HOGES SAW THE PROMISE
However his Lightning Jack foray to the Gold Coast didn’t quite deliver on the investment
THE Gold Coast’s growing film industry has become one of Queensland’s great success stories of the past decade.
With multiple critical and financial hits being filmed here, including Thor: Ragnarok and San Andreas, the city is becoming well established as a movie-making hub.
This week the Gold Coast Bulletin launched its Golden Age campaign, looking at the state of the city in the post-Commonwealth Games period and how we can best capitalise on this event and its legacy over the following decade.
In coming weeks the film industry will be one of those analysed in the wake of Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk and the Federal Government both putting millions of dollars into shoring it up.
It’s a far cry from where the city was 25 years ago this week where plans for a film to shoot a handful of scenes in the city was front page news.
It was June 1993 – Paul Keating was Prime Minister, LA Law was still pulling in the viewers on Australian screens and the Gold Coast was in the crosshairs of Paul Hogan.
The Crocodile Dundee icon announced plans to make a cowboy-themed film Lightning Jack and invited locals to become invested in the film in a very real sense.
Lightning Jack was the first film ever to be listed on the Australian Stock Exchange.
Mr Hogan launched his bid, offering 35 million shares on the film at $1 each.
The film, about an Australian outlaw in the American Old West, was a passion project for Mr Hogan, whose previous film Almost an Angel had flopped at the box office.
The star told the media his film would be more successful than Angel because it was “the right movie” for him to do.
He said people liked him in a cowboy hat with a knife but not “in a beanie with a bible”; trying to cure people unsuccessfully of cancer, as he had in the previous film.
IT’S NOT LIKE A HORSE RACE BECAUSE YOU CAN COME 27TH AT THE BOX OFFICE IN THE SEASON AND STILL MAKE MONEY
PAUL HOGAN
The share issue was underwritten by Morgan Corporate Limited to the tune of $25 million, with Mr Hogan expecting more than half the budget would come from “average punters”.
The actor was the film’s biggest investor and said people would be far more likely to get money back investing in the film than betting on a horse.
“It’s not like a horse race because you can come 27th at the box office in the season and still make money,” he said.
Appearing at a press conference with Premier Wayne Goss, Mr Hogan said he was keen to shoot the film on the Gold Coast.
Some of the filming, he said, would be done at Village Roadshow’s studios at Oxenford. But the rest could not be made locally because of the need for authentic wild west locations. “We are doing an American western and you can’t muck around with their heritage,” he said.
The film was released in March 1994 and went on to make $16 million at the box office.
Director Simon Wincer later admitted the shoot was a logistical nightmare, with its US locations also simultaneously being used by other westerns including Tombstone, Wyatt Earp and City Slickers 2.