The birds’ waywardness was also featured in several media reports. ‘Pelican Trio Gets Its Film Wings’, The Advertiser, 21 April 1976. This was quite an achievement, since ‘their fear of humans usually makes them vomit as soon as they are approached’ – not to mention the propensity for the young chicks being reared for the film to go into a sort of epileptic feeding frenzy, which made using food as an incentive and a reward problematic. The completion – and the success – of their training session was reported in The Advertiser readers learned that the pelicans had been taught to ‘be near people, to respond to simple signals and fly off holding an object in their beaks’. The actors and the location played second billing to the real, avian ‘stars’. Noel Rait, ‘Meet Dum Dum… Sandwich… and Carpenter… Stars of a New Film That Will Make Us All WATCH THE BIRDIES’, The Australian Women’s Weekly, 25 August 1976, pp. A double-page feature article in The Australian Women’s Weekly was entitled ‘Meet Dum Dum… Sandwich… and Carpenter… Stars of a New Film That Will Make Us All WATCH THE BIRDIES’. ![]() The pelicans’ habits, training and contrariness were the subject of constant media attention throughout filming. Producer Matt Carroll, recalling the beach shack in which the pelicans were raised, put it more pungently: ‘It stank! Pelican shit smells like rotting fish.’ Matt Carroll, quoted in Erin Free, ‘Taking Flight: The Making of Storm Boy’, FilmInk, 15 November 2016,, accessed. – ‘wild ways’ being, no doubt, a euphemism for another euphemism: ‘pelicans are not fastidious in their toilet habits’. One thing pelicans will not do, however, is behave themselves at film premieres as Noel Purdon recounts, ‘a plan to have them strolling elegantly in the foyer at the preview had to be dropped when the birds’ wild ways asserted themselves’ Noel Purdon, ‘ Storm Boy’, Cinema Papers, issue 11, January 1977, p. Sonia Borg, quoted in ‘ Storm Boy’, Ozmovies,, accessed. I think it’s better to restrict oneself and only write down what is possible, rather than ask for the impossible. This influenced what I put in the script. I met the animal trainer on Storm Boy and we talked about what the pelicans would be able to do. Scriptwriter Sonia Borg described these ‘skill sets’ as a major determinant in her adaptation of Colin Thiele’s novella: Birds can be temperamental and if one was grumpy they would use another one.’ Greg Rowe, quoted in Gavin Lower & Verity Edwards, ‘Mr Percival Dips His Wings at 33’, The Australian, 4 September 2009. Mike ‘Storm Boy’ Kingley himself, Greg Rowe, said: ‘One was better at certain tricks than the others. So back to ‘this pelican’ – or, rather, pelicans, since the Mr Percival of the film was a composite of three different pelicans, each with different skill sets and temperaments. Something of an exaggeration, given Potter was a kid-generated cult, and Storm Boy, a triumph of astutely targeted educational packaging and marketing, but there’s some grain of truth there. ![]() David Koch, in ‘Where Is “Storm Boy” Greg Rowe Now?’, YouTube, 16 November 2008,, accessed. ![]() To most schoolkids, Safran’s film was – according to media personality David Koch – the Harry Potter of its time. Not that any schoolchild of the late 1970s and early 1980s, particularly a South Australian one, would need reminding of Storm Boy or what it was about. Substitute ‘film’ for ‘book’ and ‘pelican’ for ‘whale’, and you have something of both the media hype at the time of the making and screening of Storm Boy (Henri Safran, 1976) as well as the way in which memories of the film have lingered in a sort of collective Australian psyche: ‘It’s about this pelican.’ Desperately: ‘it’s about this whale.’ David Shipman, The Great Movie Stars: The Golden Years, Angus & Robertson, London, 1979, p. ‘it’s worth picking up again.’ still no response. ‘I haven’t picked that book up in years …’ still no response. In the musical Wonderful Town, in an awkward moment, trying to make conversation, Rosalind Russell said: ‘I was re-reading Moby Dick the other night …’ pause.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |