"Sweet Dreamers" a low-budget feature film by Tom Cowan, restored after the passage of 40 years since its release.

Recently my friend Tom sent me a digitised version of a film he completed in 1982.  

Sweet Dreamers  

(1982, 82 mins, 16mm, drama)

Until this movie was digitised by the NFSA the only copy Tom had available was a poor quality videotape full of all the usual videotape baddies such as excessive 'noise' in the images. Now we have this vastly superior copy to view.

When the film was first released Tom received quite a lot of negative comment. For any filmmaker this is hard to come to terms with, it is extremely dispiriting. After the passage of forty years Tom now sees the film very differently from the time in which it was created.

SWEET DREAMERS WEB.mp4 from Tom Cowan on Vimeo.

Here are some notes I received from Tom:

"SWEET DREAMERS"

Seeing it again after so long, I now find myself very proud of my most critically derided and unsuccessful movie. "SWEET DREAMERS" – I made it forty years ago. I was unsatisfied with it at the time, not just because it was slammed although that hurt, but because it had changed so much from the original fine careless conception. It was called "I CHING ON A DOUBLE BED".

It was to be improvised from whatever direction the I Ching advised of the lovers.  

Then, following the monster success of my  "JOURNEY AMONG WOMEN", every obstacle by the bureaucrats was put in the way of an even more experimental movie such as this idea. To get the funding which had already been recommended by the real film-makers on the assessment panel of the experimental film fund, I had to conform to the conditions set out by people who had no real production experience. 

The proposed experiment of an ‘in the moment’ development in the progress of the central relationship, even as it was being filmed, was radical (thinking about it now). But these bozos at the film commission stipulated that I had to write a script to get the funding. So I was required to distort the very basis of the proposal which had been given a tick by film-makers. 

Eventually after about two years of wrangling, I got a small grant of $25,000 which was later changed to investment funding. NB: at that time experimental film funding was being changed to investments: 

"Experimental film-making must be controlled, this is not the seventies!”

With all the delaying, that fine careless experimental idea became bogged down and the movie became very conventional in production. I didn’t have the joie de vivre to pull off my original conception. I was disappointed with myself for letting the film bureaucrats wear me down. It was twenty years before I attempted another movie as Bruce Hodsdon reported in his fine piece about not well-known film-makers. There was one nice review by Steve Wallace in Film Review at the time.

It's a film about the hopes and dreams of the seventies when so much seemed possible. How dare we hope so naively was a problem for the critics. They contended that the male character is unrealistic in his dreams and chauvinist. But that’s not so unrealistic: it is rather an essential struggle which the couple try to face. The script is low key and I reckon: it is not the very small budget but the pacing and being too locked-off for an independent movie that was a problem.

The performances are interesting. Sue Smithers was better than a French actress from a nouvelle vague movie. She acted well and she’s lovely. Richard Moir was very generous in agreeing to a role in such a low budget effort and he does a fine job. Bryan Probyn did a beautiful job as DoP and it is nice to look at. He went on to shoot ‘Far East’ for John Duigan when I was not available and did a better job than I could have done. The ingenious music by Brett Cabot makes me proud of him. I’m sorry he left Australia.

Anyway, with all the regrets I had at the time, seeing "SWEET DREAMERS" now, I love it. It seems to say a little something that’s real about the time we had in the seventies.

TOM