How many short-story writers does it take to change a light bulb? Sixteen – one to do it, and the other 15 to provide critical feedback.
I’ve just finished teaching a short-story class at the Victorian Writers Centre, a crew of 16 ambitious beavers – and one embedded journalist named Sarah L’Estrange.
Sarah’s a regular on Radio [...]
Just posted the original draft for a Geoffrey Rush profile. For those who read the downsized feature in Sunday Life magazine this May, you’ll notice several changes, largely to obey the laws of ever-shrinking press space, as earlier chewed on this blog.
This draft, some 500 words longer than the mag version, has a lot more [...]
What a day to see a movie called Noise. This Australian cop yarn, starring Brendan Cowell as Constable Graham McGahan, is loose-limbed, laconic and legit. An engrossing film. While sirens wail, and a city seethes after an awful crime, C-flat shrills in Graham’s ear, the poor cop a victim of tinnitus – or tinea as [...]
Part 3 of my meander, more about the Art of Feature Writing, than Scrabble, or Geoffrey Rush.
Recapping, I’d been granted 40 minutes with a man like Geoffrey. What to do? Here’s a bloke who’s almost tanned by limelight, a veteran of the post-project quip & snap – so just another sit-down interview faced the risk [...]
“Eight shows a week is getting tougher,” confesses Geoffrey Rush, still punch-drunk from the night before. “You don’t bounce back as quickly.”
The trouper is a trooper of the first degree. Rush is looking a little ragged from a month onstage at Melbourne’s Malthouse, playing the potty King Berenger in Ionesco’s farce, Exit the King. The [...]
The idea was Story Scrabble. I invented the game a day before meeting Geoffrey Rush.
Thanks to a Sunday Life commission, and all the talent agents in between, I had 30 minutes with the stage and screen star – chatting in the Melbourne offices of Buena Vista. An hour if I was lucky. Scarcely time to [...]