I TOLD YOU I WAS ILL: THE LIFE AND LEGACY OF SPIKE MILLIGAN will screen in Sydney as part of a wonderful fringe event during the Sydney Film Festival along with three other 'must-see' Australian documentaries. There will be three screenings of Spike: Saturday 18 June at 6.30pm along with Sunday 19 June at 11.30am & 2.30pm.

The Inaugural Salon Des Refuses Film Festival 2005 will host a selection of exceptionally outstanding, life affirming Australian documentary films not screening for one reason or another, at this year's Sydney Film Festival.

The Salon des Refuses will be held on Saturday 18 June and Sunday 19 June at a function room on the 8th floor of the Swissotel, 68 Market Street, Sydney, which is conveniently located just across the road from the Sydney Film Festival's main venue. Entry is by donation.

A prize will be awarded on the last night by popular vote, the Silver Yabby - a yabby being a hardy creature used to surviving in murky waters and in drought. The organisers felt this to be an apt metaphor relating to independent Australian film makers.

I TOLD YOU I WAS ILL has also been selected for the 54th Melbourne International Film Festival (20 July to 7 August 2005) and the Brisbane International Film Festival (27 July to 8th August).

We will also be presenting a session at this year’s Byron Bay Writers' Festival, called 'Writing for Multi-platform Delivery – the Spike Model', on Friday 5 August. The screening of the new Director's Cut is on the following Monday, 8 August, at the Byron Bay Community Centre.

The film, I TOLD YOU I WAS ILL, has played to packed houses during its limited theatrical release. Its world premiere at the Adelaide Film Festival on 22 February 2005 sold out, as did its East Coast premiere in Byron Bay on 8 April 2005. The Byron Bay screening was the first of three sessions held in the Northern Rivers to determine the potential for a regional theatrical tour called ‘Spike Milligan is Back!!’. The first part of the show features Spike’s eldest daughter Laura reading a selection of his hysterical poems and eccentric letters. Then Glen Cardier, who toured with Spike in the 1980s, performed a live acoustic gig including songs featured in the film. The trial tour grossed almost $7000 at only three small theatres in Lismore, Ballina and Byron Bay.

Following the success of this trial, Hatchling Productions now plans to stage a theatrical tour of regional towns and centres in eastern Australia in late 2005. It is our intention to sell the enhanced DVD on the tour, as well as online and in ABC Shops.

Using this opportunity to promote a cause about which Spike would have been passionate will be a key feature of the tour. Spike was a dedicated activist who took a stand on many, many issues and was a prolific letter writer about causes in which he believed. Therefore we propose to call this tour ‘Spike Milligan is Back!! Pick up a Pen’, encouraging audiences all around Australia to play a more active role in democracy –Spike would have been proud if he knew his legacy encouraged people to engage with the political process, to question the decision makers and to be passionate, not apathetic.

The East Coast Premiere of I TOLD YOU I WAS ILL: THE LIFE AND LEGACY OF SPIKE MILLIGAN takes place at the Byron Bay Community Centre on Friday 8 April as part of the 2005 OZeCulture Conference.

The East Coast Premiere is followed by two further screenings in the Northern Rivers, titled 'Spike Milligan is back!!'. Prior to the screenings of the feature length documentary, Spike's eldest daughter Laura will read some of his eccentric letters and hilarious poems and there will be a musical performance by Glenn Cardier, who toured with Spike.

EAST COAST PREMIERE - Friday 8 April at 8pm
BYRON BAY COMMUNITY CENTRE
Jonson Street, Byron Bay
Bookings through Byron Bay Community Centre or telephone 02 6685 6807

Also screening at:
Ballina RSL Club
Sunday 10 April at 2pm
Tickets from Caddies, Ballina
or telephone 02 6681 5452

and

Star Court Theatre, Lismore
Wednesday 13 April at 8pm
Tickets from Caddies, Lismore or telephone 02 6621 7709
Or for further enquiries, phone Hatchling Productions on +61 2 6629 1449.
TICKETS: $20 and $15 concession. All three screenings are fundraising events for Northern Rivers Screenworks.

The world premiere of the film "I told you I was ill: The life and legacy of Spike Milligan" took place on February 22nd at the Adelaide Film Festival. The film was the first documentary to receive funding from the Adelaide Film Festival Investment Fund, and as such it was given red-carpet treatment by the festival. My partner and co-producer Jeff Canin and I flew to Adelaide for the festivals' opening night, and we were joined by the Milligans on the weekend. The buzz about the film's upcoming premiere started building, and the following five days were a roller coaster ride of exhileration and emotion.

What is the best thing you can hope for at the world premiere of your film that has taken so much of your energy, commitment, time, money, love and passion? You hope that lots of people will hear about it, will want to come and even that it will be sold out. This happened. The pre-launch publicity was brilliant. We had a full page story in The Australian, and our Spike T-shirts and promotional material were everywhere. Spike's brother Desmond, his eldest daughter Laura and Spike's only granddaughter Georga joined us for a great press launch on the morning before the screening. We managed to find four minis and drove the family and crew in a mini convey to the cinema for photos and interviews, and some Spike fans even turned up for this suitably mad event. This resulted in a full page article in the Adelaide Advertiser. Word spread quickly that opening night was sold out and this made more people want to see it and our second screening started filling up. The opening speech by the premier of South Australia, Hon Mike Rann was generous and funny and the Milligans won over the audience with their natural humour and charm. Then the film started.

Despite a disaster with the cinema's sound system, which meant our beautiful surround sound audio track was seriously distorted, the audience seemed to be very engaged and responded well to the film. They laughed a lot and appeared to enjoy the roller coaster ride it took them on. The questions afterwards revealed that the story of what happened in the Milligan family after Spike died shocked and upset a lot of people and we had many offers of legal and personal help from people wanting to know what they could do to help protect Spike's legacy.

The second screening of the film on Thursday 24th February was also packed and this time the sound was perfect. There was a long Q & A session after the screening and some people even followed us down the street wanting to talk about it and asking what they could do to help the Milligan family. We are working on several ideas now, one of which is to create a space on the web site for audience comments and responses and a place to track the story of the legacy. More about this soon. On Friday The Age newspaper ran a full page story on the film, and over 500 people visited the Spike website. Copies of the press coverage can be found on the news page.

Kerry Sunderland, who produced and wrote the Spike Milligan Legacy web site, gave Edward Borland at RUCC (the company that hosts the site) the green light to 'go live' over a mobile phone in the back of Nina Angelo's car at 11.15pm on Sunday 20 February 2005, while Spike's eldest daughter Laura joined Nina and her friend Trish (who worked as a sound recordist on the Woy Woy shoot) in celebrating. It was a suitably 'virtual' and madcap moment all at once because, while Kerry was on the phone, there was some confusion about which way to turn and the Milligan clan got themselves lost. One hour later, Nina pulled into a petrol station and discovered the group was about 70kms north of where they wanted to end up. Dressed uniformly in Spike Milligan Legacy t-shirts, the petrol station attendant enquired whether we were members of a religious group. The Cult of Latter-Day Milligans was officially born.

The launch of the web site, despite a few early morning hiccups, was a success. In its first week, it attracted almost one thousand unique visitors.

Special thanks must go to Murray Debus, who created the wonderful animations, and the team at Katalyst Web Design (Jason Sidoryn, Chris Joyner, Kipp Brady, Malte Wiegand and Oli) who provided art direction, created the special applications like the quiz and News of the Galaxy and undertook all Flash programming.

I spent three weeks in Adelaide locked in edit rooms with expensive, clever equipment driven by expert, creative people to lift the picture and sound quality of the film and add the 'bells and whistles'. In the past this has been the most enjoyable part of the edit process for me, but this time it was fraught with problems and challenges that took me to new edges of my own endurance and stamina.

There is a vast amount of archive material in the film, and we were still dealing with the problems of clearing rights and getting master tapes of the footage sent from all over the globe. The BBC footage arrived the day we needed it, but other footage was late, and even arrived with bits missing. Jeff's job as co-producer extended to getting clearances for all the material and negotiating payment to all parties involved, and all I can say is, beware, it's a minefield and you have to be smart, quick and persuasive or you will bankrupt the project.

There were technical challenges, last minute changes requested by some of the broadcasters, and the difficulty of editing three versions in the time allotted. Also, I'd never worked with animations before and these presented their own unique challenges. So by the first week of February, the films were finished, the Irish version despatched to Ireland and broadcast five days after delivery, and the Adelaide Film festival had their copy, and I returned home and fell in a heap. I felt as if I'd just given birth to triplets and I wasn't sure if I had the stamina left to nurture and care for them all. For an entire week I promised myself I'd never make another film and would consider other career options. But I did recover, and began to think about the launch of the film, and once again packed my bag and headed back to Adelaide.

Landing home from London in late October with the filming stage of the film complete, I was in need of a big rest. Being away from my home and family for seven weeks takes its toll and the last two weeks of filming were extremely stressful. But the edit had started and we were on a roller coaster ride already with Christmas fast approaching and delivery deadlines looming. I began to regret our promise to deliver the film to Ireland by the end of January and the Adelaide Film festival in early February. But that was the deal. They provided financial support and we delivered on time. So it was straight into the edit room, where our intrepid editor James Bradley was already at work, logging and viewing all the footage.

The next ten weeks are a blurr. Wading through all the material, deciding which characters and which pieces of story should be in, and cutting, slicing and trimming the material down until the film begins to emerge. We decided early on to use a selection of Spike's funny sayings as chapter links and we brought an animator, Murray Debus, into the process in December. There was an air of mania throughout the edit, partly induced by Spike and the material and partly by the looming deadlines. Spike kept us laughing, even when we were dealing with the difficult and unfunny aspects of the story and we tried to keep to the spirit of: "we don't have a plan, so nothing can go wrong". However, when you are editing a feature length and two television versions of a film, you have to have a plan, and it has to be clear. Our plan was to show the personal side of Spike, what he was like as a father, brother, husband and friend, and how his personal life and his "illness" affected both his family and his work. This meant the film was going to be a mix of humour and sadness, and would roller coaster from one mood to another just like Spike did when he was alive. He was very open and articulate about his manic depression and we wanted audiences to hear in his own words, what it was like for him. We also wanted to show how the family dealt with it and how profoundly it influenced his work.

Christmas came and went in the midst of the blurr and still the film wasn't ready. Our Irish broadcaster wanted more Irish elements in the film, and our Australian partners wanted less. The Woy Woy sequences, which had at one stage been central to the story, were now feeling extraneous and were cut almost to extinction. The focus needed to be on Spike, his depression, his legacy and his family. Finally be the second week of January, we had three films that worked for all the partners, and we set off for Adelaide to do the picture grade, graphics, sound mix and final animations.