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"Last Bus to Banjo Creek"
Rod Taylor spent more than a decade trying to produce this film, which
he described as "a sort of 'African Queen' on a truck." But with
the feeling that he was "flogging a dead horse" and hope that
other opportunities were opening up in Australia, Taylor finally abandoned
the project.
He was still optimistic in a 1975 interview, when he was in Australia
to collect an award and was saluted on "This
Is Your Life."
I've been meaning to get out here to make it for the past
11 years. Every time I think I'll make it, another film comes up or finance
for it dries up, but this time next year, I reckon I'll be back to do it.
... There's more money around here now for film-making.
-- TV Week (Australia), Nov. 1, 1975
Taylor explained further, from the set of "The
Picture Show Man," in Australia:
I had a script called "Banjo Creek," written
by Ted Willis, that had been re-written by some hack at Universal Studios
for a production to be made in Australia. I thought the Universal version
was a piece of shit, so I added some dialogue and made it good and Aussie
and, I thought, funny. But unfortunately I got static from Willis about
changing his script -- me, not Universal!
-- Cinema Papers (Australia), January 1977
The story involved a pretty, fragile English girl who has to get to the
outback and is taken there by "a sweaty oaf in a truck." Of course,
the pair encounter many disasters, including breaking down in the desert.
And of course, they fall in love along the way.
Candidates to play opposite Rod's "sweaty oaf" included Maggie
Smith, Julie Andrews, Sarah Miles, Olivia Newton-John or Glenda Jackson.
Taylor "got static" from Lord Ted Willis (1918-1992), a pioneering
and prolific English screenwriter. Willis created 41 TV serials, wrote 37
stage plays, a dozen novels and scripts for 39 feature films. Among his
notable creations was "Dixon Of Dock Green," the longest-running
police series on British television (1955-76).
In his own memoir, "Evening All," Willis described the inspiration
for "Last Bus to Banjo Creek" -- his own travels in a truck driven
by a man named Stu along the Birdsville Track, the old cattle trail that
links Birdsville in Queensland with Maree in South Australia.
I invented a cool, laid-back young English girl who goes
to the outback to marry an Australian she had met in London the previous
year. A mix-up in the dates prevents the boyfriend from meeting her in
Maree so she sets off to his station in Stu's truck. Because of their differing
backgrounds, they quarrel violently at first but then come to respect each
other and fall in love. In the end she has to choose between Stu and her
boyfriend.
Beginning in 1965, Willis went to Los Angeles to develop the screenplay
for Universal along with a script editor who informed Willis that "our
first job would be to cut 30 pages from the screenplay."
After little progress, Willis went home on the understanding that he
would return when the film started pre-production. However, Universal experienced
several internal shakeups, and Willis remarked:
I felt in my bones that this was yet another screenplay
that would not go before the cameras. In the next 10 years, a half-dozen
producers read it and became keen but the project seem to be jinxed, for
something always intervened to stop further progress.
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THE ACTOR AS WRITER
Rod Taylor said he's done a lot of re-writing, but he's
written only one film from scratch, "The Treasure
Seekers."
Among the films Rod's done some re-writing for:
"Chuka": At the peak
of his acting career, Taylor also was immersed in producing this Western,
spending evenings and weekends writing and rewriting the script based on
a novel by Richard Jessup.
"The Deadly Trackers":
Taylor contributed new scenes to invigorate the hatred between hero and
villain: "I think that's what the story lacked -- a decent account
of the villain's villainy," he said.
"Young Cassidy":
Taylor offered contributions as he tried to follow John Ford's orders to
bring Julie Christie's character back into the picture toward the end. "I
wrote a scene where she's in a doorway after hooking too much, shabby and
dirty, and they didn't go for it," Taylor explained. |
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