Making Priscilla by Al Clark Read Free Book Online

so — and the red tint from its rusting iron oxide is spectacular at sunset. But I have seen it before, and I am mostly interested in returning with a film crew. We ask the resort manager whether it will be possible to film the rock on a long lens from one of the resort look-outs, which we could then match up with close-ups shot elsewhere. He says that it is, but that he has no wish to upset the good relationship which the resort enjoys with the local Aborigines and the Community Park Liaison Officer who protects their interests.
    Following the earlier correspondence and rejection, we have drinks with the Community Park Liaison Officer, who brings along a member of the Mutitjulu Community and a civil servant from Melbourne. As the resort rooms are posted with notices from Aboriginal leaders requesting visitors not to supply alcohol to their people, I am a little surprised to find the one at our table drinking rum. He remains silent throughout the discussion. It turns out that the Community Park Liaison Officer knows quite a lot about Sydney drag queens, and mentions several of them by name, but he is politely, firmly resolute: we will not film there. Stephan is aggrieved, says so and leaves the table. There is really no more to be added.
    Driving away from the rock towards Alice Springs, we are given the keys to the land surrounding Mount Connor by its owner. More overwhelming than the rock from a distance — Mount Connor truly resembles the ‘helipad of the gods’ which UFO enthusiasts have called Uluru — it is less impressive close up and, crucially, it would be impossible for a film crew to climb.
    In our exploration of Alice Springs and its outlying areas, we review numerous gaps and gorges, and — in a giant open-air version of a stage farce — collide with the Swedish backpackers from William Creek, Logoman (forced by the heat into a lightweight version of the jumpsuit with duplicate logos) and Roland, who has mysteriously driven all the way from Coober Pedy to have dinner.
    As the film is to be announced at the forthcoming Cannes Film Festival, we have decided that the most effective way of selling the movie, of capturing its tone, its essential joke of three people hilariously and tragically at odds with their environment, is through a single picture. In the absence of a cast, we have packed two dresses and a sequined swimsuit and brought them along with us with the idea of, somewhere along the way, slipping into the outfits, setting up the photograph and persuading a passing stranger to press the shutter. Finally, Stephan, Brian and I are struggling into our drag on a windy hill west of Alice Springs, looking out towards the horizon with the MacDonnell Ranges in the background. Stephan, in the simplest outfit, is enjoying himself tremendously; I am having a few difficulties with my heels and fishnet stockings; and Brian just looks like a cameraman in a wedding dress. A bewildered but fascinated backpacker friend of Roland’s captures the moment.
    Andrena, who has discovered that she is pregnant, meets us when we arrive at Sydney Airport. The four of us sit on the beach at Watsons Bay as the sun sets, eating fish and chips and drinking champagne. We hope that the movie materialises, but in the meantime we are having the time of our lives.

3
The Launch
    May 1993. We are leaving for the Cannes Film Festival to launch the picture — or at least to announce the prospect of its existence — without a single member of the cast in place. This means that we are straying close to the edge of the precipice, but there is a confidence in our stride which may keep us from falling over it.
    If the role of the middle-aged transsexual Bernadette is to be played by the one permitted foreigner, our first choice is Tony Curtis, an engaging comic actor in the ’50s and ’60s, whose declining popularity and escalating substance abuse left him navigating a path through what turned out to be two-and-a-half decades of