EXCLUSIVE:
Graeme Blundell still gets stopped in the street and recognised for his many stage and screen exploits, but it’s a lot calmer than the 1970s when he was chased bare-bummed down the streets of Melbourne.
Such were the script demands of Alvin Purple, a wild 1973 film directed by Tim Burstall. Titillating audiences across the nation, it was such a box office smash it spawned two sequels Alvin Rides Again (1974), Melvin Son of Alvin (1984) a hit pop song and the ABC series Alvin Purple (1976).
Actor, writer, director Blundell had emerged, like so many of his peers, from the bohemian Carlton arts hub, having performed at Melbourne University, La Mama Theatre (Blundell being part of the foundation members), Pram Factory, leading to film roles with Burstall whose career was taking off with the film Stork (1971).
“La Mama had just started, run by his wife, Betty Burstall. I did the first productions there, and eventually we formed the La Mama company. So that was all going on simultaneously with what amounted to a student film industry, which was actually quite significant, looking back. All these films were coming out of Carlton, many of which I appeared in with Alan Finney and others,” he tells TV Tonight.
“It was that kind of winsome character that Tim was looking for”
“Tim decided that the sort of stuff that was working at La Mama could possibly work on film. This is the early days of David Williamson, with a very satirical look at Australia -a comic, satirical grab- on who we were, rather than the serious art films that were coming out of Europe.
“So he decided to make a film out of Stork….. I played a tiny little character. It was that kind of winsome character that Tim was looking for when he got the script for Alvin, so I was kind of automatically pushed into it without even having read the script. I had no idea what I was in for.”
Alvin Purple by writer Alan Hopgood revolved around the irresistible charms of a young waterbed salesman, who became the obsession of every woman he encountered, leading to a bedroom romp that spilled into the streets.
“He was just a sort of knockabout, ordinary guy who just happened to be sort of supernaturally attractive. He never understood why, and most of the people that were attracted to him never understood why. That was the comic idea of it. That’s basically it,” Blundell reveals.
“I was a pretty average, young bloke, but that was the joke”
“He wasn’t a particularly attractive looking guy. I mean, I was a pretty average, young bloke, but that was the joke. It was just like a series of burlesque sketches, really.”
Outrageously, the film even depicted Alvin as a schoolboy irresistible to older women.
“The schoolboy sequences are probably the best in it. I think they’re very funny. I was actually 28 I think, but I got away with youthfulness then!” he laughs.
The film became the most commercially successful Australian film ever released.
“It was absolutely immense, but it had followed on from Stork, which had also been very successful at the box office. Though it was an incredible trial for Burstall to actually have it screened anywhere, because the British exhibitors controlled the system, and they just weren’t interested in Australian films at all at that stage, the late 60s,” he recalls.
“People just loved it”
“But people just loved it, and they flocked and eventually it got a distribution outlet in the cities. So that suggested there was an audience for Australian films.”
At the time Blundell also played Don Cook on The Box for 162 episodes, having previously made guest appearances on other Crawford Productions, Ryan, Homicide and Matlock Police.
“Don Cook was the floor manager of the television station and he eventually became a director of the variety show that was, to some extent, based on In Melbourne Tonight. He was a pretty central figure in the whole thing. A bit like early Alvin, he was involved in a whole range of rather permissive events with women who worked at the station. So there was a sort of sex element to the thing as well. It was basically a satire on the television industry at that stage. It was pretty good, I think too, given that we were shooting two hours a week, which is a lot of television.”
By 1976 ABC produced an Alvin Purple series of just 13 episodes, but its candid and saucy tone drew viewer complaints.
“There was a director, appropriately named Henry Bland, the supremo at the ABC, and he got it off air on the first or the second night, and then there was a huge crisis at the ABC over it.”
“You can meet someone for the first time, and 10 minutes later, you’re simulating making love with them”
How did he feel about the nudity and sex farce scenes required for the cameras?
“God it was an era!” he exclaims.
“I wouldn’t say it was fun. It’s just what actors do, we’re used to that kind of intimacy. It’s a weird thing about actors …you can meet someone for the first time, and 10 minutes later, you’re simulating making love with them, and then you say, ‘Thanks very much,’ and you never see them again. It’s one of the bizarre things that actors just get used to.
“It seems to be a problem these days with the so called, Intimacy Co-ordinators. I’ve talked to quite a few younger directors about that and a lot of them loathe it. I don’t think I’d put up with it on a set anymore.
“In those days there was always a lot more crew hanging around on the days when you were doing sex scenes. There were suddenly blokes up ladders. It was all pretty prurient. Most of the so-called ‘Sexual Revolution’ was run by much older men who were desperate to get out of their marriages.”
But he did work with some of Australia’s legendary actresses, Jacki Weaver, Abigail, Tina Bursill, Belinda Giblin, Lynette Curran, Chantal Contouri and more.
“The press used to say, the production was ‘pulled off.’ They loved saying that.”
The ABC series was also enveloped in a copyright claim and a court trial.
“Burstall tried to close it down, with Alan Finney (Hexagon Films). There were all sorts of breaches possibly involved,” he continues.
“Hexagon Films were saying that the ABC didn’t actually have the formal rights to produce it. Hexagon brought an action against the ABC and as the press used to say, the production was ‘pulled off.’ They loved saying that.
“Eventually it got sorted out. But it was quite a quite an event…..it wasn’t banned for any sort of licentious reason. It was banned for a contractual reason.”
They all screened eventually, albeit via Seven network.
“A lot of the Alvin era I can only remember with the aid of deep sleep therapy,” he adds.
The popularity of Alvin did not inhibit his casting opportunities, with guest roles in Cop Shop, Water Under the Bridge, Kingswood Country, A Country Practice, Vietnam, Rafferty’s Rules, GP, while Blundell was busy working across the ’80s & ’90s in film and theatre, largely with the Melbourne Theatre Company.
“I had a completely separate career, also writing at different stages. I was extremely busy, so there was no actual ‘shadow’, in a sense. I worked in many, many films and countless TV shows playing all sorts of different characters.”
By the mid 1990s there were significant run in two action shows, Fire and Medivac, both produced by Liberty Films.
“I was the director of the hospital, so I wasn’t out in the field all that often, but occasionally, because the character had invented emergency medicine in Vietnam, I would occasionally push myself into the action,”
“They were very, very clever, very lateral producers. They took over an entire floor of this massive Brisbane building, and decked it out as a Medivac hospital ward with dozens of beds and and they lit it for 360 degrees, which was unheard of then. The directors and the cameramen could just shoot in any direction without having to change the lighting, which meant that it could be shot very, very quickly, which was terrific for the actors,” says Blundell.
“It was very well shot, and very dangerous I remember! Fires everywhere!”
“Liberty Film did a lot of things in Brisbane. They were pioneers. I did a couple of episodes of Fire which was a bit of a hit for Channel Seven. I played in that a deranged fire captain who his crew mutinied against and there was a court case and various things. It was very well shot, and very dangerous I remember! Fires everywhere!”
Language
More roles followed from the 2000s in All Saints, Pizza, The Secret Life of Us, Chandon Pictures, Underbelly, East West 101, Marking Time, Laid and The Hollowmen.
“On The Hollowmen, I played the director of whatever party it was… I just came in and swore at people. I remember Chris Mitchell, the editor of the Australian walking up one day and saying, ‘I just saw you swearing on television last night.’”
Blundell’s writing talents have seen him as national television critic at The Australian for over 20 years.
“I started writing for them way back in the late 80s doing book reviews. I was also doing countless book reviews for The Herald and occasionally for The Age. Then I started writing about television, because I was working on the Graham Kennedy book for all that time, so I was starting to learn a huge amount about television from a different perspective, not just from an actor’s point of view,” he explains.
“I don’t review much Free to Air because it’s just not particularly interesting”
Across the decades television criticism has shifted to being dominated by premium dramas on streaming.
“I don’t review much Free to Air because it’s just not particularly interesting, and because it’s a dying thing. So few people are watching it compared to Streaming. And all the interesting work, of course, is on Streaming. If I’ve got to do 50 shows a year they’re nearly all going to be on Streaming.”
And despite any cultural war with ABC, Blundell is not restricted or influenced in his copy.
“The editor, Tim Douglas, is completely clear about that. I can write about anything that I like and say whatever I like. There’s no restrictions on anyone writing for Review, the magazine that I write for. So it doesn’t bother me in the slightest.”
He managed to merge both writing and television when he joined Margaret Pomeranz on Foxtel review show Screen, becoming her next counterpoint, following on from critic David Stratton.
“I was also doing Saturday Night at the Movies, taking over from Bill Collins for many years as well. So I had all that extra work loaded on top of my daily commitments at The Australian it was quite a frenzied time,” he observes.
Both big shoes to fill?
“Yes, that’s absolutely true. And I managed. I brought a quite different perspective to it all, because I was an actor and a director in film, television, theatre. So I had a lot more to talk about than they ever did, the dear old things.”
“It’s been a long time. So it is quite good to lie down occasionally!”
These days Blundell lives on the NSW Central Coast, juggling semi-retirement with his insatiable appetite for the arts.
“I’m almost 80 now, so it’s getting to the stage where my wife says ‘You should go and have a lie down,’” he admits.
“I’m the chairman of a local opera company that’s been established, Coast Opera Australia. I do a bit of writing for other people, here and there, not a great deal really. I was just thinking this morning actually, it’s quite nice not to be completely enveloped in people’s concerns. Directing particularly, takes a huge toll on you, because you’re harnessing all these psychologies in the room. It’s emotionally exhausting. I did that for all those years. I directed 100 productions or something. I started directing back at the University of Melbourne, and acting, and that was around 1962 so it’s been a long time. So it is quite good to lie down occasionally!”
“We actors are so exploited by the constant regurgitation of things”
Whilst Alvin Purple lives on as just one credit amongst hundreds of hours of film and television, there is one ‘small’ matter that still riles Blundell -residuals, or the lack, thereof….
“It’s one of those things, as with other actors, I absolutely feel still furious about. We actors are so exploited by the constant regurgitation of things that we’ve done in the past, that we don’t get paid for. It’s absolutely atrocious and impossible to stop. All those films I’ve done, all show constantly on Netflix, The Odd Angry Shot, Don’s Party is big on Netflix. None of it comes back to the actors at all,” he insists.
“I was paid $500 a week for six or seven weeks for Alvin. It then made all its money back at the box office in the first week. And I can remember, I think this is in my memoir, that there was a party held at the Burstalls and they gave me a cheque…. $3500 for something that’s still being viewed!”
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