Things sure turn around quickly in the Australian film industry.

Right now, as of (so far as I can tell) last month, we are in a "bumper year" for Australian film, which can only mean one thing. Weekend newspaper articles about The New Generation of Filmmakers, telling Australian Stories and being photographed in designer clothing in the morning sunlight, looking serious but not wearing any shoes.

At any rate, it will be fun to see the Jacobson family (from Kenny ) turning up to the AFIs to mix it up with Heath Ledger's people and hopefully coming home with some loot.

Speaking of, you know, culture and stuff... Noack, who I have mentioned here before in relation to his cultural contribution to the State of Victoria through the form of Estonian Dance, is rumoured to be making a dancing comeback over the next few months. Anyone wants to know anything more about exactly how close to the front of this spectacular I will be sitting, just let me know. I can probably jack you up with a ticket. It's not something you want to miss.

The weekend of a writer who should really be at home finishing a script goes a little something like this:

Friday night - go to George Orwell's 1984 at the Melbourne International Arts Festival. This is one of those things I never would have thought of myself, but Rita thinks of most things for me and this was a present from her. The adaptation, by Michael Gene Sullivan is quite brilliant. It was directed by Tim Robbins and performed by The Actors' Gang. That's a pretty impressive line-up, just quietly.

The reason I say I wouldn't necessarily have seen the play myself is that 1984 is about the role of the powerful in society. It's extremely clever, but once you've read it, you get it, right?

But this play makes your head explode because it's clearly about today's society. It's about terrorism and Guantanamo Bay and people in power lying about wars, and it's about the economy working only when there are lots of poor and uneducated people. There's a torture scene that, even though the play was in the State Theatre and it was the opposite of claustrophobic in there, you really just wanted to leave. Some people did. So, quite a brilliant Friday night thanks to the always thoughtful Rita. My only quibble would be that they needed microphones (even just a central overhead mic would have been helpful). Everytime someone coughed, I wanted to clock them over the head.

Saturday, I went shopping. I hate shopping more than I hate the two major political parties in this country, and more than brussels sprouts. I had to recruit my friend Claire, who found me an entire new wardrobe within an hour and a half.

Saturday night, well as I've said somewhere here before, everyone in commercial radio gets stuff for free. I got a call from my mates in radio who had lined themselves up with a four course meal and unlimited booze for an entire evening because a restaurant was opening in East Melbourne. It was an increasingly hilarious evening and it took me an embarrassingly long time to recover on Sunday.

Sunday night, went and saw Little Miss Sunshine, a ridiculously farcical but funny and sweet film which was perfectly cast, very well performed, and which features many frankly alarming scenes shot in a real life beauty pagent for teensy tiny little girls tarted up to look like nineteen-eighties hookers. The film is very much a case of "what could possibly go wrong next in this hilarious dysfunctional family", but the characters are actually cleverer than that, and anyway, it's a fun ride, so shut up.

But the writing? Didn't get to the writing. Thinking I might get onto that now. Right after this cup of tea.

Last night I went to the Shed Warming at the Arts Festival, where I had a few drinks and decided I liked Kristy Edmunds, if only because of the Artist Card policy, which encourages artists to come to the festival at a slightly discounted price. This is obviously a good idea for the festival, because artists are going to want to go to the festival and they're not necessarily going to be able to afford it. So make them go to more stuff, make them bring more friends, and there's your (satisfied) audience.

Which brings me to the question of how come rich people get stuff for free?

I've never understood why people with money get invited to stuff for free and that's supposed to make the rest of us want to go. When I worked in radio, I got everything for free. Movies, CDs, concert tickets. Now that I have a wonky income? I pay full price for everything. I know it's about power and influence and fame and so on, but are they serious? They seriously think that if they can get, say, John Travolta to turn up for five minutes before the opening night screening of Swordfish, that's going to make anyone in that audience tell their friends to go and see the worst movie of 2001 all because John Travolta turned up, looked embarrassed, and then got on a plane to L.A? I'll tell you what they're going to do. They're going to do what Stitzy and I did, which is hang out eating the free food and drinking the booze and saying how turd the movie was.

People aren't stupid. It even works the other way. Bad marketing can't stop something genuinely good from working. Look at Kenny, the Australian comedy feature (and haven't we learned to love those words) released several months ago. I personally think that the marketing concepts for Kenny were terrible. I mean, it got a lot of pre-publicity, and the website is slick and everything, but they were marketing the wrong thing. Anyone with a healthy fear of dumb-Aussie-bloke-orientated films (and I don't think I'm on my own here) was not going to be enraptured by a poster featuring a dim-looking chap with a dunny brush surrounded by toilet paper.

But Kenny is a gorgeous film. It's not really about poo, or dumb blokes, or loveable idiots with hearts of gold. It's not even about comedy, really. You never once feel like you're being fed a gag, you're just getting to know a character. So what made me go from heart-sinking disappointment at the sight of the poster, to paying good money to see the film?

Two things: word of mouth, and Kenny. I was watching TV at gym one time and Kenny came on. Completely ad libbing in some mindless TV interview, it was hardly the environment in which anyone can shine. But shine he did, and I had to slow down the treadmill while I watched him sensitively describing the flushing mechanism on a toilet.

So, look, my point is, audiences are going to work it out. Kenny shouldn't have been marketed like that. I still know women who won't see it because "it looks terrible" or they're not interested in "toilet humour", and I think that's bad because women are actually who a lot of it is aimed at. So they got it wrong. But after two weeks, everyone had two friends telling them they had to see this new Aussie film called Kenny.

So dear distributors and production companies, please stop giving free tickets to people who never pay for anything anyway and who own three houses and two boats. Give the free tickets to the people who can't afford them and watch your audiences grow with the good films and sink with the lousy ones. It's really not that complicated.

I know, I know. I should really be running the country.

By the way, if you're going to see Kenny, here's some advice: see it in a HUGE cinema. Think of the biggest cinema you've been to and see it there. Do NOT see it in a teensy weensy cinema where the hand-held camera is so bad that several of you have to leave the movie and go outside and spew. There is a sign up at the Nova in Carlton warning people prone to motion sickness to sit up the back. Sit as far back as Fitzroy North would be my advice.

Last night I saw The Devil Wears Prada. It was a film that rang many bells for me, because it is about being a small fish in an industry that thinks it's important. It's also about working for arseholes, so yay for that.

It's a very silly film that makes you realise how much Sex in The City has to answer for, with pretty people prancing about drinking coffees and being shocked by changes in their own behaviour ("It was then that I realised..." etc). However, it has a sense of humour about its (very predictable) self, and what more can we ask from Hollywood fashion movies?

Speaking of pretty people swanning about thinking they're more important than they are, I'm off now to the Shed Warming for the Melbourne Arts Festival.

I went to a Fringe Festival show last night, and I was late. This is not a surprising or newsworthy event by any means, but it did afford me the opportunity to catch up with the doorbitch while I waited for the "late entry" moment when they open the door and allow you to slink guiltily into your front row seats (man I hate it when pricks like me walk in late to shows).

Anyway, the doorbitch at this show was a chap who goes by the handle of Noack. Now, Noack is the kind of bloke who rigs his shitbox car up with an elaborate alarm system, so that when he approaches the car in the street and points a remote control at it, passers-by are befuddled to see a 1984 model Sigma going "bloopbloop". Several years after first meeting Noack, I discovered that he is a highly skilled (not to mention bestockinged) performer of traditional Estonian Dance. This is completely irrelevant but it is the kind of detail I wish I could think of for characters in the scripts I write.

But I digress! Noack and I had a conversation which got me thinking. Noack has clearly put some thought into this, and I doff my hat to him while completely stealing his premise and writing it here:

WANT TO MAKE A BILLION DOLLARS IN THE FILM INDUSTRY?

Can't be done, you say?

Not in Australia, you say?

No such thing as a film industry, you say?

Then think outside the box...

START YOUR OWN FILM FESTIVAL!

Seriously. Start your own film festival. Now. What are the overheads? Maybe you have to get a permit for something. Maybe you have to get some insurance. Maybe you have to do a teensy bit of publicity. But get this, you charge! You charge, say, thirty bucks to EACH SHORT FILM ENTERED. Imagine that! That's, like, three dollars per minute that most of these films will run for. Most festivals have twenty thousand submissions. The smaller ones only get hundreds.

Hack in to the desperate market of filmmakers who can't find a way into the film industry, and watch them come to you. You can even write it into the application form that you own various rights in relation to the films these people submit to you.

Then, and here's the really good bit, hold the "festival" somewhere big and cheap but with a huge screen and CHARGE FOR ENTRY. Better still, the prizes for best film and so on can be donations from companies who want their stuff advertised to young people . Also, get a website and try to get Americans to enter or something. That way you can call yourself an International Festival, which means people will be doing interviews with you in the EG all about how you started the idea in a garage one time because you "just knew there was this gap out there and all these voices weren't being heard". Preferably there will be a shot of you on a lounge chair that has been dragged into an urban street, which will afford you an excellent opportunity to be photographed in sunglasses. And possibly also to carrying a martini which you can rest on a copy of The Unbearable Lightness of Being or Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance.

If it seems that I have a chip on my shoulder in relation to any of the above, well that is because I do. I wish I had thought of it earlier, frankly.

My festival is going to be called Alternation Film Festival (because it's alternative and nation all merged into one). Bugger, though, it already exists in Taipei.

Of course it does.

Well the Film Festival opened on Wednesday night with the hilarious "black tie" requirements (as always) being almost completely ignored by the Melbourne crowd, especially the people I was there with (who had nailed the "black" part of the dress code but needed some help with the more formal aspect symbolised by the tie).

I very much enjoy an industry event where somehow, despite all the best attempts of the organisers, a bunch of interesting people have managed to lie their way in. In other words, my friends were there, which is brilliant and which means I still haven't quite recovered.

Last night I saw The Hawk is Dying , which stars Paul Giamatti from Sideways , Michelle Williams (Jen from Dawsons Creek ), one or other of the Culkin brothers, and an extremely manhandled hawk. I then saw a Hungarian film called Taxidermia , which was genuinely insane and involved a bloke who stuffs animals, a couple who eat competitively for their country (a brilliant satire on sport actually), a guy who has sex on a dead pig, and rather a lot of projectile vomiting (welcome to the topsy turvy world of MIFF). Then we saw Thank You For Smoking , alongside a short film by the guys who made it, who did a Q&A session afterwards.

My recommendation so far is Thank You For Smoking , with the caveat that it's being released soon anyway so don't waste your MIFF time unless you have too much of it (erhem). But it's very funny and it's well-written, which are two elements I rather enjoy in a film that's supposed to be funny and well-written. The short film they made, In God We Trust , was great fun too - yay for finding people early in their careers!

I've just realised the young soapie drama theme here. So far, Seth from The OC (Thank You For Smoking ) , and Joey and Jen from Dawsons Creek (Katie Holmes, Thank You For Smoking and Michelle Williams, The Hawk Is Dying ) have all been in MIFF films. Perhaps Standing There Productions' next film should have a Neighbours star in it, preferably engaging in recreational drug use or down and dirty sex, or playing someone with "difficulties", to up the street cred. Mental note.

Tonight, Melanie Howlett, Standing There Captain of Industry, is in town to enjoy The Way I Spent The End of The World and the Sarah Silverman docco with me this evening, before an action-packed weekend of too many films and not enough time to do my homework.

Yeep. See you Monday.

How's this for robust media - it's the Prime Minister's birthday! Hurrah! The fourth estate celebrates! This article actually describes, without irony, an alleged "journalist" asking a group of rowers on the Yarra this morning to sing happy birthday to the Prime Minister, John Howard, on his fabulously athletic morning walk. Presumably the footage of the rowers singing will have the jouranlist's solicit edited out of it on the television news, although possibly not - why bother? Nobody really thinks the media has a purpose anymore other than providing a huge stack of paper to wrap around the sodoku on the weekends. (Someone I worked with once asked me: "what do journalists do these days? Isn't it all press releases?")

Indeed.

Mind you, some journos are earning their wage. I have found a cleverer headline for the "Man Wins Bet, Loses Penis" article I drew your attention to previously. Click here to read the same article, this time titled: "Bet Leaves Drunk Man Willy Nilly". As I say, I did used to work in commercial radio and headlines like that maketh the radio show.

Tonight, I'm going to the opening night of the Film Festival. Tomorrow, it begins in earnest. Stay tuned for updates, reviews, complaints about the program guide, and reports on the health and wellbeing of a person who sees five films in a row and then attempts to get up and go to work in the morning.