$29.95 AUD
AC: When you showed ‘On Any Morning’ in theatres in early 1970s, and went on the road with it, how many shows did you do?
Mex: ‘80 or 100. We went right around Australia twice, over three years. We showed it in New Zealand, my brother Rodney, showed it in England. We did better in Adelaide a year later than on our initial run. A lot of the shows were 400-450 people. There wasn’t the Internet, there wasn’t downloads, there wasn’t even VHS. A surf movie was a meeting place. The guys went and the girls went to meet them.’
‘As I had showed other peoples movies in the past, it taught me a lot about what I needed to do. When I was putting it together I had a meeting with the ASDC and said ‘I show my movie myself, I take my projector in my VW and I book the halls, I show the film and I get the money back, so they lent me $2000 to make the movie. It was really hard to get publicity back then with the newspapers, but I met a young guy called Phil Jarrett who said ‘give me $250 and I will get you in the newspapers.’ The story got in every newspaper in Australia and it read as follows ‘David hungers after film success’…’David Sumpter lived on rice and vegetables and slept in the back of his car to make his first film. ‘ With publicity like that I couldn’t go wrong.’
‘Surfing is a wonderful thing. You can drive up in a carpark, look out to sea, and there will be another bloke there that you don’t know at all, but you can comment on the conditions, or comment on a surfer who just caught a wave and you have broken the ice. That is still happening, that is still a basic we have in common, but the retailing is following every other business structure and getting bigger, then going public. Once we were a cottage industry… but nothing stays the same.‘
We can sell you these films, on dvd.
