So what's the write stuff for an Oscar?

By GREG DIXON

You want to know about Hollywood? Australian Jan Sardi can tell you everything you need to know.

It's barking, it's crazy ... it's everything you thought it was and more.

Take the time that Sardi - who gave the world the script for the Oscar-winning Shine - was sitting with Diane Keaton waiting to see a Hollywood studio boss.

Their project, Victory Park, had already been "green-lighted" as they say in those parts, so the meeting was simply called so that the studio's big enchilada could nod his head.

"We'd spent the previous three days talking about this film, so the whole point of the thing was to meet with this guy," says Sardi.

Unfortunately the boss was busy - on the phone, his secretary said - and wouldn't be available for 10 minutes.

Time stretched. The secretary came back two or three times over the next 30 to 40 minutes with the same story. Sardi and co started to steam.

"And sure enough, the secretary comes back again. The message this time was: 'Start without me.'

"We all collapsed."

Hollyweird, for sure, but to Sardi it's starting to feel like par for the course.

Since Shine, the film about the life and psychosis of Australian pianist David Helfgott, Hollywood has thrown open its doors to Sardi - though as yet it's only invited him in twice.

There's the Keaton project about the American school system, and The Journey Is The Destination, the life story of 22-year-old Reuters photographer Dan Eldon, who was stoned to death with three other photographers in Somalia in 1993.

Both films have directors attached, but Sardi really has no idea when they'll be made. That, too, is Hollywood - a place he never really fought to work in.

A former schoolteacher, he was teaching drama and film and had done some theatre before he penned his first script in 1982 for a film called Moving Out.

Over the next 12 years he wrote around 16 film and television scripts in Australia (plus one for Hollywood, which was never made), but it's 1995's Shine which leaps out from his CV.

It was an unlikely sort of film to succeed in America. On paper it "looked like death at the box office" and was initially turned down by Hollywood's big and mini-major studios.

But from its first public screening, at the Sundance Festival, Shine became a sky-rocketing success which culminated in seven Academy Award nominations and an Oscar for its star, Geoffrey Rush.

"When you make movies you fantasise about Oscars," says Sardi. "You think, 'Wouldn't it be amazing?'

"But it is kind of like a fantasy. All you can really do is set out to tell a good story, tell it honestly and with as much skill and craft as you can. The rest is so much in the hands of other people."

Which is exactly what Sardi will be telling those who gather to hear him speak at an Auckland forum and a brunch organised by the New Zealand Writers Guild this month.

The secret to success Up Over for those making films Down Under is to stick to what they know, to listen to their own voice and be passionate about the story, he says.

"It's been said before, but the best special effects are story and emotion. Most of the big movies have got all those expensive effects and we [New Zealand and Australian film-makers] will never be able to compete with that.

"So what we have to go for is the smaller, intimate film focused on our particular part of the world, but which might speak to the rest of the world in terms of what it says about being a human being.

"In other words we're allowed to use subtext - something they just don't get in American film studios."

Another story: "I was putting up an argument about a scene about something that they [the Hollywood studio] didn't understand. I said, 'Look, it's all in the subtext. You have to understand that once it's up on the screen and people see it, they'll get it. It's all in the subtext.'

"The studio person said, 'Subtext, yeah, I love subtext, subtext is great. We just have to get the subtext on to the page.'"

That's Hollywood.

* Jan Sardi will speak in Auckland at a New Zealand Writers Guild forum on February 19 and at a brunch on February 20.