Serjeant-Major!

It was a surprise, to me certainly, just how many people turned up at the Film Industry Reunion on a May weekend in Auckland — especially how many had travelled from far away. Even before I booked my place, I regretted that I was committed to working on the Saturday and would only be able to be there on the Sunday — and I regretted it all the more as Sunday drew to a close. But for those who weren’t there, the reunion website www.nzfilmreunion.co.cc has a great selection of comments and photos, some of which we’re printing here. (See also Murray Milne’s selection of nearly 100 photos on his Facebook page.)

One thing that has always surprised me about working in this game is that, even though I’ve been involved in the screen production world since 1981, on every job I’ve ever done I’ve met someone new. And this reunion was no exception!

Amongst many highlights for me was meeting a guy whose name I’ve known almost as long as I’ve been a filmo — production manager Brian Walden. There’s a possibly slightly perverse kind of pleasure in being surprised when a man you’ve never met says that, Yes, he knows who you are and then apologizes for never employing you!

From anyone else the insincerity might have been gob-smacking, but Brian exuded that day such a genuine warmth and lust for life (perhaps increased by his recent stroke?) that delighted me.

I found myself wondering whether his nickname — the “Serjeant-Major”, aka “Sarge”, had been bestowed on him so many years ago because of his manner, or as an ironic counterpoint to it…

After sharing with great enthusiasm a number of anecdotes, he gave me some pages about little incidents in his life he’d recently written while recovering from his stroke. Included was a cartoon drawn on a film set decades ago. Reading the accompanying text, I realized it had been drawn by another of our Oscar-winning guild members, Grant Major. Brian and Grant worked together on a number of TV series and at least one feature. The sketch and the story with it reflect a different world of television-making from the one we live in now…

Sarge wrote:

“Back in the early Mortimer’s Patch days, I turned up at the Waitakere Hospital location, as production managers do. The director said, ‘We’re short of extras — get Sarge into p-j’s and put him in a bed!’ I duly obliged. Trainee designer Grant Major, pencil and pad at the ready, was watching this…”

Tony F.