Fox Studios’ 21 blockbuster years well worth celebrating
Twenty-one years after Fox Studios opened its movie studio doors at Moore Park, the phone goes largely unanswered in the head office at Fox Studios, now part of the Walt Disney Company.
Opinion
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It might have been celebrated as a coming of age — but 21 years after Fox Studios opened its movie studio doors at Moore Park, the phone goes largely unanswered in the head office at Fox Studios, now part of the Walt Disney Company.
Perhaps this is because the business has had a remarkable year — changing hands in March after Disney acquired 21st Century Fox. The dust is likely still settling.
That said, the movie studio today is well separated from the mainstream media that has made Sydney the media capital of the nation.
This separation seems to have increased in recent years with this writer’s repeated attempts to reach someone at head office to compose a feature celebrating two decades of filmmaking in Sydney falling on deaf ears.
It follows a bizarre press conference in 2016 at Sydney Opera House for the launch of action movie Bleeding Steel starring Jackie Chan, then present, and attended by a horde of largely silent Chan-adoring Asian bloggers and digi-media types who asked few questions.
While the bloggers remained silent, those of us wishing to quiz Chan about the action scenes he’d shot on the Opera House sails were discouraged from doing so as a confounded Lee Lin Chin, as MC, struggled to interpret a press conference held almost entirely in spoken Mandarin.
Things were very different 20 years ago, in late 1999, when the studios officially opened for business to great fanfare with a glamorous party held in a sound stage on the well-trodden, well-fertilised expanse that for a century prior had been home to the Royal Easter Show, Sydney Showground.
Back then Fox Studios Australia was launched on the back of a revolutionary feature film — the $60 million Warner Bros-Village Roadshow cyberpunk movie, The Matrix, starring Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne and Carrie Moss, and written and directed by Lana and Lilly (formerly Laurence and Andrew) Wachowski.
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Filming of The Matrix had commenced in March 1998.
By the time Fox Studios opened in May, chunks of the city around Martin Place and Kent Street were blocked off to accommodate principal photography in re-imagined a gritty cityscape while helicopters hovered over the city.
Reeves became a part of the furniture in Sydney’s eastern suburbs.
Photographs of him riding his motorbike were published in the newspapers while reports of his strange breakfast ritual were shared by women claiming to have been bedded by him.
Sydney had arrived as an international film location.
The expression “Hollywood Down Under” was born. We were on the map as one of the largest film production studios in the Southern Hemisphere, launched into direct competition with the established Village Roadshow on the Gold Coast.
While there was overwhelmingly great excitement for the film studio and the promise of increased jobs in the creative sector, there was inevitable criticism from naysayers eager to see the enterprise fail — it didn’t — who worked diligently to undermine the opening of a backlot theme park which launched in November 1999 before closing in 2001.
Over the next two decades, a succession of big-budget films, including two Matrix sequels, were shot at Moore Park while some of the world’s most acclaimed modern-day action-adventure filmmakers pushed themselves to their creative limits on the site.
Among them was George Lucas who, in 2000 and 2003, directed the fifth and sixth films in his record-breaking Star Wars franchise, Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge Of The Sith and Episode II: Attack Of The Clones at Fox.
Like Lucas, Ridley Scott kept to himself during the making of Alien: Covenant in 2016.
Not so Australian filmmaker Baz Luhrmann, who held legendary cast parties at his nearby home and revelled in creating cinema magic at home in his big-budget films Moulin Rouge, Australia and The Great Gatsby.
Four Lego movies — The Lego Movies, The Lego Batman Movie, The Lego Ninjago Movie and The Lego Movie 2 — would seal its reputation for world-class animation.
And superheroes Superman
and Wolverine — and next year, Thor — have leapt from the green screen there.
Like Luhrmann, other Australian filmmakers enjoyed the comforts of working on home soil.
George Miller made Happy Feet Two and Mad Max: Fury Road there, Bruce Beresford bought the 1950s Sydney he loved to life in Ladies In Black, while reformed wild child Mel Gibson was celebrated for Hacksaw Ridge, also made there.
Television production companies too have utilised it as a base for shows too numerous to mention but among them, Australian Idol, The X Factor, The Voice, Dancing With The Stars and The Masked Singer.
The next chapter in Fox Studios’ life will be written by Disney and this movie fan, for one, looks forward to it investing new life — and some of the old energy and openness — in the celebrated old girl.