ADELAIDE, Western Australia, May, 1986: Kenny Hicks had a memorable birthday that year. she and her husband Scott were expecting friends for dinner, to celebrate. The scene was set for a convivial but hardly unusual evening Until, that is, Scott, an established film-maker, read in the local newspaper of an eccentric pianist who had survived a mysterious "illness" to return to the recital trail. The man was playing in Adelaide that night. Hicks felt he had to attend. He listened and marveled.
The result, 10 years in the making was Shine, the unlikely story of a deranged pianist, which is already on course to become one of the most talked-about movies of 1997. With its bittersweet theme of destructive and redeeming love, Shiner tells the tale of childlike genius David Helfgott.
But the story behind the story - the making of the film - is almost as compelling. The narrative includes some potent cinematic myths: a director with a dream, a virtually unknown star, an unseemly wrangle over distribution rights, and controversy over the film's version of the truth.
"Something - I don't know what - compelled me to skip Kerry's supper that night and attend that recital. I'm glad I did," Hicks recalls. "She's since forgiven me. I remember I came away from their vital feeling like you do when you've seen a good film. It was an extraordinary experience."
What intrigued him is evident from his film. David Heltgott is no thin-blooded interpreter of the piano repertoire. He hums, grimaces and laughs while he performs. His interpretations are not purist: notes or lines occasionally go missing. He was "like Groucho Marx on speed", Hicks recalls.
"I was captivated by the mix of man and music." Helfgott has also been known to wander down to the audience and kiss and hug anyone within reach. It is as though he has lost whatever restrains our innermost impulses. Despite, or because of that he plays like an angel.
So, Hicks found himself face to face with a conundrum What lay behind this extraordinary anomaly - a shambling, virtually incoherent idiot-savant who played Rachmaninov, Chopin and Liszt so beautifully? Who were the key figures in his life? Where had Helfgott disappeared to for a decade? Shin} offers a few answers.
Helfgott, born in 1947, was one of four artistic children of Polish-Jewish Holocaust survivors, who fled to near-poverty in Perth, Western Australia. His domineering father drove his son to succeed at the piano, but dissolved in anger when David's talent took him to Britain on a scholarship. At graduation, Helfgott tackled the technical and emotional demands of Rachmaninov's Third piano Concerto, collapsed, and entered a 10-year nether world of psychiatric wards and hostels.
On the road again to recovery and recitals, he married and rebuilt his life. The film offers lots of music, some nifty camera angles, a few unanswered questions, certainly, but many tears and a lot of laughter.
After that ground-breaking 1986 comeback tour, it took Hicks - now 44 - many months to gain Helfgott's confidence and that of his equally extraordinary wife and manager, Gillian. Hicks regularly travelled the 1,400 miles between Adelaide and Perth to interview the pianist and hear him play.
THIS sounds simple, but it was an achievement because of the way Helfgott talks. Here, he babbles about his love of cats (or is it about himself?): "A mystery, it's a mystery - he only had one arm you ass, it was a stroke, a stroke, a stroke of bad luck. Whooah! It's not funny, It's sad, very sad, poor pussycat, his paw was damaged beyond repair and id wouldn't do as it was told - sad, sad pussycat. It was bad luck, wasn't it? He was damaged . . . "
From this knotted logorrhoea, and Gillian's contributions, Hicks constructed a screenplay, Flight Of The Bumblebee. It wouldn't do. It was mundane, too "TV movie". in came screenwriter Jan Sardi to craft something finer, the screenplay that came to be filmed as Shine.
It was now 1991, five years since Hicks had first met Helfgott. Shine was still only halfway to celluloid. The script was no longer literal: it took liberties, just as Helfgott takes liberties with music. According to Hicks, the film depicts "being eaten alive by a piano", by the formidable bulk and terrible maw of an open concert grand on stage. "No wonder they go crazy," Hicks exclaims.
As Helfgott, now 49, babbles in the film: "It's a lifelong struggle isn't it... To live, to survive, to survive undamaged and not destroy any living breathing creature. The point is, it you do something wrong you can be punished for the rest of your life."
So far, Shine was on paper, and in Hicks's head. He had not yet found finance, turning to Jane Scott, producer of Jane Campion's debut box office wonder, My Brilliant Career. Scott raised the necessary $6 million, she and Hicks resisted the pleas of financiers to involve more big-name stars. Hicks saw that that would loosen the emotional grip of the film.
He was right. Three actors played David Helfgott - child, teenager and adult - each a virtual unknown. The youngest David, victim of a father who loves not wisely but too well, is Alex Rafalowiez, struggling to conclude a competition piece as the piano rolls symbolically away downstage.
The teenage David, who escapes his concentration camp of a home to study at London's Royal College of Music, is played by Noah Taylor. He conquers "Rach 3" but is destroyed in the attempt; at 23, his nervous breakdown is public, before 8,000 people at London's Albert Hall, a great concert hall.
GEOFFREY Rush, a graduate of the Lecoq school of mime in Paris, plays Helfgott as an adult. Rush learned every stammer, repetition, gasp and "whooah" of Helfgott's deranged but systematically scripted soliloquies.
Nothing was improvised. Aware that nothing convinces less than a film "pianist" whose hands flutter meaninglessly over the keys, Rush honed a credible piano technique. The soundtrack is played by the real life Helfgott, but it never shows.
Rush explains: "I'm not a pianist... but if you play Hamlet you've got a sword fight at the end of the play." If you can't convince in that, you've thrown away the final act. So with Shine. At various stages, the adult Helfgott has had a caffeine addiction - scores of cups of tea a day - and smoked like Marlboro Man. He played the piano, and, bizarrely, swam lengths of the pool, for hours on end. His nervous energy was, and is, prodigious.
How to do him justice? Rush clearly succeeded. The story goes that after Helfgott saw the final cut of Shine for the first time, he bounded up to Hicks, trilling the single word, "Brrrilliantissimo!" So, Hicks had his film. He had Helfgott's approval.
What he did not have was a distributor. The movie's first public screening was at the Sundance Film Festival in the US last January. I he result? "All hell broke loose," recalls Hicks. "Suddenly there was this feverish frenzy to lay Claim to the film." Distributors bid and outbid each other, the price rising to $2.5 million. A murky scenario developed, with the larger-than-life cochairman of Miramax, Harvey Weinstem, believing he had a deal. He hadn't. The contract went elsewhere and, in a moment of farce Weinstein was flung out of a restaurant as he publicly expressed his disapproval.
Two more controversies were to follow. Helfgott's father, played with devastating emotional force by Armin Mueller-Stahl, is at the centre of the film: the power of his performance comes from the anguished Contradictions apparent in the desperate but severe tenderness the elder Helfgott shows his son. He bullies and terrorists, because he wants "to keep the family together "No one will love you like me" he asserts, like a Curse. But he truly loves the child.
TRAVESTY, cry members of the late Peter Helfgott's family (he died in 1975). David's sister Margaret wrote to Australian papers condemning shiners "unfair and inaccurate" portrayal. "The truly great are often misunderstood," she wrote praising her father's "optimistic lively and joyful nature". Her father never struck David, or burned his manuscripts: "It breaks my heart that the man behind David's genius. . . should have needlessly been misrepresented for dramatic effect."
Mueller-Stahl's own father was killed on the last day of the second World War. "I know what it is like to lose family. I think the Holocaust drained all forgiveness from Peter Helfgott. His daughter's attitude is understandable, but it's still a shame."
As Mueller-Stahl points out, any biographical film must select, but without distorting. "Shine isn't a documentary. If I'd made Peter Helfgott wholly likeable, it would not have worked." Hicks agrees "Margaret is entitled to her view. But I'm distressed by those who would deny David his view."
The film's second controversy involves another change that has been made for dramatic effect. In life, a far-sighted doctor, Chris Reynolds brought Helfgott out of his twilight world. Shine, however, credits Helfgott's emotional and musical renaissance to a lesser character. It works: is that enough?
In life as in fiction, Helfgott is a holy fool (and the first to admit it) whose relationship to experience is indiscriminate Hicks defines the pianist as "a force of nature... He doesn't know where he ends and you begin. He's initially very perturbing but within moments people are drawn into his childlike world. And if there's a piano involved, the evening is history. I've never met anyone who isn't charmed."
"A near genius" is how Helfgott's teacher at London's Royal School of Music, played in Shine by Sir John Gielgud, described his pupil. Certainly, shine has done Helfgott's career no harm. The pianist is poised to tour worldwide, and there is a CD due this month- although it's unlikely, given his eccentricities that he'll regularly perform concertos with famous orchestras. The question is how many of those who go, and will go, to his concerts, do so as a result of seeing Shine? How many will hope for a mid-concert hug and a kiss? Does his personality overshadow the music? Is he something of a freak show? And does it matter?
"Certainly, many people are attracted to his music who wouldn't otherwise attend classical concerts," says Hicks. "but that's wholly positive. And he's no freak. His dignity is compelling. David's given a lot to me. I've given some of it back. I wish him well."