Making Venus

Clip 2: It’s all image

Taken from the documentary Making Venus (2002)

Original title classification MA – this clip chosen to be M

This clip contains non-specific language [please curate].

Curator’s clip description

Emerging film producers Jason Gooden and Julian Saggers move into prestigious offices in the hope that they can finish and market their feature film. The film’s first director is invited to a screening of a new cut of the film. Glenn Fraser says that he will take his name off the film. Co-producer Julian Saggers confirms this.

Curator’s notes

The film uses an observational style. The filmmakers are given full access to record the ‘train wreck’ of how ‘not to’ make a film.

Damien Parer, curator

Teachers’ notes

provided by The Le@rning Federation

This page is printer friendly

This clip shows the board outside the new Sydney premises of film production company Tomahawk Pictures. The camera follows producer Jason Gooden on a tour of the office, during which he comments on the importance of a ‘prestigious’ office and its symbolic function for his amateur team. Tomahawk Pictures is in the process of completing a feature film, and Glenn Fraser, the original director and screenwriter of the film, speaks to the camera about his legal entitlement to attend a post-production screening. Brief comments follow from co-producer Julian Saggers (‘Jules’). Fraser views the film, describing it as ‘all over the shop’, and confirms that he cannot put his name to it.

Educational value points

The subjects of this documentary share what they have learnt about the workings of the Australian film industry. Jason Gooden sees feature filmmaking as a confidence game, in which a facade of industrious workers in nicely partitioned offices is required to impress investors. (In an accompanying clip it is established that the subjects deceived a bank into giving them a ‘housing’ loan of $250,000.) The struggle for finance and credibility is represented by producer Jason miming knocking on the door and requesting to be allowed into the industry. According to Gooden, outsiders require considerable bravura to achieve their goals.

The post-production stage of filmmaking, which includes editing and marketing, emphasises the skills required by film producers. The producer has final responsibility for every area of a film’s production, sometimes from conceiving the idea, to the finished film and the financial outcome. The producer needs to carry a crew along on a production journey, uniting them with a creative and commercial vision. The producer must find and liaise with a director, writers, cast, musicians, editors and post-production engineers. Consultation on the final print of any film, as shown here, is a major challenge for the producer.

The suspense in this clip captures the serendipitous nature of documentary making. Although the documentary makers originally intended to film a straightforward record of the process of making a low-budget film, their documentary benefited from the tensions and dramas that developed between the main players when inexperience led to a budget blow-out and an unreleasable film. The film took five years to make and resulted in Gooden and Saggers owing their investors more than $1 million. In 2003 the film was finally released, to generally poor reviews, in its third incarnation as Moneyshot.

The scenes show how Making Venus uses some of the conventions of the observational documentary, a form of filmmaking that avoids narration and is largely unscripted. The advent of small, portable cameras and sound equipment enabled the development of observational documentary making, as cameras could be taken into intimate settings such as the film screening scene shown here. However, even in so-called observational filmmaking it is impossible to know to the extent to which the unmediated action in front of the camera is influenced by the camera’s presence.