Colin: The water in the Harbour’s not blue, it’s green. Cold and hard and green.
Elaine: The Emerald City of Oz. Everyone comes here along their yellow brick roads looking for the answers to their problems. All they find is the demons within themselves. This city lets them out and lets them rip.
The above lines are delivered by John Hargreaves and Ruth Cracknell in Emerald City (1988), the second Hargreaves-starring stage-to-film adaptation covered on DUF this month and the star’s third David Williamson adaptation after The Removalists and Don’s Party. It’s also the second film covered on the site, following Oz: A Rock ‘n’ Roll Road Movie, to draw parallels between Australia—here pitting Sydney’s Emerald City against Melbourne’s Kansas—and Frank L. Baum’s and, more specifically, Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz.
Emerald City, adapted for the screen by Williamson himself, was directed by Michael Jenkins, who previously scripted Careful, He Might Hear You—featuring some career-best screen work from stars Hargreaves and Robyn Nevin—and later directed The Heartbreak Kid and created several successful TV shows. The plot sees successful screenwriter Colin (Hargreaves) and his wife Kate (Nevin) relocate from Melbourne to Sydney. While Colin wants to work on worthy projects with integrity—an echo of Williamson as screenwriter, who scripted Gallipoli, Phar Lap, and The Year of Loving Dangerously in the early 1980s—he is persuaded to work with the more mercenary Mike (Chris Haywood), who is dating younger woman Helen (Nicole Kidman), on more sensationalist material.
The satire on display—of both the film and publishing industry, where Kate works—still mostly plays. It’s fun watching Haywood in an atypical role as a craven man of commerce pursuing Hollywood, given the character actor himself never pursued Hollywood, unlike so many Australian performers of his vintage. Hargreaves made a tentative overture, though like Colin it was on a project of integrity, Richard Attenborough’s Cry Freedom, while Nevin, predominantly a stage star, has largely worked locally but appeared in Hollywood productions shot in Australia such as The Matrix sequels and Gods of Egypt (and her partner Nicholas Hammond carries some Hollywood DNA, as one of the child stars of The Sound of Music and the first live-action Spider-Man). Kidman, of course, went to Hollywood two years later for Days of Thunder—truly an inevitability given her striking and confident work here—and has forged a distinctly personal career traversing both art & commerce and Australia & Hollywood. Her subsequent fame also helps explain the DVD cover below, perhaps the most misleading cover one could devise for the acidic Emerald City.
Emerald City followed hot on the heels of the play’s 1987 stage debut. I’d argue it’s the most swaggering and cinematic of Williamson adaptations (fitting given its milieu is the film industry), moreso than Don’s Party—which is constrained by its single night & single setting narrative—and especially the creaky film of The Removalists. Jenkins' film unfolds across multiple settings around Sydney and makes effective use of location shooting in its titular city. It also utilizes internal monologue voice-over—adapting the play’s fourth wall-breaking direct addresses to the audience—a device not used in the abovementioned Williamson adaptations, nor The Club, Travelling North, or Brilliant Lies. But despite these savvy adaptations to film, performance-wise the actors' delivery is sped up but not really modulated for film, with every performer playing—albeit entertainingly—to the cheap seats.
Ben