The blue in the green

The blue in the green,
may never be seen,
and it's power is not of this world.
For the mark of your ticket,
shall capture the wicked,
and the mystery then shall unfold.

My god, such doggerel!

Written in haste one Sunday afternoon in, I think, July of 1990 as we were finalising the script[^] for our movie.

It tied all the elements together, if you were the scriptwriter. I imagine everyone in our audience who hadn't been present at the script writing totally missed the connections. (That means everyone except me, Heino, Garry and Robin).

The blue was a Black and Decker power drill encased in blue plastic, found by Scarless (me) in a bed of grass. Later dialog reveals that this isn't a standard power drill running on standard 240 Volt power, no sir. Nope, this is an 80 volt drill! (we chose 80 volts because I'd never heard of any country in the world with 80 volt mains).

Scarless, in a leap of intuition that would put the most dishonest clairvoyant to shame, realises that the criminal he's chasing has left his fingerprints on a railway ticket that he (Scarless) has just purchased.

But who would say such enigmatic words? Who indeed? Swami Muktunanda no less!

Ted played the role. He'd be at least 15 years my senior and he'd been one of the voices of sanity at Turtle Video committee meetings back in the 70's.

Scarless, the hard bitten practical crime fighter, was also a spiritual being; he deferred to the Swami and sought his advice when the crime was otherwise impenetrable. Thus to Saturday October 6 1990 as we drove to the You Yangs[^] mountain range a few miles west of Melbourne.

Of all our shooting days on the project that's the one I enjoyed the most even though I forgot my jodhpurs and we had to repair to Werribee to buy a passable substitute (a pair of long johns). Yes, I appeared on camera clad in nothing below the waist but for a pair of longies! That's the price you pay for being sufficiently unprofessional that you forget a vital part of the costume. Fortunately no one not in the know has ever spotted it! Of course, very few not in the know have even seen the movie!

My scenes and Daves (Festering Wound) shot we turned to Ted. All he had to do was repeat the doggerel shown above whilst sitting in a fair wind wearing a kaftan I'd contributed to the production!

I reckon we did 50 takes! Ted could not get even a single line out without mistakes, let alone the entire doggerel. I remember once when he'd stumbled, yet again, over the 'and the mystery then shall unfold' line, at the 'and', Heino, cameraman extraordinaire said 'and and and what????'. We exploded in laughter. Fortunately Ted did too!

We even tried recording the dialogue in the van toward the end of the day. Ted, script in hand, stumbled!

But we managed to fix it 'in post'. An amazing feat of splice and cut.