Rory O'Donoghue, Composer: Fatty Finn. It sounds as if it was made by committees of the CWA, by people who think they know what's best for children.Probably the most successful children's film - i.e., the film that most children have seen - is Star Wars, And the reason it was so successful was because it is about the immediate generation the children aspire to - i.e., people who are just a bit older than them. But everybody knows audiences don't go to factual films.I want audiences to leave Fatty Finn and say they had a good time. It is silly to throw power towards such people.You see the problem on something like Fatty Finn, whose script was hailed by the producer as a great work of world art, yet whose realisation on screen doesn't come half way up to Disney, and is arguably garish, unfunny, and miscalculated.It is not fair that I should be saddled with bad results merely because the wrong kinds of minds are drawn inexorably by their incompetence throughout childhood, youth and young manhood into the film business … (Cinema Papers, as above)As usual there were two sides of the story, and director Maurice Murphy countered Ellis's version with his own interview in Producer Brian Rosen had asked Murphy to direct the film and he said yes because he thought it the best he'd read at that stage:All the dramas had happened before I got there - as you can read in Cinema Papers.
Children only get favorite stories because that's all they have been given. When a child gets on a bike and you say, "Keep on the footpath", he goes around the corner out of sight, and on to the road to mix it with the cars and motor-cycles. Fatty Finn raises dough for a new radio. First of two Australian family / children's comic-strip movies made during the early 1980s. And if the director interferes with that too much, he is likely to shatter the comic nature of a scene.I have always found it difficult making the actors do specific things to a specific timing - to open a door at a precise moment, so it is perfect for the camera and so on. A certain amount of realism is fine, but when producers and directors started to try and make films real, audiences disappeared. It is all so trendy and boring.
The Sydney suburb of Glebe doubled for the Sydney suburb of Woolloomooloo during production filming. Promotional materials during theatrical release promoted the Fatty Finn character as "Australia's Favorite Son". There were two versions of the script: the one Bob Ellis and Chris McGill had written, and the one incorporating the changes Bob had been asked to do.I got together with Bob, said I loved two of the new passages, but wanted to throw the rest out. This movie was made and released about fifty-three years after the first and original 'Fatty Finn' movie, The Kid Stakes (1927). Source: The film was based on the comic strip devised by Syd Nicholls, which started in the Sunday News in September 1923 as Fat and His Friends, and then became Fatty Finn in August 1924. The edition offered a 4:3 frame and a modest picture gallery.It's hard to know if it was a version derived from an official source, but nonetheless colours were bright and the image much sharper than VHS. Hooray For Fatty Finn/Phar Lap/Mean Woman Blues/Old Slouch Hat/Fatty's Fair Fatty Finn, is a popular long-run Australian comic strip, was created in the early 1920s by Syd Nicholls. The earlier 'Fatty Finn' film, The Kid Stakes (1927), is in black-and-white. So I took a deep breath and made them, word for word what they asked. There were six kid stakes goat-cart race-drivers with the same number of children as frog-racers. The original Woolloomooloo locations depicted in the comic strip were no longer available. Of course, sophisticated people did as well, but I aim to make films for people who assess the film they go to and don't feel the need to compare it with other films. But, other than using it as research - and I showed it to the children - I don't think I was much influenced. Second feature film as a D.O.P. Every Friday in August join us for the release of a new film from the freshly launched NOWNESS ASIA.
In fact, he's so famous that in a classic children's novel on King Arthur, A Once and Future King, the quality of the chivalry and competence of Sir Lancelot's sword fighting is described by comparing him to Don Bradman."