5 days ago
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Before James Reyne became famous in Australian Crawl, he was studying to be an actor at the Victorian College of the Arts. He met a wildly talented student from the year above, Vera Plevnik, and they became a couple.
“She was a big personality,” Reyne said from his home on the Mornington Peninsula, an hour out of Melbourne, on a day off from his Fall of Crawl tour. “A very vivacious woman. I was attracted to that. I don’t know what she saw in me but anyway.”
In time, they went their separate ways: Reyne to a successful music career that started with the 1979 hit Beautiful People then the classic The Boys Light Up; Plevnik to a most popular new talent Logie in 1980 for the TV series The Sullivans, then the film Monkey Grip.
It was another film that Plevnik had almost finished shooting when she was killed in a car accident in early 1982 – Haydn Keenan’s gritty, energetic drama Going Down – that brought the two of them back together.
Keenan said Reyne called him to offer a song for the soundtrack out of affection for Plevnik; Reyne thinks it was the other way around.
Either way, Going Down opens with a Reyne singing What’s It Like over a tracking shot of the carnage from a party in a Sydney share house.
Centring on four young women (played by Plevnik, Tracy Mann, Julie Barry and Moira MacLaine-Cross) on a last night out before one leaves for New York, the film was warmly reviewed but so disliked by cinema distributors that Keenan had to release it himself in 1983. It found an audience at Sydney’s long-gone Roma cinema but flopped in Melbourne.
The cast also included David Argue, who was both a roller-skating employment office clerk and a drag queen, and Esben Storm, who played a sordid writer, with cameos by Hugh Keays-Byrne, Claudia Karvan as a child, former barrister Charles Waterstreet and activist Gary Foley.
Reyne loved Going Down all those years ago and thinks it shows what a great actress Plevnik was.
“I’m remember laughing and going ‘This is just life, this is just how we live’,” he said. “We all lived in share houses. We went to those sort of parties.
“Every era has its own drug culture. [In Sydney then] it was Mandrax and booze.”
Going Down was a long-forgotten Australian film that captured a moment in the nation’s social history until an American filmmaker and distributor, Elizabeth Purchell, found an imported VHS of it in a New York video store. She liked that it was a female-centred film that was “so evocative of the time and place” and had a catchy soundtrack that included Pel Mel, Dynamic Hepnotics and The Birthday Party.
After Keenan found generous film industry friends who restored it in 4K, Going Down had a boutique cinema release in the US in May last year. It’s now getting a second life – more than four decades on – in Australian cinemas.
“I think it’s fantastic,” Reyne said of the revival. “There’s a great energy around the film because it came out of somewhere real – having to scrimp and save to make the film – and Haydn was probably pulling favours all over the place and using a core group of people.”
Reyne likes that Going Down was about young women, which was rare in contemporary Australian films at the time.
“They took drugs as well, got messed up and had fights and loved each other,” he said. “It was real.”
Keenan is “totally excited” that Going Down, having been restored so well that it looks better than it originally did, is heading back to cinemas.
“It’s $100,000 worth of work that I couldn’t have paid for,” he said. “The old-school film family saved the picture.
“It’s given young people the chance to see that there were different sorts of films being made. I think we’ve got two audiences: the old ones who saw it originally and want to go back and see how young and gorgeous they used to be. Then there’s a new young crowd going, ‘How come we haven’t heard about this film?’”
Keenan said Going Down was made at a time when there was an explosive energy in Australian culture.
“That’s one of the things it reflects – the nightlife in [Kings] Cross, the live bands everywhere,” he said.
“Things are so different now. Trying to raise money for feature films is now a Herculean task. To get a film in cinemas, you deserve an Order of Australia.”
Keenan still thinks of Plevnik’s death as a tragedy.
“It was so, so horrible,” he said. “She was an enormous talent and had a massive career in front of her.”
Going Down is in cinemas from May 14.
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