Moving Out is a 1983 film about a young Italian-Australian adolescent in Melbourne directed by Michael Pattinson.
Pattinson met Jan Sardi, who was a school teacher wanting to move into writing. They discussed making the movie as a 50-minute film and it evolved into a feature. Most of the money was raised privately except for $50,000 from the Australian Film Commission.David Stratton, The Avocado Plantation: Boom and Bust in the Australian Film Industry, Pan MacMillan, 1990 p359-360
The movie was shot over six weeks in various schools in inner Melbourne. It was shot on 16 mm and blown up to 35mm.
Story Gino Condello (Vince Colosimo) is an Italian Australian high school student in the inner suburb of Fitzroy in Melbourne.
Gino's best mate is the hyperactive class clown Renato (Maurice Devincentis) and the pair like to hang around in a wrecked car in a derelict lot with bogan, mullet-decorated Allan (Tibor Gyapjas), and blonde Sandy (Sally Cooper) who is infatuated with Gino, and the boisterous, blunt, overweight Helen (Desiree Smith).
Gino's father (Peter Sardi) and mother (Kate Jason) are routinely worried by the behaviour and attitudes of their teenage son, caught between the two worlds of being a 'wog' and being an Australian, not helped because they aren't fluent in English, and need Gino to help them interact with the Anglo world.
In the corner of the kitchen, like a brooding, rosary-wielding presence, sits a grandmother (Josephine Russian) clearly not long for this world.
Gino's world is flung into further turmoil by the arrival from Italy of some 'cousins' who will take over the family home in inner-urban Fitzroy, while Gino and his family will move out to the plush Italian mansion lifestyle of Doncaster - especially as the new arrivals include the disturbingly serene and angelic Maria (Nicole Miranda), though the new arrivals also include the irritating young Pippo (Julio Dalleore), who is always bugging Gino about something.
At school Gino endures a series of battles - the deaf old English teacher Mr Aitkins (Brian James) insists that he recite Dorothea Mackellar's poem "My Country" ("I love a sunburnt country") which has absolutely no meaning for his inner urban lifestyle
Art teacher Miss Stanislaus (Sandy Gore) encourages Gino to make a sculpture of a clenched fist, while the no nonsense science teacher Mr. Clarke (Ivar Kants) dishes it out to his charges as he gives them a lesson in static electricity.
Gino hangs loose with his mates, drinking beer and smoking, playing pinball, arguing with his parents, and deliberately mis-translating to his father what Mr Clarke has to say about his schoolwork.
Romantic matters build to a head when Gino dances with Maria at an Italian party in Doncaster, but then egged on by Renato, who says he knows the owner, Gino decides with the rest of the gang to break into an up-market home.
Renato pairs off with Helen and it seems that at last Gino might make out with Sandy, but just as they get to kissing stage, the cops arrive.
Gino and Sandy make a break for it, but inevitably Gino and his parents are dragged down to the station for a dressing down.
The trouble with the law is swept away by a flurry of incidents - the school's toilet block catches fire because of a wayward student cigarette, Mr Clarke's class is disrupted by a fart, Gino's grandmother dies, and soon enough it's time for Gino to say farewell to his old classmates, his old school and his old teachers.
The removal van arrives and there's just time for a few more reconciliations, as Maria smiles and waves Gino farewell, and Gino drags a Collingwood football club beanie over Pippo's head.
"That it?", asks the removalist, as Gino contemplates the red fist sculpture broken by Pippo, and says it is.
"Right, let's go", the removalist adds, as the van pulls into the street, and the camera cranes up to give us a last sight of Gino as he heads away from Fitzroy, into the wilds of an uncertain future in doric-pillared Doncaster ...
Cast
Vince Colosimo as Gino Sally Cooper as Sandy Tibor Gyapjas as Allan Maurice Devincentis as Renato Desiree Smith as Helen Sandy Gore as Miss Stanislaus
Production
Director Michael Pattinson made much later in publicity of his casting techniques for the film, claiming that he had seen and interviewed some 2,000 teenagers in Melbourne schools.
Pattinson in the first instance avoided standard audition techniques and instead asked the teenagers to tell jokes:
"Schools were very helpful when we lined up auditions for the kids," Mr Pattinson says. "We'd ask the kids to tell a joke, one with a story, it didn't matter how dirty. It turned out to be a good test of whether they could act in front of a camera." (The Age 19 April 1983)
According to another press report:
The experience was so much fun that he and his scriptwriter, Jan Sardi, rewrote some of the film's characters around the school kids they'd met" (Sydney Morning Herald, 19 May 1983)
For all the talk of the wide-ranging casting exercise, in some areas the seed fell close to the tree. Vince Colosimo was a former student of Jan Sardi's at St Josephs Marist Brothers College in North Fitzroy - the running joke is that Sardi failed him in drama in his first year.(In the DVD commentary, when Colosimo asks why Sardi failed him, Sardi tells him to "come on", he was a rebel and that can be seen in the film).
As if to confirm his rebellious streak, in the DVD commentary, Colosimo says he didn't know a joke and didn't want to tell a joke that he didn't think would be very funny. He claims the kids at his school thought they were auditioning for roles as extras in Cop Shop and remembers all the boys who stayed back did so because they hoped to meet that show's cast members, Linda Stoner and Paula Duncan.
Maurice Devincentis, who plays Gino's best friend Renato, was also a former student of Sardi's ("he always broke me up in class", Sardi recalled for Neil Jillett, op. cit.).
Desiree Smith recalls in the DVD interviews that Pattinson first met her as she frolicked in the fountain outside the Victorian 'national' art gallery. He subsequently met her at a drama school located in the small south eastern Melbourne suburb of Hawksburn, next to South Yarra.
Peter Sardi confesses he was about 29 when asked to play a character in his forties - he'd met director Pattinson when Pattinson was doing a student film at Swinburne Tech. Sardi played a crucial role in the film, workshopping all the young actors, and taking a dialogue coach credit.
Nicole Miranda, who played Maria, was interested in classical ballet and her younger sister Pia Miranda would go on to a career in film and television.
Sandy Gore, who plays the art teacher was then working in Melbourne theatre, which is how Pattinson knew her work.
These various "local" connections should be remembered, up against the notion that the cattle call search produced major results for the film (for more on the project's script development and casting see point 8 below)
Perhaps the best thing about the DVD interview featurette is Vince Colosimo reminiscing about the things he found confusing about making feature films - getting up at 6 am, only to hang around, shooting out of continuity, and shooting at all sorts of locations, in order to construct a scene.
As a result of the low budget flexible 16mm approach, the crew travelled to a variety of inner Melbourne locations. Schools filmed included Brunswick Tech, where the toilet catches, fire, but with a POV shot filmed at a school in South Melbourne. Other schools included St Josephs, where scriptwriter Jan Sardi had taught Vince Colosimo.
The film is in fact a homage to inner city Melbourne suburbs, including Brunswick, Fitzroy, South Melbourne and Collingwood - and a couple of Melbourne's major religions - Catholicism and Australian Rules football. These are extensively represented by way of memorabilia, from rosary beads to Ron Barassi.
That said, according to the DVD interview featurette, most of the interiors were shot in studios - at the Werribee Park studios for the school interiors, and at Fred Schepisi's Film House studio in Fitzroy for the kitchen and bedroom in Gino's Fitzroy home (the hallway and the bathroom were at separate real locations).
Many of the real locations - such as the docklands railway yards - have substantially changed since filming took place, and as a result, the film catches inner city views now lost to time. However Michael Pattinson, in the DVD commentary claims that the pinball parlour featured in the film, "the Blue Room", was still operational and still looked much the same at the time the DVD commentary was done (c. 2005).
According to the DVD interview featurette, the newspaper posters seen in the film were real and are a good guide to dating the actual period of the shoot.
In this case, it would seem that the film's six week, six days a week shoot, took place in February and March 1982. The Herald poster about PM sees Thompson, posing the question Poll?, references then Prime Minister Malcolm Frazer seeing then Victorian Premier Mr Thompson about a date for a state election, which Thompson would lose to Labor rival John Cain.
The poll date was set and the campaign was well under way by late March, with the Sydney Morning Herald on 25 March 1982 recording a TV confrontation between Thompson and Cain.
Another street poster references the Oakleigh Plate, which is a group one race that has been held near the end of February since it was first run in 1884.
This might help explain why Vince Colosimo and Desiree Smith both grumble that the first day of the shoot was located in the wrecked car, which the unit had placed in tall grass in the Melbourne suburb of Brunswick. It was a very windy 40-42 degree day, and in one shot it is possible to see smoke in the car escaping through a hole in the roof, which had been cut in to help with lighting, and possibly with ventilation.
According to director Michael Pattinson, he encouraged improvisation:
On set, the bravado of his young leads was so infectious that they adopted the practice of letting a scene go on beyond the words on the page.
"I let the cameras roll on them, until I yelled stop. We shot anything spontaneous that happened, and a lot of it stayed in the final cut of the film." (Sydney Morning Herald, 19 May 1983).
The treatment of language was a conscious and distinctive feature of the production, deriving from Jan Sardi's own experiences with language.
Instead of subtitling the Italian language, or having the Italian characters speak English, the decision was made to allow the characters to speak a mix of unsubtitled Italian and English, on the basis that the members of the Italian families, speaking in the Italian style, were expressive enough and as a result it was pretty clear what was going on.
Sardi notes in the DVD commentary adds that at the time it wasn't cool to be seen as Italian and so a lot of the kids at the school attempted to hide their migrant background. Kids would talk to their parents in English and the parents would talk back in Italian, so the production decision was part of the film's theme, of being caught between two cultures. It helped Sardi write the scenes, knowing that the drama could proceed without worrying that they would have to be subtitled.
In the DVD commentary, Colosimo notes he didn't speak English until he was four or five years old, and when he went to primary school, he and his twin brother and sister used to take home notes from the teacher asking his parents to speak more English in the home, because their two boys were having difficulty at school - the only trouble being that his mother and father couldn't read the note.