Dear Editors,
On Wednesday July 11 I was on stage at a Sydney cinema at the Sydney Film School’s graduation night awarding the prize for Best Essay on Australian Film.
The prize-winning piece was a splendid dissertation on the work of producer/director Richard Franklin. Its theme was that this Australian filmmaker, who had begun his career in the 1960s and was in fact, directing prime time TV when he was barely out of his teens, had been over-looked and thus under-rated by both critics and his industry cohorts for most of his career. But the writer noted too, that over time Richard’s career had accrued special significance for a younger generation of filmmakers like Tarantino. Only recently his major Australian features of the 70s and 80s, Patrick and Road Games were being justly celebrated for their verve and skill (and indeed Tarantino had payed homage to both in Kill Bill and Grindhouse). I knew Richard a little and was very fond of him. I thought he would be pleased on hearing of the prize, especially since, in the last few years, his filmmaking work had been side lined due to illness. As I handed the prize out I had the thought of calling him, to tell him about it. I knew he would be a little bemused and would in all likelihood on hearing of it say something sardonic and witty and sound modest and gentlemanly while he was doing it because that is the way he was. I didn’t know it, but late that same Wednesday night Richard finally succumbed to his illness. He was only 58.
Richard probably would have loved to have heard this story. His movies were full of black humour, and mystifying co-incidence. But best of all they were full of a love of cinema; the sheer excitement that comes with an artistic form that has the power to transport its maker and its audience to another time and place. Richard, who had, as a young boy, turned his East Brighton lounge room into a ‘radio studio’ and then, as his ambition grew, transformed his garage into a ‘pretend TV studio’ knew the transcendental power of the pop arts…by the time he was twelve years old he was making 8mm movies with the neighbourhood kids. But in Australia in the mid 60s there was no film industry so Richard, enamoured with Hollywood enrolled at the University of Southern California, where he shared classes with Robert Zemeckis and John Carpenter. At USC Richard shocked the faculty establishment by putting on retrospectives of Alfred Hitchcock and John Ford – wildly unfashionable figures then, in the late 60s. Today, of course there are entire courses dedicated to them in film schools around the world.
When Richard directed his first feature in Australia, The True Story of Eskimo Nell, a sort-of bawdy western set in the Australian gold fields of the 1860s and released in 1975, ‘genre’ was still a dirty word. The local industry was deep in the thrall of European cinema, a passion for ‘representational’ stories and motivated by a strongly nationalistic bent. Americans made ‘genre’ movies; and worse still, they seemed to have little to do with ‘real life’ (a big no-no in the 70s). Anyone, like Richard, who had ambitions to make thrillers, was seen as having their sub-consciousness ‘colonised by Americans’.
After Patrick and Road Games (both full of visual invention and playfulness, qualities notably absent in the Australian cinema of the 70s) Richard went to the US and directed Psycho II (1983) the very good sequel to the original; and the even better Cloak and Dagger (1984). In Britain he directed another fine and eccentric thriller Link (1986). In the 90s Richard made the kinds of ‘worthy’ films his critics had always wanted of him: both Hotel Sorrento and Brilliant Lies were fine cinematic adaptations of wordy theatre pieces.
Richard was also a film teacher – he had a long relationship with several institutions in his home city of Melbourne, like RMIT and Swinburne and I understand he was much loved by his students.
Richard had a lot of wonderful stories and happily we will all get to hear them when his memoirs are finally published. The film business is notoriously fickle and the relationships forged within it are battered by ego and hardened by self-interest. Richard was perhaps unique in this company since he was a kind and generous soul who happily and enthusiastically assisted new comers and colleagues when and wherever he could.
Recently he was interviewed for Mark Hartley’s documentary Not Quite Hollywood, an alternative history to Australian cinema and told him that he would be most likely remembered as a ‘half-decent craftsman.’ But his friends and fans know Richard deserves a finer epitaph better than that. What he has left behind is a belief in the cinema and its power. He was a true advocate and gifted exponent to an art form he loved deeply.
Peter Galvin
Writer/Filmmaker
Peter Galvin lectures in screenwriting and screen studies at the Sydney Film School. He is writing a social and cultural history of the Australian Feature Film Revival of the 70s.