CLUBLAND DIARY 07-June-07 Keith Thompson

The gathering of the clan! Brenda Blethyn flies in next week, to undertake a hectic series of “Clubland” screenings and Q&A sessions, with director Cherie Nowlan, in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, not to mention a literary lunch or two and some book-signings to promote Brenda’s delightful autobiography, “Mixed Fancies”. Where does that title come from? Brenda told me it’s from her childhood, in Ramsgate. When she was a little girl, Brenda’s mother used to send her to the grocers’ shop, to buy an assortment of cakes and biscuits. These were known as “mixed fancies”. Brenda thought that this was also an apt description of her career.

It’s always so great to catch-up with Brenda because she’s, genuinely, one of the funniest women alive. And a brilliant team-player. When we were all at Sundance, in January, Brenda had been allocated a hotel room in the heart of Park City, but – typically – she checked-out, choosing to bunk down “with all the rest of the gang” in the two ski chalets where we’d been accommodated. I doubt I’ll forget the image of Brenda, busy as a bee at the end of the night, clearing away the tables and getting stuck into the washing up, while the rest of us staggered off to our beds… “Well! We don’t want to have to face all this in the morning, do we?” Other secrets from Sundance? Khan Chittenden (Tim) can make the best omelette!

So I wonder if this period, is the calm before the storm? It’s been exciting to pick up the newspapers and see the ads for Brenda’s Q&A’s. Even weirder to listen to Drive, on 702 in Sydney where Richard Glover has been running a daily competition giving away five double-passes for a screening that he’ll host – with Brenda – on June 12th at the Chauvel. Weird (in a good way!), only because it’s still very hard to believe that this little germ of an idea for a story is now “out there”, in the big wide world. Writing, by definition, is a private act. Something you do alone at home, at your desk. And for a writer, working in television (as I have for years) remains a “domestic” kind of experience. You write the script at home in your study, e-mail it off to the production company, and then one night two or three months later, you shift from your study to your living room to watch the end-results coming out of your television set. You don’t get very much of a sense of sharing that experience with an audience, even though that television audience may number in the millions. That’s why it has been such a blast watching “Clubland” in cinemas, here and in America, with an audience. And - best of all! - hearing them laugh. And even talking to people, after the screening. I remember an elderly guy grabbing my hand after a screening in Salt Lake City and saying, “Thank God! Somebody who understands about small breasts!”, before disappearing into the night. You’ll have to see the movie to know what he was on about…

The music from our film is also going public, with the news that Milan Records (one of the biggest, specialist movie music labels in the world), will be releasing the soundtrack of “Clubland”, world-wide. Cherie Nowlan said many months ago that, as important as the music was to this movie, she doubted that it would prompt a Conway Twitty revival. Maybe the release of the soundtrack will prove her wrong!

Hopefully, the next time I’ll check in, it will be with reports of some of the special events and Q&A sessions we have planned.

CLUBLAND DIARY 27-May-07 Keith Thompson

Our producer, Rosemary Blight, e-mailed me last night to say that our American website (http://wip.warnerbros.com/introducingthedwights/) is now also up and running under the film’s U.S. title, “Introducing The Dwights”. The American site contains some great interviews with our cast and crew, which set me thinking about the casting process that the movie had to go through before director Cherie Nowlan could start filming.

It’s been recorded that I already had Brenda Blethyn in mind to play Jean when I started to write the script. It’s true. Did I believe we’d be fortunate enough to get her to come to Australia to play the role? Only in my dreams. Brenda was born in Ramsgate, in Kent, only about 15 miles from my home-town of Dover. Now, one of the unexpected side-effects for a scriptwriter of emigrating from the UK to live in Australia (as I did), is that to some extent you lose your “voice”. In a sense, you forfeit your memories in as much as all of that material that’s inside your head (from your childhood, wherever…) that you might normally draw upon to create stories, doesn’t really apply any more. You acquire new material Down Under, of course, but it’s all had to be learnt afresh, even down to the way people speak. Things would have been just the same for Jean, when she arrived in Sydney with her husband, John. That’s why I think of Jean, in part, as someone who is living in Exile…

I first remember seeing Brenda Blethyn in a Mike Leigh telemovie, “Grown-Ups”. The story was set in Canterbury, also in Kent, and kind of half-way between my home town and Brenda’s. And there on screen – in Brenda’s performances – was the voice of my childhood. I was bowled over. It was as if Brenda had given me a point of connection with all of my memories and all of the giant personalities of my childhood. Or maybe, that’s just another way of saying that there is so much truth in Brenda’s acting, that she manages to connect with everybody! But, from that point onward, I could never imagine anybody else playing that other giant personality, Jeannie Dwight. Thank God Brenda liked the script!

Emma Booth (Jill) walked into our lives, when Rosemary, Cherie and I were working together on the “Small Claims” telemovies, which I co-wrote with my wife, Kaye Bendle. Emma had been cast as a psychotic baby-sitter (!) in the last of the three telemovies and our Casting Director Nikki Barrett had warned us to watch out for her. I clearly remember meeting Emma in the “Small Claims” production office. She had just read “Clubland” and I think we all knew instantly that the role was hers. We also have to thank “Small Claims” for introducing us to Rebecca Gibney who would play Lana.

So while Emma was cast relatively early in the process, Khan Chittenden (Tim) appeared almost at the end. Cherie had been saying that the perfect Tim would walk in the door, one day, but Khan had been away in South Australia filming “Caterpillar Wish”, so there hadn’t been any opportunity for Cherie to meet with him. But, same thing... Once Khan stepped in the door, there could never be another Tim.

And that’s another interesting thing about the process of writing a screenplay… When you’re writing a script – which can take several years – you carry around “images” of the characters inside your head. You give everybody a face and a body-shape… You even kind of know what clothes they wear. Now, don’t ask me where these faces come from, because invariably these faces don’t belong to anybody you have ever met. I suspect they come from the same place as the people who populate your dreams. Movies, after all, are something that happen to us in the dark. But anyway, these “faces” lodge themselves in your head – sometimes for years on end – until, that is, the day that the role is cast…

And then, mysteriously, this face that you’ve lived with for all those years, just vanishes. It’s as though it’s been deleted from your brain. And try as you might, you can never actually retrieve that face again from your memory banks. It’s gone forever, because now it’s the individual actors who possess the role.

So, at this other end of the movie-making process, I can’t believe that anybody other than Emma and Khan were ever intended to play those roles. Emma and Khan inhabit Tim and Jill so completely, that the reason why “Clubland” took so long to get to the screen must have been because we were waiting for them both to grow up and become old enough to take on the parts. While Brenda and all the rest of us stood waiting in the wings.

CLUBLAND DIARY 20-May-07 Keith Thompson

“Clubland”, this little film of ours, is now less than a month from hitting the cinemas, both here in Australia and in the States (opens Australia June 28th, and in America on the July 4th weekend, the first Australian movie ever to score this prestigious holiday slot). I guess I still think of it as our “little” movie because, for so many years, “Clubland” was a project that only existed in the minds of just the three of us - producer Rosemary Blight, director Cherie Nowlan and myself. Movie scripts can take a startlingly long time to write. Literally years, sometimes… And it can take just as long to raise the finance to make them. “Clubland” had one of those long gestation periods. It’s embarrassing to say how long but, in the end, it probably worked to our advantage because it meant that we had the time to really hone the script (we stopped counting after we passed Draft 20). I can’t count the number of weeks – months! - that Cherie and Rosemary and I spent sat around tables, poring over the script. Line-by-line.

Of course, all the time you’re developing a project like this, there’s still no guarantee that the film is ever going to be made. But that possibility took a giant leap forward when the fourth member of our team – actress Brenda Blethyn – read the script and agreed to come on board. It would be another four or five years before the movie – finally! - went into production, but if it hadn’t been for Brenda’s commitment and enthusiasm, we’d still be sitting around waiting. None of us would be reading this web-site if it weren’t for Miss Blethyn!

Making a movie is a bit like looking at an upside down pyramid. The project starts with a very small team, just the three or four of you... That’s the pointy end of the pyramid. Then, as the movie goes into production, more and more cast and crew become involved and pretty soon, the three or four us have grown and now there’s a hundred or so people working on the shoot. And then you have to show the finished results to an audience… “Clubland’s” first ever public screening was to an auditorium of 1250 people at the Sundance Film Festival in January this year. And the pyramid gets bigger and bigger. Warners’ International Pictures purchased the movie for U.S. distribution and now I’m getting e-mail’s from friends in New York, telling me that they’ve just seen the trailer at their local theatre.

So “Clubland” is out there in the wide world, now. Or it very soon will be... I’ll be updating this diary over the next month or so, as we see where the journey takes us.