… in which the green shoots of David’s early screenwriting career take root and begin to blossom…

* This metaphor has been brought to you by ‘Gardening Australia’, returning soon to Fridays on ABC TV.

==================================================================

DP: So, leading up to that first question (and this is why we might take more than an hour!)…

Sweet and Sour was a further development; that was early 80s. By that stage, Paul and I had written a short film that got made that was quite successful; it actually made money. We made money from a short film!

SH: That’s fantastic.

DP: And after that, I can’t think who the connection was, but we were called in to work on this new ABC rock-and-roll soapie. It started off a lot more adventurous and radical than what it became. It got so watered down because of concerns about drugs and language and the type of music… It worked and the audience loved it, so they did the right thing. But for those of us who were in the mix, it all seemed to be getting diluted.

SH: My memory of it is that it was on at six o’clock at night. So, no one on it did drugs or smoked or drank… Rock-and-roll, dude! Shortly after that, in 1985, you and Paul wrote a movie! And it got made! And then it got released! That’s a very rare and impressive thing. How did that come about?

DP: In ‘81 or ‘82 and the New South Wales Film Corporation announced a screenwriting competition for budding screenwriters. But one of the conditions was that you had to have the signature of a credited feature producer on your entry form. As it happened, an Australian film that we really admired at that point was Newsfront, so we sought out its producer, David Elfick. Do you know of him?

SH: I know that name.

DP: He was a guy who grew up in the 60s – he was a keen surfer, he’d started a couple of surf magazines. I think he’d made Morning of the Earth which was a very successful feature-length surf documentary. So, Newsfront was his first fiction feature, and we thought it was a terrific film. So David read our screenplay and said, “Look it’s obviously written by neophytes”, (actually, that word’s too big for him). “Newcomers; it’s written by first-timers, but you got potential so I’ll look at anything else you write. You can bring it to me. I’ll be happy to read it.” We then wrote this screenplay a few years later called Emoh Ruo, which is “Our Home” spelled backwards. I think it’s always a terrible thing when you tell someone the title of your film and you explain that it’s a couple of words backwards.

SH: I noticed that the tagline for the movie is “Try saying it backwards”. The poster tells you what it means.

DP: Yeah. I’m looking at the poster here and it also says, “The funniest Aussie movie ever.”

SH: Wow, that’s pretty good! That’s high praise (according to the movie’s own poster). That doesn’t come along every day.

DP: I know! And posters are pretty discerning…

SH: They really are. The poster advertising the product always is very discerning. Whose idea was the title?

DP: I can’t remember. I went off it – I was concerned it sounded vaguely Polynesian. I didn’t think it conveyed anything to a potential moviegoer. But it came from the idea that in the 1940s and 50s it was an Aussie custom for a lot of homes to have plaques by the front door with a fancy name, as an ironic comment on the fact that this was just a suburban home. Like “Dunroamin’” or “Gloria Soames”… and “Emoh Ruo” was a popular one. Often, they were printed on glass in nice frames; essentially they meant “Proud homeowner”. I actually wanted to call the movie Homesick, because it was about a couple who were desperate to be homeowners. But the decision from the producer was that you couldn’t have a movie title with the word “sick” in it.

SH: I noticed it was re-titled for some foreign markets as House Broken.

The poster from one o’ them there foreign markets. I think Joy Smithers and Martin Sacks may have reasonable grounds to sue that caricaturist….

DP: I don’t know if it worked in those small African countries.

SH: Their posters were great, though!

DP: Certainly… but ultimately the movie was a very big flop. It may well have been “the funniest Aussie movie ever” but no one cared. I believe the poster went along and enjoyed it immensely.

SH: Yes, the poster must have booked out a whole cinema! Was it fun to make? Was the production of its happy memories for you or was it too stressful?

DP: No, it was a completely depressing experience.

SH: Oh really? How so?

DP: Well, earlier, the short film I told you about (Making Weekend of Summer Last) was picked up by (Australian cinema chain) Greater Union and they ran it before a couple of very successful features. And we got regular cheques from Greater Union, because we were on a cut of the box office!

SH: Fantastic!

DP: Yeah, it wasn’t much, but it was like “who makes money from a short film?” So, that was terrific. And when Emoh Ruo came around, the idea was that Paul and I would not only write the film, but we’d also direct it, because we’d had experience directing a successful short film. There was a bit of nervousness from all concerned about that. So there was a board meeting in the Greater Union head office, where Paul and I had to sell ourselves as directors. And it’s one of those kinds of cliched horrible scenes where you’re sitting at a very long table with serious-looking men in dark suits who aren’t going to put up with any bullshit. At the end of the meeting they just said, “Look you’ve convinced us. We’re going to put money in the picture and we’re happy for you to direct.” And we just thought “This is terrific!”

SH: Yes!

==================================================================

Things are on the up-and-up! David’s kicking goals left, right and centre! Everything’s coming up roses! Nothing can possibly go wrong!

Or can it?

To find out, tune in next Tuesday afternoon, right here at HowToWinGameShows.com…

Thanks tiny-fonted Wikipedia, I’ll take it from here.

I think it’s fair to say that David Poltorak is a legend of Australian TV game shows. After his 1986 World-Record-setting win on Sale of the Century….

See?

… he returned for several ‘Champion of Champions’ tournaments, before becoming a question writer and adjudicator for that same show.

Since then, he’s worked behind the scenes on many Australian TV quiz shows, and last year, he became a contestant once again, and won BIG on Beat the Chasers…. 34 years after his original Sale of the Century triumph!

Besides all that, he’s a screenwriter and standup comedian, and he’d already had his first movie produced before any of his quiz show success.

This was a delightful and really wide-ranging discussion, and I thought I’d kick it off by delving into David’s origin story…

==================================================================

SH: David Poltorak! Thank you very much indeed for joining me today for HowToWinGameShows.com.

 DP: It’s my pleasure Stephen, thanks very much.

SH: Prior to your game show career I know you were a TV and film writer. Your first TV credit on imdb.com is from 1984 for writing two episodes of Sweet & Sour: an ABC drama about a young pop band (which I watched religiously as a teenager). How did that come about, and how was that whole experience?

DP: Yes, it might be my first IMDB credit and fair enough. I wrote those two episodes with a long-term co-writer Paul Leadon (who, in recent years, has been the Head of Comedy at Channel 10). We’d been at uni together, studying architecture. We both dropped out and got heavily involved with our annual architecture review, and that led to work writing sketches for what was then 2JJ. One of the early directors of that station mentored us; a guy called Marius Webb, who was very helpful to us.

We wrote sketches and then we got on – I think in ’77 – The Garry McDonald Show. Garry McDonald had been playing his famous character Norman Gunston for years, and he was sick of that character and he wanted to do a sketch show that was a completely Gunston-free zone. It was a pretty terrible show because it made you realize in retrospect what a great anchor the Gunston character was for him. And so, without that character, he was just another actor in comedy sketches.

SH: How long did that last? I don’t remember that show at all.

DP: Well, I think it only had one series. The head writer was Morris Gleitzman, who went on to become a successful children’s author. It was produced by John Eastway who was an ABC comedy producer at that time. It was a great experience for us because having grown up as a Monty Python obsessive, I just had this enormous weight of Monty Python sitting on my head and just feeling overwhelmed by what I saw as their quality and what they’d achieved. They were such a big influence on me.

SH: Was it helpful having a writing partner, being part of a team? Surely you could bolster each other up in those moments of self-doubt?

DP: We could. We wrote more stuff together later. Initially, although we were hired as a group, we were all writing individually, not actually collaborating. So it still felt like a very lonely, isolated experience and it’s not one that I look back with any great joy, apart from what it meant in career terms. After that, we did another comedy series called Jokes which was the same thing; just half an hour of unrelated sketches. That was also on the ABC, produced by John Eastway. And that was a short-lived thing. In later years, Australia produced much more successful shows: D-Gen, Full Frontal… but at this early stage, everybody was just scrambling. We didn’t know where we were going.

SH: I’m guessing you’re in your early twenties at this stage? Not long out of university.

DP: I’m in my early 20s. I’m a pretty heavy dope smoker, I’m a cab driver. I’d been on the dole for about a year after I dropped out at uni. Back in those days, you could front up to your local Commonwealth Employment Service office and say, “Look I’m sick of being a bus conductor. Can I go on the dole, please?” “Yes, sign here. Here’s your first cheque.”

SH: Different times.

DP: Very different times! Anyway, Paul and I then became a duo and worked on kids’ shows on the ABC and did other sketch shows…. none of which are remembered by anyone except the people who made them, because they made such little impact. Back then, the top-rating current affairs show was on Channel Seven, hosted by Mike Willesee. He’d been dominating the ratings, but in 1981, Channel 9 premiered Sale of the Century up against him. And Sale of the Century was a monster – so huge, so successful!

And as a result, Mike Willesee had this brainwave that he’d introduce comedy to his current affairs show. So he hired a bunch of people to write and perform sketches. Doug Mulray, Austen Tayshus, (who at that stage was just called Sandy Gutman) and Paul and me. So, there’d be a production meeting in the morning with Mike and we’d all sit on the floor while he sat behind his huge oak-panelled desk. We would discuss the big stories of the day and he’d get one or two of the writers to write a sketch and then somebody else would perform in it for that night. Paul and I didn’t perform; we just wrote. I think it lasted about three months. Mike was getting killed in the ratings by Sale of the Century, so he tried comedy, but it didn’t work. But it was great training; we’d have to write at least one sketch a day in the morning. We only had a couple of hours to do it, but it was terrific. It was great having the subject to write about because you then knew what the sketch was. And they’d try and film as much as they could during the day.

SH: But they would broadcast it that night?

DP: Yeah, it was very ‘on the hoof’.

SH: That’s really exciting.

DP: It was exciting, yeah. It was a pity it didn’t work. And although Sale of the Century was beating it, to me Sale was just this other thing out there… if I happened to be watching TV, I liked to sit there and answer the questions, but the idea never entered my head that I’d ever go on it as a contestant.

==================================================================