Making Venus

Sydney, September 1997. Cousins Jason and Julian, both 25 years old and producers, prepare themselves for the shooting of their first low-budget full-length feature film THE VENUS FACTORY. It is a comedy about a porn star aspiring a serious acting career. For the direction, they have enlisted the services of Glenn Fraser; an award-winning maker of short films, who also makes his first long feature. ‘Think big’ is the cousins’ motto, and they have gathered together a budget of $ 100,000 from friends and relatives. MAKING VENUS is a painfully humorous account of what can go wrong during a movie production. The shooting starts with an incomplete script, there are problems with licenses, there is a constant lack of money, a distributor cannot be found, a script editor is called in, the comedy is changed into a romantic drama with another director, the title is changed, the producers re-edit it into a comedy again, but neither of the directors now wants his name on the credits. Five years and a good deal of worries later, the total expenses amount to $ 1,104,000, and the film has been rejected by all Australian distributors, which results in quarrels and debts. The documentary is a ‘making of’ with a chiefly observational slant and sometimes a few questions put to the protagonists. Black inserts with white letters regularly give a survey of the total expenses and the progress of the project.