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MASTER OF THE CEREMONIES
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Master of the Ceremonies An Eventful Life RIC
BIRCH
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First published in 2004 Copyright © Ric Birch 2004 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act. The author gratefully acknowledges the permission of the IOC to incorporate its copyright photos. Allen & Unwin 83 Alexander Street Crows Nest NSW 2065 Australia Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100 Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218 Email:
[email protected] Web: www.allenandunwin.com National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry: Birch, Ric. Master of the ceremonies : an eventful life. Includes index. ISBN 1 74114 417 5. 1. Birch, Ric. 2. Special events - Australia. 3. Special events industry - Australia. I. Title. 394.4092 Set in 12/16 pt Granjon by Bookhouse, Sydney Printed by Griffin Press, South Australia 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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To Richard Walsh, who thought there might be a story in ceremonies To everyone I’ve worked with who made the story possible And to Lara, Dylan and Jessie, who already have stories of their own
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Contents Contents
Chapter One
A ceremonial virgin
1
Chapter Two
Magnets and maestros
11
Chapter Three
Beginner’s luck
26
Chapter Four
The lanky yank
42
Chapter Five
California dreaming
49
Chapter Six
Pie in the sky
66
Chapter Seven
Spectak does Expo
75
Chapter Eight
Flaps over frocks
99
Chapter Nine
The happiest place on earth
123
Chapter Ten
Spectak goes east
134
Chapter Eleven
Tropical delights
151
Chapter Twelve
Capital Catalans
163
Chapter Thirteen
Another opening, another show
183
Chapter Fourteen
We go to a land Down Under
201
Chapter Fifteen
SOCOG gets serious
227
Chapter Sixteen
Teamwork, fun and games
247
Chapter Seventeen
More fun and games
268
Chapter Eighteen
Showtime
290
Epilogue
307
Index
312
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one
A ceremonial virgin A ceremonial virgin
I
t was November 2000. For the previous five years I’d been living in Sydney, and when the 747 landed in Los Angeles I felt like a deep-sea diver who hadn’t expected to see the surface again. Drowning men are meant to see their lives flash before them, and I knew what was going through their minds. It had been a big year—my wife of thirteen years and I had divorced, a business partner was never able to satisfactorily explain where several hundred thousand dollars of mine had gone, an exlover had also gone and cost me several thousand more, I’d had an angioplasty operation for a blocked artery, and, oh yes, I’d been the director of ceremonies, responsible for the opening and closing ceremonies of the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games. Of the events of that year, the ceremonies were the easiest to handle—at least I knew what I was doing. I hadn’t ever planned to become a ‘Master of Ceremonies’, as the Australian media dubbed me. Actually, I hadn’t even known what to do after leaving school. I was born in 1945 in Sydney and learned to walk and swim at more or less the same time on the 1
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northern beach of Collaroy where we lived. My dad was in the Royal Australian Air Force, which meant we moved every few years, and so from an early age I became used to changing suburbs, cities and even countries. This turned out to be good practice for a life in television and event production. No one in my family had shown any signs of wanting to be a producer, although several generations on my mother’s side have included amateur painters, writers and musicians. The men of the family tended towards the law, farming and the Armed Forces. So, when I left school and started an Arts/Law course at Melbourne University in 1962, it was to be expected that I’d be a lawyer one day. Fortunately, a life-long attraction to blondes led me down a different career path. Only a few weeks after attending my first lecture, I spotted a blonde woman studying a notice board that called for volunteers to appear in, or work backstage on, the Arts Revue. I followed her through the stage door and promptly fell in love—with theatre. In a very short time I knew that backstage was where I belonged, and over the next three years I had a great education in theatrical production and learned a little about blondes as well. My law studies were less noteworthy, so both the faculty and I were delighted when I applied successfully for a job as a studiohand at the ABC television studios in Melbourne. Before long I had been promoted to floor manager, which meant wearing a tie to work sometimes. One day Sir Robert Menzies, the double-breasted British-tohis-bootheels prime minister of the day, came to the Ripponlea studios to record a message about Australia’s impending conversion to decimal currency. Sir Robert was an imposing figure, from his oversized eyebrows to his vast worsted suit, and I was a nineteenyear-old floor manager. Muttering that the coinage should never have been called ‘the dollar’ (he had favoured ‘the Royal’ as the name of the new Australian currency), Sir Robert settled himself
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into a chair on the set. Moments later he stood up and asked for something more comfortable. ‘The chair is the most important part of a television performance,’ he gravely told me as we waited for a new chair to arrive. Sir Robert clearly valued his bottom above any television interviewer—an insight into political priorities that has stood me in good stead over the years since. I enjoyed television even more than theatre because I received a salary for doing my job, when I would have happily worked for free as I had done at the Union Theatre. After a year at ABV-2, I was selected for a director’s training course and soon I had moved to Sydney, directing Four Corners and This Day Tonight, before starting a sawn-off rock ’n’ roll show called GTK. In its own small way, it was a precursor to MTV, and I was very proud of it. Many years later the Australian rock historian Glenn A. Baker asked me to write liner notes for a compilation album he’d put together of performances from GTK. I wrote: I don’t try to tell my kids what it was like in the sixties. The photos show the heels and the flares, long hair and paisley shirts, beautiful people and long lost friends. But there’s nothing that tells what it felt like to be trusted with a national television program at a time when I wasn’t meant to trust anyone over thirty. ABC’s Director of Television in those days was Ken Watts—one of the great unsung heroes of the ABC’s Golden Age—who told me he wanted teenage viewers at 6.30 p.m. And that was it. No marketing studies, no demographics, no committees. So I got on with it and the result was GTK. I’m still very grateful to the ABC for giving me and other young film and television people such amazing freedom to express ourselves. It has changed our lives—those of us who were directly involved in the production as well as some of those who were
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watching. It sounds pretentious to claim a philosophy for GTK— but in the late sixties we really believed that music was going to change things for the better and not just for the bankers.
GTK taught me all the things I didn’t learn at kindergarten and remains one of the best times of my life. But I couldn’t remain a twenty-something teenager forever, so I left the ABC and spent several years working as a freelance director in commercial television. In 1978 I returned to the ABC on contract to produce several variety series with Marcia Hines, Debbie Byrne and John Farnham and found the same cameramen and sound recordists still there. The ABC was a great place to work in those days, and I often wonder what would have happened if I’d stayed on as a television producer. I don’t think I would ever have ended up as director of ceremonies for the Sydney 2000 Olympics. Sitting on the tarmac in Los Angeles in November 2000, I seemed to have come full circle. Eighteen years earlier I’d produced and directed the opening and closing ceremonies for the Commonwealth Games in Brisbane—my first major international event. And then, as now, I’d moved back to Los Angeles to live and work. People with less eventful lives occasionally ask if I have any regrets about mine, and generally I don’t. Back in 1981 when my career as a television producer and director took a new turn, I certainly didn’t regret it. At the time, I was in pre-production for an airshow that was to be televised live in celebration of the Diamond Jubilee of the Royal Australian Air Force. I’d been up in Malaysia for a week, risking my life at the bar in the Officers’ Mess with Jeffrey Watson (now much better known as a bon vivant and frequent flyer on Channel Nine’s Getaway) while we shot some video inserts for the program, and had then caught an RAAF Hercules cargo flight for the very long haul back home to Sydney.
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To my surprise, on landing at RAAF Richmond, a sleek Commonwealth car was waiting for me, while Jeffrey and the crew had to catch the ABC minibus. It turned out that they were being taken home, while I was being taken to Sydney’s domestic airport. Shagged out after the long flight and in need of a shower, I arrived at the terminal to find my boss, Alan Bateman, waiting with a firstclass ticket to Brisbane and a smile like the Cheshire Cat. He’d arranged for us to present an outline for the opening and closing ceremonies to the Brisbane Commonwealth Games Foundation, but assured me that he’d do all the talking. He just wanted me for backup. While I’d been selflessly facing danger from unlabelled wine bottles in the Officers’ Mess in Malaysia, back in Sydney Alan had gathered together a few of the ABC’s finest minds to come up with suggestions for the ceremonies. They too had been exposed to some dangerous wine (Bateman is notoriously parsimonious with expenses) and had thought of several ideas of which Alan could only remember a flag on the field and a 3D version of Matilda the kangaroo, the Commonwealth Games mascot. Now we had a little less than sixty minutes’ flying time to come up with a presentation. Sleepily, I asked for a piece of paper so that I could work out roughly how many performers would be needed to form a human rectangle containing a hollow circle about fifty metres in diameter. Alan whipped out a calculator the size of a credit card and we played schoolboy geometry for a while. It seemed that about 7000 schoolkids would do it. By the time we landed in Brisbane I was asleep, but after showering at the ABC and changing into a suit from the wardrobe department, I was ready for the presentation. Alan told me that four different production companies had been invited to bid for the ceremonies, including the ABC. This was a very unusual situation because we were never in open competition with the other networks, let alone the independent production houses. In those
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days the ABC was regarded as the last bastion of gentlemanly amateurism, so I was a little overawed at the thought of competing against hardened professionals from the—gasp!—commercial networks and I was still more than a little jetlagged. Fortunately, Alan was at his best when competing, so he pushed me into the boardroom and away we went. Alan thanked the Foundation for the opportunity. He explained that the ABC was the natural home for national events, and that we had spared no effort in gathering the ABC’s full resources for an opening and closing ceremony that all Australians would proudly embrace. He then kicked me in the leg to ensure I was awake and declared, ‘Ric will be producing the ceremonies, so he’ll tell you what to expect.’ A boardroom table of faces turned to me as I rubbed my shin, trying to remember what we’d talked about on the plane. Playing for time, I outlined something that sounded extraordinary, while Alan confirmed that we had done all our planning on a computer— a very exotic piece of equipment in 1981. He told me later that a pocket calculator was a computer, and I guess it is. When I reached the part about presenting dancers from those nations that had big migrant populations in Australia, I got the attention of the Chairman. He was a Supreme Court judge, whose international travel schedule to jurist conventions was found later to coincide uncannily with the world’s great horse races. As I described how a group of Australian Aboriginal dancers would introduce the segment and then invite dancers from many lands to join them in the centre of the field, the chairman interrupted with a merry twinkle in his eyes. ‘Tell you what, Ric, all you’d have to do is chuck a bottle of sherry into the middle and watch those black buggers dance!’ He roared laughing, while the others around the table chuckled. Alan, ever the diplomat, turned to the woman taking notes and said quietly, ‘Strike those comments from the minutes.’ I think the chairman was surprised.
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It was my first experience with one of Queensland’s ‘colourful characters’ and I never got used to them. Eventually a Royal Commission uncovered just how colourful some of the characters in the Queensland Government were and put them in jail. The chairman wasn’t one of them. Having presented the proposal to the board, Alan and I flew back to Sydney and expected to hear from the Foundation within a month or two. In fact, it was almost nine months before a decision was made. Meanwhile I had an airshow to produce, as well as the 1981 Australian Film Awards, a Rolf Harris special and an Australian entry for the Pacific Song Contest. The Rolf Harris special was an unexpected chance to work with one of my favourite Australian entertainers. I went to school in England and so I’d first seen Rolf on BBC television, where he appeared somewhere between Bill and Ben, the Flowerpot Men and University of the Air. He told stories that involved a squid which he drew on the back of his hand, and he could paint extraordinarily rapid cartoon-like images on white walls using only a large wallpaper brush and black paint. Over the years, Rolf’s career bounced around like the kangaroos he sang about—sentimental favourites like ‘Six White Boomers’ and the little soldier boy who had room on his horse for two, and music hall numbers like ‘Jake the Peg’ and ‘Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport’. Often derided as a ‘professional Australian’, Rolf should instead be venerated as one of our great entertainers who made life easier for the many who followed him. While rehearsing and taping his show at the ABC’s Gore Hill studios one day we were talking about the differences between Australian and North American audiences. He told me about a concert he’d performed in Canada. ‘Mate, there was standing room only and I’d laid ’em in the aisles. The show was huge and the applause went on for hours, so when I got back to the dressing room I was feeling pretty good. There was a fella waiting there for me, introduced himself as a
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tram driver from Melbourne who’d watched the show. Said, “Ripper show, Rolf. Now I’ll tell yer where youse went wrong.”’ I don’t know what it is about Australians, but they’re never too shy to come forward with suggestions—as they did regularly during the preparation period for the Sydney Olympics. Soon after, I happened to be in Canada myself. I was responsible for the Australian entry in the 1981 Pacific Song Contest—a sort of Pacific Rim version of the Eurovision Song Contest dreamed up by Des Monaghan of New Zealand television. The inaugural contest had been held in Christchurch and now it was the Canadians’ turn to host the event in Ottawa. A song contest is dreaded by producers because it means listening to hundreds, maybe thousands, of poorly recorded demonstration cassettes submitted by amateurs, in the hope of finding a gem. Of course, some professional writers also submit songs—usually the ones they couldn’t sell to a record company. These days, the quality of ‘demos’ is much improved due to home recording studios and samplers, but that wasn’t the case in 1981. I spent a few weeks listening to primary school kids clustered around a piano, singing of golden wattle, beaches, sunrises, and the rest of nature’s bounty rich and rare; teenagers with romantic yearnings over three major guitar chords; and duets by wellmeaning singers who should have known better. I assembled the top ten tunes from the thousands submitted, gathered a few musical judges to vote on them and we came up with a duet whose title I forgot long ago. A young New Zealander named Mark was teamed with a great Queensland singer named Brenda Kristen, and suddenly we had what sounded like a hit on our hands. We flew to Ottawa at taxpayer expense, which at the ABC meant travelling the cheapest way possible. It took four connections and nearly two days to arrive, but once there we had a ball. To cut a long story short, Brenda and Mark did us proud and won the contest! We celebrated all night, and the next day Brenda and I flew back in economy class, she clutching the trophy, me nursing
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a hangover. In Vancouver, our plane developed an airconditioning fault and we had to wait at the ramp for the mechanics to fix it. We were stuck in our seats for four hours, during which time Brenda’s carefully coiffed hair became limp and my headache got worse. We finally took off for Hawaii, where we changed planes for Sydney. We were almost into a third day of travel without rest by the time we landed and I was regretting that I’d asked Alan Bateman to arrange a press conference at the airport for our arrival. I’d also forgotten to tell Brenda about it, so when we stepped off the plane the photographers had difficulty deciding whether to photograph us or not. It’s very hard to use a triumphant caption above a shot of people who look like rejects from The Osbournes. But the media has no mercy, so somewhere in the archives are photos of Brenda in sunglasses and a hat, looking like an angry homeless person holding a statuette, with me standing in the background looking even worse. However, on the positive side, at last there was news from the Commonwealth Games Foundation. They had finally decided to accept the ABCTV proposal for the opening and closing ceremonies, which left me about nine months to produce the events. This was a mixed blessing. I couldn’t remember my ideas for the show anymore, but I figured that they probably couldn’t either. The ABC was highly confused to find that it had won a competition to produce the ceremonies and told me that I couldn’t use any of its staff or resources. Apparently the ABC chiefs didn’t realise that I was working for them at the time, because I was a contract producer rather than a staff member. They must have suspected that I planned to profit by using ABC resources for a project that was being financed by the Commonwealth Games Foundation to the tune of $750,000—which the ABC considered was more than enough to produce the two ceremonies. Fortunately, Alan Bateman was able to make some arrangements that allowed me to work with ABC staff when necessary, but he couldn’t provide a production
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office. So I was shown to a small brick garage with a room upstairs, across the road from the Gore Hill studios, that became the nerve centre for the Commonwealth Games Ceremonies Display Production Unit. Although I didn’t appreciate it at the time, this was a turning point in my career. With absolutely no preparation, practice or training, I was about to move into the world of mega-events. I could hardly wait. The Russians had set new standards for theatrical production at the 1980 Moscow Olympics Opening Ceremony, but due to a boycott instigated by US President Jimmy Carter, it wasn’t seen on American television and so it didn’t count. However, I’d been mightily impressed by it and wished the Red Army was available for freelance gigs. Months later, on the day before the Brisbane opening ceremony, an Australian journalist asked if I was nervous. I wasn’t and told him so. ‘But what if something goes wrong?’ he asked. His question shocked me, and to this day I remember my reaction. I realised that at no time during the entire preparation period had I considered that things might go wrong. If you’re the sort of person who worries about what might go wrong, when it’s your job to make sure that things go right, then the world of mega-events is probably not for you. I don’t ignore the possibility of things going wrong; it’s just that if everything is planned carefully and rehearsed properly, then you have lessened the risks to the point where you shouldn’t waste time worrying about them. Things will still go wrong, of course, and you deal with them when they happen. This is a lesson I’ve learned over the years since Brisbane, but in late 1982 I was a ceremonies virgin. From that moment on, I started losing my innocence.
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two
Magnets and maestros Magnets and maestros
T
he starting point was to create a script for the Brisbane event. Opening ceremonies are difficult to explain in words because they’re a series of images intended to connect with the audience on an emotional level. It’s like using words to describe a symphony or a ballet—at some point you become tongue-tied and start using your hands. My background was in television where there is usually a written script, so I had to start thinking in a different way to explain the visual images to the performers. Working in a studio usually only involves a handful of actors and it’s easy to communicate. For Brisbane we’d estimated that about 7000 performers would be needed. That was a few too many to take down to the pub for lunch and a chat about the script. The storyboards used to plan commercials or special effects in movies seemed appropriate for the ceremonies ideas, but how could I expect an illustrator to show what was needed until I’d done the drawings myself? Besides, each performer would be 11
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following a unique set of instructions and there was no way to produce storyboards for thousands of individuals. The computer age wasn’t quite upon us—there were mainframes in corporate offices (although not at the ABC where manual typewriters ruled), but the personal computer was still a rarity, so instead we had to use the most basic technology imaginable. The display section of the opening ceremony called for thousands of performers to move from position to position around the field so that they formed various images when viewed from above, to which we added other performers and elements as the show progressed. The first formation was to be a giant Australian flag with the Commonwealth Games logo framing it on either side. Then the flag would disappear and reform as a rectangle with a hole in the middle, into which skydivers would land. A group of Aboriginal dancers from Gove and the Mornington Peninsula would then appear, their performance introducing a choreographed segment of national dancers who celebrated Australia’s multicultural society, culminating with all dancers positioned inside an outline map of Australia, singing that they still called Australia home. This would be followed by the entrance of Matilda, the much-loved winking marsupial mascot, who would circumnavigate the track while Rolf Harris sportingly invited us to ‘tie [his] kangaroo down, sport’. The climax would be Matilda giving birth (by hydraulic caesarean) to twenty ‘joeys’ who would spring onto trampolines and leap about a bit. Then, with everyone holding hands, the field would transform into a giant XII Commonwealth Games logo as Rolf led the choir and spectators in a rousing rendition of ‘Waltzing Matilda’ while helium balloons were being released to great cheers from the crowd. The field performers could then retire to their positions around the track to wave at the teams marching in. Although the ceremony now seems somewhat naïve, times were simpler then. As a Brisbane journalist said in an article after
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watching the dress rehearsal, ‘I had no idea we were going to so much trouble!’ If he only knew! The person who went to the most trouble was my new assistant—Karen Richards. As it turned out, I don’t think the show would have been possible without her. Karen was only twenty-one and had left an administrative job in the upper echelons of the ABC to work in production. She was very keen, very smart and could type. But no credentials could have prepared her for the job that lay ahead. She was too inexperienced to tell me I was crazy (although that changed quite quickly), so she ended up with the job of documenting the moves of thousands of individual field performers. Instead of producing storyboards, I had purchased thousands of tiny flat magnets. The magnets, about six millimetres square, were cut from sheets of magnetised material coloured on both sides—either red/red, blue/blue, red/white or blue/white. Karen came to know each magnet personally because she wrote a number on every single one of them and followed their moves around a steel tabletop. Today I’d just tell the choreographers what patterns were needed and then let them get on with it, but in early 1982 I didn’t know anyone who’d choreographed a stadium show. Instead, I had had a large metal-topped table made which was carried up the stairs to our office with some difficulty. The stadium track and field was painted on the tabletop and a transparent overlay was placed over the painted surface. The overlay had a grid printed on it photographically—each segment being 7.5 millimetres square. We allocated a number to every single square, from A1 at the top left to NN210 at the bottom right, just like a street directory, and then loaded thousands of tiny magnets onto the squares. The estimates we’d made on Alan Bateman’s pocket calculator many months earlier turned out to be remarkably accurate. A total of 7000 performers was needed altogether—about 4500 on the field, a further 1500 on either side of the field, seated on benches
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arranged in the shape of the Commonwealth Games logo, and a 1000-voice choir. In Brisbane we met with the Education Department and laid the groundwork for obtaining the performers from public and private schools. A circular was sent out to principals asking if they would approve extracurricular activities for secondary school pupils that would require several hours per week of rehearsal, leading up to the Commonwealth Games. They were also told that a minimum of 100 students would be needed from each school, and in the end a total of forty-six schools was involved in the event. I haven’t had to think about those magnets for many years, but in early 1982 my life was dominated by the tiny coloured pieces that became known as ‘placards’ or ‘banners’. A replica of the Australian flag slowly formed on the tabletop, pieces of magnetised confetti coming together in patriotic union. Although the Union Jack could be represented easily enough in square pixels, the slanted edges of the white stars on the blue field were a problem. Ultimately we used blue or white fabric banners and appliquéd the edges of the stars onto the material. This was another of Karen’s contributions, who had her father’s clothing factory manufacture the banners (for free), and then gathered her family together in the lounge room to insert wooden dowel rods in each end of the banner while she inked an individual number onto each one. We knew where each performer was meant to be at every moment. We’d learned this information the hard way. Having decided how to represent the Australian flag, we now had to transform it into a hollow circle contained within a rectangle. I stared at the tabletop for hours, imagining thousands of students dutifully tramping around the grass carrying banners and placards in a futile search for their final position. One of the recurring questions I am asked is, ‘How do you come up with your ideas?’ and there’s no easy answer. However, I’m blessed with a strong visual imagination and many ideas come to me as I simply stare
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at a map or model of a venue while imagining I’m in the audience watching the show. This worked for me in 1982 as I stared at the magnets and visualised their movements. In a Eureka! moment, I suddenly saw how to achieve the change between formations, and quickly started moving magnets around the grid. Rather proud of myself, I called Karen into the room to show her my solution. She stared at me and the magnets and said, ‘How do you know which one went where? You’ve just messed up the flag and now we don’t know which one is which!’ Unfortunately, this was true. ‘However,’ I said, ‘all you have to do is write a number on each magnet and then we’ll be able to track them. In fact, I’ll even go and buy a couple of pens for you.’ And I was as good as my word. I bought her several fine marker pens and she spent the next week writing individual numbers on more than 6000 tiny magnets. Karen was in a bad mood that week so I prudently went to Brisbane with John Pine, our production manager, to work out the logistics of translating our magnetised tabletop into Brisbane’s QEII Stadium. The first challenge was to install the grid markings onto the grass—which had to be regularly watered and mown, so no permanent marks could be put down. Yet we had to ensure that the marks would be in the same place every time for rehearsals and for the ceremony itself. John came up with an ingenious solution that involved steel cables seventy-five centimetres apart being stretched from one side of the field to the other. Marks were painted on each cable at seventy-five-centimetre intervals, enabling a team of crouching volunteers to mark a spot on the grass if they happened to have a pocket full of plastic markers with the appropriate numbers on them. Each marker was held down with a good-sized nail, and after rehearsals each nail had to be recovered so the official Brisbane City Council lawn mower wouldn’t be endangered. It sounds ridiculously complex and labour-intensive, but John and a volunteer crew of twenty-five schoolboys got so good at this task they could lay out the whole field in a few hours. In fact, I’ve used this method
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ever since in stadiums from Sydney to Singapore and it works every time. Back in Sydney, Karen’s eyes were strained and red-rimmed as she glared at me balefully. I knew what she was going to ask. ‘How are you going to teach each schoolkid where to go?’ ‘Simple,’ I said. ‘We have a bracket built above the centre of the table to support a large-format camera and photograph the movements of the magnet formations. Then we make large photographic prints, showing the key transitional moments in the formations, and then you give the photos to the schoolteachers and tell them to follow the pictures—just like those old Arthur Murray dance studio diagrams where you follow the footprints and in no time you’re doing the tango.’ Actually this technique worked remarkably well, but I’ve never tried to do it again because choreographers prefer their own methods involving lots of charts, drawings and pencil marks. And now there are computer programs that make it all much easier. But for the 1982 Commonwealth Games, Karen and I moved every magnet by hand, had the photographer shoot the formation . . . then moved the magnets a bit more . . . photographed the changed formation . . . then we’d move the magnets . . . you get the picture. It was like doing a 6000-piece jigsaw puzzle and you had to hope you didn’t lose any of the pieces. Sometimes our sleeves brushed a numbered magnet out of position or off the table, and in summer our sticky forearms would pick up magnets, so Karen would have to chase people around the office in her search for a missing piece. Over a period of a month we slid those magnets slowly around the table until every movement of every placard and banner had been photographed. Poster-sized enlargements of each photo enabled us to follow the moves of any one placard or banner from beginning to end of the show. Now we had to turn magnets into schoolkids. The Queensland Education Department had provided us with details of the schools that wanted to participate, together with the
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number of pupils each school could make available to us—ranging from 100 to 400. We juggled numbers between the schools, allocated banners and placards, and decided who’d sit where on the Games logo benches and who got to be in the choir. The production team had now been assembled: Fiona Watts, a charming Brit with the air of a no-nonsense schoolteacher and the face of a fashion model, was in charge of the Games logo benches; Kate Woods (who went on to become an outstanding ABC television director) was the floor manager; Adrian Symons, another newly arrived Brit with a gentle Sloane Ranger accent and great design skills, was our production designer; John Pine was our technical production manager and Astrid Friederichs was the brilliant production manager who managed our lives. Astrid, one of the ABC’s top production managers, had ‘overtrained’ for an upcoming documentary series about the Himalayas and had badly damaged her knee. She limped into our lives and took care of everything that necessitated tact, patience and dealing with bureaucracy—skills for which I am not famous. Later we added Steve Wood as the television director and Judy Smith as his assistant, and that was the entire team. It seems extraordinary now, but we produced the opening and closing ceremonies with fewer than ten full-time staff. In Los Angeles a couple of years later, there was a production team of 165 people, and by Sydney 2000 the ceremonies staff numbered 650! Of course, there are many more volunteers who work backstage—we had 2500 in Brisbane—but the whole creative and operational plan was in the hands of six people. Needless to say, we didn’t have many days off. Rehearsals began. Karen had got together a group of girls from her old school at North Sydney to rehearse various movements with banners and placards to make sure that our instructions could be understood, and to see how long some of the moves took to accomplish. We’d also gone to the QEII Stadium where I’d made Karen run, walk or stroll from point to point so that we could
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estimate the duration of the big formations. All this information was correlated with the musical soundtrack and then instruction books were individually typed by Karen for each of the forty-six schools. The instruction books contained arcane directions like: ‘J66 turn RIGHT on music cue 23 and move forward 6 paces; then on music cue 25 move to your partner and close up your banner.’ Meanwhile, Fiona’s groups on the Games logo benches followed entirely different instructions. Her kids were to spend the entire display simply sitting and wearing red, white or blue uniforms, so we had to give them something to do. Instead of a single placard, they received multiple cards that spelled out messages or simply provided colourful distraction patterns while J66 and the rest were waiting to move off. Fiona was like a mother hen to her kids, getting to know many of them by name as well as all the teachers. On the other hand, I was always in the control room looking down at the formations being rehearsed and rarely got to meet anyone. Fiona, Adrian and Kate spent rehearsal days in the ‘war zone’, right down and dirty among the sweaty performers, packed into tight ranks in the tropical humidity. Adrian said it brought back memories of the London Underground in midsummer. Every field performer had to memorise the soundtrack for the display, so we had supplied an audio cassette to each school with all the cues recorded by an announcer over the music score that maestro Tommy Tycho had composed and then recorded with the Queensland Symphony Orchestra. Tommy is another of the very important people in my life. A Hungarian born in Budapest, Tommy had been the director of music for the Aga Khan in the early 1950s. I’ve always thought that was a great title. As befits a true romantic, Tommy eloped from Teheran with his beautiful wife-to-be, Eva, and they ended up in Sydney where he formed the Channel Seven Orchestra and became a legend. Over the decades, he became synonymous with style and gravitas, his baton never flagging or missing a beat as
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thousands of singers and dancers passed through studios for their fifteen minutes of fame. Tommy’s only sorrow was that the ABC never considered him as a fit and proper person to conduct one of its symphony orchestras, because although Tommy was a highly trained and accomplished musician he had always worked for the, uhh . . . commercial networks. So when I contracted him to compose and conduct the music for the opening ceremony, I was expecting resistance from the ABC. But in fact, everything fell into place. Tommy was available exactly when needed, as was the Queensland Symphony Orchestra, so the ABC gave its blessing. The maestro took up his baton and since then Tommy has become a firm favourite with all the ABC’s orchestras. Tommy had to compose or arrange forty-five minutes of orchestral music for the show, ranging from a symphonic version of ‘Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport’ to the backing track for some truly loony English Morris dancers (a folkloric splinter group that solemnly re-enacts long-lost arcadian revels performed by lads to attract lasses). All his arrangements were accomplished with imperturbable charm and a fine sense of timing. I used to go to Tommy’s house to discuss the soundtrack. He was literally able to do several things at once and I was constantly amazed at his ability to write orchestra charts while discussing Julie Anthony’s arrangements on the telephone, chatting to me in conversational gaps and ordering another cup of tea from Eva. When Tommy had finished the orchestrations, we moved up to Brisbane for the recording sessions. In 1982, the QEII Stadium had very basic technology, particularly when it came to the PA system. Although spectators were accustomed to garbled information that sounded like a railway station announcement, I wasn’t prepared to accept such crappy sound. My concern was that Tommy Tycho’s superb symphonic score would be diminished to a tinny transistor bleat that would not only do a great injustice to the music, but would also mean
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that my performers would be unable to hear the soundtrack properly. If they couldn’t hear the music, they might miss some of their important cues and we’d end up with chaos on the field. Another part of the ceremony involved a massed brass band of about 300 musicians from the Army, Navy and Air Force under the direction of Colonel Harper. I asked for Harper’s support in requesting the Brisbane City Council (the BCC owned the stadium and was responsible for its equipment) to install a new PA system, capable of reproducing a full dynamic range. Colonel Harper was very sniffy. Not only was I a snotty little individual for using recorded music instead of live musicians, but his massed band wouldn’t even require a microphone or a PA system to be heard. Their thunderous wall of sound would carry to all corners of the Empire! Making a mental note that I couldn’t expect much help from this quarter, I went to the council directly. To demonstrate the inadequacy of the QEII system, I recorded the Tycho symphonic score in full glorious Technicolour (as it were), against the same music played through an old telephone—which had the same dynamic range as the stadium speakers. I played this tape to the councillor in charge of the stadium. ‘Sounds pretty bloody good to me, mate!’ he said enthusiastically as soon as he heard the music. Trouble was, he was talking about the telephone version. There was no way the BCC was going to spend any money on updating the PA system. I was very depressed. For all of our massed rehearsals at the stadium, the scratchy tin horns of the PA system pathetically bleated out the music. Fortunately, our school-age performers were at the peak of their hearing ability and seemed to manage. The final dress rehearsal took place on a Sunday, in front of a capacity audience of performers’ families, friends and schoolteachers; members of the Brisbane City Council were also present. Much to their dismay, the official speeches turned out to be inaudible. It was the first time the new seating
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structures opposite the main grandstand had been full of people, and the presence of tens of thousands of murmuring bodies absorbed the sound energy from the miserable little PA speakers. Consternation! One of the official speakers was to be the Queen’s Consort, His Royal Highness the Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh! His royal personage was to read out a message from the Queen, who had sent it to the stadium on foot (via the Royal Baton Relay) some weeks earlier. The thought of HRH being unheralded and HM’s message being unheard very nearly unhinged the BCC. The next morning I received a call from a friend at the council, who gleefully told me that orders had gone out to fix the problem, whatever the cost. Forty-eight hours later, some truly awesome PA speakers, together with massive amplifiers, arrived by air from the United States and were installed on the roof of the main grandstand just in time for the ceremony. There was a brilliant young ABC radio producer in Melbourne named Chris Peacock who I brought to Brisbane to be in charge of the recording. He was painstaking in his attention to detail and oversaw the master tapes for the ceremony as well as the subsequent record album. At QEII Stadium, Chris installed two state-of-theart twenty-four-track Ampex studio tape machines in our control room. When I asked him how he’d managed to get two (I think the ABC only had three at the time and none of these was in Brisbane) he told me to enquire no further. One of the machines was a backup in case anything went wrong with the master machine. At every rehearsal, the master worked perfectly. About ten minutes before the opening ceremony started, Chris checked the machines and both were working fine. When I gave him the first music cue, the master machine didn’t start. Chris immediately switched to the backup and the rest of the ceremony came off that machine. Afterwards he pulled
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apart the master recording machine and found that a printed circuit card had inexplicably burned out. Since then I have always had at least one backup for audio at every live event that I’ve produced. There are a couple of famous anecdotes about producers who didn’t back up their audio—one was in Melbourne at an AFL football grand final where the half-time show consisted of dancers performing a number from 42nd Street. As the second quarter of the game finished, the players ran off and the dancers ran on to take up their positions. In the control room, the audio guy had previously been testing the music track. He’d played ‘On Broadway’ right through to check its quality and everything was fine. Unfortunately, he’d been distracted by a question from the producer and had forgotten to rewind the tape back to the beginning. So, with 400 dancers standing on tiptoes at the Melbourne Cricket Ground and television cameras poised to show Melbourne to the world, the producer cued the music. The sound engineer pressed the button, the tape rolled . . . and there was a great silence. Just background hiss as the desperate operator wound up the volume in search of the soundtrack. Then he remembered that he’d forgotten to rewind the tape, so he hit rewind and the tape flew backward on the reels. Thinking he’d gone far enough back, he slammed on the brakes . . . too fast. The spools crashed to a halt and the tape broke. Frantically he reached for the editing tape and did a rush splice. Then he hit the play button. Meanwhile the girls had been standing patiently, waiting to hear the first notes of ‘On Broadway’. When the music finally blasted out over the speakers, the hapless audio engineer discovered he had not rewound to the beginning. Some of the dancers started improvising, trying to pick up on the music, while others remained rooted to the spot, waiting for the beginning of the soundtrack. The producer, by now hyperventilating, told the engineer to rewind to the start of the tape. The music ceased again and those who were dancing slowed,
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then stopped. In the control room, the tape had flown off the reel and there were now metres of it on the floor which the engineer was desperately trying to thread back onto the machine. At this point, Channel Seven’s television director had had enough. Just as the sound engineer finally got the tape back on the machine and was ready to go, Channel Seven cut away to commercials and told the show producer to get the dancers off the field. To this day, the audience may be wondering why the half-time show lacked colour and movement. The other salutary lesson regarding a backup audio machine I learned at the Atlanta 1996 Olympics Opening Ceremony. By then, recording technology had advanced way beyond Brisbane in 1982. Tape machines were no longer necessary; everything was digital, and soundtracks were stored for instant replay on massive computer hard drives. So what could possibly go wrong? The Atlanta opening ceremony featured many great performers—Jessye Norman, Stevie Wonder, Celine Dion and a gospel choir, among many others. All the performers had their own music tracks and there were many different audio requirements for announcements, translations, anthems, overtures and accompaniments. Each individual piece of audio came on a DAT tape that was down-loaded onto the computer’s huge hard drive. Because digital software is so flexible and allows for last-minute editing, producers make increasing demands upon the equipment. In Atlanta, a straw broke the camel’s back. Literally minutes before the start of the opening ceremony, the computer’s hard drive died. Incredibly enough, the very experienced audio director hadn’t thought it necessary to have a backup . . . There was no other hard drive. Two audio operators had to run the entire Atlanta opening ceremony from the original DAT tapes, loading and unloading, cueing and pre-cueing, playing backing tracks while mixing live audio and losing two kilos in sweat over the course of the evening. Needless to say, by the closing
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ceremony there were backup computers and hard drives in the control room which, of course, weren’t needed because the master computer worked perfectly throughout the night. I have a theory about audio and ceremonies. For a spectator, seated at a stadium and watching the event live, there are many potential distractions. To engage the visual attention of audience members, it’s essential they aren’t distracted by the need to concentrate on what they’re hearing, so I try to record the very best soundtrack possible and play it back over the best equipment available. The music needs to be loud enough that it’s difficult to talk to your neighbour, but not so loud that it becomes painful or makes your ears bleed. Music connects emotionally with a listener, so if everything is working properly the spectators get carried away on the waves of audio and react to the events that are unfolding in front of them without being aware of the music. It’s the same principle as a movie soundtrack. The best soundtracks never intrude, they just heighten the emotional reactions the director is trying to achieve. On the other hand, if the music doesn’t engage the stadium audience emotionally and spectators start noticing, or worse, ignoring the soundtrack, then you have a problem. People start talking among themselves, shuffling their feet and heading for the toilets. It’s hard to reach an audience that’s in the restrooms. One question I’m often asked is, ‘Do you design the ceremony for the live audience or for television viewers?’ Given that there will be, at most, around 100,000 spectators compared to a television audience of several billion, the answer is expected to be: ‘Television, of course.’ But it’s not, and the reason is simple. Other producers may work differently, but my theory is that if the stadium audience is excited, then the TV viewers will be, too. However, if the live audience is getting restless, television viewers will be aware of it. So I plan every show to work for the live audience and then let the television viewers come along for the ride. Major event producers have to recognise that the scale of a stadium means you can’t simply
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import a production from a theatre, put it onstage in a stadium and imagine that the audience will enjoy it. Equally, a major opening ceremony needs entirely different production techniques to a rock concert that’s held in the same stadium. Still, because I was a television director for many years, I like to make sure that all the key moments in the stadium production can be seen by cameras—whether or not the director actually uses those shots and camera angles live on the night. I started learning these lessons at the Brisbane Commonwealth Games.
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three
Beginner’s luck Beginner’s luck
O
ne of the great successes of the Brisbane opening ceremony was the appearance of Matilda, who became known as the Winking Kangaroo. John Pine, our technical production manager, had located a film and theatrical set-making company in Sydney that was prepared, and even eager, to make a thirteen-metre-tall mobile marsupial weighing in at around six tonnes. They found ideal workshop space in the old White Bay power station, where Matilda’s metal skeleton was formed, then sheathed in chic fibreglass while her bottom rested comfortably on the chassis of an old forklift truck. She was quite a character: baby blue eyes with lashes to die for and a pouch that opened like the door of the mothership in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Instead of albino aliens, Matilda carried a crew of twenty miniature beings dressed as baby kangaroos. Matilda assumed her personality as the paintwork was finished and the operators were able to move her head from side to side and close her eyes in a slow and rather sexy wink.
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Her first forays around the QEII were emotional moments, made more so because the venue manager came running after her to complain that Matilda was dripping oil onto the running track. The track surface was a synthetic rubber that dissolved when exposed to mineral oils, so Matilda’s trail of little droppings ate into the track like Pacmen. Her aged forklift chassis was to blame for Matilda’s incontinence, so we had to clean her hydraulics and fit a napkin that extended under her drip tray. Thus protected, the sprightly hussy was able to move around the track without any little accidents. Inside her cavernous interior the twenty joeys were like paratroopers heading for the dropzone. They sat on a circular bench wearing seatbelts while their mothership circled the track at about ten kilometres an hour. When she hit her marks, the plan was for Matilda to pivot as gracefully as a robot kangaroo can, wink roguishly in the direction of HRH Prince Philip, then drop her drawers and pop out the joeys. The furry kids were to head for the trampolines like roo shooters were after them and start bouncing in the air while Rolf Harris sang ‘Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport’. At the first rehearsal we nearly wet ourselves because we laughed so hard and knew that a star was born. When Karen and I first started manoeuvring magnets around a tabletop, we must have been numbed by the tedium of the process because I thought that watching 6000 people change positions on a field would be boring. As it turned out, the sight of all those red, white and blue costumes moving around looked like a twodimensional Rubik’s Cube and I could have watched it for hours. But in the meantime I had made some other arrangements. I’d been told that Brisbane was the home of the Marching Girl movement, although it turned out that Brisbane was the movement’s only home. A demonstration was arranged over the phone, and one Saturday I found myself at a suburban oval surrounded by a number of very large girls in toy soldier costumes. The sight of so
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many miniskirts and massive thighs was unnerving, particularly when they moved off in unsmiling lines, more terrifying than a Marine battalion. These Girls were Women now and they meant business. I was too scared to refuse their wish to be in the ceremonies. I had also learned that while Australia was called home by people from 117 nations, only about twenty of those nations could provide performers who were ready to dance for free in front of an international audience. The multicultural dancers ranged from the Serbo-Croat battalions who glared and made throat-cutting gestures at the Ukrainian folk dancers, the gentle Filipinos who danced gracefully between bamboo staves, and the predictably skittish Highlanders, to gorgeous grass-skirted wahines from Tahiti and the extraordinarily serious Morris dancers. Tommy Tycho bravely met with all the groups to discuss their musical needs, after I’d told their leaders that they only had forty-five seconds to dance, followed by ten seconds to move out of the way of the next group. After the initial disbelief, the protests began. What did I think I was doing? ‘Our dance is an elevated art form, come down through the centuries, and we are the guardians of its purity.’ ‘We’ll need at least five minutes just to get into position!’ Finally, they quietened and grumpily signed on. A few days later, Tommy called to say he was having a little difficulty with the Morris dancers. Apparently they were prepared to edit their dance routine down to a tight ten minutes, but needed an additional five minutes of preparatory music to tie ribbons in their hair and put on their clogs. I had to confess that I’d never actually watched Morris dancing, but this sounded like it could be a bit time-consuming. I called the Morris in charge and requested a demonstration of his troupe. A few nights later I found myself in a dusty hall where half a dozen sheepish male Poms were gathered, ready to re-enact the archaic mating ritual dance that had probably caused a fall in the birth rate of Olde England. A few
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of them had tied string around their trouser legs, the rest used bicycle clips, presumably to ensure I missed none of their nimble clogwork. They reminded me of Michael Palin’s Monty Python character, who wore Wellington boots with tweed shorts, a knotted handkerchief on his head and spoke in broad vowels. Lots of ‘ee bar goom’ and ‘Ah doan’t know do aye?’. It seemed I was in for a real treat. I turned to the Morris major and gaily said, ‘Start your engines, lads!’ Shuffling in embarrassment, the Morrises gathered around a basketball hoop that I was asked to imagine was a maypole. Then a cassette player started up with a warbly version of ‘Here We Go Gathering Nuts in May’. For five minutes I watched the chaps tie ribbons around their elbows, play with their hair and pull on their dancing shoes. Then the dance began. In pairs, they bent their elbows and presented themselves to each other before hooking up for a twirl in slow motion. It was like watching trees mating. I caught the eye of the Morris major and shook my head. He was furious. Apparently the Morris minors were warming up for a big finish, but I told him that life was too short for Morris dancing and we parted on bad terms. I had more luck with the skydivers. At a remote airfield well away from Brisbane I had located some daring young men who had assured me on the phone that they could land right on target from a great height nearly every time. The secret, they said, was their wing parachutes—aerofoil shapes that behaved like an aircraft wing and allowed great manoeuvrability, very different from the old mushroom-shaped canopy. By jumping out of planes all afternoon, they demonstrated that when the conditions were right, they could land exactly on target and could even do it standing on someone else’s shoulders. This definitely interested me. We decided there were nine qualified skydivers who had the necessary experience to drop into a fifty-metre circle of schoolchildren at QEII Stadium and land within a metre of the centre. This was
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important. There’s nothing worse than skydivers landing on top of a crowd of schoolchildren who can’t get away, particularly when it’s on live television. My plan required the skydivers to jump from two aircraft at a height of 1500 metres, opening their ’chutes at 1000 metres and manoeuvring themselves in the air to join up in three groups. Within each group, three skydivers would stand with their feet on the shoulders of the one below, their wingfoil ’chutes stacked in three parallel rows. I thought the plan sounded complicated and dangerous, but they were ready to give it a go if I’d provide them with new parachutes. So we ordered nine wingfoils to be made, each one carrying the Commonwealth Games logo. A different aerial stunt was planned for the closing ceremony. An English traveller had come to Australia with something called a Cloudhopper, and he sent me a photo of it. It seemed to be a personal hot air balloon that was tethered to a backpack containing a butane burner. The ‘pilot’ wore this on his back, the gas nozzle pointing up into the open mouth of the balloon so he could give it a squirt of flame from time to time to keep the canopy inflated. Despite my cancellation of the Morris dancers, I hadn’t forgotten their basketball hoop. What if the Cloudhopper became a maypole, surrounded by real dancers in real costumes who were connected to the balloon with coloured ropes/ribbons? After dancing something dainty without getting their ribbons in a twist, the dancers could release the tethers and the Cloudhopper would rise out of the stadium, to the cheers of the spectators and athletes. It’s at moments like this that creativity and reality coincide. Creatively, the pilot, David, saw no problem with the plan. The reality was I needed to get CAA (Civil Aviation Administration) approval because the Cloudhopper was technically an aircraft. We set up a BYO test at the stadium. David brought the balloon and the butane, I brought a crew of stagehands (not dancers), and the CAA supplied an observer who positioned himself on the
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roof of the main grandstand. He gave us express instructions not to release the balloon because we had not cleared a flight plan with air traffic controllers. He then surrounded himself with equipment on tripods that measured the windspeed or took photographs, or both. Once he was set up, he brought out his sandwiches and made himself comfortable on the roof overlooking our setup. Shortly afterward, David was airborne above the centre of the field, attached by a thick nylon rope to a parked 4WD. He was pumping up the volume in his balloon by torching the butane into the canopy and the Cloudhopper looked rock-hard. So far so good. I wanted to be sure that a group of dancers could actually hold the balloon down, so my ten stagehands each grabbed ropes that were attached to strong points on the harness and took the strain. Gingerly, John Pine (our technical production manager) loosened the rope that was attached to the 4WD and finally released it. Nothing happened. The ten ropes holding the balloon were more than enough. I grabbed one of the ropes and gave it a tug. David swayed gently in the air. It looked like more fun than Morris dancing and he was certainly a better maypole. For reasons which I can never explain, I told everyone to let go. This was a mistake. The balloon was full of super-heated air and it took off like a champagne cork. As the ten ropes snaked past me, I grabbed at one in a vain attempt to slow the balloon. I managed to hold on hard enough that my feet rose off the ground. Opposite me, a stagehand had also managed to grab hold. We looked at each other as we left the ground, rising rapidly. This was not part of the plan. Vivid memories came to mind of newsreel footage showing men being dragged high into the air while attempting to moor one of the great pre-Second World War airships in New Jersey. I remembered that those men had dropped to their deaths when they could hold on no longer. Oops. I yelled at the guy opposite to let go, which he did, dropping about ten feet to the ground. I followed him moments later. We both had severe burns on our hands from grabbing at the nylon ropes,
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but we couldn’t take our eyes off David as he rose high into the air above us. The trailing ropes made the Cloudhopper look like a fantastic squid as the wind carried it towards the main grandstand. David was fearful that he’d hit the front edge of the roof, so he gave the burner another squirt of butane. The balloon itself cleared the roof safely, but the dangling ropes were brushing the roofline as the winds carried Cloudhopper directly towards the CAA man who had stopped eating his sandwiches and was watching David’s approach with horror. Just before the balloon reached him, he flung himself flat on the roof and hung on for his life as the ropes passed by, knocking over his expensive equipment and spilling his tea. I suspected this meant we might have trouble getting a permit. And so it proved. Shortly before I left for the hospital to have my hands attended to, the still-shaken CAA man let me know that I had Buckley’s. Meanwhile, David had radioed that he’d landed in the main square of the Athletes’ Village, which was a kilometre downwind of the stadium. In his understated British way, he mentioned he’d had ‘a spot of bother’ but that everything would be okay if I could talk to the head of security on the radio. It turned out that a red alert had been issued at the sight of an apparent terrorist making an unauthorised entry into the village, where David had landed safely but without accreditation to find himself surrounded by large men with guns. The date of the first mass rehearsal at the stadium had been scheduled for months. When the big day arrived, Brisbane was in the middle of a bus strike. Since we were using 100 buses to bring the student performers to the stadium, we were unable to have a full rehearsal but we could proceed with those who had got there by train. The first time the motley crew of volunteer performers shuffled into the stadium was a life-changing moment for me. Using the PA system, I cued the reduced number of performers
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through their formations and it was extraordinary to see the exact same patterns we had created months earlier on the magnetic tabletop coming to life. Although it was hardly a surprise—it was, after all, what was meant to happen—the fact that the instructions had found their way from Karen’s typewriter to thousands of students who were actually listening to the music, following their cues, raising their banners or placards and accurately forming the patterns made me feel like Cecil B. De Mille on location. The next rehearsal was a week later and for the first time all the performers were brought together. Down in the war zone Adrian, Kate and Fiona dealt with the challenges of creating order out of chaos when thousands of teenagers from different schools and backgrounds were brought into close physical contact. One socially challenged group of boys put razor blades in the grass where a very prim and proper group of privately schooled young ladies was to sit later, but fortunately Adrian discovered their dastardly plot. Other teenagers were making friends—slipping phone numbers and suggestive notes to the objects of their affection as the lines of students crossed in the hot sun. Up in the control room I was oblivious to all this, watching the big picture as the show came together. The schoolkids called me ‘Iceman’—not because I was cool, but because I’d yelled at them to ‘Freeze! Just where you are!’ The reason for the big chill was that two different school groups were on a collision course and we needed to work out why. That was the only glitch in all of the complex formations, however, and Karen preened as cue after cue went by and the patterns formed exactly as planned. She gained additional respect from the performers when one of the boys broke out of line to make ritual mating gestures at a member of the opposite sex. ‘H43 from Waverley High! Get back in line immediately!’ came Karen’s voice over the PA. From then on, the kids behaved very well, believing we could identify every single one of them at any time. (Karen had only been lucky. She’d had
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the right school chart in front of her and because she knew the charts so well, was able to pick out the appropriate number instantly.) The day of the final dress rehearsal dawned red in the morning—shepherd’s warning. I’ve found that this rhyme is an infallible method of weather forecasting, and it certainly worked that day. For the first time, we would be rehearsing with the entire cast in front of a capacity audience; also for the first time, the performers would be wearing their costumes instead of school uniforms. It is law in Queensland that schoolchildren must wear hats for protection against the sun and the world’s highest skin cancer statistics. But we had a problem—we’d run out of money and couldn’t afford the caps. Once again, Karen came to the rescue. Her brother Gary ran an advertising agency and knew Peter Ritchie, head of McDonald’s in Queensland. Karen and I went to meet Peter and suggested that McDonald’s might sponsor the caps. Peter was great. Not only did he provide 7000 red, white and blue caps without any visible McDonald’s branding (which would have caused us problems with the Games Foundation), but he also provided a hot Happy Meal at the stadium for each of the performers, plus a certificate that could be redeemed for a Big Mac! For someone like me, raised in the public-sector atmosphere of the ABC, this was heady commercial enterprise and I wasn’t surprised that Peter went on to head up McDonald’s worldwide. As the time for the dress rehearsal grew nearer, the stadium got busier and the sky got darker. We had invited a full audience of teachers, families and friends, so by the start time of 4 p.m. the stadium was at its capacity of 58,000 spectators. Directly overhead the sky was a startling blue, but to the south, huge black thunderclouds lined up along the horizon. We started right on time, and although the audience strained to hear the pathetic little PA system, everything went as planned. The honour guard looked honourable, twenty-one guns saluted, the stand-ins for the VIPs looked very
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important, and soon it was time for the schoolkids to run onto the field. Meanwhile the edge of darkness had moved closer, an immense anvil-shaped thundercloud now darkening half of the sky. Overhead, the two light planes loaded with skydivers were circling in sunshine at 1500 metres. At one point in the show I went outside the control room with a UHF radio so that I could cue the parachutists when to jump. I got in touch with Dave McEvoy, leader of the pack, and asked him if the weather was a problem. ‘No worries!’ I heard through the static. It was a surreal moment. If I looked north, the sky was a brilliant blue. To the south, there was no sky, just inky darkness. Directly overhead I could make out the two planes, circling to get into position for their run which would take them straight into the blackness. I could hear the music through the PA and knew exactly when I had to give the jump cue so the skydivers would have two minutes thirty seconds to arrive at the stadium and land in the centre of the circle, which was only starting to be formed. As the moment got closer, everything happened at once. I gave the jump cue, I saw four skydivers clear one aircraft before they disappeared into a cloud that hadn’t been there only seconds earlier, and then the huge thunderstorm swallowed everything. The skies opened and torrential sheets of rain bucketed down on the performers and the spectators. The placards and banners were true troupers. Those wonderful schoolkids didn’t miss a beat, completing their moves and forming the giant circle as rain pelted down. Then all we could do was wait. This was a tropical thunderstorm, full of noise and fury but short-lived, very warm and very humid. The sky was grey with rain when suddenly a parachute appeared only sixty metres overhead. Somehow Dave McEvoy had found the stadium in nil visibility and made an incredible touchdown in the centre of the circle to tumultuous applause. A minute later two more parachutes arrived over the stadium and both skydivers landed on the track, well outside the circle but safe nevertheless. There were no more.
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The rain was already easing and a few minutes later the sun was beating down on the stadium again. Spectators put down their umbrellas or plastic bags, performers shook the water off their clothes like spaniels and stood up waiting for their next cue. Meanwhile, I wondered what to do. I’d stopped the music track for about fifteen minutes during the storm, but it was clear that no more skydivers were going to arrive at the stadium. Dave McEvoy came into the control room and said they’d made contact with eight of the nine parachutists and they were safe, but Terry was still missing. I decided to go ahead with the rehearsal and made an announcement to the audience and performers that we were about to restart, but first I wanted them to know that all the parachutists had landed safely and how about a big hand for the incredible skydivers! To generous applause the music started and the show went on. Suddenly the control room door flew open and a hysterical woman burst in, screaming, ‘They’re not all safe! Terry’s missing! Where is he? No one’s heard! Oh, my god. He’s dead, isn’t he?’ Between cues, I learned that this was Terry’s wife. She had heard my announcement, but then learned from one of the other skydivers that Terry was still missing. I was in the middle of the show and had other things on my mind by then, so it was a relief when a phone call came in from Terry to say that he was safe but was about twenty kilometres from the stadium. His wife ran out of the control room and I got on with the ceremony. During the final minutes of the rehearsal, a cut and bloodstained person limped into the control room. It was Terry, who wanted to tell me that he’d lost his special Commonwealth Games parachute. Later that evening I had time to listen to his story. He had jumped out of the plane straight into the storm and had been caught in a ferocious updraft which was carrying him aloft. ‘Mate,’ he said, ‘I’m going up like an express lift and there’s nothing I can do about it. There’s hailstones smashing into me, me face is getting
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cut, me hands are freezing and I can hardly feel the straps, so I knew I had to do something fast. So I hit the release and let me main ’chute go. Then I started dropping and I waited until I was nearly on the deck before I tried the reserve and she opened and here I am.’ Terry had landed in a paddock and walked to the nearest farmhouse from where he’d made a phone call to the stadium. His only concern was losing his parachute, because he knew there wasn’t time to make a replacement and he thought I might cancel him from the jump if he wasn’t wearing the right one. I assured him he could jump with a plain ’chute, but next day a farmer phoned the production office to tell us he’d discovered a bit of fabric with the Games logo on it and thought it might be something we’d be interested in. McEvoy drove out and triumphantly returned with a very muddy but good as new parachute, that had travelled almost twenty kilometres from the dropzone. The Official History of the XII Commonwealth Games contains the following paragraph. The Australian public created a surplus of $1 million for the Games in a frenzy of ticket buying which exceeded not only our budget forecasts but even our most enthusiastic and optimistic hopes. It commenced two months before the Games but gained real momentum when latent nationalism was stirred following the dress rehearsal for the Opening Ceremony. The long queues that awaited our ticket staff next morning remained a feature of our ticket trading from then until the end of the Games.
We knew we had a hit on our hands because Beryl Renton, our faithful office volunteer with whom I stayed in touch for years, told me that all the sixty-minute photo labs in Surfers Paradise were churning out hundreds of photos of the ceremony the next
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day. The spectators who’d seen the rehearsal had told all their friends and ticket sales for the Games had soared. I wished that I had a share in the box office. Ironically enough, there was no parachute drop in the opening ceremony. Instead of a thunderstorm, we had strong westerly winds that gusted up to 100 kilometres per hour and remained above forty kilometres all day. The drop couldn’t be made in those conditions, so Dave McEvoy and his group watched the ceremony at the stadium in their jumpsuits. The biggest problem we faced was whether Matilda could go out safely. The builders had total faith that the thirteen-metre flirt with her fibreglass heart wouldn’t fail us, and of course they were right. The opening ceremony started with a kookaburra call and a ‘cooeee’. Military personnel formed an honour guard to make sure that Prince Philip, accompanied by the Prime Minister, Malcolm Fraser and his wife Tamie, could find their seats. Norman May, the ABC’s sporting commentator, had been roped in to cover the opening ceremony and found it difficult to describe an event for which he had no statistics. He managed to inject the right note of hysterical urgency into counting the hats that blew off the honour guard during inspection by Prince Philip. ‘There’s fifteen, no sixteen, I count SEVENTEEN hats that have blown across the track . . . ’ Once everyone was in their seats and the hats had been recovered, it was time for the first burst of our soundtrack. The new PA system was great and our music was heard for miles. Thousands of schoolchildren formed a flawless flag, then waited patiently while the skydivers didn’t appear as planned—which I explained to the audience. Dancers from around the world in national costume formed ranks and waved their hands and sang that no matter how far they roamed, they still called Australia home. Malcolm Fraser, sitting next to the Royal guest of honour, couldn’t have cared less. The Duke of Edinburgh was obviously enjoying the show
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enormously, gesturing and pointing out highlights to his entourage as the Prime Minister slumped in his seat almost asleep with boredom. When it came time for the spectators to sing ‘Waltzing Matilda’, the PM’s wife had to dig him in the ribs to make him mouth the words. I’ve never asked him what was wrong that day. Maybe he just doesn’t like ceremonies. But the audience did. They applauded the schoolkids who, holding onto their caps in the howling wind as they reached their positions, moved through the flawless formations,. They clapped the marching girls and cheered Rolf, but saved their biggest reaction for Matilda who cruised into the stadium and won the hearts and minds of all who saw her. It’s hard to believe that a fibreglass shell with a mechanical eye could be the highlight of the show, but when she winked cheekily at Prince Philip it was as if Dame Edna herself had appeared larger than lifesized to grace the occasion. The show was a hit. After the ceremony, our special trains with the schoolkids on their way home in their red, white and blue costumes were cheered all the way along the tracks. Next morning, I found there was an insular group that had hated the ceremony. The good folk of Tasmania were up in arms. Media hotlines ran hot with furious Taspersons who claimed they’d been left off the map of Australia that had been faithfully formed at the stadium by the schoolchildren. This came as a total surprise. The map we’d used for the outline was in fact taken from the Federal Government’s own Austrade organisation, whose logo is a simplified map of Australia. On that logo, Tasmania is represented more or less as part of the mainland, with a mere line separating the island state. On the field, I’d choreographed a line of placards to represent the division rather than a sea of banners, which did not please the furious Tasmanians who accused me of deleting their island home. I tried to explain, but they didn’t want to know. I decided to avoid Tasmania for the rest of my life, but every now
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and again I meet someone from there who points a finger and says, ‘You’re the bloke who left Tasmania off the map . . . ’ The effect on Brisbane of the opening ceremony was quite extraordinary. We had been left pretty much alone during the rehearsals, so the live televised event came as a surprise to the people of Queensland who immediately congratulated themselves on a job very well done. Suddenly it wasn’t enough to sing ‘Waltzing Matilda’ in public, you had to have a flag in your front garden as well. Driving to the stadium the next morning I was amazed to see the Aussie flag in windows and on flagpoles everywhere. People were smiling and saying ‘you bloody beauty’ to each other. It was a small foretaste of what would happen in Sydney after the opening ceremony at Homebush. The newspaper reviews were also good, but in one of my many house moves, my scrapbook of clippings about Brisbane has been lost. I can remember that the correspondent for the London Times said that ‘to review a modern Games ceremony these days one needs to be a defence correspondent as well as a theatre critic’. I thought that was about right and meant to bring it to Norman May’s attention but he was screaming ‘gold . . . Gold . . . GOLD TO AUSTRALIA ’ all the time and couldn’t be interrupted. So, the opening was over and soon it would be time for the closing ceremony—an event without a budget or any prior expectations. However, because of the overwhelming and unexpected success of the opening ceremony, suddenly the media was asking what the closing one would contain. The correct answer was ‘leftovers’, but of course we couldn’t say that. Fortunately, the weather stayed reasonable and the skydivers finally had the chance to show off their new parachutes. By popular demand, Matilda returned and drove round and round the track. The crowd didn’t know that she was winking like crazy because the operator was chemically enhanced, and neither did I until later, but it didn’t
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matter. Matilda was a star, and even fibreglass stars are treated differently from the rest of us. Days later the office was packed up and it was over. None of us knew where we were going next, but we’d all discovered there was something very special about working with thousands of performers to create an event like the opening ceremony. I decided that I’d like to do it again sometime.
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four
The lanky yank The lanky yank
M
y private life was in its usual intermittent state of disarray. My explanation was that I put so much effort into organising big productions I sometimes overlooked the smaller events at home, whereas the people who loved and lived with me said I was just a selfish bastard. That was one of the descriptions Therese used. One of the nicer ones, actually. Therese and I had started living together in 1969 and we separated in 1980, two years after our daughter Lara was born. After the Commonwealth Games I was back living in Sydney, which meant I could spend more time with Lara— introducing her to hotel room service, frequent flying, restaurants, and yum cha in Chinatown which became a regular Sunday outing. There was time to enjoy being a dad and discovering what fouryear-old girls thought about the world, but this idyllic and unnatural state of affairs didn’t last long. I was at home one day when the phone rang and a familiar voice came on the line. ‘Mate, just wanted to tell you that was the best bloody show I’ve ever seen! You did an amazing job! All the crims here were
42
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watching and we all cheered and sang “Waltzing Matilda” and you’re a bloody hero!’ It was Harry M. Miller, calling from Her Majesty’s Prison at Cessnock, north of Sydney. Harry had had an unfortunate interruption to his career as a super agent, manager and entrepreneur when he was convicted of misuse of trust funds and jailed for two years. However, imprisonment didn’t affect his business as much as one might have expected. He seemed to have the use of the warden’s phone after 6 p.m. for important calls, and gave me the number, suggesting that I visit him to discuss my future, because he would like to represent me as my manager. I suspected that being in prison might limit his effectiveness but Harry brushed that off, saying he’d be out in time for Christmas and the future looked rosy. He was too enthusiastic to refuse, so I went to Cessnock the following weekend and made my way through a gate in the barbed-wire fence and found him sitting at a picnic table, surrounded by paperwork and people. Harry was dealing with telexes and correspondence, dictating memos and scribbling notes, but broke off when he saw me. ‘Mate!’ he said, leaping to his feet and shaking hands. ‘I’ll only be a minute . . . want a coffee?’ When I nodded, he signalled to a nearby guard who came over and all but tugged his forelock. ‘Yes, Mr Miller?’ Harry briskly said, ‘McPherson, could you get another pot of coffee here for Mr Birch?’ and the guard trotted off and returned a couple of minutes later with a vacuum flask of fresh coffee. It was great to see Harry in action—dealing with an order for Russian tractors, arranging an auction of his pedigree bulls, checking on the availability of a current Broadway play—and finally turning his high-wattage charm on me. Fortunately, I already knew this was an act, as I’d seen Harry being charming before. He will cheerfully admit that he doesn’t have loyalty to anyone
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except himself, and even that’s for sale if he gets a better offer. But his advice for me that day was to get away from the ABC and work in commercial television for a stint. That would get my name before the people with money and then the world would be my oyster and he’d enjoy sharing it with me for twenty per cent of the action. So, what did I think? At the time I didn’t have any better offers, and Harry said he was sure that I could produce The Don Lane Show for the following season because Peter Faiman, who’d produced The Tonight Show for years, was leaving to work on a Royal Tour and GTV9 was looking for a replacement. And in fact, that’s exactly what happened. Peter Faiman and I had only met socially before then, but when we had a chance to talk we got along famously and found our lives had some uncanny similarities. Our birthdates are only a few days apart, we both attended university to study law but left to work in television, we both started as studio hands and quickly worked our way up to directing, but best of all we’re both keen amateur photographers, love digital gadgets and are firm fans of Macintosh computers (a later discovery). Peter briefed me about The Don Lane Show and made it sound easy. On the other hand, Peter is one of the best in the business. I met the show’s production unit and was surprised to find that it was small by ABC standards. The researchers were called producers; they were very young and seemed to get their information from PR people, friends, and from watching television. I’d worked as a producer and director on Four Corners and This Day Tonight, but never on a Tonight Show, so it took me a while to adjust to the differences between ABC current affairs and commercial entertainment television. I also met Bert Newton, genuinely a television legend, whose brilliant ad lib wit and phenomenal memory I had long admired. Finally, I met Don Lane. He had the easy charm of a Las Vegas lounge act and the unfocused energy of a Labrador pup. His enthusiastic greeting was overtaken by invitations to play
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tennis at his house while telling me his requirements for the songs he wanted to perform and instructing me that this year he wanted to do the sort of interviews that Faiman wouldn’t let him do, and did I have a rundown together yet for the first show? The answer to most of his questions was ‘no’, which didn’t please him. He scowled and changed from a Labrador to a Doberman. I was told I’d better watch my step. The production meetings were conducted with a bunker mentality because the team feared Don’s outbursts if he didn’t like an idea for the show. Mike McColl-Jones, a veteran writer who had worked with Graham Kennedy, Bert Newton and Peter Faiman for many years, was the head writer, responsible for Don’s monologues, which were often thrown back at Mike by our charming host. Mike’s way of coping with this was to keep his head down and go to the pub. I thought that the ideas from the segment producers were generally predictable and safe, but discovered this was because Don refused to consider anything else—unless it had already been done by Johnny Carson. The Don Lane Show was a Carson clone, and once the US Tonight Show was received live by satellite, Australian viewers lost interest in secondhand jokes and stopped watching. But in 1983, although his ratings were falling, Don was still the Top Banana. Bert, waiting in the wings and watching Don’s every move, was the Second Banana. I felt like the Banana Skin that was going to be blamed if Don slipped. The first week of The Don Lane Show in 1983 benefited from a national tragedy. The vast inferno that became known as the St Valentine’s Day fires struck Victoria the day before our first program of the year. The well-drilled technical team at GTV9 were able to swing into telethon mode overnight and the first show of the year was a big ratings success. Don was delighted. By the second or third week of the show, however, I was more depressed than I’ve ever been in my life. There was nothing to be gained,
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learned from or excited about with The Don Lane Show and every morning I dreaded the same old list of suggestions for interviewees who had made a film, written a book, knitted a sweater or performed a song. Of course, there were some highlights—John Cleese and Barry Humphries were great to see again—but nothing about the show gave me the same buzz as working on the Commonwealth Games. So it was with great excitement one morning that I listened to a call from Karen, telling me that the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee had asked if there was a copy of the Brisbane ceremony available on videotape. Of course there was, and it was sent off immediately to the attention of David L. Wolper and Peter V. Ueberroth of the LAOOC. A month or so later I hadn’t heard anything, so I found a phone number for David L. Wolper Productions in Los Angeles and called him at his office. He sounded a little distracted on the phone, but said, ‘Why don’t you come over and see us?’ I didn’t need a second invitation. My three-month contract with Don’s show was almost up, and neither of us cared if we never saw each other again. I called Harry M. (who had recently been released from prison) to let him know that I was bailing out and flew to Los Angeles. Three years earlier, the LAOOC had reached an understanding with Walt Disney that Bob Jani, director of entertainment for the Disney theme parks, would produce the opening and closing ceremonies for the 1984 Olympics. Then Walt Disney died and an accountant named Card Walker had taken over responsibility for Disney’s operations. Walker was also on the board of the LAOOC. During his three years as potential producer, Bob Jani had developed some quite elaborate plans for the ceremonies, including a motorcade of vintage cars driven by Disney costume characters that would carry the International Olympic Committee members and guests to the LA Coliseum, site of the opening and closing ceremonies. The motorcade plan involved building bleachers
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(grandstands) along Figueroa Boulevard with a red carpet arrival modelled on the Oscars—and Peter Ueberroth didn’t like any of it. But one of Peter’s great strengths is knowing when to trust his instincts and when to get a second opinion. The LAOOC had sent a couple of observers to the Brisbane Commonwealth Games and they’d reported back that the opening ceremony had been a hit. Some months later, as Ueberroth was tussling with Disney over the plans for the Olympic ceremonies, he must have remembered that report and had asked for a copy of the video. When I arrived in LA, Peter explained that he wanted someone with experience in production to advise him about the Disney plans and designs. He didn’t want his own feelings to get in the way of a great idea, but at the same time he didn’t want the Disney characters hijacking the Games via the ceremonies. In other words, he wanted me to take up a new position between a rock and a hard place—between him and the Disney organisation. He was also very astute in choosing someone who hadn’t worked for Disney in the past and who was unlikely to work for them in the future. At that time, virtually anyone in the US who had experience in major live production had come from Disney, or wanted to work there. As an Australian, I was outside that loop. Peter Ueberroth explained that Bob Jani had built models of the venues, developed many charts and plans showing the routes of performers, and outlined some segments of the ceremonies— but despite repeated requests he had been unable to provide any budget estimates. Ueberroth was frustrated by the lack of financial information and wanted me to analyse the production plans and work out what it would cost. Budgets weren’t Bob’s forte. Walt Disney had given him a free hand to develop his fabulous ideas over the previous decade and the cost was irrelevant because the parks were producing huge cash revenues. After Disney’s death, the revenues started to drop,
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and by 1983 the once-mighty Disney shares had declined significantly. Card Walker was trying to stem the flow, and Bob was still trying to do things the old way. Things came to a head in June 1983 at a breakfast meeting at the Bel Air Country Club, when Ueberroth was told that the ceremonies budget, as estimated by Bob Jani, was somewhere between US$12 million and US$18 million. This allowed a pretty wide margin of error, even by Hollywood standards, and Peter made an offer that Card Walker chose to refuse. The Disney representatives were told that the LAOOC budget for ceremonies was US$7 million, and Ueberroth offered to give that amount to Disney—as long as they would then take financial responsibility for any cost overruns. In return, Disney would be entitled to promote itself as ‘Official Suppliers of Ceremonies to the Los Angeles Olympic Games’, or words to that effect. I have to assume that the Disney corporation subsequently regretted Card’s decision to withdraw the company from the ceremonies, but without that decision I would never have had the opportunity to be director of production for the ceremonies of the 1984 Olympic Games. Immediately following the Bel Air meeting, Peter’s office called me and told me to get on a plane to LA. Ueberroth’s first question when I arrived was, ‘Can we produce this thing in-house?’ I was over the moon, over Don Lane and over-confident. ‘No worries,’ I said, and never regretted it. In fact, my only regret was that I would be leaving Lara. She was very upset to find that I was going to Disneyland and not taking her.
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five
California dreaming California dreaming
M
y arrival in Los Angeles to work on the 1984 Olympics had gone well. I’d been told I’d be staying in a hotel for a month at LAOOC’s expense and that there’d be a car waiting for me at the airport. The hotel turned out to be a Holiday Inn, not the Beverly Wilshire, and the car was a rental rather than a stretch limo, but that was the cost-conscious way the LA Olympic Organizing Committee did things. My office location was at 10425 Le Conte Avenue in Westwood. Now it’s rather grandly named the Peter V. Ueberroth Building, but when I ran up its entrance steps on July 4, 1983, it was an anonymous building on the edge of the UCLA campus and it was locked. This was a surprise to me until I remembered that it was Independence Day and everything was closed. So, I went back to the motel and met up with another Olympic neophyte, Mike Mitchell, who had arrived from Alaska to be in charge of ‘process and planning’. Over the following year, Mike became a powerhouse in the LAOOC and was dreaded by anyone who didn’t 49
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have their planning in process, but he was always baffled by the ceremonies unit and left us pretty much alone. That may also have been because the commissioner for ceremonies was the legendary David L. Wolper, mover and shaker involved with getting the Olympics to LA and a close personal friend of Peter Ueberroth. Wolper had produced the Jacques Cousteau underwater series for National Geographic, Roots and The Thorn Birds among many other TV series, and my children’s favourite movie when they were young—Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. David is also a sports nut who can be seen on videotape replays running onto the court and screaming at the referee of the infamous basketball game between Russia and the US at the 1972 Munich Olympics—for which he produced the official film, Visions of Eight—and he had been a key member of the group that successfully campaigned to bring the Olympics back to LA. The International Olympic Committee no longer had much of a choice. In 1972 the Munich Olympics were the scene of the Black September terrorist attack on the Israeli athletes in the Village; in 1976, the Montreal Olympic Games began in a not quite finished stadium that was CAN$1 billion over budget; and in 1980, US President Jimmy Carter had instituted a boycott of the Moscow Games due to Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan, resulting in many of the major Western nations (but not Australia) staying home. The result of these consecutive Olympic disasters was that no city on earth was prepared to take the risk of hosting the 1984 Games except Los Angeles— which for the first time was going to put on the Games entirely from private funding, without any government help or guarantees. David L. Wolper lived in a low-slung mansion adjoining the back nine holes of the Bel Air Golf Club. In those days, David had one of the biggest private collections of Picasso artworks in the world and it was all at his house. Breakfast meetings took place in the lounge or dining room, surrounded by extraordinary images that I recognised from art reference books. This was heady stuff
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for a boy from Oz who was the proud owner of a small collection of posters. When I started working with the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee in July 1983, I was employee number 112. Peter Ueberroth welcomed me personally and told me he’d be seeing me in a couple of weeks for an orientation meeting. I thought I was special, but soon found out that Peter personally welcomed all employees and also turned up at every Monday morning orientation to administer what became known as ‘The Peter Test’. Grown men quaked at the mention of the PT, although young men and women straight out of college took it in their stride. We actually had to know something about the Olympics, and Peter would spring questions at us. Legend was that even the vice presidents of LAOOC had to answer these questions; if you got the answers wrong, out you’d go. Every new employee would study Olympic history and turn up neatly groomed for the test, terrified that they’d be asked which athlete had won the bronze medal for discus in 1924 or something equally arcane. Fortunately, the questions were pretty straightforward and Peter himself was charming and affable, explaining that we were hosting the Games on behalf of the IOC and that we needed to know about this historical event. Where were the Games held in 1908? When did women first start competing in the Olympics? Who is President of the IOC? The answers to these and other questions were scribbled in pencil on yellow legal pads which Peter collected and assured us that he’d read. On my first day I was shown to a desk and phone and was asked if anything else was needed. I couldn’t think of a thing. The phone rang a few minutes later and in a deep southern voice, the caller introduced himself as Lee Waggoner, special agent with the Secret Service in Washington DC. I was very impressed by both the accent and his knowledge of my duties. He asked, ‘Mr Bench [they rarely got my name right], who’s paying for the bulletproof
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glass in the President’s box?’ There is only one correct answer to questions like that: ‘Why, y’all,’ I said. From that first morning, I started making phone calls to assemble the team that would become the production unit responsible for the opening and closing ceremonies. Each morning around 7 a.m. I’d arrive at David Wolper’s house where he’d spend a couple of hours briefing me and going over creative ideas for the ceremonies, as well as finding out how little I knew about American football, basketball or baseball. This was a great disappointment to David, who took me to a Raiders game at the Coliseum to try and explain the game. It didn’t work. I grew up on Aussie Rules and I still don’t understand why the US game is called ‘football’ when the ball rarely gets kicked and usually gets thrown away while lots of very big guys fight each other. David also took me to a Lakers game where I was very impressed by the band, but didn’t pay much attention to the players on the court. After that, he gave up. As the ceremonies production unit started growing, the rest of the LAOOC staff relocated to a huge building in Marina Del Rey, but David persuaded Human Resources that it made more sense for Ceremonies to remain where we were. This was great for him because he lived up the road, but I’d moved into an apartment in the Marina. One morning I arrived to find we had a new receptionist named Bobbi, a Californian beauty except for a severe squint in one eye. Over the next few weeks she confided in me that the medical benefits with LAOOC were the reason she was with us, and as soon as the Games were over she was having her strabismus fixed, after which she would take Hollywood by storm. And then one morning she wasn’t there and a young guy was manning the desk. He didn’t know what had happened to Bobbi, but he was her replacement. David’s secretary explained what had happened. Mr Wolper, in addition to the Olympic ceremonies, was also executive producer on two telemovies and three TV series being
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made over at Warners, where his production company was based. One series, called His Mistress, was being made for NBC, and one day while David was away from our office the production manager called. Finding he wasn’t there, the caller said: ‘Ask Mr Wolper to call His Mistress at the studio, please.’ Bobbi took the message and when David returned with a couple of staff, she leaned over the front desk and said, ‘Oh, Mr Wolper, your mistress phoned and wants you to call her back.’ I keep hoping I’ll see Bobbi in a movie one day, but it hasn’t happened yet. While working in Australia, I had of course heard about Hollywood lunches and days at the Polo Lounge, power tables on restaurant row in Beverly Hills, stars at the Ivy—and I could hardly wait. Unfortunately, the LAOOC wasn’t Hollywood. Peter Ueberroth had issued strict instructions that no alcohol was to be consumed at lunch time, so we had power lunches around sandwiches on the desk. Our sponsors provided endless brewed coffee and free Coke machines, so everyone was wired. Alcohol might actually have been useful to bring some people down. On occasions when visiting Aussies came to town, I’d sometimes risk a glass of wine in some remote restaurant, but by and large my year with LAOOC was a very sober experience. Peter also had strict instructions regarding dress code, and all male members of the LAOOC were required to wear a business shirt and tie with trousers—no jeans. This was fine for the staff over at headquarters, but most people at Ceremonies only owned jeans and a T-shirt and very few of the guys knew how to knot a tie. One time, Peter visited unexpectedly and was aghast at some of the outfits in Ceremonies, but we were able to persuade him that the badly dressed people were visitors who worked for outside contractors. From then on, we had a stack of Visitor labels ready, and if Peter arrived in the building, people would run around slapping stickers on anyone without a tie or business shirt. People without shoes were smuggled out the back until Peter had left.
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In August 1983 the Kimball Piano Company called from Chicago. Bob Fitzpatrick, who was director of the Olympic Arts Festival, had suggested they contact me to see if we needed pianos in the opening ceremony. Immediately an image of pianos filling the arena came into my head and I said, ‘If I asked you for 100 grand pianos, what would you say?’ The reply came immediately: ‘What colour do you want?’ I decided I liked working in America. Kimball offered to deliver 100 grand pianos to any location we specified, to provide piano tuners, and to collect the pianos when we were done. All of this at no cost. The pianos, of course, went on to become one of the most memorable images of the 1984 Olympics Opening Ceremony, although the number ended up costing somewhat more than ‘nothing’. When I told David about the offer he was very enthusiastic, but neither of us could really solve the problem of how to introduce 100 grand pianos into the show and then make them go away. We thought of putting them on wheels and pushing them, or putting keyboards on handlebars and then cycling around with them, but it took our genius art director, René Lagler, to solve the problem. He designed giant staircase units that held two pianos on each of three levels, and each stair unit sat on the prongs of a very large forklift truck. At the eastern end of the Coliseum there are fifteen arches—a tall centre one and seven lower arches on either side— known as the Peristyle. René’s solution was to have a forklift drive forward through each archway, supporting its load of pianos, pianists and dancers, wait there while the number was performed, then withdraw the way it came. And in the end, that was exactly how it happened. Apart from a slight mishap at the dress rehearsal when one forklift driver, temporarily distracted by a dancer’s flimsy tulle garment, managed to collide with the Peristyle and slide six grand pianos with pianists to the brink of disaster, the whole segment went remarkably smoothly. The Kimball Company was as good
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as its word: the pianos arrived and departed on schedule, and on the day before the opening ceremony a large group of piano tuners arrived to ensure perfect pitch. Incidentally, if you’re ever asked how many pianos appeared in the Los Angeles Olympics Opening Ceremony, the correct answer is eighty-five—eighty-four Kimballs and one Bosendorfer that was part of John Williams’s orchestra onstage. I’d first met John Williams on the Fox movie lot. David Wolper and I had gone to talk to him about composing the theme for the LA Olympics and found the great man at his piano scoring Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. He was charming and patient with us as we tried to explain what was needed and he didn’t let our musical ideas influence him in the slightest. Finally, as David was humming loudly and beating time with his fist on the table, John interrupted gently and told us he thought he’d be able to handle it. Hands were shaken and John told us not to call him, that he’d call us. Two months later he did. The piece was ready, but John only had a three-hour window of availability to record it—on Easter Friday. Could I talk to his orchestra contractor and organise the session? No worries. I went over to David’s office to tell him the good news. I added that, of course, the musicians would be on triple time because of the holiday and he gave me a piece of advice which I remember when needed. ‘If the problem is money, it’s not a problem,’ he said. David had been a multi-millionaire for years, but that wasn’t what he meant. He explained that the problem in Hollywood was always the same—coming up with the great idea. The idea was the problem, never the money. If you had a great idea, you’d always be able to get the money. So we spent some money, booked 104 musicians and a studio, and a few weeks later I was in the control room of a Paramount sound stage to hear The Los Angeles Olympic Fanfare and Theme for the very first time. It was genuinely a moment I will never forget. Not only because Stephen Spielberg was standing beside
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me as John conducted the orchestra through the score, but because I knew that the Theme was truly a masterpiece. Since 1984, John’s composition has become so closely identified with the Olympics that it is played everywhere and every time any athletes gather. To hear that music through studio monitors, every nuance being captured on tape as the orchestra played it for the first time, was the experience of a lifetime. Only three takes were needed, and then John sat with the engineer as he physically cut the twentyfour-track master tape and rejoined it to combine different passages from the three recordings. Then it was done. Two-and-a-half hours from start to finish. The musical director for Ceremonies was Jack Elliot, a wonderful, gruff and bearded bandleader from the old school who told me that musicians were dinosaurs, doomed to extinction by synthesizers and digital sampling. For the Olympics he brought together the best dinosaurs in Los Angeles—the recording industry’s studio musicians. I’ve been asked many times if the music in the Olympic ceremonies is pre-recorded, and the answer is ‘yes’— although star vocalists sometimes want to sing live and that can be done. The reason for pre-recording is simply to avoid unnecessary risk. Both the stadium spectators and the global television audience hear the soundtracks through speakers, and it’s impossible to tell if the music is live or pre-recorded. The ceremonies take place outdoors where orchestral instruments can go out of tune in hot, humid conditions (and also in cold and damp), especially over the four-hour timespan of the event. Symphony orchestras of around 100 musicians need a lot of microphones, leads, wires, headsets and monitors—any one of which can break down or be tripped over during the ceremony. Musicians and vocalists may not be at their best on the night because of nerves or sore throats, so the prerecording gives them a great deal of security. Finally, we can use the actual music for rehearsal instead of guide tracks, so that all
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the performers get accustomed to the real sound and the audio engineers get a chance to fine-tune the stadium acoustics. As musical director for the opening and closing ceremonies, Jack Elliot was responsible for assembling the scores and orchestral arrangements for more than four hours of music, a task that would take at least a month in Australia due to the relatively small number of arrangers, orchestrators and copyists available. One Friday night as Jack was leaving the office, I said I was looking forward to the recording sessions due to begin on Monday, and added that I assumed all the scores and arrangements had been finished. Jack laughed and said that none of them had been started. Once I realised he wasn’t kidding, my heart sank. Then Jack rescued me, saying that he had thirty arrangers lined up and fifty copyists who would make sure that everything would be ready for Monday and that they’d keep going all week until the work was done. I know that work expands to fill the time available, but personally I like to have a little more leeway. On the other hand, that’s how they work in Hollywood, where many production people need the adrenaline rush of being ready just in time. Jack could see I wasn’t too impressed, so he explained that he could only do this in LA, Chicago or New York. There was nowhere else in the States with enough talent available to do so much work so quickly to the highest standards. And of course it was all ready on time, the recording sessions went perfectly, and within another week my breathing was back to normal. The key emotional moment in the opening ceremony is the arrival of the Olympic Torch into the stadium, and the music has to underscore the excitement and tension of that moment for the audience. The great Greek composer, Vangelis, wrote a superb title track for the movie Chariots of Fire that told the story of the Olympic competition for the men’s 100 metres sprint between Harold Abrahams and Eric Liddell. From early in pre-production
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I thought that Vangelis would be the perfect composer for the Torch theme and discussed it with David Wolper one day in his office. David was horrified that I was thinking of a non-American composer and suggested instead that Philip Glass should be approached. As things turned out, Philip composed a brilliant theme for the torch arrival and also became a friend, but a couple of months later I was in my office playing the soundtrack to Chariots of Fire when David walked past. He stuck his head in the door and said, ‘Great music! Who wrote that?’ When I told him it was the Greek guy I’d told him about, he just looked at me and grinned. As the date for the opening ceremony got closer, the decisionmaking process got faster. All our agreements were very simple contracts, usually no more than a couple of pages. Peter Ueberroth’s instructions were very clear—choose the right people to do the job in the first place, because there’s no point trying to sue them after the Games are over. ‘There’ll be no more LAOOC, just the memory of your failure.’ This was quite an incentive to get it right. Peter was very supportive of our decisions, and I needed that support a few months before the Games. The Olympic year 1984 was also an election year—in November, Ronald Reagan would be standing for his second term as President. Reagan’s all-powerful press secretary was Michael Deaver and he had a problem with me. Ever since I’d told the Secret Service that they had to pay for the bulletproof glass, we’d had an ongoing dispute about exactly where the President was to be located for the official opening announcement. Traditionally, the head of state of the host nation has the honour of declaring open the Olympic Games. In 1980, the Russian President, Leonid Brezhnev, had done so, and Deaver was determined that his boss would be equally prominent for this key moment in Los Angeles. He wanted President Reagan to appear on the track to make the declaration, but the Secret Service insisted that the President would have to be entirely surrounded by bulletproof glass. This meant
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that Olympic President, Juan Antonio Samaranch, and the LAOOC President, Peter Ueberroth, would both be standing on an open podium to make their speeches, but when the President of the United States rose to declare the Games open, he would be in a glasshouse in case people threw stones. We wanted the President to remain high up in the stadium in his VIP viewing position, from where he could be covered by a TV camera and it didn’t matter to us whether there was bulletproof glass there or not. However, Deaver wouldn’t agree. There was no way I could persuade him that not only was it logistically impossible to have a glasshouse on the track, but it would also be embarrassing to show that the leader of the world’s most powerful nation had to be protected from his home crowd. Deaver called Peter Ueberroth’s office to complain that I was un-American, and Peter called me to find out what the fuss was about. I found out later that Ueberroth suggested to Deaver that if it was felt that the President wouldn’t be safe at the LA Olympics, perhaps the Vice President of the United States would be available to open the Games instead? That put an end to the trackside glasshouse, and the Secret Service duly installed bulletproof glass at their own expense in front of the VIP viewing area. The President also changed the text of the formal opening speech in a way that showed what a fine ear for dialogue his acting career had given him. The wording in the Olympic Charter is: ‘Celebrating the Games of [Los Angeles] I declare open the [XXIIIrd] Olympiad of the modern era.’ The President knew what the crowd wanted and changed the words around so that the sentence read: ‘Celebrating the Games of the XXIIIrd Olympiad of the modern era, I declare open the Games of Los Angeles!’ Of course, the crowd went crazy and Reagan was re-elected in a landslide, so we all got what we wanted. Many years later in Sydney, I tried to have the Australian governor-general change the order of the words again, so that the official opening speech would end
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with the word ‘Sydney’ instead of ‘era’. But the governor-general’s protocol minders told him that I was wrong, the US President had not said the words that way, and that the sentence must be pronounced in the formally prescribed manner. It turned out that the protocol minders had no idea which Olympic Games had been opened by President Reagan and they’d looked instead at a video of Atlanta which President Clinton had opened in 1996 using the original word order. It is of such small details that an Olympic ceremony is made. The Secret Service had other impacts on the ceremony. The President’s viewing position was in the press box at the top of the southern stands. On the roof and to one side of the press box was the videoboard control room, where a crew of six people worked during the ceremony. Only a couple of days before the opening, the Secret Service told me that the control room crew would have to be locked in during the ceremony because they were working above the President’s position. I laughed, but they didn’t. I explained that the people were there to control cameras and information necessary for the same production that the President would be watching. If they were unable to leave the control room for any reason, the production would be affected. And by the way, the toilets are at the other end of the roof and I think it’s against the Bill of Rights to lock people up without access to a toilet. This argument was the one that seemed to work best. It was agreed that an escort would be provided so that none of our highly accredited and thoroughly vetted staff would do anything subversive on their way to the toilet. Two days later, on the morning of the opening ceremony, I arrived early and looked up at the press box, unable to believe my eyes. Overnight, the Secret Service had installed a fire-rated, steelplate staircase leading down from the videoboard control room to the rear of the audience seats. The staircase had been built as an emergency exit in case the President needed to be evacuated and the other three exits were unavailable. It turned out
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they’d also installed a toilet next to the control room. Who knows what it must have cost to build this structure overnight at such short notice, but I guess I wasn’t in the need-to-know category. I was also too busy trying to sort out another Secret Service issue. Without any discussion or advice, the Secret Service had installed overnight a number of chainlink fences near the main press box entrance. These acted as security barriers, I guess, in case the few accredited people allowed in this area wanted to mob the President as he was whisked in from his bulletproof limo. But one of the overnight fences had been installed directly across the main exit ramp from the Sports Arena that adjoins the LA Coliseum. And we were planning to assemble the world’s athletes in the Sports Arena, from where they were to march up that same exit ramp towards the Coliseum and onto the field for the opening ceremony! A conference was hastily arranged and a gate was installed into the fence so the athletes could pass through. David Wolper was a veteran of this stuff and had warned all the stage managers to carry bolt cutters in case gates were locked and there was no one around with a key. Sure enough, about thirty minutes after the ceremony had started, we received a plaintive call in the control room from the production manager. Over the walkie-talkie we heard him say, ‘Mr Wolper! Mr Wolper! The gate from the Sports Arena is locked!’ David answered quite calmly, ‘Barnett, have you got your bolt cutters?’ ‘Yes, Mr Wolper! But there’s a man here with a gun and he says he’ll shoot me if I touch the lock!’ Personally, I would have told Barnett to go ahead and make the man’s day, but our security guys managed to get the lock removed so the athletes could leave the Sports Arena, just in time to make their entrance. Later in the ceremony, the torchbearer wasn’t so lucky. The torch was to be carried by Gina Hemphill, granddaughter of Jesse Owens, the black American medallist famously snubbed
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by Hitler at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. The Olympic Flame itself had arrived twenty-four hours earlier and had spent the night at the University of Southern California Athletes’ Village. In case the relay to the Coliseum was delayed, we had a genuine second flame waiting in a miner’s lamp so that Gina could light the torch just before she ran into the arena. There is only one external connection to the field of play at the Coliseum—the tunnel down which the athletes marched to appear on the track. It’s about 100 metres long and wide enough for a semi-trailer. The stage manager, who had the torch for Gina, was told to meet her at the entrance to the tunnel and Gina was told he’d be waiting there. A minute or so before her cue to enter the stadium, both reported that they were in position. The ‘GO’ cue was given and Philip Glass’s composition, The Olympian, started playing. Gina should have appeared at the tunnel entrance, but there was no sign of her. Instead there was confused radio traffic saying, ‘Where’s Gina?’ and Gina’s voice saying, ‘Where’s the torch?’ Stage managers came on air saying, ‘We’re at the tunnel entrance.’ It all became clear. Gina was waiting at one end of the tunnel, the torch was waiting at the other. An unofficial Olympic record for the 100 metres dash by a stage manager was set that afternoon. If you watch a video of LA ’84, you’ll notice that there’s rather a long pause before Gina, looking a little stressed, bursts out of the tunnel and into the sunshine. We weren’t the only ones glad to see her. The waiting athletes broke ranks to join her on the track, but the LA police, with years of experience dealing with rioters, pushed them none too gently back to the field. Gina passed the torch to Rafer Johnson, the great American decathlete, who was to make the final assault on the steep staircase leading to the cauldron. By now we were a little concerned about the music. With the initial delay, followed by Gina’s impeded progress around the track, we figured the music would end about a minute before Rafer reached the final position.
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And it did. Fortunately, Philip’s music ended inconclusively without any crescendo, so our audio operator hit rewind, counted to six, hit stop and then play, trusting to experience and blind luck. He was rewarded. The music ended exactly as scripted when the Olympic Flame burst forth from the LA Coliseum Cauldron. The ceremony was hailed as a great success, and of course it was, although we very nearly sabotaged ourselves. The opening number involved the release of hundreds of giant mylar heliumfilled balloons with dangling streamers saying ‘Welcome’ in various languages. Mylar is like very tough aluminium foil and much less permeable than rubber, so it’s always used for helium balloons. A drawback is that it’s a very good conductor of electricity. Our giant (1.5-metre-diameter) balloons were gold and silver, so they reflected the dazzling late-afternoon sun as they rose into the sky. Around them, fireworks exploded into coloured smoke, airships with ‘Welcome’ painted on them cruised past, skywriting planes wrote ‘Welcome’ in the sky, and the original composition Welcome, written by Marvin Hamlisch, came to a big finish. In the seating sections, beautiful girls in Southern Belle costumes were passing out flowers with ribbons attached that read ‘Welcome’. It all looked great. As David said, ‘If that doesn’t make ’em feel fokking welcome, nothing will.’ We went on with the show and about five minutes later we saw an interruption to the television broadcast. Apparently there had been a power failure, but then the emergency generator cut in and all was well. We discovered later that one of our giant mylar balloons had descended earlier than expected and managed to wrap itself around a bunch of high-tension cables on a transmission tower. Of all the cables to choose, the balloon shorted out the main power supply to the International Broadcast Center—the location of every global broadcaster’s control centre. If it hadn’t been for the emergency generators, we would have prevented the world from seeing the opening ceremony. We also cut power to about 50,000 homes for
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the rest of the evening, so the moral is not to use mylar balloons near power lines. In fact, these days mylar balloon releases are frowned upon ecologically, so there’ll probably never be another chance to make that mistake again. Another endangered ceremonies participant is the Rocket Man. Not for ecological reasons, but because he’s running out of fuel. Back in the 1950s, the US Defense Department paid Jet Propulsion Laboratories a lot of money to develop a means to lift soldiers into the clear blue sky—to get them over walls, fences, mine fields, rivers, etc. If the Pentagon planners had paid attention during their high school physics classes they would have learned not only that what goes up has to come down, but also that there is a trade-off between energy and weight. In other words, they could have saved themselves millions of dollars, but then I would never have met Kinnie Gibson. Kinnie was the Rocket Man, a shrewd bargain hunter who’d managed to pick up the only three rocket belts that were left when JPL and the Pentagon called it quits after finding that the laws of physics still apply, even in the United States. Just before the Pentagon pulled the plug on the project, the rocket belt they’d developed was capable of lifting an unarmed soldier into the air for a total of seventeen seconds. (The soldier had to be unarmed, for reasons of weight and also because he needed both hands to operate the belt controls.) As Kinnie explained the device to me, I realised that the Pentagon should open an entertainment division. This belt was absolutely useless for war, but what an idea for a show! The Rocket Man was a great surprise at the LA Olympics Opening Ceremony, but perhaps not to people from Victoria, because he had performed at the Royal Melbourne Show a few years earlier. The rocket belt used the same fuel as the giant Atlas rockets that American astronauts flew to the moon. Unfortunately for Kinnie, that fuel was no longer being made and his supply was running out. It’s not the sort of mix that you can get at a local
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petrol station, so I’m afraid that the Rocket Man may have made his last dash by now. Working on the Olympics ceremonies in Los Angeles had been very different from producing the Brisbane event two years earlier. It wasn’t just the difference in budgets and the scale of production; there was also the sheer quality and availability of production resources. It was like the difference between a high school essay and a doctoral thesis. I had been taken on a tour of the President’s Oval Office in the White House; I had met Stephen Spielberg and John Williams; I could phone Marvin Hamlisch, José Feliciano, Etta James; and I knew where to go when a special effect was needed in a hurry. This was lucky, because special effects were needed when David Wolper said that he wanted an alien invasion to introduce the closing ceremony.
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six
Pie in the sky Pie in the sky
F
or the LA Olympics Closing Ceremony, the plan was to have a flying saucer fly over the stadium, bringing a message of praise to all the athletes from the people of the universe. We had even arranged with NASA for a live broadcast from the shuttle astronauts, who would have reported from outer space that a flying saucer had just gone past them, heading for Los Angeles. As it happened, bad weather in Florida delayed the NASA launch date so we never had a chance to find out how gullible the world’s TV viewers were. But my mum’s pretty gullible. She was sitting in the audience that night and she thought she saw a real flying saucer. It was an easy mistake. Only ten days earlier I’d been standing outside a helicopter hangar in Marina Del Rey, waiting for the first test flight of our spacecraft. The saucer was fifteen metres in diameter and clad in silver fabric. It wasn’t quite up to Star Wars standards, but with your eyes half-closed it looked like it could belong to the Jetsons. The location belonged to Hughes Aerospace, and while we were chatting, one of the staff motioned to us all to move inside the
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hangar, leaving the saucer outside. He told us that a Russian spy satellite was due overhead in a couple of minutes, and Hughes wanted to give them something to think about. Now you know how your taxes are being spent. A few minutes later we got the all-clear and our test flight got underway. The flying saucer had been designed by Bob Gurr, who was one of Disney’s Imagineering geniuses. Twenty years earlier, Bob had designed and built the first animatronic at Disneyland—the figure of Abraham Lincoln in the Hall of the Presidents. One of his later works was King Kong in the Universal theme park ride. For the Olympics, Bob had come up with an elegant design for our flying saucer. Imagine a bicycle wheel fifteen metres in diameter lying horizontally, with a cylindrical power generator in place of an axle. The ‘spokes’ are stainless steel cables that run from the rim to the generator and are covered by the fabric. Bob’s workshop had built the saucer in less than two weeks, and we were about to suspend it beneath a helicopter and watch it fly. Clay Wright, the pilot, slowly brought the helicopter down over the saucer so the crew could connect the ‘umbilical cord’ that hung from beneath the helicopter. In addition to a steel lifting cable, there was also a computer data cable to control the lights around the rim of the saucer and a control cable for the big Altadyne alternator that formed the ‘axle’. This heavy-duty power supply was necessary because David had wanted the biggest light anyone had ever seen in the sky, so Bob obtained a 7000-watt Xenon searchlight and strapped it to an alternator that was normally used in a Boeing 747 to supply all the onboard power. The whole load had to weigh less than 2500 kilograms and we were running pretty close. Once the lifting cable was secure, Clay slowly raised the chopper fifty metres above the saucer until the cable became taut. Bob gave him a thumbs-up and the saucer was lifted slowly into the air above us. It was a strange moment. Even though I knew exactly what it was, it still looked like the Martians were coming. I wondered
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what the Russians would think when they processed their satellite images. Clay checked that all was clear for forward flight, then gingerly moved horizontally with the saucer. The fabric cover caught the headwind and started to tilt downward. Suddenly there was a loud CRACK and the saucer broke in half, dangling in the air like a silver taco shell. Oops. Back to the drawing board. Clay managed to lower the stricken spacecraft back to earth and Bob checked the structural damage. Obviously he was going to have to come up with another solution. No worries, there were still eight days to go. In fact, Bob came up with a simple solution. Why have a cover at all? The saucer was only going to fly at night, so if it was outlined in lights it would still look like a UFO. The computer lighting console was reprogrammed and extra lights were added. The saucer was moved into a secure compound within the Coliseum precincts and next to the Sports Arena. A chainlink fence covered in hessian was erected around the saucer and the crew got to work. With five nights left until closing, we were ready for the first flight test at the stadium. At two o’clock on a misty morning, Clay brought his chopper low between the palm trees and landed in the compound next to the saucer. The cables were attached, and Sherry Peck, the petite and tough Texan production manager for the saucer, strapped herself onto the edge of the flight deck. It was her job to run the lighting console from the chopper and to keep an eye on the saucer— thirty metres below. Clay couldn’t see it from the cockpit and there were a lot of palm trees and lamp posts around. That first night was nearly a disaster. Fog built up and, although the saucer looked fantastic looming through the mist, Clay had no idea where he was and nearly swung the saucer into the Cauldron. Meanwhile, the computer program seemed to be shutting down the generator. Sherry suspected that there was too much electrical load when a particular sequence of moving lights came on and the generator was programmed to shut
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down if its rating was exceeded. The next day was spent working on the computer and the lighting controller, so that by midnight all seemed to be working perfectly. This time the night was clear and Clay took the saucer out along Figueroa Street where vendors had set up tents and marquees for sales of Olympic merchandise. The helicopter rotors created enough downwash to tip over most of the tents, but the vendors all said that the sight of the UFO was worth it. The problem was that the generator kept cutting out. The lights would come on, start their programmed flashing, then the power would shut down. Four days left. Meanwhile, the main crew had been rehearsing the installation of the set for the closing ceremony. David Wolper had noticed in the paper one day that a local high school was being shut down due to a lack of pupils. He quickly got on the phone and arranged to rent the school for closing ceremony rehearsals. The playing fields were marked up to simulate the Coliseum and then used for the stage and lighting towers, and some of the schoolrooms were used for production offices and technical storage. René Lagler had designed an enormous stage with internal lighting, fountains, fireworks and a couple of other surprises. Surrounding it were four towers, supporting tons of lighting equipment. Everything was perfect except that there were moles or gophers under the fields and René’s set kept tilting as a new burrow appeared under the stage. Olympic competition in the Coliseum was scheduled to finish by 10 o’clock on Saturday night. The closing ceremony was due to begin at 7 o’clock the following night. The first challenge was to have all the equipment on the lighting towers installed, connected to power, positioned and focused before dawn—because once the sun was up it would be impossible to focus the lights. The second challenge was to have the stage completed by 2 p.m. in time for rehearsals on Sunday. The entire stage, lighting towers, generators, fountains, lights, plus the ground cloth and plywood decking filled
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forty-six semi-trailers. On three separate occasions, loading and unloading these trucks, then erecting the stage and lighting towers, was rehearsed at the high school. The first time took almost a day and a night. By the third rehearsal, the crew had the move down to fifteen hours—just enough time if everything went perfectly at the Coliseum. That Saturday evening we were poised to leap into action the moment that the Coliseum was clear of spectators. A police escort had brought our semi-trailer convoy to the stadium and we could hear the truck engines idling as we waited in our offices. At 11 p.m. the first trucks drove down the tunnel to the field and the crew started unloading more than a hectare of plywood that was laid down first to protect the turf of the Coliseum. With that done, the forklifts could start operating and their first job was to unload the lighting towers. All seemed to be going pretty smoothly, so I went over to the flying saucer compound. In contrast, in the compound, nothing was going well. We’d had two more unsuccessful nights, attempting to maintain the lighting effects on the saucer during rehearsals, but each night the power supply had shut down mid-sequence. Despite increasingly frantic work by the software engineers who had developed the lighting program, we had no idea if the saucer could perform during the show or whether it would simply shut down as it had for the past five nights. In fact, the lighting on the saucer had never worked for more than a few minutes at a time. Hours after midnight on Saturday, while the crew inside the stadium were installing the lighting towers and stage for the closing ceremony, Clay Wright said he thought the alternator was shutting down because of a problem with fuel flow, not the lighting program. Sherry said she’d call Altadyne, who manufactured the alternator. I told the crew to get some rest and wandered back to the stadium. By this time I was a little dazed. I’d been up all Friday night to watch the unsuccessful flying saucer rehearsals, then had a couple
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of hours sleep before going out to the high school to watch the loading process on Saturday morning. Then I’d returned to the stadium production office to make sure that everything was ready for the load-in that night. We had hired 500 union stagehands, carpenters and riggers to handle the installation with our crew of 300 backstage volunteers. The professional crew were exceptional and worked a straight twenty-four-hour shift, as did most of our volunteers. As dawn broke on Sunday, lighting director Bill Klages had just focused the very last light fixture. So far so good. I had breakfast on the field from a mobile kitchen that supplied watery eggs and bacon to 1000 people. Then I went back to the saucer compound. Earlier, Sherry had locked the gates and left a female volunteer security guard standing outside to make sure no one tried to break in. Dressed in a khaki uniform supplied by the LAOOC, the volunteer security guards were unarmed and had instructions to call for backup on their radios if they noted anything suspicious. When I went over at 7 a.m. there was no sign of anyone in front of the compound. I rattled the gate and discovered it was still locked, but now the padlock was on the inside of the gate. Strange. I rattled the gate again and a scared female voice said, ‘Who’s that?’ I asked her the same question. ‘I’m the security guard,’ she replied. Peering through a hole in the hessian I could see a buxom young woman in her underwear. ‘You don’t look like a security guard to me’, I said. ‘Where’s your uniform?’ ‘Sold,’ she said. Sure enough, she’d been standing outside the compound gate, as instructed, when a man approached and offered $1000 for her uniform. She didn’t hesitate. When I explained that the man might have been a terrorist looking for a way to crash the ceremony, she looked downcast.
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‘Does this mean I’ve got to give the money back?’ That was left to her supervisor, who arrived with a golf cart and a blanket. As a result of this, a security alert was issued for special attention to be paid to all volunteer security guards on duty that day at the Coliseum, but we never heard of an incident. A frenzy of collecting had hit LA, and any souvenirs of the Games were attracting crazy offers. Perhaps this had been just one more example. I lay down on the grass inside the compound as I waited for Sherry and the crew to arrive. Sherry had called Altadyne first thing on Sunday morning and located not only the senior engineer, but also the man who’d designed the jet turbine unit. They knew we were using the alternator, and immediately they heard there was a problem they flew up from San Diego in their own helicopter. It was one of those times that you dream about: the technician making the service call on a piece of faulty equipment was the actual man who’d designed it! He and the senior engineer got straight to work with their tool kits, field-stripping a jet turbine right there on the grass, surrounded by sleeping crew next to a flying saucer. The rehearsal for the closing ceremony was scheduled for 2 p.m. and we were ready in the stadium but the television director wasn’t in the video truck. At 2.15 p.m. we decided to wait no longer and the rehearsal got underway, with the TV coverage being supervised by the director’s assistant. She directed the rehearsal very capably. Later we were talking together in the compound when the director walked by. It turned out that during the camera rehearsal, he was hanging around the stars’ trailers having his photo taken with Lionel Ritchie and schmoozing while the rest of us were working. He was a TV sports director who had never worked in entertainment, and there are big differences between the two fields.
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Months earlier, David Wolper and I had gone to New York to meet with ABC TV’s legendary Head of Sport—Roone Arledge—to discuss this very thing, and it turned out to be the only time I ever saw David lose a negotiation. Wolper explained that the ceremony was a major entertainment spectacle, involving music and choreography, and wouldn’t it be terrific to get Bob Fosse or someone like that to direct the telecast? Arledge simply said, ‘David, this is an ABC Sports presentation. We paid the money, we get to choose the director.’ And that was that. The ceremonies were directed by a nice enough guy, who wore the hippest clothes on the set, walked the walk and talked the talk, but who couldn’t read music, count bars for choreography, or even write a camera script because he’d never needed those skills to cover a boxing match or a football game. For the closing ceremony he called the cameras ‘on the fly’— just the way he would cover a sporting event. Without having seen the rehearsal, he had no idea what was coming next. The television coverage of Olympic ceremonies is often a very sore point with those of us who create the live event and know what it could have looked like. Traditionally, the final event of the Olympics is the Men’s Marathon, which finishes in the stadium. It’s followed by medal presentation ceremonies and then it’s time for the closing ceremony. In Los Angeles, I took a deep breath and crossed my fingers. The Altadyne engineers had found a problem and had repaired it, but there was no chance of a test flight. The stadium lights were doused and our theatrical lighting took over. Spectators were having a great time, but nothing had prepared them for the entrance of the saucer. Clay had painted his helicopter black, so it was virtually invisible in the night sky. The blacked-out chopper was joined by two LAPD helicopters whose engines totally covered the noise of Clay’s rotors, so that when the flying saucer appeared above the
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Coliseum’s Peristyle, flashing its lights and shining down a brilliant beam worthy of the Star Ship Enterprise, the surprise was total. The police choppers circled the saucer, using their airborne PA systems to ask the alien craft to identify itself. The audience had been given flashlights with coloured filters and the entire Coliseum lit up like a starfield to welcome the aliens. It was a breathtaking moment, although personally I was holding my breath that the generator wouldn’t stop, because I’d told David the problem had been fixed. The gods that watch over ceremonies were on our side that night and everything worked perfectly. By midnight it was all over. For a change, I knew where I was going next. But first, I was going to Disneyland with my daughter. Lara, aged six, had flown over from Sydney on her own and we spent a wonderful month visiting every theme park in Southern California. Due to the contacts I’d made, Lara was in the right seat when King Kong loomed up to blast banana-flavoured breath onto the tram at Universal. And at Seaworld in San Diego, she’d been the kid who’d patted the killer whale’s nose at the end of the Shamu show. We flew to San Luis Obispo to visit the Hearst Castle, and had a special screening of a simulator ride with prototype motion-base seats at Showscan. I may not be a very reliable father, but by golly I can show my kids a good time!
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seven
Spectak does Expo Spectak does Expo
B
etween the LA Olympics Opening and Closing Ceremonies, Rupert Murdoch had thrown a party for LAOOC officials and other guests of the Channel Ten network—which Rupert owned at that time and which had the Olympic broadcast rights for Australia. I’d been invited to the party and found myself in the midst of many Australian faces that I recognised, and just as many that I didn’t. During the party, a charming grey-haired man came over and introduced himself as Jim. He wondered if I ever visited New York, and I told him that in fact I would be there in a few weeks, to wrap up some Olympic business. He asked if I would mind dropping in to the New York Post offices while I was there, because Rupert Murdoch would like to ‘have a chat’. Of course, I said that I’d be delighted, and Jim gave me a business card that showed him to be Sir James Cruthers, Vice-Chairman of News Corporation. It seemed to be the week for meeting Australians. A couple of days earlier I’d had lunch with Bob Minnikin, who’d been 75
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appointed as general manager of the World Expo being planned for Brisbane. I wasn’t sure what an Expo was, but I remembered Bob from the Brisbane Commonwealth Games where he’d been the deputy general manager and a good bloke. So, when he asked if I’d be interested in putting together six months of entertainment for the Expo in 1988, I told him that it would be my pleasure. We agreed that I would visit him in Queensland when my Olympic duties had finished, and work out a contract. In September 1984, I went to Manhattan and spent a couple of hours with Rupert Murdoch in his office at the New York Post. The mogul with the fearsome reputation turned out, of course, to be disarmingly charming, with piercing eyes and a brilliant mind that was open to new ideas. He asked if I’d be interested in a production role at the Ten network in Australia, and although slightly surprised when I shook my head, he wanted to know what would interest me. I explained that I saw live event production as a new field of opportunity. Although America had pioneered halftime shows, big corporate events, lavish Broadway productions and theme parks, no one had tried to bring all those skills and talents together to produce mega-events. It was the beginning of a new era. Less than ten years later there would be university courses for special event planners, but in 1984 it was still virgin territory. I explained that in Australia alone over the next five years there would be the Bicentennial celebrations, the World Expo, the America’s Cup in Fremantle, and even Victoria’s Sesquicentennial Celebrations. (Try saying that without lisping.) ‘So you want me to put in the money and you’ll put in the ideas,’ he said. He was way ahead of me. ‘We’ll form a company of which News holds fifty-one per cent, and you’ll have forty-nine per cent. Just tell Jim what you need and we’ll take care of it.’ Murdoch was famous for his ability to make quick decisions, but I was also awed by his intellect, his vision and his grasp of
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essentials. I still am. But that’s how Spectak Productions came into existence. Spectak’s first contract was with Brisbane’s World Expo, so I needed to find out more about them. There was an Expo running in New Orleans in 1984, which I visited at the end of September during its final week. It was an example of what an Expo can look like when it doesn’t cover its costs, but there was a daily aquacade that drew a good crowd. Aquacades are basically theatrical shows in a swimming pool, and the New Orleans one was a rather patriotic affair. The swimmers’ red, white and blue costumes were wildly applauded, although I knew that such showbiz nationalism would be doomed to disdain in Australia. But the synchronised swimmers had overtones of Gold Coast meter maids, so an aquacade became the first item on the Brisbane entertainment plan. I also wanted to create a street entertainment atmosphere for the Expo site, so I went looking for the real thing in the French Quarter of New Orleans. There were plenty of street buskers—a one-man band, a pianist with a piano mounted on a pushbike, and a water harmonium player with glasses of water filled to different depths that he struck or stroked. In the end we didn’t use any of the bayou buskers or their acts at the Brisbane Expo, but I was influenced by the atmosphere of New Orleans while designing the street entertainment brief. It wasn’t the only influence that I brought back from the US. When I returned to Sydney in late 1984, I brought Laurie Plainer back home to meet my mother. I’d met Laurie in Boston, while I was researching laser companies for the LA Olympics, and she’d worked on the display that formed part of the closing ceremony. The fact that she was a rather beautiful blonde had nothing to do with my professional interest in her, but I was hoping to progress beyond that stage. I had no fixed address, because I was staying in hotels in various cities around the world, so Laurie
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thought for a long time that I was a rather unreliable prospect. She was born and raised in Connecticut, where Yankees advise ‘always expect the worst and you won’t be disappointed’. Fortunately, she’s not much of a Yankee. I wooed her from afar and also travelled to Boston and Connecticut to woo her more closely, and finally she agreed to come out to Australia for a visit in January. Laurie spent a month in Australia and later told me that she’d been surprised and relieved to see so many trees and gardens. Apparently her impressions of Australia had been formed by the TV series A Town Like Alice, and she was expecting desert, dust, corrugated iron and people who spoke like Bryan Brown. I thought she was very brave, or perhaps foolish, to have flown to the other side of the world believing we all said things like ‘crikey’, ‘you beauty’, ‘my oath’, ‘fair dinkum’ and ‘strewth’, but Laurie enjoyed the beer so I thought things would probably work out. She was with me in Brisbane for my first Expo press conference in January 1985, at which I was introduced to the media as the entertainment director. The headquarters of Brisbane’s World Expo ’88 were in a blond, bland building on the south bank of the Brisbane River. From its windows I could see a sprawl of rundown warehouses, workshops, and a couple of pubs that in three years’ time would be transformed into the Happiest Place on Earth. ‘A short man in grey who’s easily overlooked’ was the verdict of a female Brisbane journalist. Although I like to think she was peeved because I’d arrived two hours late after missing my flight, the physical description was accurate. The journalist added that I was only overlooked until I started to speak—because of my track record, not my oratory skills, she hastened to point out. My love/hate relationship with the Australian media started there in Queensland. There was much to think about as I parried the rapier-like questions of the Brisbane press corps. ‘What d’yer reckon about Brisbane?’
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‘What do you think of Expo?’ ‘How do you spell your name?’ And then, from out of the blue, came the question I’d been waiting for: ‘What are you gonna do? Like, what ideas do you have?’ I’d been staring out the window at the Brisbane River and for no apparent reason said out loud, ‘Pink submarines. There’ll be pink submarines on the river at the opening ceremony.’ This was a prophetic announcement, but only partly correct. Laurie could only stay for a month, but it was a great chance to show her some of my favourite places in Australia and it was a chance for her to get to know me better. Unfortunately, she showed no signs of wanting to know me any better than she already did and flew back to Connecticut. In Sydney, Spectak Productions had become a reality. The name ‘Spectak’ had occurred to me in Los Angeles and the first person I shared it with was my daughter, Lara. I told her that I wasn’t sure how to spell it, so she wrote out a couple of versions, then told me to use the one with a ‘k’. In Sydney I had a sign made and hung it in the window of our new offices in Chatswood. The first person I hired was Karen Richards. Karen had remained at the ABC after the Commonwealth Games but found life there a little dull, so she jumped at the chance to get in on the ground floor of mega-events—Spectak style. Karen discovered this meant she was the one who stayed in Sydney while I commuted to Brisbane every week, and occasionally further afield. I’d stayed in touch with Laurie, partly because I wanted her to work at Expo but mostly because I was hopelessly in love with her. A few months after her first visit to Australia, I persuaded her to accompany me to Tokyo, because I wanted her to see the Japanese Expo at Tsukuba, a small town not far from the Narita airport. Tsukuba ’85 had a theme of ‘Leisure in the Age of Technology’ which seemed to mean ‘golf courses’ to exhibitors.
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The Japanese corporate and national pavilions of Tsukuba ’85 were impressive, but other countries didn’t seem to have spent much money or time developing their exhibits, except Australia which had Alan Bond’s ten-metre yacht outside and a butterfly farm inside. Laurie and I wandered around the site for several days, had our picture shown on the giant Jumbotron video screen, watched some inscrutable entertainment events, and visited all the pavilions. Tsukuba ’85 was mostly attended by Japanese schoolchildren who, when they weren’t waiting in long lines outside exhibits, wanted to have their photo taken with Laurie—the only blonde for miles and apparently the first some of them had ever seen. When we left Tsukuba we headed for Tokyo and from there visited a Yamaha piano factory (in case Kimball weren’t able to provide another 100 pianos for Brisbane) and went on to Kyoto. This was to be the site of yet another upcoming Expo—themed as ‘The Silk Road’—and it occurred to me that there could be a glut of Expos coming up. Known in America as World’s Fairs, Expos used to be important as forums to release or demonstrate new inventions—Ferris wheels and ice cream being two that spring to mind. Nowadays, because inventions come onto the market so fast and furiously, an Expo is out of date before it’s even open, so they tend to be used as tourism and investment advertisements by countries that have paid the BIE and the host nation for the right to exhibit. It’s a comfy club for a number of specialist firms who travel the world setting up stands and exhibits that are often identical, assuming nobody will notice because who’s going to travel from one Expo to the next? Well, Laurie and I did. World Expositions are allocated and sanctioned by an organising body based in Paris which is called the Bureau Internationale des Expositions (or BIE) and, as often happens with the French, they’ve cleverly carved out a niche position whereby they have authority to make the decisions that cost other people a lot of money. The first Expo was the Great Exhibition at the Crystal
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Palace in London in 1858, but somehow the English must have stood aside politely to allow the French through the door first and once the pied was in the door, voila! The BIE was formed and now France has the final say on who can have an Expo. Expo ’88 was headed up by Sir Llew Edwards, Chairman Llew to his friends, who presided over the transformation of a rundown riverside site in the heart of Brisbane to a recreational riverside asset. Llew bears an uncanny resemblance to Yoda, the sage of Star Wars, although the resemblance stops when he speaks. Rather than croaking wisely, blinking his eyes occasionally like Yoda, Llew almost stutters in an eager rush to express his enthusiastic views on life. On the wall of his office were framed maxims such as Followers Let It Happen, Leaders Make It Happen. Llew was big on leadership, having led the Queensland Liberal Party while there still was one and acting as State Treasurer and Deputy Prime Minister of Queensland during the reign of the National Party’s redoubtable Sir Johannes Bjelke-Petersen, known to all and sundry as ‘Sir Joh’. The connection between Sir Llew and the Queensland Cabinet allowed him to take care of the politics while the rest of us got on with the job. Bob Minnikin, who first approached me about the Expo entertainment job in Los Angeles, had commissioned market research that indicated it was a waste of time and money to advertise for overseas visitors to come to Expo—for Expo ’88 to succeed, the domestic market had to make multiple visits. Instead of portraying Australia to international visitors, we had to provide an international experience to the home crowd, which led to the slightly truculent slogan—We’ll Show the World. I spent 1985 and 1986 consolidating the people and ideas that would become the Expo Entertainment division. It was difficult to separate my personal and professional feelings for Laurie, but she made it easier by spending most of 1985 avoiding me. She thought that trying to establish a relationship with someone who
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lived on the other side of the world was too difficult. However, she was finally won over by my persistent offer of a job combined with my puppy-like adoration, and by 1986 she’d accepted a position as an entertainment producer responsible for developing the nightly laser, light and fireworks show, and other onsite laser displays. She was also responsible for conceiving the lighting effects for the huge canopies that overshadowed the Expo site. The Expo site was relatively small—roughly one kilometre long and 200 metres wide, hemmed in on one side by a main railway line and on the other by the Brisbane River, so there wasn’t a lot of space for entertainment venues. At one end of the site stood the new Queensland Performing Arts Centre, a state-of-the-art facility which was perfect for theatre, ballet, orchestral concerts and opera, and at the opposite end of the site was the Aquacade venue. On the river we had the Waterski stage, around which a show was performed four or five times daily; the River Stage, which was indeed built in the river; the Piazza, which was an open-air performing space with terraced seats for 3000 spectators and very good technical facilities; and the Amphitheatre, a smaller space with a covered stage and sheltered seating. I also had plans for mobile entertainment—a daily and nightly parade, the Expocity Marching Band, and a wide-ranging street entertainment program. For each of these activities or venues I appointed a producer, who was responsible for creating, developing and overseeing the daily production schedule. In addition, there would of course be an opening and a closing ceremony. In 1986, the demolition of the Expo site was complete and water, gas and power lines were being laid underground. Sir Llew presided at weekly board meetings where each director reported on our divisional progress. Although I could see all the venues in my mind, there was nothing for the other directors to see and they had to take my word for it that things were moving along.
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One of the first people I had hired was Barbara Absolon, whose background was in television production. She was highly recommended by one of my oldest friends and turned out to be a perfect deputy director of entertainment. At our first meeting, she interviewed me for the job and then had only one question. Was I only interviewing women for the position, or was it also open to men? I had to confess that so far she was the only interviewee, but if she was unsuccessful, then men could apply. Barb nodded and said that if she was not going to be a token female, she was prepared to accept the position. She was also much better at dealing with paperwork and bureaucracy than I ever was, so she took on much of the administrative load of the Entertainment Department until she realised that the creative producers were having much more fun. She had only one request—could she be the producer in charge of street entertainment? As anyone who saw the range and quality of street performers at Expo would know, she did an outstanding job. Barb knew there were very few entertainers available in Brisbane with the necessary experience, so she held workshops to develop their performance skills. One big difference between Expo’s avenues and the real streets was that our entertainers were paid a salary. This was a bonanza for Actors Equity and, probably, the Taxation Department. Other producers turned up at exactly the time they were needed—Mike Mullins, a truly crazy and dedicated performer/ producer, who tries from time to time to get serious about being corporate. Mike has orchestrated some great public events in his time—including a silent vigil of schoolchildren at Orange in rural New South Wales in the 1970s. There he mobilised hundreds of kids to dress in their mums’ Whirlpool-white robes (bedsheets), wearing even whiter makeup, and to stand silently at street corners in groups to protest the Vietnam war. Apparently the Returned Services League went apoplectic. Mike also pulled off another
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stunt at Sydney’s Taronga Zoo that interested me—he put himself in a cage and became the Human Exhibit for a couple of weeks. Apparently he attracted as much attention from the neighbouring chimpanzees as from visitors, and had to leave before a scandal developed among the simians. For Expo ’88, Mike was in charge of parades, which took on a new direction once he became involved. The lunchtime parade became a picnic that was being hijacked by ants. There were a number of floats—one celebrated the Great Aussie BBQ; another presented an enormous Norm the Couch Potato and hamburgers—and these were interspersed with soldier ants (on stilts) and various iconic picnic moments. At the tail of the parade was an echidna whose tongue was meant to pick up any stray ants. Encouraged by the creative direction of the lunchtime parade, I allowed Mike to develop another entertaining group to accompany the parade performers. This was a mistake. The result of Mike’s manic enthusiasm was a monochromatic bunch called ‘The Wedding Party’. The performers wore tattered black and white gauzy robes reminiscent of an Edgar Allen Poe story, and stalked spectators while performing acts of random violence upon each other that was somehow meant to reflect the institution of marriage. This attempt at social commentary failed dismally with Expo visitors, but I later came to realise that the theatrically violent Wedding Party performers simply expressed Mike’s views on marriage at the time. The night parade, known as ‘The Light Fantastic’, was a much happier and more joyous succession of internally illuminated floats in fantasy shapes, culminating in a very realistic quarterscale model of the nose and cockpit of a Qantas 747—our sponsors. For 186 nights, the floats made it along the one-kilometre length of the Expo site without any major mishaps, and somehow Mike made it through, too. In fact, the experience so energised him that subsequently he went to Spain and worked with the Australian
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company that was awarded the merchandising contract for the huge World Expo ’92 in Seville. David Hamilton was recommended to me by several people as one of Brisbane’s smartest young theatrical entrepreneurs. David had trained as an opera singer, but, unable to get enough work, he had turned to puppetry and ran a very successful business at shopping centres around Brisbane. In fact, David was concerned that his business interests would suffer if he took the Expo job, but once he realised the potential of the Piazza venue he decided to put the puppets into other hands for a couple of years while he put together one of the best entertainment programs at Expo. Every day, the Piazza attracted thousands of spectators to watch the everchanging program of events. The biggest hits were the wood chop and ballroom dancing on Friday evenings, believe it or not. On those nights, the Piazza crowds went beyond standing-room only, to the strains of sharpened axes, chainsaws, Strauss waltzes, zippy tangos and cutting-edge performances. The surface of the Piazza was more complex than it appeared at first glance. There was a poured concrete floor about fifty-metres by thirty-metres, with a ten-metre square hole in the centre covered by wooden planking. The wooden bit was my idea, because I thought tap dancers would appear at some time during Expo and I wanted to be ready for them. I’d heard the best audio for tap dancing was designed by Fred Astaire, who had a wooden floor built over an empty swimming pool with microphones located below the floor. At Expo, we installed microphone cables beneath the wooden stage and waited for tap dancers to show up. Unfortunately, it rained solidly for a month before Expo, so instead of an empty pit we had a real swimming pool. The mic cables rusted away while we were busy bailing water from other parts of the site, and to the best of my knowledge we never heard a peep or a tap from the subterranean audio transponders. No one except me seemed to notice, probably because the wooden section was so
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cleverly integrated into the Piazza floor design that even Fred Astaire would have had trouble finding it. It was David’s idea to paint the entire floor area with an elaborate design, reminiscent of a medieval painting of the sun, with stylised tendrils and a happy face peering out at the visitors. The actual image was the work of our resident designer, an elfin character named Paul Fitzgerald, whose brilliant and distinctive work appeared throughout Expo. At the Piazza, his design incorporated a series of small, shaded circles around the circumference of the floor, on which the sixty-five-piece Expocity Marching Band set their feet during their lunchtime performance. In view of what became known as The Marching Band Fiasco in the buildup to the Sydney Olympics, I should explain my attraction to these mobile musicians. In Los Angeles, I saw a performance by the University of Southern California Trojans Marching Band, under the watchful eye and baton of Dr Art Bartner. It was a revelation to me. Until then I had been treated to the sight and sounds of military bands, council bands and the occasional Salvation Army band playing under my window early on a Sunday morning in suburban Sydney. Each time, the sight was not a pretty one. The military chaps were, of course, very good at marching but not very good at enjoying themselves. Their civilian counterparts strolled rather than marched, ranging from overweight and under-enthusiastic players to those who were keen but too small for the uniform, their caps kept in place by newspaper inserts that stuck out over their ears. The big bass drums were usually carried by red-faced gentlemen wearing old tiger skins, while the brass players pursed their lips and went cross-eyed at the little pieces of paper on which their music score was written. So in Los Angeles, when the 250-strong USC Trojans Band burst into a staccato percussion riff that was followed by a massive wall of sound as the brass came in, the hair on the back of my neck stood up straight. These guys were awesome, I thought, before
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realising that I was thinking in Californian like a native. They were all young, between eighteen and twenty-two, and they were genuinely enjoying themselves. The moves were choreographic, not militaristic, and they flung their capes and drumsticks about like bullfighters. About fifty lissom young women threw flags in the air while performing cartwheels in short skirts, and out front there was a baton-twirling girl who made her stick defy gravity. Art Bartner, the band director, was on top of a stepladder conducting and yelling at his musicians like a demented Marine sergeant while they performed as though it was a world championship. In fact, it was just a weekday after-school practice session to which I’d been invited. After that, whenever possible I’d go to USC games at the Coliseum to watch the band perform at half-time. For the LA Olympics Opening Ceremony, Art Bartner had been the director of what we called the All-American Olympic Marching Band. It’s unlikely that there will ever be a better marching band anywhere in the world. The musicians, handpicked as the best in his or her college, came from every state in the US to be part of the enormous 812-member ensemble. I’d never seen their full marching routine until the band came to the Coliseum about a week before opening. The opening number was Aaron Copland’s ‘Fanfare for the Common Man’ and it brought work at the Coliseum to a standstill. The painters and carpenters, steelworkers and forklift drivers all dropped their jaws at the sight and sound of the massive drum and percussion section that filled the centre of the field. Then, from the grandstands, 600 musicians marched down the aisles to join the onfield formation, playing on the move in perfect time and harmony as Art and six assistant band directors waved them on. One of those assistants was named Barry Spanier, and two years later he arrived in Brisbane to share with me an impossible dream. I’d wondered whether it would be possible to start a marching band movement in Australia. The spirit and morale of the band
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had been so inspiring that I wanted to bring the same opportunity to the high school students of Australia. The dream was that if Barry could instigate a marching band program in the schools, the student musicians could perform at Expo ’88. Barry and I visited the Music Education departments in all the major states of Australia and were greeted with a total lack of interest. The entrenched department heads saw no need to vary the curriculum, and others felt that schoolkids enjoying themselves musically was a subversive and dangerous idea. Music teachers generally saw marching bands as a threat to their own music programs, which relied on student orchestras and string ensembles to play nicely at school concerts and speech nights. With the exception of one private school—St Paul’s College in Brisbane— all other educational establishments showed total disinterest in the concept, and so did Australia’s musical instrument suppliers. Although Australia prides itself on being an entrepreneurial country, I couldn’t find a single person in the education system or in the music industry who could see the opportunity. Finally, Barry said the only way to get the idea off the ground for Expo was to form a professional marching band, composed of sixty-five graduates from Australia’s music conservatoriums. And that’s what we did. Barry went to every state in Australia and auditioned trumpeters, trombonists and all the other horn players, drummers, percussionists and woodwinds until he had found players of sufficiently high standard. Then he had to persuade them to come to Brisbane and learn to march. Not just to march, but to enjoy themselves while they were doing it. Barry succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest hopes, including my own. The Expocity Marching Band became a huge favourite with Expo crowds, and every day around noon a capacity audience of 3000 would jam the Piazza to watch them. In July, Art Bartner brought half of the USC Trojans Band out to Australia to join Barry in the Piazza for a battle of the bands. The visit had been organised
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by another clever musician from San Francisco, Bill Lutt. Bill and his father, Bob, had visited a couple of years earlier to make me an offer that I couldn’t refuse. Bob Lutt had been a music teacher and then an administrator with the San Francisco school system all his working life, and after retiring he had continued his interest in music education. Bill had been a trumpeter, and after graduating from college he formed a company called World Projects in partnership with his father. In the US every high school and every college has a music program, and most primary schools and even some kindergartens have musical education available to their students. There are opportunities to belong to bands, orchestras or choirs, as well as opportunities to be in drill teams or cheerleading squads that accompany a band at football matches and other sporting events. The Lutts came to me with a proposal that changed the level of music performance at Expo ’88. They explained that every school or college with a music program in the US faces a challenge to keep their students motivated and interested. Most band members are not music students—participation is an extracurricular activity, and the students know that after graduation they won’t be pursuing a musical career. Hence, schools are constantly looking for ways to reward and encourage band members to stay with the program. One of the perks is the opportunity for travel to international destinations, and World Projects specialised in arranging tours for musical performance groups from North America, Japan and China. Over the course of Expo, which was running during the Northern Hemisphere’s summer months, the Lutts managed to bring almost 7000 students on visits to Expo. This provided our entertainment program with many performances by bands, choirs and ensembles of very high standard, at no cost to us. The other benefit was that Bill organised an instrument package for our Expocity Band, whereby we not only obtained rehearsal instruments from Yamaha in Japan, but also the full fabulous lineup of marching
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instruments—without which a band loses its oomph. The price was right because Bill had arranged in advance to sell the instruments to North American bands after Expo had finished. Before agreeing to this plan, Barry and I tried to organise something similar through Australian musical instrument importers, but they wouldn’t even offer us a discount! As the Americans like to say, it was a win/win situation. Ten years later, Bill and I would come up with a similar scheme for the Olympics in 2000, which was received rather differently due to the antics of Sydney’s talkback radio jocks. Another hugely popular attraction at the Piazza were the circus acts that appeared over the six-month run of Expo. There was a non-stop program of great circus performers, and David Hamilton had even managed to get an agreement from Cirque du Soleil to come to Expo. Regrettably, Australia’s Actors Equity refused to approve their visa application, and shortly afterward, Cirque du Soleil appeared in Los Angeles at the Santa Monica Pier where it was promptly ‘discovered’. Thereafter, Cirque du Soleil was too busy to scratch itself and it was another ten years before it was seen in Australia. However, we’d designed a flying trapeze platform high above the Piazza floor in the hope that we’d find some high flyers and, as visitors to Expo discovered, we found some beauties. Two years before Expo opened, I’d met up with a German circus performer named John Bugler, who would qualify as a most unforgettable character in the Reader’s Digest. He speaks about eight languages, and did an extraordinary job in obtaining international circus performers for Expo, particularly from China. He travelled around the world for about three months, asking for little from me beyond a business card and expenses, and returned with a list of acts that he had persuaded to come to Australia. He’d even been able to get the Chinese Ministry of Culture to agree to allow
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the Shanghai Circus to send three troupes of twenty performers out to Brisbane for four weeks each. While in China, John sent me a fax asking if I wanted the ‘cycling panda’ act, which I thought was a translation mistake. But it turned out that indeed there was a cycling panda act available in Shanghai, and the bear didn’t just pedal, but played trumpet while doing so! This sounded too good to be true, and it was. On further enquiry, we found that the panda’s care routine was exhaustive and three handler/trainers were required to accompany the bear at all times. The regimen of bamboo for the bear and catering for the trainers, together with the accommodation needs of both, membership restrictions at the Musicians’ Union, and demarcation disputes that applied to pandas playing a trumpet while cycling without a helmet, plus quarantine and the other problems involved with having live animals on the Expo site, all added up to impossible. Regretfully, I let the chance of a lifetime slip, but I often wonder what tunes the panda would have played and whether he took requests. Notwithstanding the panda’s absence, the Shanghai troupes were outstanding and every second month our Expo visitors could watch some of the world’s finest circus performers for free. The waterski shows on the Brisbane River were held five times every day, even when the tide and turbulent currents would have stopped anyone else. About seventeen skiers were in each show, many of them world or national champions, and on the river bank a non-stop narration was provided by Lon Linke, the voice of the Smokies. Folks, that’s the Smokey Mountains around Gatlinburg in Tennessee, Dolly Parton country. My relationship with the backwoods boys from Tennessee had begun a few years earlier through an introduction to Fred Hardwick III. Fred was a three-time USA National Waterski Champion, whose career came to a sudden stop when he hit a ski ramp just
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wrong enough to send his shin bone up through his knee cap. Fred’s skiing days were over, but he had a Master’s degree in Business Administration and it wasn’t long before he was running a waterski show hundreds of miles from the ocean in a place called Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. This narrow strip of shops and fast food joints on the Interstate 95 between New York and Miami was the first place in America to have a Factory Outlet Mall and it became a magnet for bargain hunters from all directions. Pigeon Forge was suddenly on the map, and is now an example to us all of what unfettered growth can do to a charming rural retreat. But it’s been great for business. After a couple of years, Fred started exporting shows, concepts and skiers to the rest of the world. He established training schools for skiers to work on his shows, and at the time I met him to discuss a show for Brisbane, Fred’s company was running eighteen separate waterski shows worldwide. Many of his skiers were Australian, and we agreed that for Expo, Fred would bring them back to Brisbane together with his best manager and announcer. So Australian Brett Wing, the world champion barefoot skier, was just one of many fellow countrymen who were able to return to their homeland and actually earn a living while waterskiing—something they’d been unable to do before. The ski shows took place downstream from the River Stage, our most prestigious venue and location for National Day celebrations by the participant nations at Expo ’88. It was also the venue with the biggest audience capacity—more than 20,000 people on a big night—so that was where the rock acts were staged. Over the course of Expo, Bryan Ferry, Joe Cocker, Glen Frey (who appeared with Glenn Shorrock and the Little River Band), Julio Iglesias, Ladysmith Black Mombasa, John Denver, the Seekers and many others performed live in this unique venue. The producer for the River Stage was John Watson, a Brisbane theatrical who brought wit and worry to his job. Almost every day he’d tell me his concerns about something that wasn’t working, and yet every
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night there’d be huge crowds and thunderous applause for him to worry about. John brought theatrical events to the stage such as Sweeney Todd, he created events like Synth the Electric Muse (a rock musical performed by local students), he hosted National Day events that featured everyone from Jason Donovan and Kylie Minogue to John Farnham, and he handled diplomats and Expo commissioners with equal aplomb. I’d thought that Kylie and Jason would be the biggest attraction at Expo, and indeed they gathered a capacity crowd, but the greatest crush was for Julio Iglesias. While the Spanish singer murmured endearments to a vast audience, women of a certain age fought viciously with each other to get as close to the stage as possible. By 1987, Laurie decided she knew me well enough to accept my longstanding proposal of marriage—which I’d made to her on our first date. Yankees may be cautious, but they’re also practical. Laurie demonstrated her organisational skills by arranging the wedding ceremony in Connecticut to coincide with her need to record material for her laser shows in several US cities. That way we could get married and claim it as a tax deduction. Our honeymoon in Fiji was shortened when I got bored by the beach and Laurie got sunburned. We returned to Brisbane so she could continue preparation work for the nightly flash-and-crash pyro shows, which one year later were staged at 10 p.m. as the finale and farewell for the day. Over the six months of Expo, Laurie produced three totally different shows, each with a themed music track, special effects, projection, lasers, lighting, space cannons and, of course, fireworks. The crackers were designed and supplied by Syd Howard, an old mate I’d first met when producing a TV series starring Marcia Hines. Syd supplied a number of new fireworks for Laurie, including floating comets, shells that burst in a heart shape, shells that formed palm tree shapes, and one he called a Saturn shell that burst to reveal a sphere within a ring. Night after night, tens of
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thousands of people would gather at the stage, and even on the cliffs beyond the Expo site, to watch the pyro rock the river. The rolling explosions richocheted off the high-rise Executive Government buildings opposite, and I like to think that Sir Joh spent his evenings listening to his subjects enjoying themselves. The explosions also caused a bit of bother in some suburbs close to the site. A few times I received phone calls at 3 a.m. and when I answered the phone, an angry voice would shout at me: ‘How do you like being woken up in the middle of the night, you bastard?’ and would then hang up. Actually I didn’t mind because I was rarely asleep and was sometimes still on the Expo site. We hired an audio consultant to monitor the ambient sound levels in streets where the complaints seemed worst, and the resulting readings showed that domestic arguments and squealing brakes registered higher decibel levels than the fireworks. Sir Llew stalwartly defended our right to light up the Brisbane sky nightly and told people they’d miss it after Expo was over. As it turned out, even the dogs grew accustomed to the nightly noise and after a few weeks there were no more complaints. The Queensland Performing Arts Centre was a really fine venue containing a concert hall, drama theatre and a smaller performance space for theatrical experimentation. I appointed Anthony Steele and Marguerite Pepper to be in charge of developing a wide-ranging festival of Australian and international performers that we called World Expo on Stage. Anthony had directed several Adelaide Festivals and I’d visited him during 1986 to watch some of his imported companies. Among his many talents, Anthony speaks fluent Russian and had brought to Adelaide a theatrical company from Georgia to perform Richard III. It may not have been clear to audiences in advance that the Georgia in question was on the Baltic Sea, rather than the one that Ray Charles sings about. It only became obvious on opening night, when a perplexed crowd of non-Russian speakers left the theatre at the interval, making
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it one of Anthony’s least financially successful ventures. On the other hand, he brought enormous taste and style to World Expo on Stage and left me to judge whether the program would be a commercial success. Anthony and his assistant, Marguerite, were a breath of theatrical freshness in the Expo headquarters. Marguerite had started as an actress but soon became interested in fringe theatrical groups that she brought into mainstream prominence as their agent and manager. Marguerite wore dramatically coloured scarves around her short hair, had piercing eyes and a voice trained to reach the back row from upstage. Anthony always appeared slightly distracted, favoured sandals and Hawaiian shirts, and I suspect Sir Llew thought that he was constantly on holiday. In fact, Anthony travelled extensively to bring together World Expo on Stage and it was a great success—with locals, visitors and even my production accountant. During Expo’s construction and implementation phase, I seemed to have a constant struggle with the site engineers who were responsible for building and commissioning our performance venues. The River Stage was a very handsome architectural design, a steel grey polygon floating on black pillars embedded in the Brisbane River. It was a triumph of form over function and looked great in photographs. John Rayment, head of technical production (and lighting designer on the Bicentennial Wool Collection and, later, on the Sydney 2000 Olympic Ceremonies) insisted to the architects that the venue had to be a performing space and finally we signed off on the design. A couple of months later the building was taking shape and I was looking forward to photographing it when John called me. ‘Did you authorise any changes to the design?’ he asked. When I replied in the negative, he suggested I might like to stroll down to the stage and have a look around. The side walls of the building met in a V shape that jutted out into the river, with the open end of the V facing the audience
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on land. The stage was about twenty-five metres wide and the dressing rooms were built in the wings, against the outer walls. John had noticed that the builders were installing floor-to-ceiling clear glass panels to form these outer walls, whereas we’d expected them to be solid. We pulled out the approved drawings and found no mention of glass walls, so we called up the site development folk for an explanation. Their reply was that architects thought of the stage as a ‘jewel’ on the river and consequently it should ‘glow from within’ when our stage lighting was on. When we pointed out that undressed ladies and gentlemen in glass-walled dressing rooms might also be glowing and highly visible, there was a pause. The site development team claimed we’d approved glass walls. We shook our heads over the phone and quoted the approved blueprint number. There was another pause. ‘It’s going to cost you money.’ ‘Not on our budget,’ we said. ‘Besides, if you don’t change the glass, we’ll just stick newspaper over it.’ The glass walls were removed at great expense and replaced with exactly what we had approved. I don’t think it ended up on our budget but it was hard to tell with construction costs, which I’ve always found more difficult to control than a Hollywood film budget. The River Stage wasn’t the only venue that needed to be carefully checked before buying. For instance, when the Amphitheatre was completed, John Rayment went over to sign off on it so that he could start installing the entertainment technical equipment. All looked great. The audience seats were installed on the graded asphalt floor, the conduits (pipes) had been laid to carry our power and control cables from the stage to the control room behind the audience, and the stage had been finished with the special dance surface as requested. About to sign, John idly kicked his foot against one of the conduits that stuck out of the ground and it fell over. This wasn’t meant to happen. That conduit was
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meant to be buried several feet beneath the asphalt and should have been immoveable. Instead, a short length of pipe had merely been stuck in the ground to look like the real thing. It turned out that the contractor had forgotten to install the conduits, and if John hadn’t idly kicked the pipe, we would have been up for a change order to get the job done the way it should have been done in the first place. The Aquacade venue had a few problems, too. We had a total of twenty-four synchronised swimmers for the show, and the sparkling water was ready for them on their first day of rehearsal. By noon the following day, twenty-one of the girls had developed ear infections. We discovered that the site development people had switched off the power over the weekend but had neglected to tell our pool maintenance staff. A couple of days without chlorination and filtration had been long enough for bacteria to build up, and so we lost almost a week of rehearsals and the girls lost a lot of confidence in Brisbane’s water. At the River Stage, Laurie’s fireworks shows were computercontrolled. Elaborate lighting, and pyrotechnic and projection effects were cued by electronic pulses pre-recorded on the music track, and each cue had to be individually programmed during rehearsals. Whenever I asked Laurie about progress, she complained that she was spending days longer than anticipated to get the programming done because the lighting computers kept losing cues and needed constant maintenance. Not only that, but the lasers kept shutting down and she didn’t know why. Since Laurie had started in the business by building medical lasers, she knew a thing or two about how they worked. She didn’t appreciate being patted on the head by the site development engineers who called her ‘girlie’ and told her she was imagining things. John Rayment suspected that the power supply was the problem, but the site development chaps said that the supply was well within specifications because they’d checked. We decided to
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run our own tests and found that instead of 240 volts, the local power supply fluctuated between 160 volts and 340 volts at the control room, which was enough variation not only to shut down the lasers but also to fry the lighting computer’s logic chips. Site development told us blandly that this variation was well within Queensland specifications, but our insurers, who had to replace the burned-out equipment, didn’t buy it. Finally, we had to install massive electronic filters to iron out the variations in the supply. Being involved in this level of detail for every area of production gave me a new appreciation of the teamwork necessary for an endeavour as complex as Expo ’88. I tried to remember this lesson and yearned for the days of Expo when, ten years later in Sydney, I had to deal with David Richmond and his Olympic Co-ordination Authority.
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eight
Flaps over frocks Flaps over frocks
H
aving such a great team in Brisbane left me free to get involved with another project that came to Spectak in 1986—the Bicentennial Wool Collection. Karen had become somewhat restless at being left in Sydney while I was having all the fun in Brisbane, so she was delighted when Vincent Matthews of the Australian Wool Corporation came to Spectak with an idea. Australia’s days of living off the sheep’s back were long gone, but during the 1980s the wool producers were doing very well. Vincent, as head of communications for the AWC, and responsible for getting the word out to the world about wool, suggested that in the current economic climate it would be possible for Australian wool producers to sponsor an event that celebrated the role of wool in world fashion—a fitting tribute during the Bicentennial year. His idea was to stage a fashion spectacular, incorporating the world’s top international designers, and he’d come to Sydney from Melbourne to see if I’d be interested in developing the idea into a major production for international television. I warmed to Vincent 99
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when he told me that the International Wool Secretariat, based in London, wanted to produce the show, but he was insisting that it must be done by Australians. As Australian woolgrowers would be putting up the bulk of the money, the IWS could go and shear itself, as far as he was concerned. It was the start of a beautiful friendship. I wrote down a brief concept for the show—that a select few of the world’s great fashion designers would be invited to develop a Bicentennial collection, not only using wool but specifically inspired by Australia. Each designer’s segment would be introduced by a few minutes of dance, projected imagery and audio to evoke the designer’s source of Australian inspiration, and the designer would then have, say, ten minutes to present his or her collection on stage. We were hoping that up to six legendary designers would participate, and knew the only stage that would attract interest from fashion royalty was the Opera House. Vincent thought that members of real royalty would also be attracted, so he encouraged the IWS in London to forward an invitation to Prince Charles and Princess Diana, who were due to visit Australia as part of their Bicentennial duties. Sitting in Spectak’s Chatswood office in Sydney, the Bicentennial Wool Collection seemed an entirely reasonable idea, but I had much to learn about the world of haute couture and found very little about it that is entirely reasonable. My fashion sense brings tears to the eyes of my friends and family, so I left the choice of hautes couturiers to Vincent and the IWS. I didn’t even know many of the designers by name. In the European autumn of 1986, Vincent and I arrived in London to make our first presentations. I’d brought with me a sturdy, but far from fashionable, suitcase containing a model of the stage set planned for the Opera House, plus some photographic essays of Australia that I hoped would strike some creative chords among
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the fashion cognoscenti. Not surprisingly, the London crowd were somewhat snippy at having an Aussie thrust into their world, particularly one who referred to fashion garments as ‘frocks’ and could barely tell jersey from jewellery. However, since the Australian woolgrowers were footing the bill, the IWS chaps graciously gave me the benefit of their advice. Their first suggestions were to ditch the suitcase and get a new stage model. I was told rather primly that Aussie enthusiasm was no match for European sophistication, particularly in matters of style where the designers were accustomed to an altogether higher class of presentation. Furthermore, they expressed polite scepticism, perhaps even scorn, that the chosen designers would meet with us, far less agree to travel to the Antipodes to appear on the same stage as half a dozen other designers. To cap it off, I could tell they didn’t think highly of my suit and tie. A ‘wishlist’ of ten designers had been nominated and, much to the surprise of the IWS, nine of the ten agreed to participate and all nine promised to design a collection inspired by Australia. It turned out that two or three may have had their fingers crossed behind their backs as they made this promise, but it was such a delight to meet these legendary designers that I couldn’t have cared less. My favourite was Jean Muir, but the others were no slouches either—Bruce Oldfield, Sonia Rykiel, Kenzo, Claude Montana, Missoni, Gianni Versace, Oscar de la Renta and Donna Karan. The only designer that we failed to meet, let alone persuade, was Yves St Laurent, but I was told not to take it personally. YSL doesn’t ‘do’ shows with other people, darling. The IWS chaps were flabbergasted that the nine designers had accepted our invitation at once, notwithstanding my simple suitcase and humble stage model, but from then on they were totally supportive and shared a great deal about the ways of the famously fashionable and some insights into how the industry works.
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Back home in Sydney, I started to think about the creative team. The most important people would be the director and the choreographers, because I saw the show as a series of audiovisual segments that set a different mood for each collection. The mood pieces were designed to evoke the designer’s source of inspiration and were of necessity very vague, even a little woolly. So, when Chrissie Koltai was suggested as a possible director and choreographer, I thought she might be perfect. Chrissie came from a theatrical background, as I could tell when we first met in Spectak’s Sydney office. Dramatically dressed in bold colours, with dark glasses in her bright red coiffure, Chrissie was the very picture of a dedicated follower of fashion and the world of emotional extravagance that goes with it. I was delighted to meet someone who called everyone darling in thrillingly vibrant tones and whose every gesture told a story. Chrissie’s flamboyance tended to overshadow her altruistic side, but when I discovered that she had founded a dance company to work with Aboriginal kids in Redfern, I knew that she would bring integrity as well as style to the project. Karen Richards’ fashion sense was even less developed than mine, but clearly Chrissie had more than enough to go around, so Karen took over the role of producer and we started getting serious about the show. Our technical directors were Merri Took, whose elfin name belies his computer and organisational skills, and Greg Volich, who headed up a company that took on responsibility for construction and technical staging of the whole event. The Concert Hall of the Sydney Opera House is a great space for the audience, but backstage it has some limitations. Although the Opera House had opened more than ten years earlier, the only stage plans available for the Concert Hall were drawn up in imperial measurements and were copies of Joern Utzon’s original architectural blueprints. They belonged in a museum, not a production office. Another surprise was that the
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measurements weren’t accurate. Greg and Merri’s first job became to measure the Concert Hall so that we would have accurate metric scale drawings of the stage. Their other challenge was to install a lighting rig that was capable of all the high-tech effects we needed, but which wasn’t allowed to ‘impact the envelope’ of the building in any way. In simple terms, this meant that we couldn’t drive nails into the walls. That was okay because we didn’t intend to use nails, but it created a problem for our plans to suspend a series of metal trusses from the roof to hold the lighting equipment. As part of Greg and Merri’s measurement project, they were given access to parts of the Opera House that had been forgotten or overlooked for years. High up in the roof behind the acoustic panels, they discovered that Utzon had designed strong points in the huge overhead concrete shells which were in exactly the right places to suspend our lighting trusses. There was also a vast room in the ceiling that Utzon had designed as a reverberation chamber, but which had been covered over by the New South Wales Government architect after Utzon was fired. Had I been paying attention, it would have been a useful lesson to remember years later when the New South Wales Government again became involved in matters of staging technology at the Sydney Olympics. But in 1987 it was simply another example of how farsighted Utzon’s original design had been and how much had been lost when his ideas were ignored. We quickly discovered that access from backstage onto the Concert Hall stage was going to be a problem for fashion models in high heels. On either side of the stage are doorways that lead onto the gleaming wooden surface, but the doorways are only 172 centimetres high. The average fashion model is taller than that in bare feet, and by the time we added heels and hair we were likely to decapitate them. I guess orchestral musicians have become accustomed to bowing their way onto the stage through these low
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doorways, but we would have to hide fashionable models making their entrances on hands and knees or holding their tight skirts up around their waists. I was surprised that Utzon had designed such low stage entrances, but it turned out that the ABC’s requirements for orchestral acoustics were responsible. The original stage level had been thirty centimetres lower—so the doorways had been of normal height, but then the ABC’s audio consultants required the stage floor to be raised to achieve their desired reverberation figures. This was done without allowing for the doorways, so from that time, every entrance by a person taller than 172 centimetres has been made with a lowered head, a sort of nod to the audience. Dressing rooms for orchestras and choirs, the usual performers in the Concert Hall, were one or two levels below the stage and were well-appointed and comfortable. But if our fashion models used them, they would have to totter up several flights of stairs on their high heels to the dwarf doorways, or would have to change backstage. Given that we were anticipating about eighty models wearing a total of 300 garments plus twenty dancers with 100 costumes, we could expect a major crush of frocks in the wings. However, as we didn’t yet know the details of the designers’ collections, we decided there was little to be done except make allowance for a ‘quick change area’ close to the stage. Hair and makeup would cause another major traffic jam, so we needed to plan a flow chart for the models. Karen may have owned a pair of high-heeled shoes, but in more than six years I’d never seen her wear anything except sneakers. Chrissie wasn’t really the right person to ask to run up and down stairs in high heels with a stopwatch, because she would have wanted to stop and discuss her motivation. Fortunately, Louisa, our receptionist at Spectak, was not only a perfect fashion sample size but also was happy in high heels. Backstage at the Opera House, Louisa sped up steps and down stairs, from dressing room
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to makeup, ducking her head low under the doorway onto the stage, then off the other side back to the dressing room, while we timed her with a stopwatch. We’d planned for each designer to have around eight minutes to parade their collections onstage, after which there’d be a four-minute interlude of woolly conceptual dance to set the scene for the next designer. Louisa’s timed dashes showed that this was possible if none of the models fell off their heels and blocked the staircases. The show was taking shape, but we still didn’t know what the clothes would actually look like. A couple of the designers, particularly Jean Muir, were regularly in touch to discuss music for their collections and colours so that we could plan lighting effects. Others were still searching for inspiration. It was frustrating not to know what some collections would look like, because Chrissie couldn’t start planning the choreographic introductions until she knew what had inspired the designers. Unable to stand the suspense any longer, we set off from Australia to find out how much of the Bicentennial Wool Collection was in the bag. I had learned enough about the fashion industry to know that sometimes a collection doesn’t exist until days or even the night before a parade. Yves St Laurent, in particular, was infamous for leaving the design of his collection until the last possible moment—but of course he wasn’t one of our designers. Surely our famous couturiers would be more thoroughly prepared? As part of the television broadcast we were planning to videotape statements from each designer that explained how Australia had influenced their collection. It seemed like a good idea to record each of the designers in their own cities, so Karen, Chrissie, Vincent and I, together with Jacqui Culliton, our television director, and the camera crew, headed first for London. Our first recording was with Jean Muir. Sadly, Jean died of cancer a couple of years after the Bicentennial, so we never had another chance to work together. We’d made a deal that she’d be
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costume designer on my next feature film, and I said she’d have to be patient because I’d never directed one. She assured me that she’d be patient because she’d never worked on one either. Jean was petite, with huge dark eyes that shone out of a starkly white face. Universally addressed as Miss Muir by her staff and the fashion industry, she had a spirit of steel and a glare that could reduce strong men to jelly. Always dressed impeccably in black or French navy, she designed exquisitely cut dresses of wool jersey that draped on models like a second skin. At one of Jean’s shows I ran into Joanna Lumley and learned that she’d started as a house model for Miss Muir. Joanna’s now better known as Patsy in Absolutely Fabulous. Joanna was particularly keen on some new designs that Jean was showing, pale dresses of buttery soft suede that flowed over the body like water. I’d never seen such soft suede and Jean explained that she had it made to her specifications by a small factory in Italy. Joanna and she then giggled about a couple of Italian designers, but I promised them that I hadn’t overheard a thing. Although I did make a mental note to check out some photographs in a 1970s edition of Vogue. When it came time to videotape the interview with Jean, we decided to shoot it at her private apartment, which occupied a floor of a magnificent Victorian building next to the Albert Hall. She and her husband Harry, who ran Jean’s fashion business, lived in an all-white environment. It was a room from a 1960s movie where the floor, ceilings and walls were all painted white, the furniture was white and the only item of contrast was Jean. She had a refined accent like a P.G. Wodehouse character and spoke quickly and enthusiastically, often ending her sentences with ‘don’t you know?’ She also had an endearing sort of stutter, a catch in the throat that interrupted her sentences but which neither she nor those around her appeared to notice. But it was hell to record. Not only did our cameraman have to somehow balance the lighting in a stark white
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room where the subject was wearing black, but our sound recordist had to modulate Jean’s rather disconcerting gulps as she explained that the colours of Australia’s coral reef fish had inspired her Bicentennial Collection. It was the first time she had ever designed clothes in such pulsating and vivid colours, and for those who follow fashion this was big news indeed. Jean also knew exactly the music she wanted for her segment—Bobby Short of the New York Café Carlyle singing a Cole Porter song. Chrissie Koltai was thrilled with her choice and choreographed an introduction for Jean on the Opera House stage, where the dancers lay on beach towels and rolled languidly around to ‘Birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it. Let’s do it, let’s fall in love’. When I told Jean that I’d never heard Bobby at the Carlyle, she was shocked. She immediately picked up the phone and called him in New York to explain that I’d be there in a couple of weeks and to make sure that he sang ‘Let’s Fall in Love’ for me because it was most important. We did call in to listen to one of Bobby’s shows at the Carlyle Hotel where he has been an institution for nearly thirty years, but in the end we used an equally legendary Australian talent—Edwin Duff— to record the song for Jean’s segment. Regretfully we had to leave Jean and moved on to record our other British designer—Bruce Oldfield. Bruce had an extraordinary background for a fashion designer—he had been raised as an orphan at a Dr Barnardo Home in northern England. It’s obviously a great tribute to his talent that he became a favourite of the fashion set in London—particularly of Princess Di, who wore one of his designs to the Bicentennial Wool Collection at the Opera House. Bruce was charming but a little bemused by the number of people who turned up at his door to record his thoughts about designing his collection for the Australian event. He felt a strong affinity for Aboriginal design and colour, he said, and had drawn upon that
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for his collection. In London he was quiet and gently spoken, but he showed later in Sydney that he had a much tougher side when necessary. From London we went to Milan. Karen succumbed to a bout of severe food poisoning brought on by a dubious British sausage she’d scored at Piccadilly Circus, and our first night in Italy was like an episode from ER. But next day she’d recovered completely and we went to Casa Versace. It wasn’t a casa actually, it was a palazzo and simply magnificent. From reception we were led to a courtyard where we stood with our mouths open and pretended that we all lived lifestyles of the rich and famous. Gianni Versace and his sister Donatella met us and posed prettily for photographs, but Gianni turned very vague when I asked him about his inspiration for the forthcoming Bicentennial event. It became obvious that neither he nor his sister had spent any time at all thinking about it just yet, although Donatella said that the shoes would be important. Thinking about the narrow staircases leading up to the stage, I couldn’t have agreed more, but decided not to burden her with details just yet. Eventually we recorded some vague comments by Gianni, which were delivered most charmingly but made very little sense. It seemed, however, that Donatella was taking notes and, as has become clear since Gianni’s tragic death, her talents as a designer were obscured by the larger-than-life personality of her famous brother. Our next destination was near Lake Geneva—home of the House of Missoni, label of the husband-and-wife team of Tai and Rosita Missoni. Whereas Versace lived in the heart of industrial Milan, the Missonis lived in the most idyllic rural surroundings imaginable. Their factory, totally hidden by trees in rolling meadows, is a high-tech plant that produces breathtaking woollen fabric in signature Missoni designs that blend and interweave colours in abstract modernist patterns. The fabric is then woven into quite the sexiest woollens available. Rosita, who is responsible for design,
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is a benign grandmotherly type who invited us to afternoon tea in their orchard from where we could hear the quacking of ducks and the laughter of children. Tai Missoni is an impossibly handsome man, an ex-Olympic skier for Italy who is responsible for marketing the business. The Missonis’ daughter and her husband live next door, and in a scene from a fairytale, their three-year-old daughter brought a gardener to our table carrying a gingham-covered basket. Gently she peeled back the cloth to reveal three blue duck eggs that they’d just found. We recorded the interview in the orchard and didn’t want to leave. But our next stop was Paris and our first film shoot was with Sonia Rykiel. Mme Rykiel is red-haired and narrow-faced with a fine eye for knitted wool fashions. She would have made a wonderful character actress in movies about Berlin in the 1920s or Paris in the 1950s, and perhaps she did. Although she understood English very well, she was more comfortable speaking in French, and told us in her husky, cigarette-flavoured voice that ‘wool is for lovers’ or laine est l’amour. We couldn’t have agreed more. Later, we crossed the road for coffee and a baguette at Les Deux Magots. Hemingway and his crowd had hung out here, as had most of the French literary elite, but I was sitting with two French girls from the International Wool Secretariat. While chatting idly, both girls were scanning the passing pedestrians for their outfits. They were devastating in their ability to name each designer’s work as it walked past on someone’s back, and also whether it was still fashionable or passé. I was wearing jeans and they’d already dismissed my fashion sense as too hopeless even to be passé, so they were paying me no attention. A rather attractive woman in her late twenties walked by and both girls stopped their flow of designer comments, looked at each other significantly and nodded. I asked what they’d seen. ‘She has broken up with her boyfriend this morning,’ one of them told me.
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I asked if she was a friend, and they said they’d never seen her before. ‘Then how . . . ?’ They looked at me pityingly. ‘She is not wearing a ring on either hand, she is not married. Her eye liner was applied too quickly and her eyes are puffy.’ I pointed out that she could be allergic to something. The girls called for the bill; they were sick of spending time with an idiot. ‘Ric, she was wearing a Gucci dress with Chanel shoes and the wrong handbag. They were uncoordinated. She has obviously not worried about her accessories when she dressed this morning. There is only one thing that could so distract a French woman, and that is love. She is either too happy or too sad to dress well this morning. She was not happy, so voila!’ They could have taught Sherlock Holmes a thing or two about fashion and it reinforced Sonia Rykiel’s message about wool and lovers. We also recorded interviews with Claude Montana and Kenzo while we were in Paris. Montana sat brooding moodily in his studio, surrounded by endless racks of navy coats and dresses that Chrissie said were ‘to die for’. Claude looked ready to—possibly because there was no earthly connection between his wonderful woollens and the land from which the wool came. Still, he pretended that while sketching his designs for the Bicentennial Collection, he thought of nothing but Australian woolgrowers and their sheep. It may even have been true. Months later when he was in Sydney, a journalist asked Montana for his opinion of Australia. Claude looked at him with mournful eyes and said deadpan that if he couldn’t live in Paris, he’d like to die in Australia. At the entrance to Kenzo’s studio was a lobby, in which rows of small wooden chairs had been arranged as if in a schoolroom. Seated in the chairs were woollen sheep puppets, wearing perky coloured outfits. I wondered at first if Kenzo had received a faulty
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translation of the brief he’d been sent, but I think the cute woolly things were his own way of welcoming us. Kenzo is unusual in that he’s a Japanese designer living in Paris, who has been totally accepted by the French as one of their own. He and I were both very excited about his reaction to another part of the brief—the designers’ choice of models. Vincent and I were concerned that the catwalk models in Sydney who strutted their stuff at David Jones or Myer might not all fulfil international expectations, so we offered the designers their choice of two models each. These girls would also be available to the other designers, so we would have a core group of eighteen ‘super’ models to present the Collection at the Opera House. Kenzo wanted Elle Macpherson as one of his models, and I didn’t mind a bit. We had a day off in Paris so we headed for Reims—centre of the champagne district. After a fleeting glimpse of the famous cathedral façade, I decided that postcards would do for the landmarks, but not for the bubbly stuff that the good monk Dom Perignon had discovered hundreds of years earlier in this very town. In fact, I planned to visit all the major labels for comparison tests, but after visiting only Taittinger and Veuve Cliquot I was having difficulty staggering, so was placed back in the bus. The great champagne houses provide very good tours of their caves, and it is thirsty work. The Romans were the first to start tunnelling in the limestone, and every century the tunnels grow a little longer. Generations of winegrowers have used these underground cellars, and knowing that there were millions of bottles of champagne stored carefully in kilometres of underground tunnels reassured me that the Bicentennial celebrations were unlikely to run short. When everyone was back in the bus, we headed out of town in search of a chateau. By one of those coincidences that make life interesting, we came around a bend and there in the long, slanting rays of the setting sun was a fairytale castle surrounded by vineyards. We drove up to the front gate to find a wizened
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vintner tending his vines. I offered to purchase as many as two bottles of his wine if he’d show us over his castle. He produced two bottles of champagne, and after I’d paid he told us that the castle didn’t belong to him—he was just renting some acreage for his vines. But he did say that this was the Cliquot family seat and there was no one home if we wanted to have a look around. Unfortunately, the doors were locked and there was a huge statue of someone resembling Saddam Hussein in the front yard. We discovered that the Cliquot family had cashed in the castle back in the 1920s and that a Persian clan had bought it. From Paris we flew on to New York to record our final two designers—Donna Karan and Oscar de la Renta. When we met in her office, Donna played the role of a Jewish mum to perfection. She was warm and funny and offered me a recipe for chicken soup. Her collection seemed to consist of navy blue body stockings and navy blue business suits for busy New York women, so it was difficult to decide how Australia had inspired Donna’s designs. (Perhaps the deep blue seas where the Great White Sharks swim, we decided.) There was also muttering by the International Wool Secretariat that some of Donna’s fabric might not be, gasp, 100 per cent wool. On the other hand, she was a very good client who was about to launch her DKNY label, so they stretched a point to allow her sexy undergarments to be stretched over our models in Sydney. Donna’s personal assistant, Patty, took me aside to get the lowdown on details like the show rehearsal schedule, models and dressing rooms. Patty was rail-thin and spent a lot of time running her hands through her hair while speaking very fast. Her high metabolic rate was a clue to the stress of working with Donna, but at the time I ignored it—although I did notice that the personal assistants reflected the character of their designer bosses. Broody and moody Claude Montana had a PA known as Bootsie, who got the name from his habit of hurling shoes at models during fashion parades. The other two Parisian designers, Sonia Rykiel and Kenzo, had
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efficient assistants who reflected the professionalism of their labels. Jean Muir’s two assistants were very English, simply charming and highly efficient. Oscar de la Renta’s assistant looked like a Swiss banker. The Missoni assistants were treated like members of the family, and Gianni Versace brought out real members of his family to help with his collection. The pressure on a top-level fashion designer is intense, and the assistants have a role somewhere between best friend, psychiatrist and corporate adviser. Back in Sydney, we were heading towards Christmas 1987 and all seemed in reasonable shape for both Expo ’88 and the Bicentennial Wool Collection. Chrissie Koltai was getting into creative director mode and teetered on the edge of a nervous breakdown, which is when she works best. She was putting much thought and energy into choosing the dancers and creating the choreographic tableaux that would introduce each designer’s collection. The tableaux ranged from the 1920s Boyfriend-style choreography that introduced Jean Muir’s clothes to the ‘Killer Yam’ costumes that led into Claude Montana’s stylish display. (Killer Yams were large brown bags made of stretch fabric, inside which the dancers performed deeply meaningful movements in homage to the designer.) The stage set was being constructed and the Concert Hall had been measured to within a centimetre. I wondered what I had forgotten. There were, in fact, a couple of jobs I would have preferred to forget—not because I produced them, but because I didn’t. When Spectak was formed in partnership with Rupert Murdoch, the upcoming Bicentennial celebrations and the opening ceremony for the new Parliament House would have been in my business plan—if I’d written one. There had been a quiet nod and a wink from Canberra that perhaps I’d like to pop down and have a look at progress on the new Parliament House and bend my mind around an opening ceremony for it. I did go down and have a look around, then came back to Sydney and developed an opening
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ceremony that I think, in all modesty, would have been pretty memorable. I always try to create a logical storyline in a ceremony so that a spectator can follow it without needing a commentary. Obviously, the old Parliament House represented the spirit of Australia past, and the new building was the future. But most Australians, like citizens of democracies everywhere, know little of the history of their parliament or its members and, frankly, couldn’t care less. I wanted to visually represent the thousands of ordinary (in some cases, very ordinary) members of parliament who had faithfully (and in some cases, unfaithfully) performed their duties in the green and pleasant paddocks of Canberra over the past sixty years or so. The old Parliament House stands a little forlorn these days, but in its heyday it was probably very nice—like a brick veneer in a comfortable suburb, it represented the solid values of the mythical ordinary Australian. The new Parliament House, on the other hand, is probably the most palatial building ever paid for by a democracy, certainly on a per capita basis. Louis XIV would have felt comfy in Canberra. I decided to have a ‘card stunt’ section form up on the lawns directly in front of the old Parliament House stretching in a long block towards the Imperial War Museum. A card stunt section is a group of people who, with cards, umbrellas, balloons or similar, form a giant mural—exactly the same as the schoolchildren had in Brisbane at the Commonwealth Games. For Canberra, however, I wanted the performers to carry a card that was white on one side and black on the other. The ceremony would have begun with the card section coming out of the old Parliament House and taking their position on the long lawns in front. I hadn’t thought too much about the composition of the group, but would like to have costumed them in appropriate clothes from 1901 to the present. They’d have been wearing work clothes to remind the politicians that although they
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had it sweet, they’d got there on the sweat of a lot of working people. On cue, the cards would form a black and white portrait of an Australian prime minister, hold it for a moment, then move on to the next and so on, from 1901 to 1988. We could even have added a governor-general or two if Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser were speaking to each other by then. Having rolled through the prime ministers of the day up to Bob Hawke and back again to Edmund Barton and Federation, the card section would form the federal coat of arms with ’roo and emu, after which a military band would march out of the old Parliament House and form up at the head of the card section. Then all would move off together towards the new Parliament House, the card-carrying members of our democracy following the defenders of our way of life. When our brave parade arrived at the new building, it would have formed up on the forecourt and continued with the rolling portraits of prime ministers as the band played on. But hark! From afar comes the sound of a mighty throng! The new Parliament House is at the hub of six major avenues linking to it like the spokes of a wheel, and down each avenue a huge crowd of voters would have approached, representing every federal electorate, past and present. They would have been carrying banners with the name of each electorate, and photographs with the name of every man or woman who had been their parliamentary representative; a mighty throng indeed as they came to Canberra to celebrate their new building on behalf of all taxpayers and voters. They were to assemble on the grassed roof of the building and listen to the necessary speeches before breaking out into picnics. There was a bit more to it than that, but you get the picture, I hope. I put all this together into a document with a few artist’s impressions and photographs, a stab at a budget of around $20 million and sent it off to the Clerk of the Parliament, the chap in charge of celebrations. I got a phone call a few days later asking if my fee was $20 million. To this day I wish I’d said ‘yes’. There
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might have been a cheque in the mail. Remember, these people had paid $10 million for a flagpole and they didn’t think that was excessive. Unfortunately, I put the Clerk straight and pointed out to him that bringing thousands of people to the national capital would cost a bit, plus there were all those cards and banners and picnics. He hung up the phone and I never heard from him again. But I did speak to the architect who said that both he and the Clerk of the Parliament had been horrified by my ceremony, which they felt entirely missed the point. As far as they were concerned, this magnificent building was for parliamentarians, not the people, and it needed to celebrate those who were to sit in it, not entertain the electorate. I felt of course that they’d rather missed the point, so perhaps I needed a commentator after all. (The eventual opening of the new Parliament Building was indeed a very sedate and solemn affair, with very few of the electorate allowed near enough to get in the way of the really important people. I occasionally go to Canberra and look at the new Parliament House and wonder if anything would be different if I’d had my way with the opening ceremony.) The other major gig that passed me by was the Federal Bicentennial celebration. Of course, as things had turned out, I was producing the Bicentennial Wool Collection and the entertainment program for Expo ’88 which, as Sir Llew never tired of telling his interstate visitors, was going to be the centrepiece of the Bicentennial celebrations. The interstate visitors thought that it would just be a Queensland country party. But there had been a time a few years earlier when it seemed that Australia would throw its metaphorical 200-year-old hat in the air and declare itself a jolly good fellow—so I had hoped there would be a major ceremony to celebrate the occasion. A Bicentennial Committee was formed, stuffed with good people and intentions. There was a Tall Ships Committee and great expenditure of money, but the only
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significant result was the Bicentennial Travelling Exhibition which avoided the major cities and only showed itself to rural voters. The real party took place on Sydney Harbour on Australia Day, when hundreds of thousands of fellow Australians attended the fabulous fireworks and boat show. To this day I have friends who say it was the greatest day of their life and, if asked to explain, mumble about sunshine and national pride and being on the water with millions of others just like them in search of a drink. Unfortunately, I couldn’t take part or even go to watch. Instead, I was up to my ears in models and frocks. Australia Day was the date that we’d scheduled for the designers and their staffs to meet the girls we had selected to wear their collections. The imported supermodels were like exotic racing cars in a parking lot of Holdens and came over to tell me they couldn’t stay long because the Prime Minister had invited them over to Kirribilli for a drink. And he had, too, the lucky bastard. Bob Hawke got to spend the afternoon and evening with all eighteen gorgeous girls in their best frocks plus the designers who went off to Kirribilli House to watch the fireworks, while Karen and I and the assistants stayed behind until midnight to work out who was going to wear what. That was January 26, 1988. Five days until the show at the Opera House and one of the last times that we were all speaking to each other. The Ten network was televising the show, but the network’s owners had recently changed. Weeks earlier, Rupert Murdoch had resigned himself to the fact that he couldn’t meet the Australian and American media ownership rules that would have required him to live in both countries at once, although if anyone could, it would be Murdoch. Instead, he had taken advantage of a remarkable surge of interest from buyers willing to pay huge money for an Australian TV licence. This gold rush had started with Bondy, the pommy from Perth who’d had a rush of blood to the head when he won the America’s Cup in 1983. He bought the Nine network from Kerry Packer for a billion dollars, a deal that Packer had
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found too good to refuse. As Packer famously said, ‘You only meet one Alan Bond in a lifetime.’ Christopher Skase, who later became Australia’s most famous overseas financier, was doing well at the time with his prophetically named Mirage developments. Skase bought Channel Seven and, thinking he was now a mogul, made an Alan Bond-like play to buy the MGM movie studio from Kirk Kerkorian in Los Angeles. Meanwhile, over at Ten, an offer too good to refuse arrived from the Lowy family—owners and developers of the highly successful Westfield Shoppingtowns. The Lowys knew about shopping but not about television, so Rupert turned a handsome profit and exited stage left. He didn’t hang about for the Bicentennial Wool Collection either, but must have forgotten to hand over his tickets to the chairman of Westfield, Frank Lowy, because two days before the show we got a call from the new network chairman’s office asking for seats. Whoops. All tickets had gone to woolgrowers and there was no way we could ask for them back. The tickets had actually been free, but were selling on the black market for up to $5000 each. Many society women in Sydney found they had no way of getting tickets to the hottest fashion show in the history of Australia, so chose to leave town rather than admit they were luckless. But our indefatigable PR person, Prue McSween, managed to scrounge four seats in the choir stalls for the Lowys, so the new owners of the network got to watch their flagship show, albeit a long way from the Royals. (They weren’t happy then, and were even less happy a couple of years later, when they realised that running a television network wasn’t like owning shopping malls and decided to sell the Ten network at a massive discount.) I didn’t even have time to talk to the Lowys. Backstage at the Opera House, a soap opera was unfolding. Donna Karan had extended her rehearsal time by an hour, ignoring everyone and infuriating the normally mild-mannered Bruce Oldfield. Gianni Versace and Oscar de la Renta had almost come to blows over the
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models. Claude Montana had become very sulky when he saw an Australian designer’s outfits for the show—which were copies of Claude’s designs from last season—homage! darling, the wool girls trilled, trying to keep Bootsie from throwing shoes at people. Jean Muir wandered around murmuring ‘good luck, darling’ to everyone. Sonia Rykiel and Kenzo banded together to say things in French that no one would translate for me. On the night of January 30 we had the final dress rehearsal. It’s an old showbiz saying that a bad dress rehearsal means a good show, but I’ve never been ready to rely on it. I’d asked Donna Karan’s assistant to take her up to Palm Beach for the afternoon, just so she wasn’t killed by a long line of people with me at the head of it. I was losing my voice. Karen and I had stayed up until dawn for three nights in a row after rehearsals, trying to rearrange the rundown and shorten the show so that it would finish on the same day it started. The dress rehearsal wasn’t going well. Models were complaining that cameramen followed them backstage to film them changing. Dressers were complaining there wasn’t enough space for the girls to change or room for their accessories. Our music composer, who had promised that the music would be ready, was still putting the final touches onto tape for the second half of the show during intermission. Bootsie was about to throw shoes. The final straw was a call from the stage manager to ask if I could talk to Oscar de la Renta who was leaving the building with his frocks. I ran around to the backstage corridor to find Oscar pushing a wardrobe rack laden with his clothes towards the exit. I placed a foot in front of a wheel and over a stab of pain asked Oscar what seemed to be the problem. ‘Versace,’ was all he said. I discovered that the source of Oscar’s angst was Gianni’s demand that his models have fluffed-up hair, while Oscar wanted the same girls to be wearing slicked-down hair for his segment. There wouldn’t be time to change the hair between segments and Oscar didn’t want big hair with his collection. (He also didn’t have an
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explanation for how his extremely Hispanic black and white ensembles had been inspired by Australia, but I managed to come up with the idea that he’d been inspired by the monochrome engravings in early books about Australia. Oscar repeated this on television with a somewhat sardonic smile.) But now Oscar was complaining that Versace had got to his girls and their hairdressers and no one would listen to him, so now Oscar was leaving the show. He’d caught me at a bad time. I stood back from the wardrobe rack and said, ‘OK, Oscar. You want to leave, there’s the door. The show’s running too long, and frankly I don’t mind dropping a segment.’ Oscar paused. ‘You want me to leave?’ ‘No, of course not, but it’s your choice.’ The thought of leaving Versace to have the stage and the models to himself was too much for Oscar. I helped him push the rack of clothes back to the dressing room. No one took a scrap of notice and our brilliant hair supervisor, John Bird, soothed ruffled feathers, smoothed out the bangs, pins and bouffants, and everyone seemed to be happy. The imperturbable Michael Parkinson was to be a television commentator for the show and had been originally paired with Maggie Tabberer. But Maggie had called from Italy to say that she couldn’t do it and in a flurry of last-minute suggestions Chrissie suggested Deborah Hutton. Deborah was perfect. She had been a fashion model herself and was currently on television as the ‘face’ of Grace Bros. Harry M. Miller, who represented Maggie and was a little chagrined at being unable to deliver her, offered to handle Deborah. As it were. Harry and Deborah became a couple around town for nearly a decade afterwards and it all started at the Bicentennial Wool Collection. After the final dress rehearsal at the Opera House, I wrote a memo to myself: ‘No matter how the show turns out, remember
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you never want to work with fashion designers again.’ This is advice that I’ve followed ever since. However, although the combination of egos was a potentially explosive mix, I developed an enormous respect and admiration for the top international fashion designers. There can be no other industry that puts such pressure on its leading figures. Every six months, they are expected to come out with a new collection and every seam and hemline is closely scrutinised. The fashion media mafia are merciless if they discern any weakness or misstep and, of course, there are plenty of piranhas down the food chain that are waiting to attack one of the big fish. Designers need high personal esteem and self-confidence to survive when their own name is literally on the product and millions of dollars and thousands of employees depend upon their creativity. So, although I don’t want to work with fashion designers again, it’s not because I don’t admire them. On the day of the Wool Collection, I wasn’t quite so calm or objective. By late afternoon on the day of the show I’d lost my voice entirely. Laurie had arrived from Brisbane where she was preparing for Expo ’88 and wanted to know how things had been going at the Opera House. I used explicit gestures that startled her. Laurie was going to watch the show with me because I’d decided there was no point in being backstage. My job finishes just before the curtain rises. Then it’s up to everyone involved onstage and backstage to do their jobs. Usually I like being around the control room so I can keep an eye on problems, but in the case of the Bicentennial Collection there were too many to worry about. Earlier, I’d assembled the cast of models and crew and, standing on a chair, whispered hoarsely that the show would be great and their place in the history of fashion was secure. It was somewhat less inspiring than Churchill addressing Spitfire pilots, but an hour later the show took off. It turned out to be a great success, and later that night I was surrounded by very tall models who stooped
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to kiss me on the cheek as I shook hands manfully with the designers. Charles and Di said they’d had a ripping time; Di had chatted excitedly with all the designers, while Charles commented favourably upon the see-through blouses that had confronted him at eye-level. About then I would have been prepared to produce another fashion parade, but somehow I just never got the urge again.
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nine
The happiest place on earth The happiest place on earth
I
n my days as a student at Melbourne University, Burt Cooper was studying law and I should have been studying too; instead, I was spending a lot of my time behind the curtains of the Union Theatre. I learned about stage management, lighting, design, directing, producing and how to build sets, but spent far less time studying torts and the principles of law. On the other hand, Burt managed his time and studies so that he could appear onstage in the German department’s production of Goethe’s Faust and my production of the ‘Arts Revue’ and still pass his exams. Years later, Burt had found lawyers were less fun to work with than theatricals and he too had become a producer of special events based in Melbourne. I phoned him and asked if he’d like to produce the opening ceremony for Expo ’88, fibbing a little when I said ‘It’s all organised. It’s simply a question of bringing the pieces together and making it happen.’ Burt said he’d be delighted and flew to Brisbane. 123
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We had an emotional reunion and Burt approached the Expo opening ceremony with the energy and single-mindedness of an eighteen-year-old. I tentatively mentioned my somewhat rash promise to the Brisbane media that there would be pink submarines in the river. Not just submarines, but tap dancers, too. Burt took notes and said nothing. Emboldened, I told him about my idea of having an inflatable ribbon submerged beneath the river, so that at the opening it could rise to the surface and a giant pair of scissors on a boat would cut through it. He looked a little more quizzical, but just nodded and made a note. Then there was the 2000-piece symphony orchestra (at which his head shot up), the marching band and formation in the Town Hall Square followed by a march to the Expo site past a wall of flags made of helium balloons lining the Victoria Bridge, the flyover by a wing of RAAF Hercules aircraft dropping balloons, the pyrotechnic flag shells being launched from the Expo site, followed, of course, by the formal opening ceremony at the River Stage involving the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh. The entertainment program that had taken three years to prepare would then begin all over the site and continue for 186 days straight. Then there would be a closing ceremony. Burt looked up again and asked his first question. ‘Would you like me to do that, too?’ Of course I would. Burt managed to procure a pink submarine. I’d hoped that the Navy would lend us one for painting practice, but it turned out that Australia’s submarines weren’t available. (They turned out not to be available to the Navy very much either, but that’s another story.) Burt got students and staff at one of Brisbane’s technical colleges to design and build the top half of a submarine that could be placed on top of two barges. They got to work, and shortly before the opening we had the submarine. Who says that dreams don’t come true? Between them, Burt and Paul Fitzgerald had created a polka-dotted pink and purple submarine with a Perspex deck that lit up when the thirty-six tap dancers burst into
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their routine; frankly, if that vessel had ever gone to war the enemy would have died laughing. It wasn’t the only bit of fun onsite. In between playing with frocks in Sydney I’d been working on the aquacade with the wickedly talented Robyn Moase. Robyn and I had worked together on the ABC TV variety shows I’d produced ten years earlier, and remains a great friend and one of the most talented people I’ve ever met. In the course of her working life Robyn’s been an exceptional director, dancer, writer, singer, actress, comedienne and choreographer. In the course of her private life, Robyn is a Scorpio, neurotic, totally romantic, unlucky in love and wasn’t doing anything when I called. ‘What’s an aquacade?’ she asked. ‘You remember Esther Williams in Million Dollar Mermaid?’ I said. ‘My God! Are you going to do one of those!’ Robyn shrieked, envisaging trapezes being lowered from the sky as heroines rose from the crystal depths with perfect hairstyles, their underwater makeup illuminated by submarine pyrotechnics while a symphony orchestra played at poolside. ‘Exactly,’ I told her. This was a bit of an exaggeration, but it got her attention and she started working on the script. Robyn’s historical knowledge was sketchy and the aquacade ended up starring Captain Bligh instead of Governor Phillip (who was the official cause of the Bicentennial celebrations), but we weren’t making a documentary. Over the preceding years, I’d been preparing for the aquacade with an American named Bob Maxwell, who, together with his wife Norma and son Dean, had been operating high-diving shows all over the US and in a few international locations as well. The Maxwells became great friends, and in fact Dean was my best man when Laurie and I were married. To Laurie’s great dismay, Bob even followed us on our honeymoon to keep me informed about
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the aquacade and other business opportunities that I could take advantage of, if only I would concentrate on making money instead of having fun. I had to tell him that it was the story of my life and that I wasn’t about to change. Bob and Norma had both been champion swimmers and divers when they met, and Bob had turned their skills into an international business that employed dozens of divers. They’d actually worked with Esther Williams and knew her well, but Bob said that after she married Fernando Lamas her swimming days ended because Lamas wouldn’t allow other men to see her in a swimsuit. In the 1950s, Norma had performed in Billy Rose’s legendary aquacade at the Coney Island steel pier in Atlantic City. She used to ride a horse bareback in a huge tank of seawater on the pier, in a show that sounded like an odd mix of mermaid and Melbourne Cup. The finale came when the side of the tank flew open, and the horse with Norma aboard was emptied from the tank to the ocean below in a huge deluge of water. She used to do this five times a day. It sounded fabulous but it was too late to incorporate into the Brisbane venue design. Besides, one of the animal cruelty organisations had stepped in to protect the horse. Interestingly, no one stepped in to protect Norma, so she had to find another job and that was when the Maxwells began their diving shows. Robyn’s script called for Captain Bligh’s mutinous crew to dilly-dally daily in Tahitian lagoons with synchronised maidens, and compete in a high-diving contest for the hand of the king’s beautiful daughter. Bob and Norma introduced me to a famous synchronised swimming coach from the US named Marion Kane, who sentenced Canadian and American swimmers, along with a few Australians, to ‘six months in paradise’, as she described the job. As mentioned earlier, the first venture into the water wasn’t a success as almost all the girls came down with ear infections. The
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divers were luckier, probably because they spent less time in the water, but the setback got rehearsals off to a shaky start. There were a total of twenty-four swimmers and fifteen divers, although they never all appeared at once. (We needed additional cast members so they could have days off during the non-stop six-month schedule.) The venue looked great, but we were having problems with the set. Scenery for a theatrical show doesn’t have to be made of real stone or trees or concrete—it just has to look as though it is. This message didn’t seem to have reached the set builders who normally worked in the Brisbane housing construction industry. When the sets depicting the Tahitian idyll arrived, we needed a forklift just to get them onto the stage. The divers would have had a hernia to get them off. Back in Sydney, Greg Volich and Merri Took had finished the Wool Collection where they had been responsible for the set construction and done a great job, so they came up to lend theatrical experience to the aquacade. Robyn had meanwhile hired John Connelly to choreograph, and we’d also been lucky enough to get Trevor White and Mike Williams to alternate the lead in ‘Bligh’s Follies’—we needed two stars because we played five times daily for 186 days in a row. (John Connelly would later become even more famous when he choreographed Moulin Rouge for Baz Luhrmann, and Trevor was always famous because he’d had the title role in Jesus Christ, Superstar. Mike was the best-known of all at the time, because he’d been a regular on The Mike Walsh Show.) Now that the synchronised swimmers had recovered from their ear infections, the set builders were back on track, the divers were happy with the pools and highdive positions, the stars had arrived and the costumes looked good, it started to rain. The swimmers and waterskiers were able to keep rehearsals going, but it made everyone else miserable. It didn’t just rain for a few days, it rained for weeks. Expo was due to open on April 30 and there were only three days onsite
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without rain in the whole month. During that period, our electronic equipment had to be installed at the venues, together with lighting and audio cabinets and consoles, speakers, microphones, lights, followspots, fog machines, projectors, SkyTrackers, Space Cannons and lasers. It’s somewhat tricky to connect three-phase, 400-volt power cables to lighting systems in the rain, but John Rayment’s team persevered magnificently and safely. Slowly the venues had the finishing touches added, using giant tarpaulins to protect wet paint while giant hot air blowers were used to dry the paint as quickly as possible. The rain cascaded down the shade structures and onto the main pathways throughout the Expo site. The site development chaps had painted these pathways with a special paint that became as slippery as ice when wet. Before the Expo opened, staff fell down regularly on the rain-drenched paths. Once Expo opened, the sprinkler system for the landscaping ensured that the paths got wet and slippery, even without rain. The local hospital became very familiar with wrist, arm and knee injuries from the slipways of Expo, but amazingly enough, although many people were injured over the six months of Expo, no one sued and the paint was never changed for something less slippery. Finally, after the endless rain of April, Opening Day cleared to brilliant sunshine and from then on Expo was blessed. Over the next six months there were only eight days on which it rained. No wonder show business people are superstitious. The opening ceremony got underway. Everything worked like clockwork and the Royal couple arrived by boat at the River Stage to declare that we were now in business and to let the commoners in. The 2000-piece symphony orchestra positioned along the parade route swung into action, coordinated by thirty conductors wearing headphones to ensure their musicians stayed in synch. More than 100,000 happy Expo season ticket holders
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swarmed onto the site, filling the nooks and crannies of every venue. Among the visitors was my daughter Lara, now aged ten and rapidly adapting to life on the Expo site. She’d spent a few weeks with Laurie and me in Brisbane during the preparation phase, but once the site was open she had a lot more fun. Apart from hanging around backstage at the aquacade and getting in the way, she got to know most of the performers at the other venues and made a very good unofficial guide for friends who were visiting the site. On Opening Day, my secretary Margaret asked if Lara would like to meet the Queen. Lara, never overawed by the occasion, allowed that that might be cool. Margaret took her downstairs to the front entrance of Expo Headquarters, and handed her a bouquet of freshly-picked dandelions. Shortly afterward, the Queen and Duke arrived for a formal lunch and Lara was pushed forward into the path of Her Majesty. The Queen was very gracious and received the somewhat limp wildflowers with a smile as Lara performed her best dancing school curtsy. The Queen then went to lunch, while the press tried to identify the cherub with the wildflowers. Now it can be revealed. On Opening Day, the people of Brisbane were clearly very happy with the fun fair that had landed on their front doorstep and were determined to make the most of it. It was a pattern that repeated itself for 186 days, and on the final day an extraordinary crowd of almost 350,000 people came to say farewell to the Happiest Place on Earth, as Sir Llew referred to the Expo site. But on Opening Day we still didn’t know if Expo ’88 would be successful. A couple of months earlier there had been a special Expo train to Melbourne to drum up awareness and support for the event. It hadn’t attracted much attention from the Melbourne media, who intimated that Brisbane’s idea of modernity was to travel by rail. I remember an interview with a Melbourne journalist who sneered
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when Sir Llew predicted that the Expo attendance would top eight million. The journo curled his lip at me and said, ‘You don’t really believe that, do you?’ As it happened, I wasn’t sure. Sir Peter Abeles, an extremely astute businessman, wasn’t sure either. One of Sir Peter’s companies owned the merchandising rights for Expo ’88 and he had questioned Sir Llew’s prediction of eight million visitors when he was negotiating the contract. That figure had in fact been calculated by specialists from Walt Disney who were meant to know the attendance business better than anyone. But Sir Peter insisted on hedging his bets. He told Sir Llew that if the Expo attendance figures did not reach 7.5 million, he wanted one dollar per person for the shortfall. Llew conceded, but only if Sir Peter agreed that if the attendance went beyond 7.5 million visitors, Expo would receive one dollar for each extra visitor. As the conventional wisdom in Melbourne held that Expo could never reach its target, Abeles agreed. It ended up being a costly concession. The Melbourne journalist must have been listening to Sir Peter, because he too made me a deal. When I insisted that of course Expo would reach its attendance target, he bet me a case of French champagne that it wouldn’t. I agreed and when I got back to Brisbane I sent him a note confirming the bet. All of us were hopelessly wrong. The final tally was that 17.8 million visitors had gone through Expo’s turnstiles. The Melbourne journalist welched on the bet and said he couldn’t remember making it. He’d probably been told that the paper wouldn’t reimburse him for a dozen bottles of vintage Bollinger, but since then I’ve never trusted anything he’s written. The first night concert at the River Stage set the standard for the shows that followed—Glen Frey played with Glenn Shorrock and the Little River Band and the crowd loved it. The pink submarine steamed improbably down the river, with girls in pink concoctions tap dancing on its deck. Personal hovercraft zoomed
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around the water pretending they were Star Wars warriors. The first of Laurie’s fabulous laser and fireworks shows followed the concert, and that too was a blast. A tired but happy group of entertainment department people gathered at my office later that night and we celebrated, until we realised that we were going to have to do this again, next day and every day for the next six months. I’d rarely been involved with a project that had to be done more than once and wondered how I’d cope. In fact, it was easy—everyone else did the work and I was able to wander around and enjoy it. The pink submarine with its tap dancing deckhands assumed mythical proportions. Although it had been designed to appear only on opening night, popular demand to see the submarine and crew was so strong that Burt arranged for it to navigate the river every night for a week. After that extended cruise, however, the vessel’s joints were starting to come apart because it hadn’t been built to last, so the decision was made to get it into dry dock for repairs and reinforcement. Unfortunately, the guys at the Brisbane dry dock had no theatrical training. They apparently thought the pink polka-dotted vessel was a real submarine. Over Burt’s anguished cries of alarm, the dockside cranes picked up the hull with slings fore and aft, and no support in the middle. With a loud rending of timber, the hull cracked apart and the ship sailed no more. (Something like John Bertrand’s One Australia some years later.) A few weeks after we lost our submarine on dry land, we suffered another maritime loss. Expo ’88’s marketing mascot was known as Expo Oz, a platypus-like creature with a strong family resemblance to Disney’s Donald Duck. We had commissioned a ten-metre-tall, inflatable version of Oz for the opening ceremony, which was mounted on a ‘tinny’ (although perhaps we should have used a rubber ducky) and taken for a cruise on the river alongside
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the Expo site. On this particular day, Oz was taken for a trawl in his aluminium boat and hit turbulence caused by a passing ferry— a following wave flooded the stern and kept on flooding as Oz settled into the water. Rather than be dragged to his death by a blown-up duck, our boat driver cut Oz loose and watched the mascot sink into the murky waters of the Brisbane River. We had salvage divers into the water within fifteen minutes of the cry ‘Oz Overboard!’, but the marsupial mascot’s body was never recovered. I like to think of him in some mangrove swamp on Moreton Bay, still entertaining the local fauna and flora with tales of his Expo exploits. For quite a while after the opening ceremony, I didn’t really think about life after Expo. Most nights I was down at the River Stage with Laurie, watching her laser and fireworks show, or standing around the Piazza watching the latest circus performers, or over at the Aquacade watching Mike or Trevor having fun with the audience. The last thing I wanted to do was to make plans for the closing ceremony, but it was approaching faster than I’d expected. Burt Cooper came back up to Brisbane and we decided to have the Seekers perform ‘The Carnival is Over’ as the last musical moment on the Expo site. At a time when more and more visitors were coming to Expo to enjoy it, Burt and I were the only ones planning to end the euphoria. It had been a while since the Seekers had performed together, but I hoped they’d be prepared to regroup for this one time to perform the perfect song for the occasion. At least that was how we pitched it to Judith Durham, but she didn’t want to play. This was a shame because her unusually pure and powerful, soaring soprano was the key to the Seekers’ distinctive sound. The three men wanted to perform and had apparently wanted to regroup in the past, but had always run into resistance from Judith. They could afford to wait, but Burt and I could not. Burt came up with a brilliant suggestion for a replacement and the three male members
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of the group were enthusiastic, so we approached Julie Anthony to see if she’d be willing to take Judith’s place for the night. She was uncertain until she’d rehearsed in the studio with Bruce Welch, Athol Guy and Keith Potger, after which we knew we had a hit on our hands. I suspect that Judith Durham felt the same way because after Julie’s stunning performance, Judith suddenly became available for a nostalgic reunion tour of the Seekers which, until then, had been out of the question. On the closing night of Expo, the packed crowd in front of the stage lit sparklers as the carnival was declared over, and most of the entertainment department burst into tears at the thought that now we’d all have to get a real job.
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ten
Spectak goes east Spectak goes east
M
y options were either to remain in Australia and hope there’d be more work for Spectak, or to pack up everything and move back to the US where there seemed to be endless opportunities. Laurie would happily have remained in Australia, but I wanted to re-establish myself in Los Angeles and take advantage of the contacts I’d made while planning the Expo entertainment. However, the thought of packing up two houses of furniture, plus the content of our Sydney offices, was slightly daunting. In all my previous moves I’d just put books into boxes, suits into cases, thrown them in the back of the car and driven to my new address, leaving furniture and kitchen utensils behind. Fortunately, Karen knew that there are companies who specialise in packing up a whole house and sending it anywhere in the world, which would take the hard work out of moving. That clinched my decision to move back to the US. Quite simply, there were too few opportunities in Australia. There are plenty of companies, disparagingly known as ‘Party Planners’, who provide
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entertainment services to corporations and private clients, but I didn’t want Spectak to become one of them. My plans for a job on the Expo site had also fallen through. I had hoped to have a post-Expo working relationship with the Kern Corporation in Brisbane, because they had won a tender for the development of the Expo site. This public tender had been issued by the Brisbane City Council, of which Sallyanne Atkinson was mayor at the time, but when it became known that a casino was at the centre of the redevelopment she took a lot of heat. The good folk of Brisbane weren’t happy about having a gambling hell in the centre of town and let the mayor know how they felt. Sally Anne did an abrupt backdown and withdrew the tender. A few years later, Brisbane got a casino anyway. My involvement with the Kern Corporation would have been to redevelop the only unsuccessful component of Expo—the socalled amusement park located on a concrete slab adjoining the site. This ‘iron ride’ park had been privately developed at a cost of around $60 million, but it never worked very well and after Expo was sold and then closed down. These days it’s a car park for the Convention Centre. My proposal had been to build a selfcontained village and entertainment area on the concrete slab, and I still think it would have been very successful. Based loosely on the knowledge that those areas of cities where artists congregate attract more visitors than other areas, I proposed building Expocity. Like Montmartre in Paris, Greenwich Village in New York, Venice Beach in Los Angeles, it would have its own population of artists, craftspeople, jewellers, stained-glass makers, together with early computer-graphic artists (whom Laurie had developed and encouraged for Expo displays), to populate an area designed around lofts, studios, ateliers and workshops, with narrow, winding, pedestrian-only walkways throughout the site. Restaurants, coffee shops and bars would attract locals and visitors, and the fine arts
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and crafts would sell if they were any good. Regrettably, once the Expo redevelopment tender was cancelled, Kern Corporation went very low profile and I never got the chance to build a place that artists could call home. Funnily enough, in Los Angeles the following year a mutual friend told Frank Zappa about the idea and Frank called me to suggest a meeting. He had a zany plan that had some similarities to my Expocity proposal. Frank wanted to establish an artistic centre in some key cities—Houston, Milan, Marseilles and possibly Sydney—and paint all the buildings in the arts precinct a particular shade of sky blue. His idea was that as the centre became popular with tourists and visitors, businesses would also want to be part of the colour scheme and the ‘blue’ centre would enlarge until an entire city was painted blue. I spent a couple of afternoons at his house, intrigued by the man but not the plan. My plans after Expo were to close the Sydney office, find a moving company to pack the Brisbane household, another to pack the Sydney apartment, then put everything into a container and set up shop again in Los Angeles. Mark Flaisher, who’d worked with me on the LA Olympics, was available so I hired him as Spectak’s first US employee and he started looking for office space in Santa Monica. Karen and Jacqui Culliton (TV director of the Wool Collection) had decided they wanted to form a special events production company and offered to represent Spectak in Australia, while I could represent them in LA. Laurie had purchased all the laser equipment from Expo, so in addition to an office and two households of furniture and possessions, we were now the proud owners of several powerful lasers and miles of the water hoses necessary to keep them cool. Much to my surprise, all this was stuffed into a twelve-metre shipping container, and without a backward glance Laurie and I made our way to the US the long way round via Thailand,
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Italy, Holland and England. We spent more than a month getting to Connecticut, where we arrived in time for New Year and then headed west to re-establish Spectak in Los Angeles. Mark Flaisher had found a serviced office with enough space for three chairs and two desks. For a short while this became the global headquarters of Spectak Productions, where I sat and waited for the work to flood in. In a month’s time, the shipping container was due to arrive from Australia and we would need to find bigger premises, although there was currently no demand from clients. We rented a hangar at Santa Monica airport so that Laurie could establish the laser business, and waited for the semi-trailer to deliver our container. As the contents were unloaded, it became clear how so much stuff had been made to fit into one container— anything fragile had been ‘consolidated’. We had a marble dining table, with marble coffee tables and planter stands, that must have been dropped from a considerable height, after which the fragments had been placed into large paper bags. Our entire dining room suite had been reduced to the size of two large garbage bins. Other bulky objects (like sofa cushions) were missing altogether. Miraculously, the lasers had arrived in the same number of pieces as they had left the Expo site, so Laurie was able to start setting up a demonstration studio while I wandered around the hangar looking at piles of boxes, trying to work out what was missing and what had been destroyed. It took no time at all to realise that Laurie and I couldn’t co-exist in a hangar—she needed it dark and I needed the lights on, so Mark started looking for new premises. He found a great space in Santa Monica on Broadway—the entire ground floor of a building with several offices and a conference room, a large studio for Laurie and twelve parking spaces. The only question mark was the Oriental Massage parlour upstairs. But the girls who worked there seemed very nice and they were certainly very clean because the spa baths were running most of
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the time. (Laurie discovered this later because water pressure to the lasers was important and was affected when too many of the spa baths were in use.) So now Spectak Productions was on Broadway and in business. Some interesting jobs came our way, including consulting on entertainment for the Parc Asterix theme park near Paris, and planning the entertainment for a proposed Expo that was to be staged jointly in Budapest and Vienna. While in Austria, I ran into Tony Phillips who had been head of Finance and Administration for Expo ’88 and was now working on the figures for Vienna. He told me that in the Australian New Year’s honours list, only Queenslanders had been honoured for their work on Expo. I wasn’t surprised and asked why he was surprised. Tony was apparently very miffed that his strong New Zealand accent seemed to have counted against him, because his Queensland-based deputy had received an Order of Australia and he hadn’t. That was when I discovered that Barbara Absolon, my deputy director of entertainment at Expo ’88, had been made an Orderly Australian, and I hadn’t! The same fate befell the director of marketing, where Sydneysider Graham Currie was overlooked for an honour, unlike his deputy who came from Brisbane. Sir Llew, it seemed, had been very loyal in recommending his fellow statesmen and women for honours, but was a bit cavalier towards the interstate and international people who’d assisted the Queenslanders in their hour of need. I reminded Tony that Rupert Murdoch had declined the traditional knighthood when he became the proprietor of the London Times, but Tony wouldn’t be placated. He really was upset to find that his efforts hadn’t been rewarded and said he had written to Sir Llew, who responded by denying all knowledge of the honours. We swapped stories for a while, then Tony went back to his figures and I reported to the Viennese that their Expo was doomed to failure if they only regarded it as a real estate
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development opportunity. A few months later, Vienna withdrew its bid, leaving Budapest out on a limb which broke off entirely when the Hungarians withdrew as well, and that was the last I heard from Tony. But I did send a letter to Sir Llew asking why there was such a difference between Queenslanders and nonQueenslanders when it came to the awarding of Expo honours. To this day I haven’t received an explanation. Six or seven years after Expo ’88, Sir Llew headed up another bid to obtain an international Expo for Queensland, located on some farmland ripe for development not far from Surfer’s Paradise. The BIE preferred a bid from the Philippines and awarded that Expo to Manila. Subsequently, President Estrella told the BIE that the Philippines would have to withdraw its candidature due to a total lack of funds. Sir Llew was unable to persuade the French authorities to reconsider the Queensland bid to become the next Happiest Place on Earth. I hope the knowledge that even people with honours don’t always get the gig will be of comfort to Tony, wherever he is. It made me feel better anyway, because I’ve never been offered an honour for any of my work in Australia although it’s been good for my deputies—Barb Absolon received one for Expo and David Atkins received one for Sydney 2000. But as I tend to live in countries that aren’t part of the British Commonwealth, the mailman could confuse an AO with AA, OA or even DOA, so it’s safer to be without honour in my own country—wherever that happens to be. I think that the honours are most treasured by people who still call Australia home or, in Tony’s case, New Zealand. Or in my case, my mother. Personally, I choose to live in Los Angeles because potential clients know where it is, but I rarely work in California. Most of 1989, I was elsewhere—in Seville, Osaka and Vienna working on Expo plans for those cities and in Paris and Orlando for theme park development, but rarely back home in Los Angeles. Laurie
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had an equally hectic schedule, travelling to various cities to mount laser shows and spending time in Japan where she installed complex laser equipment for one of the Expo pavilions. I almost became a movie producer, too—buying the rights to make a movie about Cecil B. De Mille which took me to England where I met the late Robert Bolt to discuss the screenplay. Bolt had had a stroke a few months earlier and his estranged wife Sarah Miles had returned to be with him. I met them in their beautiful farmhouse in Guildford, where I said how lucky they both were. Sarah looked at Bolt very lovingly and simply said, ‘Yes, we’re blessed.’ Unfortunately, I wasn’t. Although Robert was ready to discuss writing the script, he wanted to get to know the subject better. I had brought over several books about De Mille and left them with Bolt while I spent the weekend wandering around picturesque English villages. I had a problem with De Mille. Although he had led an extraordinary life, it was almost impossible to get a sense of the real person. He was what became known by later generations as a ‘control freak’ who had, despite his penchant for publicity, successfully kept his private life out of the media. He had managed to maintain three mistresses and a wife for decades, apparently without too much rancour. He also fancied himself as a man’s man, a rugged outdoors kind of guy who directed grandly visual biblical epics and obtained wooden performances from stars like Charlton Heston (Ten Commandments) or Victor Mature (Samson and Delilah). Almost no one today claims that De Mille made great movies, but all agree that Hollywood doesn’t make them like that anymore. De Mille’s biography was authorised and sanitised, and although it contained intriguing fragments of his persona, it was very difficult to get a sense of the man from it. This was the reason I wanted Bolt to write the script. Robert Bolt wrote A Man For All Seasons, which is my personal pick for best screenplay ever, as well as Lawrence of Arabia (second-best
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screenplay ever), so I was hoping that he’d come up with the thirdbest screenplay ever—about De Mille, the invisible man behind the legend. I went back to see Robert after the weekend. He sounded somewhat puzzled and told me he couldn’t get a sense of the real man, and what little he had learned about De Mille, he didn’t like at all. I told him I knew what he meant because I had the same problem. Sadly, Robert Bolt died a few months later. I’ve always felt that no other writer could find in De Mille what Bolt was unable to see, so I never tried to develop this script again. In September, two interesting offers came in to Spectak more or less at the same time. The first was an enquiry from the Barcelona Olympic Organising Committee, and the second was from Bob Jani—the original Disney producer for the LA Olympics whom I had met briefly under difficult circumstances six years earlier. I was very interested in the possibility of working on another Olympic Games, but the call from Bob Jani was equally intriguing. I’d heard that Bob had developed multiple sclerosis and was now in a wheelchair, so I was prepared when he greeted me at his office in Palos Verdes. He seemed to have shrunk, as victims of muscular diseases do, but his enthusiasm and charm had only increased. Bob introduced his son Jeff and then we moved into his study—a room full of memorabilia, books, paintings, storyboards and music. Bob’s long years with Disney and Radio City Music Hall had resulted in probably the finest collection of source materials that has ever been assembled and I spent several minutes just wandering around the room looking at the storyboards while we waited for tea and coffee to arrive. There was a photograph of a Fourth of July stunt that I’d heard about—an enormous American flag made from thousands of small coloured light bulbs that was being towed above the East River by a helicopter. Shortly after the photo was taken, the chopper ran into difficulties and had to jettison the flag, which sank into New York Harbor and was never seen again. The photo was the only record of it.
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Bob didn’t take long to raise the reason we were there—his son Jeff had just come back from Singapore where he had landed the biggest contract their company had ever been awarded. Due to his illness, Bob wouldn’t be able to create and direct the show and he wanted me to take the job. This was an enormous compliment from the man who had virtually created the live spectacle business for Disney. Of course I said it would be an honour and a pleasure for me, and it turned out to be true on both counts. Jeff didn’t have his father’s passion for live spectaculars and although he was taking over the production company his real love was computer technology. (His software company was bought out by Microsoft for millions of dollars a few years later.) When I met Bob and Jeff, I think Bob was relieved to know the company’s reputation for live production would continue, if only for the next year or so. The job turned out to be the Silver Jubilee celebrations for Singapore’s 25th Anniversary of Independence, the highlight of which was a stadium spectacular scheduled for August 25, 1990. All I had to do was come up with a script. Jeff suggested a production team he thought I’d want to work with. Since they were Bob’s ‘A’ list, the team was about as good as it gets in the special events business. Not one, not two, but three choreographers—Judy Chabola, Ron Mangham and Doug Jack. The designer was Christa Bartels, wardrobe was Dave Profeta and Katrina Kerr, production manager was Sayre Wiseman, lighting director was Jim Tetlow, audio director was Christian Hugener, and card stunts were programmed by Scott Givens. Since then, almost all of the above people have worked on at least one Olympics ceremony. Ron Mangham was to be my assistant director and would also direct the concert to celebrate the opening of the new Singapore Entertainment Centre, scheduled for January 1990. It didn’t take long to realise that Ron was one of the fastest wits and sharpest minds I’d met. He’d started as a dancer on A Chorus Line on Broadway, then moved to Disney where he became a dance
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captain, then choreographer, then a director of theme park shows. In between times he’d lived in Singapore for a couple of years, and was a source of scandalous stories from behind the straitlaced curtains of the island republic. Judy Chabola had worked as an assistant to Kay Crawford (responsible for drill teams in the LA Olympics), although we’d never met in those days. Judy had started out as a physical education teacher working with handicapped kids and had the patience and enthusiasm you’d expect of someone with that background. Doug was the junior one of the trio, bursting with energy and talent and somewhat in Ron’s shadow at first, though he rapidly became an equal member of the team. For the Silver Jubilee, I devised a storyline that depicted the influences that created the island nation, added an audience singalong, a concert and then fireworks. The first scene of the show established a visual representation of the island—then the following scenes introduced Chinese, then Malay, then Indian performers in national costumes to populate it, followed by the British, with Sir Stamford Raffles standing tall in a ship that sailed a resolute path over prostrate natives. As each successive wave of arrivals moved across the stadium floor towards their island home, they brought with them large props and objects, and a 5000-member card section rotated through image after image as the choir sang on and dancers performed on the main stage. Once everyone had arrived on the island, there would be a pause while we unleashed the obligatory display of heavy weaponry—in this case, five F-16s trailing coloured smoke followed by a large helicopter from which was suspended an even larger national flag. The colourful island of Singapore would then transform into a spectacular purple orchid (the state flower) that appeared to attract honey bees—who would be but the first of five large groups of small children to arrive on the field accompanied by inflatable mascots from some of Singapore’s famous social campaigns. The children would be followed by a spectacular drill team whose rapid-fire formations would ultimately form
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Singapore’s red and white crescent flag, together with the Silver Jubilee slogan—One Nation, One People, One Singapore. This all sounds pretty straightforward, but we were only halfway into the show. The Silver Jubilee Spectacular was to start in daylight, and as dusk approached as the drill team finished their act, the onstage choir would lead the audience in a medley of old favourites like ‘Don’t Throw Your Rubbish on the Streets’ and ‘Long Hair is Dangerous’. Such community singing is hugely popular in Singapore, and we could have had four hours of singalong and everyone would have been content. But instead we decided to glitz it up a bit. As the audience sang along, the plan was for stage hands to roll thirty giant stages out into the arena, each stage concealing a lifting mechanism. Once all was in place and the audience could be persuaded to stop singing, we planned to elevate buildings from out of each mobile stage to form the skyline of modern Singapore. But wait, there’s more. The stages were assembled into a crescent shape that would form a performance space for local artists, of whom the most extraordinary had to be Dick Lee, followed by the glamorous Christine Ong. Hours later, as our singing stars and the entire audience joined in just one more rousing chorus of ‘One Nation, One People . . . ,’ the sky behind the stadium would light up with a pyrotechnic display the likes of which hadn’t been seen before in the Republic of Singapore. This show would have the largest cast I’ve ever worked with—15,000 performers. Jeff had been to Singapore on two occasions before we met and had sold the idea of a major ceremony to the Republic’s Defence Forces. The Army, lacking any theatres of war, had become theatrical producers instead. Singapore’s National Day is August 8, and every year it is celebrated by a massive military performance. The soldiers and their officers have become very skilled at show business, so there was a certain amount of rivalry and rumbling from the military men aimed at the overseas civilians who had
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been conscripted to organise the Silver Jubilee. To stave off any risk of a backstage coup, the National Day celebration was to continue as usual under military control on August 8, and the Silver Jubilee Spectacular was to be performed on August 25. All this Jeff explained to me as we flew to Singapore for my first meeting with the brass. It was like being a school cadet again. I was surrounded by chaps in khaki, barking orders and instructions at national servicemen who ran rather than walked. Colonel Law would have made a brilliant Broadway producer, which was lucky, because he was responsible for providing me with resources from the Defence Forces. He quickly seized on the important issues in the script and made arrangements for us to obtain whatever services or personnel were required. He made only one misstep, and it was very early on. At a production meeting, he asked me about communications and I said I would need to talk to seven different departments— main stage management, entrance marshals, crescent stage manager, lighting, audio, choreographers and production. He nodded and made a note. Next morning, waiting for me at the production office were seven national servicemen in camouflage gear and boots, wearing large backpack radios with long whip aerials extending high above their heads. Wherever I went, they followed. I explained to Colonel Law that one handheld walkie-talkie with seven channels was what I had had in mind rather than the armed services radio network, and he took care of it. After that we had no more crossed signals. Meanwhile, faxes from Barcelona were piling up in my Singapore hotel room. Hundreds and hundreds of pages, five different scripts and rundowns for Olympic opening ceremonies from five different production companies. This was the result of a visit to Spain I’d made a couple of months earlier. I’d flown to Madrid to meet Josep Roca, the executive in charge of ceremonies for the Comité d’Organisation Olympique
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de Barcelona ’92 (COOB ’92). Josep had contacted Spectak in Los Angeles after he’d checked me out with David Wolper, and wanted to discuss my possible involvement in the production of the Barcelona Olympics. He told me he wanted to meet in Madrid because he didn’t want word of our meeting to get around Barcelona. I didn’t believe him at the time but later came to appreciate how tight Catalan creative circles are. I was booked into the Madrid Palace Hotel, a very posh place with a magnificent stained glass dome in the dining room and an easy walk to the Prado Museum. I spent a couple of days waiting for Roca to turn up, and was starting to wonder if I’d imagined the phone call. Finally, as I was about to make a return booking to Los Angeles, Josep Roca arrived at the hotel, looking intense and nervous. Later I discovered that Josep always looks intense and nervous, even when he’s laughing, and his constant turns to look back over his shoulder are just to ease a stiff neck. His background was in television production, so we had plenty to talk about. He led me to a secluded corner under the glass dome and told me that six production companies (four Spanish, one French and one Italian) had been asked to submit proposals for ceremonies. COOB ’92 was concerned that although there was no shortage of creative people in Barcelona, the creativity might come at too great a price for their budget, or might mean the ceremony wouldn’t be ready by the due date. Josep asked if I’d be willing to be executive producer for the ceremonies, no matter which production company was selected. This sounded like a challenge, given that at the time I spoke no Spanish, but Josep said that it would be ‘no problem’ as most Catalans spoke English. I had no plans for 1992, so I told Josep that I would be delighted to join him in Barcelona as soon as the Singapore Jubilee had concluded. We shook hands and I caught a plane back to Los Angeles to let Laurie know that Spanish lessons might be a good investment. She was excited by the idea of moving to Barcelona but didn’t want to take the lasers with her,
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saying it would be a good opportunity for her to stay home and improve her culinary abilities. As Laurie was a notoriously poor cook and often used a smoke detector to judge when a meal was ready, this was noteworthy. She coyly admitted that her biological clock might be ticking too, as she was starting to find babies and toddlers adorable. We needed to talk. Shortly afterward, the six production companies were told to have their proposals ready for presentation to COOB ’92 and the IOC in February 1990. My deal with Josep was meant to be confidential, but nothing stays secret in Barcelona for long. I was still in Singapore in January when the first of hundreds of pages of fax paper started to arrive in my room—all the production companies except one had sent me their scripts and were asking for my comments. The exception was a company named Ovideo. The managing director, Pepo Sol, instead phoned to suggest I should spend a few days in Barcelona meeting with Ovideo’s creative team and getting to know the city. I called Josep Roca and he assured me it would be a good idea. An air ticket arrived, a hotel was booked, and before long I was in the Catalan capital. I was met at the airport by a tall, slightly stooped man with hooded dark eyes, closely cropped grey hair, a smoker’s voice, and an elegant overcoat draped carelessly over his shoulders. This was Pepo Sol, the head of Ovideo. Pepo turned out to be probably the greatest creative influence in my life. He was charismatic, brilliant, sardonic, moody and generous; he was a snob, an idealist, a romantic, a chain smoker, a fiercely proud Catalan; he spoke five languages fluently and had a wicked sense of humour. He was quite wonderful and he died of throat cancer in 1997. I miss him greatly. It didn’t take long for us to strike up a rapport. Within days Pepo had asked me to join Ovideo’s bid and to help present their creative proposal to COOB ’92 and to the IOC. Josep Roca told me that this would be fine, so in February 1990, when the ceremonies concepts were presented to the evaluation committees, I was part
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of the Ovideo team. The presentation was the result of innumerable cups of coffee and many memorable meals. Pepo told me that he’d never hire anyone he couldn’t have a good dinner with. Ovideo’s proposal included a few ideas that never made it beyond the presentation. One was to have an Andalusian fighting bull stride onto the stadium field immediately prior to the athletes’ parade. The huge black bull was a subliminal fantasy of both Pepo and his original creative director, Bigas Luna, who both told me that if they could be reincarnated as an animal, they would want to be a fighting bull. Señor, what a perfect life! (For gentle readers familiar only with cute dairy herds, you should know that the Andulusian bulls come from different stock entirely. They are huge, wild animals with ferocious power, half as high again as the prissy Angus that end up in steakhouses.) The fighting bulls run free in the vast grasslands of Andalusia, never seeing man and with an endless harem of heifers who think the bulls are rock stars. After a year or two of continuous sex, the bull is brought to a corrida where it appears in front of a huge crowd and has a chance to die bravely, in which case it becomes a legend. The highlights of this idealised existence were difficult to convey in an Olympic ceremony, but the plan was to train a bull to run to the centre of the field where it would stop, paw the ground and toss its horns at the crowd. Then from the sky would appear a white dove— una paloma blanca—that would alight onto the bull’s head. (The reference to Picasso, another Spaniard who loved bullfighting and often painted doves, was not a coincidence). The bull would pause, then trot from the stadium carrying the dove, and Pepo’s fantasies, upon its broad shoulders. After that the Parade of Athletes would be hard to forget, particularly if the Spanish team came in carrying doves. The only question asked by IOC President Samaranch (who is, of course, Spanish and understood the deeper significance) was whether the bull and the bird could be trained to perform reliably.
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Pepo had already discussed this with an animal trainer from the film industry and had been assured that it would be ‘no problem’. In fact, just to be sure, he would train two bulls in case anything happened to the first one. Although this idea was unopposed by the IOC, it was obviously talked about when the evaluation committee returned to Switzerland. Within a few weeks of the presentation, word reached Pepo that the bull would have to be scrapped. Apparently some US animal rights organisations had heard that there were to be bullfights as part of the opening ceremony, that the bulls would be slaughtered and their blood spilled in a ritual introduction to the athletes. Something appeared to have been lost in the translation, but a blizzard of faxes was starting to arrive at IOC headquarters, threatening a boycott of sponsors. Samaranch said that it was simpler to cancel the moment than try and explain it, so the animal rights organisations were assured there would be no bullfights in the opening ceremony and, of course, we kept our word. The other great unseen moment was the paella. When the first presentation to the IOC was made, the idea was still conceptual, but involved a boat sailing across the Mediterranean Sea on a ‘voyage of discovery’ that ended at Barcelona. When the boat docked, the plan was to empty the stadium floor of the costumed performers who had created the ‘sea’. Left behind, stranded on the ‘sea floor’, would be edible sea creatures that until then had been hidden by the other performers. The crustaceans’ costumes were to be designed by Xavier Mariscal—the famous Catalan artist who also designed Coobi, the Barcelona Olympic mascot. After the ‘sea’ performers had left the arena, thousands of schoolkids in white spherical costumes were to run through the audience onto the field, forming a big crowd of rice grains that would herd the squirming crustaceans and molluscs into a circle in the middle of the field. Then a black fabric ribbon would be run around the whole group, thus containing the rice and the seafood within a
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giant paella dish. Some rice grains were to carry small fire extinguishers that they would squirt into the air, thus creating the effect of steam, while overhead a helicopter was to drop seasoning into the pot. Writing this down now makes me wonder what a psychiatrist would have thought of our creative production meetings, but we invested a lot of emotional capital into this scene. Unfortunately, President Samaranch exercised his veto over the paella and we never knew why. Perhaps he didn’t think we were taking the national dish seriously enough.
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eleven
Tropical delights Tropical delights
T
he time spent with Pepo in Barcelona had been fun, but I had work to do in Singapore. Instead of playing with paella, 5000 people were now needed to form a land mass. You might remember that for the Silver Jubilee, I wanted to form an image of the island of Singapore, so I’d been toying with the possibility of creating a relief map, using props of different heights that were coloured in shades of brown and green. One problem is that Singapore doesn’t have much height, apart from its highrise buildings. The other was that I wanted the green and brown island to transform into an orchid, in shades of blue and purple with yellow and white highlights. Walking back to the hotel one night, the solution struck me: imagine you’re standing inside a paper lantern. The lantern can collapse upon itself so it’s just a ring on the ground, but by bending down and pulling the ring up around your body, you can raise the lantern to different heights and be completely hidden. Next morning I explained this to Christa, our art director, who immediately started looking for a lantern maker to fabricate 151
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prototypes for the choreographers to work with. The idea for the second prop came as I was talking to Christa: large fans made in the appropriate shades of purple, blue, white or yellow, which the performers could simply snap open when required. Luckily, we were in exactly the right place to have these made, and within a week Christa showed us some samples. We were also lucky with the performers. Colonel Law told us about a Buddhist community organisation that would be perfect for the island/orchid stunt. We met them and found that, unlike everyone else in Singapore, they didn’t speak English. Fortunately, they didn’t need to. We conducted rehearsals with an interpreter standing beside us, passing on the instructions in Cantonese over a microphone. The Buddhists were the perfect performers. For a start we didn’t have to organise their transport—we just told them when they were needed at the stadium for rehearsals and they arrived with their own food and water bottles and got on with it. The lanterns were of different heights and diameters, and luckily so were the Buddhists. The first time we saw the island appear from a cluster of bodies was a defining moment in the ceremony, and the performers loved watching replays on the giant video screen. Another great moment was when I first saw the transformation from ‘island’ to ‘orchid’. The island appeared from nowhere as the tubular props were raised by the performers, forming brown and green hills fringed with surf of gently waving giant white fans. Just as suddenly, the island disappeared as the performers lowered the lanterns and moved into a tight new formation before opening their ‘orchid’ fans. I couldn’t believe how beautiful it looked, and it’s still one of my favourite moments of any ceremony. There was another great moment when Laurie told me she was pregnant. Although we were in Singapore, by the date the baby was due we’d be living in Spain and Laurie wanted to have
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the baby in California. That meant I’d be in Barcelona for a few months and return for the birth. That was the easy part. Laurie’s morning sickness was a bigger problem. In Singapore, we were staying in a hotel that had a hairdressing salon near the elevator bank, and the smell of the perming chemicals made Laurie nauseous. If an elevator took its time arriving, those ladies under the hoods knew better than to impede Laurie in her dash for the salon loo. But it wasn’t just hairdressing chemicals that affected her. By now she was working on the laser show that formed part of the Jubilee finale and had to spend long evenings in the dark at the stadium setting up the projectors. She cursed me constantly as she dashed backwards and forwards from the middle of the field to the toilets. When she returned to Los Angeles, Laurie’s cravings turned from yoghurt to matzo ball soup and burgers. Surprisingly, perhaps, our first born was a healthy boy who we named Dylan in tribute to the Welsh poet whose lines Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light were very appropriate because lasers are about the most unreliable light source known to man and are constantly dying. And I was enraged when they didn’t work. One day in Singapore I received a phone call from Pepo. He was calling from Barcelona to tell me COOB ’92 had suggested that Ovideo form a partnership with one of his competitors, who had a strong relationship with the Spanish prime minister. This situation was the result of a long, drawn-out process which had made COOB ’92 weary and wary of the potential for federal interference in what should have been a purely local decision. It was suggested to Pepo that he should form a partnership with his competitor—Bassat Sport—or else all bets were off and everyone would have to start again. Ovideo had spent at least $250,000 on its bid and Bassat Sport had probably spent a similar amount.
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Neither company wanted to risk losing it all, so they agreed to form Ovideo Bassat Sport to produce the ceremonies for both the Olympics and the Paralympics under contract to COOB ’92. Once the new company was announced, the responsibilities for the production were divided. Ovideo’s creative script was retained in its entirety, and Pepo was to be the producer responsible for all issues of artistic and creative control. Bassat Sport would provide the office infrastructure, supervise finance and administration, and handle publicity and promotion. I was appointed executive producer for the new company. Bigas Luna, the original creative director for Ovideo’s ceremony script, had become bored with the delays and had gone back to directing films. His first major commercial success, The Ages of Lulu, was released in 1990. Lulu was a soft-core porn feature that brought Bigas fame as an erotic director of note, and he added to his reputation in 1992 with Jamón, Jamón. I’ve often wondered how the Barcelona ceremonies would have turned out with Bigas at the creative helm but, alas, we were never to find out. Bigas Luna had so much to handle in the studio that he could no longer be creative director for the Olympics, so Pepo brought in Manel Huerga for the role. Manel is a television director who specialises in music documentaries and has a wide-ranging knowledge and admiration for American films and musicians, among many other interests. Oddly enough, he’d visited Australia but had never travelled to the US. He and Pepo had known each other for a long time and the partnership worked well. Manel was particularly good at allowing the creative directors to have independence while he kept an eye on the overall show. But I’m getting ahead of myself. While Pepo was in Barcelona waiting for the competitive tender process to be resolved, I was wringing wet in Singapore. The card section props for the Jubilee were being painted, costumes were being manufactured, inflatables
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were being made, and the crescent stages were taking shape. The weather was tropical. Hot and very humid in the morning. Hot and very humid in the afternoon. Then rain and high humidity, followed by hot and humid at night. Colonel Law shook his head sorrowfully at the quality of the national service rookies he was given. ‘Oh, lah,’ he said. ‘All the young people hang about in shopping malls for the airconditioning and when they start their training it takes a month just to get them used to the weather again.’ We had a couple of young national servicemen as our drivers, and they were very happy. Their task was to drive us from venue to venue in airconditioned cars and to nap while they waited for us. Only the mad dogs, Englishmen and ourselves were out in the midday sun, because everyone else was far too clever. I’d had an idea about balloons for Judy’s drill team that we needed to check out. I wanted to position thousands of large balloons around the upper rim of the stadium, from where they’d be released on cue to roll and bounce down over the heads of the spectators. The Singapore National Stadium is unusual because the front rows of seats are suspended a couple of metres above a wide trench that circles the entire field. The trench proved very handy for entrances and gave me the opportunity to exchange the audience balloons for helium-filled ones that would be waiting in the trench, without the audience being aware of the switch. On the night of the Jubilee Spectacular, the stunt worked really well. The spectators had great fun hitting and batting the large red and white balloons down to the field where hundreds of stagehands and thousands of performers were waiting. Without anyone noticing, about 2000 helium balloons were substituted for the audience ones, and the performers formed a giant Singapore flag on the field with red or white balloons. On cue, the large substitute balloons were popped, releasing small helium-filled balloons into the air with the audience wondering where the heck they’d come from. I hope that’s what they were
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thinking, anyway—it’s very hard to read a Chinese audience, but they clapped and looked astonished as the balloons sailed into the sunset. But it wasn’t all sweat and latex. During Lee Kwan Yew’s presidency, civic campaigns were conducted fairly regularly to ensure that things like public hygiene standards, road traffic regulations and national security were all observed and respected— and each campaign had its own song. Not only a song, but also a mascot. Busy Bee honoured the work ethic and buzzed about on Singapore billboards and television screens, singing his heart out. Likewise Savings Squirrel, who stored his nuts in a bank. This was too good an opportunity to pass up. I came up with an idea that could only work if performed by very small children—because no older person would allow themselves to be seen in public in the costume. The local kindergartens and schools provided about 1000 young citizens aged from four to eight to perform the number, dressed as bees, squirrels, elephants and so on. Then a problem emerged. For the Singapore mascots, I’d creatively recycled the maypole moment from the Brisbane Commonwealth Games, changing it of course to suit the occasion. The new version required five different helium-filled mascots to enter through tunnels onto the field, there to be surrounded by five groups of kids whose costumes matched the mascots. Between naps, they had to master some very basic choreography and hold ribbons attached to their floating mascot, before running back off the field to their waiting parents. The five inflatables were being manufactured in Taiwan through a company that Colonel Law had worked with before. They’d quoted very reasonable prices and their work samples were of high quality. When the inflatables arrived, Ron and I met the truck, which unloaded five large packages and then drove off. Our military stagehands had helium cylinders ready and started inflating the mascots. We’d estimated that two cylinders per mascot would do
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the trick, but this proved woefully inadequate. It took twelve cylinders to fill each inflatable, and as they soared above our heads I tried to work out what had gone wrong. The helium-filled mascots were supposed to fit into a tunnel that was four metres high, but these monsters were towering at least eight metres above our heads. The Spinal Tap Syndrome had struck again. Because we were an American production company, Christa had supplied measurements in feet and inches to the manufacturers in Taiwan, but because the order had come from Singapore the factory assumed the measurements were metric. A balloon that we’d planned to be ten feet tall turned out to be ten metres tall. The trouble was that they looked fantastic. We had a speedy meeting with Colonel Law to see if we could borrow 200 soldiers and some rope from the Singapore Defence Forces, and since they didn’t seem to be needed that week we also got some very organised Army engineers, who trained their lads to manoeuvre the inflatables up the outside of the stadium until the mighty mascots cleared the wall behind the top row of seats. Then another group of soldiers on the inside of the stadium took control of the ropes dangling from the inflatables and walked them down through the aisles to the playing field where they were handed over to the performers. This whole routine worked like a charm and was almost more fun to watch than the show. The card stunt routines for the Jubilee were very complex and a complete departure from the traditional card displays in Singapore. Normally, Singapore’s National Day celebrations involved a seated card section composed of 5000 high school students holding books like a very large photo album with ten pages. Each book formed a tiny part of ten enormous pictures that had been painted onto giant sheets of paper and then cut up into pages. When the whole card section flipped to the appropriate page, the original enormous picture was formed. I found it a little dull. Simply displaying ten paintings, each of which had been cut up
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into 5000 pieces, didn’t qualify as show business. So we designed new imagery to accompany every segment of the Silver Jubilee, sometimes using the traditional painting technique, but more often using intricate instructions to progressively move images across the card section. This last effect was unknown in Singapore at the time and took a lot of rehearsal. The sequences had been designed by Scott Givens using custom software, and when the images were displayed on a computer screen they looked wonderful. In 1990, personal computers didn’t have the power they do now, and Scott had had to link up dozens of Apple Macintosh computers in Los Angeles to process the complex animated patterns. But by the time the instructions had been individually processed for each of the 5000 schoolboys, who were now handling up to twenty-five pages in their books, we observed enormous gaps and lags in the patterns when the card section tried it in the stadium. Each book had its own unique set of instructions, which required the 5000 participants to really concentrate on what they were doing. Being schoolboys, they just wanted to go home early. Progress was very slow, so I suggested to Scott that we call an additional rehearsal just for the card section so that he could monitor what they were doing. At least we’d find out whether the operators or the instructions were wrong. On the chosen day, the schoolkids turned up and so did the rain. Scott was talking them through each cue when the sky darkened. Moments later, rain fell like warm water from a bucket. The card section did the natural thing and held their books over their heads to keep the rain off. It was easy to tell which boys had read the instructions for care and maintenance of their book. They were the ones who had covered the book in clear plastic, and theirs survived quite well. The remainder were clutching soggy masses of paper as the books dissolved, the water paint dripping over their white shirts. Over
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the microphone I told them to find shelter under the stands and watched as they headed in all directions—some leaving their books behind, some using them as stepping stones, and some opening the pages in the rain to watch the water wash the images away. Thirty minutes later the rain had stopped. The boys were sent to find the books that had been left behind in the seats and we tried to work out what had survived. Over the next couple of weeks, a lot of replacement books were prepared, a lot of plastic wrap went onto covers, and a lot of Scott’s original instructions went into the bin. Then we tried again, and by the final rehearsal the card section was in pretty good shape. Their last task was to leave their seats when the audience singalong began, leaving behind their book opened at a white page so that a gigantic white screen was formed where the card section had been seated. On this screen, Laurie planned to have a laser display with animated imagery and patterns to accompany the sing-along and the Crescent City performers. Lasers always sound very cool to clients and Austin Powers, but I have trouble sharing their excitement. Lasers are simply the world’s most expensive lightbulbs and are very tricky to keep operational. They can be difficult to see under some conditions, but Singapore was ideal because of the high humidity. Moist air provides droplets for the laser to reflect against, so the beam remains visible. You can achieve a similar effect using smoke, mist or steam. But we couldn’t see Laurie’s lasers at all in rehearsals because they kept shutting themselves down. Big lasers get very hot and are kept cool by pumping water through them, so if the water pressure drops they automatically switch off to avoid meltdown. Laurie’s lasers had hardly started before they stopped. Her techs found that the water filters on the lasers were choked with rust and no amount of cleaning would fix the problem. It turned out that the National Stadium hadn’t had much plumbing maintenance over the years
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and the water supply pipes were so full of rust that the filters clogged up the moment the taps were turned on. I made a mental note to drink bottled water while at the stadium and went to talk to Colonel Law. He arranged for a military water tanker to come and attach itself to the lasers, which then started working more or less as expected. As the show date neared, I received a call from Pepo to let me know that Josep Roca, Manel and he, accompanied by their spouses, would be coming to watch the Singapore Jubilee show. This was good news. It would give them an idea of the scale of one of these events, and of the infrastructure and pre-production necessary to ensure that everything goes as planned. The Catalan contingent arrived a few days before August 25 and were immediately impressed by Judy, Ron and Doug and their ability to maintain control and laughter with a vast crowd of performers. Pepo sidled over to me and said, ‘Would they like to come to Barcelona?’ ‘Is the Pope a Catholic?’ I asked him. He was confused by the change in subject and said he was an atheist. I said that I was sure they’d be very honoured and excited by the challenge. Pepo had a problem with Singapore’s strict anti-smoking regulations. He was totally incredulous when told that there was no smoking in restaurants and used to stand outside with his face pressed up to the window, cigarette clamped between his teeth, watching us eat and trying to lipread the conversation. He was also baffled by the copy Rolexes that were available on the streets, because they looked identical to his genuine one and kept time just as well. I bought one and wore it from time to time, just so I could make a point of checking the time with him. He had the feeling that he’d paid several thousand dollars too many for his timepiece, so he was delighted when within days the copy Rolex was leaving green marks on my wrist.
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The Singapore Silver Jubilee show went off very well in the stadium, although it was difficult to follow on television. The TV director had attended endless rehearsals and made all sorts of notes to himself, but in the end he seemed to lose confidence or concentration and cut the cameras without any apparent plan at all. He chose angles and pictures from all around the stadium in a medley that made it impossible to follow the carefully planned sequences. Next day I had a frank and full exchange with the head of the Singapore Broadcasting Corporation’s entertainment department, but by then it was too late. Never mind, the night had been fun, particularly watching Lee Kwan Yew and the President of Singapore waving shiny mylar ribbons when instructed to do so by their cheerleaders. Using cheerleaders among the audience was something that I did for the first time in Singapore and it was so successful that we did it again in Barcelona, where they were called animadores. And, if you were in the stadium for the Sydney Olympics Opening Ceremony, you would have had one of 500 carefully chosen ‘audience leaders’ urging you to sing, wave, hoot and flash, or just say hello to the person next to you. For our cheerleaders, we choose unabashed extroverts who are happy to lead the crowd in community singing or Mexican waves and, surprisingly enough, even in Singapore’s somewhat shy society, Doug and Ron were able to find several hundred teenagers who were prepared to stand up and out in a crowd. Syd Howard, our Expo ’88 pyrotechnic designer, had flown fireworks and crew to Singapore to handle the pyrotechnic display that closed the Jubilee Spectacular. The locals had never seen anything like it, and not just because they were watching the show through 3D glasses. (This was an old trick I’d picked up somewhere, probably Disney: the cardboard red/green 3D glasses used for viewing 3D movies added another dimension to a fireworks show that was already in three.) Colonel Law managed to obtain a sponsor
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for the glasses, and the sight of thousands of young Chinese faces gasping at the night sky through their 3D lenses is something I’ll remember for life. It was also the first time the crowd had seen fireworks synchronised to music. This was so successful that the military producers invited Syd back to Singapore the following year for the traditional National Day celebrations.
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Capital Catalans Capital Catalans
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ext morning the Straits Times newspaper led with a headline saying ‘Silver Jubilee Gets Gold’, and Colonel Law presented us with wall plaques from his Commando regiment. It rarely gets better than that. We packed up the Singapore office and I headed to Barcelona after spending a few days in Los Angeles with Laurie, who wasn’t thrilled about being left alone and pregnant in the new house we’d just bought in Manhattan Beach. But she knew it would be only a month or two before she’d join me in Barcelona to start looking for a house there. Meanwhile, she had to unload all our laser equipment. Somehow she managed to accomplish everything and arrived in Spain two months later looking pregnant and great. Her spirits fell over the next dispiriting days of looking at small, dark apartments in downtown Barcelona. On Friday evening we met up at the hotel and the helpful concierges asked how her day had been—and she told them. One of the young guys said, ‘You should look in my village! It’s called San Just Desvern de Llobregat and one of Barca’s players lives there!’ 163
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It turned out to be a great suggestion once we learned how to spell it, though we never met the footballer from Barcelona’s fabled soccer team. Although San Just is only a couple of kilometres outside the city of Barcelona, it’s in another world. Instead of the cramped quarters of the Catalan capital, San Just has detached houses, views and is quiet at night. Laurie and I arrived to find the narrow village streets blocked off with hay bales for a soapbox derby (billy cart race) and immediately decided that a village prepared to close down the main street for an entertainment event was the right place for us. We found a villa that overlooked the Mediterranean across miles of plains, signed a lease, said adéu to Pepo and headed back to Connecticut to spend Christmas with Laurie’s parents at the end of 1990. A couple of weeks later I was back in Barcelona while Laurie returned to LA to finalise packing and prepare for the birth of the baby. Pepo was predictably surprised by our choice to live outside the city, rather than in one of the barrios with intense street life, bars, restaurants and shops on every block. However, he was somewhat miffed to find that I could reach the stadium from San Just in half the time it took him to cross the crowded streets of Barcelona from his trendy address. I only visited Pepo’s apartment a couple of times. It was a sleekly modern, dark, somewhat sterile environment and looked unlived in because he and his wife were never there. Pepo showed me the contents of his refrigerator with great pride—some olives and six bottles of champagne. That was all the food and drink he kept at home. He and Concha never ate or even made coffee at home, but spent their waking hours in restaurants, the office or at parties. Concha was Pepo’s second wife, a striking brunette in her twenties with coal-black hair whose nickname was ‘the Replicant’ in homage to the movie Bladerunner. She only ever wore black clothes with silver accessories. Concha was the only girl in her family and had eleven brothers, so you didn’t mess with her because
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she could kill with a glance. She seemed to use this glance on Pepo rather a lot, and life was never dull while we were working on the Olympics. The office for Ovideo Bassat Sport was initially in a Disneyesque part of town called poble espanyol in Catalan, or pueblo español in Castillian. It didn’t matter what you called it, because everyone knew it as the site of a world Expo in the late 1920s or early 1930s. I was never sure exactly when the Expo took place, because it was scheduled for 1927 but preparations ran late and it was delayed by a few years. Poble espanyol had been built to showcase the artisans and architecture of all regions of Spain, so a Moorish tower similar to one in Seville stood beside austere stone-block buildings like those in Madrid. There were now many restaurants, wine bars and a popular nightclub called Torres d’Avila in the area, but there were also working printing presses, furnaces with glass-blowing demonstrations and a number of fine arts craftsmen. A bit like Expocity, actually, but without overnight accommodation. Some limited office space was available, so Pepo decided that it would make suitably artistic space for us all. The three-storey office became very cramped before we finally moved to the stadium, but I have fond memories of strolling to morning coffee and lunch, only a few metres away in any direction down cobbled streets. The poble espanyol complex occupied about ten hectares on the lower slopes of Monjuich, above which were located the Olympic stadium, Olympic swimming pool, Olympic diving pool, the Palau San Jordi (an I.M. Pei-designed superdome where Olympic gymnastics were held) and the International Press Centre, so as well as being aesthetically correct, our cramped offices were also very conveniently located. I had hardly returned to Barcelona from the US, when Pepo decided it would be a good idea to watch the NFL Superbowl half-time show, which in 1991 took place at Tampa in Florida. I was able to arrange backstage passes for Pepo, Manel and myself,
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so only three weeks after leaving the US I was back again on the east coast. As well as the half-time show, which was being produced that year by Disney, we also wanted to talk to the master magician, David Copperfield, about developing a magical illusion for Barcelona. We had nothing particular in mind, but his name had come up in conversation at a production meeting and I’d discovered he’d be on tour in Tampa while we were there. Copperfield had performed a number of spectacular illusions on television as part of his show, including making a Boeing 737 aircraft disappear off a stage in Las Vegas, making the Statue of Liberty disappear, and performing a Houdini-like escape from a building that was being demolished, so we thought it would be worth talking to him to see if he had a trick up his sleeve that could be performed in front of two or three billion people. One night after his show, Copperfield and his manager met us backstage to discuss the possibilities. David was constantly on tour and it was going to be difficult for him to find time to visit Barcelona and think seriously about a grand-scale illusion that could take place live in front of a stadium audience that totally surrounded him. Unfortunately, the idea never got off the ground, partly because of time but also because we could never solve the problem of scale and sightlines. It remains another of those ideas that are waiting for the right time and place. Tampa was nothing like Barcelona. Pepo was aghast to find that the finest cuisine in town was at The Olive Tree, a franchised restaurant chain that specialises in enormous bowls of pasta covered in tomato sauce. Of course, there was no real coffee available and, again, Pepo could only smoke outdoors. He became very morose. On the day of Superbowl, security was very tight due to fears of a terrorist attack in the aftermath of the first Gulf War. Pepo, Manel and I met up with the cast of the half-time show at a high school several miles from the stadium where we were allocated a wristband identity bracelet and a school bus. A long convoy of
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yellow school buses headed for the stadium carrying all the costumed performers, and Pepo was intrigued by the planning involved in having police at every intersection, ready to allow our convoy through without stopping once on the way to the backstage dropoff area. He kept murmuring that this would be impossible in Barcelona. Catalan car drivers would want to join the convoy because it would be the quickest way to the stadium, whereas American drivers lacked the initiative to burst through the police cordon and fall into line behind the buses. Due to a television network programming decision, the halftime show that year was pre-empted by a news update from the Middle East, so no one outside the stadium got to see the show. In itself that may not have been a bad thing, but people at Disney were predictably furious. My strongest memory of the show is of white doves that decided not to head home after they were released as part of the performance, but instead chose to start roosting among the spectators. Pepo had to be restrained from capturing a couple for dinner. A few days after we returned to Barcelona, we were in one of our regular creative production meetings when the name Peter Minshall came up. An old friend of Pepo’s named Miralda was at the meeting. Miralda himself is a leading Catalan artist and has many extraordinary artworks and happenings to his credit. One of my favourites is an elaborate ‘wedding ceremony’ he orchestrated between the statue of Christopher Columbus that stands at the end of the Ramblas in Barcelona and the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. The event was a long and complex affair spread over several years, involving periods of courtship, engagement, the wedding itself and then a honeymoon in Las Vegas. Miralda had spent a lot of time in New York and had come across Minshall’s work while he was there. Miralda showed us photos of Peter Minshall’s designs— spectacular and original costumes based on a technique Peter called
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‘human puppetry’. Minshall had been the director of Mas (as the Mardi Gras-based festival is known in Trinidad) for fifteen years or so and had created many memorable images. The Trinidad festival is a giant street parade, with neighbourhoods combining into ‘bands’ that each comprise around 2000 performers headed by a steel drum band on a flatbed truck. The parade can go for most of the day, after which there is a ceremony where prizes are presented for the best and most creative ‘bands’. One of Peter’s most famous works was ‘Man Crab’—a costume of six articulated beams like crab’s legs, controlled by rods and levers, and worn on a backpack so the performer could walk through the streets of Port of Spain in Trinidad. The performance piece was called ‘The River’ and was a typical example of Peter’s concerns for the environment and for the people of Trinidad. A band of 2000 women dressed in simple white robes flowed slowly down the parade route, following the steel drum musicians’ truck. Behind the women, Man Crab suddenly appeared, scuttling along the street, waving his ‘legs’ high in the air. He made his way to the centre of the band of women, who then slowed and stopped. Man Crab raised his claws in the air and started spraying thick red dye over the pristine white robes of the women. From around him, a spreading stain of ‘blood’ flowed to the edges of the band, then the colour of the dye changed to black—the colour of crude oil. The final tableau was the river of women twisted into agonised shapes lying motionless on the road, covered in red and black liquid, while Man Crab raised his claws triumphantly like a prize fighter in a ring. Unsurprisingly, the government, which was in negotiations with American oil companies at the time, didn’t award Peter Minshall the Judge’s Prize that year for ‘The River’, although it was the unanimous choice of the people. It was also the unanimous choice of all of us at the production meeting, again unsurprisingly, as Catalans are famous anarchists. Because I was planning to return
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to Los Angeles to be with Laurie for the birth of our baby, I suggested that I return home via Trinidad to have an initial meeting with Minshall. So it was that very late one night in mid-March I landed in Port of Spain after three flight connections and a major case of sleep deprivation. Things were to get worse. I had expected Commonwealth countries to stick together when it comes to visas, particularly as I only intended to stay for a couple of days. But the punctilious passport control person wasn’t having a bar of it. No visa, no entry, she said. In vain did I mention Minshall, the arts minister, the Hilton Hotel and my return ticket. ‘Too bad,’ she said. ‘You don’t have a visa. If you wish to enter Trinidad you’ll have to go to New York and obtain a visa.’ I said that I’d be sure to next time, but to no avail—I couldn’t talk my way into Trinidad. I was placed in detention until dawn and was then shipped back to New York from where I flew home to Los Angeles and slept for a couple of days. Subsequently, there were letters of apology from the minister and hopefully some retraining of a passport person, but I had no plans to return to Trinidad. Laurie and I were making plans of our own, including rehearsing the fastest way to the maternity hospital. Because I’d been in Barcelona for months, I’d missed all the Lamaze classes for sharing, caring couples that Laurie had attended. ‘They thought I was an unmarried mother,’ she hissed, as she tried to teach me four months of birthing lessons in thirty minutes. A week later I drove Laurie to the hospital and after a long labour our son Dylan was born the day before Laurie’s birthday. As a growing embryo, Dylan had been a very active little boy and had managed to tie the umbilical cord in a knot, which wasn’t discovered until very late in the labour and led to an emergency caesarean. Fortunately, mother and son both survived the experience without any complications and I spent the following week hugging them
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alternately. Laurie’s mother came over from Connecticut to help her at home when I flew back to Spain, promising Laurie I’d be back in three months to help her bring Dylan to Barcelona. Having failed to meet Peter Minshall in Trinidad, I now discovered that he was due to spend a few days in the southern French town of Arles, the location for some of Vincent Van Gogh’s most famous paintings. Manel Huerga and I decided to drive to France to meet up with Minshall, and Pepo wanted to come because it was the time of a famous bullfighting festival. He told me he preferred the bullfights he had seen as a youth because the stakes were more equal in those days, when penicillin wasn’t available for those who were injured in the ring. Barcelona isn’t much of a city for toreadors, with or without penicillin. But the Arles festival attracts the best toreadors from Spain and the bulls end up on the local restaurant menus. When we arrived, Manel and I went looking for Minshall while Pepo headed for the arena. At the address I’d been given there was a long-haired blond waiting at the doorway to guide us to the courtyard inside. The blond turned out to be an American man, Todd Gulick, who is Minshall’s longtime partner and project manager. Peter himself was waiting for us, languidly posed in a chair. He was almost fifty years old, with a deep, resonant voice and a commanding presence. Gulick introduced us to Peter, who nodded regally while allowing Todd to talk about him in the third person. They have an unnerving routine in which Todd refers to Peter as the ‘Artist’ or talks about ‘Minshall’ as though he’s not there, while Peter sits motionless enjoying the attention. He has piercing pale blue eyes and uses them like the Ancient Mariner to fix his listeners while telling them stories. It’s a dramatic and theatrical act. Although much of the content of the ceremonies was already in place, we were interested in Minshall as art director for the overall event, as well as for some specific segments. Peter’s
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knowledge, skills, insights and experience with both large- and small-scale theatrics made him a candidate, but his charisma and sense of the dramatic made him a certainty. Before long, Todd and Peter were living in Barcelona and the Artist had started on his Spanish odyssey. The creative influences on the ceremonies were many and varied. Pepo knew most of the artists, designers and directors in Barcelona, and all of them wanted to help. One of them created the most memorable moment in the opening ceremony without realising what he’d done. The man in question was a set designer, who turned up uninvited at the Ovideo offices one day with a small model of an Olympic stage. Unfortunately, the stage model was totally impractical for a stadium ceremony. The final straw was that there was no connection from the stage to the location of the cauldron, which would make life difficult for the athlete carrying the Olympic Torch. After the shortcomings of his stage design were pointed out to him, the man grumpily packed up his model and moved to the door, where he turned back. ‘Use an arrow,’ he said scornfully. ‘Like Robin Hood.’ He then walked out of the building, but Pepo and I exchanged a glance. ‘That’s not a bad idea!’ From then on, we discussed ways of making the arrow work. Pepo’s image was of a naked Hercules, bending a mighty bow that fired a thunderbolt towards the cauldron. Pepo wasn’t a sportsman, however, and didn’t really believe that a mere human archer could fire an arrow accurately enough to light the cauldron. One morning he arrived at the office and announced triumphantly that he had solved the problem of the arrow. He would be able to guarantee pinpoint accuracy, every time, in any kind of weather. He’d had dinner the night before with a young couple who were graphic designers and they’d come up with the solution. I should say here that if Pepo had a weakness, it was that he revered designers and style beyond form and function. If something or someone was
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reeking of style, they would be introduced as world authorities by Pepo, usually on the flimsiest evidence. The two young designers, Carlo and Carla, were certainly stylish. They wore silver-chrome motorcycle helmets on their silver-chrome Harley-Davidson, dressed in identical skin-tight black leathers, finished each other’s sentences, and both were tall and very good-looking. Pepo had talked to them over dinner about the arrow and of his fears that the archer wouldn’t be able to accomplish the shot. (This was before we had even started to look for an archer, and well before the Olympic cauldron had been designed.) The young man told Pepo he knew how to guarantee the shot. Next morning, Pepo grabbed me in the office and said that Carlo had come up with the solution to the arrow problem. All that was required was the guidance system from a Patriot missile— this would be attached to the arrow and it would unerringly make its way to the cauldron! Easy! I looked at Pepo to see if he was joking, because he was a notorious prankster and might have had a Patriot missile waiting downstairs. But he seemed convinced that Carlo had come up with a brilliant idea and became annoyed with me when I said it was ridiculous. Finally, he bet me a million dollars that the idea would work and that I’d be sorry for doubting it. We shook hands on the bet and promptly forgot the whole thing. The first test of an actual flaming arrow was a comedy of errors. Due to local politics, the engineering company that designed the cauldron was also given the responsibility of designing the arrow and ignition system. We were instructed to pay them $30,000 for their trouble, after which our troubles would be over—they were engineers! What could go wrong? It took them more than six months to come up with an answer to the arrow question and we were then invited to a secret test site for their first demonstration. A small busload from Ceremonies headed 100 kilometres south to a huge rock quarry, where the engineers had placed a target high up on one wall to represent the
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position of the cauldron. Waiting to take his shot was the archer. He was very different from the image of a naked god that appeared in the original presentation to the Olympic committees. This archer looked about fifty years old, was almost bald, with a large belly hanging over his dark and dirty trousers. He was naked to the waist, perhaps in homage to the image of Hercules in the presentation, and was clutching a wineskin when we arrived. He took a couple of good swigs as we gathered around to witness history in the making. A long box was reverently brought forward, the archer belched and swapped his wineskin for a basic-looking bow as the engineers opened the box to reveal their arrow. It looked extraordinary. Instead of a normal arrowhead, there was a piece of metal about fifteen centimetres long that resembled the head of an old-fashioned soldering iron. The engineers proudly explained that they had done a lot of research and had discovered that a flaming arrow would be extinguished by the rush of air involved in firing it. Their solution was a breakthrough in aerodynamics and aesthetics and would leave us breathless with admiration. We were pumped and could hardly wait. The archer leaned back, his belly quivered, the bow arched, and the chief engineer stepped forward with a cigarette lighter to ignite the arrow. Nothing happened. The soldering iron refused to burst into flame. The archer’s arms started wobbling with strain. Finally, a blowtorch was lit and applied to the arrow. After a few seconds, greenish sparks started erupting from the back of the soldering iron and there was much excitement as the archer let it go. Alas, it only travelled about two-thirds of the distance to the target. Another arrow was sent for as I asked, ‘Why the greenish sparks instead of a flame?’ With much disdain I was told that they had inserted pyrotechnics in the arrowhead to create a truly twentieth century arrow and now they would demonstrate its superiority. The blowtorch was applied to the second arrow, the sparks flew, and the archer released it towards the ‘cauldron’. This
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time the arrow hit the cliff and fell into a pile of canvas that had been used to wrap the target. The audience was starting to get restless. A third arrow was sent for, but before it could be released, the canvas burst into flame and we decided not to wait around as the engineers discovered they hadn’t brought any fire extinguishers. On the way back, Salvador Pons, head of technical production for ceremonies, said that he’d contact some film guys he knew in Madrid. Salvador had worked in the Spanish film and television industry for many years, so even though he was from Madrid he had the respect of Pepo and the other Catalans on the crew. Salvador became known in the production office as el torro, the hardestworking person on the production, strong and unstoppable, totally reliable and resourceful. He contacted Reyes Abad, a special effects technician, and asked him to come up with a flaming arrow. Two weeks later at midnight in light fog, we stood in the grassed depression that had once been a castle moat on Monjuich, only a kilometre from our office. A tall ‘cherrypicker’ was positioned sixty metres away, holding a target twenty metres above the ground. Salvador explained that this was the distance from the stage to the cauldron location and that Abad had brought an archer with him who would demonstrate. This time the arrow looked normal except for a small tin funnel on its tip, and cloth bound around the shaft. Antoni Rebollo, the archer, bent the bow and Reyes held out a cigarette lighter. Everyone nodded, the lighter flicked, there was an instant whoosh of flame as the cloth caught and then Rebollo fired the arrow. It hit the target and dropped to the ground still burning. He fired five more and they all worked just as well. It seemed that special effects technicians knew more about flaming arrows than highly qualified engineers. The prototype had a tin funnel from a Singer sewing machine as its arrowhead because Reyes thought that the shape of the flame would be improved if he controlled the airflow. The cloth around the shaft was impregnated with kerosene and a kind of napalm,
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so there was never any chance that it wouldn’t ignite or that it would be extinguished by the rush of air. Over the next eighteen months the design was refined and more than 700 test arrows were fired, mostly to demonstrate its reliability to others. Jim Easton, who is head of the Archery Federation and also owns the company that makes the arrows used for Olympic competition, came to see us. He had heard how we were planning to light the cauldron, and volunteered to manufacture a special heavy-walled, long shaft for the arrow, as well as provide technical advice. He said that Reyes had the balance of the arrow virtually perfect from the beginning, but that a heavier and longer shaft would make it more accurate. After that first demonstration at Monjuich, we were never in doubt that Reyes’s arrow would work, and on the evening of the opening ceremony it was Antoni Rebollo who fired that unforgettable arrow to light the cauldron. Angelo Badalamenti, who composed the music for the lighting of the cauldron and was waiting backstage to conduct the orchestra, told me later that he shook hands with Rebollo as they waited for their cue. ‘His hands were the only ones wetter than mine in the whole stadium,’ Angelo said. But it didn’t seem to affect Rebollo’s nerves or his timing, and he pulled off a perfect shot with the whole world watching. Angelo Badalamenti was one of three international composers who wrote music for the ceremonies, the others being Ryuichi Sakamoto and Andrew Lloyd Webber. There were also a number of Catalan composers involved and, of course, there was the unique ensemble of Spanish opera singers. Manel Huerga, the artistic director for ceremonies, was a great music and film buff, so for him the Olympics were a chance to work with some of his heroes. We were all great fans of Twin Peaks, the darkly mysterious TV series made by David Lynch with music composed by Badalamenti, so I contacted Angelo and invited him to Barcelona for a meeting. He’s a big teddy bear of a man, wonderfully warm, outgoing and hugely talented. Angelo’s Italian background made him ‘family’
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in the Mediterranean mix of the Ceremonies crew and he was asked to compose the torch-lighting music. He was great to work with, so we later asked him to create the soundtrack for the fashion sequence that celebrated the XXVth Olympiad. This turned out to be one of the most beautiful musical pieces I’ve ever heard. Ryuichi Sakamoto, like Angelo, was based in New York and was the perfect composer to work with La Fura dels Baus on their cataclysmic performance of the Mar Mediterraneo, which was the finale of the ‘cultural display’ in the opening ceremony. Ryuichi was an intense and introverted composer, who left most of his dealings to his manager, David Rubenstein. The piece for Fura was almost twenty minutes long and involved complex orchestral passages. During our contractual discussions I had told Rubenstein that Ryuichi would be expected to conduct the orchestra at the opening ceremony for his own composition, but David said that Ryuichi never conducted his own work because he felt more comfortable having a professional conductor lead the orchestra. But for Barcelona, Ryuichi made an exception. He conducted his own work for the first time in a studio and, of course, later appeared onstage at the opening ceremony, resplendent in a white tuxedo as he led the musicians through the sweeping symphony of the Mar Mediterraneo. The third of our international composers, Andrew Lloyd Webber, was also a great delight to meet and work with. I first spoke to him on a mobile phone while he was driving to Manchester where Margaret Thatcher was about to launch the Conservative Party credo, to original music he had composed. He was a little distracted and asked if I could come to London to have a chat, so a couple of days later I was in his living room in Eaton Square, introducing him to the Barcelona Olympics. At that time, we planned to restage the Three Tenors for Barcelona, because José Carreras (who was also musical director for the ceremonies) and Placido Domingo were locals, and Pavarotti
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was welcome. Andrew was very excited at the thought of writing a song for the three famous voices, and spent a few minutes telling me what kind of structure would be necessary. He felt sure that the audience would want to join in and be swept away by emotion at the climax to the song and that the finale should be repeated a few times so the audience could really get involved. ‘In fact,’ he said, ‘it could go something like this.’ He crossed over to the piano and thumped out the tune that became known as Amigos para Siempre. I was astonished. He murmured that he’d already had the tune in mind and had been waiting for the right occasion, so when I returned to Barcelona I was able to tell Manel and Pepo that we had a hit on our hands. But nothing is ever that simple. The plan to reunite the Three Tenors fell through when José Carreras told us Pavarotti had accepted an engagement in Paris that left him no time to learn the new song. I called Andrew to discuss the options—either Placido and José would perform as a duet, or we could change the emphasis by having a man and a woman sing Amigos para Siempre. Andrew liked the idea of a mixed pair and Placido very decently stepped aside without a word of disappointment to allow Carreras to sing the male role. Finding the female voice turned out to be another adventure. Gloria Estafan was an obvious choice, but she was contracted to Sony and Tommy Mottola (the powerful head of Sony Music in the US) didn’t want her to sing the song. For some reason he was adamant that Gloria wouldn’t be made available by Sony, despite all our combined entreaties. Gloria herself desperately wanted to sing Amigos para Siempre, and told me she was prepared to record a clandestine studio ‘demo’ that she would then take to Mottola to convince him of its potential. So it was that on Mother’s Day in 1992, Gloria and her husband Emilio flew to New York from Miami and arrived at the studio in great secrecy. There were quite a few people waiting. The producer for the session, who always worked with Andrew, had
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arrived a few hours earlier via a chartered plane from Stockholm where he’d conducted the orchestra for the Eurovison Song Contest the night before. David Caddick, Andrew’s vocal director, who was responsible for auditioning, teaching and assisting all the stars of his shows worldwide, had flown in from Tokyo on a special flight the night before. Andrew had arrived by private plane from London. José Carreras was in New York for a concert at the Carnegie Hall and had walked to the studio. I think I was the only person at the session who caught a commercial flight to get there. Gloria and José immediately got to work around the piano with David, while Andrew remained in the control room watching closed-circuit video replays of the London Symphony Orchestra which had recorded the magnificent backing track in London a few days earlier. Gloria suggested changes to some of the lyrics in Spanish (and, in fact, gets a credit on the CD) that everyone was happy to accept, and finally all was in readiness for recording. José had to leave for rehearsals at the Carnegie Hall, so it was decided to record his vocal first and add Gloria’s separately. José stood up to the microphone and his magnificent voice filled the studio. The first take was perfect, but we did another for luck and it was nailed, as they say in the recording industry. Carreras had to leave before Gloria started recording her vocal track, but even if he’d stayed I don’t think he would have been able to help. From the moment she started recording, it was obvious that Gloria was having difficulties, but it was Andrew who first diagnosed the problem. He had originally composed for three male tenors, and Gloria’s singing voice is in exactly that same range. The problem was that we couldn’t hear her. Carreras’s trained operatic voice was so powerful that Gloria’s vocals literally couldn’t be heard whenever their voices were together. Despite all the technology at the studio’s disposal, the engineers could not compensate sufficiently to allow Gloria’s voice to balance with José’s. This called for a rethink. Gloria and Emilio were totally sympathetic and supportive
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of the need for change, and we thanked our stars that we hadn’t obtained a waiver from Mottola after all. Andrew and I talked in the control room about what could be done. We were up against a very tight deadline because there were only ten weeks left until the opening ceremony, and we’d hoped to have the recording finished within fourteen days. Without Gloria, we’d have to start all over again. ‘There’s only one person in the world with the right voice who can do this at such short notice,’ Andrew said. ‘Sarah Brightman. She’s a soprano, she can get above Carreras on the duets and she’s a very fast study. Besides, she’ll learn the Spanish and Catalan lyrics because she’s good with languages.’ Andrew didn’t need to add that Sarah was also his ex-wife. I took it as another sign of his professionalism, and a couple of weeks later in London, Sarah added her flawless vocals to the now much-travelled master tape. She then flew to Spain where a Catalan and a Spanish choir were waiting to add their vocals. At last the track was complete and Jordi Bonet, the young and brilliant audio engineer for ceremonies, oversaw the final mix in Barcelona. All that remained was to shoot the video clip that would be released when Amigos para Siempre went on sale a few days before the opening ceremony. The director of the video clip was the very British Hugh Hudson, who had, among other movies, directed Chariots of Fire. I’d first met Hugh a couple of months earlier, following a visit to Cambridge University with the director and music director of the Paralympics. In addition to the Olympic ceremonies, the production company Ovideo Bassat Sport was also responsible for the Paralympic ceremonies—directed by Gloria Rognoni. The music director was Carlos Moysi. Both Gloria and Carlos were in wheelchairs, she because of a circus highwire accident and Carlos because of infantile polio. Gloria developed the script for the Paralympic opening ceremony and had her own creative team, but
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the technical crews and production personnel were the same for all the ceremonies, which meant that I was also executive producer for the Paralympics. Gloria and her team were so competent that there was very little for me to do, but she had asked me to accompany her and Carlos to London to meet Stephen Hawking. This was a chance in a lifetime. Professor Hawking is the legendary physicist who was diagnosed with a degenerative muscular disease in his early twenties and has since become the world’s leading theoretician on black holes and other arcana of space and time—despite being confined to a wheelchair and able to communicate only via computer and a voice synthesiser. His book A Brief History of Time became a best seller and a BBC television series. This was the man whom Gloria wanted to address the Paralympians in Barcelona, and we were going to London to try and persuade him. Her office had arranged a date and time for the meeting, so the three of us arrived in Cambridge one morning and started looking for the mathematics department of the university. Behind a building we saw a wheelchair ramp leading up to a back door, with a small sign announcing that this was the office of the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, and no sign of security anywhere. Gloria and Carlos gripped their rims and wheeled up the ramp while I held the door open. We entered an empty hallway leading to a corridor and headed that way. As we rounded the corner, we saw the back of a familiar motorised wheelchair disappearing rapidly around a bend at the far end of the corridor. Without a word, Gloria and Carlos spun their wheels and gave chase, leaving me to bring up the rear. By the time I caught up, they’d cornered Hawking in a common room and all three were grinning at each other like idiots. I started to explain to Hawking that we had an appointment to meet him, when his assistant hurried into the room. Obviously we’d foiled their plan to tell us that Professor Hawking wasn’t available, so he had to come up with
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another excuse. But Hawking looked at his assistant (almost the only voluntary movement he could make) and made it clear that he wanted to stay in the room with Carlos and Gloria. We ended up spending a couple of hours with Hawking. It seems extraordinary to say that a person so severely limited in movement and communication could be mischievous, cheeky, funny and even flirtatious—but he was. He had a wicked smile and his eyes were very expressive, so it was unnecessary to use as many words as in normal conversation. Instead, he would type out a few words on his computer, which could be synthesised or just read from the screen. We also went into his office, where he explained that due to a clash in his schedule he would be unable to visit Barcelona for the Paralympics, although he would be delighted to record a videotaped message for the athletes. We arranged a date and time for that to be done and when we returned to Barcelona, Pepo and Manel both agreed that Hugh Hudson should direct the video. I wasn’t able to return to Cambridge for the shoot and Hugh said that he’d be able to handle the taping—which, of course, he could. Later, Hawking’s assistant told us that Hugh had kept the professor in his office all day taping the short message. I’ve got no idea why it could have taken so long. Not many camera angles or lighting setups would be required to record a talent such as Hawking. In the edited message from Hawking that was delivered at the Barcelona Paralympics, the remarkable genius seemed a little tired. So it was the same Hugh Hudson who directed the video clip of Sarah Brightman and José Carreras singing Amigos para Siempre. Hugh wanted to shoot on location in Barcelona, using various buildings and scenic outlooks as well as the Olympic Stadium. I met Andrew at the Barcelona airport late one afternoon where he’d arrived by private plane to see how things were going. We drove to the location where a large crew was sitting around doing nothing—the normal state of a shoot when the stars are in makeup.
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By the time they appeared, it was dark and growing cold, so there was concern for José’s voice and Sarah’s thin blouse. I think the shoot was wrapped around midnight. By that time I was having trouble focusing on anything, because Andrew and I had been having dinner and drinks while we waited for the shoot to finish. Andrew turned out to have a great sense of humour regarding any musical theatre other than his own, and had a store of funny stories. At some point in the evening he asked, ‘Do you know someone in Australia called Harry M. Miller?’ I nodded and said that he’d produced Jesus Christ, Superstar in Sydney back in the 1960s. Andrew said, ‘I’ve never heard of him! He’s just sent me a cheque for a quarter of a million pounds for a concert version of Superstar that’s been running for weeks and he doesn’t even have the rights!’ Harry must have decided to mount the touring concert production first, and pay royalties later if it turned out to be successful. This was the John Farnham/Jon English version and it was very successful indeed, so Andrew must have been content with the delayed payment scheme.
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thirteen
Another opening, another show Another opening, another show
A
t more or less the same time as the recording sessions for Amigos para Siempre were being rescheduled for Sarah Brightman, the most ambitious part of the stage set for the ceremonies was arriving in Barcelona from Switzerland. This mammoth undertaking had begun a year earlier in our production office when the stage designer, Alfredo Arribas, had unveiled a model of his design (which can be seen today in the Olympic Museum in the Barcelona Stadium). The stage was composed of several circular levels, one above the other, on the same rake as the seating sections. The topmost level was for the orchestra and solo performers, the next was a smaller performance stage and the lowest disc was the largest performing area. It was very contemporary and looked spectacular when placed into our stadium model, but everyone, including Arribas, felt that it needed something more. 183
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One day Arribas arrived at the office with five white plastic rings and positioned them so they were standing vertically on the edge on the model, from the lowest stage to the top. They looked amazing and we all knew that the rings would be an unforgettable image—one that would be associated with Barcelona forever after the Olympics. Now it was just a question of building them. The full-size rings were designed to be forty-two metres across and less than a metre thick. Although the best material to fabricate them would have been titanium, the cost was totally prohibitive, so Salvador Pons asked our stage construction company if they’d be interested in taking on the job. The stage was being built by a Swiss company called Nüssli, located in a tiny village an hour’s drive from Zurich, where they manufacture theatrical sets, as well as portable grandstands and other complex staging items. Heinrich Nüssli had come up with an idea for the rings that was elegant but complex to build. He drove us to another small village where a high-tech factory was turning out huge laminated wooden beams. Nüssli proposed that the rings could be made of hollow curved wooden tubes with internal bulkheads at regular intervals—much like stalks of bamboo. The Swiss factory could manufacture the tubes in seven-metre lengths that would then be joined end-to-end to form the huge rings for the stage. The factory said they could meet Arribas’s specifications, and just before Christmas in 1991, Salvador and I saw the first ring erected in a foggy Swiss field, hanging from a giant crane. It was an eerie sight and a little overwhelming. I’m accustomed to theatrical illusion, but these rings were the real thing—masterpieces of construction and at the outer limits of wood technology. At the same time, we knew they would make an unforgettable image over the stage. We approved the prototype and the factory kept on manufacturing. In April 1992, several semi-trailers carrying thirty-five curved wooden tubes arrived at a field next to the stadium in Barcelona.
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The installation was completed without mishap, and as expected, the image of these five towering circles above the stage was quite unforgettable. The giant rings not only provided an aesthetic solution but also gave Marc Brickman, our lighting designer, a unique opportunity to locate his lights directly above the stage. Marc himself was also a unique opportunity—he had started his career as lighting designer with Bruce Springsteen and became a legend with the Boss for his first eleven years on the road. Then he’d moved on to Pink Floyd where he became their equally legendary designer, responsible for the flying pig, the travelling bedstead, the crashing aircraft, the ‘irising’ circular projection screen and all the other lighting effects that made Pink Floyd concerts beyond incredible. We’d also hired Morris Lyda (production manager for Phil Collins, Genesis and Pink Floyd, among many others) and Michael Ahern (production manager for the Rolling Stones tours) to coordinate the lighting equipment and installation schedules for Barcelona. This meant not only that we had arguably the best lighting team ever assembled, but we also had access to the latest technology and the best crews and board operators. As things turned out, it was lucky we had them. Five weeks before the opening ceremony, at around 3 p.m. while the stage was crowded with people, the giant wooden rings collapsed. Fortunately, it didn’t happen all at once. I was in the production office with Pepo when the walkie-talkie on the desk crackled and Salvador came on air. We were needed at the stage immediately. An hour earlier, we had been in the arena looking at the stage and I’d taken one of my favourite photos of Pepo with the rings behind his head like multiple halos. Now, the second ring from the front had broken at the first glue joint like a buckled knee. Salvador had cleared the area around the stage and we had a huge problem. The German crane that had been used for the installation had been dismantled and was two days away, crawling slowly down the road towards Madrid. The broken ring was totally
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unstable, so the riggers couldn’t work close enough to get extra support cables into place. Nüssli and his lead engineers were standing in a small worried knot, discussing what options they had, when about forty-five minutes after the joint had first broken, the weakened ring collapsed with a thunderous roar, bringing two more rings down with it. The huge wooden tubes broke into pieces that speared down into the stage, smashing the deck and the mechanisms under it. We stood in stunned silence, looking at the wreckage of our plans. The only good news was, first, no one had been injured; second the lights hadn’t yet been attached to the rings so they were all still usable; and third, the rings hadn’t collapsed during the opening ceremony. Miguel Abad, general manager of the organising committee, had hurried to the stadium at the first news of the disaster and was now in our production office instructing us to have the entire mess cleared away before dawn and to ensure that the media didn’t get hold of the story. There really wasn’t an alternative. We had no time to manufacture more rings, even if that had been an option. The giant crane wasn’t available for at least a week and we needed to repair the stage immediately so that rehearsals could begin. Salvador Pons, having spent months bringing about the miracle of the rings, now had to supervise a wrecking crew who moved in with chainsaws and dump trucks. By daylight next morning it was as if the rings had never existed except for the huge scars and gashes in the stage. The media did get hold of the story but didn’t make much of it—a local television station heard the radio chatter from the stadium but they weren’t allowed into the area, and although a cameraman reached the top of a distant hill that overlooked the stadium, his shots weren’t very clear so the story never really developed. Miguel Abad feared that international media coverage would reinforce the stereotype of inefficient Spanish workmen, whereas the irony was, of course, that the rings had been engineered and manufactured by the Swiss,
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renowned for their precision and reliability. Later, it was discovered that some of the glue joints hadn’t cured properly and the calculations used to establish the strength of the wooden rings were faulty. But right now there was no time to hold an inquiry into what had caused the disaster. We had less than five weeks left before the opening ceremony, and the centrepiece of the show had just vanished. At moments like these, it’s a huge relief to have available the best crews in the world. Olympic ceremonies are the most complex and challenging live productions since the Romans programmed the Coliseum, so they attract the sort of people who respond well in an emergency. Alfredo Arribas designed new lighting towers, Marc totally redesigned his lighting plot for the stage, the choreographers worked around the fact that the stage wasn’t available for rehearsals while it was being repaired, and Salvador didn’t sleep for weeks. He wasn’t the only one. Although the collapse was a disaster, it had raised the adrenaline level of all the production personnel to the point where they could have achieved anything and gave me new respect for their professionalism. Pepo was stricken by the loss of the rings, but slowly regained his sardonic humour and presented me with a set of photos of the collapse sequence that he’d obtained. By an extraordinary coincidence, a Nüssli engineer with a motor-drive camera had started photographing the rings moments before the collapse, and had captured the entire sequence on a roll of film. It took more than three weeks to design, construct, install and certify the new towers, after which the lighting instruments had to be installed and wired, so Marc and the lighting crew had less than a week to get ready for the opening ceremony. Fortunately, their years of rock ’n’ roll touring had accustomed them to living without sleep and working all night, so by showtime Marc had totally reprogrammed the lighting. He had a special T-shirt made for the crew who worked with him and experienced his antics
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during sleep deprivation—a caricature of himself sub-titled ‘The Alienator’. Pepo often told me that no great event is achieved without risk, forgetting that I’d introduced him to that concept when I suggested hiring Marc two years earlier. Judy Chabola, Ron Mangham and Doug Jack had by now become firm favourites with the performers. They had hired a Spanish assistant named Ana who helped to translate, but the choreographic trio’s enthusiasm and ability to count to eight in Catalan was all they needed to communicate. When I’d first discussed the need for choreographers with Pepo, he’d grunted and said that Catalans weren’t sheep like the American performers he’d seen on television. ‘No Catalan will stand in a straight line,’ he predicted, ‘It is too boring. And if you ask a Catalan to stand in the same place all the time, he will refuse. He will say, “I stood there yesterday. Today, I will stand here.”’ Needless to say, Judy, Ron and Doug were somewhat alarmed by the thought of choreographing a few thousand anarchists who had their own ideas about where to stand, but Pepo’s fears were groundless. Our choreographers had a great deal of experience in working with volunteers, and knew only too well that there were other things the performers could be doing with their lives, so they treated the cast with respect while keeping them entertained. A Catalan choreographer had discovered the penalty of getting this wrong when working on the opening ceremony for the Barcelona Stadium a couple of years before we all arrived. The choreographer planned for about 250 volunteers to form an outline of a dove as drawn by Picasso. At each rehearsal he yelled and screamed and insulted the dancers as if they were professionals, and provided only a sandwich for catering at the final dress rehearsal. This was probably his worst mistake. The next day for the ceremony, only one performer showed up. The choreographer gained great critical acclaim for his ceremony—in which a single performer
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walked to the centre of an outline dove painted on the grass, and released a white pigeon from his gloved hand. The critics raved about the Zen simplicity of the image, so the choreographer was not only clever but also lucky. For the Olympics, we like to retain our volunteer casts, and in Barcelona we made sure that the catering went beyond sandwiches. Lara was now aged fourteen and, of course, I wanted her to see the Barcelona ceremonies. She had remained in Sydney living with her mother, so it meant she would miss three weeks of school if she came to Barcelona. Fortunately, her headmistress was sympathetic and Lara arrived a few days before the opening. Although she’d been able to visit us occasionally, this was the first time I’d seen her for nearly a year. It was a surprise to both myself and the crew that I had a beautiful teenage daughter with opinions and an appreciation of fashion design. The ceremony itself was almost an anti-climax after the dramas leading up to it. Just before going to New York for the first recordings of Amigos para Siempre, I’d had to relieve Minshall of his duties, because he was still fiddling with the design for costumes and props way after the deadline for construction had come and gone. He could never finalise the prototypes, but kept trying to improve them. The directors from Fura dels Baus were getting frustrated and nervous, waiting for Minshall’s designs to come to a final fruition. In the end I had to tell him that the Fura workshop would take over responsibility for the manufacturing of costumes and props that Minshall had sketched, and the Mar Mediterraneo segment then moved ahead at much higher speed. The young man who I’d put in charge of organising the athletes’ assembly turned out not to be up to the task. At the first dress rehearsal, volunteers representing each national team of athletes had appeared in non-alphabetical order with the wrong flags, so Karen Wardle, my brilliant and multilingual assistant, took over the job and did it flawlessly. In fact, Karen’s assembly
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of the athletes became the textbook example for the ceremonies that followed. The final drama before the opening ceremony was the arrival of the opera singers. Due to fortuitous timing, in 1992 six of the world’s greatest opera singers were Spanish and they all performed together in a spectacular finale at the opening ceremony. Just to show that even the best intentions can be misunderstood, we received complaints from a few conservative members of the IOC who grumbled that the athletes were the real stars and the opera singers were just trying to steal their thunder. Well, excuse me. We thought that the athletes would appreciate having front row seats to a unique performance, and there was no question in our minds that the athletes were the stars that night. This had been made clear to the divas earlier in the evening when they’d been collected at their hotel by a shuttle bus instead of limousines. Montserrat Caballe, a legendary soprano of considerable size, decided she’d prefer to rest comfortably at the hotel until closer to her performance, at which time we could send a limo for her. Unfortunately, this was impossible. Due to the extraordinarily high attendance of IPPs (Internationally Protected Persons such as kings, queens, emirs, princes, princesses, presidents, governors and prime ministers, all of whom rank well above regular VIPs), the security chiefs had ordered roads to the stadium closed to all vehicular traffic as soon as the opening ceremony began. From memory, there were 103 IPPs at Barcelona and the security edicts weren’t going to change, not even for a legend like Caballe. I received a frantic phone call from Virginia Ensesa, our brilliant music coordinator who was at the hotel with a busload of opera singers, minus Ms Caballe, as the deadline approached. She explained that the famous diva simply would not believe that the roads could be closed to her, and so she had retreated into the lobby leaving everyone else sitting on the shuttle bus. I asked Virginia to convey my compliments to Ms Caballe and explain to her that as the diva’s voice was already
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pre-recorded, we didn’t need her onstage. In fact, I suggested to Virginia, you could tell Ms Caballe that we could substitute someone else to mime her vocals, so there would be no embarrassment if Ms Caballe was unable to appear. Virginia went into the hotel to pass on this message. A few minutes later, she called back to say that all the singers were on the bus and to alert security that they were on their way. When you’ve lived with the details of a ceremony for so long, there is a strange feeling of detachment as you watch the show unfolding exactly as you’ve imagined, dreamed and organised that it will. The performers, crews and creative staff are so keyed-up, so pumped with adrenaline and so determined to excel, that there is little for me to do during the show except to watch the planned images unfold. That’s how it was in Barcelona, right up to the point where the torch entered the arena. The audience had been provided with glowsticks, those plastic tubes that, when bent, break a glass vial that releases a chemical and starts a light-emitting reaction. For the ceremony finale, the orchestra was to play Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and the entire audience was meant to light up their glowsticks. Most of the spectators had blue ones, but in selected groups of seats our cheerleaders had distributed yellow glowsticks and the effect was to create the twelve yellow stars of the European Union flag against a blue background that encircled the entire stadium. It had been impossible to rehearse, so I was looking forward to seeing the effect. As the torchbearer entered the stadium, Marc Brickman doused the lights except for two spotlights that were focused on the runner. In one of those magic moments and against all our planning, the spectators spontaneously bent their glowsticks and the stadium came to light in a blue twinkling sea of colour with twelve yellow stars. It looked just the way we had expected, but during an entirely different part of the show and television viewers never got to see the image. The TV director had already planned his shots and wouldn’t deviate
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from his plan, even to show the entire audience waving their glowsticks at the torchbearers. Soon after Antoni Rebollo’s arrow had lit the cauldron, we introduced twelve teams of castellers into the arena. The castells or torres are human pyramids or towers, sometimes formed eight or nine people high, and are a particular speciality of the villages in the Pyrenees mountains. Only the men of the village form the torre and it is a competitive sport. The youngest boy in the village has to climb up the human tower, grasping handholds and footholds on the legs, arms and shoulders of the men, who sway unsteadily as he goes higher. Upon reaching the top (which can be a terrifying ten or fifteen metres high), the boy waves a handkerchief very briefly then descends as rapidly as possible. Due to the potential for public disaster, we had restricted the height of the castells to six levels in the stadium. Eleven of the towers, which were located symmetrically on the track around the athletes, achieved this height without any apparent problems. However, from the control room we could see that one castell in the south-east corner was having difficulties getting started. The base level is complicated and is made up of about fifty men who form the foundation of the tower and a safety net for anyone who falls from above. This particular group had formed and re-formed but had just come apart for the third time when the spectators started throwing their seat cushions at the castellers. (Cushion throwing is also a mark of disapproval at a bullfight, where it signifies that either the toreador or the bull, or both, could be doing better.) In the stadium, the nearest spectators soon ran out of cushions and since they were holding their lit glowsticks, it must have seemed natural to throw them too. Once again there was a magical moment as the spectators came up with one of the greatest visual images I’ve ever seen. From a small localised shower of blue glowsticks, the effect grew until the entire stadium audience were throwing their glowsticks down towards the athletes, creating a vast encircling Niagara of blue fireflies
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mixed with yellow. It was the most extraordinary sight to see 60,000 people acting spontaneously to create a visual metaphor reminiscent of bullfights but which was also seen as a salute to the Olympic athletes. Australia’s Glynis Nunn copped a glowstick in the face and a few other athletes received cuts, but remarkably enough, no more serious injuries were reported. Once again, television viewers were denied this sight. The TV director stuck to his shooting script which hadn’t made allowance for any shots of an avalanche of glowsticks. In the next segment, the director took his pre-planned shots of the grandstands during Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, but of course as the spectators had already thrown their glowsticks, there was nothing to be seen. Viewers the world over may have wondered why they were watching shots of spectators sitting in the dark for much of the Ninth Symphony. The other great moment with potential for audience participation was the unfurling of the giant Olympic flag over the assembled athletes in the field. This was a new idea and had originally been intended to involve the audience as well as the athletes. However, once we had inspected the grandstands, we realised that the barbed-wire fences and chainlink barriers that were there to control crowds during soccer matches at the stadium would make it impossible to bring the giant flag down through the spectators as originally planned. Instead, 200 volunteers carried it out in a sausage-shaped bag over 100 metres long. The flagbearers stretched the bag tight in the corridor that ran down the middle of the athletes (where the torchbearer was about to run towards the stage) and on cue passed the edge of the flag to the nearest athletes. Assisted and instructed by our marshals and cheerleaders, the athletes grasped the idea and passed the flag above their heads until it covered the entire assembly of Olympians. After the ceremony, IOC President Samaranch said that the greatest moment in any Games he had ever seen was the moment when the athletes of the world were united under the Olympic flag.
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It was a tired but happy crew who celebrated later that night in the production office. Prince Felipe, flagbearer for the Spanish team and heir to the throne, had visited the control room earlier and we had seen the King and Queen of Spain on television accepting the congratulations of the crowd. But the royal family are from Madrid and aren’t Catalan. Under General Franco’s regime, the language and culture of Catalunya had been forcibly repressed, so the 1992 Olympic Opening Ceremony was inevitably interpreted by Catalans as a political statement. As the show unfolded, there was much rejoicing at the emergence of Barcelona as an international city, and an old man burst into tears as he told me of his happiness. He said he had never believed it possible that the Catalan flag would appear next to the Spanish flag at an official ceremony, or that a Catalan anthem would be sung in public, let alone in front of the King of Spain. For him, this was the greatest achievement of the Olympic Games. The Games had no sooner opened than we were planning to close them. Unfortunately, Andrew Lloyd Webber hadn’t been able to make it to the opening ceremony, where an orchestral version of Amigos para Siempre was played as the giant Olympic flag unfurled over the athletes, but he did fly to Barcelona with his personal assistant for the closing ceremony at which Carreras and Brightman were to sing live. His plane was delayed by air traffic control, so he arrived late at the stadium and the show had already begun. Up in the control room my walkie-talkie beeped and Andrew’s assistant came on the line in an advanced stage of hysterics. She didn’t speak Spanish and neither did Lloyd Webber, so they were at something of a disadvantage when trying to get to their seats. Once the show had started, the grandstands were in darkness, the ushers moved off to watch from somewhere else and a pair of enterprising Catalans decided to improve their viewing position by moving into Andrew’s empty seats. Of course, they weren’t
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going to give them up when a couple of British latecomers arrived who couldn’t explain why they wanted those particular seats, and then the rest of the crowd thereabouts started yelling in Catalan at the latecomers to sit down or get out of the way. The message was apparently pretty clear, even if you didn’t understand the words. His assistant said that Andrew was ‘terribly upset’ and ‘ropeable’, and that ‘something had to be done’ and she’d ‘lose her job’. I was a little preoccupied myself at the time and said I’d get back to her as soon as there was a break in the show. It wasn’t until the athletes started entering the stadium that I remembered leaving Sir Andrew (I think he had been knighted by then) and his assistant in the lurch. The stage manager told me that he’d put Señor Webber in the star dressing room, so I hurried down from the control room to find Sir Andrew’s assistant hopping from one foot to another in a state of total tension outside the dressing rooms. ‘He’s in there!’ she whispered, pointing at the one marked ‘José Carreras’. Both José and Sarah had already been taken to their backstage entrance positions to await their cues, so the famous composer was alone, ensconced in José Carreras’s room with a glass of champagne, watching the ceremony on television. ‘Everything okay, Andrew?’ I asked. ‘Oh, yes, everything’s fine. The show’s looking very good.’ ‘I believe you had a bit of trouble with the seats, though?’ ‘Oh, no problem. This is much better. There is one thing, though,’ he added. ‘I’d really like to watch the fireworks out on the field. Would that be possible?’ ‘No problem,’ I said and meant it. I walked with Sir Andrew to the tunnel entrance and asked one of the stage managers to take him out into the middle of the arena and to make sure he got back to the dressing room after the pyrotechnic display. That was the last time I saw him in Spain. He must have got back to London safely because his assistant called me and said she hadn’t lost her job after all. Working with a genius
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can’t be easy because none of his assistants seemed to stay very long in the job, but I have to say that I always found Sir Andrew (and now Lord Lloyd Webber) quite charming. NBC’s television coverage of the closing ceremony was underwhelming. The Spanish performance group, Els Comedients had devised an elaborate sequence for the ceremony based on ritual fire festivals that may have had links to the Spanish Inquisition. I didn’t want to enquire too deeply. It was sufficient for me that it was spectacular and involved fire and fireworks in equal proportions, together with two inflatable floating caryatids that had no explanation except perhaps in Sigmund Freud’s writings. (A caryatid is a feminine sculptural form, often with a sphinx-like face and body with breasts, used to disguise the support structure of a roof, or simply for decoration. Els Comedients had freed the idea and let the ladies loose in the night.) The female of the pair was a greyish-pink apparition with three breasts who moved seductively, tugging at the bonds that linked to her handlers, while the androgynous male hovered like a black preying mantis above the performers, following his mate in a lazy flight pattern. In fact, these two inflatables were the work of a French company— Plasticiens Volants—so perhaps I shouldn’t be too surprised that NBC edited these floating flirts out of their broadcast. NBC are very concerned about the sensitivities of their viewers when ceremonies come from foreign countries, and not only did they edit out large chunks from Barcelona’s opening and closing ceremonies, but they did it again in Sydney. NBC’s broadcast of both closing ceremonies consisted predominantly of American athletes being asked what they thought of the ceremony—which their viewers were unable to see. But I digress . . . Between opening and closing, there had been visitors in town engaged in a tough competition to host a future Olympics in their city. For once, the competition was close to home. Rod McGeogh
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and the Sydney 2000 bid team spent most of their time in Barcelona loitering in hotel entrances hoping to corner IOC delegates for a few important moments of lobbying, so it was great to spend an hour with Rod over lunch to learn of the bid’s progress. Rod asked about the budget for ceremonies and when I told him that it was US$25 million, he said, ‘Okay, that’ll be our budget, too.’ I didn’t think to mention that this was only for the opening and closing ceremonies, so Rod’s bid budget also incorporated medal ceremonies, the flag handover ceremony in Atlanta and the Athletes’ Village welcome ceremonies within the same amount. Eight years later, the final figure for the Sydney 2000 ceremonies was equivalent to US$27.5 million. In 1985, I had had my first encounter with the urge to hold the Olympics in Australia in the shape of Sallyanne Atkinson, the charismatic and capable mayor of Brisbane who had joined forces with the redoubtable John Coates, president of the Australian Olympic Committee. Coates has often been compared favourably with Machiavelli, and he was certainly merciless in his campaign to bring the Games to Australia. The Premier of New South Wales, Neville Wran, had declined the opportunity for Sydney to host the 1988 Olympics, because he feared that the costs would bankrupt the state. Wran was at the time watching the Darling Harbour rehabilitation going wildly over budget and had no doubt that the Olympics would be similarly out of control. Coates felt that Sydney would have been a shoo-in in Australia’s Bicentennial year and was disappointed that he couldn’t persuade Wran to get involved. So . . . the Sunshine State beckoned. The 1982 Commonwealth Games had succeeded well beyond expectations and meant that Brisbane could no longer be dismissed as a country town. The plans for Expo showed that the Queensland Government was willing to spend money on big events, so plans went forward for Brisbane to bid for the 1992 Olympic Games. Sallyanne went to
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Switzerland and beyond, and turned out to be a very potent proponent of the Brisbane bid. In 1985, Spectak was asked to produce a fundraising dinner in Brisbane at which songs were sung and flags were raised, only to have the whole bid shot down in flames when Barcelona was awarded the Games. For reasons that Coates could have explained but didn’t, the next bid city became Melbourne. There were rumours of bank sponsorship being withdrawn if the bid didn’t move south, but it could also have been hoped that history would repeat itself. Melbourne had hosted the Olympics in 1956 in an Olympiad remembered fondly as the ‘Friendly Games’. In 1989, there was less friendliness among the Melbourne bid committee members when they gathered in Japan to hear Samaranch announce that the Centennial Olympic Games would go to Atlanta in 1996. Coates followed this by announcing that it would be Sydney’s turn next, much to the fury of the Melbourne bid. Rod McGeogh was appointed to head up the Sydney 2000 bid committee, and Nick Greiner’s Liberal government threw its weight and money behind the bid. Bruce Baird was appointed the minister responsible, and the good ship Sydney 2000 sailed forth to do whatever was necessary to gain the Games. Coates made payments to African IOC delegates that wouldn’t be allowed today under the rules of the IOC Ethics Committee, and Rod McGeogh travelled around the world wining and dining IOC delegates (or if necessary, as it was in Mongolia, drinking fermented mare’s milk), again not permissible under today’s IOC rules. By the time Rod and the team were in Barcelona schmoozing the IOC delegates, there were twelve months left to make Sydney’s day. I was invited to return to my home town after the Barcelona Olympics for a press conference to announce my participation in the Sydney 2000 bid team, so I shamelessly accepted the offer of first-class tickets from Qantas for my daughter Lara and myself, and flew back to Sydney for a week.
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I immediately discovered one very big difference between the Catalan and Aussie approaches to the Olympics. When I first arrived in Barcelona, I had asked whether Catalans had priority for the creative positions. COOB ’92 told me that I could hire anyone, as long as they were the best in the world. In Sydney I was told in no uncertain terms that the only people who were going to work on the ceremonies were bloody Australians. The Lucky Country and Catalunya shared the same insecurities and lack of confidence about whether or not the world would love them. But whereas the Catalans decided that they would go forth into the world and hire the best people available to ensure their success, in Australia the xenophobes wanted to make sure that no foreigners could participate. I had to tell the bid committee that in all conscience I couldn’t go along with this policy. Many different countries had trusted me with their ceremonies and celebrations, and it would have been totally hypocritical of me to maintain an Aussie-only hiring policy. As it turned out, we had a number of the world’s best working on the Sydney ceremonies, and the Sydney Organising Committee for the Olympic Games never issued any instructions on restrictive hiring policies. The classic peak of xenophobia remained the marching band, when my plans to have American and Japanese student musicians perform in the Sydney opening ceremony became the occasion for xenophobic outpourings on Sydney’s talkback radio stations. The level of hysteria that was reached on the airwaves is difficult to contemplate now, but at the time it was a symptom of how insecure Australians felt about their ranking in the world order. After the 2000 Olympics, Australians realised that their place in the world is secure and that they’re loved and admired by the rest of the globe. Accordingly, I shouldn’t get any more faxes like the one I received from an unnamed correspondent in rural New South Wales at the height of the marching madness. ‘Dear Rich
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Berk,’ it read. ‘Why don’t you go back to America? I’ve never left Australia in my whole life because I know that this is the best bloody country in the whole world! So get rid of those yanks and japs and yourself and let Aussies rule!’ But at the time of the 1992 press conference in Sydney, all was sweetness and light.
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fourteen
We go to a land Down Under We go to a land Down Under
L
aurie and I returned to Connecticut with Dylan towards the end of 1992 for Thanksgiving with her family, and then headed to Melbourne for Christmas with mine. We stayed on for a couple of months, because in a moment of nostalgia I’d agreed to produce the 1993 Logies for the Ten network. It was a chance to work with Bert Newton again, and it also provided an opportunity to talk with Ron Walker about the Crown Casino project. Ron had been lord mayor of Melbourne many years earlier and remained a tireless booster of the city, forming a company to attract major sporting events to Melbourne and becoming a wealthy property developer along the way. Ron introduced me to the world of highrollers and low bids, and also to Lloyd Williams— one of the greatest patrons I have ever met. Lloyd’s company, Hudson Conway, was preparing a tender submission for the right to build a casino in Melbourne and he asked me to prepare an entertainment proposal for the Crown Casino complex. Working 201
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with Lloyd was never predictable, but he would make a decision when I needed one, and he wasn’t scared to spend money. I was fascinated by Lloyd’s vision of a world-class hotel and casino complex on the Yarra and spent several months working on the project. After a few weeks, Lloyd asked me to write the executive summary for the tender proposal, and also to produce the live presentation to the tender committee. The architectural firm of Bates Smart McCutcheon became available to work with Lloyd Williams when BSM’s first client was eliminated by the Casino Commission in the initial round of tendering. Roger Poole, a director of BSM, had spent some time with Steve Wynne in Las Vegas while preparing the initial bid, so Lloyd snapped him up. More than anyone, Steve Wynne inspired Williams to develop Crown Casino to rival the best of Las Vegas. Wynne is one of the truly great characters of that Nevada gambling city—having conceived and built the Mirage, Treasure Island and the Bellagio hotel/casinos. Each property he designed has a major ‘feature’ outside, and a fabulous showroom inside. Ironically enough, the man who is hailed as one of the great visionaries of casino design is legally blind. Steve Wynne has a degenerative eye disease that causes tunnel vision. The original design for Crown was totally unlike the rather bland buildings that can be seen today on the southern bank of the Yarra between Spencer Street and Queen Street. Roger Poole originally designed Crown around three uniquely shaped buildings. At the western end of the site (where the cinemas and nightclubs are now), there was to be a giant transparent globe within which I planned to build a Ferris wheel and roller-coaster. In the centre, where the gaming areas are located, Roger had designed a glass cube that stood on one corner as a playful metaphor for a dice. Finally, the hotel on the eastern boundary of the site was originally designed to be a prism with glittering glass walls that refracted Marvellous Melbourne. The playful silhouettes of these shapes
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would have made the Yarra bank far more interesting, and might have given Melbourne a building to rival Sydney’s Opera House in its impact on tourism. But it wasn’t to be. Melbourne’s architectural establishment, in the person of the dean of architecture at Melbourne University, sniffed that the buildings were suitable only for a theme park or an Expo. Unfortunately, the dean was chairman of the panel appointed by the Victorian Government to judge the casino tenders, so Melbourne ended up with the bland compromise skyline that can be seen today at Crown Casino. Lloyd had the complex totally redesigned and Melbourne lost the chance to be even more Marvellous. My involvement with Crown’s fortunes rose and fell with Lloyd’s level of enthusiasm. In late 1993, it was announced that the Crown Casino proposal had been selected as the preferred tenderer and work started on a temporary facility in the World Trade Centre. Lloyd had retained me to design the entertainment plan for the permanent complex, but over the next couple of years he became convinced that the future of entertainment lay in simulators and video arcades. This was not a vision that I shared, so we parted company until he very unexpectedly asked me to produce the opening ceremony for Crown in April 1997. I have fond memories of working for Lloyd—he was totally committed to making Crown the greatest development anyone had ever seen, and was prepared to pay any price to achieve his vision. (Of course, his dreams were somewhat dashed by commercial reality a couple of years later when Kerry Packer ended up buying out his erstwhile partner for less than half the cost of Crown’s construction.) During 1994, when I wasn’t in Melbourne for Crown, I was flying to Tennessee for a good time with the good old boys who had produced the waterski show at Expo. Fred Hardwick had expanded beyond his original waterski show in Pigeon Forge and was now in business with Dolly Parton for a hootin’ ’n’ hollerin’ show called ‘Dixie Stampede’. The show is set in a purpose-built
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venue with room for 1000 spectators, who get to eat a whole chicken using their fingers while watching 30 horses and riders compete for the Pride of the South against the Honour of the North. The genius of this concept is that kids don’t have to worry about table manners and are encouraged to kick their heels against plywood walls under their seats. Because their children are having such a good time, their parents are ready to enjoy themselves too, and Fred and Dolly’s Stampede has been very successful indeed. In 1994, Fred asked if I’d be interested in ‘freshening up’ the show— which required some serious thought because I’m allergic to horses. At that time, there were three Stampede locations. I’d hired two other directors so we could each work with the cast of one Stampede, and they could work with the riders and horse wranglers while I sneezed on the sidelines. Who knows what the cast called me behind my back, but they referred to the other two directors as Mary Poppins and Mussolini. Ron Mangham, choreographer from Barcelona and assistant director in Singapore, was of course Ms Poppins—and one of the most engaging personalities the farm boys from Tennessee had ever met. Ron’s flashing teeth and line of chat should have got him into a lot of trouble, but he was so charming and so talented that the farm boys learned to dance and be proud of it. Mussolini was Australia’s own Ignatius Jones. Also gay, but into gymnasium-muscle strutting culture, Iggy came from a different charm school altogether. Spanish/Filipino/Catholic, to be precise. He’d cut his teeth, and many other parts of his body, with his band Jimmy and the Boys—a new direction in Australian music that dead-ended with Iggy. Often in an alcoholic haze, Ig officially remembers little of his stage-struck days, but he was able to identify with the horseriders’ tales of White Lightnin’ up in the Appalachian Mountains. When we weren’t eating Stampede chicken, Ron, Iggy and I lived on brown or yellow food in Pigeon Forge. Fried everything. Catfish, broccoli, chicken fried in a hundred different ways, donuts, eggs easy and eggs over. Breakfasts at
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Shoney’s and the Crackerbarrel where the waitresses were worth the wait just to hear them say, ‘How y’all doin’ today?’ At the top of the hill in a different county was the town of Gatlinburg where two restaurants had a wine list. One of them had a fireplace, Mouton-Rothschild Cadet and a menu that included vegetables. We went there whenever we could. Having ‘refreshed’ the standard Stampedes, Fred asked me back to develop a new Christmas show for the three locations. Once again, Iggy and Ron joined me in the rural South and we developed a show that involved flying angels, a Nativity scene, and girls and boys being good because Santa Claus was comin’ to town. The Stampede experience was to have some unfortunate consequences for Fred and me a few years later in Australia. Much of 1993 and 1994 was spent in aeroplanes. My line of work requires me to follow up opportunities wherever they are in the world, and this was tough on Laurie and Dylan because I was often at home in Los Angeles for only a few days before I flew away again. Business was good, but I didn’t spend much time at home. In addition to the Stampede, I was also commuting to Melbourne for Crown Casino and, of course, I had to be in Monaco for the 2000 Olympic Candidate City announcement. The Sydney bid team was based at Loew’s Hotel in Monte Carlo, scene of a significant party celebrating Sydney’s success where glum Chinese gazed through the doorway and cheerful Poms from the Manchester bid downed Foster’s and said Aussies gave the best parties. Up on the roof, there was a small shelter where the Today program was being transmitted back to Australia in a dismal drizzle of rain, and I remember sitting there wondering what this might mean for my future. I’d arrived in Monte Carlo a few days before the announcement, convinced that Sydney would win, but then Rod McGeogh told me, ‘That was last week. We’re hearing that Beijing is ahead by two or three votes.’ There seemed little doubt that the final decision
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would be between Beijing and Sydney, and the tension in the corridors of power grew stronger as the day of the vote approached. Behind the scenes, Australian Olympic Committee chairman John Coates had moved into overdrive and was calling in every favour he could. Prime Minister Paul Keating and John Fahey, the New South Wales Premier, were in town moving and shaking, the members of the Sydney bid committee were everywhere working the backrooms, the streets were full of Sydney supporters wearing peculiar pink T-shirts that were visible by day or night, and by the afternoon of Thursday, September 23, 1993 the tension took on an air of desperation. Rod McGeogh’s voice was slightly hoarse, but he was still projecting confidence to the team. When Samaranch announced that ‘Syddernee’ was the winner of the 2000 Olympic lottery, the Chinese bid team looked like they would face a firing squad, the Turks looked baffled, the Poms looked happy, and the Aussies went crazy, whether they were in Monaco or on Sydney Harbour. This was the last time for the next seven years that everyone associated with the bid was joyful. The bloodletting began almost as soon as the victorious team returned to Sydney. Premier John Fahey announced that the minister responsible for the bid—Bruce Baird—would now be responsible for roads and highways. A search began for a CEO for the newly minted SOCOG, but Fahey and John Coates let it be known that Rod McGeogh need not bother applying for the job. Coates always considered that Rod was a ‘show pony’ and that he had received far too much credit for the success of Sydney’s bid. Coates had worked behind the scenes to ensure that Sydney got votes from IOC members, whereas Rod had pursued a tireless round of political, social and media appearances to get the vote out for Sydney. The fact is that they were both essential to Sydney’s success, but Coates is a Labor Party man and a ‘good hater’, as Graham Richardson has said of him admiringly.
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The people of Sydney who had innocently celebrated the win didn’t understand the dynamics of the power struggle behind the scenes, and John Fahey lost the next state election by the narrowest of margins—a ‘busload of voters’, as a media commentator said at the time. Fahey’s victory leap into the air in Monte Carlo remains the proudest, and certainly most publicised, moment of his life. As Fahey’s feet were leaving the ground, I was thinking about the cauldron-lighting sequence for Sydney. In Monte Carlo, the memory of Barcelona’s arrow was still very strong and I knew it would be necessary to come up with an equally powerful image for Sydney. I never seriously considered using a boomerang, spear or flaming marsupial as a substitute for Antoni Rebollo and the arrow, much less Greg Norman hitting a burning golf ball into the cauldron—although those ideas and many others were freely shared with me by Australians over the coming years. As a pre-requisite of bidding for the 2000 Olympic Games, the IOC required the host city to agree that all the athletes would be seated for the opening ceremony. This meant there would be a lot of empty seats once the athletes left them to start marching into the arena. I pictured ways to fill the seats so that they weren’t so glaringly empty, and before long I’d decided to remove the actual seats themselves once the teams vacated them, so by the time all the athletes had assembled on the field, the grandstand would be a series of platforms with no seats at all. Once this image was created, it was a simple step to imagine a waterfall cascading down the platforms towards the torchbearer waiting on the grass at the base of the grandstand. Instead of the torchbearer running up through the torrent, I imagined surf lifesavers carrying the torch upward against the churning waves in a variation of a classic reeland-line surf rescue. That led to the idea of lifesavers appearing on surfboards at the top of the grandstand, riding the wild waterfall all the way down to the field where they would collect the torch and return to the waves. The climax would occur when the
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torchbearer reached the summit of the waterfall to ignite the water’s surface as the cauldron appeared from below, thrusting up hydraulically to its full height above the stadium. Writing down the idea just now took about as long as my original thought process, so that as John Fahey settled back down into his seat in Monte Carlo and started shaking hands with those around him, I had already decided how to light the cauldron. Of course, there were to be many improvements to the idea after Michael Scott-Mitchell started designing the stage and the cauldron, but the basic concept remained. Call me inflexible or unimaginative, but from that moment in Monte Carlo I knew that fire and water would be the right image for Sydney and I never bothered thinking of an alternative. During 1994, Gary Pemberton, chairman of Qantas at the time, was appointed as president of SOCOG and I met with him several times to discuss the selection process for the position of director of ceremonies. Although I had been named in the Sydney bid documents as being responsible for ceremonies, in the interests of probity it was necessary to hold a public process that was open to suitably qualified applicants. However, Gary wanted to discuss how the budget would be managed and needed information about the responsibilities of the position. A public announcement was placed in newspapers, and applicants were invited to register their interest. The day before applications were due to close, I heard a familiar voice on the phone. ‘Mate, mate . . . Harry here. Listen, mate. I’m putting together a team for this job at the Olympics . . . would you join us?’ I told Harry M. Miller that I’d be applying for the job without him. ‘But, mate . . . there’s $36 million in the budget . . . just imagine what we could do with that!’ I told Harry that I already had a few ideas of my own and he hung up, no doubt calling other people around town to join his
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assault on ceremonies. I didn’t hear from him again for some time. There were about thirty replies from qualified candidates, but I was the only one who had already produced the ceremonies for two Olympic Games and one Commonwealth Games, so on September 23, 1994, Gary announced that I had been selected as the preferred candidate for the position of director of ceremonies. Back in Los Angeles, I had to tell Laurie it was time to pack again. It was a little more complicated than before, because we now had a daughter named Jessie who had been born a month after the bid announcement in Monte Carlo. This time Laurie had been resigned to me missing the Lamaze classes and was only insistent that I be around for the birth. Jessica Rose arrived safely, and at the age of three months experienced her first earthquake. It was January 1994, and my older daughter Lara had escaped from the bushfires in Sydney to come to Los Angeles to meet her baby sister for the first time. At 4.30 a.m. the house started shaking and threeyear-old Dylan wandered into our bedroom to report that something had broken. It turned out that a flashlight had vibrated off a bookshelf in his room and this was the only casualty. The house stopped shaking and the peculiar noise that often accompanies earthquakes abated. Laurie and Jessie were safe and so I went looking for Lara, who was the only person I hadn’t seen as the house shook on its foundations. My teenage daughter was still fast asleep, and it is now part of Jessie’s repertoire that her sister can sleep through earthquakes. So a year later, when Lara flew to LA in early 1995 to help us with our move to Sydney, she wasn’t expecting another natural disaster. This time, instead of earthquakes, we had downpours. Like all transients, Laurie and I rented a storage unit where we kept the stuff that wouldn’t fit wherever we were living at the time, but which we were sure would come in handy one day. We went to the storage bay to meet the movers, only to discover that a flash flood a few days earlier had inundated our unit with storm
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water to a depth of about half a metre. Instead of a leisurely packing process, instructing the movers what to take and what to leave, we suddenly had to unpack boxes and boxes of records, books, videos, as well as paintings and graphics, tool chests and electrical goods of various voltages to find out if the contents were worth keeping. Lara ended up babysitting and packing, instead of going to the disco and doing the driving that she’d been looking forward to. Meanwhile, Laurie and I were throwing mouldy possessions and saturated boxes into the dumpster and were finally able to send off a smaller-than-expected sea container for Sydney. The final straw was that when we finally arrived at LAX to board our midday flight to Sydney, it was discovered that Laurie’s US passport had expired. She’d been so busy packing she hadn’t had time to renew her passport but thought she’d be allowed into Australia because she still had a valid visa. To complicate matters further, it was a federal public holiday in the US and no passport offices were open. I called Margaret McLennan, who had been seconded from the New South Wales Government to be Rod McGeogh’s PA during the bid, and was now working for Gary Pemberton, president of SOCOG and chairman of Qantas. I explained the situation to Margaret, who leapt into action on the phone lines to Canberra. She also told Gary what had happened and apparently he mused, ‘If he can’t organise a trip to Sydney, I wonder if he’s the right guy for the ceremonies?’ At LAX, the Qantas baggage handlers, who had just completed a heroic ticketing and tagging of our stuff, pulled it all back off the plane. We spent the afternoon and evening waiting for Margaret to get back to us with information. Somehow she managed to persuade the Canberra bureaucrats that the Birch family, although demonstrably idiots, did not otherwise pose a threat to the Commonwealth and should be allowed in as soon as possible. Faxed entry papers for Laurie arrived at the airport, and somehow
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Margaret managed to get us five seats in business class on that night’s Qantas flight to Sydney, which was already overbooked. She made me promise not to tell Gary Pemberton, and this is the first time I’ve mentioned it because I think the statute of limitations would apply by now. And so, in January 1995, a day after my fiftieth birthday, Laurie and I arrived in Sydney with one teenager, two small children, forty-one pieces of luggage and serious sleep deficit. Margaret McLennan met us at the airport and arranged a fleet of vans to ferry our stuff to the hotel in Maroubra where we were staying. A couple of weeks later, Laurie found a house in Greenwich available for rent and we moved in—I ended up staying there for almost six years, which is the longest residential address I’ve had in my life. Laurie felt that our children should have a stable home and a fixed address once they were of school age, so for her the Greenwich house was a major commitment. Ironically, I ended up spending far more time there than she and the children did. SOCOG was still adjusting from being a bid committee to becoming an organising committee, and the turf and personal wars that had erupted in 1993 in Monte Carlo were still being fought out. Gary Pemberton seemed somewhat bemused by the passion of public servants for their piece of the pie, but presided over the embryonic organising committee with decency and remarkable humility. These were traits rarely seen in the corner offices after he left. Over the next few months the floors at SOCOG’s headquarters started to fill. Dr Mal Hemmerling, fresh from the Adelaide Grand Prix, arrived to take up the CEO position, and the hard-working and popular Bob Elphinstone, who had worked on the bid committee, was appointed deputy CEO. John Moore came from the private sector to head up marketing. John Pope was already in position as director of finance. By the time of the Olympics, only Bob Elphinstone and I were left of this group. In
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those early days, it was like the phoney war must have been for the British in 1939. We knew we’d be going into action one day, but meantime there was time for lunch. My contract with SOCOG stipulated that my services were not exclusive, but that I had to ensure that any Olympic duties were performed as required. This enabled me to establish Spectak as a production company in Australia again, while allowing me to develop the Olympic program. One important bit of business was my cauldron-lighting fantasy, so I asked Ove Arup, the international engineering company, to perform some very basic calculations for me. Their representative was asked to imagine a box one metre high, two metres wide and seventy metres long resting along the top seating rows of a grandstand, then filling it with water. On cue, the ‘box’ would open and deliver a deluge of water that had to continue pouring down the grandstands for at least fifteen minutes. To his credit, the engineer didn’t blink but reached for his calculator. After a few minutes he told me that the weight of the water wasn’t really a problem because it was more or less equivalent to that of the spectators, and that one of the waterfalls at the Sydney Aquatic Centre would give me an idea of the depth of waterflow we could achieve. The problem, he said, was maintaining the volume of water for fifteen minutes because that would involve some very hefty pumps and some serious plumbing. But for me the main question had been answered—it was feasible to tip a lot of water down a grandstand and we’d worry later exactly how to do it. The next task was to brief the architects and engineers who were in competition for the design and construction of the Olympic Stadium. There were three construction companies involved— Civil & Civic, Hornibrook, and Multiplex—with three different architectural designs, but none of them had thought of incorporating a waterfall into the northern seating section. On three occasions I
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stood in front of a group of grown men and explained that their stadium design had to allow for a torrent of water to cascade down over the spectators’ seats and that they would need to collect the water at the bottom and recirculate it back to the top. Any further questions? There was usually a semi-strangled comment along the lines of ‘Are you serious?’ and I suspect that none of the architects really gave the matter a lot of thought. It was one of those things they’d worry about if they got the job. And in the end we did it ourselves. From the moment I arrived at my SOCOG office in Kent Street, Sydney, I was made aware that my fellow Australians were ready to help me create the ceremonies. In fact, some insisted that they help me. John Valder, a Liberal Party fundraiser and SOCOG board member, wrote a letter suggesting that because Australia was a young country I shouldn’t have any performers in the ceremony aged over twenty. I sent a facetious reply, but Valder apparently was serious. He sent more letters in increasingly hostile tones ordering me to pay attention to his edicts. He finally tried to enlist the support of the SOCOG board, but they told Valder to desist and I didn’t hear from him again. Bob Elphinstone delivered boxes of letters that had arrived since the bid and said that the correspondents had been told that ‘the director of ceremonies will reply to your suggestions when he has been appointed’. Now it was up to me to go through the letters and see if anything raised interest instead of an eyebrow. My new personal assistant, Marie-Claire Courtin, started my day with a cup of coffee and a pile of correspondence that she’d sorted through. ‘More boomerangs, Ric,’ she’d say. For some reason, Aussies overwhelmingly wanted to see the cauldron lit with a flaming boomerang. We must have received more than 4000 letters suggesting this concept, ranging from simple handwritten notes thanking me for my attention, to a letter from some physicists in
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Canberra who tried to get a confidentiality agreement and a large fee before they’d share the details of their proposal. I already had an idea that involved fiery boomerangs, but they weren’t for lighting the cauldron. Back in the Brisbane Expo days, we’d experimented one night with a chap who dipped the end of a boomerang in kerosene, lit it then threw it away. The effect was magical—a looping eccentric series of parabolas in the darkness that were unlike any effect I’d ever seen. I’d saved the idea for the right occasion, and it seemed that its time had come. As anyone who saw the Sydney 2000 Opening Ceremony might recall, there was a bushfire sequence performed by firebreathers. My original idea had been to use hundreds of flaming boomerangs at this point in the ceremony. The image would have been unforgettable, but I was dissuaded by two powerful voices, one from the insurance company and the other from Rhoda Roberts. Rhoda was the Aboriginal director of the Dreaming Arts Festival and she told me not to even dream of doing it, because boomerangs were a cultural stereotype. That was the political position. The insurance argument was even more compelling—if flaming boomerangs went astray into the stands, we might have to extinguish the audience. I stopped thinking about flammable boomerangs, but the letters continued right up to the ceremony. There were some amazing suggestions for ceremonies from members of the public who must have been unhappy in their day jobs and wanted mine. One of the most persistent came from Western Australia where a self-styled artist gave interviews to a gullible media, declaring that he was producing and directing the opening ceremony and that he’d developed a script for a ‘Hollywood-style extravaganza with a budget of $200 million’. It is a credit to the hometown loyalty of Perth’s journalists that they printed this claim without even phoning me to check on the facts.
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Over the months that followed, the same story appeared several more times. The Premier of Western Australia forwarded letters to Canberra and Macquarie Street, endorsing this genius of the west who was making an offer we’d be mad to refuse. The genius in question refused to divulge his ideas—which I could understand, but insisted that he had sponsors and a marketing plan for the entire budget—which I couldn’t understand. Finally, months later, an elaborate book arrived by messenger. A story involving bears and interplanetary travel unravelled on page after page of drawings and music from the golden days of MGM. It was difficult to imagine any way at all in which this was relevant to the Olympics or even to human existence, but I did have to admire the persistence and self-confidence of its proponent. I finally managed to break off contact by steering him towards Hollywood where I assured him that his genius would be better appreciated. Another detailed suggestion for ceremonies came from a grazier in outback New South Wales who was really a long way out. He wanted me to flood the Sydney Stadium to an unspecified depth, but sufficiently deep to sink the First Fleet. His plan was to have Captain Cook arrive in a sailing ship and take a look around the stadium, while unseen in the sky above him was a giant rainbow serpent. The correspondent was kind enough to include a sketch of how to achieve the serpent effect—there would be a ‘silenced’ helicopter hidden inside an inflatable snake with only its rotor showing. Captain Cook was to leave the stadium and a few minutes later the First Fleet was to take his place. But here was the twist— the rainbow serpent was to sink the entire fleet and its hapless cargo of white trash settlers with a flick of its giant silenced tail. Then, for the closing ceremony, we would empty the stadium of water and reveal the wrecks of the First Fleet covered in weed and barnacles, lying on the floor of the stadium. This would have been a salutary lesson to us all of the perils of sailing on Sydney
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Harbour, but since the Olympic yachting events were to be held there, I thought the message was unnecessarily gloomy and suggested that the grazier should stay out of the sun. Not all letters gave impractical advice. A young man named Adrian Jordan sent me an ingenious idea which came close to succeeding. He suggested having a squadron of paragliders instead of the traditional release of doves. The paragliders were tiny aircraft—the pilot has a small engine and propellor mounted on a backpack with a wingfoil parachute above. At the time, there were only seven in Australia, but soon there were eight because I bought one from Japan for Adrian to experiment with. The plan was to fly 100 paragliders over the stadium, and once Adrian had demonstrated that his idea could work, he developed a budget for the stunt. Unfortunately, this was where reality raised its ugly head. I had to explain that $4 million would buy me a lot of real doves, so Adrian kept reducing the content and the costs until finally we were down to seven or eight gliders plus the cost of sandwiches and fuel. One night in 2000 we arranged a test at the Olympic Stadium with Adrian and another intrepid birdman to fly low overhead, but it wasn’t a great success. Although the gliders looked intriguing, they sounded like an attack by flying lawnmowers, even with only two of them. Doves traditionally symbolise peace and quiet, but the sound of a squadron of paragliders would have dispelled any thoughts of peace among the spectators. Another problem was that many spectators would have been unable to see Adrian’s formation because the giant roofs at the stadium would block their view. That was the final straw and the gliders disappeared off the radar. As well as handling Olympic fantasies, there was also some actual work to be done in 1995. I was starting to assemble the ideas and creative team for a segment known as the Olympic Flag Handover Ceremony, which would form part of the Atlanta 1996 Olympics Closing Ceremony and would symbolise the passing of
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the Olympic Games to Sydney. The handover ceremony had become part of the Olympic Games in 1920 when Baron de Coubertin was presented with an Olympic flag embroidered by the good ladies of Antwerp, host city of the 1920 Games. Four years later, during the opening ceremony, this so-called Antwerp flag was presented to the mayor of Paris—the next host city. This meant that a host city retained the Antwerp flag for four years after they had hosted the Olympics. The transfer of the flag from the mayor of one city to the next became a tradition and continued until 1984 when David Wolper observed that the flag was getting a little worn; besides which it would make more sense to hand it over at the closing ceremony so that the incoming host city would have it in its possession during its Olympiad. This change in protocol was approved by the IOC, and Los Angeles became the only Olympic city to have the Antwerp flag for two weeks instead of four years, because it received the flag from the mayor of Moscow at the opening ceremony and then passed it on to the mayor of Seoul at the closing ceremony. Seoul, host city for the 1988 Games, told the IOC that they’d make a new flag, so now if you want to see the original Antwerp flag you must visit the IOC Museum in Lausanne. The Seoul Olympic flag is the one that was waved so enthusiastically by the lord mayor of Sydney, Frank Sartor, when he received it during the closing ceremony of the 1996 Atlanta Games. The Right Honourable flag waving was followed by an even more patriotic sight—twelve inflatable kangaroos on bikes riding to glory in the Atlanta Stadium. So, what on earth was I thinking of? The story had started a year earlier in Sydney when Rod McGeogh, who among his many civic contributions was the chairman of the National Institute for the Dramatic Arts, had invited me to a NIDA graduation ceremony. Afterwards, I’d met Peter Cook, head of the design department, and several of his students. Peter was keen to see his department get involved in a real project, and I was interested to have a creative workshop with
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NIDA. At that time I had a few ideas for the handover ceremony, but they hadn’t yet formed into a coherent script. Over the next few weeks I met with Peter Cook and three students, plus a recent design graduate named Peter England, and many ideas came and went as we tried to visually define what it means to be an Australian from Sydney in search of the Olympics. Then I brought Stephen Page to meet the group. I had seen Stephen’s dancework Ochres some months earlier and had been mesmerised by the extraordinary fusion of Western ballet and traditional Aboriginal dance that he had pioneered with his Bangarra Dance Company. The lead male performer was Djakapurra Munyarrin, a huge man in his early twenties who moved with cat-like grace and agility and dominated the stage with his presence. The lighting, choreography and performance were all exceptional, and the haunting quality of the images stayed in my mind for a very long time. Immediately afterward I had tried to contact Stephen, but he never returned my calls. Then one day at SOCOG he was walking past with Rhoda Roberts and she introduced us. Stephen and I started talking and it became clear to me very quickly that his exceptional talent, visual imagination and emotional understanding would be ideal for ceremonies. Over the following months we continued to meet, and Stephen agreed to be the creative director for the flag handover and also rearranged the Bangarra touring schedule so that all the dancers in the company could be available for Atlanta in 1996. I told Stephen that I had an idea for the ceremony that involved white boys on bicycles riding towards the centre of the stadium, where Aboriginal men were dancing a corroboree that transformed the boys into kangaroos. This was a metaphor for the way that Europeans became Australians, and at the end there would be lifesavers and an image of the Sydney Opera House. I didn’t yet know what would happen in the middle. The reason for the bikes was to get the performers onto the field quickly—a rush of energy that symbolised Australia’s
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youth. Stephen was hesitant about the kangaroos but went along with them because I felt they were an important symbol for international audiences. When Stephen first met the NIDA students at a production meeting, the ideas started flowing and before long we had a working script, which was, as usual, a series of drawings and sketches rather than a written description. Stephen’s close identification with the land was a unique influence in his creativity, and it was something of a revelation to see how that infused the way he thought about movement. Later in rehearsal, he would tell the dancers to feel the land ‘breathing’ beneath them, and encouraged them to be aware of the natural rhythms that were all around. In Sydney, this was difficult during rehearsals that took place in winter, where it was hard to feel anything except cold, but when the production team arrived in Georgia for final rehearsals, the dancers worked barefoot in the sweltering heat and the results were very different. We’d assembled a cast of dancers from Bangarra, students from the Performing Arts Unit of the New South Wales Education Department, and members of the Surf Lifesaving Association that Stephen and I had auditioned one afternoon at Bondi. It had been a slightly surreal experience to see tanned young Australians in swimming costumes, perspiring under a cloudless sky, walking and running barefoot on grass and sand as an Aboriginal director put them through choreographic routines and finally through height charts. It reinforced my deeply held belief that all Australians have an affinity with our wide brown land that crosses all racial boundaries. As the handover ceremony took shape, we started building the cast and crew numbers. Stephen had four assistant choreographers, and there were also props and wardrobe crew plus the NIDA team. I’d added Celia Smith to my staff, where she rapidly became an indispensable asset because she attended SOCOG meetings on my behalf while I got on with the real work. Celia
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had been recommended by Karen Richards, my long-time PA who was now a mother and unavailable, but Celia shared many of Karen’s ‘can-do’ qualities and fitted right in. Marie-Claire, my multilingual and diplomatic PA, was rapidly becoming an overseer responsible for a travelling circus of 124 people who would be needed for the handover ceremony in Atlanta. Finally, in July 1996, at the old Sydney Showgrounds not long before they became the Fox Studios, we assembled the full cast for a final rehearsal before heading for Atlanta. It was early evening and it was freezing. We had asked the dancers to perform in body makeup or fairly flimsy dresses, and the lifesavers were in Speedos. It was only the cockatoos who were dressed for the weather. Marie-Claire shepherded the large group of Aussies into Atlanta a few days after the Atlanta 1996 Opening Ceremony. We met up at the airport and piled into buses for the one-hour drive north to the University of Georgia in Athens, where there was student dormitory accommodation for everyone. Next day, the rehearsals started on a remote UGA athletic field where the stage was set up and we discovered what it was like to rehearse in stifling heat. Until this time, Djakapurra and the male Bangarra dancers had introduced the performance sequence with a didgeridoo chorus that built to the sounds of sunrise, followed by a pyrotechnic burst from the stage—after which the young bike riders pedalled like mad to the centre of the field where they dismounted and moved onto the stage where the Bangarra men were performing a kangaroo dance. The young boys were to join with them and then activate the inflatable roos that were concealed in their backpacks, so the effect was that the boys disappeared and became the kangaroos. This was pretty basic symbolism—ancient land with original inhabitants attracts young modern arrivals who are changed by the land and its people. After a few rehearsals, Stephen was concerned that the kangaroo costumes weren’t reliable enough. Occasionally one or two of the inflatables took longer to inflate
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than the other costumes and he was concerned that this would be distracting. Stephen felt that if the kangaroos were inflated offstage, we’d know that the costumes were correct before the boys made their entrance. At first I wasn’t sure, because it made the storyline less clear, but when I saw the biker boys in full kangaroo formation at rehearsal, I laughed so hard I nearly fell off the scaffolding and told Stephen that the change would be fine. I think I probably said at the time, ‘It says something about the Australian sense of humour.’ As it turned out, the result tapped into a deep vein of Australian sensitivities—but humour wasn’t among them. All was in readiness for a rehearsal day at the Olympic Stadium in Atlanta, which was the reason that we’d come over from Australia a few days earlier than necessary. It is traditional in Olympic track and field competition to leave a blank day for wet weather contingency, but in Atlanta the weather had remained good and the day was still available for our scheduled rehearsal. Then Ginger Watkins, the woman who was second-in-charge of the Atlanta organising committee, phoned to say that we couldn’t rehearse at the stadium because we’d damage the grass. Her apprehension was understandable—the organising committee had had to replace the turf unexpectedly after the opening ceremony because the original grass surface looked like old hay after the months of rehearsal. The replacement grass was simply gorgeous, emerald green and glowing with good health, and Ginger wouldn’t let us place a foot on it, let alone a stage, bicycles, people, flags, helium tubes and tanks. I tried to explain to her that without a rehearsal I would be sending nearly 200 people onto the field in the dark without them knowing where they were meant to perform. Ginger relented to the point where the Australian performers were allowed to walk around the stadium and look at the backstage areas we’d be using, but no one was allowed to walk onto the field. The head of security at the stadium made us aware that he knew where we could walk, and since he carried a gun and was a good old Southern
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boy, I decided that discretion was the better part of valour and that we’d stay off the grass. So we travelled down to the stadium and the performers all sat in the grandstand and imagined what it would be like to run onto that space in a few days time, at night, with lights and in front of 90,000 people. They were ready. And so on August 4, 1996, several busloads of excited Australian performers arrived backstage at the stadium. The noise level in the backstage tunnels was indescribable as thousands of Atlanta performers shrieked and screamed at the wonder of it all, but our kids and crew behaved like seasoned troupers and quickly settled in. There was much interest from the locals as dancers applied white ochre all over their bodies and gasps of envy for the white cockatoo costumes and then suddenly the closing ceremony had started. Out on the field, Sydney’s lord mayor, Frank Sartor, was waving the Seoul flag around with great enthusiasm, and as he left the stage, all was in readiness for the handover ceremony. Except that one of the security guys at the bike boys’ entrance tunnel hadn’t been briefed—because we hadn’t had a rehearsal. He had strict instructions not to allow anyone onto the field, and suddenly he was confronted with twelve inflated kangaroos on bikes that were obviously planning to make a break for it. The guard tried to grab the boys as they heard their cue and pedalled frantically past him onto the field, but our lads were too quick for him and he was left empty-handed. Unfortunately, he’d thrown the boys off-balance, so one of the costumes had slipped and became engaged with a bicycle wheel and the entrance was perhaps less dignified than planned. Don Mischer, the TV director who also had had no chance for rehearsal, found himself without any working cameras during the afternoon because the host broadcast technicians had packed up when they finished covering the Marathon earlier in the day— overlooking the fact that there was still a closing ceremony to go. This explains why, instead of shooting the approaching kangaroos
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head-on as we had planned and discussed, Don was forced to take a shot of the Olyroos from behind as they headed for the stage; it was the only camera shot he had available. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the ’roos’ best angle, but it didn’t matter for the stadium audience whose flash cameras jumped into action and filled the stands with strobes as the kangaroos reached the stage. From then on the flash cameras didn’t stop. The audience seemed to follow the storyline as beautiful young girls appeared from the cover of the giant waratahs and joined ‘earth spirit women’ on the stage, only to have their lyrical reverie shattered by a group of gregarious yahoo cockatoos, who squawked around the field to the sound of electric guitars. Then the lifesavers appeared from behind the cover of the giant white tubes, carrying large blue flags and forming a tableau of colour and movement that would have made Dame Edna happy. Finally, all the performers gathered as the helium sails lifted above the arena and the press photographers got the shot that appeared in all the papers next morning. In the national daily newspaper USA Today, our photo was on the front page, and it was the only picture of the whole Atlanta closing ceremony that they used. There was much excited squealing and screaming as the performers ran backstage through the stadium tunnels, releasing their tension with happy whoops and high fives. They’d done brilliantly well and were being congratulated by everyone they met. We’d arranged a party back in Athens near the University of Georgia, so the performers scrubbed off as much of the ochre body paint as possible and boarded the buses while the closing ceremony continued in the stadium. I had a car and was following the buses when my phone rang. It was an ABC Radio reporter, calling from Sydney. ‘G’day, Ric. Whaddya reckon about the ceremony?’ I said that I thought it had gone off really well, and that I was very proud of all the performers who had put on a great show without any rehearsal in the stadium at all.
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‘But what about the ’roos on bikes?’ he asked. ‘Weren’t they great?’ I said. ‘So, you haven’t heard about the controversy?’ he replied. Obviously not—he was the first person outside the Ceremonies unit that I’d spoken to. So he started to tell me that the sight of the ’roos on bikes had totally shocked all Australians, who now felt that they were the laughing-stock of the world, and that I’d embarrassed nineteen million people whose worst fears were now realised, and what was I thinking of anyway? I was puzzled. I knew that the stadium audience had loved the ‘roos on bikes, and had in fact loved the whole thing, as you can tell if you ever have occasion to watch a video recording of the ceremony. I explained that the whole point of the handover ceremony was to alert the international television audience to the fact that the next Olympic host city was in Australia—and the combination of kangaroos and the Opera House was a pretty clear clue. Besides, I couldn’t believe that my fellow Australians were still so parochial, particularly Sydneysiders who prided themselves on their cosmopolitan city. Over the next few days, I was surprised at how many Australians turned out to have very deep-seated insecurity complexes about their image overseas. Of course, the international audiences couldn’t care less about the ’roos—they enjoyed the show and then got on with their lives. But in Australia the controversy raged for weeks and never really went away until after the Sydney opening ceremony, at which time all Australians suddenly became enormously confident and secure about their place in the world, greeting the cycling ’roos with great affection when they made a guest appearance in the Paralympic ceremonies in Sydney 2000. But in Atlanta in 1996, the Australian media reports put a dampener on the thoroughly deserved euphoria among the performers. There was a rest day, and then Marie-Claire and Celia started assembling the tired but happy groups and putting them on buses for the airport. I was staying on to see the handover ceremony for
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the Paralympics, which Karen Richards was producing, but in the meantime I headed for Myrtle Beach in South Carolina to spend time with Laurie and the kids. A couple of days later, the phone rang. It was Steve Wood, executive producer of The Today Show on Australia’s Nine network, who was calling to see if I wanted to comment on a story that Harry M. Miller had spilled to the Daily Telegraph in Sydney. Apparently, my old mate Harry was claiming to have got me the Olympics job in LA. He had said that I was incompetent, and alleged that I had committed the unpardonable sin of putting white women in ‘blackface’ and pretending they were Aboriginal. Having been out of regular contact with Australia, I had had no idea that things were getting so out of control, so I agreed to record an interview with Liz Mulliner if Nine could arrange a video uplink from South Carolina. Next day in Charlotte, I heard for the first time the venom that was being injected into the Olympics debate. There was also some humour—Sydney radio’s arch disc jockey, Alan Jones, claimed that by an amazing coincidence Miller had just happened to be walking down the corridor outside the studio at the same time as he was discussing the Olympics, so he dragged him in for an interview. Harry M. Miller was at the time Alan Jones’s manager, but this wasn’t mentioned by the Parrot (as Jones is known in the industry). Jones did, however, mention Miller’s credentials for discussing the ceremonies—that he had been chairman of a committee responsible for the Queen’s Silver Jubilee celebrations almost twenty years earlier! Listeners would be forgiven if they couldn’t remember them. Fortunately, I was able to point out in my Nine interview that Harry Miller had been in jail at the time that the LAOOC observers had been in Brisbane, so it was a bit of a stretch (no pun intended) for Miller to claim to have been instrumental in my appointment in LA. As to the ‘blackface’ allegations, Jones and Miller had totally misrepresented Stephen’s choreography. ‘Blackface’ had been a vaudevillian makeup used
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by white Americans like Al Jolson to imitate black musicians. Stephen’s use of ochre on Aboriginal and white performers alike had been a traditional Aboriginal ceremonial gesture to unify them as ‘earth spirits’ and had no link whatsoever with American music halls. Stephen Page’s manager was able to point out their error and Jones had to stop insulting the Bangarra dancers on air. It didn’t stop him or Miller continuing to insult me, but fortunately neither of them had much credibility with the new president of SOCOG, Michael Knight.
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SOCOG gets serious SOCOG gets serious
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y first meeting with Michael Knight, the Man who would be President, took place in Atlanta in the VIP Lounge of the Olympic Stadium at the time of the Paralympics. Michael is tall. Much taller than me, so in my case he had to stoop further than usual to be heard, as his voice is disarmingly quiet and he speaks out of one corner of his mouth. If you’re on the wrong side of him it can be difficult to see his lips moving. He also has the politician’s trick of maintaining a conversation while his eyes are flicking around the room to check out the action elsewhere. Australian writer Bob Ellis famously described the Hon. John Howard’s voice as sounding like ‘curdled Vegemite’, and Knight’s voice adds a nasal whining quality to the spread. Michael Knight had been appointed minister for the Olympics in the newly elected Labor Government of New South Wales, and his first official duty was to appear in Atlanta in 1996 for the Olympic Games. My first impression of him was that he looked young and somewhat insecure, with intermittent eye contact, a forced smile and feigned enthusiasm. Later I came to know that 227
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he’s always like this. However, he’s a genuine Olympic enthusiast, and knows far more than I do about the sporting side of the Games. He told me that he’d loved the kangaroos and had told Bob Carr so, but I think that Michael was persuaded more by the IOC’s approval of the ’roos than by his own artistic judgement. Knight has the least aesthetic soul of anyone I’ve met, and he recognises his own limitations. Later in Sydney, where we met in his aerial minister’s office, he was charming. He asked me to take him through my initial ideas for the ceremonies, so I told him about the cauldron-lighting sequence, the ride of the stockmen, the giant Olympic flag and the F-111 flyover for the closing ceremony. He was intrigued by my descriptions, but told me that he was unable to visualise them because he couldn’t visualise things abstractly in three dimensions. It seemed like a strange variant of dyslexia as he described his inability to play chess because he couldn’t ‘see’ the board a few moves ahead. I don’t know what it must be like to have no visual imagination, but over the next four years I found that it didn’t affect Knight’s ability to play the game. Michael Knight faced the same difficulties in dealing with the wily John Coates as had Gary Pemberton. Coates is a lawyer, had been president of Australia’s Olympic Committee for many years, is a highly experienced player of the Olympic cards and was a board member of SOCOG. His various roles and interests enabled him to stonewall the business and decision-making ability of the SOCOG board by claiming he was protecting the AOC’s interests— which was entitled to a percentage of profits from the Sydney Games. When Gary Pemberton resigned, he had been unable to reach a working relationship with Coates, but Knight’s mentor, Graham Richardson, arranged a classic Labor Party solution to the problem. He invited them both for lunch at a Chinese restaurant on Goulburn Street, Sydney—after which they became as thick as thieves. Knight agreed to Coates’s demand that the AOC would
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receive a guaranteed payment of $90 million as its share of profits from the Sydney Games, and after that SOCOG business resumed at board level. When I returned to Sydney I went through the piles of letters of condemnation I had received over Atlanta, together with a lesser number of letters that said, in effect, ‘Good on you, Ric! Don’t worry, those talkback idiots’ll get over it.’ Among the letters of support were notes from advertising guru John Singleton and artist Ken Done, both of whom had also gone public in newspapers and on television. I called them both to thank them for their messages of support and asked John if he would speak to the performers, because I thought it would do them good to hear such strong and passionate praise for what they’d achieved in the handover ceremony. I also met Ken for the first time and was delighted not only by his strong support but also by his latest paintings. We remained in touch and a couple of years later I asked Ken to be art director of the printed programs for the opening and closing ceremonies. Lord Mayor Frank Sartor had returned in triumph from Atlanta. In pride of place in his office at the Sydney Town Hall, he had a framed newspaper front page photograph of himself waving the Olympic flag. I called Frank to ask if he would host an official reception for the performers, and he very graciously agreed. A few weeks later, all the performers gathered in the main hall under the replica Seoul flag hanging from the ceiling. (The genuine flag was in a bank vault, having been cleaned of a mysterious stain that Frank blamed on the ochre body paint. In fact, the stain was caused by a lemon soda spilled by one of the Americans before the flag was brought onto the field, but I didn’t discover this for months.) Frank and John Singleton both delivered speeches of thanks and admiration to the performers, and it made up in small measure for the many misguided and ill-informed comments that the media had heaped upon these very fine young
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Australians who had done a fabulous job for their country. Some years later when I was quoted in an interview saying that ‘Australia eats its young’, it was these performers of whom I was thinking. As the reception at the Town Hall wound down, Frank plucked at my sleeve and said, ‘You know, it’s a pity your company doesn’t do big events.’ I wasn’t yet accustomed to Frank’s conversational gambits and must have looked a little surprised. He went on: ‘We’re putting out a tender for the 1996 New Year’s Eve celebrations in Sydney. I’ll get Beth to send a copy over to your office.’ This was an interesting opportunity. I’d been aware of Sydney’s explosive New Year’s Eve celebrations, of course, and had been to several of them. When the tender documents arrived at Spectak’s office, I was surprised to find they contained an outline for Sydney’s New Year’s Eve celebrations that had been prepared by a Melbourne-based company. I was even more surprised to find that the report had been prepared by Burt Cooper, who had produced the opening and closing ceremonies for Expo ’88. Burt’s report was a grand plan for Sydney entitled Tempus Nova, which envisioned the good people of Sydney making their way to harbour vantage points in an orderly procession past various cultural landmarks. It was suggested, for instance, that the NSW State Library could remain open so that the revellers could avail themselves of a cultural experience. Various routes to the harbour were to be developed into grand avenues of approach in a combination of Boston’s First Night and Melbourne’s gracious but short-lived Spoleto Festival. It seemed like an ideal opportunity for Ignatius Jones, and so I hired the ignoble Ig to work on the response to the tender for New Year’s Eve. The first hurdle was the Latin tag of Tempus Nova, but as Ignatius speaks several languages as well as in tongues, we decided that no matter what it was called officially, to the consumers it would always just be New Year’s Eve. We couldn’t agree with the recommendation to allow Sydney landmarks to
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remain open on New Year’s Eve, feeling that it was like inviting a raiding party of Huns to a birthday party of thirteen-year-old girls. Another person involved in the preparation of the proposal was Peter England, one of the NIDA graduates who had worked as a designer on the Atlanta Flag Handover Ceremony. Peter had been invaluable in Atlanta, able to assist with any of the production challenges that faced us, and I was glad to work with him again. The tender response was for 1996 only, and by the time of the submission we would be cutting it fine to actually produce the event if we were successful. In October we were informed that Spectak had indeed won the tender and we got into action quickly. The core elements of the Spectak proposal for New Year’s Eve were a series of events that remained more or less constant over the next four years. First was the pyrotechnic celebration. This had been produced by Syd Howard’s company each year in the past and was fired synchronously with a soundtrack broadcast on radio. The second element was parties and celebrations leading up to midnight. In our research we’d found that the long waiting periods and hot weather around Sydney Harbour had led, not unexpectedly, to high alcohol consumption. That was hardly unique to Sydney— I had vivid memories of being on the Ramblas in Barcelona one New Year’s Eve, wading through ankle-deep smashed champagne bottles—but Sydney’s crowds became aggressive as the evening wore on. There had been at least two occasions on which people had been killed on New Year’s Eve in Sydney, so we paid a great deal of attention to making the celebration safer. One solution was to have the fireworks display early in the evening, soon after sunset. This meant that families with young children could watch the show, then depart the city, leaving the younger crowd to take to the streets waiting for midnight. Mrs Macquarie’s Chair, in the Botanic Gardens, was made an alcohol-free site, and a children’s party was set up in Hyde Park so that families could
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have fun there in the afternoon before heading down to the foreshore at dusk. We also created a Lord Mayor’s Picnic for underprivileged children, which Frank hosted in the Botanic Gardens. The Boy Scouts provided cooks and bottlewashers for sausage sizzles, and the food and softdrinks were donated by sponsors. We provided performers and music, presents and giveaways, but the best part of the Picnic was that the kids and their parents were seated in a prime vantage point, directly behind the Opera House in the Gardens. This was always closed to the public to avoid damage on New Year’s Eve, but the Parks and Gardens Department made an exception for the Lord Mayor’s Picnic and thousands of kids had a better New Year’s Eve than they might have otherwise. Frank also hosted a Lord Mayor’s Party, for which Peter England designed masks that became a tradition over the years that Spectak produced the event. The Lord Mayor’s Party brought about 600 people onto the forecourt of the Opera House where we provided music, food, refreshments and one of the best views of the pyrotechnic display. The New South Wales Police Department turned out to be great allies and were very supportive of our efforts. They had many years of experience with New Year’s Eve crowds and suggested that we try and organise additional food outlets in the Rocks area, because one of the reasons for public drunkenness was that people couldn’t get anything to eat. Most of the normal businesses in the Rocks area closed early on New Year’s Eve, because they were concerned about safety, and this cut back on the number of food outlets just when they were most needed. We were able to get additional permits for mobile food vendors, and we also installed an extensive food fair in Hyde Park, where people could obtain food on their way down to the harbour. The music soundtrack that had been played for previous fireworks shows was traditionally just an assembly of Top 40 hits, so, as a self-acknowledged musical genius, Ignatius Jones was made
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responsible for assembling the music for the fireworks. Iggy turned out to favour dance club music, so we had artistic differences until he agreed to use familiar rock, pop and classical tracks. This soundtrack had to be pre-recorded at least two months in advance of New Year’s Eve, so that Syd Howard had time to program all the pyro cues and plan the installation and positions for the shells. I wanted to install PA systems around the harbour so that spectators could appreciate the display better, but the cost was prohibitive. Then one morning, sitting at traffic lights, I became aware of the audio system in a car a few lanes away. It was pumping out so much sound that the doors were vibrating. We contacted one of the major installers of high-end car stereo systems and asked for their customer list. Parking spots in key positions on both sides of the harbour were reserved for members of an automotive megaaudio club, and on New Year’s Eve about thirty cars with their doors wide open provided howling audio for the fireworks. An additional musical component was added for the 1996 fireworks display—30 tympanists placed on three barges positioned around the inner harbour. Each barge had a series of platforms that supported the drummers and their gleaming brass tympani, and to draw attention to them, each barge carried a giant fiery gas burner in the shape of a tree. Composer Michael Askill wrote a driving, powerful percussion piece for the drummers, and three years later he composed the music for the firebreathing sequence in the Olympic opening ceremony. The tympani barges were towed out into the harbour as a prelude to the main show, and although the drummers had to overcome seasickness and keep their balance, they had a great view of the pyrotechnics that followed. Syd Howard had been the first person to put pyrotechnics on the Sydney Harbour Bridge and it had become something of a trademark for him. Each year he tried to come up with a new effect, and for 1996 he developed the computerised firing of comets from the main span that became known as the ‘windscreen wiper’.
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He had also been responsible for the brilliant idea of using fireworks off the Centrepoint Tower to form a giant torch during the Olympic bid, so I asked him to recreate the Olympic Torch effect to mark midnight on New Year’s Eve. We also had one of Sydney Ferries’ Jet Cats, a giant passenger catamaran that cruised up our cleared channel from Balmain to the bridge, firing pyrotechnic mines and comets as a warmup for the show. The 1996 New Year’s Eve celebration went well, and Frank told me he’d think about hiring Spectak for another three years. He had a phobia about contracts that ran longer than three years, telling me that a contractor became complacent and stopped trying if they had a long-term arrangement. I wasn’t too concerned. I had a feeling that 2000 would be a busy year and I didn’t need the distraction; besides which the real attraction of producing the shows was the Millennium New Year’s Eve that would take place at the end of 1999. Each year we developed new ingredients for the celebrations, most notably the ‘smilie’ face that Peter England designed for the Harbour Bridge which appeared in 1997 and 1998. We also added another pyrotechnic company—the Foti family’s business—to program additional fireworks barges located to the west of the bridge. The Fotis are a third-generation Italian/Australian family whose pyrotechnic history goes back to before Australia was discovered. Sam Foti, patriarch of the family, had made me an offer I didn’t want to refuse. Sam showed me videos of some of the Foti displays, including their entries in several major international fireworks festivals, and told me that if I wasn’t happy with their work there’d be no charge. Although Syd Howard was unhappy at having to share the harbour, the Fotis’s displays more than earned their respect and Sam was paid in full. We remain firm friends, and his grandson, Fortunato (Forch) Foti, later became the pyrotechnic designer for the Sydney 2000 ceremonies.
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By 1999, the pressure was on to create a New Year’s event that would be noticed worldwide. A recovered alcoholic named Arthur Stace provided a key image for Ignatius, even though Arthur had died in relative obscurity thirty years earlier. Stace had walked the streets of Sydney, obsessively chalking the word Eternity in an impeccable copperplate script, on footpaths, walls and even inside one of the bells of the Martin Place Post Office. It seemed a particularly appropriate word for the end of the century, and Peter England started designing the enormous electrical sign that lit up the Harbour Bridge after the fireworks at midnight. (At about 4 a.m. on New Year’s Day, half the sign went out due to an electrical load problem. A Swedish tourist called to say how thoughtful Sydney was to wish revellers ‘nity’ after a long night of celebration.) Peter England also designed a series of floating ‘lanterns’ the size of four-storey buildings, modelled on sea creatures native to Sydney Harbour. Each year, Lord Mayor Frank Sartor was able to find sponsors and funding for the event so that the people of Sydney could enjoy a free fireworks show on the harbour, and I hope it continues. Sydney Harbour is probably the finest location in the world for a major pyrotechnic display, and because New Year occurs in summer, it’s possible to sit around the water late into the night. (I was invited to Stockholm once to discuss producing a New Year’s Eve event there, but found that spectators watched the fireworks from inside heated shelters to survive the subzero temperatures, which made me appreciate Sydney’s weather even more.) Of course, during the four years of preparing the New Year’s Eve celebrations, I was also starting to pay attention to Sydney’s Olympic ceremonies. In addition to the opening and closing, I was also responsible for the medal ceremonies and the Athletes’ Village welcome ceremonies—which required 200 separate performances and speeches of welcome for the national teams that would be
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arriving from around the world. I’d also had some more meetings about the design of the cauldron, and had met the man who solved the challenges of combining aesthetics and engineering. This was Michael Scott-Mitchell, a Sydney-based designer of whose work I was well aware, but we’d never worked together. Michael is unusually versatile, having designed interiors (including Sydney’s Rockpool restaurant), as well as theatre, opera and television productions, and I was particularly interested because he has designed a number of complex stages that incorporated hydraulics, revolves and lifts. We met at my house one morning and I told Michael of my dream of having a massive waterfall cascading down the entire northern stand once the athletes had left their seats to take part in the parade. I also told him that my original idea had been to bring surfers down the waterfall, but that the final Multiplex grandstand design with overlapping tiers made this difficult and probably fatal. (Although Alan Whelpton from Surf Lifesaving loved the idea and happily volunteered that his lads would give it a try.) The final part of the puzzle was that I needed the cauldron to be invisible until the waterfall began, and then to rise up flaming from beneath the water. The position of the cauldron had become rather problematic once the Multiplex design was chosen. Due to the huge size of the main grandstands and the equally vast overhanging arched roofs, only about half of the spectators in the stadium could see the top of the northern stand—the preferred location. Nearly every spectator could see the base section of the northern stand, so that was obviously the best place to ignite the cauldron, but if the cauldron remained there, no one outside the stadium would be able to see the flaming thing. Michael, of course, came up with a very clever solution to the conundrum, which the world saw at the opening ceremony as Cathy Freeman walked across water to light the hidden cauldron beneath her feet.
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Meanwhile, in the US and Australia, a major clash was developing over artistic control of ceremonies and I learned that when push came to shove, I’d get shafted. There were three different binding agreements between SOCOG and the IOC which mandated that the athletes must be provided with seats for the opening ceremony; there was the candidate city agreement, the host city agreement and the Olympic Charter itself (the IOC rulebook for all matters to do with the Olympic Games), and all of them clearly stated that the organisers must provide seating for the athletes. The only real decision left was whether they would be seated at the beginning of the ceremony and then leave their seats to march in the Parade of the Athletes, or whether they should march into the stadium at the beginning and then take their seats following the formalities of the opening ceremony. It was a no-brainer. The athletes are the stars of the show, and once they’re onstage you can’t ask them to go and sit down so we can get on with the ‘cultural display’. There were also issues involved in moving about 12,000 athletes up into the seating areas simultaneously once the formalities were completed, but prior to the display. On the other hand, it’s straightforward to pre-issue tickets to the athletes, who can then take their seats over a period of an hour or two with help from ushers. The plan was to have the athletes seated in the northern stand when the ceremony began. As it got close to the time that the Greek team was needed to lead the parade, the production stage managers would escort the team from their seats down to field level via the stadium’s giant north-eastern spiral ramp, out of sight of the spectators. Behind Greece, all the other teams would follow alphabetically down the same route to the field. We had an additional ‘wow’ factor though, which was only possible because the stadium wasn’t yet built. In 1991 in Barcelona, President Samaranch had asked if we could devise a faster way to introduce the athletes onto the field. Although there are a number of officials like the IOC president
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who have spent endless hours at ceremonies watching interminable parades, for those stadium spectators for whom an Olympic Athletes Parade is genuinely a once in-a-lifetime experience, it doesn’t seem too long. For television networks, particularly commercial ones like NBC, the parade is a bonanza. In the US, there are domestic viewers from virtually every country in the parade and they’ll stay with NBC no matter how long it takes to get all those countries onto the field. Until recently, NBC used to cut away from smaller teams in favour of on-air commercials, but now their policy is to televise every single participant. Thus on commercial TV networks, the parade is even longer than in reality, because of the added advertising content. In Barcelona, it had taken about 90 minutes for all the athletes to enter the stadium, and we were unable to speed this up in accordance with Samaranch’s expressed wish. In fact, we were prevented by the design of the Barcelona stadium— but in Sydney the stadium was still on the drawing board. In Sydney, David Atkins and I had met a couple of times over lunch to discuss his passionate desire to be involved with the production of the Olympic ceremonies. David is one of those human dynamos who keeps working long after everyone else has stopped. I once asked him, at three o’clock in the morning after rehearsals, what kept him going and he said, ‘Fear of failure.’ He doesn’t need to fear, just to bite his tongue occasionally because he’s got a great line in sarcasm. I’ve known David since he appeared in the ABCTV Follies series that I produced in 1978, tap dancing his way into the hearts and minds of viewers in a subliminal preview of his production of Hot Shoe Shuffle that showed up about twelve years later. David had called me after the Atlanta Games to say that he applied for my job originally and hadn’t wanted to talk to me when I was appointed. But he realised that he would regret it for the rest of his life if he missed out on the Olympics and asked if there was a chance for him to be involved. As it happened, he was exactly
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the person I was looking for, although neither of us was sure at first. We had lunch several times so that he could pitch himself for the Olympics. I was interested, of course, my only reservation being whether all of the creative team would be prepared to work with him. His reputation as an egotist and control freak preceded him, but I’d always found his intense and focused professionalism to be a real asset. David and I were never able to socialise; his ambition was too naked for him to relax around me, and he couldn’t accept that I wasn’t the same sort of driven, Sammy Glick figure that he emulated. He would have had a great career in Hollywood, where he could have swum with the sharks and bitten their fins off. I explained my reservations to him, and David swore that he’d be nice to everyone, including me. At the time I had some candidates for the creative team in mind, but I was looking for an overall artistic director. This role had arisen from my experience in Barcelona, where I’d learned that it was possible to harness the individual talents of many creative people who would normally never have considered working on the same show. For Sydney I wanted to find different creative directors for each segment in the ceremony, supply each of them with their own designer, choreographer and composer, then let them develop their segment in their own way. The overall artistic director would be necessary to assist if there was a creative block and also to ensure that the transitions between segments were as smooth as possible. David was an experienced performer, dancer, choreographer, director and producer—ideal skills for the job. From the beginning I had wanted to incorporate ‘flying’ in the ceremony, to expand the space available for performers from the two-dimensional area of the field to the third dimension of the air—directly in front of the high grandstands of the Sydney Stadium. Over several lunches with David, I explained the design of the new stadium and the opportunities and challenges that were
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inherent in its shape and size. I also wanted to make the whole ceremony continuous, rather than have a series of separate and unrelated segments following one another, and in passing mentioned Samaranch’s request in Barcelona to shorten the parade. Over lunch we came up with a plan to bring the athletes to a new entrance that lay directly opposite the VIP Tribune of Honour in the western grandstand. The new opening would be wide enough for the athletes to enter the field sixteen abreast and to march in a column directly towards the VIP Tribune preceded by two flagbearers and two national placardbearers. The final team to make its entrance would be Australia—to huge excitement from the spectators. The host nation’s team would circle the track then march down the centre passageway and stop directly in front of the Tribune of Honour. All the flagbearers would then march forward on either side of the Australian team to complete a circuit of the track before placing their national flags around the main stage. I still have pangs of regret for the parade that could have been. Not only would it have been shorter, but the pageantry of the formations would have been spectacular. At one of my regular meetings with Michael Knight, I outlined the plan using computer graphics to illustrate the route of the parade. He immediately saw the benefits and asked me to present the proposal to a full SOCOG board meeting, which occurred a couple of weeks later. Kevan Gosper, Australia’s senior IOC delegate, in particular thought that the proposal was very exciting, and John Coates agreed. The board signed off on the change of plans for the stadium and the architects started redesigning their blueprints. The new entrance was where they’d planned to install major refrigeration equipment and storerooms, so there was some muttering from the contractors that Ceremonies didn’t have a clue, Birch was a maniac, etc. But they got to work. A few weeks later I was en route to New Orleans to see the 1997 Superbowl half-time show. Michael Knight had suggested
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that, as a professional courtesy, I might like to call in on NBC in New York to explain the new parade route to Dick Ebersoll, head of the Olympic unit for the network and a Most Important Person in Olympic circles. I thought that this was a fine idea and looked forward to seeing Dick again, together with his executive producer for the Olympics, David Neal. I was ushered into Dick’s office clutching my envelope of computer graphics, and looking forward to explaining the idea to him and David. To say that I got a chilly reception would make it sound welcoming. Ebersoll, wearing a white sweater emblazoned with large Olympic rings, wasn’t in a charitable mood towards the athletes. He was obviously not in love with the changed concept for the parade and seemed exasperated that someone was still trying to seat the athletes in the stands for the ceremony. It had been tried unsuccessfully in 1984, 1992 and 1996, and now here we were again! I explained the change in the traditional parade, and Dick said that if the athletes marched towards the VIP Tribune and then split, his commentators and cameramen wouldn’t be able to follow them because they wouldn’t know which way they were going. This was so patently absurd that he didn’t persist. Then he said that the conventional camera positions to cover the parade were at the end of the straight and in the VIP stands, and he didn’t want to change them or the lighting. ‘No problem,’ I said. ‘You’ll be able to switch shots on the cameras and you’ll get the same angles.’ His final argument was that he didn’t want the athletes seated in the stands before the show started because the cameras would see them and give away the ‘stars of the show’. I pointed out that if the athletes weren’t lit, the cameras wouldn’t see them, beside which his director was in charge of camera angles so he didn’t have to show them. But finally I said, ‘This is out of our hands, anyway. When Sydney was a candidate city, it signed an agreement that the athletes would be seated for the opening ceremony. When Sydney won the bid, it signed a host city agreement that the athletes
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would be seated. And, of course, in the Olympic Charter it stipulates that the athletes shall be seated during the ceremony. So I’m sorry if you don’t like the idea, but that’s the way it is.’ With that we parted and I heard nothing further for a couple of months. Back in Sydney at the end of March 1997, I received a call from Cheryl, Michael Knight’s PA: ‘Ric, the minister would like to see you at ten o’clock tomorrow in his office.’ Michael and I used to have ad hoc meetings, and Cheryl rarely knew what the subject matter would be, so I didn’t bother trying to find out more. Next morning I showed up at the ministerial offices and Michael bounced out of the boardroom with his best insincere grin. ‘We’re all here for the meeting, Ric. I managed to get everyone along. Come in, come in.’ I was somewhat mystified by this, but realised that I’d been ambushed when I entered the room to find a quorum of the SOCOG board present, together with Dick Ebersoll, Peter Diamond (an NBC vice president) and Alex Gilady (Israeli member of the IOC since 1994 and also an NBC vice president, a situation that apparently doesn’t create a conflict of interest for him). This was obviously not to be a standard meeting with the minister. Neither Coates nor Gosper would look at me, so it was left up to the cheery Gilady to say, ‘This idea of the athletes being seated will never work, you know! I’ve checked the design of the stands with your people and it will be too crowded. The passageways are too narrow and the athletes won’t get out.’ I pointed out to Gilady that the grandstands had a fire rating requiring that all spectators could be evacuated safely in an emergency in no more than ten minutes. The athletes had almost two hours. If they couldn’t get out in that time, the stadium would never get a fire rating approval. Dick Ebersoll looked like the cat that got the cream. ‘Your idea’s not going to be approved, you know, Ric.’
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Gosper chimed in, ‘That’s right, Ric. I can’t support you on this.’ John Coates also said that he wouldn’t support it. Michael Knight gave the impression that he personally couldn’t have been more supportive, even if he’d tried. Ever the consummate numbers man, Knight looked at me sorrowfully and said, ‘Well, there it is, Ric. You don’t have approval to change the Athletes Parade.’ I left the boardroom and Michael Knight, following me into the corridor, asked me to step into his office. Once inside he closed the door and said, ‘Ric, I’m sorry the meeting didn’t go your way, but that had to be the risk you were taking when you asked me to arrange it.’ Once again I was baffled. ‘What do you mean? I didn’t ask you to arrange this meeting!’ ‘Of course you did,’ he replied. ‘Your PA called and told Cheryl that you wanted this meeting.’ ‘Marie-Claire called?’ ‘Yes, she called Cheryl last week.’ Knight then pressed a button on his desk and asked Cheryl to join us in his office. When she arrived, Knight asked her who had called for the meeting. She replied, ‘Rosemarie, Dick Ebersoll’s assistant.’ Knight acted surprised. ‘Oh, no. I thought it was Ric’s PA who had called to set this up,’ he said to Cheryl. ‘No, Minister,’ she replied. ‘Oh, well. I’m sorry, Ric, I really thought it was Marie-Claire who’d called. But you’ve got your answer,’ he said, trying to sound sincerely sympathetic. And that was that. A few weeks earlier, Dick Ebersoll had gone to Switzerland for a meeting with Samaranch, after which the Olympic Charter, the candidature agreement and the host city
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agreement were all bypassed. When I pointed out that these three documents required the athletes to be seated, Ebersoll and Gilady said that they would take care of it. To change the Charter would have required at least an IOC executive board meeting and possibly a majority vote from the members of the IOC. Samaranch didn’t want to do this, so he simply issued an instruction saying that the Athletes Parade would take place in the traditional manner. When I related all this to David Atkins, he couldn’t believe it and wanted me to fight the decision. David was always keen that I should be the one to object to ministerial or media difficulties. I had no problem with Dick Ebersoll’s actions—he was doing his job as he saw it, and doing it well. My problem was with the lack of support from the SOCOG board members. I suspect that one reason they may have been delighted to see the athletes relegated to the parking lot instead of the grandstands, was that SOCOG gained additional revenue. The unplanned income from 12,000 additional seats at $1800 each amounted to a windfall of more than $21 million. Some of it went towards fees for the architects who were within two weeks of pouring the concrete for the new entrance in the eastern stand—if I hadn’t happened to go to New York, the concrete pour would have gone ahead and we might have a new Olympic tradition these days. But the fact that now we would have spectators seated in the northern stands, rather than athletes, meant another major design change in the cauldron sequence. It seemed unlikely that the paying public would enjoy having a massive waterfall tipped over them, so the original concept was reduced to a trickle. It was still a significant amount of water, but only fourteen metres wide instead of seventy. I had arranged a meeting for Michael Scott-Mitchell, our designer of the cauldron, and Jack Katon from BHP, because the Big Australian had a sponsorship deal with SOCOG to supply the steel for the cauldron. We met one day at my office in Kent Street to discuss for the first time how to create the effect of a cauldron
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rising through water, and what the cauldron might look like. Because of the scale of the stadium, Michael and I had agreed that the cauldron should be ten metres in diameter. Jack quickly brought us down to earth when he calculated the weight of rolled stainless steel in a cauldron of that size and the result was far too heavy. The problem was I’d already had to give the architects and engineers an estimated weight for the cauldron a few months earlier. They were preparing the tender specifications for the northern stands where we planned to locate the cauldron and needed to know the proposed weight to calculate the required strength of the support structure. I’d said ‘ten tonnes’ when they asked, but at that time I didn’t have a clue. Now, months later, Jack was saying that the stainless steel alone, without gas tanks or burners, would weigh around twelve tonnes. I didn’t want to reduce the diameter of the cauldron because it was the right size for the stadium, and then Jack came up with the solution. He said that if BHP rolled the steel thin enough to meet our weight limitations, it would need an internal frame to support the skin and the weight would rise again. However, if the steel skin was perforated to reduce weight, then pressed into corrugations, it would be self-supporting. It was a very clever idea and immediately Michael started sketching the final design. Within days he had a blueprint from which Jack could make calculations, and only a couple of months later an engineering firm in outer Sydney had made a full-size prototype of a segment of the cauldron. Michael was able to refine his design and BHP could tell their rolling mills what thickness was required. Once the cauldron shape and size was known, Michael was able to concentrate on his design for the extraordinary stage that would hold a symphony orchestra and hide a waterfall. These were the first steps in a four-year journey. My personal life at this time was in much worse shape than the planning for the ceremonies. Laurie had remained in the United States with Dylan and Jessie after the Atlanta Olympics. Although
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she returned to Sydney for a few months, we were unable to reconcile our marriage and she moved back to Connecticut permanently in late 1997. At the time, we owned two houses in Los Angeles and sold these to buy a family home for Laurie and the children only a kilometre from her mother’s house, and they live there to this day. There were several times during the years leading up to Sydney 2000 that I wished I could just move there too, but I wasn’t able or ready to abandon my dreams for the Sydney Olympics ceremonies.
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sixteen
Teamwork, fun and games Teamwork, fun and games
D
uring 1996 I had met several people I thought would be perfect to work on the Sydney ceremonies, but as we started to explore ideas and concepts I changed my mind. Many times I’ve been asked what sort of people are suited to ceremonies, or what qualifications are necessary, and the answer to both questions is that there’s no easy answer. For Pepo, the selection process started over a meal, because he refused to hire people if he found they were dull over dinner. It’s not a bad method, either. The creative people best suited to ceremonies have intangible qualities of imagination and ideas that a conversation over dinner will bring out much better than an interview across a desk. Unfortunately, Australia has a fringe benefits tax on meals, so it’s an expensive way to assemble a production team although it does cut down on the washing up. The creative structure established for Barcelona had worked so well that I reproduced it for Sydney and took it a step further. For the 1992 Games, we had four different creative directors plus 247
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Manel Huerga as overall director, but for Sydney 2000, I appointed ten creative directors plus David Atkins. Under normal circumstances this could never work—so many egos and creative visions would make a cooperative venture self-destruct—but the Olympics are different. People who have had famous differences of opinions ranging from hissyfits to fisticuffs put aside their differences to work together again. Their drive comes from more than ambition, more than national pride. The Games are not only the ultimate ambition for athletes, but also represent an elusive ideal for the rest of us. Every two years the nations of the world come together in peace to compete in either summer or winter Olympics. The ceremonies are a celebration of this brief moment in time when it seems possible that all nations could live together in peace. It’s a triumph for those of us who are optimists, despite all the reasons not to be, and the ideals of Olympism are the reason we keep coming back. By 1997 I’d assembled a list of fifty or so people that I thought had the right backgrounds to be part of the creative team for ceremonies. The list was diverse—painters and graphic artists, theatre and television directors, set and costume designers, choreographers, composers and performers with varying degrees of fame and fortune. Although I would have been happy to have dinner with each of them over a period of months, it seemed easier to bring them together for a weekend workshop somewhere. Fortunately, I knew just the place. Kevin Weldon was president of the International Surf Lifesaving Association and was also a very successful publisher who had built a conference centre called Gwinganna in the high rainforest country inland from Surfer’s Paradise. Kevin had transported an eclectic group of buildings, including a small wooden church, high up onto one of the mountain ridges and assembled them into a village near an eccentric cricket field that doubles as a helicopter landing ground. Groups of around forty people can spend a few days in a location that’s as close to
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heaven as you can get without being deceased. Although there is a so-called road to Gwinganna, the preferred approach is by helicopter from Coolongatta airport which adds to the feeling of being away from it all. Kevin arranged for his staff and helicopter pilot to open up Gwinganna for us, so we started organising the workshops. Marie-Claire proved to be a diplomat as well as a gifted tour operator, persuading and cajoling the creative team to alter their schedules to include a weekend in Queensland. In the end, we held two creative workshops at Gwinganna and they proved to be valuable experiences for everyone. I’d invited Doug Jack and David Goldberg (producer of the 1996 Atlanta ceremonies and, later, Salt Lake City 2002) to speak to the participants, and to give their perspectives on the Atlanta ceremonies that they’d completed a year earlier. We also showed videos of previous ceremonies that explained the structure of the cultural display as well as the IOC’s formal and traditional requirements. The point of the weekend was not to come up with creative ideas, but rather to introduce potential team members to the size, scope and challenges of the Olympics, and also to the idea that separate creative directors would be responsible for single segments. It was also a good chance to observe the chemistry at work between different personalities, some of whom had never met before, while some others had stopped speaking to each other years earlier. After the second workshop, I held individual meetings back in Sydney to discuss who would be allocated to the various segments. Amazingly enough, the segments and the creative teams came together in a way that couldn’t have been planned better. Several participants had decided that the ceremonies weren’t for them— either their schedules or their personalities weren’t suited to the demands of the Olympics—but everyone else was ready to embrace the idea of a communal creative team working towards one major production on behalf of Australia.
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The basic shape of the opening ceremony was in place very early. I’d imagined a more or less chronological progression through birds and fish, to flora, fauna and humans on the land, then the arrival of Europeans, art and machinery, and finally, a celebratory bash which culminated with a representation of the Sydney Harbour Bridge or the Opera House. There were several false starts and dead ends as we moved forward, but there were also great new insights and ideas from the extraordinary team of directors, designers, choreographers and composers who proceeded to put their stamp upon their segments. In addition to interesting meals, I had also been to a lot of dance, opera and theatre to see the work of Australian designers and directors. One evening at the Sydney Opera House I saw a trilogy of ballets, one of which particularly intrigued me. It was the work of Meryl Tankard, who’d also impressed me at Expo nearly ten years earlier. At the Opera House, she created a ballet in a simulated swimming pool, with several large ladies in bathing costumes sitting around the edge. The stage floor was the bottom of the pool, so the audience looked up at the ladies sitting high above the floor pretending to dabble their feet in the water (which was created entirely with lighting) and as night fell a couple of frog/men appeared. The frogs were fabulous and ‘swam’ through the now-dark waters, suspended by lines from above. As it happened, I had already been thinking of fish for the opening ceremony, using a flying rig (that as yet had not been designed) in a stadium (that had not yet been built). Obviously Meryl would be the perfect person to direct the segment. A few months later I flew to meet with her in Adelaide, at a time when she was facing intolerable political pressure and criticism over her management of the South Australian Dance Company. Meryl and I met for breakfast (eating again) at my hotel, and she seemed relieved to be talking about something that used the creative side of her brain. I was glad I’d caught up with her—she was being wooed by several
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European dance companies and was about to resign from the SADC. Australia eating its young again. But she was excited at the thought of the Olympics and we agreed over coffee that she would come back from Europe when required and that she’d give her contact details to Marie-Claire. So, that took care of life in the fishbowl and although I wasn’t sure in my mind exactly how or where the marine piece would fit, I knew that Meryl was starting to think of flying fish. There was still a way to go. On the other hand, the horses and riders that opened the Sydney ceremony had been planned for a long time. Almost from the moment that Sydney was awarded the Games, I’d started thinking about the opening sequence. The spectators at an opening ceremony are seated for at least an hour before it starts, and although there is usually some form of pre-show entertainment, pressure builds all the time towards the opening moment. We underscore this with a countdown on the giant video screens that encourages spectators to shout aloud and together, as the seconds tick away to the moment for which they’ve paid a lot of money. Expectations are high, and I wanted a high-energy moment to release that pentup excitement. We hadn’t done that in Barcelona or LA, where there were large numbers of performers in position on the field ready to begin as soon as they received their first cue, but Sydney could be different. For the first time ever, the opening ceremony was to commence in darkness. (Previous ceremonies had taken place during the day or had started in daylight.) The other difference was that the Sydney Stadium was huge, the biggest Olympic stadium ever built, with 118,000 seats. This meant that there would be a lot of very excited people sitting in the dark waiting for something to happen. As the roar of ‘5–4–3–2–1’ built to its climax, I wanted 500 horses to sweep into the arena in a rerun of the Snowy River ride that Banjo Paterson and Michael Edgley had brought to the screen and consciousness of Australians in 1982. Bruce Rowland, who
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had written the evocative score for the movie, was an old friend from Expo days, having composed an original theme for the Expo opening ceremony. He very generously agreed to rearrange the Man From Snowy River theme for the Olympics, and just as generously told the Royal Agricultural Society that they couldn’t use it for their proposed Snowy River ride (which premiered at the 2000 Sydney Royal Easter Show) because it would detract from the Olympic ceremony which followed. Ignatius Jones, with his recently acquired Tennessee equine fever, was an ideal director for the piece, so I asked him to start planning a mad galloping entrance for 500 horses that would then form into five Olympic rings before dashing to the rails where the riders would throw their hats into the audience and shout ‘G’day!’ A year or so earlier I’d travelled to Scone, north of Sydney, where I’d met with Bryan Brown of the Australian Stock Horse Society. At that time I’d wanted to find out if it would be feasible to ride 1000 horses across the Sydney Harbour Bridge at dawn, as a part of the Millennium New Year’s Eve celebrations. Bryan was absolutely confident that the Society could provide the riders and that their horses would all be more or less the same size and shade of chestnut. For various reasons, mostly to do with the cost, we didn’t persevere with the idea, but I’d been very impressed by Bryan, so I put Iggy in touch with the Australian Stock Horse Society and let him run with it. Iggy was spending a lot of time on computers in the Fairfax newspaper library at the time, so it wasn’t long before he’d come up with a computer graphic representation of the segment. He calculated that 500 horses would be way too crowded in the stadium, and estimated that the right number would be 120. This was a disappointment, because I liked the thought of 500 horses racing across the arena. Iggy recruited Tony Jablonski, a great wrangler from Queensland, as the horse master and Senior Sergeant Don Eyb of Sydney’s mounted police as troop drill leader, and between
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them all they came up with the segment that introduced the Sydney Olympics to the world. However, there were a few hurdles to clear first. In 1999 I was informed that David Richmond, director of the Olympic Co-ordination Authority, wouldn’t permit me to include horses in the opening ceremony, because the stadium wasn’t licensed for animals. A meeting was arranged with Richmond which was also attended by Iggy and Tony Jablonski. Richmond made it clear that he didn’t trust me to organise a school fete, let alone bring 120 horses into his stadium. I tossed my head, whinnied a bit, and allowed Tony to handle Richmond as he would a spooked horse. Jablonski is a very large man who wears ten-gallon hats and comes from Queensland. He’s softly spoken and enormously knowledgeable about everything equine. By the end of the meeting he had Richmond eating out of his hand and we had no further objections from the OCA concerning horses. My original plan for the audience countdown to culminate in a massed gallop proved impossible, due to lack of space backstage for the horses to build up speed before erupting from the entrances. However, there was room for one horse and rider, so Steve Jeffries, one fearless horseman, burst into the arena at full speed on a horse named Ammo and became the first performer to appear in the opening ceremony. He was followed at a stately pace by the 120 horsemen and women who had been training for more than a year at three riding camps. I had been told by the New South Wales Government Protocol Department that the Olympic flag needed to be raised prior to the Australian flag, but I could never find any authority for this odd piece of flag lore. However, it seemed natural for the riders to carry Olympic flags as they performed the carousels that made the familiar five rings. Once they had galloped to the rails, their Olympic flags were swapped for Australian flags which the riders held proudly as they sang the national anthem. I wanted the riders to throw their hats to the spectators as they shouted ‘G’day’, but the riders were reluctant to part with such a good
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souvenir. Luckily, Akubra offered us a two-for-one deal which was too good to refuse, so not only the riders but also 120 spectators got to keep an official hat that will probably start showing up on eBay soon. Ken Done designed and painted a graphic of the Harbour Bridge with G’day written on it, which was transformed into an enormous banner that dropped from the overhead flying lines as the riders tossed their hats and yelled, ‘G’day!’ All that was missing was Paul Hogan, who’d ridden in the dress rehearsal but was unavailable for the actual performance. I’d seen theatre director Richard Wherret’s production of Richard III and had greatly admired the costumes—leather and metal outfits that combined biker culture with medieval military fashion. The costume designer was Kristian Fredrikson, who’d also designed a production of Turandot that I’d seen at Melbourne’s Arts Centre. I met Kristian and gave him responsibility for designing the various formal uniforms required for the ceremonies (such as cheerleaders, marshalls and flagbearers) in addition to the horse riders’ outfits. We were very keen on glossy, black vinyl Drizabone coats for the riders, who we imagined would enter carrying fiery torches and form up the Olympic rings at a full gallop (and possibly ablaze in their flammable vinyl ensembles). Alas, once Iggy got involved, we had to deal with reality and found that high-speed blazing saddles weren’t going to be possible. Perhaps Melbourne can do it for the 2006 Commonwealth Games. Ignatius Jones also became responsible for the opening fanfare and national anthem, which followed the G’day moment. The fanfare was played from the stage to introduce the arrival of the governor-general, the prime minister and the president of the IOC as they took their seats in the VIP area. Iggy suggested that James Morrison, Australia’s own trumpet player extraordinaire, might compose a triumphal accompaniment, which indeed he did. James came up with an original fanfare that started in some time/space continuum with high notes that only he can reach, then reprised
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the chords and melody of ‘Waltzing Matilda’ before becoming a swing processional as the official party headed towards the front row. Once they reached their seats, the Australian national anthem commenced. Iggy, in one of many television appearances that he has trouble remembering, did recall that he’d heard the vocal group Human Nature in their dressing room singing Australia’s national anthem a capella in three-part harmony. So impressed was Iggy that he immediately burst into their room and asked if he could record their version. They agreed, but pointed out that Iggy would have trouble recording them on the half-empty bottle he was clutching. Somehow Iggy found a Walkman and, even more amazingly, he played me the recording some years later when we were discussing the ceremony. The concept for the national anthem was to start with Human Nature singing a capella, then bring in the orchestra for Julie Anthony to perform her most beloved version for one verse, and then for a choir of angels to join with Julie and Human Nature for a big finish. Our brilliant musical director, Max Lambert, brought it all together and at the opening ceremony, Simone Young conducted the Sydney Symphony Orchestra in the magnificent version of the anthem that caused grown men to cry. Small children didn’t recognise the song at all because it sounded so much better than what they heard at school assembly each morning. As part of the 1997 Sydney Olympic Arts Festival directed by Rhoda Roberts, there had been an outdoor performance in Centennial Park called Mimis. This was an intriguing collaborative effort between Rachael Swain and David Clarkson of the Stalker Theatre Company, and dancers from the Kunwinjku people of Western Australia. In Aboriginal myths, the Mimi is a spirit figure who can range from merely mischievous to downright dangerous. Mimis appear in north-eastern Australian myths and are usually stick-like figures, often associated with rocks or rocky outcrops, who appear at night in dreams. In Rachael’s production, the Mimis
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were stiltwalkers, led by David Clarkson, who went on to build the three-metre stilts and instruct our performers in their use for the Sydney 2000 Awakening sequence. Rachael and I had a series of meetings over months trying to develop a scenario for the Olympic ceremonies which incorporated the magic of the Mimis production, but it didn’t work out and I started looking elsewhere. One day I was talking to Rhoda Roberts who told me that in the Kimberley region of Australia there were similar Aboriginal myths based on a spirit called Wandjina. ‘In fact,’ she said, ‘there’s an exhibition of Wandjina paintings in downtown Sydney that’s the work of an Aboriginal community from Moanjum, in the Kimberleys near Broome.’ Then she added, ‘I think it finishes today.’ I jumped in a taxi and reached Cumberland Place just as the artworks were being taken off the walls and packed away in crates and cartons. It was my first introduction to a Wandjina and I was immediately struck by the power of the image, so much so that I purchased four paintings immediately and have bought several more since. Discovering the Wandjina image was a defining moment in the creative development of the ceremonies. Until then, I only had a half-formed notion of the indigenous masterwork that became ‘The Awakening’. The relationship between white Australians and the native Aboriginal peoples is far too complex to deal with here, and the political issues have no place in an Olympic ceremony. But I feel very strongly that the prime ministerial refusal to say ‘sorry’, and the suffering inflicted upon Aboriginal families of the Stolen Generations, resonate with all Australians—whether they agree or not. In the opening ceremony, the haunting beauty and great emotional power of ‘The Awakening’ brought home for the first time to many white Australians the spiritual links between our land, its oldest inhabitants and its newest. We were watching ourselves and our ancestors linked in a ceremony that was being
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seen all over the world, sharing the primal behaviour of every human being that meets another, beneath a mysterious sky and upon an unforgiving land. ‘The Awakening’ was not a show business overture. Instead it was a truly grounded performance of enormous integrity that empowered the rest of the ceremony. And watching over it all was the awesome Wandjina spirit cloth, designed by Peter England and built by volunteer arts students over many months. Peter was also responsible for designing the arena groundcloth that many Australians watching on television have since told me was a shock when they first saw it. They were apparently worried that there’d been no rain for a while and that the stadium grass had died, because Peter’s design of a parched and sunburnt country had been so realistically painted onto two hectares of carpet that covered the arena. In fact, the cloth was originally going to be blue, as it had been in Barcelona and Atlanta, but a visit from Peter Minshall, who had been art director for Barcelona 1992, changed my mind. Barcelona is, of course, a harbour city, so the blue groundcloth there seemed natural. Atlanta grew up around a railroad junction, and the blue cloth had no significance at all. But the harbour affects every facet of Sydneysiders’ lives, and I had always imagined that the ceremony would be enacted upon a swirling blue seascape, inspired by the paintings of Brett Whiteley, Peter Kingston and Ken Done. However, Peter Minshall challenged me to think beyond a sea-coloured cloth, to recognise the land instead. I asked Peter England to think about it and within a few days he had prepared some alternative designs for the groundcloth, representing the sunburnt land that we all sing about but rarely visit. Rather than use bright colours, Peter had opted for neutral tones that would react well to theatrical lighting. The cloth itself was a very coarse carpet, normally used by the construction industry to prevent sand from washing away in roadworks and foundations. Malcolm White, who had been seconded from his duties as technical director at Spectak, spent weeks phoning around the world for an
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affordable and suitable material before discovering Envirotech in Albury—who turned out to have the ideal product and were prepared to make the cloth for us in any colours we specified. Stephen Page and I had discussed a transitional moment where Djakapurra (the lead dancer from Bangarra who had danced at Atlanta) was to be discovered onstage in front of a vast golden sun projected onto a screen tethered to enormous circular rings that towered over the stage. (A homage to the Barcelona rings that collapsed in 1992. In Sydney, we never even got to the point of construction—I had to cancel the rings for budgetary reasons.) The initial idea for ‘The Awakening’ was a creation myth image of ochre-covered tribes crawling ‘ashore’ onto the main stage, where Djakapurra would act as a storyteller for the ceremony. Then, as Rhoda and Stephen started working with David Atkins, the segment developed a life of its own. Their first idea was to have a vast brown cloth covering the performers, forming a landscape over which a single, small boy walked or climbed until he reached a particular outcrop. Then either Djakapurra would signal the boy, or the landscape itself would move around him. I told David that I didn’t like using cloth as a prop—it always looks tacky and is difficult to handle—and besides, it didn’t sound like a strong opening to the segment. A few days later David came back and said, ‘We changed the boy to a little girl. Now there’s no cloth. She’s a young white girl and she’s walking onto the beach and the whole ceremony is her dream.’ And that’s how Nikki Webster became a superstar. David Atkins had taken responsibility for a couple of sequences that acted as transitions—one being the ‘bushfire’ that was to sweep through the arena after ‘The Awakening’, and another being the giant flag that was passed from the spectators to cover all the athletes before the arrival of the Olympic Torch. But undoubtedly, his most important single contribution was Nikki Webster and the way that she and Djakapurra linked the various segments of
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the ceremony. David had auditioned almost 200 ‘Hero Girls’, but in the end only twelve young girls were brought to the stadium and given the chance to ‘fly’. One chilly night a few months before opening, we saw Nikki and the others, strapped into their harnesses and flying high above the arena for the first time. On their first test the girls were only lifted a few metres into the air, but Nikki was one of the ones who shrieked ‘higher’ as she flew across the field. In the end, we had a short list of four girls—our musical director Max Lambert worked with them on their vocals, the ceremonies photographer Kylie Smith photographed them so we could check their ‘look’ on camera, and David and I talked to the girls and their parents to evaluate how they’d handle the stress. In the end, Nikki was our unanimous choice, and it’s now impossible to imagine anyone else in the role. Aged thirteen at the time of the Olympics, she epitomised young Australia—frank, friendly and fearless, an innocent on the edge of greatness. My daughter Jessie, seven years old at the time of the opening ceremony, spent at least a year wishing every day that she was Nikki Webster and has never forgiven me for not giving her the role. ‘The Awakening’ was important not only for introducing a new perspective to white Australians, but also for the effect it had on the indigenous participants. Australia’s Aborigines have inhabited the continent continuously for at least 40,000 years—but in all that time, never before had any of the tribal clans gathered to dance together to one Songline. Normally at a corroboree, when clans and tribes travelled vast distances for these ritual gatherings, tribal members performed their own music and individual dances that were often guide maps or descriptions of their territory. For Sydney, we wanted one soundtrack which would be based on traditional music but would nevertheless be a totally new and contemporary ‘Welcoming’ dance. Rhoda Roberts, who was co-director of ‘The Awakening’ with Stephen Page, spent months negotiating with tribal leaders from around Australia to make this possible. Stephen’s
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brother, David Page and Djakapurra Munyarrin (both of whom had worked on the music for the Atlanta Flag Handover Ceremony), created the soundtrack for ‘The Awakening’ assisted by five other indigenous composers. The cast of more than 1100 dancers was assembled from around Australia—350 women from the Central Desert, many of whom travelled for four days simply to reach Alice Springs, from where they flew to Sydney; 200 men and women from four Arnhem Land clan groups—Maningrida, Raminginging, Yirrkala and Nulumbah; 120 dancers from the Torres Strait Islands; 100 young people from Grafton in regional New South Wales; and 400 teenagers from Sydney’s urban Koori clan. This was a potent mix. Women from the Central Desert who had never been in an aeroplane or seen an escalator before arriving at the airport joined street-wise teenagers who live in some of the most depressed areas of Sydney. Men from remote communities with secret tribal knowledge met boys who had long ago lost their Aboriginal culture and who survive against all odds in the face of urban decay. Choreographers used to working with professional dancers found themselves learning from elders whose movements, gestures and steps haven’t changed for a thousand generations. The biggest ‘paint-up’ ever took place in the Olympic parking structure— where modern steel and concrete were spattered with organic ochres from the most ancient sites in the world. Stephen Page and Rhoda Roberts created a true ‘Awakening’ for all Australians. The integrity and spiritual power of the ancient culture, with the contemporary Songline that united the indigenous performers and the spectators, struck a chord with all Australians. I was quoted after the ceremony as saying that the integrity of ‘The Awakening’ segment grounded the whole Sydney Olympic Opening Ceremony, allowing the other creative directors to use fantasy and surrealism without becoming camp or ‘theatrical’, and causing a re-evaluation of white attitudes to the traditional owners of the land.
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The climax of ‘The Awakening’ was the raising of the gigantic Wandjina cloth at the southern end of the stadium. Traditionally, Wandjinas are involved with lightning and storms, so we used the appearance of the spirit to cue a thunderous lightning strike that rippled along the underside of the roofs towards the stage. This was a great pyrotechnic effect, produced by the fabulous Foti fireworks family. The lightning ignited a ‘bushfire’, creating sheets of flame at the northern end of the stadium that moved down the field, clearing all before them. When I first told David Atkins about this sequence, he started working with special effects technicians to create a sort of flame thrower that could be wheeled down the arena. Meanwhile, I had been working with an entrepreneurial character who wanted to assemble a world record number of firebreathers on the Harbour Bridge for the Millennium New Year’s Eve. Meeting with David one day, it suddenly hit me that firebreathers could create a fabulous bushfire effect and I told him about the group. We never did persevere with the New Year’s Eve world record attempt, but David found some professionals who were willing to teach amateurs to play with fire. Volunteer firebreathers were recruited from some unlikely sources—such as IBM and major accounting firms—and classes in how to be hot stuff without burning your mouth or your neighbours began. The trick is to blow, not suck, while running and juggling your fuel container and flame stick. Waiting in the wings were medics and lots of milk—which helps the fuel go down if you accidentally swallow some while learning how to impress your friends at a barbecue. In the aftermath of a bushfire, the recovery of native Australian trees and vegetation borders on the miraculous. That was the motivation behind the ‘Nature’ segment of the ceremony, and we were lucky to assemble a creative team that managed to achieve some miracles of its own. I’d never met Peter Wilson, but David had worked with him and said he was a genius with puppets, so
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Peter was our number one choice as creative director of the sequence. Al Martinez had co-founded the Skylark Puppet Company with Peter Wilson, so we had a package deal by bringing them both on board. Al became props supervisor for the whole ceremony in addition to his work on ‘Nature’. Additionally, John Farnham’s musical director, Chong Lim, wrote one of the most beautiful and haunting soundtracks of the whole ceremony for ‘Nature’, and I still listen to it today. Eamon D’Arcy, Sydney’s most unsung hero designer, was teamed with Peter and Al to design the amazing costumes and props that became the floral fantasy landscape of ‘Nature’. Jeffrey Samuels designed large graphic cloths that came to represent the wildlife rebirth that follows rain after fire. Thousands of volunteer performers were choreographed by Doug Jack, who also taught dozens of Australian assistants the special skills required to keep so many volunteers motivated and happy. The ceremonies provided another great opportunity—a dating service that brought together thousands of young performers of similar ages and interests. (I think the ‘Nature’ performers subsequently held the record for engagements and marriages, but I could be wrong . . . ) ‘Nature’ concluded with a vast electrical floral wonderland as the costumes illuminated like hundreds of elaborate Chinese lanterns spread across the landscape. Into this fantasy walked Djakapurra Munyarrin, a lone Aboriginal figure who was about to witness the arrival of white settlement into Australia. From the moment of my appointment as director of ceremonies, the dilemma of how to treat this divisive event in Australia’s history had occupied my mind. On one side were the voices who called white settlers ‘invaders’, on the other the settlers who said they had nothing to apologise for and that the land had been empty—‘terra nullius’, to use the legal phrase much quoted in land rights cases. The concept of an empty land was decisively overturned in the Mabo case, but two centuries after Governor Phillip had claimed Australia in the name of the British Crown,
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the continent had been populated by races and creeds from virtually every nation on earth and the original inhabitants of Australia had had to share their land—whether they liked it or not. In fact, the Aboriginal people had not even been recognised as Australians until the 1960s when, for the first time, they were given the rights of citizens and were also counted in the census. Meanwhile, millions of ‘New Australians’ had arrived as migrants, and hundreds of thousands of convicts or refugees from the wars and revolutions of Europe had had the decision made for them. It was no longer possible to think of Australia as a predominantly British culture, despite the many nostalgic and conservative voices who insisted that it was. Those same voices wanted to totally ignore Aboriginal issues and exhorted me to simply stage a concert as a ceremony. This was never an option, but it begged the question of how to represent the arrival of the first white explorers, convicts and settlers in an Olympic ceremony. For a long time I had planned to use art as the bridge between Aboriginal culture and the European arrivals, thus avoiding the notion of ‘invasion’ by representing how Western artists saw this new and strangely beautiful land in their paintings. But images on canvas are difficult to bring to life in a stadium, and although I’d come up with some ideas, none of them excited me. Then I saw an extraordinary production that was part of the 1997 Sydney Festival. It was an outdoor performance in front of the Opera House steps called ‘Kelly’s Republic’, commissioned by Anthony Steel, my old friend from Expo days. Anthony directed the Sydney Festival that year and believed passionately in creating and commissioning original Australian works, rather than importing masterworks from Europe to be performed for the local audience. Ironically enough, Anthony was born in England and he commissioned another English-born director to create ‘Kelly’s Republic’, a quintessentially Australian performance piece. The director was Nigel Jamieson, an articulate and passionate producer and creative director, and like Anthony, a naturalised Australian
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citizen. ‘Kelly’s Republic’ was somewhat flawed due to lack of money and rehearsal time, but it contained many astounding ideas and images. I was particularly intrigued to see how Nigel had integrated the famous Kelly paintings of Sir Sidney Nolan into the costume and set design, and was impressed to see a bobcat and front-end loader choreographed as part of a theatrical performance. Sadly, I don’t think ‘Kelly’s Republic’ has ever had a revival. I talked to Nigel about the integration of art into a theatre the size of the Sydney Stadium and we started brainstorming the segment that eventually became ‘Tin Symphony’ but which took many interesting turns along the way. From the outset, I’d had an image of a ship sailing into the stadium, on which migrants were arriving. The ship was to have giant sails, on which we could project historic newsreels as background imagery for people seeing Australia for the first time. I’d even asked Ian Murray, the famous designer of Sydney’s eighteen-footers and twelve-metre America’s Cup yachts, to look at the plans for the sailing ship and asked whether or not we’d be able to restrain the sails if the wind was blowing on the night of the ceremony. Ian was very kind, but left shaking his head and we didn’t pursue the idea. Nigel then suggested a train, which would dump hundreds of migrant families upon a platform, carrying their suitcases. For some reason, we both shared an image of the quintessential new arrival—a European man in a long woollen overcoat, belted at the back, standing with a child on one side and a string-tied suitcase on the other. This image expressed everything that is inspiring about the bravery of migrants arriving in an unknown country and hoping to make a home there. The wrong clothes for the climate—showing that, despite a lack of even basic knowledge about the new country, they are still prepared to start a new life. The string-tied suitcase—bringing with them only what they can carry, all their possessions reduced to a single sad bundle. And finally, a child—the hope for all our futures.
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Nigel and I wrestled with how to make this image theatrical and came up with many ideas, of which very few survived through to the ceremony. One proposal was to create a suitcase ballet in which the parents were herded away from the train station, leaving their suitcases behind on the platform. After a moment the suitcases would start moving, sprouting arms and legs and soon revealing little New Australians. This idea ended up in the opening ceremony as a collection of cardboard boxes which were shorn as sheep and then transformed into Victa lawnmowers being pushed by men in Hawaiian shirts. As you can imagine, creative sessions with Nigel were never dull, but it wasn’t until Dan Potra became involved that the whole segment started to make sense. Potra is another creative genius whose work, although he comes from Eastern Europe, captures some essential qualities of Australia. Dan was designer for both Meryl Tankard’s ‘Deep Sea Dreaming’ and Nigel Jamieson’s ‘Tin Symphony’—and both, of course, were outstanding. I’d seen Dan’s work at the Opera House where he had designed several operas, but I think he’d agree that his work for the opening ceremony was probably his finest. As well as the strange sea creatures that swam through Nikki Webster’s dreams of beaches, Dan invented the mad machinery that animated ‘Tin’ from beginning to end and created a rural landscape that brought tears of nostalgia to the eyes of old farmers. Finally, after long discussions, it was decided to remove the migration arrivals sequence from the segment, leaving Nigel and Dan to interpret Australian history from the arrival of white settlement to the present day. The starting point of white settlement became the arrival of the botanist Joseph Banks, on a large bicycle-like vessel with sails and sailors and a large telescope, which was pedalled through the illuminated petals of the ‘Nature’ segment. Oddly enough, given the surrealistic imagery in this sequence, the only objection that I remember being voiced by SOCOG’s board was to do with this
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bicycle. From time to time, Michael Knight would ask for a progress report for the board, so one day David and I arrived with eccentric models and sketches prepared by Dan Potra to illustrate the ‘Tin’ segment. As I talked through the segment, avoiding the most extreme moments of anarchy as best I could, David held up the sketches or propelled the miniature machinery around the tabletop. The SOCOG board were either spellbound or speechless, because they said very little and allowed us to complete the presentation. Then Kevan Gosper raised a hand. ‘Ric, was that a Union Jack I saw?’ Nick Greiner chimed in with, ‘I saw it too. Can’t have that.’ On one of the many drawings and storyboards was Joseph Banks’s magnificent riding machine bringing the Brits to Botany Bay, and in one particular sketch there was a Union Jack flying over the stern. I was about to argue that the flag was appropriate because it signalled the arrival of the British, but David kicked me under the table and said, ‘No problem, we can change the flag.’ He couldn’t believe we’d got through the whole show with no other objections and wanted to quit while we were ahead. So that’s why Joseph Banks entered the stadium on a large bicycle-like machine, over the stern of which hung a birdcage containing a white rabbit, which was actually a much better idea than the flag. Incidentally, ‘Tin Symphony’ got its name from the corrugated iron sheeting that covers the Australian countryside from coast to coast and which became a design theme for the segment. The Big Australian, BHP, has been manufacturing corrugated iron for a good long time, and as a major Olympic sponsor they were pretty pleased to discover that we were ordering large quantities without even asking for mate’s rates. Our workshop guys invited the local head of BHP to visit anytime to see what was being done with the product and, of course, because everything to do with ceremonies was being kept under such strict wraps, Adrian Begg (the New South Wales BHP manager) was intrigued. He wasn’t so pleased, however, when he saw what we were doing with the corrugated
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iron. The gist of his problem was that BHP has been making the world’s greatest corrugated iron for a century and the latest version of the product is state-of-the-art, if you’re into that sort of thing. ‘What’s the problem, Adrian?’ I asked. It turned out that Adrian took exception to the fact that we were painting rust and signs of ageing onto his corrugated product, thereby making The Big Australian the laughing-stock of stock and station agents everywhere and abusing the non-rust policy of BHP in the eyes of worldwide consumers. I explained that we were taking what is known as ‘dramatic licence’, and that rust and corrugated iron go together like sheep and shearers. Adrian wasn’t impressed, but since we’d bought the product fair and square I claimed we could do whatever we liked with it, including painting rust and stains onto brand-new tin. (I hope that BHP’s share of the world corrugated iron market didn’t plummet after the opening ceremony. Adrian has never called to complain, though, so I assume it turned out all right in the end.) Without question, ‘Tin Symphony’ was one of the most spectacular numbers in the whole ceremony and a triumph not only for Nigel and Dan, Karen Johnson Mortimer (who choreographed it with Doug Jack), Ian Cooper (who composed the fantastic fast and furious fiddle playing), and Paul Grabowsky (who composed the second part of the soundtrack), but especially for our technical workshop and the flying crew.
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seventeen
More fun and games More fun and games
T
here could, and probably should, be a whole book written just about the flying rig that was installed for the Sydney 2000 ceremonies. There were eleven lines running east to west across the field, each ten metres apart and about 120 metres long. This is a phenomenal distance to span and remains the biggest computerised flying rig in the world so far. We were fortunate to have one of the world’s most knowledgeable flying riggers available—Richard Hartman, who had just completed work on London’s Millennium Dome. He was a friend of Morris Lyda, our technical director, and after a phone call from Morris, he said Sydney sounded interesting and turned up one day. From then on, I never had to worry about the flying rig. Computercontrolled winches were designed and fabricated by John Mignone and the Adelaide Festival Trust workshop, and the custom software was also programmed locally. Everything worked so well and unobtrusively it was often hard to remember that there were human bodies as high as forty metres above the ground, capable of being hauled at speeds of up to ten metres per second, and we didn’t
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have to worry about them because Richard and his team made it seem so easy. Still, there were all sorts of complex forces at play; some being laws of physics and others being laws of bureaucrats. The bureaucrats from the Mines Department, for instance, told us that we couldn’t have more than two people on the stadium roof at any time. The two main roof trusses were each capable of supporting forty tonnes, so this restriction seemed unnecessarily conservative. Their reasoning was that if two riggers weighing 120 kilograms each simultaneously fell off the roof on safety lines, the combined kinetic force of abruptly stopping at the end of their lines would reach the maximum safe load on the roof (which they said was equal to one-quarter of the total load-bearing capacity). I’m not very good at dealing with this sort of bureaucrat, so I left these negotiations to Malcolm White (my ex-Spectak technical director who was very good at dealing with regulations and regulators). Eventually, after involving Stephen Morley (the British engineer who’d actually designed the roof structure), the Mines Department was persuaded that Nikki Webster and the rest of our aerial armada were unlikely to bring down the roof, even if they did bring down the house. As you’d expect, productions on the scale of the Olympic ceremonies demand state-of-the-art technology—onstage and offstage. When designers like Dan Potra, Eamon D’Arcy, Peter England, Michael Scott-Mitchell or Nigel Triffitt are given their head (and considerable budgets), the results of their ideas are often impressive and seemingly impossible. Because such a wide range of technical skills and materials are required to realise their designs—ranging from fibreglass to metalwork to carpentry, moulded plastic to bridge engineering to sequins—it’s usually necessary to establish a ceremonies workshop that can be staffed with the appropriate skilled tradespeople, propsmakers, costumers, and special effects and theatrical geniuses. We were particularly lucky in Sydney, because Malcolm White was able to obtain two
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old railway workshops in Redfern. These Victorian brick edifices became the manufacturing centre for all props, costumes, sets and machinery seen in the ceremony, with the exception of the cauldron. The workshop space had previously been used by Belvoir Street Theatre for an ill-fated production where the seating units collapsed under the weight of an audience. Due to legal wrangles and lack of money, the space was still occupied by giant heaps of dirt (which had formed the set for the show) and tangled scaffolding (which had supported the seats). Malcolm did a deal with Belvoir Street to take over their space for a year for no rent, in return for totally renovating and refurbishing the area. It was an offer they couldn’t refuse and it gave us a large workshop space in the centre of town that few people outside Ceremonies even knew existed. Brian Edmonds, a film art director who had just finished work on Anna and the King (the elaborate remake of The King and I, starring Jodie Foster), was available and was immediately hired to head up the workshop. Among his many contacts was Paula Ryan, who was put in charge of wardrobe and costumes. Even now, looking back, I have no idea how Paula achieved what she did for the Sydney Olympics. In a relatively small space, Paula assembled the greatest group of seamstresses, wigmakers and assistants that has ever been seen in Australia. The quality of their work and the quantity of their output has never been rivalled in my experience. Paula brought in design students, as well as hundreds of other volunteers from sewing circles or community groups, and they spent weeks or months attaching sequins, making meticulous wigs or jewelled headdresses, altering and fitting every single costume that was seen in the ceremonies—almost 13,000 in the opening ceremony alone. Usually for a ceremony, costumes are kept pretty simple on the basis that there are so many of them that details and fine quality won’t be noticed, and they’re only going to be seen once. Paula is not of that school. Her costume department produced thousands of garments that were designed for detailed
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close-ups on television, particularly the spectacular costumes for ‘Nature’ and the truly extraordinary fashion creations for ‘Arrivals’— the migration segment that had been excised from ‘Tin Symphony’. A handful of the ‘Arrivals’ fashion designs were exhibited at the Powerhouse Museum following the opening ceremony and received a stunned reception—until spectators saw the garments in closeup, they were unaware of the quality and complexity of the work that had been achieved at the ceremonies workshop and I guess we’ll never have a chance to do anything like it again in Australia. Unless Paula is involved, anyway. Brian Edmonds also brought in the best workshop manager we know, Jeremy Sparks, to handle the variety of manufacturing processes that were necessary for the construction of props and setpieces. The ceremonies workshop built everything from massive hydraulically operated vehicles to the dainty high-heeled Priscilla bikes that accompanied the Queen of the Desert bus in the closing ceremony, and from Dan Potra’s huge floating fish to individual, internally illuminated flower petals for the ‘Nature’ segment. The workshop also built a scale model of the stadium so that we could get an idea of what the flying sequences would look like. Because ceremonies are usually planned on scale drawings from above in two dimensions, it was difficult to visualise the relationships between flying objects and the ground-based choreography, so the workshop built a one to twenty-five scale replica of the main stadium roof trusses and strung steel wire between them. Then Dan Potra could suspend his fish designs, and Steve McTaggart (who choreographed with Meryl Tankard) could shuffle them around and decide what cues would be needed by the flying crew. Sydney 2000 spectators may not have realised it, but the sound system for the ceremonies at Stadium Australia was the work of an audio legend who was born in Sydney. His name is Bruce Jackson. For Sydney 2000, Bruce designed and specified the best PA system I’ve ever heard and also provided perfect audio to the
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world’s broadcasters via fibre-optic cables. He learned his craft working on the road with some legendary talents—including Elvis Presley, Bruce Springsteen and Barbra Streisand. Not surprisingly, Bruce is unfazed by anything and was able to accommodate any last-minute requests made by creative directors to alter their soundtracks. And he had his work cut out—Nigel Jamieson was still asking for changes between the final dress rehearsal and the actual opening ceremony. After the frenetic pace of ‘Tin Symphony’, the segment that followed was initially an oasis of calm. The creative director was Lex Marinos, an old friend from my earliest days in television who, among other things, was the director of Carnivale—a Sydneybased multicultural performance festival. When the immigration component was removed from Nigel Jamieson’s segment, Lex started to develop the new segment called ‘Arrivals’. His first solution was simply to form five Olympic rings using costumes in Olympic colours, but I wasn’t happy with this because it was too obvious. Fortunately, the idea took a new creative direction when Nigel Triffitt had problems with the final segment—‘Eternity’— which followed ‘Arrivals’. Nigel had become well known because of the great success of Tap Dogs, which he designed and directed in its first appearance at Anthony Steele’s 1997 Sydney Festival. Dein Perry was the star dancer and choreographer who had become famous for his hard-driving, industrial-strength tap dancing in the same production. Tap Dogs became an international phenomenon that rewarded Nigel and Dein professionally and financially, although unfortunately they were no longer talking to each other. Nigel was notorious for many things, among them designing brilliant sets for his productions, but I’d never met him. David Atkins felt that if anyone could solve the creative and technical problems for the final segment it would be Nigel, so he arranged a lunch meeting at which we outlined to him the basic premise for the segment—to create an enormous Harbour Bridge as the
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finale. To Nigel’s great credit he didn’t tell us at that time that we were crazy, and also said he’d be happy to work with Dein Perry again—if Dein agreed. Feeling like marriage counsellors, David and I met with Dein (who was preparing to direct his first movie, Steel City) and found that he too was willing to bury old hatchets and tap shoes for the sake of the Olympics. The agreement was that Nigel would design and direct the segment, while Dein would choreograph a massive onslaught of tap dancing. Once Nigel started concentrating on the bridge design, he ran into some insuperable problems. We were asking for a replica of the bridge at least 100 metres long and capable of holding hundreds of performers, that could be brought into the stadium in a matter of minutes and removed completely after the performance in a few minutes more. Nigel spent many nights in a smoke-filled chair in his house in Port Douglas pondering the problem. From time to time he’d call, saying he didn’t have a clue how to do it. Once, he and David arrived at my Spectak office to persuade me that a big dance number would be just as good, but I couldn’t be convinced. The finale had to be bigger than anything before, and it was to be followed by the 2000-piece marching band and the Athletes Parade, so a dance number wasn’t going to cut it. Nigel went away to think again in his Kings Cross hotel room and later that same night had a Eureka! moment. Pausing only to send out for coffee, glue and balsa wood, Nigel worked through the following day building a scale model of his design and turned up next evening with a suitcase and receipts for supplies. He’d come up with a different bridge— instead of using the familiar coathanger, he’d been inspired by the Anzac Bridge that connects Glebe Island to downtown Sydney. Although there were modifications and refinements to the idea over the coming months, Nigel’s concept was the solution we’d been waiting for. The idea was to create a major construction in the centre of the arena, formed by five trucks carrying long ramps interspersed with six high ‘cherrypickers’ that acted as platforms for fireworks.
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The entire cast from the show would come back onto the field, joined by 1000 tap dancers who entered via aisles through the audience to lay down squares of steel and then dance their socks off. In the centre, a rising platform would feature one of the top Tap Dogs—Adam Garcia—in full solo performance while all around him, other Tap Dogs would be working angle grinders to create sparks in rhythm with the music. Nikki Webster and Djakapurra would meet up again on the hydraulic hoist, both a little overwhelmed at what had happened in the previous fifty minutes, while overhead a gigantic cloth of the Harbour Bridge, designed by Ken Done, burst into pyrotechnics spelling out ‘Eternity’—our favourite image from New Year’s Eve. I was happy with the sequence and felt it was a good finale to all that had gone before. There remained, however, one basic problem—the sheer amount of material that had to be brought onto the field. No matter what we did, it was going to take time and we couldn’t see the audience sitting still for thirty minutes watching a traffic jam, even if that was a familiar sight on the Anzac Bridge. So Nigel proposed that his five hydraulic trucks be positioned on the field during the preceding director’s segment, which provided the creative solution for Lex’s ‘Arrivals’ segment as well. It’s difficult to explain the creative process, but you know when the right answer comes along. Now Lex’s segment was going to start with the arrival of highenergy dancers from each of the five continents, accompanied by large trucks carrying pieces of Nigel’s Anzac Bridge. Morris Lyda and the workshop were glad that we’d finally made up our minds about how to achieve the segment and started work on the five custom-made vehicles to carry the long hydraulically operated ramps that formed the basic structure for the bridge. Meanwhile, David and Lex had come up with a plan to introduce fashion designers to the ‘Arrivals’ segment, to show the world that Australia is home to well-dressed people from all
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four corners of the globe, or from all five continents which was a better match for the number of Olympic rings. There are two schools of thought regarding the Olympic colours—that at least one of the colours appears on every flag in the world, or alternately that Baron de Coubertin was ascribing a colour to a continent when he devised the Olympic Rings logo. I went with the latter, politically incorrect, view and decided that black was Africa, green was Europe, yellow was Asia, red was the Americas north and south, and blue was Oceania. This colour scheme was then given to four of Australia’s leading fashion designers who produced the stunning garments that were seen on the night of the opening ceremony—the models standing proudly, if a little nervously, on the high truck platforms as they assembled in the centre of the stadium. There were to have been five designers but one withdrew at the last minute, so the hugely talented and energetic Jenny Kee agreed to design for two continents (Africa and the Americas), Lisa Ho designed the Asian contingent, Norma Moriceau, who is a film costume designer, was responsible for Europe, and the Oceania segment outfits were the work of Peter Morrissey. Their designs were all quite wonderful and contributed another layer of sophistication and style to the ceremony. There were still a few other details to be developed for the opening ceremony—the marching bands, the giant flag, the selection of singers and songs and, of course, the cauldron-lighting sequence. The marching band fiasco, so-called, was a media beat-up typical of the passions aroused by the Olympic Games. It’s hard to believe now the depth of invective and political manoeuvring that was involved, but at the time the marching band issue seemed likely to derail the opening ceremony. It marked the collapse of a working relationship between myself and Michael Knight, so that from then on he installed a committee to oversee the ceremonies. It was a greater tragedy for the performers who had put so much effort and commitment into being part of the band project, and it was a
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divisive and destructive issue within SOCOG. And, of course, it should never have happened. As explained earlier, my own particular passion for marching bands grew out of the LA Olympics, so when Bill Lutt offered to put together a 2000-piece marching band for Sydney, my only concern was whether we could handle the logistics. Bill and his assistants worked with my office for most of 1998 to sort out the issues, the method and the costs, and by the end of 1998 we had a signed contract that spelled out the details. Essentially, Bill’s company was to bring together 2000 young musicians from Australia, Japan and the US and assemble them in a band camp in Bathurst for their final rehearsals prior to the opening ceremony. In the meantime, the band director Barry Spanier, my old friend from Expo days who was now a professor at New York University, was assembling more than two hours of music for the band. The Parade of the Athletes is usually accompanied by taped music, but for Sydney we decided to have the band play live throughout the entire parade. This was one of the great unrecognised triumphs of the opening ceremony—Barry directed the band for almost two hours continuously, playing national songs and tunes as different countries appeared in the parade, climaxing with the ten-minute tribute to Australia as our athletes entered. In March 1999, there was a New South Wales state election and although there was no chance of Bob Carr’s Labor Party being defeated, they were happy to pick up a rural seat or two if possible. Knight’s press secretary called one day to see if I had any news that the Minister could use on a forthcoming visit to Bathurst, and I mentioned the band project. Apart from their musical and social contribution, the band members and their chaperones would also bring a considerable amount of spending money to the area, so this was seen as a good example of how the Olympics benefited rural New South Wales. I provided the statistics to Knight’s press secretary that 750 Australian musicians would be joined by 250
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Japanese and 1000 American marching band members in a tenday band camp at Bathurst’s Charles Sturt University. We couldn’t give away too many details because I didn’t want the content of the opening ceremony divulged eighteen months early. However, the Minister’s press secretary drafted a release that went out to the rural media and may have got a mention or two in Sydney, but essentially it didn’t create much interest. Three months later, however, a firestorm erupted over the hapless band members, instigated by a whingeing ex-Pom band director from Melbourne, whose musicians hadn’t met our stringent audition standards. In the aftermath, an ABC Radio special program investigated the media ‘firestorm’ and discovered that several disgruntled Australian band directors had initiated a ‘phone-tree’ to Sydney’s ruling talkback radio shock jocks—Alan Jones and John Laws. A phonetree is an organised campaign whereby one person calls three or four friends, each of whom calls another three or four friends, and so on—the instruction being that each person should call Laws or Jones and complain about the lack of Australian musicians or the presence of American or Japanese marching bands in the Sydney Olympics. The result of the phone-tree was very successful in establishing a benchmark for political knee-jerk reaction. On the first day of the campaign, even Graham Richardson, who hosted a relatively low-rating breakfast radio program, received enough calls to rattle the normally unflappable ex-politician. It was he who described it as a ‘firestorm’ and with all his political antennae waving he called Knight to warn him that the electorate was revolting. Unfortunately, Michael Knight believed him, and by the second day of a radio feeding frenzy, Knight was shaken enough to call me into his office. He told me that the people had spoken, and what they were saying was that they didn’t want American or Japanese musicians performing in the opening ceremony of their Olympic Games. There was more than enough paranoia and xenophobia on radio already and why hadn’t I warned
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him about the make-up of the band? I referred him to the press release that he’d issued three months earlier that clearly stated the numbers of people involved and their nationalities, but he didn’t want to listen. Instead, Knight announced that there would be no foreigners in the marching band. The problem with this was that (a) the media could now exploit an obvious rift between us, and (b) SOCOG had signed a contract with Bill Lutt’s company. The media smelled blood in the corridors of power and Knight had to try to defend his position. He announced that he was cancelling Lutt’s World Projects contract and that if Bill Lutt didn’t like it, he could sue. SOCOG was now facing a public relations disaster. Knight had clearly left me hanging in the wind as soon as the media put him under pressure, and he had now also enraged hundreds of American students who had not only paid money to be part of the band, but many of whom had changed their study schedules and even postponed college in order to be part of the Sydney Olympic Games. Knight’s actions seemed to imply to SOCOG staff that his first priority wasn’t the Olympic Games, but his own political career. Several weeks and much legal argument later, Knight had to do a total backdown. Eminent QC opinions informed him that not only was the contract enforceable, but that if he persisted in cancelling the marching band contract, SOCOG would face damage suits from the US that could dwarf the Olympic budget. Knight had to settle a large sum upon World Projects to compensate for their costs and damages, and from then on he never trusted me again. However, he soon had his hands full with the Ticketing Scandal, which was far more damaging than the Marching Band Fiasco. I don’t think we had a Quagmire, but only because the media didn’t think of it at the time. A few months after the fiasco, radio jocks Laws and Jones were exposed as mouthpieces for sale, soliciting fees for apparently spontaneous endorsements of people and products on their radio programs in a practice that is illegal
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in the US where each may have gone to jail had they been found guilty. In Australia, following an official inquiry, nothing of the sort happened and they have gone on from strength to strength. Meantime I was in Connecticut, recovering from heart surgery—which sounds rather more dramatic than it was in reality. Laurie and I had arranged for me to visit the children in August during their school holidays, so I had no intention of staying in Sydney to keep the bruising marching band media campaign alive. A couple of weeks after arriving in the US, I was climbing up sand dunes in Cape Cod with the children and Laurie. I had gained weight and wasn’t as fit as I should have been, so when I reached the top of a high dune and felt a pain in my chest and arm I knew this wasn’t a good vital sign. I planned to ignore it, but Laurie noticed my grey pallor and perspiration and told me to have a checkup with the cardiologist who had looked after her father. To cut a long story short, after an afternoon of tests I was told that one of my arteries was 90 per cent blocked and that I should lie down immediately and not move until they could operate. This seemed extreme, but a day later I was in a high-tech operating theatre in Bridgeport Hospital having a catheter shoved up my inside leg and undergoing angioplasty—in which a small stainless steel cylinder called a ‘stent’ is inserted into an artery to keep it open. There’s no real surgery and not even anaesthesia—just enough Valium to keep the patient very relaxed. The best part was that the operation was performed at seven in the morning, I was walking around at two in the afternoon and was checked out at three! That’s American medicine for you. The surgeon assured me that if I survived the next two weeks, he’d give me a lifetime guarantee. Tee hee. But he was serious about the two weeks, because apparently the biggest risk is that the stitches in the femoral artery where the catheter is inserted might burst. So I spent an additional two weeks in Connecticut with the kids, and the marching band and the whole Olympics
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seemed a very long way away. Throughout this time, SOCOG’s general manager, Sandy Hollway, was magnificent, calling to update me on the situation and being very supportive generally. I returned to Sydney to find that the marching band issue had lost a lot of steam: Alan Jones had tried and failed again to have me removed from my position, and Channel Nine’s 60 Minutes program recorded an interview that gave me a chance to present my side of the story. After that, the issue seemed to quieten down and we went back to trying to rebuild the marching band and get on with the ceremonies. In SOCOG’s Ultimo headquarters—the old Fairfax building— the smell of fear in the upper corridors was now palpable. As Knight was put under more and more pressure, he retreated into the small circle of people he trusted—his personal lawyer, Michael Eyers (who Knight appointed to SOCOG), and David Richmond of OCA. Sandy Hollway remained the human face of SOCOG and during the ticket scandals, when it was discovered that little Aussie diggers were unable to obtain good seats because most of them had been sold off to sponsors and the highest bidders, it was Sandy who maintained what was left of morale among the staff. Had Ceremonies been based in the Ultimo headquarters, I think the black mood of SOCOG would have had a disastrous effect on our existence, but fortunately we had already moved to the basement production office that I’d had included in the original plans for the stadium. Far from luxurious, our office was actually a large open space with a sprawl of people and cramped desks, but I’ve always found this setup is the most efficient way to produce major events. Not only were we all together on one level, but we were well away from SOCOG and in the actual venue where the ceremonies were to be produced. In October, with a little less than twelve months to go until the Games, I was summoned to the first of the oversight committee meetings. David Atkins, Clive Chandler (our financial guru who
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had been working on the ceremonies budget with David in my absence) and Celia Smith (my former assistant and now an associate producer on ceremonies) joined me at a table around which sat Knight, David Richmond, Sandy Hollway, Craig McLatchley (secretary-general of the Australian Olympic Committee) and Peter Morris (project management consultant to SOCOG). Clive Chandler slid the ceremonies budget over to me, showing a bottom line total of A$54 million. We were either $11 million over budget, or $4 million over budget, depending on which figures were used. In January 1995, when I’d started at SOCOG, before anyone else around the table had been there, I had estimated the ceremonies budget would be A$50 million. Although this is a huge amount of money, it’s not unusual for Olympic ceremonies and at the exchange rate between the US dollar and the Australian dollar at that time, it was considerably less than the Atlanta ceremonies budget had been three years earlier. Furthermore, the Sydney budget had to cover the medal ceremonies, the flag handover ceremonies and the Athletes’ Village welcome ceremonies, in addition to the opening and closing ceremonies, so in fact Sydney was much cheaper than either Barcelona or Atlanta in US dollar terms. However, in 1995 my budget prediction of A$50 million was derided by the finance person of the time (who had departed from SOCOG by 1999) and the ceremonies budget was somewhat arbitrarily reduced to around A$43 million. There was little point in arguing at that time—the ceremonies script hadn’t been prepared, so it was impossible to calculate the real budget, but I had a very good track record of predicting the budgets for major ceremonies and felt confident that it would prove correct. By late 1999, the content of the opening and closing ceremonies was more or less settled. There were still changes to come, but they could now be made within the framework of a budget that was much more accurate. The SOCOG group around the table, however, could only see that the budget had increased from A$43 to A$54 million.
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I pointed out that over a five-year period, the budget had increased only eight per cent from my original estimate, which was less than inflation. I also pointed out that SOCOG had made a windfall profit of more than $20 million from the extra seats that had become available when the athletes were removed from the stands for the opening ceremony, and plans were afoot to remove the athletes from the stands for the closing ceremony as well. But no one around the table was interested. They’d already spent the money somewhere else and now they were faced with a problem. Knight and Coates didn’t want to ask the government for more money so soon after the ticket scandal had created active distrust of SOCOG and its secretive clique. Knight had announced at the start of the meeting that there would be no minutes or notes made of the meeting—looking straight at Celia who was a fastidious keeper of notes and minutes. A couple of months later he had to reverse himself when the public inquiry into ticketing found that the minister’s habit of keeping things quiet meant that a paper trail didn’t exist for anything. There were no public records of any of the decisions made, apart from minutes of board meetings. The problem for Knight and the oversight committee was that they couldn’t really make any cuts in the ceremonies. By now it was too late. Staff and contractors were already working on segment designs, costumes were being detailed, and machinery was being costed. Our rehearsal venue was being planned at Schofields—a decommissioned wartime airstrip used mostly by drag racers (cars, not fast queens of course) and skydivers. The requirement to use Schofields instead of the stadium for rehearsals had become necessary when David Richmond and the Olympic Co-ordination Authority approved the Rugby League Grand Final being held at the Olympic Stadium—even though it would take place only two weeks before the opening ceremony. Our segment rehearsals needed to start in May, four months before the stadium would be available. Five years earlier I had prepared milestones
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and deadlines for rehearsal schedules, and the dates had even been incorporated into my contract—but they were conveniently ignored by SOCOG. Setting up Schofields added almost $4 million to the cost of ceremonies, although, as things turned out, the abandoned airstrip was in many ways a better location for rehearsals than the stadium. At the first of the oversight committee meetings, Sandy Hollway suggested scrapping the cauldron-lighting ceremony to save money, but everyone else around the table knew that it was an unforgettable moment and would be the last part of the ceremony to be scrapped. The meeting ended inconclusively regarding the budget, with David and Clive saying they’d look at it again. There were one or two more oversight meetings that I attended and they too ended inconclusively, except one that affected the overhead flying rig. The flying lines were forty-five metres in the air and needed to be installed months before the opening ceremony so that we could program and rehearse the complex aerial moves. Richmond was concerned that the Rugby League players would be distracted by the wires, or that they might kick the ball high enough to hit the cables which could lead to a complicated decision for the referee. Richmond insisted that the overhead cables be removed after the opening ceremony because they might be unsightly or even be hit by a javelin. The head of the Olympic Co-ordination Authority had clearly never seen javelin throwers in action, but it meant that we couldn’t use the flying capacity of the stadium for the closing ceremony. A committee attempting to control a creative venture can only, in the end, provide opinions. Consensus decisions, by definition, reflect an average point of view, and creative insights are not the result of average decisions. A committee can’t have creative brainwaves, and in the end someone has to be prepared to accept responsibility for things that go wrong. The old Russian proverb
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that success has a thousand fathers while failure is an orphan, is particularly true with any creative endeavour. Michael Knight wasn’t prepared to fire me because he knew that if he did so, and the Sydney opening ceremony was perceived as a failure, he would have to accept the blame. I didn’t have time to worry about the ceremony being a failure; we were too busy planning to get things right. Among the things that almost came out right were the Sydney 2000 victory medals. In late 1998 we held a design competition for the medals between twenty invited artists and designers. Their final designs were to be supplied to us as three-dimensional plaster or resin replicas, and I’d assembled a group of five judges to decide on the winning design. Early one evening, Sandi Harding (who’d worked with me on Expo ’88 and was hired to be in charge of medal ceremonies after Celia Smith was promoted to associate producer) and her assistant Nicola Andrews set up black velvet pillows and scrounged desk lamps in the SOCOG boardroom to display the designs to our illustrious judges. Sandi had prepared score sheets and snacks, and the judges wandered around until we sat down and compared notes. From the 1928 Amsterdam Olympic Games onwards, Olympic medals have on one side (called the ‘obverse’ for some reason), a rendition of Nike (the Greek goddess of Victory, not the shoe) clutching a sheaf of wheat and waving a laurel wreath outside a Roman coliseum. The name of the host city, the year and the number of the Olympiad in Roman numerals (counted from the first modern Olympics in 1896) are also included in the ‘obverse’ design. This democratic mix of classical Greek and Roman symbols was the work of an Italian designer, Guiseppe Cassioli, who was commissioned to design the 1928 medals. On the ‘reverse’ side of the medal, the design is left up to the host city but it should provide space for the medallist’s name to be engraved. Our judges came up with a clear winner—Wojciech Pietranik—who is a designer
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with the Royal Australian Mint in Canberra. On the obverse side of the medal, he had depicted Nike in exactly the same pose as the original Cassioli goddess, holding a laurel wreath, but with wattle blossoms at her feet. The startling part of the design was that Wojciech had seated Nike next to the graceful sails of the Sydney Opera House, instead of a Roman coliseum. Poor Wojciech. His design might have been the winning one, but that didn’t mean he was finished. The Mint made an actual set of medals in his design in accordance with IOC specifications in gold, silver and bronze. This set was shown to the SOCOG board, who were most favourably impressed. As it happened, two senior IOC members were visiting Sydney at that time and I gave them an informal preview of the medals. They too were most impressed, so when Michael Knight left for an IOC Session in Seoul a few weeks later, the approval of the medal design should have been a mere formality. Unfortunately, Wojciech’s medal design was a victim of politics. One of Australia’s two IOC members, Phil Coles, had been dismissed from the board of SOCOG, and this was neither forgotten nor was Knight forgiven by some of Phil Coles’s friends at the IOC. During an inquiry into IOC delegates and their relationships with the Salt Lake City bid committee, Phil and his partner Patricia had been pilloried in the Australian media for their acceptance of gifts from the Salt Lake City organisers, and Coles had been reprimanded by the IOC. But Michael Knight took it further when he announced that Phil Coles was also being dismissed from the board of SOCOG, which hurt Phil very deeply. His many friends at the IOC were furious at SOCOG and were looking for ways to express their feelings. So when Knight made his normal progress report to the IOC session in Seoul, he found the going tougher than expected. Among the casualties was the medal design, which the executive board refused to approve on the basis that the design didn’t meet IOC specifications. Since two members of the board
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had already informally given their approval, this was a bit rich. Late that afternoon, I received a harried phone call from Bob Elphinstone who had gone to Seoul. Bob asked for information about the medal design, because the SOCOG representatives were being told that the design was non-conforming. At that time I didn’t know the background to the IOC’s decision, so I was somewhat mystified. The obverse side of an Olympic medal (the one featuring Nike) is in fact slightly altered by each host city, but is usually a close replica of the 1928 design. Although it has been the custom to use the Cassioli design, I knew from personal experience that in 1992 the Barcelona medals were significantly different. In fact, on the Barcelona medal there was no coliseum at all, just a decorative frieze. But Elphinstone told me that the IOC executive board had told him that every Olympics used the same design and he had no knowledge to the contrary. Sandi and Nicola scrambled to assemble a package of photographs, showing every medal design from 1928 forward, then realised that it didn’t help our case because, except for Barcelona, they all featured a Roman coliseum. Instead, we included simply the 1992 and 1996 designs to show that, indeed, the medal designs could vary considerably. In the end, it didn’t matter. We were told that our urgent overnight package in fact never arrived at the hotel where the SOCOG members were staying. The result was that Knight returned, distrusting my advice more than usual and not helped by Kevan Gosper announcing at a board meeting, ‘Oh well, Ric. If you’d asked me, I’d have told you that the design never changes and the executive board would never have approved it.’ In the circumstances, it was easier to ask Wojciech to change the design than demonstrate that the executive board of the IOC didn’t know their own medals. So we ended up with a medal that was still beautiful and a little larger, but the traditional coliseum wasn’t
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quite as magical as the sight of Nike waving beside the Opera House. The revised design was routinely approved by the IOC and the Royal Mints in Perth and Canberra went into production. In August 2000 we presented the medal design at a press conference at the Opera House and it seemed to be well received. A few days later, however, I started receiving phone calls from an irate Greek Orthodox priest in Sydney who had stirred up a media campaign saying that I didn’t know my arena from my elbow. He accused me of being in league with atheists (he probably meant aesthetes, or maybe athletes). For whatever reason, the deluded cleric, who knew nothing of Olympic traditions, must have thought I had some influence on the original 1928 design and he was most upset that a Roman coliseum was featured on a medal celebrating games that had their beginnings in Greece. He didn’t seem to notice that the design also featured Roman numerals or that he should have complained to Guiseppe Cassioli in 1928 instead of holding back for seventy-two years. I told him that the coliseum wasn’t really Roman, but simply a symbolic competition venue. He wasn’t buying that, so next thing I knew the London Times was running a story vilifying me for having a Roman coliseum on a medal celebrating games that originated in Greece! I allowed Michael Pirrie, our hugely overworked media relations guru, to deal with the response because I was tired of having to defend a medal designed years before I was born. Michael said he was amazed that the London Times reporter would be so ignorant of Olympic history and tradition, and where on earth could he have come up with a story like that? I said that I had no idea, but maybe a meddlesome priest might know. As a footnote to history, in July 2003 the medal design for the Athens 2004 Games was approved. The new design represents the Athenian 1896 stadium in place of the Roman coliseum, and the IOC announced that this is now the design that all future Olympic
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medals will use. So if Sydney ever hosts the Games again, the lucky director of ceremonies will start with an obvious obverse and have his/her own way on the reverse. The rehearsals for Ceremonies got underway at Schofields in May 1999. Morris Lyda and Malcolm White had discovered the disused airfield a couple of years earlier and, when it seemed likely we’d need the space, they’d entered into negotiations with the Defence Department which was willing to let us use the land free of charge. Then the OCA bureaucrats got involved and we were told that Ceremonies would first have to pay a real estate company thousands of dollars to come up with a valuation of the land, after which we would have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent to the owners. We pointed out that we had negotiated a rentfree deal, but the OCA was insistent that this wasn’t the right way to do things. The situation stagnated for months until finally even the bureaucrats understood that we needed rehearsal space somewhere and that free was probably the best deal going, particularly as SOCOG was becoming more sensitive about costs. Once we had obtained agreement on the land, Malcolm was able to start preparing the venue. An area exactly the same size as the stadium field was cleared and graded, with scaffolding gates erected to mark the position of each stadium entrance. A control tower with two floors was built on the western side of the field in the same relative position as the control room at the stadium, although not nearly as high. A hangar that had originally been built to house Alan Bond’s airship became a storage area for large setpieces and fragile props, and the communications chaps were housed in a couple of trailers from where they dispensed radios to the stage management team. Near the field, Malcolm erected a couple of large tents which became the check-in facility, backpack cloakroom and watering hole. Catering trucks were ordered for the big rehearsal days, although the performers also brought their own food. On the big
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days—which could involve more than 15,000 arrivals from daylight to dusk—the Schofields site was a miracle of organisation as shuttle buses full of performers arrived from the railway station with military precision. Production coordinators, stage managers and volunteer assistants checked the arrivals, who were then issued colour-coded tank tops marked with their individual performer number. Then, just like an army, they were told to hurry up and wait. And just like soldiers in any army, the performers sat around talking, a few of them grumbling that the officers didn’t know what they were doing and things would be different if they were in charge. Meanwhile, in the control tower, choreographers and creative directors and stage managers grappled with the challenges of bringing mental images into reality. This was a process I’d experienced many times in my life, starting with the Commonwealth Games in Brisbane eighteen years earlier, through to Singapore and Barcelona. I was no longer directly involved in the rehearsal process, but it was always fun to watch. None of the Sydney 2000 team had had the chance to work on such a scale with so many performers before, but I knew that they would work it out. Slowly the masses of nameless but numbered performers were organised into disciplined groups and assembled at their entrance points, and as the music burst from the PA system we had a chance to see what each sequence would look like in the stadium. For weeks or months before coming to Schofields, each of the groups had rehearsed separately in small venues ranging from warehouses to aircraft hangars, but Schofields was the only venue large enough to bring everyone together in one place. For the first time, the performers began to realise the enormity and complexity of the opening ceremony and the importance of their role in creating an image of Sydney and Australia for the world.
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eighteen
Showtime Showtime
B
y August 2000, everything seemed to be in readiness for the ceremonies when I suddenly lost my trust in one of the producers. The person in question was Lloyd Bond, a garrulous and extroverted Queenslander who stood out in a crowd by wearing a large fez-like hat over his bald head. Most people found his self-promotional rants a little tiring, but I thought he was a diamond in the rough and worth encouraging. I’d appointed him as the producer responsible for the welcome ceremonies at the Athletes’ Village and also for the prelude to the opening ceremony. The latter wasn’t seen on television, but was an orientation for the spectators and an introduction to the audience participation moments in the ceremony. If I’d paid more attention I could have saved myself a great deal of trouble and money, but my first experience of working with Lloyd didn’t set off any alarm bells. That had been in early 1998 when we submitted a joint proposal for the redevelopment of Sydney’s historic Luna Park. Our proposal did not have a happy outcome—which was nothing to do with Lloyd, but everything
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to do with the New South Wales Public Works Department. Lloyd and I formed a partnership and I brought in some world experts on heritage and theme park financial operations, together with Ipoh Gardens, the company that had renovated the Queen Victoria Building and proved to be one of the most heritage-conscious construction companies ever to work in Sydney. Together we developed a masterplan for the Luna Park site that retained its charm and its role as an entertainment area for the people of Sydney, while providing a commercial return for investors. After a long delay, the New South Wales Public Works Department finally awarded the contract to Michael Edgley and the Metro Group who took another five years to reopen Luna Park. Lloyd and I were both disappointed, but decided that we’d proceed on other joint ventures if another opportunity arose. It wasn’t long in coming. Lloyd had been intrigued by my tales of ‘Dixie Stampede’ in Tennessee and we often discussed the possibility of establishing a Down Under version. We agreed that opening a Stampede in Surfer’s Paradise would be a good project to follow the Olympic ceremonies and would give us both something to do in 2001. In preparation for this, Fred Hardwick (chairman) and Jim Rule (general manager of the US-based Stampede chain) flew to Queensland in April 2000 to meet with local authorities and to establish ‘Dixie in Paradise’ in association with myself and Lloyd. We had agreed on a site in the heart of Surfer’s which was ideal, and the local council were prepared to lease it to us. Lloyd said that he’d handle the business out of his Gold Coast office and agreed that his company Theme Corporation, Spectak and the USbased Stampede would jointly fund the development of the project. Lloyd formed a new company and proceeded to hire staff and consultants to design and develop the project, while I was in Sydney involved with the Olympic ceremonies. Obviously I was distracted, because Spectak had invested about $310,000 with Lloyd without receiving any accounting statements or financial reports on
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expenditure. The US company had put in $700,000, and Lloyd was asking for more when we finally brought the project to a halt. It turned out that many of the staff and consultants hadn’t been paid and that the bulk of the new company’s capital had been tranferred into two companies owned by Lloyd Bond. Fortunately, when Lloyd registered the new company he had made himself sole director. That meant that when the inevitable round of lawsuits by consultants and contractors was brought to recover fees and expenses, neither Fred nor I was liable because we had no standing in Lloyd’s corporation and were simply two more companies on the debtor list. To this day, Bond hasn’t provided any explanation of where the money went and Fred’s advice was to forget it and take a tax loss. This was all very well for a multi-million US dollar company that was writing off Aussie dollars, but for Spectak it was real money. It wasn’t made easier by the fact that I still had to try and work with Lloyd on the Olympics, because there were only four weeks left before the opening ceremony and two weeks before the first Athletes’ Village welcome ceremony. I would love to have fired Lloyd, but the problems were connected only with my personal company and there was no evidence of any impropriety with his ceremonies budget. One reason I hadn’t been paying much attention to Lloyd Bond’s activities was that I had my hands full, as it were, of drag queens. David Atkins and Brian Thompson, the designer of the closing ceremony, had been auditioning drag queens for the coveted roles to accompany a bus celebrating the Australian film, Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, in the ceremony. Predictably, despite David’s injunctions of secrecy, tongues had started wagging in gay circles and the media had been alerted. This time, Michael Knight handled the potential outcry much better than he had during the marching band excitement. David Atkins, a good politician himself, ducked for cover and refused to take calls, leaving me to handle the media and the protesters. A predictable religious outcry had arisen,
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claiming that drag queens weren’t fit persons to represent Sydney in an Olympic ceremony. Knight maintained solidarity with me, so the media had no differences to exploit and the story never really got started. Somehow Sydney, home of the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, magnet for gay pride and pink tourism, survived the inclusion of fifty drag queens in a ceremony that made them look almost commonplace. David Atkins had not only been busy planning the closing ceremony but had also managed to gain the fireworks display, in partnership with Ignatius Jones. I felt strongly that Knight and David Richmond had behaved churlishly when they announced an open tender for the pyrotechnic finale that I had originated, developed and planned for three years, and that Spectak was uniquely qualified to produce. From a business aspect it was regrettable for my company, but from a creative point of view it made no difference. Iggy, or Ignatius as he now styled himself, had worked for me for four years as director of the Sydney Harbour New Year’s Eve celebrations, so he had all the contacts and experience necessary for the job. I’d already planned and organised the F-111 flights that coincided with the last moments of the ceremony in the stadium, and had outlined the progression of fireworks along the river that would accompany the plane before it climbed steeply over the Harbour Bridge in full afterburner torch mode, as a signal to commence the pyro explosions below. To have Spectak excluded from the opportunity to produce the display was just another bit of bastardry from Knight and Richmond, as far as I was concerned. I’m not sure why the antipathy between myself and Richmond began, but from the moment we first met there was mutual dislike and things went downhill from there. (Reminds me of the famous story about Andrew Lloyd Webber complaining to a friend that he couldn’t understand why people took an instant dislike to him. ‘Saves time, old boy,’ came the reply.)
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My first meeting took place because I had been told it would be a good idea to explain the cauldron-lighting sequence to David Richmond, the public servant in charge of the Olympic Coordination Authority, an intimate of Michael Knight and, clearly, a person going places. So one evening I trekked out to the OCA office at Homebush where the stadium was under construction, only to be kept waiting in the foyer like a naughty schoolboy. When Richmond was finally ready to see me, he contained his enthusiasm. We shook hands with difficulty as I was carrying a model and storyboards for show and tell, and he made no move to help me. He didn’t even get up from behind the table where he was sitting. Hardly a flicker of expression crossed his rotund face or behind his large glasses as he permitted me to begin. I could tell this wasn’t going to be an easy sell. I went through the ignition sequence from the moment the torchbearer arrived, to the triumphant finale as the cauldron was lifted skyward, cascading water and billowing flames signifying that the Olympics had begun in the Harbour City. It was, if I may say so, a pretty good presentation. Richmond remained unmoved. He had only one question. ‘But you’d need an able-bodied athlete to do that, wouldn’t you?’ I was somewhat surprised. ‘Well, yes, I guess so. But Olympic athletes are very able-bodied,’ I replied. There was a long silence. I don’t know whether Richmond was thinking of Betty Cuthbert or the Paralympics, but he let me know that the presentation was over. Then he stood and limped from the room and that’s when I learned for the first time that he had a gammy leg. Perhaps Richmond secretly nursed the expectation that he would be called upon to light the cauldron himself and was now coming to terms with his disappointment. Whatever the reason, he treated me with cordial dislike from then on. It was the beginning of my problems with the OCA. On an almost daily basis, there would be some new dictate or other that threatened to overturn our plans. At one time we were told that
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the stadium was only licensed to accommodate 110,000 people— the number of seats in the stands—so the fact that we were planning to add almost 13,000 performers and 12,000 athletes was clearly going to exceed the licence. What was I going to do about it? I suggested cancelling the opening ceremony and saving ourselves a lot of red tape, but this wasn’t the correct answer. Instead, we had to make complex arrangements to bring the cast for one segment into the backstage tunnel and make sure that they left as soon as they finished and were only replaced on a one-for-one basis by the next segment performers. This was clearly lunacy and no way to plan a production, but the OCA had total authority over the stadium and we were apparently lucky to have it. I suggested at one time that it might be easier if we relocated the ceremony to the Sydney Football Stadium, but apparently that wasn’t an option either. After the ticketing scandal, the capacity of the stadium was increased magically to 113,000 seats, thus allowing more disgruntled punters to be accommodated without whingeing, and we never heard another word about the licensed capacity of the stadium. In the buildup to the opening ceremony we held two fulldress rehearsals with a capacity audience. The first one was held on Saturday, September 9, and the spectators would have noticed significant delays between segments. Although this was partly caused by chaos backstage as cast members were being exchanged on a one-for-one basis, the main reason for the traffic jams was the presence of four fire engines and five ambulances in the backstage tunnel that circles beneath the grandstands. They weren’t meant to be there, so our cast members had difficulty getting past and all our performance machinery was totally blocked. This situation had come about because the OCA had refused our request to isolate the smoke and fire doors that operate at each entrance portal onto the field. It is, of course, a jolly good idea to have fire doors and a very sensible precaution, but as we explained to OCA, we would prefer to have an operator positioned at each location
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who could operate the door manually. The OCA refused absolutely to even consider this option and at the first dress rehearsal, with the tunnels loaded with performers and the ‘Arrivals’ trucks poised in the portals, hot fat from a fish ’n’ chip fryer in a first-floor snack bar caught fire. Smoke detectors and fire alarms registered and without warning the smoke doors at the portals slammed shut, trapping our performers in front or behind the doors and injuring one of our drivers. Fire engines started arriving at the tunnel entrance and followed each other down into the tunnel, threading their way through colourfully costumed performers who were surprised to see them because there had been no fire appliances at earlier rehearsals. Walkie-talkie traffic reporting our driver’s injured hand was being monitored by safety officers and the ambulance services, so five ambulances sped to the scene before we could stop them. Miraculously enough, after some heroic redirection of traffic backstage, the show went on and the next day, without comment, the OCA informed us that the smoke doors would be isolated for manual operation—which until then they had assured us was impossible. This rehearsal created another problem. The giant Olympic flag covering the athletes in Barcelona had been a great success and from that time I had wanted to incorporate a similar moment into each Olympic ceremony. Unfortunately, in Atlanta the producers decided not to bring out a giant flag but I wanted to try again. In Sydney, when I explained my idea to David Atkins, he wanted to be creative director of this segment. Whereas the flag in Barcelona had the Olympic rings logo embroidered onto white fabric, my idea for Sydney was to have a plain white flag of the same size, but with inflatable white rings incorporated into the fabric. I wanted to pass the flag down from the audience until it reached the athletes, thus creating a direct link between the athletes and the spectators of the world. Once the flag had covered the
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athletes, stage managers waiting beneath in strategic positions would connect tanks of compressed air to the rings and inflate them. The embossed white rings upon a white background would form the IOC’s letterhead logo. David had a flag made to these specifications and all was in readiness for the first and only opportunity to test it—at the dress rehearsal in the stadium. On that night, the flag went horribly wrong. A TV camera had been left unattended on a tripod next to the railing at the front of the upper grandstand. As the giant flag was passed down overhead by the spectators, the loose fabric forming one of the Olympic rings snagged the camera. Immoveable object met irresistible force as the flag kept moving and the tripod refused to move. Then the fabric gave way and a massive rip developed as the flag started coming apart. Then the other side of the flag developed a new rip when it caught on a guardrail and within moments there were long ribbons of material instead of a giant flag. The next day, the flag makers said that there was time to repair the main flag itself, but not the inflatable rings. Reluctantly, I agreed with David’s suggestion to use projected imagery to create the Olympic rings but on the night, I thought that the projections were an improvement on my original idea. As the flag moved down from the upper grandstand seats, the projected imagery of athletes appeared to ripple as though underwater, and when the flag finally unfurled above the athletes there were projected images of a dove as well as the Olympic logo which conveyed several messages at once. I still hope that future producers will consider making the giant Olympic flag a new tradition for the ceremonies, in which case perhaps they’ll be able to make the inflatable rings work properly at another time and in another place. The second and final dress rehearsal took place on Wednesday, September 13, and was a considerable improvement on the first one. David and the stage management team were sleepless but
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confident, and I was sure that the adrenaline levels on the night of the opening ceremony would be sufficient to overcome any problems. This turned out to be true—but no one could have foreseen the problem we had with the cauldron. I had never had a moment’s doubt about the cauldron once the initial engineering studies showed that it was feasible. There were many, many difficulties, challenges and problems that kept the cauldron engineering team perplexed during the development period, but I never doubted that everything would come out right. John Coates and Michael Knight were responsible for choosing the person who would light the cauldron, but relations were so bad between us by then that Knight didn’t even tell me when the selection was made. Instead, he told David Atkins. David called me and let me know that there would be a rehearsal at the stadium with the torchbearers—the golden girls of Australian Olympic history—but even they didn’t know who the final torchbearer would be. Betty Cuthbert, Raelene Boyle, Dawn Fraser, Shirley Strickland, Shane Gould and Debbie Flintoff-King had all left the stadium by the time that Cathy Freeman arrived at 2 a.m. Cathy went through the cauldron-lighting sequence, shivering from the cold and with a mild dose of ’flu, but proved why she’s a champion as she was drenched with water during the ascent of the cauldron, without complaint. The best-kept secret of the opening ceremony seemed to remain that way, despite a number of security guards being around to watch the slight, hooded figure of Cathy ascending the steps to the reflecting pool. We rehearsed the sequence with Cathy three times, and everything worked exactly as planned. From the initial ignition of the underwater gas ring, fuelled by hydrogen as well as natural gas, to the final docking with the main shaft and ignition of the main burner, everything worked to plan— just like the drawings and models that had been prepared years earlier to explain the sequence to the board of SOCOG and ultimately to the IOC a few months before the opening. Tired and
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wet but happy, Cathy returned home, ready to light the cauldron for the last time in less than 24 hours with the whole world watching. So many people were associated with the cauldron sequence that it’s difficult to know where to begin, but the real work started when Morris Lyda reappeared in my life. Morris had been the lighting production manager for Barcelona in 1992, the ‘ghost who walked’, as we called him because he was always away on tour but mysteriously showed up whenever there was a hint of trouble. He showed up again in Sydney, having married his Australian wife Fiona, and decided to settle down on the northern beaches. ‘It doan’ get no betta ’n this’, Morris drawled in Texan to me. I don’t know if he changed his mind over the subsequent three years, but, after Marie-Claire and Celia Smith, he was the next person I hired to work on the Sydney ceremonies. His first and most important task was to get the cauldron project moving. I’d spent some time working with Bytecraft, a Melbourne-based lighting company that has a record of innovative engineering. Once again, one of the company directors had been involved with Expo in Brisbane, and we had remained in touch ever since. This was Stephen Found, who brought along his partner Ted Fregon, a specialist in electronic engineering, for the initial meetings to plan the cauldron sequence. Ted and Stephen had solved some of the cauldron challenges and had completed much of the electrical load and power supply calculations, but we still weren’t satisfied with the method of lifting the cauldron itself. Morris took the bull by the horns as he’d done in his early days as a real Texan cowboy. ‘This dog won’t hunt,’ he told me, ‘It’s time to fish or cut bait.’ I could have listened to this stuff all day, but there was work to be done if only I knew what he was trying to say. Morris brought in another engineer to solve the cauldron issues, while Stephen and Bytecraft were contracted as the lighting producers for ceremonies, responsible for assembling the mightiest collection of lighting instruments ever seen in one place in Australia.
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The new engineer was David Tierney, and after several weeks of quiet contemplation he came up with the solution to moving the cauldron. ‘Imagine,’ he explained to Morris and me, ‘a frying pan. Now imagine that the cauldron is the pan and the handle is attached to a hydraulic column that lifts it vertically to the base of the upper grandstand, where the waterfall is pouring over the edge. Then the frying pan gets pulled up the grandstand tracks by a steel cable. When it’s reached the top of the grandstand, the main shaft of the column rises hydraulically and separates the cauldron from the ‘handle’ and takes it up to its full height above the stadium so it can be seen from outside.’ Morris and I looked at each other. ‘By golly,’ Morris said. ‘That sucker just might fly.’ This was high praise indeed, and David Tierney was given the go-ahead to develop the concept to technical drawing stage. We could now talk to the gas supply company, AGL, about the ring of fire in the cauldron and the main burner on the hydraulic shaft. In a Sydney laneway in Camperdown, Morris and I watched as gas company technicians lit hydrogen with a fine disregard for my basic schoolboy physics that told me to stay well clear of hydrogen and a naked flame. Their designers had told us that the natural gas burners in the ring of fire would be susceptible to wind, but that hydrogen would keep burning through a gale as well as underwater. So, pilot lights of high-pressure hydrogen gas were installed at regular intervals around the ring to keep the natural gas alight if necessary. The cauldron carried its own bottled gas supply in the ‘handle’, which would burn for about twelve minutes. As the entire sequence was timed at seven minutes, this seemed like plenty in reserve. However, after the waterfall slipway was installed at the stadium, I was sitting there one day and noticed a couple of softdrink cans that had been thrown between the tracks. It occurred
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to me that on the night, the torrent of water might flush out cans or other debris that hadn’t been noticed, or even that a spectator might toss a can into the flood to see what happened. If there was any debris on the tracks, it could jam the cauldron as it travelled upward and delay the whole sequence. This meant that we would need an additional gas supply to take care of any emergency on the tracks. I told Morris of my fears, and a few days later he told me that they’d redesigned the carrying capacity and the cauldron would now burn for thirty minutes with onboard bottled gas. This was of considerable comfort to me at the opening ceremony when the cauldron ascent was delayed and we had no idea how long it would take to fix, or even if it could be fixed. The construction of the intricate stage and cauldron infrastructure was entrusted to Australian Winch and Haulage who did a wonderful job, not just with the construction but also in working within the constraints imposed by OCA. Perhaps the most surprising thing of all was that the ignition sequence and the hidden underwater cauldron remained secret right up until the ceremony, despite the involvement of literally hundreds of people in its design over a period of years—any one of whom could have given the story to reporters, who were always looking for the scoop of the ceremony. The cauldron remained Morris’s baby, so that on the night of the opening ceremony when it shuddered and stopped at the top of its first ascent, he was the first person I tried to contact by radio. At the time he was somewhere under the stage and said tersely that he’d get back to me. At times like these, there is no point shrieking over radios at the technicians who are trying to find the fault because it just delays them, but it’s a natural reaction as the tension builds. Instead, there was silence in the control room as we held our breaths and waited. A couple of minutes after the cauldron stopped, the tech crew reported briefly that they’d identified the fault and were working
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on it. The stage manager told me that the first music track— Berlioz’s Te Deum—would run out in another ninety seconds and did I want to cue the following piece? The second music track was designed for the fireworks display and contained all the firing cues on time-coded audio. I decided that since we had enough gas to burn for thirty minutes, we should cue the second piece of music and when it finished, if the cauldron still hadn’t moved, we should make an announcement that the opening ceremony was completed. I imagined that we’d be able to use Cathy Freeman’s torch to convey the flame from the cauldron to the main burner at the top of the grandstand. I was starting to write out some words for John Stanton, our stadium announcer, when the fireworks music began and at almost the same moment the cauldron lurched slightly, then started ascending smoothly to the top, completing its journey perfectly and allowing us all to get our hearts back from our mouths. It had taken three minutes and forty seconds to get the cauldron moving again. Those 220 seconds had seemed longer in the control room, where I was very proud and impressed by the professionalism of the stage management crew who had stayed calm while making contingency arrangements. The fireworks were exploding high in the sky behind the cauldron as it rose and I was told later that there were people around the world who were unaware that there had been any delay at all. But we knew. It had been the only imperfection in an extraordinarily complex and ambitious production that the performers and stage crews had achieved to a standard of excellence that was totally unreasonable to expect. And yet, they’d done it. Morris turned up a few minutes later in the control room looking shaken. He didn’t tell me then, but waited until next morning to explain why he had been so shook up. After I’d asked him to increase the cauldron’s gas supply to allow for an unexpected delay, he’d spoken to David Tierney to see what could be done. David
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advised him that the cauldron was already at its weight limit and there was simply no space available to fit any more gas bottles onto the handle. Morris decided not to bother me with details and had lied that there was thirty minutes of gas onboard. Had I known, as he did, that there was only twelve minutes of gas available, I’m not sure that I would have been able to restrain myself from shrieking at the technicians. Morris was still white-faced next morning as he told me that there was less than a minute’s worth of gas left in the cauldron when the main gas burner took over. Imagine the symbolism of watching the cauldron ignite and start moving, only to see it stop, and then a few minutes later to witness the Olympic Flame die out. That would have turned a glitch into a major disaster and the stuff that a ceremony director’s nightmares are made of. Morris was still baffled by the fault that had brought the cauldron to a halt and muttered darkly about sabotage. However, he admitted that it could have been caused by a short-circuit and we’ll never know, because the whole apparatus was dismantled and removed next morning to allow the spectators’ seats to be replaced in the stands. According to a newspaper poll, seventy-eight per cent of Australians thought the opening ceremony was ‘very good’ and 1 per cent thought it was ‘very poor’. It’s reassuring to know that there are still some rugged individualists out there, but personally I thought it was the best Olympic ceremony that I’ve seen. The days following the opening ceremony were something of a blur. The next day I was driven down to Stanwell Tops where the ‘Awakening’ performers were staying. On a grassed area, young men and elders were demonstrating tribal dance steps to each other in front of a large mixed crowd of visitors and it seemed for a moment that perhaps reconciliation might be more than just a word. Years later, I don’t know that we achieved as much change as I hoped at the time, but friends who are teachers tell me that
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Aboriginal studies and culture are starting to appear on their school curricula. Three days after the opening I received a phone call from Michael Knight, congratulating me coolly on doing a good job. I think he must have been goaded into making the call because the media kept asking him what he’d said to me after the ceremony. Around the same time, at Circular Quay I ran into Donald McDonald, chairman of the ABC, who uncharacteristically hugged and congratulated me, but apart from Knight he was the only member of the SOCOG board I ever heard from. Bob Carr, Premier of New South Wales, had made a generous and articulate speech after the opening in which he claimed that the ceremony was perhaps the most important work of art ever produced in Australia’s history. A week after the opening ceremony I disgraced myself when I let fly about Michael Knight to a reporter with the Financial Review. It was very stupid of me and I can plead tiredness, but in the end I know better than to talk to reporters in unguarded moments. The headline read ‘A Bitter Birch Lashes out at Knight’ and I was quoted as ‘accusing Mr. Knight of arrogance and excessive interference in the creative aspects of the Games’. Then I said, ’I’ve had to try and live with Knight and Richmond. In the end you do what you’ve got to do, but they’ve made my life a whole lot more difficult.’ In case this seemed mild, I was then quoted as saying, ‘I don’t give a shit about Michael Knight. He’s just a New South Wales Labor politician.’ A day or two later I was with Dylan and Jessie outside a Crows Nest restaurant. They’d only been in Australia for a week, but already they were accustomed to strangers asking whether I was Ric Birch. This time a man walked up and shook my hand saying, ‘Congratulations, Ric!’ And as I thanked him, he said: ‘Not for the ceremonies. For what you said about Michael Knight!’ Jessie turned to me as the man left and asked, ‘Who’s Michael Knight?’
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To no one’s surprise, the interview destroyed any remote possibility that the minister and I might reconcile our differences. Michael himself behaved very well and ignored my outburst. I phoned him on the morning the interview appeared to apologise, and he simply said that he never believed anything he read in the papers. There was a real possibility that Knight would be forgiven his trespasses and be declared a national hero for the overwhelming success of the Games organisation over which he had presided. However, the man himself managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. On the morning following the closing ceremony I was still in bed recovering from the after-party, when the phone rang. It was ABC Radio’s Phil Clarke, enquiring if I’d been invited to the Olympic Awards Breakfast, and had I received a medal from the IOC? When I replied sleepily that the answer to both was ‘no’, Phillip told me that Sandy Hollway had been snubbed with a Silver Order of the Olympics, whereas David Richmond had received a Gold, and that David Atkins had been invited to the Awards Breakfast where he had accepted an Olympic award on behalf of Ceremonies. This was news to me because David hadn’t mentioned anything, but it’s more important for him to get awards than me. I only lose them or put them in storage, whereas David really values them. After the Awards Breakfast, the media managed to find some members of the IOC executive board who were furious enough at Knight to spill the beans on his behaviour. Not only had Knight taken Sandy Hollway’s seats in the VIP area and given them to Richmond, but the minister for the Olympics had told Samaranch that he would only accept a Gold Order of the Olympics so long as Sandy didn’t get one. A few days later, Sandy received a Gold Order from the IOC after all and I received a small pink jewellery box through the ordinary mail. Inside the box was a very small lapel pin of the Olympic rings in pure gold, together with a photocopied note from the OCA advising me that if my name was
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spelled incorrectly, I should notify them. That was the last I heard from the OCA, and as there was no name on the pin, it didn’t seem necessary to bother them. Bob Carr threw a party at Government House to honour the creative team behind the ceremonies, and Michael Knight stalked the gardens like Banquo’s ghost. Knight had resigned from parliament shortly after the closing ceremony when he was pilloried in the press for his treatment of Sandy Hollway. And so the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games had come to an end. I felt very flat. The seeds of ambition and envy that had been sown in the euphoria following the famous 1993 Monte Carlo announcement had flowered into some very poisonous blossoms. Michael Eyers, Knight’s lawyer and appointee to oversee the dissolution of SOCOG, disputed my termination payment and refused to pay it in accordance with my contract. He also disputed that I was entitled to any holiday pay. As with so many actions of SOCOG, legal remedies became necessary and it took another year or so before Eyers settled out of court. I had enjoyed working on the Los Angeles Olympics and had enjoyed even more being involved with Barcelona for the 1992 Games. But in Sydney, despite producing the ‘most beautiful ceremonies ever’ (Juan Antonio Samaranch), I knew that I hadn’t enjoyed them. On the other hand, I had survived.
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Epilogue Epilogue
A
fter the plane landed in LA I spent a few days with friends before heading for New York, where I spent part of the US Presidential Election Day lunching with Rupert Murdoch discussing ‘signature events’. This is a concept I have for potential new events that combine live production with television coverage and they seemed like a good idea at the time. Mr Murdoch agreed, and Spectak once again joined with News Corporation to develop these new business opportunities, which went swimmingly until the events of September 11 put a halt to corporate investment and sponsorship. This began a downturn in the US economy which continued for long enough that Fox eventually offered to buy me out of my development contract. I felt like a farmer who’s being paid not to grow crops, but I accepted their kind offer and moved on. One of the places I visited in 2001 after the Games was Turkey. On the southern coastline not far from Cyprus is the town of Antalya and I discovered I had friends who lived there. The ancient Romans made friends there, too, and built amphitheatres, forums 307
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and marketplaces faster than Meriton all over southern Turkey. Many of these desirable Roman villas and holiday homes are still around, although not in original condition. Antalya has become a favourite of packaged-holiday makers from Russia, Germany, Holland and Britain, who arrive at the airport to be whisked away to more than 100 resort hotels that specialise in wet T-shirt competitions and free beer during happy hour. Although this isn’t necessarily my idea of a good time, I’d been introduced to the mayor and the regional governor of Antalya, who had an intriguing proposition. The city owned some land on the coastline that the mayor was prepared to let me develop, if I could come up with a way of getting the packaged tourists to leave their hotels and spend time and money in the town of Antalya. Although I haven’t got around to this yet, it’s one of the reasons that I plan to live in Turkey some time in the future. Another reason is the possibility that Istanbul might host the Olympics, because the city has been bidding since 1993 and intends to continue until it is successful. I personally believe that Istanbul would make a superb Olympic city and hope to assist the bid committee in any way I can over the coming years. Since I left Sydney at the end of 2000, the world of special events has grown more than ever. The opportunity to produce ceremonies on behalf of the Olympic or Commonwealth Games, or any of the many other regional sporting events, is attracting more and more interest—although the role of a creative producer of ceremonies seems to have been overtaken by consultant project managers, who refer to ceremonies as ‘deliverables’ that produce marketing and promotional ‘outcomes’. Since 2000, there have been several competitive tenders for major events and the tender documents appear to have been drawn up by the construction industry. Production companies are being asked to lodge ‘completion guarantees’ and, depending upon the success of the ceremonies, they may or may not be entitled to obtain their fees. Unfortunately,
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this won’t result in better ceremonies but will simply provide employment for more lawyers and accountants, resulting in less money being spent on actual production. I have participated in very few of these tenders because I don’t agree with the methodology, but one competition did attract me. In late 2002, I was invited to address a workshop on ceremonies that was being held by the organisers of the Torino 2006 Winter Olympic Games. The location was the Palazzo Rivoli, a spectacular castle that had been bombed by our side during the Second World War but which has since been restored as a conference and arts centre. I was so inspired by the organisers and the location that I forgot my usual prejudice against cold weather and enjoyed myself greatly. A month or two later, representatives from one of the Italian production companies that had attended the workshop asked me if I would partner with them in the competition to produce the Torino 2006 ceremonies. This led to a very enjoyable couple of months in Milan, where the very urbane Marco Balich and his team were developing the creative and organisational plans for their proposal for the ceremonies. Marco is a charming, multilingual partner in one of Italy’s major film and television production companies, and we share some similarities in our background experience. The chance to work on another Olympic script was good for me, and six months later the Torino organising committee announced that our proposal had won the competition against five other international production companies. This means that I will be spending roughly half of my time in Torino until 2006, assisting with the planning and development of the ceremonies and checking out the local restaurants. There are other benefits, too. The city of Modena isn’t far away and my son Dylan, now a strapping teenager, knows that Ferraris and Lamborghinis are manufactured there, so we plan to visit the factories between trips to Verona and Venice when the children visit on their school holidays. And even my private life seems to
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have improved since leaving Sydney. Laurie and I divorced, amicably enough, in 2000 and I spent the next two years without feeling the need for a relationship. That all changed when I met Beata, a Polish/American beauty who came into my life in Los Angeles and who I married in September 2003. We had the wedding in Napa Valley, the premier winegrowing area of California, with Bill Lutt as my best man. Having married in wine country, we intend to celebrate each anniversary in a different wine-growing centre, as long as we both can stand. To start things off, we went on a round-the-world tour so Beata could get an idea of what her life may be like for the next decade. Fortunately, she’s not only wonderfully tolerant but also shares my love of travel, cuisine, wine and books. Beata was born in a small town in south-eastern Poland where she introduced me to her family and the creative forces of her homeland, but she has also introduced me to hiking in the local mountains of California— which I hadn’t realised was possible before we met. We currently have an apartment in Milan, from where we travel to wherever the next project might be located. Some friends think I’m crazy for wanting to live in Turkey, and just as many envy us our freedom to travel. I don’t know whether this lifestyle would appeal to everyone because it’s difficult to decide where to call home. Since leaving Sydney, I’ve been asked to work on projects in Austria, Germany, France, England, South Korea and Spain, in addition to the Torino Winter Olympics, so it doesn’t look like we’ll be settling down anywhere soon. There is even renewed interest in ‘signature events’ back in the US, so I’m spending time commuting to New York from Italy, which also allows me to see Dylan and Jess every few weeks. Unfortunately, I can’t travel to Australia as regularly, so I haven’t had a chance to catch up with Lara in Sydney. But it seems that she’s busier than I am. After qualifying as a hairdresser in Australia, Lara stayed with me in Los Angeles for several months while she studied at a film makeup academy, and
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now she’s back in Sydney at the Fox Studios working on her first feature film. So it seems that the showbiz gene might be hereditary. Jessie wants to be a performer and is also showing signs of being a very talented artist. Dylan is a gifted musician, although like most teenage boys he’s also a dedicated computer gameplayer and a good skateboarder. I don’t know where the genes started, but I’m glad they’re continuing. As for me, there are a few ceremonies left yet, so I hope to find some more openings for a perennially rolling stone before I run out of energy and settle down in Sydney to build my dream house in the hills of the Cattai valley. But that’s another story.
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60 Minutes 280 Abad, Miguel 186–7 Abad, Reyes 174–5 ABC see Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) ABCTV Follies 238 Abeles, Sir Peter 130 Aboriginal Australians 259–61, 262–3, 303–4 Absolon, Barbara 83, 138, 139 Absolutely Fabulous 106 Actors Equity 83, 90 Adelaide Festival Trust 268 Ages of Lulu, The 154 AGL 300 Ahern, Michael 185 Akubra 254 All-American Olympic Marching Band 87 Altadyne 67, 70, 72, 73 Amigos para Siempre 177–9, 181, 183, 194 Andrews, Nicola 284, 286
312
Antalya, Turkey 307–8 Anthony, Julie 133, 255 Anzac Bridge 273, 274 Arledge, Roone 73 Arribas, Alfredo 183–4, 187 ‘Arrivals’ 272–3, 274 Arup, Ove 212 Askill, Michael 233 Athens Olympics 2004, medal design 287–8 Atkins, David 139, 238–9, 244, 248, 280–1, 292–3, 297–8, 305 contributions to Sydney Olympics 258–9, 261, 266, 272–3, 274, 292–3, 296–7 Atkinson, Sallyanne 135, 197–8 Atlanta Olympics 1996 23–4, 198 flag handover ceremony 216–26 Australia epitomised 259 identity/image 199–200, 224, 289
spiritual links 256–7 white settlement 262–3 Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) 2, 5–6, 9–10, 12, 19, 277 Opera House acoustics 104 Australian Financial Review 304 Australian Olympic Committee (AOC) 228 Australian Stock Horse Society 252 Australian Winch and Haulage 301 Australian Wool Corporation 99 ‘Awakening, The’ 256–7, 258, 259–61 Badalamenti, Angelo 175–6 Baird, Bruce 198, 206 Baker, Glenn A 3 Balich, Marco 309 balloons, mylar 63–4 Bangarra Dance Company 218, 219, 220, 226
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Banks, Joseph 265–6 Barcelona Olympics 1992 145–50, 160, 163–5, 167–96, 306 five rings fiasco 184–7 flaming arrow 171–5 giant Olympic flag 193–4 glowsticks 191–3 hiring policy 199 opera singers 190–1 TV coverage 191–2, 196 Barcelona Paralympics 179–81 Bartels, Christa 142, 151–2, 157 Bartner, Dr Art 86, 87, 88 Bassat Sport 153–4 Bateman, Alan 5–7, 9–10 Bates Smart McCutcheon 202 Bathurst 276–7 Begg, Adrian 266 Belvoir Street Theatre 270 BHP 244–5, 266–7 Bicentennial celebrations 116–17 Bicentennial Travelling Exhibition 117 Bicentennial Wool Collection 99, 113 dress rehearsal 119–20 inadequate doorways 103–5 lighting 103 Birch, Beata (RB’s second wife) 310 Birch, Dylan (RB’s son) 153, 169–70, 201, 205, 209, 245–6, 304, 309, 310, 311 Birch, Jessica Rose (RB’s daughter) 209, 245–6, 259, 304–5, 310, 311 Birch, Lara (RB’s daughter) 42, 48, 74, 79, 189, 198, 209–10 career 310–11 meets the Queen 129 Birch, Laurie (RB’s first wife) see Plainer, Laurie
Birch, Ric arrives in Los Angeles 1984 49–50 at ABC TV 2–4 attempts to start marching band movement 87–8 bids for Brisbane Games 4–7 devises opening ceremony for Parliament House 113–16 director of ceremonies Sydney 209 early life 1–2 first meets David Richmond 294–5 heart surgery 279–80 marries Beata 310 receives Olympic pin 305–6 relationship with Laurie 77–8, 82, 93, 245–6, 310 returns to Los Angeles 134–5, 136–8, 139 Bird, John 120 Bjelke-Petersen, Sir Johannes 81, 94 ‘Bligh’s Follies’ 126, 127 Bolt, Robert 140–1 Bond, Alan 80, 117, 288 Bond, Lloyd 290–2 Bonet, Jordi 179 boomerangs, flaming 213–14 Boyle, Raelene 298 Brickman, Marc 185, 187–8, 191 Brief History of Time, A 180 Brightman, Sarah 179, 181–2, 183, 194, 195 Brisbane, bids for 1992 Olympics 197–8 Brisbane City Council 20–1, 135 Brisbane Expo 1988 76, 77, 78–9, 81–2, 113, 123–33, 197–8 circus acts 90–1 closing ceremony 132–3
construction problems 95–7, 127 fireworks 93–4, 97–8 marching bands 87–90 opening ceremony 123–5 rain 127–8 River Stage 92, 95–6 site 82–3 tap dancing 85–6 waterskiing 91–2 Bugler, John 90–1 Bureau Internationale des Expositions (BIE) 81, 139 Byrne, Debbie 4 Bytecraft 299 Caballe, Montserrat 190–1 Caddick, David 178 card stunts 114–15, 143–4, 157–9 Carr, Bob 276, 304, 306 Carreras, José 176–7, 178–9, 181–2, 194, 195 Carter, Jimmy 10, 50 Casino Commission 202 Cassioli, Guiseppe 284 Chabola, Judy 142, 143, 155, 160, 188 Chandler, Clive 280-1 Channel Nine 4, 117, 225–6, 280 Channel Seven 23, 118 Channel Ten 75, 117, 118, 201 Chariots of Fire 57 Charles, Prince of Wales 100, 122 Charles Sturt University, Bathurst 277 Cheryl (Knight’s PA) 242, 243 Chong Lim 262 Cirque du Soleil 90 Civil & Civic 212 Civil Aviation Administration (CAA) 30–1 Clarke, Phil 305 Clarkson, David 255, 256 Cleese, John 46
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Clinton, Bill 60 Cloudhopper 30–2 Coates, John 197, 198, 206–7, 228, 240, 243, 282, 298 Cocker, Joe 92 Coles, Patricia 285 Coles, Phil 285 Comité d’Organisation Olympique de Barcelona ’92 (COOB ’92) 145–6, 153, 154, 199 Commonwealth Games, Brisbane 1982 4, 9–10, 26–41, 197 closing ceremony 40–1 opening ceremony 26, 38–40 rehearsals 20–2, 32–8 scripting 11–19 skydiving 29–30, 35–7, 38, 40 Commonwealth Games Ceremonies Display Production Unit 10 Commonwealth Games Foundation 5, 6, 7, 9 Connelly, John 127 Cook, Peter 217–18 Cooper, Burt 123–5, 131, 132, 230 Cooper, Ian 267 Copland, Aaron 87 Copperfield, David 166 Courtin, Marie-Claire 213, 220, 224, 243, 249, 299 Crawford, Kay 143 Crown Casino 201–3, 205 Cruthers, Sir James 75 Culliton, Jacqui 105, 136 Currie, Graham 138 Cuthbert, Betty 294, 298 D’Arcy, Eamon 262, 269 Darling Harbour 197 de Coubertin, Baron 217, 275 de la Renta, Oscar 101, 113, 118, 119–20
De Mille, Cecil B 140–1 Deaver, Michael 58–9 ‘Deep Sea Dreaming’ 250–1, 265 Denver, John 92 Diamond, Peter 242 Diana, Princess of Wales 100, 107, 122 Dion, Celine 23 Disney Corporation 47–8, 130, 166, 167 Disney, Walt 46, 47 ‘Dixie in Paradise’ 291–2 ‘Dixie Stampede’ 203–4, 291–2 Domingo, Plácido 176–7 Don Lane Show, The 44, 45–6 Done, Ken 229, 254, 274 Donovan, Jason 93 Dreaming Arts Festival 214 Duff, Edwin 107 Durham, Judith 132–3 Easton, Jim 175 Ebersoll, Dick 241–3, 244 Edgley, Michael 251, 291 Edmonds, Brian 270, 271 Edwards, Sir Llew 81, 82, 94, 95, 116, 129, 138, 139 Elizabeth II, Queen 21, 124, 128, 129 Elliot, Jack 56, 57 Ellis, Bob 227 Elphinstone, Bob 211, 213, 286 Els Comedients 196 England, Peter 218, 231, 232, 234, 235, 257, 269 English, Jon 182 Ensesa, Virginia 190–1 Envirotech 258 Estafan, Emilio 177, 178 Estafan, Gloria 177–9 ‘Eternity’ 272 Expo ’88 see Brisbane Expo Expo Oz 131–2 Expocity 135–6
Expocity Marching Band 82, 86, 88–9 Expos see Brisbane Expo; New Orleans Expo; Seville Expo; Tsukuba Expo; World Expositions Eyb, Don 252–3 Eyers, Michael 280, 306 Fahey, John 206, 207, 208 Faiman, Peter 44, 45 Farnham, John 4, 93, 182 fashion designers 120–1 Feliciano, José 65 Felipe, Prince, of Spain 194 Ferry, Bryan 92 firebreathing 261 Fitzgerald, Paul 86, 124–5 Fitzpatrick, Bob 54 flag handover ceremony, Atlanta Olympics 216–26 Flaisher, Mark 136, 137 Flintoff-King, Debbie 298 flying saucer 66–9, 70, 72, 73–4 Foti family 234, 261 Foti, Fortunato (Forch) 234 Foti, Sam 234 Found, Stephen 299 Four Corners 3, 44 Fox 55, 307 Fox Studios 311 Fraser, Dawn 298 Fraser, Malcolm 38, 39 Fraser, Tamie 38, 39 Fredrikson, Kristian 254 Freeman, Cathy 236, 298–9, 302 Fregon, Ted 299 Frey, Glen 92, 130 Friederichs, Astrid 17 Garcia, Adam 274 Getaway 4 Gibson, Kinnie 64–5 Gilady, Alex 242, 244
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Givens, Scott 142, 158–9 Glass, Philip 58, 62 Goldberg, David 249 Gosper, Kevan 240, 266, 286 Gould, Shane 298 Grabowsky, Paul 267 Great Exhibition, Crystal Palace 80–1 Greiner, Nick 198, 266 GTK 3–4 GTV9 44, 45 Gulick, Todd 170, 171 Gurr, Bob 67–8 Guy, Athol 133 Gwinganna 248–9 Hamilton, David 85, 86, 90 Hamlisch, Marvin 63, 65 Harding, Sandi 284, 286 Hardwick, Fred III 91–2, 203–4, 205, 291, 292 Harper, Colonel 20 Harris, Rolf 7–8, 12, 27, 39 Hartman, Richard 268, 269 Hawke, Bob 117 Hawking, Stephen 180–1 Hemmerling, Dr Mal 211 Hemphill, Gina 61–2 Hines, Marcia 4, 93 His Mistress 53 Ho, Lisa 275 Hogan, Paul 254 Hollway, Sandy 280, 281, 283, 305, 306 Hornibrook 212 House of Missoni 101, 108, 113 Howard, John 227 Howard, Syd 93–4, 161–2, 231, 233–4 Hudson Conway 201 Hudson, Hugh 179, 181 Huerga, Manel 154, 160, 165, 166, 170, 175, 177, 181, 248 Hugener, Christian 142
Hughes Aerospace 66–7 Human Nature 255 Humphries, Barry 46 Hutton, Deborah 120 Iglesias, Julio 92, 93 International Broadcast Center 63–4 International Olympic Committee (IOC) 50, 149, 190, 197, 198, 207, 217, 228, 237, 249, 285, 305 International Wool Secretariat 100, 101, 109, 112 Ipoh Gardens 291 Istanbul, Olympic bid 308 Jablonski, Tony 252–3 Jack, Doug 142, 143, 160, 161, 188, 249, 262, 267 Jackson, Bruce 271–2 Jamieson, Nigel 263–5, 267, 272, 273–4 Jamón, Jamón 154 Jani, Bob 46, 47, 48, 141–2 Jani, Jeff 141, 142, 144 Jeffries, Steve 253 Jesus Christ, Superstar 182 Jet Propulsion Laboratories 64 Johnson, Rafer 62–3 Jones, Alan 225–6, 277, 278–9, 280 Jones, Ignatius 204–5, 230, 232, 235, 252, 253, 254, 255, 293 Jordan, Adrian 216 Kane, Marion 126 Karan, Donna 101, 112, 118 Katon, Jack 244–5 Kee, Jenny 275 ‘Kelly’s Republic’ 263–4 Kennedy, Graham 45 Kenzo 101, 110–11, 112, 119 Kerkorian, Kirk 118
Kern Corporation 135, 136 Kerr, Katrina 142 Kimball Piano Company 54–5 Klages, Bill 71 Knight, Michael 226, 227–8, 240, 243, 266, 275, 277–8, 280, 281–2, 284, 285, 286, 292–3, 298, 304–5, 306 Koltai, Chrissie 102, 104, 105, 107, 110, 113 Koori clan 260 Kristen, Brenda 8–9 Kunwinjku people 255 Ladysmith Black Mombasa 92 Lagler, René 54, 69 Lamas, Fernando 126 Lambert, Max 255, 259 Lane, Don 44–5 Law, Colonel (Singapore Army) 145, 152, 155, 156, 157, 160, 161–2, 163 Lawrence of Arabia 140–1 Laws, John 277, 278–9 Lee, Dick 144 Lee Kwan Yew 156, 161 Les Deux Magots 109 ‘Light Fantastic, The’ 84 Linke, Lon 91 Little River Band 92, 130 Lloyd Webber, Sir Andrew 175, 176–7, 178, 179, 181–2, 194–6, 293 Logies 1993 201 Lord Mayor’s Party 232 Lord Mayor’s Picnic 232 Los Angeles Olympic Fanfare and Theme, The 55 Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee (LAOOC) 46–7, 49, 51, 52 dress code 53–4 The Peter Test 51
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Los Angeles Olympics 1984 17, 46, 49–74, 306 closing ceremony 73–4 flying saucer 66–9, 70, 72, 73–4 mylar balloons 63–4 opening speech 59 piano number 54–5 Rocket Man 64–5 security 51–2, 58–9, 71–2 theme music 55–6 torch arrival 62–3 TV coverage 73 Louisa (Spectak receptionist) 104–5 Lowy family 118 Lowy, Frank 118 Lumley, Joanna 106 Luna, Bigas 148, 154 Luna Park 290–1 Lutt, Bill 89–90, 276, 278, 310 Lutt, Bob 89–90 Lyda, Morris 185, 268, 274, 288, 299–300, 301–3 Lynch, David 175 Macpherson, Elle 111 ‘Man Crab’ 168 Man For All Seasons, A 140 Man From Snowy River 251, 252 Mangham, Ron 142–3, 156, 160, 161, 188, 204–5 Maningrida clan 260 Mar Mediterraneo 176, 189 marching bands 86–9, 199, 275–9 Marching Girls 27–8, 39 Margaret (RB’s secretary) 129 Marinos, Lex 272, 274 Mariscal, Xavier 149 Martinez, Al 262 Matilda, the Winking Kangaroo 26–7, 38, 39, 40–1 Matthews, Vincent 99–100, 105, 111 Maxwell, Bob 125–6
Maxwell, Dean 125 Maxwell, Norma 125, 126 May, Norman 38, 40 McColl-Jones, Mike 45 McDonald, Donald 304 McDonald’s 34 McEvoy, Dave 35, 36, 37, 38 McGeogh, Rod 196–7, 198, 205–6, 217 McLatchley, Craig 281 McLennan, Margaret 210–11 McSween, Prue 118 McTaggart, Steve 271 Melbourne 201, 203 bid for 1992 Olympics 197–8 Melbourne Olympics 1956 198 Menzies, Sir Robert 2–3 Metro Group 291 Mignone, John 268 Miles, Sarah 140 Millennium New Year’s Eve 261 Miller, Harry M 42–4, 46, 120, 182, 208–9, 225–6 Mimis 255–6 Mines Department 269 Minnikin, Bob 75–6, 81 Minogue, Kylie 93 Minshall, Peter 167–9, 170–1, 189, 257 Miralda (Catalan artist) 167–8 Mischer, Don 222–3 Missoni, Rosita 108–9 Missoni, Tai 108–9 Moase, Robyn 125, 126, 127 Monaghan, Des 8 Montana, Claude 101, 110, 113, 119 Montreal Olympics 1976 50 Moore, John 211 Moriceau, Norma 275 Morley, Stephen 269 Morris dancing 28–9 Morris, Peter 281
Morrison, James 254–5 Morrissey, Peter 275 Mortimer, Karen Johnson 267 Moscow Olympics 1980 10, 50 Mottola, Tommy 177, 179 Moysi, Carlos 179–81 Muir, Harry 106 Muir, Jean 101, 105–7, 113, 119 Mulliner, Liz 225 Mullins, Mike 83–5 Multiplex 212, 236 Munich Olympics 1972 50 Munyarrin, Djakapurra 218, 220, 258–9, 260, 262, 274 Murdoch, Rupert 75, 76–7, 117, 118, 138, 307 Murray, Ian 264 National Geographic, Jacques Cousteau series 50 National Institute for the Dramatic Arts (NIDA) 217–18, 219 NBC TV 196, 237–8, 241 Neal, David 241 New Orleans Expo 1984 77 New South Wales Police Department 232 Public Works Department 291 New Year’s Eve 1996 230–4 News Corporation 307 Newton, Bert 44, 45, 201 Nolan, Sir Sidney 264 Norman, Greg 207 Norman, Jessye 23 Nulumbah clan 260 Nunn, Glynis 193 Nüssli, Heinrich 184, 186 Ochres 218 Official History of the XII Commonwealth Games 37 Oldfield, Bruce 101, 107, 118 Olympian, The 62, 63
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Olympic Athletes Parade 238, 240, 276 Olympic Awards Breakfast 305 Olympic Co-ordination Authority (OCA) 98, 253, 282, 288, 295–6 Olympic Flag Handover Ceremony 216–17 Olympic Games 248 Antwerp 1920 217 Atlanta 1996 see Atlanta Olympics Barcelona 1992 see Barcelona Olympics Berlin 1936 62 Candidate City announcement 205–6 colours 275 Los Angeles 1984 see Los Angeles Olympics Melbourne 1956 198 Montreal 1976 50 Moscow 1980 10, 50 Munich 1972 50 Olympic torch 57–8 opening ceremonies 11, 24–5 Seoul 1988 217 Sydney 2000 see Sydney Olympics victory medals 284–7 Ong, Christine 144 Opera House, Sydney 100, 102, 203 Concert Hall 102–3 Ovideo 147–8, 153–4 Ovideo Bassat Sport 154, 165, 179 Owens, Jesse 61 Pacific Song Contest 1981 8–9 Packer, Kerry 117–18, 203 Page, David 260 Page, Stephen 218–19, 220–1, 225–6, 258, 259–60
panda, cycling 91 parades 84–5 paragliders 216 Parc Asterix 138 Parkinson, Michael 120 Parliament House, opening ceremony 113–16 Parton, Dolly 203–4 Paterson, ‘Banjo’ 251 Pavarotti, Luciano 176–7 Peacock, Chris 21–2 Peck, Sherry 68–9, 70, 71 Pemberton, Gary 208, 210, 211, 228 Pepper, Marguerite 94, 95 Performing Arts Unit (NSW Education Department) 219 Perry, Dein 272–3 Philip, Duke of Edinburgh 21, 27, 38–9, 124, 128, 129 Phillips, Tony 138–9 Picasso, Pablo 148 Pietranik, Wojciech 284–5, 286 Pigeon Forge, Tennessee 92, 203–5 Pine, John 15–16, 17, 26, 31 Pink Floyd 185 Pirrie, Michael 287 Plainer, Laurie 80, 121, 134, 135, 201, 205, 209, 209–11, 279 accepts job with RB 82 divorce 310 laser business 82, 97–8, 131, 132, 136–7, 139–40, 146–7, 159 marries RB 93, 125–6 pregnancy/birth 152–3, 163, 169–70 separation from RB 245–6 visits Australia 77–8, 79 Plasticiens Volants 196 Pons, Salvador 174, 184, 185, 186, 187
Poole, Roger 202 Pope, John 211 Potger, Keith 133 Potra, Dan 265, 266, 267, 269, 271 Powerhouse Museum 271 Priscilla, Queen of the Desert 292 Profeta, Dave 142 Qantas 84, 198, 210–11 QEII Stadium, Brisbane 15, 17 PA system 19–21, 38 Queensland Education Department 14, 16–17 Queensland Performing Arts Centre 82, 94 Queensland Symphony Orchestra 18, 19 Raffles, Sir Stamford 143 Raminginging clan 260 Rayment, John 95–6, 97, 128 Reagan, Ronald 58–9 changes opening speech 59–60 Rebollo, Antoni 174, 175, 192, 207 Renton, Beryl 37 Returned Services League 83 Richards, Gary 34 Richards, Karen 46, 102, 104, 105, 108, 117, 134, 220, 225 joins Spectak 79, 99 scripting Brisbane Games 13–18, 27, 33–4 Richardson, Graham 206, 228, 277 Richmond, David 98, 253, 280, 281, 282, 283, 293–5, 305 Ritchie, Lionel 72 Ritchie, Peter 34 Roberts, Rhoda 214, 218, 255, 256, 258, 259, 260 Roca, Josep 145–7, 160 Rocket Man 64–5
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Rognoni, Gloria 179–81 Roots 50 Rowland, Bruce 251–2 Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) 2 Diamond Jubilee 4 Royal Australian Mints 285, 287 Royal Melbourne Show 64 Rubenstein, David 176 Rule, Jim 291 Ryan, Paula 270–1 Rykiel, Sonia 101, 109, 110, 112, 119 Sakamoto, Ryuichi 175, 176 Samaranch, Juan Antonio 59, 148, 193, 198, 206, 244 praises Sydney ceremonies 306 vetos paella 150 wishes to speed up athletes entry 237, 238 Samuels, Jeffrey 262 San Just 163–4 Sartor, Frank 217, 222, 229–30, 232, 234, 235 Schofields 282–3, 288–9 Scott-Mitchell, Michael 208, 236, 244–5, 269 Secret Service (US) 51–2, 58–9, 60–1 Seekers 92, 132 Seoul Olympics 1988, provide new flag 217 Seville Expo 1992 85 Shanghai Circus 91 Shorrock, Glenn 92, 130 Short, Bobby 107 Singapore Defence Forces 144–5, 157 National Day 144–5, 157 Silver Jubilee 142–5, 151–3, 154–60, 161–2, 163 Singapore Broadcasting Corporation 161
Singapore Entertainment Centre 142 Singapore National Stadium 155, 159–60 Singleton, John 229 Skase, Christopher 118 skydiving 29–30, 35–7 Skylark Puppet Company 262 Smith, Celia 219–20, 224, 281, 282, 299 Smith, Judy 17 Smith, Kylie 259 SOCOG (Sydney’s Organising Committee of the Olympic Games) 206, 228, 237, 242, 265, 276, 288 disputes RB’s payment 306 lack of support 244 oversight committee 280–3 turf wars 211–12 World Projects contract 278 Sol, Concha 164–5 Sol, Pepo 153–4, 171–2, 177, 181, 185, 188 apartment 164–5 bullfights 170 character 147–8, 160, 166–7, 187, 247 song contests 8 Sony Music 177 soundtracks 24, 56–7, 232–3 South Australian Dance Company 250–1 Spanier, Barry 87–8, 276 Sparks, Jeremy 271 special events 76–7, 308–9 Spectak Productions 77, 79, 99, 113, 136, 137–8, 198, 212, 231, 234, 291–2, 307 Spielberg, Stephen 55, 65 Springsteen, Bruce 185, 272 St Laurent, Yves 101, 105 St Paul’s College, Brisbane 88
Stadium Australia 212–13, 251, 253, 282–3, 295 Stalker Theatre Company 255 Stanton, John 302 Stace, Arthur 235 Steele, Anthony 94–5, 272 street entertainment 77, 83 Strickland, Shirley 298 submarine, pink 124–5, 130, 131 Surf Lifesaving Association 219 Swain, Rachael 255, 256 Sweeney Todd 93 Sydney Harbour 235 Sydney Harbour Bridge 233, 234 Sydney Olympic Stadium see Stadium Australia Sydney Olympics 2000 17, 60, 90, 211–306 arena groundcloth 257–8 ‘Arrivals’ 272–3, 274 athletes parade 236–8, 240, 241 bid team 197, 198–9, 205–6 budget 281–2 cauldron-lighting sequence 207–8, 212–13, 236, 244–5, 275, 283, 298–303 ‘Deep Sea Dreaming’ 250–1, 265 drag queens 292–3 ‘Eternity’ 272 fireworks display 293–4 flying rig 268–9, 283 giant flag 296–8 ideas from public 213–16 marching band fiasco 199, 275–9 rehearsals 282–3, 288–9, 295–9 selecting creative directors 247–9 sound system 271–2 ‘The Awakening’ 256–7, 258, 259–61
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ticketing scandal 278, 280, 282, 295 ‘Tin Symphony’ 264, 265, 266–7, 271, 272 victory medals 284–7 Sydney Opera House see Opera House, Sydney Sydney Paralympics 2000 224 Sydney Symphony Orchestra 255 Symons, Adrian 17, 18, 33 Synth the Electric Muse 93 Tabberer, Maggie 120 talkback radio 199, 277 Tampa, Florida 165–7 Tankard, Meryl 250–1, 265 Tap Dogs 272, 274 Taronga Zoo, Sydney 84 Tasmania, ‘left off the map’ 39–40 television networks ABC 2, 3 NBC 196, 238, 240–1 Nine 4, 117, 225–6, 280 Seven 23, 118 Ten 75, 117, 118, 201 Tempus Nova 230 Tetlow, Jim 142 Thatcher, Margaret 176 Theme Corporation 291 Therese (RB’s partner) 42 This Day Tonight 3, 44 Thompson, Brian 292 Thorn Birds, The 50 Tierney, David 300, 302–3 Times (London) 40, 287 ‘Tin Symphony’ 264, 265, 266–7, 271, 272 Today 205 Today Show, The 225
Tonight Show 44, 45 Took, Merri 102, 103, 127 Torino Winter Olympic Games 2006 309 Triffit, Nigel 269, 272–3 Trinidad, Mas festival 168 Trojans Marching Band, University of Southern California 86, 87, 88 Tsukuba Expo 1985 79–80 Twin Peaks 175 Tycho, Eva 18, 19 Tycho, Tommy 18–19, 28 Uebberroth, Peter V 46, 47, 48, 51, 53–4, 58, 59 United States Defense Department 64 football 52 Secret Service 51–2, 58–9, 60–1 USA Today 223 Utzon, Joern 102, 103, 104 Valder, John 213 Vangelis 57–8 Versace, Donatella 108 Versace, Gianni 101, 108, 113, 118, 119 Vietnam war protest, Orange 83–4 Visions of Eight 50 Volich, Greg 102, 103, 127 volunteers, working with 188–9, 262, 270 Waggoner, Lee 51–2 Walker, Card 46, 48 Walker, Ron 201 Wandjinas 256, 257, 261 Wardle, Karen 189–90 Watkins, Ginger 221
Watson, Jeffrey 4–5 Watson, John 92–3 Watts, Fiona 17, 18, 33 Watts, Ken 3 Webster, Nikki 258–9, 265, 269, 274 ‘Wedding Party’ 84 Welch, Bruce 133 Welcome 63 Weldon, Kevin 248–9 Whelpton, Alan 236 Wherret, Richard 254 White, Malcolm 257–8, 269, 270, 288 White, Trevor 127, 132 Williams, Esther 125, 126 Williams, John 55–6, 65 Williams, Lloyd 201–2, 203 Williams, Mike 127, 132 Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory 50 Wilson, Peter 261–2 Wing, Brett 92 Wiseman, Sayre 142 Wolper, David L 46, 50–1, 52–3, 55, 58, 61, 65, 69, 73, 146, 217 Wonder, Stevie 23 Wood, Steve 17, 225 Woods, Kate 17, 18, 33 World Expo on Stage 94–5 World Expositions 80–1 World Projects 89–90, 278 World’s Fairs see World Expositions Wran, Neville 197 Wright, Clay 67–9, 70, 73 Wynne, Steve 202 Yirrkala clan 260 Young, Simone 255 Zappa, Frank 136
