Before ABC ran Q&A and Bananas in Pajama commercials between shows, they used to do meditative interludes: waves crashing against rocks, hot air balloons drifting through the clouds, that sort of thing. This is how the director of Oz: A Rock’n’Roll Road Movie, Chris Löfvén, began. At 14, he dashed across Melbourne with his 16mm camera, licked a stamp and uploaded the footage to the television network. They liked it and executed it.
Chris’ first job out of high school was working for director Fred Schepisi (who would later make The Devil’s Playground and The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith). “I trained as an assistant cameraman,” he recalls. “Fred, he was very good about lending equipment on the weekends.”
One such weekend, in 1971, he boarded a bus with Melbourne band Daddy Cool, traveling to Myponga, South Australia, for a rock festival. “So, I was shooting little bits of that trip. And we ended up using it for Daddy Cool’s Eagle Rock movie clip.
Chris helped pioneer an entire genre. “And what is a film clip? They didn’t really exist then,” he says. There were few TV shows that played rock music and those that did wanted the bands to perform in the studio. With nowhere to play video clips, no one thought to film them. “I didn’t shoot much because I had a very tight budget. I would have only shot about 100 feet the whole trip.” 100 feet is two and a half minutes. So scarce, so precious. How times have changed. You can’t even get killed these days without it being caught in 17 iPhones.
Eagle Rock became the biggest selling single in Australia that year, the music video was a big part of its success. So Chris, 23, and his co-producer Lyne Helms headed to London (they were also boyfriend and girlfriend). Around this time, he captured the American film Easy Rider, directed and starring Dennis Hopper. “This was a very loose road movie with a lot of great music. And the plot came into it three-quarters of the way through. I thought, oh, what did they have to do this for? It was really nice to sail through the freeway and nothing happened.”
‘If you dig rock and roll…!’ The Oz trailer.
Chris originally envisioned Oz to be like Easy Rider before the pesky plot came along. “It was never a narrative feature. It was originally going to evolve around the idea of a loose doco-style film, covering all the things I thought were young, like vans and Holden cars and motorbikes and music . Chris decided that even a loose film needs something to hold it together. “So I thought maybe you could have a wizard character and one thing led to another. Why don’t we make it an allegorical story, from The Wizard of Oz, which I saw when I was a kid.”
That Oz means Australia seemed like a sign from the slang gods that there was something here. Chris and Lyne returned to Australia.
The field was like this:
Dorothy is a 16-year-old groupie who goes with a rock band in the country of Victoria (Kansas) when their wagon crashes and knocks her out. He wakes up in a fantasy world and learns that a local thug (The Wicked Witch of the East) has been run over. As a reward for killing the unpopular bully, a gay shop assistant (The Good Fairy) from a nearby store gives her a pair of red shoes to help her see the last concert of The Wizard, a rock singer androgynous, which will play. the stage in Emerald City (Melbourne). She is pursued by the thug’s brother (Wicked Witch of the West) who tries to rape her on several occasions. Along the way he meets a mute surfer (The Scarecrow), a heartless mechanic (The Tinman) and a cowardly biker (The Lion).
The Australian Film Commission (AFC) invested $90,000 of the $150,000 budget. They needed to find a distributor who would cough up the rest. “There were only about three distribution companies in the whole country. Village Roadshow hit him on the head. They said, ‘Oh no, he’s too gay and we don’t want to know.'”
We lost the sound. Immediately the public knew that this was not real, that it was bullshit, and they became even more aggressive Bruce Spence
The Good Fairy was played by Robin Ramsay, speaking in rural Victoria as Mr Humphries in Are You Being Served? The Wizard is based on David Bowie. Graham Matters, who sadly passed away in 2021, was groomed for the role, having appeared in local productions of The Rocky Horror Show and Hair. Joy Dunstan played Dorothy, and Bruce Spence, Michael Carman and Gary Waddell rounded out the cast as The Scarecrow, The Tin Man and The Lion.
Chris and Lyne flew to Sydney to present to the Greater Union board. “We had to do an exercise to say how new this was, how it dealt with the youth market, which they had never touched before. We had no idea if we were talking shit or not.”
The film version of The Who’s rock opera Tommy was a big hit at the time, so crap or not, it seemed certain that rock-fueled Oz could work. Greater Union committed to the film, but did not release all the necessary money. “The only money we could put into it was our deferred wages, which meant we were really fighting the back of our pants to get the thing.”
AFC eventually agreed to provide the final $25,000 needed, but this was in the form of a personal loan. “It’s stressing me out just remembering,” says Chris.
Filming took five weeks, in January and February 1976. Hotel accommodation for the cast and crew could not be afforded. “We had to keep the locations close to Melbourne and make them look like they were in the middle of nowhere.” Little River in Greater Geelong was chosen. A few years later Mad Max filmed there.
“We shot in the middle of summer to get all the exteriors really hot and steamy.” Chris was too successful in this regard, he was struck with heatstroke on the first day, so he could not make it to the first day of rush. (Chris didn’t learn his lesson. He now wears a pirate bandana, having lost an ear to skin cancer.) But, Chris says, it wasn’t the weather that got the best of him . He found himself at odds with the most accomplished actor on the set, Bruce Spence. He had won Best Actor at the 1972 Australian Film Institute Awards, for Stork. Now he was surfing, a stand-in for The Scarecrow.
Chris worried that Bruce was pressuring the other actors to turn on him: “They used to do all these little sessions in the trailer”
“I don’t think I enjoyed the experience at all,” says Chris. “He wanted a lot more input. And he didn’t like the casual way I was leading. He kept wanting motivation for things that didn’t require it.” The hitherto relaxed Chris perks up by explaining. “I told him, look, this character is pretty much based on me. So just watch me and how I act. It’s very simple. Don’t try to read too much into it.” Chris snorts. “It’s up to you if you contact Bruce, but he won’t say anything nice about it.”
I contact Bruce.
“It was a weird, weird movie to shoot,” Bruce says. He doesn’t think Chris led casually, quite the opposite. Bruce explains that Easy Rider, Chris’s influence, was part of the New Hollywood movement, which was inspired by French New Wave cinema. “What they were trying to do was refer to the world in a more contemporary way,” Bruce says, compared to the films coming out of American studios. They rejected cinematic conventions around pace, editing and plot, and did not see themselves as cogs in the creative process, as in traditional Hollywood. They were auteurs, controlling (or trying to) everything from writing to filming to editing. “We started seeing a lot of authors in Australia. And that’s how Chris saw himself,” says Bruce. “Chris was very protective of what he was doing and almost obsessively so.”
They rehearsed Oz in Chris’s backyard. “He and I had a difference of opinion because he didn’t want one syllable altered in his script.” Bruce feels that Chris was too much of an author even for an author. Bruce worked with German director Werner Herzog on Where the Green Ants Dream in 1984. “Herzog could be relatively obsessive about his script, but he would recognize that a scene might need a massage.”
Michael Carman, Gary Waddell and Bruce Spence (right) in Oz: A Rock’n’Roll Road Movie. Photo: Melbourne International Film Festival
Things didn’t slow down, going from rehearsals in Chris’ backyard to filming. Chris became concerned that Bruce was pressuring the other actors to turn against him. “They used to do all these little sessions in the caravan,” says Chris. “Where I suspected they were talking about this, that and the other.” Now, Bruce wonders if Chris controlled the syllables so much because it was hard to control much more when shooting a movie like Oz. Chris couldn’t yell at the sun to come out from behind the clouds in Little River and he didn’t have the budget to sit and wait.
Bruce recalls a hectic night of filming. The script called for The Wizard to perform with his band in the Emerald City with Dorothy looking on in awe. Chris had convinced music mogul Michael Gudinski to let the fictitious band line up at a concert at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl.
“AC/DC were the headliners, and we had to go on right before them,” Bruce recalls. Countdown’s Molly Meldrum served as MC. “The crowd was chanting ‘AC/DC! ACDC!’ And Molly said, “Just before AC/DC, I’d like to introduce you to a new band.” And as soon as we go on and they can see all this camp costume that we’ve been wearing, you can hear chants of ‘poofters’ ! poofters!’ We hadn’t even started playing.”
Bruce, downstairs, feared for his safety. “The music starts, and we leave, and the audience kind of…