Every once in a while, behind-the-scenes stories about problems beleaguering a feature film production are so dramatic or weird they deserve a movie unto themselves. The classic example is Francis Ford Coppola’s disastrous experience making Apocalypse Now and the jaw-dropping documentary that captured how wrong everything went for his Vietnam war epic, 1991’s Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse.

Australian cinema’s most sensational case study of a film that went bizarrely off the rails is also one of its least well known. There will never be another film quite like writer/director Bert Deling’s once-lost racy 1975 drama Pure Shit, and nor could the strange circumstances that beset its production and release ever be repeated.

Trailer for Pure Shit

Set during a debaucherous narcotic-fuelled weekend in Melbourne, the film follows a bunch of hardcore miscreants played by actors who, on several occasions, actually consumed the on-screen drugs, including injecting real heroin. This established Pure Shit’s reputation as a film by and about junkies – hardly the most reliable kind of employee and thus chaos ensued.



During filming, one score-hungry cast member left the set to obtain drugs by robbing a pharmacy in a Gene Simmons mask. The man behind the counter responded by having a heart attack and, the director admitted several years later, literally dropped dead.



The film’s first public screening, at Melbourne’s Playbox Theatre in 1976, was raided by the vice squad. Pure Shit was banned by a one-armed man (no, really) who was Australia’s chief film censor at the time. The notoriously conservative RJ Prowse took umbrage with, among other things, its title. Pure Shit was softened to Pure S and the ban lifted.

Deling’s powerful and precisely calibrated (if a little repetitive) street-level drama was slammed by the Melbourne Herald critic Andrew McKay as “the most evil film I’ve ever seen”. It disappeared into oblivion for the next three and a half decades, unavailable to rent or buy in any format. In 2009 (the same year a restored version of director Ted Kotcheff’s sun-baked classic Wake in Fright finally hit the shelf) Pure Shit belatedly arrived in a fancy three-disc DVD box set.

Part time capsule, part hyper-paced crime drama, part jet black satire and part junked-up party pic, Pure Shit – shot on 16mm with a minuscule budget – follows a group of junkies as they score, sell and steal drugs, attend parties, shoot up, smoke, drink, share beds, argue with each other and generally misbehave.

The story is loosely framed around the perspective of Lou (Gary Waddell), although the focus is shared with other jacked-up members of his crew including Gerry (Carol Porter) and John (John Laurie).

Waddell, a veteran character actor who specialises in playing rough-as-guts criminals, was nominated for an AFI award for his troubles. Pure Shit also features cameos from the author Helen Garner (who would go on to write a book about the drug scene, Monkey Grip, adapted into a film in 1982), an early appearance from Greig Pickhaver (later known as HG Nelson) and was co-composed by the radio host and ex-Skyhooks member Red Symons.

Deling’s bat-out-of-hell style combines snappy editing, killer music (recorded in one day, mostly by local Melbourne bands the Toads and Spo-dee-o-dee) and unconventional compositions. There are shots through cracks of doors, out of car windows and there is a stylish use of hand-held cameras long before the technique became fashionable. One short carwash scene shows the film at its most frenetic, comprising about a dozen images lasting about a second each. That staccato rhythm encapsulates the film’s wigged-out energy.



Exchanges of dialogue between characters take place in unusually fast and snappy ways: a machine-gun tango of bickering, cussing and talkin’ jive. Deling achieved this by instructing the cast to speak quicker than usual, inspired by the ping-pong wordplay of director Howard Hawks’ 1940 classic His Girl Friday. It’s a great technique, and one reflective of a film-maker not taking a single moment in a single scene for granted.

Australian cinema has returned to stories focused on drug users many times since, forming a powder-splotched canon that includes Dogs in Space, Candy, Little Fish and Head On. The people who made these films owe something to Deling’s see-it-to-believe-it classic, even if they may not have known it at the time.