Celluloid Heroes (play)

Celluloid Heroes
Written by	David Williamson
Date premiered	1980
Original language	English

Celluloid Heroes is a play by David Williamson about the Australian film industry. It was written to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Nimrod Theatre and is not one of his highly regarded plays.^[1] Williamson later called it:

A bad play which didn't create characters that were complex enough to last the distance after interval. Part of the problem was that I felt I was writing to order... and I was supposed to be writing something light and bright and happy, but my feelings about the film industry were anything but light and bright. I think I let my personal bile about the indignities writers suffer in the film industry, and how basically shoddy it all is, spill over into the play. I wasn't sufficiently objective and I made the characters overly evil or two-dimensional... [it] was simply social satire dipped into crude farce. Not one of my best efforts... It's the only time I've worked to a commission and it's the only time I've been ashamed of the final product.^[2]

He later wrote about the Australian film industry far more successfully in Emerald City.

References

1. Donald Pulford, "Defining moments: the Nimrod story" Real Time Arts accessed 24 October 2012
2. Candida Baker, "David Williamson", Yacker: Australian Writers Talk about Their Work, Picador 1986 p 290-315 accessed 24 October 2012

External links

• Celluloid Heroes at AusStage