one Saturday morning of all days, to recreate the protest stand made by an evicted wharfie who "set up house" on the tram tracks outside Parliament House. Mac Gudgeon, 35, was studying for a LawArts degree at Sydney University when he became the subject of Commonwealth Police "harrassment" during the draft-dodging years of the Vietnam War. Already disillusioned by a legal system more concerned about "how well off you are, not how right you he fled to the Port Kembla docks and with the assistance and contacts of the Seamen's Union and the wharfies' unions kept one jump ahead of the Feds, through the wharves of Port Melbourne, Adelaide, back to Port Kembla and Melbourne again.

It was during that year on the run that he learned first-hand of the impassioned events of 1928. Later, Gudgeon, his wife and some friends opened Shakahari, a vegetarian restaurant in Carlton, but it wasn't until a friend video-taped the birth of his daughter that he became interested in film. After working with a couple of access video outfits in Australia and freelancing as an editor in the US, Mac Gudgeon decided to write Waterfront as a feature film. He rocketed the script off the typewriter in an astonishing six weeks, got a job as unit manager on Women Of The Sun and showed the script to the series' producer, Bob Weis, who was enraptured with the idea but felt there was enough excellent material there to support a mini-series. "When people write out of a passion for the material, often they can write it so much better than someone who has a lot of experience but not necessarily the involvement in the subject," Weis said.

Gudgeon then spent a couple of months in the Latrobe Library reading newspapers and magazines of the period and uncovered strong media bias against the wharfies "especially in the 'Argus'. It was obvious that they, wrote it as they wanted to see it, not how it really The final draft took 18 months to produce. By the end of March Australian viewers will have seen two mini-series (the other is Seven's Eureka Stockade) which have their roots buried deep in the politics rather than costumes of the past, a turning point Gudgeon and Weis see as both significant and relevant to the 80s. Speaking this week from Los Angeles where he is producing the feature film I Continued: PAGE 12; preview: PAGE 2 of the worlds largest-selling STEREO TELEVISION OF WEST GERMANY JV HIFI FOR NORDMENDE SERVICE on TV and VIDEO rina 62 2283 STEREO TELEVISION IS ALREADY HERE SEgfAND HEAR: WHAT AieLJTURE TEUEVJSfON rWpW? NEW RANGE bTELEVISION JUS A RRIVED FROM 20" to 27" IN FULL STEREO 99 channels for ad satellite and cable TV transmissions. FuH function infra-red emote controls.

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