TWO THOUSAND WEEKS
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Production Year:
1969
Genre: feature-length drama
Format: B&W 35mm film
Duration: 88 mins
Synopsis:
A struggling writer has a life of crises: choosing between family and
mistress, struggling with the Australian cultural wasteland and seeing
a boyhood friend become a success overseas.
Production company: Eltham
Films
Productions / Senior Films
Producers: David Bilcock Sr.and Patrick Ryan
Director: Tim Burstall
Script: Tim Burstall & Patrick Ryan
Original music: Don Burrows
Cinematography: Robin Copping
Editor: David Bilcock
Set builder: Lindsay Foote
Cast:
Mark McManus (Will Gardiner)
Jeanie Drynan (Jacky Lewis)
Eileen Chapman (Sarah Gardiner)
David Turnbull (Noel Oakshot)
Michael Duffield (Will's father)
Bruce Anderson (Rex Stapleton)
Nicholas McCallum (young Noel)
Anne Charleston (Will's Mother)
Graeme Blundell (journalist)
Release Date: 27 March 1969
Soundtrack:
LP - EMI SCXO-7883 (LP) 1969
45(a) (AD) Columbia. DO-8711. 1969.
LP(t) (AD) EMI. EMA 327. 1969 |
Jeannie
Drynan and Mark McManus in a scene from 2000 Weeks
[Image
source: Screensound]
|
Notes
Two Thousand
Weeks was the feature-film
debut for its director
Tim Burstall and its
star, Scottish-born actor Mark McManus, who became famous in the
1980s in the title role of the popular Scottish TV detective
series Taggart. Although it was a critical and
commercial failure at the time of its release and has
rarely been seen
since, Two Thousand Weeks (aka 2000 Weeks) was
a landmark for the Australian film industry, since it was the
first all-Australian feature film to gain a mainstream cinema
release in Australian since Chauvel's last film, Jedda,
in 1958.
Since the early Sixties Tim Burstall had been regarded as one
of the most promising young talents of
Australian film. He made his directorial debut with the short
children's film The
Prize
(1960), which won an award at the Venice Film Festival. He then formed
Eltham Films with Patrick Ryan, and they made the
acclaimed series of
short films examining the work of Australian artists including Nolan,
Perceval and Boyd, followed by the children's TV series Sebastian The Fox,
and the children's film Nullabor
Hideout
(1965) for the Commonwealth Film Unit. A planned Ned Kelly
project
never came to fruition and in 1965 he won a Harkness scholarship which
enabled him to travel to America, where he studied at the Actor's
Studio and worked as an assistant director to Martin Ritt on the Paul
Newman film Hombre
(1967).
After his return from America, Burstall and Eltham Films embarked on
the making of Two
Thousand Weeks.
It was a joint venture with Senior Films, Melbourne's leading
leading film company and a prolfic producer of commericals and
sponsored documentaries, who provided studio facilities, crew
and
equipment. Burstall was also able to secure the
services of Robin Copping, one of Australia's best cameramen, as
cinematographer for the project. With a budget of around $100,000
dollars, shooting began on 2 January 1968 with a crew of 14 and wrapped
seven weeks later. The film secured distribution through Columbia and
the world premiere was held at the Melbourne Forum on 27 March 1969.
The film was in part based on Burstall's own experiences as an aspiring
film-maker, and the
title refers to the protagonist's realisation that he has two thousand
weeks
left in his life to fulfil his dreams. It explores the isolation and
frustration Will Gardner
(McManus), a journalist and aspiring writer in his thirties, who has
reached a crisis point in his life and career -- he must choose between
his wife
and his mistress, and the disappointments of his writing career are
reinforced
by the return from the UK of an old friend who has become a
successful TV producer.
Many of the supporting cast (including Graeme
Blundell) were at the time members of the Australian Performing
Group. This company was based at the La Mama
theatre in Melbourne,
which had been founded in 1967 by Burstall's wife Betty,
following a
trip to New York where she had been inspired by the "off off
Broadway" independent theatre of the same name. Tim Burstall
was
closely involved with
the APG from its earliest days. The innovative Melbourne theatre
collective was also the training ground for playwright David
Williamson, and Burstall's next mainstream feature,
Stork
was an adaptation of Williamson's play The Coming Of Stork,
which had its premiere at La Mama.
The making of the film was widely reported by the media, with articles
appearing in many newspapers and
magazines, as well as TV coverage that used some of the 'rushes' from
the film. Expectations were high and pre-publicity trumpeted
the
film as "A New Era In Australian Cinema" but it failed to connect with
local
audiences, who were apparently put off by its rather mannered 'art
house' style, and it was savaged by local critics. Colin Bennett of The Age
wrote a lengthy review published on March 29, headed "Banality lets
down
our great film hope", in which he criticised the dialogue for its
"incongruous
naivety", attacked the script for its "lack of guts" and described the
characters as "dangerously thin if not cardboard". The film was also
poorly received when it screened at the Sydney Flm Festival in June.
According to John Baxter (1970), the failure of Two Thousand Weeks
was due to a combination of
negative word-of-mouth and apathy on the part of the
distrubutors, Columbia. However, Pike and Cooper (1998) quote
from
a letter
Burstall wrote to them in 1977, in which he laid the blame for the
film's failure squarely at the feet of the Australian critics, and also
countered claims that the distributors were partly at fault -- in his
view, the irony was that while the distributors had been seen
as "the enemy" in the 1950s, they had proven to be genuinely interested
and that they could see the possibilities for growth in the work of
new Australian film-makers.
John Baxter blames the film's artiness for its
failure with audiences, yet only five years later, another Australian
film which was
unequivocally 'art house' in style -- Peter Weir's Picnic At Hanging Rock
-- was a major commercial success and was hailed as the saviour of the
local industry by many of the
same critics who had blasted Burstall's films, and others -- in spite
of
the fact that two of these films (Alvin
Purple and The
Adventures of Barry MacKenzie) were the
biggest commercial successes in the history of Australian film before
1975.
Despite the bad press at home, the film was well-received when
screened at the Moscow Film Festival and it was given a limited release
in the UK and the USA; Sunday Times critic Dilys Powell (of My Word
fame) wrote that it "seemed to shine with decent sincerity" and that it
was "the first film from a director who deserves to be encouraged".
Unfortunately, this did nothing to help its fortunes back home and the
film's box office failure precipitated the end of Eltham Films and the
partnership between Burstall and Ryan.
The failure of Two
Thousand Weeks
affected Burstall strongly. It's clear that this, combined with
his close contact with the APG, were instrumental in changing his
approach to film-making, and led directly to the choice of his next two
features, Stork
and Alvin
Purple, both of which were hits with audiences and
commercially successful, in spite of negative reviews. It was
also an important example for other film-makers like John B. Murray and
Philip Adams, and helped steer them away from serious art-house
features towards the more popular comedy fare of Barry MacKenzie and
other so-called 'ocker' films.
EMI's Columbia
label released the soundtrack LP of the film, featuring the
music composed by Don Burrows.
Now very rare and collectible, the album is of great interest to fans
of Australian modern jazz, and features
the cream
of the Australian jazz scene at that time, including
Burrows, George Golla, Graham Lyall, Ed Gaston and John Sangster.
A solo single called "2000 Weeks" by Twilights guitarist Terry
Britten was released around the time the film came
out; is
one of several Britten songs that were inspired by film and TV
projects ("Cathy Come Home", "Age of Consent") but in each case
they had no direct connection to the films they were named
after.
Quotes
"2000 Weeks ... was
such a critical
and commercial failure that he thought his feature career had begun and
ended at the same moment. He pulls a face when I mention that I have
seen it recently, and says, "The thing that worries me about it when I
see it now is that the writing seems so self-conscious."
2000 Weeks is the story of Will, a journalist who
wants to be a writer, but whose ambitions have stalled: he is married,
and is having an affair with a young woman who is about to leave for
England. He finds himself in competition, sexually and professionally,
with a TV journalist friend who has made a name for himself in London.
England looms over the film, as the place to aspire to, and the place
where decisions are made: Australia and Australian creativity is still
in its thrall.
It is, undeniably, a period piece, and there's a
certain awkwardness in the script: "I hadn't really learned how to
direct actors," Burstall says, and despite his mixed feelings about the
film, he says, "It was deeply hated here." It went down better at the
Moscow Film Festival than in Sydney.
"The Brits liked it. Dilys Powell and Alexander Walker
(English critics) liked it, but the local audience didn't. Its failure
was difficult to deal with," Burstall says.
"You get into rather a demented state. I was in a
rather odd frame of mind for about 18 months. It's a very public
business, being rejected. A lot of people think that David Williamson
is paranoid about critics, but they don't know what it's like." His
distress was public, and he wrote about it.
His partnership with producer and collaborator Patrick
Ryan was at an end. "Eltham Films finished up, and my angel, Pat Ryan,
had done about 50 grand on the film."
It was time for a new strategy. "One of the
consequences (of the film's failure) was that I realised who the people
were that I had to get into bed with, the ones who would give me
support," Burstall says. "It wasn't the ABC, The Age,
it wasn't, if you like, the intelligentsia -- it was all the people in
the western suburbs who watched the commercial stations and would go
just for a nice night's entertainment."
- -
Philippa Hawker, The direction of Burstall
(The Age)
"The Naked Bunyip grew
out of my
experience in 2000 Weeks
with
Tim Burstall and Patrick Ryan, which was canned; it was set upon by
ferocious critics, unjustly in my view, it was sort of embarrassment we
had as Australians. Philip Adams and I were working on commercials and
one minor documentary. He was interested in 2000
Weeks and how it fared at the box office and we decided to
raise finance for another film ..."
- John B. Murray, interview with Dhav Naidu, RMIT, 1998
"Scottish actor Mark McManus is perhaps
best
remembered for playing the craggy title Glasgow police detective in Taggart,
a gritty [Scottish] television show that ran from
the mid '80s through the early '90s as a sequence of periodic
three-part miniseries. Sold to over 40 countries, episodes were
sometimes bundled and edited down into feature-length movies such as Cold
Blood (1987). In the early '70s, McManus starred as a
coal-miner in the series Sam. McManus became an
actor after moving to Australia in the 1960s. He gained experience in
touring productions and made his feature film debut in 2,000
Weeks (1969) [followed by Adam's
Woman (1970)]. In 1970, McManus starred opposite
Rolling Stones lead singer Mick Jagger in Ned
Kelly. The following year, McManus returned to the
UK and joined the Royal Court Theatre and the National Theatre. McManus
first played the role of Taggart in Killer (1983)."
- Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
References / Links
All Movie Guide
http://www.allmovie.com/
Australian Cinema: Historical Perspective
http://www.angelfire.com/blues/lifty/24AustralianCinema.htm
Australian Performing Group (Pram Factory)
Research Site
http://communication.students.rmit.edu.au/1995/Billy_Head/apg/
Australian Soundtracks
http://users.bigpond.net.au/nodette/AussieST/
John Baxter
The Australian Cinema (Pacific Books, Sydney, 1970)
Philippa Hawker
'The direction of Burstall'
The Age 1 June 2001
http://www.theage.com.au/cgi-bin/print_article.pl?path=/entertainment/2001/06/01/FFXSP1L3ENC.html
Andrew Pike and
Ross Cooper
Oxford Australian Film
1900-1977 (Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1998)
IMDb
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063971/
Screensound
http://www.screensound.gov.au/