Billy's Holiday

Billy's Holiday (1995)

This movie is all about a normal guy called Billy Apples. He is a social drinker and sometimes lead singer of a band. While he is doing all of this, he still manages to bring up his teenage daughter. One night while sitting at home Billy finds that he has a talent! He finds that he is able to sing like his idol, 50's singer Billie Holiday. From there he is going places, from huge live performances to even cutting a hit record, but in the end he must make a choice between the life he has, and the life he once knew. Written by Graham Wilson Jr

Date de sortie
1995-07-26
TMDB
9.0 / 10 (1)
Durée
1 h 32 min
Genres
Musique
Réalisateur
Richard Wherrett

Distribution

Anecdotes

  • Box-office : 68,5 k $AU
  • Récompenses : 1 · Nominations : 1. Dont : AACTA Award des meilleurs costumes

Billy's Holiday is a 1995 Australian musical film, directed by Richard Wherrett and starring Max Cullen. Based on Cullen's real-life ability to vocally impersonate Billie Holiday, the film revolves around a man named Billy Apples, played by Cullen, whose life and music career are stagnating until he is visited by Holiday's spirit and finds himself gifted with her voice. Despite finding a receptive audience at the Cannes Film Festival and some success with international distributors, the film was negatively received in Australia and was a box office bomb.

Production

In 1977, Denis Whitburn wrote the play The Siege of Frank Sinatra, based on the infamous 1974 incident in which Sinatra was held hostage by Australian trade unions after calling a local journalist a "two-dollar whore." (This later became the basis for the 2003 film The Night We Called It a Day, though that film did not use Whitburn's play as source material.) The play debuted in 1980 at Sydney's King O'Malley Theatre, with Max Cullen in the role…

In 1983, Richard Wherrett directed the ABC TV movie The Girl from Moonooloo. This film revolves around a young man who is cast as Ginger Meggs in a radio serial, despite the fact that his mother performs the voice of Meggs in reality. In the film's climax, he develops the confidence to use his real voice and become famous for who he really is.

In the early 1990s, Whitburn wrote the screenplay for Billy's Holiday in three weeks, inspired by his vivid memory of Cullen's performance as Holiday. Wherrett picked up the project as he was drawn to the premise of "a middle-aged man getting a second chance at life and love", and later connected this to his diagnosis as HIV positive. It was Wherrett's first feature film after a long career in theatre and occasionally in television.

The film's opening shot begins as an extreme close-up on the mouth of Sid's trumpet as he plays "I Can't Get Started" at the back of the bus, pulls back to the driver's seat as Sid delivers the line "We can't get started!", then leaves the bus and continues into the air, becoming a long shot revealing that the bus is stuck in traffic along King Street, Newtown.

Wherrett never returned to filmmaking after Billy's Holiday, but directed several more stage productions and worked on the opening ceremony of the Sydney 2000 Olympics before his death in 2001.

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