Chance find in a video store prompts US release of a cult Australian movie

More than four decades after it was made, a cult Australian film is being released in the US for the first time – after a distributor found a VHS copy in a New York video store last year.

Haydn Keenan’s raggedly boisterous drama Going Down, about four young women on a last night out before one leaves for New York, had a troubled production and a patchy Australian release despite glowing reviews in 1983.

“The picture is written by four young women, it’s about their lives and young women were the ones who really responded strongly to it’: Director Haydn Keenan with Tracy Mann, who stars in Going Down.Credit: Steven Siewert

The Australian Financial Review called Going Down “an inspiring achievement” with “all the wit and inventiveness that tempts a critic to call it the best Australian film in years”. The Sydney Morning Herald considered it “a sharp, smart poem to those clinging on the undersides of Sydney”.

Other reviewers praised it as “a key work in the history of independent feature filmmaking in Australia” and “one of the most unusual, and unusually interesting, Australian features of recent times”.

The best known of the film’s stars are Tracy Mann, who played the departing Karli; David Argue, who was both a roller-skating employment office clerk and a drag queen; and Esben Storm, who played a sordid writer. There are cameos by Hugh Keays-Byrne, Claudia Karvan as a child, former barrister Charles Waterstreet, and activist Gary Foley, with songs by James Reyne, Pel Mel, Dynamic Hepnotics and the Birthday Party on the soundtrack.

Keenan released the film himself in Australia – no distributor was interested – and it found an audience at the now long-gone Roma cinema on Sydney’s George Street.

But it flopped in Melbourne after unwisely opening in grand final week at a former adult cinema. “The raincoat brigade wanted their money back,” he says.

So Keenan was stunned to get an email out of the blue from American filmmaker and distributor Elizabeth Purchell, who wanted to release Going Down in the US, where it has screened only in an Australian sidebar at the Sundance Film Festival.

“The way she talked about the film, in particular that it was a thing that young women were going to like, was something I really responded to,” he says. “The picture is written by four young women, it’s about their lives and young women were the ones who really responded strongly to it [in the 1980s].”

Purchell says she saw an imported VHS of the film for rent and vaguely recognised the title.

“I took a chance on it and I really, really liked it,” she says. “It’s so evocative of the time and place. I’ve never been to Australia, but it feels like such a wonderful portrait of what it must have been like in that era.”

“I remember late, late nights”: Mann in Going Down.Credit: Smart Street Films

Purchell’s Muscle Distribution is releasing a restored 4K version of Going Down in a Brooklyn art-house cinema on May 9 followed by releases in Austin, Chicago, Seattle, Los Angeles and Atlanta.

“I’m really going after as many cool, interesting art-house cinemas as I can,” she says. “Everyone I’ve shown the film to has really responded well to it.”

Part of Going Down’s appeal is that it is so little known.

“People are just really hungry to see new things,” Purchell says. “And, for me, this film has so many incredible hooks to it. It’s a female-centred film, it’s so evocative of the time and place, it’s got a great soundtrack.

Mann with David Argue, who played a roller-skating employment office clerk and a drag queen.Credit: Smart Street Films

“It’s got David Argue and Hugh Keays-Byrne, who a lot of cult movie fans will recognise from Mad Max, BMX Bandits, Razorback and all the other Ozploitation films.”

Tracy Mann, whose long career has included Home and Away and The Twelve, says the American release is exciting, as the film shows “a Sydney that doesn’t exist any more” and had a difficult production.

“We actually made it twice,” she says. “The first was in 1981 then in 1982 when one of the actresses was recast and Vera Plevnik played that role. To revisit something twice is very unusual.”

Going Down could also get a second life in Australian cinemas.Credit: Smart Street Films

Mann remembers “late, late nights” during the shoot that included standing around in Kings Cross and playing pool with Storm. She thinks the film captured the experience of many young women at the time.

“I don’t know if it’s that different now,” she says. “I’ve certainly heard that a lot of younger women who’ve seen it have gone, ‘Yes, I recognise that. That’s our story.’”

Mann also remembers the shock of Plevnik being killed in a car accident before shooting her final scene. “That was dreadfully sad,” she says.

Gary Foley (centre) is among the cameos.

Keenan sent off Plevnik’s character, hedonistic Jane, with a dreamy, late-night montage. “We had to construct a scene for her out of out-takes and bits of voiceover and optical effects,” he says.

He is now hoping Going Down will have a second life in Australian cinemas.

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