Pure Shit

A woman tightens a belt around her arm as a makeshift tourniquet, restricting blood flow and allowing her to inject a hypodermic needle into her vein, filled with heroin. Soon after, she overdoses, and her junkie friends Lou (Gary Waddell), John (John Laurie), Sandy (Anne Heatherington), and newcomer Gerry (Carol Porter) nonchalantly flee the premises to avoid any questions from paramedics. What follows next in Bert Deling’s speedball comedy, Pure Shit (1975), is a frantic 48-hour journey with these bickering friends through the streets of Melbourne, capturing the chaotic and apathetic tedium of their lives as they remain perpetually in search of their next hit. The film features encounters with a myriad of colourful addicts – including a paranoid, cleanliness-obsessed speed addict and a wide-eyed, gun-wielding cocaine addict – along with visceral vomiting from bad dope, two pharmacy break-ins, one destructive police raid, and a car chase fleeing from violent skinheads. Pure Shit aimed to capture Melbourne’s drug scene in its raw, gritty reality, encapsulating both the tragedy and comedy of its subjects’ lives without passing judgement towards them.

Upon its initial release, Pure Shit was banned and persecuted by the media for its ambivalent and graphic portrayal of drug use. For over 30 years it was ostracised from the Australian film canon, surviving only on two deteriorating 16-millimetre prints until it was restored by the National Film and Sound Archive in 2009 and brought to DVD.¹ Pure Shit had “clung to life by its fingernails and the occasional one-off underground screening,”[2. Megan Spencer, “Pure Shit: An Australian Film in Exile,” Pure Shit DVD booklet (Beyond Home Entertainment, 2009), p. 9.] prevailing as a mythical film of drug-fuelled mayhem that took place both on screen and behind the scenes. 

Deling’s early career “can be traced back to his time at Melbourne University as a film critic [and] an influential member of the Melbourne University Film Society,”² developing an experimental neorealist filmmaking style that was inspired by Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960) and the French New Wave.³ Embedded firmly within the city’s arthouse scene and drug culture, Deling directed his first acid-fuelled avant-garde feature Dalmas (1973) with local actors from Carlton’s famous Pram Factory theatre, bearing witness to how the best and brightest of his generation had their lives “modified, controlled, and changed by the new experiences they […] had as the result of drugs.”⁴ It was during this time he came to know people from the Buoyancy Foundation, “an organization set up to help drug addicts – who wanted […] a more accurate and inclusive drug-themed film that would counteract those produced by various, predominantly American, government and religious bodies”⁵ and that would portray drug addicts as human beings.⁶

With a budget of $30,000 funded by both the Buoyancy Foundation as well as the industry-led Australian Film Development Corporation, Deling organised a cast and crew consisting almost entirely of addicts (past, present and in passing). Pure Shit’s screenplay was based upon the lived experiences of these addicts, ensuring that, despite their fictionalised circumstances, all scenes within the film reflected real incidents.⁷ In an interview with Cinema Papers, Deling remembered the concerned reactions from his contemporaries in the industry: “What are you getting into, man? You’re making a feature and going to crew it and cast it with junkies. You’re going to make three days if you’re lucky!”⁸ But a major part of both Deling and Buoyancy’s desire to make this film was to provide these addicts with a positive creative experience, to teach them new skills through the filmmaking process and give them something to look forward to. As Deling saw it, “why shouldn’t they go back to dope – they’re certainly not being offered anything else” in life.⁹

Despite this optimistic outlook, the production was anything but orderly. “Many of Pure Shit’s cast ‘went method’ on set,”¹⁰ with actors injecting real needles full of heroin into their veins while filming, and crew members taking even more drugs like speed and cocaine behind the scenes. Director of photography Tom Cowan recalled that “Pure Shit was teetering on the edge of being out of control, it was a crazy shoot […] most of the actors were speed addicts and I was probably the only one on location who wasn’t stoned.”¹¹ The reputation Pure Shit earned for being a film about junkies made by junkies has led to rumours surrounding its chaotic production, which only added to its legendary status within the Australian film canon. Some, however, were not just rumours: while filming the first chemist break-in sequence, score-hungry Willy Kerr (playing Willy the Chemist Burglar) vanished off set to rob a pharmacy in the countryside while wearing a Gene Simmons mask, causing the old man behind the counter to have a heart attack and drop dead.¹² With Kerr now MIA, Deling had to quickly rewrite the burglary scene without him, instead having his character suddenly overdose off screen with what we see of his corpse being played by location sound recordist Lloyd Carrick.¹³ Deling and Cowan’s efforts were likely why Pure Shit manages to be narratively coherent and palatable to look at despite its skin-crawling depictions of live drug consumption – they made the film into “a controlled view of an out-of-control situation.”¹⁴

Pure Shit also notably features renowned Australian novelist Helen Garner as Jo the Speed Freak, just two years prior to the release of her debut novel, Monkey Grip (1977) – a semi-autobiographical story also dealing with the drug scene in Melbourne. At the time of the film’s production, Garner had been two years divorced from her first husband, Bill Garner, a major player at the Pram Factory who was also cast as a TV Presenter in the film. Due to her association with Carlton’s arts scene, Deling decided to cast Garner as the neurotic speed junkie specifically because “she was the straightest looking person I knew.”¹⁵ In an interview with Luke Buckmaster, Deling reminisced about how nervous Garner was to perform, and that Gary Waddell had “slipped her a vast quantity of speed prior to her beginning and her confidence rose magnificently! She was shit faced when she did it!”¹⁶ Garner’s experience acting in Pure Shit likely had an influence on the events of her novel, with its main character Nora also taking on small acting gigs in independent films to support her young daughter. And if Deling is to be believed, Garner got into a relationship with a heroin addict named James ‘Shuvus’ Williamson – who played one of the two nurses in the methadone hospital sequence – just like Nora’s relationship with unreliable junkie Javo.¹⁷

Despite the chaos of the production, Deling looked back on working with the inexperienced actors and crew fondly, believing that despite the dramas, the positives outweighed the negatives for everyone involved.¹⁸ However, the newly formed and bureaucratically-run Australian Film Commission – the successor to the Australian Film Development Corporation – did not feel the same, pulling funding from the film during post-production due to its explicit content and refusing to take it to the Cannes Film Festival.¹⁹ In addition to this, the Commonwealth Film Censorship Board – led by conservative RJ Prowse – banned Pure Shit upon its release in 1975. After protests from Deling, the ban was reversed in early 1976 on the condition that the title be changed to (the equally suggestive) ‘Pure S’ and that it be given an ‘R’ classification,²⁰ ruining any chance for the film to achieve commercial success. And if the odds were not stacked against Pure Shit’s favour enough, “the film’s first public screening at Melbourne’s Playbox Theatre […] was raided by the vice squad.”²¹

The media’s reaction to the film was similarly unkind, with the film’s blasé attitude towards the consumption of drugs coming under heavy fire by self-righteous moralising critics. Writing for The Melbourne Herald, Andrew Mackay dubbed Pure Shit “the most evil film that I’ve ever seen”²² – a phrase that would quickly become synonymous with the film’s marketing – and declared its comedic tone to be “as appropriate as a musical about Auschwitz.”²³ Mortified reviewers fearmongered the effects the film could have on impressionable youth, hyperbolically claiming that “the movie purports to show the joy experienced by kids who shoot heroin into their bloodstream”²⁴ to enrage and frighten prospective audiences. However, the film is not without fault in this regard, as Eva Bajoras explains in Melbourne University’s own Farrago Magazine: “though the dangers of drug addiction are not disregarded totally, more often than not, they aren’t seriously considered.”²⁵ When the protagonists reflect upon the death of their friend Keryn (Gena Brookes) at the beginning of the film – who overdosed on the very same drugs they are out searching for – they try to absolve themselves of any guilt, rationalising that “she wanted to die anyway.”²⁶

Critics saw this as endorsing the self-destructive behaviour and rampant drug use of its addicts, though they miss the point that these characters were so deep into their addiction that finding their next hit mattered even more than the death of a friend. As Deling remarked during an interview in 2009, “they kept calling it a pro-drug movie because it wasn’t a stupid anti-drug movie. So therefore we were seen as pro-drug.”²⁷

While Deling wanted to realistically show the heroin scene for what it was – hence the film’s non-judgemental tone – he also wanted to criticise the “system” as being ineffectual in its treatment of addicts. During a television broadcast, we are introduced to the buffoonish methadone expert, Dr. Harry Wolf (Max Gillies), as he deflects against any criticisms of his rehabilitation program whilst repeatedly getting the TV presenter’s name wrong. His ‘Happy Hollow’ clinic is shown to turn patients into lifeless zombies by redirecting their addiction to methadone; the orderlies are callous with their care, hoisting addicts up like puppets for their own amusement. While the antagonistic caricature of the doctor clearly conveys Deling’s critical perspective that “methadone treatment is more harmful to the individual than the ‘problem’ it is trying to eradicate,”²⁸ its inclusion ends up undermining the film’s non-judgemental stance towards addicts. Deling’s portrayal of the addicts’ complaints about methadone, when compared to the overly cartoonish and incompetent Dr. Wolf, are “too one dimensional, and the doctor’s ignorance cannot be taken seriously by the audience.”²⁹ Despite Deling’s efforts to honestly depict Melbourne’s heroin scene in all its nightmarish tedium, violence and aimless search for the next hit, the film can’t help but entertain its audience through its speedball comedy narrative and thus potentially glamorise drug use. What Deling’s ultimate intentions were with Pure Shit are conflicting and muddled. While he seemingly wanted to portray drug culture in an unbiased way, whether he wanted to endorse, warn against or merely show the scene as it is remains hard to pin down. 

Deling’s directorial career never had a chance to flourish following his first two films, with Pure Shit – outside of small underground screenings – being buried and forgotten by Australian cinema history. His third film, Dead Easy (1982), was a pure action flick aiming for commercial viability to revitalise his career, however, this too failed to return a profit. Pure Shit is an honest snapshot of Melbourne’s arthouse culture and underground drug scene in the 1970s, illustrating Deling’s frenetic auteur style of filmmaking that separated him from his contemporaries as one of the most idiosyncratic directors of his time. However, the backlash the film faced from both the Commonwealth Censorship Board and Australian media crushed any chance of this locally made film finding a broad audience and hindered Deling’s reputation going forward. As Megan Spencer argues, the gritty realism of Pure Shit is “the sound of a culture trying to shed years of colonialism and grow a language of [its] own,”³⁰ an attempt that was cut down in favour of clean and sanitised films designed to sell Australian culture to international markets.

Pure Shit (1975 Australia 93 mins)

Prod Co: Apogee Films Prod: Bob Weis Dir, Scr: Bert Deling Phot: Tom Cowan Ed: John Scott Mus: Martin Armiger, Red Symons

Cast: Gary Waddell, Anne Hetherington, Carol Porter, John Laurie, Max Gillies, Tim Robertson, Helen Garner, Phil Motherwell, Russell Kirby, Greig Pickhaver, Vicki Heal, Jane Clifton

Endnotes