Australian industry dismayed by Crowe film shutdown

Russell Crowe

SYDNEY - Australia's film industry is reeling after the surprise shutdown of a high-profile movie that was to have starred Russell Crowe and Nicole Kidman, and two co-stars in "Eucalyptus" have cast doubt on the official reason that the script was not up to scratch.

The media have characterized the collapse as a major blow to the local film industry. It has left 80 crew members without jobs, while locals in the small town of Bellingen in the state of New South Wales will lose three months' worth of accommodation bookings and associated business.

The US$25 million Fox Searchlight project was scrapped because the script needed more work, according to a statement issued last week by producer Uberto Pasolini, writer-director Jocelyn Moorhouse, Crowe and Kidman. Fox Searchlight president Peter Rice, who had been in Australia supervising the project, echoed that assessment.

But Hugo Weaving, also cast in the film, told the Daily Telegraph that that explanation unfairly blamed the collapse on writer-director Moorhouse when, in fact, her script had attracted the stellar cast in the first place.

"That was a very dishonest position to take," Weaving said. "I regard this script as an absolute gem. They should have come clean and said Russell needed some changes made to certain parts of the script."

Actor Jack Thompson told the Telegraph he agreed with Weaving about the quality of the script and said the rehearsals with Kidman and Moorhouse in recent weeks had gone well, with no requests for script changes to his knowledge.

According to other sources familiar with the production, Crowe had been demanding that Moorhouse make script changes. One theory is that Crowe had requested that the female lead, originally written for a 19-year-old woman, be rewritten to accommodate Kidman, and that all the changes did not come together in time.

Other sources close to the production, however, insist that Kidman's role had been successfully rewritten but that Crowe was insisting that his own role be augmented.

A publicist representing both Crowe and Kidman said that neither star had any further comment.

- REUTERS