About Face: Jewel's Darl

Filmmakers sometimes find themselves caught in a waiting room between their early short films, and their first full-length feature. How do you go about building up filmmaking experience, and an audience and ensure potential talent is not being lost to an industry?

In the days before film courses, 48 hour film contests and cheap digital moviemaking, these could be tricky questions indeed.

1985's About Face was an attempt at an answer: seven contemporary dramas for television. Seven dramas that allowed a new wave of writers and directors to stretch out and tell a story that was longer than a short, shorter than Utu, and different from the television norm.

Jewel's Darl director Peter Wells: "It was low-budget, fast turn-around, yet high quality, quite individualized drama. Each one was completely different, and it was like making seven mini-features very quickly."

Film-wise, in 1984 not a lot was going on. The Government had just closed off tax loopholes, sending private investment scurrying. Frustrated by a lack of funding, Peter Wells, Gregor Nicholas and other independent filmmakers formed the New Film Group.

Among other ideas, they proposed a package of short dramas for TV, knowing that programmers prefer regularity over individual short films.

The NFG took their anthology idea to producers Bridget Ikin and John Maynard (working under the banner of Ikin's Hibiscus Films). The Film Commission, keen to support new filmmakers, agreed to invest alongside a finance company. 

Networks in England and New York bought the results, and later five of About Face's directors went on to direct feature films - with a sixth working extensively in television.

But first Ikin had to whittle roughly 150 script ideas down to seven, keeping her eye out for non-racist, non-sexist ideas that suited a half-hour running time.

Each director was given a relatively generous two weeks to shoot, while the producers frantically juggled seven balls. The creative team often swapped jobs between episodes, as with previous anthology series Winners and Losers.

The episodes screened in the following order (directors in brackets):

1) Danny and Raewyn (Gregor Nicholas) - a portrait of a decaying suburban relationship

2) The Lamb of God (Costa Botes) - comic-horror about sheep taking over

3) A Fitting Tribute (Greg Stitt) - a tale of a mythmaking Kiwi legend

4) Jewel's Darl (Peter Wells) - life for a transsexual and a transvestite in love

5) Return Journey (Shereen Maloney) - a mother and daughter recall past differences

6) Universal Drive (Martyn Sanderson) - conflicts between a car loving brother and sister

7) My First Suit (Stewart Main) - a gay teenager's coming of age

The shows chosen reflected a desire to move beyond familiar staples of the Kiwi screen - the rural, the macho, the romanticized - and mine drama from tales of ordinary people. Six of the seven stories were set in the city.

Three episodes had women on the writing team, and five put women actors into key roles. Roughly half of the writers and directors had never made a drama before.

Completed in 1985, About Face debuted in August 1986, at 10pm. The questionable time-slot was a compromise; television executives originally wanted to drop the Jewel's Darl episode entirely, arguing it violated public standards (starring future MP Georgina Beyer, it also featured strongly in the show's generally impressive reviews).

The signs About Face was on the right track began to appear even before it went on air. TVNZ productions themselves begun looking in different directions - Roche (1985) and Open House (premiering two months before About Face) also shared working class characters, urban settings, and better female roles.

Producer Bridget Ikin remarked (in 1986): "we took a lot of risks, working with directors and writers who hadn't been involved with narrative drama before. The series vindicates our belief that it is necessary to take risks like that."

The Return Journey episode received a Merit Award at the 1985 Chicago Film Festival. In 1987 About Face was nominated for five Gofta awards. It was a finalist in Best Drama Series. Jewel's Darl was nominated for Best Writing for a Drama: (Anne Kennedy, Peter Wells), Best Director (Peter Wells) and Best Single Drama Programme.

Three of the five nominations for Best Performance by a Female in a Dramatic Role (including winner Jennifer Ward-Lealand) were from About Face episodes. The other actress nominations came from a show whose title perhaps best encapsulated the About Face mission: Open House.