Emerald City 2002 New DVD Top-quality Free UK shipping

Michael Jenkins’ sadly overlooked 1988 film of David Williamson’s play Emerald City is one of the most horribly accurate films about screenwriting and independent filmmaking outside the USA, where everything hinges on an imaginary presale and appealing to the Americans even if it means throwing out cultural identity and your country’s own stories out of the window. Constantly swinging between wanting to create art and wanting to have the big commercial success that comes to the most undeserving and derivative, John Hargreaves’ idealistic but constantly compromising screenwriter is the film industry in all-too human microsm, but despite being now marketed as a Nicole Kidman film, the standout performance comes from Chris Heywood as the bottom-feeding hustler who rises without a trace and with no visible signs of talent. He’s the kind of producer who’s a common feature at every film market, hopping from deal to deal by sheer force of will and infectious but misplaced enthusiasm without ever producing anything of merit.

The material does work better as a play, not because Williamson’s own screen adaptation isn’t good – apart from one botched infidelity scene it is – but because the film occasionally seems in danger of becoming the very thing it’s satirising too (Chris Neal’s catchy upbeat score certainly tends to steer the film more to feelgood comedy than lacerating satire) and often the performances are dialled up to 11, not least of them John Hargreaves’ thinly disguised impersonation of the playwright. The autobiographical moments aren’t hard to spot: the scene from ‘Heroes of the Dardanelles’ that a chauffeur describes is actually the finale of Williamson’s screenplay for Gallipoli. Yet it manages to get the balance right more often than not and avoids falling into too much in-jokiness, keeping the dilemma recognisably human and universal. It’s the kind of story that could just as easily be transposed from Oz to the UK, South Africa, Eire, Canada and any other English-speaking territory desperate to get in with the big boys, but it has certainly proved remarkably prescient about the future of Australian film industry, where being used as a cheap backlot for Hollywood pictures has become more important than telling their own stories and where everyone sells out when big success seems possible, even if it means turning a novel about Aboriginals into a film about blacks in Tennessee. Naturally it never got a presale to the US…