[You wake up in New Zealand after 5 days in Australia for the 30th Annual Gay and Lesbian Sydney Mardi Gras and you try and put it all together in your head, ordering the thousands and thousands of impressions and reactions, trying to get a handle on your own experience of it, not only the event itself but as the director of a documentary about it which gives you a somewhat different perspective on everything that occurred because not only were you there and seeing it yourself but you were simultaneously trying to record what was happening as it happened]

The Team

Xavier is Camera 1. His footage is going to form the basis of everything. He’s got a bigger, better but necessarily slower cam. He is going to get the great wide visuals and the interviews. Andy is Camera 2. He’s going to be my mobile unit. He is going to get the quick shots, the details, and he’s going to be running lots. He’ll also be away from me focusing on things that I won’t see until later. Amid 300,000 people watching the Parade, the 10,000 people in it, and the 18, 500 people at the Party, they are going to be my eyes and my ears. We’ll be working amid human chaos a lot. I need to know what they are doing when they are doing it. My awareness through most of the weekend is going to be split between my own eyes and them and their cameras. I will have to rely on them and because I am me, I will also like and love them for what they are doing. We will merge as a unit. We will become psychically attuned to each other. We will know each other’s rhythms Then there is Matt - Associate Producer, Shoot Manager and Production Runner simultaneously. He is going to ground things. He’s going to perform an organisational function that we’ll all need. He’s going to be Comms - organising the punters and knowing where everyone is. And then there is Glenn - Producer. He’s going to give me overview. His Charm-Offensives are going to get us entry into places and get us services. He’s going to solve bureaucratic problems. I’ll go to him for advice. He’s going to keep tabs on everything. He’s going to nudge me into other directions. He’s going to anchor everything.

Why Can’t Aircrafts Always Be Like This

Late on the Pink Flight, I’m standing beside Xavier in what would be Business Class normally. Anne Spier has a drink, a magnolia in her her hair, and is sprawling in a seat talking to a Drag Queen. A boy without a shirt is standing behind her talking to another boy without a shirt. James Leuii, the DJ, is standing talking intently to someone else. The pink-stetsoned 42 Below guys are still handing out cocktails. Kids are running amid the streamer-litter on the floor. Xavier is getting views of clouds out the ports just to illustrate the fact that we are 10 kms above the earth’s surface. The cabin has a slightly pink glow from all the pink stuff - pink plastic leis, souvenir pink flight bags given to everyone - lying around being reflected by the white bulkheads. It is relaxed, not at all like the frenzy that was depicted on the Campbell Live item about the Pink Flight. At this moment it feels like a pleasant gay and lesbian bar and I wonder why flights aren’t always like this. I’ve roamed the length of the plane. I’ve stood in the crew areas. We’re seated in Economy and that is just the same.There is no real disorder, just people enjoying themselves. We could always be having a New Era in Flight, I think, freed from seating constraints, an easy party in the stratosphere, drinks in hand….

Sydney Light

There is a softer more reddish glow to Australian light when it is compared to New Zealand’s sharp white-edged brightness. I’ll try several times in the weekend to get this light as it falls on the Sydney sand-stone walls, as it is absorbed by the old brick and rusted wrought iron of houses in Darlinghurst, and the dapple of gum and palm-shadows on old-painted walls and steps.

Hotel

Like most New Zealanders at Mardi Gras we are staying at a hotel. I’m sharing with Matt and Andy. Sometimes I’ll wake up from four hours sleep and put on my sunglasses straight away, while I’m still in bed. I’ll learn the lengths of Andy’s showers and Matt’s ability to somehow limit his mess to his suitcase. We’ll live in amid camera-equipment, discs and tapes, a broadband-connected laptop, and Matt’s production folders - and clothes, two copies of The Butt Book, a bottle of Chanel’s Cuir De Russie, Andy’s hair-straighteners, and Matt’s collection of gay Sydney magazines. The great view out over Wooloomooloo, Darlinghurst and King’s Cross will sustain me in the few minutes I have alone here to sit and think. The air-conditioning is always being adjusted. I like frigid. Matt likes warmer. Andy alternates.

One-Two-Three-Four-And-One

They are rehearsing ‘I Am What I Am’ with Carlotta. This is to be the second show. It went on first in 1988, then it was repeated in 1998, now it is being repeated in 2008. The great spaces of the Royal Hall of Industries, the RHI, are cluttered with equipment. Tomorrow it will be filled with 10,000 dancing gay men. The dancers are dressed in civvies. ‘One-Two-Three-Four,’ the chereographer chants into a mike in an Australian accent. I’m pissed off a little because we aren’t being allowed to shoot it and I’m pacing up and down while Xavier sits in a plastic chair near the back-stage with his camera on the floor. I have an unexpected encounter with Peter Dragecevich, former editor of express and the Sydney Star Observer, also here on a media-pass, which is fun. Then five minutes later we are given permission to shoot, just in time for the rehearsal to end…..

Oxford Street - Friday Night.

I think for many New Zealander’s Mardi Gras is almost a ritual sequence of events: Travel - Arrival in Sydney - Friday Night Oxford Street Bars - Saturday Morning Shopping - Saturday Afternoon and Evening Mardi Gras Parade - The Mardi Gras Party - Recovery. To me it is like the Stations of The Cross and I’m trying to capture this sense of an ordained journey. Oxford Street on Friday night is busy. There are queues for Midnight Shift and Stonewall and the Columbian. Oxford Street is filled with gay visitors - no longer quite the gay centre that it once was, but for a moment it recaptures a past. We shoot inside Stonewall. Xavier is getting boys dancing. Andy is doing barstaff, cash registers filled with money and glasses being filled. It is Twink Heaven. Three floors of Twinks. Jam-packed. Outside the footpaths get more and more crowded. It is possible just to stand there and within a few minutes you’ll meet scores of New Zealanders you know.

Parade Leaders

Craig Gee and Shane Brennan were attacked and savagely beaten up three months ago - for holding hands. They are amongst the the Parade leaders. Standing out in Hyde Park after the Mardi Gras Media launch there is a small media scrum around them. The Channel Ten reporter is pushy and pisses me off. I really don’t like him. We are coming in on the middle of a story that has been extensively reported in Australia. I ask Shane to just tell me what happened. For me it is a devastating recital of the details of the attack - from Shane turning around to see Craig on the ground getting stomped in the head to the text-messages - “We killed your faggot son” - sent to Craig’s parents on his stolen cell-phone. Standing there in the Park I can feel my eyes prickle with tears. Shane’s level delivery of the story, its content, and his reactions to it all get to me big-time. I think it is his precise and matter-of-fact delivery of the events that really does it to me. The moment when he turns around to see Craig on the ground is almost visceral to me. I have to haul myself together to do the next question. Two day’s later when I’m tired and I’m trying to tell a friend the experience of doing that interview, I will actually have tears rolling down my cheeks.

Carmen

Interviewing Carmen is like interviewing an ancient Aztec Goddess.

Eye-Candy

For every New Zealander, Sydney seems full of unimaginable eye candy. It is boompf! and there is another one. There is ‘Oh he works for me.’ There is ‘Did you see that hottie?’. I’ll speculate on whether the fact that Australia’s immigration policy post World War Two letting in so many Italians and Greeks has helped the gene-pool. I’ll contemplate the fact that a larger gay population will mean, statistically, that there is a greater chance of attractive males appearing. At all events this plethora of eye-candy is one of the constants in my weekend. ‘Xavier, get that one,’ I say to Xavier, figuring that if anyone does watch our product, eye-candy is some part of the parcel they’ll want.
Views of a Producer

In sunglasses, full-face, talking on his mobile. In sunglasses, profile, talking on his mobile. In sunglasses, walking, talking on his mobile. In a white hotel bathrobe, with a laptop, talking on his mobile.
Random Surrealism

It is chaos in the Parade Assembly area. Floats are being assembled. People are getting dressed. There are bizarre mixtures of Greek Warriors, drag-queens, rugby players, soldiers, the chaperoned New Zealand Safe-Sex Posterboys, gay NSW Volunteer Firemen, boys in hotpants, and Asian Princesses…. Everywhere you look there is a bizarre juxtaposition. Asian tourists on the other side of the barrier are flashing enough cameras to illuminate several streets. It is our first taste of the crowded chaos that the night will become. I’m getting my first ‘Whr r u?’ txts. I’m also learning about moving a crew through this environment. It helps that we’ve been assigned Ryan and Arthur, two late-twenties, worked-out, good-looking Sydney gay-boys (except Ryan was originally from Christchurch) as our Media Liaisons. They are in pink Mardi Gras volunteer T-shirts. At first I think ‘Fuck, another two people I have to haul around’ but they quickly prove their worth. Arthur lugs our heavy camera tripod and Ryan leads. They are alert to our needs and they take us places. They are a couple and they work on all sorts of levels. They almost look like the ideal gay relationship. In fact, looking at other media crews, I think we’ve got the hottest ones…. Music merges: drums, ‘I Am What I Am’, more drums, whistles, ‘Go West’… More Asian tourists flash their cameras. Extras mingle. Drag-queens in huge self-sewn feathered costumes twirl. Make-up is applied. Loincloths adjusted. Sirens sound.

Parade 

This is the moment that it is going to be clear what we face. It is like being marooned on one of those desert islands in cartoons. We are on the parade route, hemmed in by 300,000 people. I feel as if I have every one to look after as well as having to know where they are and what they are doing. Xavier and Andy are falling into the right routine. Andy is getting in there, right to the middle of things. He’s alert and fast. Xavier is getting the lovely wide-shots from front and side as well as going in to get the detail when he can. The crowd is screaming when the 78ers, those people who were the instigators of the first Mardi Gras riot in 1978, come out, thirty years later, to lead the parade. They’re followed by Margaret Cho, and then there is Craig Gee and Shane Brennan, our beaten-up boys. ‘Them,’ I yell to Xavier and Andy, and Craig and Shane get out of their convertable surrounded by our cameras and hold hands and begin to walk up Oxford Street, and in a weekend when the hairs on my arms will rise often at certain moments, I’m prickling and a shiver goes up my back as Craig and Shane are cheered by thousands and thousands of people….