After the success of her first narrative feature -- the breakout Australian hit My Brilliant Career (1979) -- director Gillian Armstrong was besieged by script offers from all over Hollywood. Trouble was, they were all variations on the same theme: "Endless scripts of the first woman to fly a plane, the first woman to ride a camel, the first woman to climb a mountain," Armstrong later recalled. "I was suddenly the director who does women achievers in the past... I didn't want to spend the rest of my life doing films that were only about young women battling to achieve."

As part of the Australian New Wave of filmmakers and actors to emerge in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Armstrong was eager to prove her versatility. So while she waited for the right second script to come along, she went back to happily making documentaries (she'd already made several). Then she heard about a film that two producers, David Elfick and Richard Brennan, were trying to get made. She got hold of the script and was taken with its offbeat, spirited tone, and its story that called for many full-fledged musical numbers. Thus was born her second feature, Starstruck (1982).

The story was an age-old "let's put on a show!" tale straight out of Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, but with a 1980s twist, about two kids who try to save their mother's pub by going for the big time. The characters are 18-year-old Jackie (Jo Kennedy), and her 14-year-old cousin Angus (Ross O'Donovan). Both were unknowns, and were cast after what the production notes called "the most extensive talent search ever conducted in Australia."

The cast underwent two months of vigorous rehearsal, with voice, singing and dance training -- and in the case of Jo Kennedy, tightrope-walking as preparation for one particular scene. Armstrong found that the intense dance rehearsals helped unite the cast in such a positive way that she went on to incorporate dancing into her future films' rehearsals, even if those films didn't call for dancing. "[It's] one of my biggest tips in filmmaking," she later said. "Dancing is the most fantastic way of bringing actors together... Before we started shooting there were a number of actors and extras who learned dances twice a week for two months. In that instance, the group of people in the bar in Starstruck were so relaxed they felt they had known each other for a long time. It was fantastic and I think it really helped the film."

Starstruck shot for ten weeks all over Sydney, showing off many of the city's beauties. Armstrong and her cinematographer Russell Boyd had fun with the throwback musical sequences, in some cases imitating 1930s Busby Berkeley camera angles, and incorporating an all-male parody of an Esther Williams water ballet. That combined with Luciana Arrighi's flamboyantly funny new-wave costumes helped result in a lively, colorful-looking movie. Arrighi would soon transition to become an art director and would win an Oscar for her work on Howards End (1992).

Starstruck earned $1.5 million in Australia (which wasn't bad), but very little in America, where it had trouble landing many screens. Critics were generally positive, however, with many noting the influence of classic backstage musicals and also comparing it to A Hard Day's Night (1964) in tone and spirit. The Los Angeles Times called it "a radiant surprise," and The Hollywood Reporter declared, "it dazzles... Congenial and sparkling and vastly entertaining."

The New York Times called it "silly through and through, but it's also full of happy, musical surprises." The paper specifically praised the costumes and "masterful decor," singling out set decorator Brian Thomson: "It is Mr. Thomson, presumably, who was responsible for giving Jackie an inflatable sandbox in her beach-wallpapered bedroom, or for giving her little cousin Angus Elvis Presley bedsheets."

Armstrong later semi-joked that when Starstruck came out, the same people who had tried to label her as merely a director of "women achievers" now said, "Oh, now she's done this film with another redhead; she only likes redheads who are trying to achieve." But Armstrong did succeed in continuing to prove her versatility; her next feature was the studio production Mrs. Soffel (1984), starring Mel Gibson and Diane Keaton.

Look for Geoffrey Rush in one of his earliest appearances, as a floor manager.

By Jeremy Arnold

SOURCES:

Michaela Boland and Michael Bodey, Aussiewood
Raffaele Caputo and Geoff Burton, Second Take: Australian Film-makers Talk
Peter Malone, Myth and Meaning: Australian Film Directors in Their Own Words