Name Bob Ellis Role Writer | ||
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Movies The Nostradamus Kid, Man of Flowers, Newsfront Awards Australian Film Institute Award for Best Screenplay, AACTA Award for Best Original Screenplay Books And So it Went, The Capitalism Delusion, The Ellis Laws: Penguin, Suddenly - Last Winter: A, The Year it All Fell Down Similar People Paul Cox, Anne Brooksbank, Norman Kaye, Denny Lawrence, Wendy Hughes | ||
And so it went bob ellis in conversation with bob carr syd writers festival
Robert James "Bob" Ellis (10 May 1942 – 3 April 2016) was an Australian writer, journalist, filmmaker, and political commentator. He was a student at the University of Sydney at the same time as other notable Australians including Clive James, Germaine Greer, Les Murray, John Bell, Ken Horler, and Mungo McCallum. He lived in Sydney with the author and screenwriter Anne Brooksbank; they had three children.
Contents
- And so it went bob ellis in conversation with bob carr syd writers festival
- Bobby the brain heenan vs cowboy bob ellis
- Early years
- Writing career
- Awards
- Politics
- Death
- Writings
- Plays
- Screenplays
- Unmade screenplays
- Novels
- Non fiction
- Acting
- References
Bobby the brain heenan vs cowboy bob ellis
Early years
Ellis was raised a Seventh-day Adventist. He says the "seminal moment" of his life happened when he was ten and his 22-year-old sister was killed while crossing the road. He attended Lismore High and then Sydney University on a Sir Robert Menzies scholarship. After graduating he had a variety of jobs before being employed by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
Writing career
Ellis was a regular contributor to the Nation Review in the 1970s and subsequently contributed to Fairfax Media newspapers and The National Times.
Ellis became a popular playwright, usually working in collaboration. In 1970 he and Michael Boddy (1934–2014) became known for co-writing The Legend of King O'Malley, a musical play based on the life of King O'Malley. From 1975 to 1986 he and his wife also owned the Stables Theatre in Kings Cross, Sydney, during which time it became home to the Griffin Theatre Company. They sold it in 1986 for $200,000.
Ellis wrote several film scripts, notably The Nostradamus Kid (1992), Cactus (1986, with Paul Cox), My First Wife (1984, with Paul Cox), Where the Green Ants Dream (Wo die grünen Ameisen träumen) (1984, with Werner Herzog), Man of Flowers (1983, with Paul Cox), Goodbye Paradise (1983), ...Maybe This Time (1981, with Anne Brooksbank), Fatty Finn (1980) and Newsfront (1978). Most of his film scripts, as with his plays, were written in collaboration with other writers.
In 1980 Ellis signed a contract with the New South Wales Film Corporation to write ten feature film scripts over two years for $7,000 for each script, with a payment of $12,000 for the second draft if they wanted to make the movie. Ellis says he presented them with 33 ideas, they chose five and he chose five.
Ellis also directed several films, including The Nostradamus Kid (1992), Warm Nights on a Slow Moving Train (1988), Unfinished Business (1985) and Run Rabbit, Run (2007).
Ellis's writing for television included the miniseries True Believers (with co-author Matt Carroll) and Infamous Victory: Ben Chifley's Battle for Coal (2008), with co-author Geoff Burton, made for Film Australia.
Awards
Ellis won the Australian Film Institute Award for Best Screenplay for Newsfront (1978, with Anne Brooksbank and Phillip Noyce) and for My First Wife (1984, with Paul Cox).
Politics
Ellis, a supporter of the Australian Labor Party, wrote speeches for a number of Labor leaders (such as Bob Carr, Paul Keating and Kim Beazley) and wrote extensively on Labor history.
Regarding Ellis's speech writing, Beazley said on the 7.30 Report that if he had used any of Ellis's speeches he would have been out of politics.
Ellis's involvement in politics became more direct when he unsuccessfully contested the Federal seat of Mackellar as an independent candidate against the Liberal Party's Bronwyn Bishop in a by-election in 1994 as the ALP did not field a candidate in that by-election.
Ellis's 2011 book Suddenly, Last Winter – An Election Diary created headlines for its criticism of the Labor Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, and praise for the Liberal Opposition Leader, Tony Abbott. He described Gillard as "not well informed" and "sudden, firm and wrong" in everything she does. He also said "She has no power, no influence, no friends, no learning. There's not much there" whilst describing Abbott as having "good manners", being "formidable" and possessing a "first-class mind".
Ellis wrote speeches for South Australian premier Mike Rann for a number of years.
Death
On 18 July 2015, Ellis reported on his blog that he would be attending hospital for what he called "ominous" tests on his liver. The next day he announced "The news is very bad", and that the tests had revealed he had advanced liver cancer with a prognosis that he had weeks, if not months, to live.
Ellis died on 3 April 2016, at his home in Sydney's Northern Beaches.
Writings
Ellis wrote two books, Goodbye Jerusalem and Goodbye Babylon, on his experiences of the Labor Party. The first edition of Goodbye Jerusalem was pulped following a successful defamation case brought by two Liberal cabinet ministers, Tony Abbott and Peter Costello, and their wives. At issue was the single sentence where Ellis quoted politician Rodney Cavalier as having said, "Abbott and Costello...they're both in the Right wing of the Labour Party till the one woman fucked both of them and married one of them and inducted them into the Young Liberals". The publisher, Random House, accepted that the disputed content was a falsehood and the book was removed from sale. ACT Supreme Court Justice Higgins awarded the two politicians and their wives a total of $277,000 damages. A new edition of the book was published three months later which omitted the defamatory passage.
In 1998 Penguin Books Australia published Ellis's First Abolish the Customer – 202 Arguments Against Economic Rationalism, then Ellis's The Capitalism Delusion – How Global Economics Wrecked Everything and What To Do About It in 2009, One Hundred Days of Summer in 2010, and The Ellis Laws in 2014.