Pretty much as predicted by the Weather Bureau 24 hours or more before, light rain set in as the invited glitterati of Adelaide arrived at the new film studios at Glenside this evening to both open them and farewell the Premier, Mike Rann, as part of this, his final public duty in that role.
500 guests – Labor Party luvvies, filmanistas and assorted arts luminaries – got a little wet and feasted on bland wine and the usual assortment of canapés that cost taxpayers around $120 a head. Cate wasn’t there. Graham Cornes arrived seemingly desperate to be buttonholed by the camera-armed TV media but wasn’t. The man they wanted wouldn’t have a bar of them. Bob Ellis wandered around dressed somewhere between David Tomlinson and Dick van Dyke in Mary Poppins, Kevin Foley was present and accompanied by someone of the expected age and poor Nicole Cornes, adorned with a plunging neckline that left little to the imagination, looked lost and craving for attention. The new premier was nowhere to be seen.
Amidst abysmally lack security and seemingly organisation in the face of adverse weather, speeches were made on a walkway high above the attendees in sound studio 2 sans microphone.
The spunky Cheryl Bart as Chair of the SA Film Corporation, was quick to dismiss the pesky criticism of the largesse given out to the ABC for its scheduling of filming for its kids series at Glenside by references to a multitude of SA Film Commission sponsored films of recent times, some of which we knew of, many others we suspected never made it to DVD distribution. She praised Mike Rann as a great man, one ‘who would put his money where his mouth was’ seemingly oblivious to the fact that it was taxpayers’ all along the way.
Rann stepped forward to remarkably restrained applause and then had to contend with a cuttlefish protester who, through the near nonexistent security, had managed to climb the walk way and now waved his fishing net full of dead molluscs at us.
These studios, Rann said, would be our ‘Paramount Studios’, of course ‘world class’, at least to anyone who knows anything about the film industry. (Many suspect the new ‘Paramount of Parkside’ cannot even mount the claim to be being sound proof.) His last announcement in office of the replacement for Bart was by no means an electrifying moment – the luvvies had moved on. The King is dead, but where in Hell was the next one?
There may be something prophetic about the way this night went. The cuttlefish man was previously joined by anti-uranium protesters who dashed into the courtyard and made a scene. Was the magic of spin and control already eluding the next gen?
The dark bland background of Sound Studio 2, lack of euphoria and the rain falling on the parade may be metaphors for the problems now besetting this State and the new premier when he takes command in a few hours. When you are $3.8b of debt shy of your AAA criteria and you have blown $8b in just three years (more on these numbers another time), only the most difficult of times await you.
Were the studios and its audience, diligently faithful in their support of their paymaster, suspecting they were about to join the rest of us into ramming into a massive fiscal iceberg?
Both Rann and Bart’s speeches will make for interesting reading in even a year’s time, period pieces to the era when we believed our emperors still wore bright new shiny clothes. May be they do and still will.
Cynics abate! The glass is forever only half full. Let the cameras roll. Another game changer in our midst.
Goodbye Mike, things will not be the same without you.
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