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Archive for the ‘Hippie Hippie Shake’ Category
IT SOUNDED like a promising idea for a film – the rebellious lives of the Australian hippie intelligentsia as they took on swinging London in the 1960s.
Based on a memoir by Richard Neville, Hippie Hippie Shake featured a who’s who of the counterculture including Germaine Greer, Jenny Kee and artists Martin Sharp and Jim Anderson. It centred on the launch of the London edition of the radical magazine Oz and the trial for distributing a sexually explicit issue.
Interest in the film increased when Greer lashed the writers for fashioning her likeness ”out of their own excreta”. But there was always going to be anticipation for a £20 million ($A32 million) film from the director of Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, Beeban Kidron, and her husband, Lee Hall, who wrote Billy Elliot.
But three years after the film was shot in England, with Cillian Murphy playing Neville, Sienna Miller as his girlfriend Louise Ferrier, and Emma Booth as Greer, rumours that Hippie Hippie Shake has turned out dismally have proven accurate.
After a promised release failed to eventuate last year, the British production company Working Title has now confirmed – without explanation – that Hippie Hippie Shake will not reach cinemas at all.
Said Neville: ”We saw the first cut of the film – Jim, I and other Oz people – and there was a lot of disappointment among us.”
Anderson said the central problem with Hippie Hippie Shake was the portrayal of Neville. ”They ruined it by turning Richard into a reconstructed heterosexual male. Back then he was certainly unreconstructed – as we all were.”
- smh.com.au
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