Sally & the Screen World

We’ve been thinking for a while of doing a series on our Past-Presidents, linking them in with a history of the Guild; and also focussing our crew profiles more on our members from the so-called non-technical areas.

SALLY MEIKLEJOHN and LYN BERGQUIST, a couple since the early 1980s, provided us with a brilliant opportunity to start doing both at once! But, of course, two fascinating people means at least twice as much to talk about… So here is Part One, featuring mostly Sally and her screen industry career, including her Presidency of the Techos’ Guild, and also her founding of Filmcrews…

NZT: Going back to the beginning of the Techos’ Guild, first there was the NZ Academy of Motion Pictures, which involved everybody in the industry; and then as I recall the producers and directors decided to split off?

Sally: And formed the Producers and Directors Guild.

Which eventually became the Screen Producers and Directors Association, or SPADA. They now call it Screen Production and Development Association – since the directors split off in turn, to form their own guild. So is it fair to say, crew people responded to SPADA moving off like that by deciding that they needed to form their own...

That’s right, they did. Till then we’d all worked under one umbrella, which I was actually very sorry to see go. I thought it was great to have that umbrella of the so-called Academy, this grandiose title that Geoff Murphy came up with. Roger Donaldson designed the first letterhead, with a piece of film across the top and the name ‘New Zealand Academy of Motion Pictures’.

As the Academy, we published a Guide to Production Practice, the beginnings of the Blue Book, but it was just typewritten on sheets of A4 paper. Roger stapled these to the contract for Sleeping Dogs, and said, “This is the contract…”, which was fantastic. So with people like Sam Pillsbury, Roger and Ian Mune, John Barnett and others involved – we had a really effective umbrella for the whole industry. But it didn’t suit all producers, it seemed; they wanted to talk amongst themselves. We did try to get them to just set up a producers’ division within the Academy, but they felt it was going to be better for them to have their own organisation.

So that’s what they did. Then the crew people thought We might as well do the same thing as an answer to that – which I think has left some people in the industry never quite knowing whether they should belong to the Guild or not, because previously a lot of production people belonged to the Academy; there were make-up and wardrobe, even writers and editors...

I remember actors used to come along...

Yeah, the Academy was open to anybody who worked in motion pictures. There were quite a few people working in Auckland, and after a while they got together, decided they’d like to have an organisation – for various reasons, such as professional standards, government support, and so forth. There was strong opposition to having a union, as lots of people had worked in unions overseas and thought they could be counter-productive. It seemed those days that everyone on a crew had a script in their back-pocket that they wanted to make; and so it was decided to go down to Wellington, meet with the film community there and start a national organisation to work towards those aims.

A great meeting was held in Wellington: several carloads of us went down from Auckland, met up with old friends, made new ones and a committee was set up. There was a bit of to-ing and fro-ing – I remember visiting Geoff Murphy for a meeting at some garage in Wellington – it was their office, equipment storage and car repair outfit, I think. Upstairs I went for the meeting and there were Geoff and Pat (Geoff’s then wife) sitting up in bed like John and Yoko! A pretty amazing meeting…

However, the committee set up at the first meeting in Wellington decided that we Aucklanders couldn’t be taken seriously until we had Roger Donaldson and Ian Mune in the group. They were very busy people, and although Roger agreed to get involved, Ian was reluctant. He finally relented and they both gave their support for the group and its ideas. I do remember Ian saying that we didn’t need his support, there were enough of us already, and me replying that he was right and in fact we were trying to show Wellington that the Auckland film industry was more than just Roger Donaldson and Ian Mune – he thought that was hilarious! But they did give us their support, and so the Academy was up and running!

I must say – in those days I was married to Jim Bartle; we had a house in Three Kings, and when we had a party everyone in the industry could fit into this big back garden! Then when Vidcom held parties, everybody in the industry could fit into their studio – the industry was a lot smaller then!

Which years would those have been?

We came back from Australia at the beginning of ’74. Jim came back for the start-up of Vidcom and I started doing production then, at Vidcom, freelancing; but our son Hamish was a baby, so I did just a little of that. So ’75-’76 at the latest.

Vidcom was set up by Tom Cook and Harvey Glick, and Tom had headhunted crew that he had worked with earlier. Both Jim and I had worked with him at Channel Ten (Sydney) so he invited Jim to join VidCom. Other people he brought to New Zealand were Warren Sellars, Ian Richardson, Andy Tyler, Bluey Nowell… Tom was a great believer in people starting at the bottom, and so he would employ people as couriers and then move them up the ladder; and then he encouraged his senior people to go freelance and would hire them till they were set up. He may have worked at the BBC, where they had a similar belief – even if you were employed to work in a senior position you still had to learn how the work was done, so you would not be making production decisions without knowing how they could be implemented. Great training!

I didn’t get involved in the film industry myself until the summer of 1980-81, and the Academy was still going then; but it was some time soon after that that this split happened. I know it was early 80s, because I went to Australia myself in ‘84…

Oh, that’d be right.

So when the Guild was formed, who were the first key people involved – who was the first Chair, and so on? I’m a bit hazy on all that!

There have always been Sound people involved, and I have a theory about that. I think they’re the only people in the industry that actually listen to anything that’s going on. Nobody else listens. That’s why soundies make wonderful Presidents, because they’re actually very good listeners. But I can’t remember who was the first!

When did you become Chair of the Guild?

That was when we were using Ken Sparks’ office in Mt Eden Road, and that was through default really, because we’d had a very dodgy office person… This has gotta be off the record. Although it’s the truth… (PASSAGE CENSORED!) …

So suddenly we realised we had an organisation – but we didn’t know who the members were, we weren’t collecting their subs, we had no money at all, and it was just going to peter out. So we developed what I always refer to as the Unholy Alliance – the Committee. We got together at Jude Crozier’s place; she was there, with me, Lisa Kissin, Steve Buckland, Graham Morris, Chris MacKenzie, plus others who would help. (Forgive me for not mentioning everyone.)

We met, and we did all the work ourselves; we split up the jobs of the co-ordinator between us. We did all that for nothing of course, in an effort to build up the Guild again – and it worked. But I remember once bursting into tears at one of these meetings, when suddenly it all became just too much for me. One guy had started to really ride things a bit – and I burst into tears, which is not what you do when you’re chairing a professional organisation! But they all said, Oh-oh, cuppa tea time, what can we do – Oh, we’ll finish the meeting now, that’s it, yes. Hamish, who was taking the minutes said, “9.30 – Meeting finished”, and then: “Well done, Mum, good tactic.”

Then I said, I don’t want to be the Chairperson anymore. Graham Morris stepped in with, “Now, we had this agreement that we all stick together – we are all in it together, you’re the Chairperson and we’re all supporting you.” There’s a movie with that idea, isn’t there, One for All and All for One. (The Three Musketeers, from Dumas’ novel – Ed.) That’s why I called it the Unholy Bloody Alliance; but we got through, and we did actually get the Guild back on its feet, which was good – but it was hard work!

Would that have been in the mid- or late 80s?

I set up Filmcrews in 1981 and sold it in ’86, I think – Five years, would that be right. It was after that.

When was your reign, as it were, and when did you finish as President?

(And when did the name of the position change from “Chair” to “President”? Ed.)

Dave Madigan took over from me; and I took over from Steve Buckland. I was there for three years. The dates will be in the minutes. (Research yields 1996 - 99. Ed)

Yeah, they should be – if we’ve got them still.

Hopefully they haven’t been thrown out.

I hope not.

There was another executive director we had who was hopeless. She was before the other woman, but I think she threw out a lot of stuff. I went in there one day and I said, What’s happened to all our boxes? She said, Oh, the rain got in and they’ve gotten wet, so I’ve been moving them around. So I said, Well, don’t throw anything out. No, no, I won’t, she said; and I said, I mean it, you know – Don’t throw anything out, because what we don’t want we’ll send to the Film Archive… (We had already sent minutes from the Academy meetings when Mort Schreiber was President.)

But I believe we don’t actually have a lot of that stuff any more. That’s a shame. I don’t know what happened, but there is a file of newsletters that got lost. It’s terrible to think that all that’s just gone.

Yes. There’s only a very incomplete set of “InFIlm” newsletters – there’s about six left in the office that I’ve found.

Now, there’s a job somebody needs to do! If we could start a “Time Line” – once you’ve got a time line, if you know certain things, you can add them to it. For example, who was there when, or I remember when this or that happened… Then we could start threading our history together. We could be saying to people at every meeting, or ask in a newsletter: Call into the Guild and see what you can put on the Time Line. It’d have to be censored, of course! Because – you’ll remember from the Academy days – we had these great dances, parties…

We had one at the Tamaki University – somewhere in the early to mid 80s – and Trish Downie, the Chairperson of the Academy at the time, made the punch. She made two identical punches; one was very heavily tequila’ed and one wasn’t, and nobody knew which was which! Well, people were off their faces. No one could find their cars, we all drove home, no one could see straight. We all blamed Trish – nothing to do with us! A friend of mine fell into the band – the musos were very unamused, with this drunken woman flailing around the percussion.

During the time that I was President, Alan Sorrell was the Film Commission representative; I think he was the Chairman, wasn’t he?

(Alan Sorrell was a member of the Commission from 1993 and Chair from 1996 till 2002. He’s now Chair of the Board of Creative NZ. Ed.)

We had the Guild Code of Practice discussions with Alan chairing them, because we’d got into such an awkward relationship with the Producers and Directors Guild at that point. They had got a couple of hard-headed people in there who decided they weren’t having anything to do with the Code of Practice (the Blue Book), and as far as they were concerned, they were going to destroy it. Alan was fantastic because he was such a great moderator – that’s a very good word for what he did – he was very moderate in his manner and attitude, but he stuck to the task in hand, and so we got it through. We weren’t allowed to have a blue cover that time, though.

I remember being involved in some of those discussions, for what became the “Buff Book”! Now, when would that have been roughly? Mid-90s, if I recall correctly…

Well, I was still the Chair, so it must have been.

I do know that after I came back from Australia at the end of ’87, it was in late ’87 or early ’88 that I remember you press-ganged me onto the committee!

That was a good move, wasn’t it – look at you!

It was a while before we disbanded the Academy. Eventually we called a public meeting, and we voted to put the remaining Academy funds into either the Crew Code of Practice or the Safety Code. This was welcomed by the Techos’ Guild, because we had always paid for those two publications.

The Academy meetings in the Albion, I remember those well.

And then the Techos’ Guild met there too.

Yeah, I think that all happened before I went to Australia…?

We really do need that Time Line!

Tell us now about Filmcrews – you set that up in 1980 or ’81?

1981

At that time I needed to get an income. I knew this wonderful woman in Sydney called Sue Lemon, who’d set up the first crew agency in Sydney. I thought it could be a good thing to do from home, with Hamish at school and such; so I rang Sue and talked to her, and, basically, she told me pretty much everything. I’d already sat down and worked out how I might do it, and I found she did it pretty much the same way. It was all paper-based of course, because I didn’t have a computer. But it was good.

Lyn: That’s interesting; they’re still bringing out the sheets.

Well, it’s just so much easier to see it all in a moment. I’m sure the computer’s good for some things – printing out at the end of the day what you’ve done, and putting all your notes on that instead of writing laboriously on people’s job sheets. But it all changes so quickly... We had these huge book-keeping books.

Lyn: They still use those.

So I set it up, and everybody wanted to know – but nobody wanted to belong to it if nobody else belonged to it! So I became this very experienced fudger. Richard Clark was the first person to come on the books, but he thought he was the 12th. I didn’t tell him for years that he was the only person on the books for the first few weeks. Then I remember going after Alan Locke – he didn’t like the idea; he thought it was all a bit strange. Richard Clark was a video cameraman, but we didn’t have any film cameramen. I think Jim (Bartle) might have come on quite early in the piece, though.

Before I had many cameramen on the books I would promote them to production companies and then I’d ring them and say, Look, I’ve set up this agency, and people are ringing me all the time and they want to book you; and you know, I’d really love you to come onto the books. Oh God, nobody knew; at one stage I had 12 people, but I made it sound as if there were about 35!

And then Christine Macrill came and joined me, and she and I job-shared, which was great, because she had Pare – her stepson, who was the same age as Hamish. We took turn about in school holidays, and we did that for five years – and it worked. When I left we had 100 people on the books and we charged $30 a month.

It was a good little business. We had an old answerphone that Mike Westgate gave me; so when Lyn and I went camping to Pakiri we’d never tell anyone we’d gone camping, because they might think, My professional life’s in your hands and you’ve left! So the answerphone would be on, and at Pakiri I’d have to go to the phone box and ring the answerphone and put in these complicated numbers and get our messages. But it was fun.

After I sold Filmcrews I spent some time at home, because Hamish was starting secondary school and I wanted to spend some time with him. Then I started freelancing again, back in production, since that had been my training. I’d done production at Australia’s Channel 10; before that I’d done sound at the BBC and sound at Auckland’s Radio 1ZB. I did production management – did some big jobs, and quite enjoyed it; but it was really involving work, quite hard with a kid at home.

Lyn had started working for Matinee Films with Andy Roelants and Grant Marshall. (I think Andy was the first freelancer in Auckland wasn’t he?) Lyn then set up The Art Department Limited, and I started running the production side of it, organising that. It was an awful lot of work, because we subcontracted the whole art department; we would put all the bills we got through our company and then we’d just give one invoice to the production house. There were all these different jobs happening, there was so much work in those days. So that’s what I did for ages.

We did a lot of work then, mostly commercials. Lyn did some features, but then it got hard living with and being married to someone who’s away on features all the time.

Lyn: I think one year I was only home for about three weeks.

I thought, Well, this isn’t working for me. If I’m going to be on my own, I might as well be completely on my own, instead of… So then Lyn just took commercials after that; he’d also had an experience with one feature which disillusioned him with features somewhat.

NZT:_ So only commercials from that point on._

Absolutely. Commercials are actually really good, though. I’ve always thought they were good; they are a fantastic training ground. When I was at Filmcrews some people would say, Oh, I don’t want to work on commercials, I only want to work on a film – but I knew, and had known for a long time, that in a year’s worth of commercials in those days, the 80s, you’d confront every filming situation that you’re ever going to find.

It’s such a shame that those commercials aren’t there anymore to give art department people work. There are so many commercials now that don’t have an art department, I believe; they’re either very big and they do have a big art department, or they don’t have any at all. Well, that’s what happened for us, Lyn, didn’t it?

NZT: But when that sort of work was drying up, you were also feeling it was time to move on and do something else?

I think the work left us more than we left the work. I mean, if the work had continued… It was incredibly varied, and we actually had so much fun on the shoots. We were surrounded by really good crews as well, on every major job. Yeah, very professional, but they were comedians! And you knew it was all going to happen as intended – basically, it was all very smooth.

Lyn and I met on a cheesecake ad – that was funny. We were shooting in Haddon Hall; it had tiered seating, and the director and rest of the crew were sitting around gossiping whilst we were doing the pack shot of these appalling cheesecakes that were machine made – just awful! Lyn was the art department, along with Liz Croft; so he was cutting the slices and bringing them in. The client would say, Oh, no, no, it’s a little bit rough around the edges, it’s not exactly looking precision-cut... (where the machine has put the fruit in a straight line, and then there’s a straight line of the cream and then a straight line of the base). I tried to say to him, Well, it looks a bit homemade otherwise, it looks better if it looks homemade. But he wanted the machine look, and he said, No, I don’t like it, bring another one! So these slices were coming out… Eventually I thought, we haven’t got that many cheesecakes, have we? I went out the back and said, Where are you getting all these cheesecakes from? And Lyn said, Nowhere, I’m just recycling them. I said, Okay, and I went up to the director and said, We’ve got a problem – we’ve been looking at the same bits over and over. We’ve actually run out – we need an Executive Decision. Okay, he said. So the next one came out and he said, No, no, that’s not good enough – another one! The next one came in and he said, Perfect, that’s the one, don’t you like that? Yes, that’s it, we’re doing that one; and the client said, Oh, yes, yes, that’s good.

You used to smoke too, Lyn. I remember doing an ad with Lynton Butler, and Lyn had to paint the grime into the bottom of a shower. Lyn used to always have a fag hanging out of his mouth; and you know how some people keep the ash on all the time? Lyn used to do that. Gradually the crew got quieter and quieter and Lynton didn’t want to say anything, but he was motioning towards this ash, which was going to drop off any minute on all this wet paint, but it never did!

Do you have any thoughts on what’s happened with the Guild since you stopped being President? Because things have evolved, it’s changed…

Oh, I just think it’s stunning, fabulous. I think Dave Madigan did a great job. When he took over I said to him, Look, I’m there if you want to ask any questions, but he never ever did; and I thought, Oh – doesn’t he want to use this wonderful knowledge I have? But he went in and he just sorted it all out for himself and became aware of everything. Amazing!

The stuff that they’ve done with immigration, and with dealing with other screen industry organisations, and dealing with the Film Commission – I think Fritha’s stunning. It’s really miles ahead of what it was when I was President. I think we did a good job, but I wouldn’t have taken it where Dave took it, and I think he’s been very, very good for us.

I think the Guild’s in very good heart. But I do think it somehow has to involve everyone, from all departments.

And then we’re absolutely blessed to have AlBol there now, because he is such a gorgeous figure, and he’s such an authority. You have so much confidence in everything he says, because his integrity is so legendary.

I did a shoot with AlBol once. He came up north with his equally legendary bare feet! Geoff Murphy was also in the habit of appearing with bare feet. Once financier David Richwhite came to a meeting because he was going to invest in a film; then Geoff (our expert advisor) arrived, barefoot of course, sat down and proceeded to put on his socks and shoes for the meeting. The socks didn’t match, of course, and David Richwhite could not seem to take his eyes off this spectacle! Like you, Lyn, Geoff always had a fag hanging out of his mouth too…

In the next issue we’ll focus on Lyn, both his art department career and his other life as a regularly exhibiting artist in paint.

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