F
rom Errol Flynn to the Hemsworths, Australia has long been exporting their best actors to Hollywood. Cate Blanchett, Hugh Jackman, Margot Robbie, Toni Collette, Geoffrey Rush, Rebel Wilson, Jackie Weaver and “Crocodile Dundee” Paul Hogan have entertained us for years. Australia has long been a popular location for filming. Similar to California, it too has everything from surf to mountains to desert, and there are currently three studios in the country including one
Discovers
HOLLYWOOD
ing at UCLA, had given day-long lectures at the Melbourne International Film Festival for the last few years, and was returning again. The annual three-week festival was founded in 1952 and is one of the oldest film festivals in the world. Greeted on my first morning with clear sunshine, I opened the newspaper and saw two articles about Melbourne and its movie connections: Russell Crowe and Charlie Hunnam had both been spotted locally, as they were about to start filming The True History of the Kelly Gang. Bush ranger and outlaw Ned Kelly and his gang—who robbed banks and evaded the authorities in the 1870s before donning cobbled-together suits of armor for a final shootout—
by James Bartlett
Melbour owned by Fox, and the small Docklands Studio in Melbourne. Actors Blanchett, Ben Mendelsohn, Eric Bana and Chris, Liam and Luke Hemsworth all come from Melbourne. With a burgeoning arts scene, array of museums, connection to film it was definitely time to visit “Hollywood Down Under.” I already had a Hollywood-Melbourne connection: My wife Wendall Thomas, a novelist and adjunct professor in screenwrit-
are folk legends in Australia, and their story has been bought to the big screen a number of times. Perhaps contrary to Hollywood’s creation story of its first feature length film, The Squaw Man made in 1912, The Story of the Kelly Gang was Australia’s first feature-length movies filmed in Melbourne in 1906. Although Rolling Stone Mick Jagger was lambasted for his efforts in 1970’s Ned Kelly, there was more
Urban art is alive and thriving, with expressive murals throught the city, much like Hollywood.
The Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) pays homage to TV, film, video and digital culture. Photo: James Bartlett
28 DISCOVER HOLLYWOOD / WINTER 2018
