Making Priscilla by Al Clark Page B

— whose schedule on the TV series The Man From Snowy River prevents travel to Sydney — together. The wardrobe fittings are a great success: Hugo runs around the hotel in a white wedding dress, which he refuses to take off. A 42-page fax arrives from a choreographer looking for a job. Our office machine does not include a cutting facility, so it emerges as a single, continuous piece of paper, stretching the entire length of the office. We employ somebody else.
    Even with an ally at PolyGram music publishing in Sydney, and a composer friend who tracks down fifteen out-of-copyright numbers for various uses, the song clearances are still proving, at this late stage, frustratingly difficult, but I brighten when I hear that PolyGram has bought Motown Records: it may mean that we can use Charlene’s ‘I’ve Never Been To Me’ after all. There is still a great deal of procedural tedium: hair-splitting, teeth-grinding paperwork connected with the completion bond, the insurances, the frequency and amounts of the cash drawdowns, and the maximum balance permitted in our account before PolyGram will send us anymore. It seems to me pointless to have an approved cash-drawdown schedule unless we can count on the money being in the bank on the appropriate day every week.
    A title search report — which one is obliged to do as part of the film’s insurance arrangements — reveals that someone once published a book called Lady Hester Stanhope: Queen of the Desert and that there is a fresh-vegetable company in the United States called Desert Queen. Neither is likely to sue, I feel. The Marx Brothers once received a letter from the legal department at Warner Bros cautioning them against including the word ‘Casablanca’ in their title A Night in Casablanca because it infringed, claimed the lawyer, Warner’s exclusive rights to its use in a title. In his reply Groucho pointed out that the Marx Brothers had been brothers for longer than the Warner Brothers, so he could just as legitimately insist that the Warners stop using the word ‘Brothers’.
    Then there is Priscilla herself. We have finally found the bus, and in a neighbouring hangar a team of demolishers and designers begin to transform her. The sound of drills, soldering irons and hammers is a distant echo for two days. On one of them, I am leaving the office late one evening when I hear a different sound: it is Tim Chappel shaping emu heads out of a block of polystyrene with a sabre saw.
    *
    Terence Stamp — in linen under a Panama hat — arrives on a Qantas flight from Honolulu early one morning eighteen days before we begin shooting. An experienced traveller, he has been resting in the sun after an American press junket for the film The Real McCoy, in which he plays another of those sullen bad guys from whom Priscilla will at least provide some kind of relief. He spent much of the ’70s seeing the world,taking the occasional low-key European film role to subsidise his odyssey, before returning to the screen, memorably, as the villainous General Zod in Superman and Superman 2.
    He has arrived in Sydney with no body hair, or at least very little. After a body wax, each of his nipple hairs was pulled out with tweezers. He has also completed a course, intended to put him in touch with his feminine side, in which one of the challenges was to do something you feared in front of the others. His was to sing in public, so he did it, a kind of karaoke for the psyche. He is reading Jan Morris’s book Conundrum, which includes a description of a sex change operation that leaves even the most imperturbable reader gagging for air.
    On his second night in town, still jet-lagged and disorientated, Terence is walking from the city-centre cinema complexes back to his hotel and realises after a while that he has no idea where he is going. Under the giant Coca-Cola sign at Kings Cross — fortuitously only five minutes from his destination — he sees a large fellow in a tuxedo standing