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Haunting Douglas: A pound of Douglas's flesh

Author: Amy Prebble

Publication: NZ Listener

Publication Date: 26 July 2003

Subject: Hounting Douglas documetary film

That rarest of programming creatures – a New Zealand arts documentary – plays on primetime TV this week. Is Leanne Pooley's film about dancer Douglas Wright an early sign of TVNZ responding to the charter?

"WHY AM I DOING THIS? Why am I letting you point this thing at me?" asks Douglas Wright in the documentary Haunting Douglas. "I don't want people to know all this about me at all. I want to share my work with people … and it seems that there has to be a kind of metaphorical pound of flesh that you have to pay to get that." Wright cuts a deal with director Leanne Pooley – details of his pain and eccentricity in exchange for fresh eyes for his work.

Pooley's documentary is playing at this year's International Film Festival, and also screens on TV1 this week – Saturday night, 9.30pm. How did an arts feature snaffle such a respectable timeslot? Something to do with the charter, perhaps? According to Tony Holden, general manager for commissioning at TVNZ, the charter merely formalises the network's existing commitment to the arts. "It doesn't mean we're suddenly doing things because of the charter. We always did them," he claims. Haunting Douglas earned its plum spot simply because "it was such a great documentary".

Which it is, but the fact is that Pooley hadn't been commissioned to direct for TV since 1999 – when her film Relative Guilt (about the family of convicted murderer David Wayne Tamihere) won the 1999 Qantas Award for best documentary. She was frustrated because the types of films that she was interested in making were not the kinds of films that were being commissioned. "Because I didn't want to make a film about my neighbour who slept with my brother's dog or something like that, I wasn't having much luck," she says.

Her fortunes changed with Haunting Douglas. After TVNZ green-lighted the idea for the documentary, the network and Pooley took it to NZ On Air for funding. The application was successful. But she also needed to raise a significant amount of capital separate to that; happily for her, Creative New Zealand and Wellington couple Jane Vesty and Brian Sweeney put their hands in their pockets to get the documentary off the ground.

Pooley first spotted a photograph of Douglas Wright in an article about his dance work Inland in 2002. She was moved by what he had to say. And she realised that if Wright was going to be the subject for a documentary, she had to get some footage of Inland. So she chucked a camera in a bag and hot-footed it to the dress rehearsal in Wellington.

Even now, she isn't exactly sure why Wright let her stick around. He did watch some of her previous films. Pooley has a lot of experience – she started directing documentaries for the BBC in 1993. In her time, she has chatted to the Pope, watched a doctor take a heart out of a patient's chest, and followed Boy George around New York gay clubs.

She also thinks that being a non-dancer helped gain Wright's trust. "I think he had a degree of confidence in me as a film-maker, but I also think that I came to the project unencumbered, without any preconceptions about him or the dance community."

Wright had a lot of input into the documentary. He and Pooley haggled over the dances that would be shown and which parts of his novel (Ghost Dance, to be published by Penguin next year) he would read aloud. Pooley included their negotiations in the documentary because "why he doesn't want to speak about something is almost as interesting as an answer".

As a child, Wright constantly danced around his parents' house, behaviour that perplexed his footy-mad father. In his novel, he writes, "In Tuakau, South Auckland, in the early 1960s, a dancing boy was frowned on with a frown handed down from generations." He found an outlet for his gyrations in gymnastics. In his late teens, he graduated from the high bar to a kaleidoscopic mix of drug highs, taking everything from LSD to heroin. He spent many nights listening to Patti Smith and staring into space. It wasn't until Malcolm Ross, whom he was madly in love with, asked him what he wanted to do with his life that he started taking dance classes.

Talented male dancers are a rarity in New Zealand; Wright was swiftly snapped up by Limbs. Then, in New York, the Paul Taylor Dance Company had its first open audition in four years – a cattle-call of hundreds of hopefuls. Wright outdanced 150 other male dancers to land a spot in the company. For Wright, New York was a concentration of forbidden pleasures. "The whole Aids thing was just beginning, really, but I ignored that … I mean, I had lots of lovers and in the weekends did go quite wild, really. I was stupid … but I'm glad I did it."

He returned to New Zealand in 1987 and was diagnosed with HIV in 1990. When he eventually went public with his illness, audiences at his shows swelled with the curious. "Eventually these disaster tourists lost interest," he says. Naturally, after his diagnosis some of Wright's works dealt with death and dying, but many were a celebration of life. "I don't think that everything I make is dark and disturbing and troubling. I think that I do make things that are funny and beautiful as well."

Haunting Douglas, TV1, Saturday, 9.30pm

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