I'm in the Extras!
Personally, I’m not that excited by the news that Dogs in Space is now out on DVD. It was bad enough when it came out at the movies. But for one friend of mine, it’s like when they finally released Nelson Mandela. ‘It’s here!’ she squealed, leaping up and down with excitement in New Releases at the Prahran JB Hi-Fi. ‘And it’s two discs! And look at the fancy metal box. They’ve given it the full treatment.’
‘I see there’s some Richard Lowenstein short films,’ I noted, thinking this might put her off, and calm the security guard, who looked like he was about to go for his gun.
‘Great!’ she said, undeterred. ‘That’s my weekend taken care of.’
And the thing is, she’s from Sydney. On three previous visits, she’s made me drive her past ‘the Dogs in Space house’ in Berry Street, Richmond.
‘How did you know the address?’ I asked the first time this happened.
‘It’s all over the Internet,’ she explained.
‘All over? Really? How many people would actually be interested?’
‘You just don’t get it, do you?’
‘Why are we stopping? It’s only a house.’
‘I want to take a closer look.’
‘But what is there to see?’
‘Who cares? It’s the Dogs in Space house!’
‘It’s not as if Nique Needles is going to come to the door, fitting a tourniquet.’
‘No. But wouldn’t it be great if he did?’
This isn’t the first time this has happened. When the movie came out, I was dragged along to it by a bloke who claimed some vague affiliation with one of the people the film was supposed to be about. ‘It’s amazing,’ he whispered, in the darkened and largely, it has to be said, empty cinema. ‘This is just what it was like in the late seventies.’
‘But it feels like the eighties,’ I said, bored shitless. ‘Or at least a bad eighties video.’
‘These are the people who were there,’ he explained. ‘In the original punk scene.’
‘But isn’t that Michael Hutchence from INXS?’ I asked, continuing to rain on his overlit parade. ‘Isn’t this like filming The Sid Vicious Story with Leif Garrett?’
‘But, mate, he’s got all of Sam’s mannerisms down pat,’ he enthused.
‘You mean this is based on a real person?’ I said. ‘Surely they can’t have been this boring.’
‘You don’t understand. This is exactly what it was like.’
‘But why is the band called “Dogs in Space”? Doesn’t that immediately make you think of “Pigs in Space” from The Muppet Show? Isn’t that kind of undermining the whole edgy punk thing?’
‘I think maybe you should wait outside.’
My friend may have been there when it happened (whatever it was), and then there again, watching from across the road as they shot the movie version, but unlike many, he didn’t make it into the movie itself, as an extra in ‘the scene with Noah Taylor’, or throwing up in the sink during one of the many party sequences. But I feel like I should call him and tell him about this new DVD. No doubt he’s somewhere in the extras, standing up the back, wondering how it can possibly be that David Argue isn’t in this film.
Because that’s something I’ve been hearing a lot of lately: ‘I’m in the extras.’ It happened when the insanely comprehensive three-disc version of Pure Shit came out a few months back. Pure Shit or, to use the title as it actually appears on-screen, Pure S, is like the seventies Dogs in Space. Chockas with Melbourne share-house smackfoolery, replete with strangle-voiced claims of ‘authenticity’, and completely tedious to anyone who wasn’t ‘there’, shooting up and chasing Garry Waddell over the back fence, to some Skyhooks. As always, the most fun comes in the docos, seeing how badly everyone has held up.
On the other hand, I was kind of impressed and, dare I say, even a little jealous, when someone told me that they are visible in the extras for Pacific Banana. This notorious 1980 sex comedy that nearly brought the South Australian Film Corporation to its knees has been granted an incongruously lavish Special Edition, which features Banana auteur, John D Lamond, pontificating hilariously on a motel double bed while occasionally being served cocktails by a topless waitress. I wonder if she’s been boasting to her friends that she’s ‘in the extras’.
A decade ago, I had occasion to interview film director Roger Donaldson. He’d just come from the Ballarat premiere of his movie Dante’s Peak, where, in honour of his having been born there, the local cinema owner had constructed a huge malfunctioning papier-mâché volcano in the foyer. As soon as he sat down, I informed him that I’d appeared in his first movie, New Zealand’s Sleeping Dogs, back in 1976. Donaldson was genuinely gobsmacked.
‘Where are you?’ he said.
‘In the car chase at the end. There’s a whip-pan and if you freeze it, you can see my whole form-two class reflected in a shop window.’
‘Really?’ He seemed unconvinced.
‘Well, that’s what one of my old schoolmates reckons.’
‘He’s actually slowed it down?’
‘He has,’ I explained. ‘We’re nerds. That’s what we do.’
In late 1976, I’d been in the small peninsula town of Coromandel on a school trip, on the exact day they shot the spectacular finale of New Zealand’s first ever proper feature film. Our class had spent the afternoon lurking around the town’s main drag, hoping for a glimpse of the overseas star, Warren Oates, who we only knew from Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia.
Years later, when I told this story on the radio, a listener in New Zealand went out and bought the DVD and stepped through the scene one frame at a time. He then posted me two photocopied frame blow-ups. In the first frame, while no gawking schoolchildren are evident, a school bus that may have been ours is briefly seen through the back window of Sam Neill’s car. Even if it is our bus, the chances of my class having been on board during the shot are nil. Therefore, no, I am not actually in the movie. But the second frame, taken from the DVD’s ‘making of’ documentary, shows a clump of flare-panted youngsters crowded outside a dairy, craning their heads for a view of the bloke who drove to Mexico with a severed head in a pillow case. But although there are several faces I half recognise, and one suspiciously familiar Miller shirt, I am not in this shot either.
I’m not even in the extras.
I wonder how many people will be spending the next week shuttling through the extras on Dogs in Space, the endless home movies and stills galleries, hoping to see an earlier version of themselves. My friend, the one who left JB Hi-Fi skipping while clutching that black metal box, has spent the weekend doing just that…and she wasn’t even there. She just really loves Dogs in Space.
I guess one man’s piece of S is another man’s masterpiece.
Tony Martin is the Melbourne-based author of ‘A Nest of Occasionals’ and ‘Lolly Scramble’. Podcasts of his radio show ‘Get This’ are still available for free download at iTunes (type in: ‘Get This: Richard Marsland Lives’). He is currently directing new episodes of ABCTV's ‘The Librarians’.
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