Second generation: Paul Hogan as Mick Dundee heads for La-La Land with his young son, Mikey (Serge Cockburn).

CROC OF GOLD

Let me start with a small anecdote - you’ll understand why. On a cool autumn evening in April 1986 (April is autumn in the Southern Hemisphere), I went to a preview screening of a new Australian film in the big Hoyts cinema on Melbourne’s Bourke Street. As Editor of Australia’s leading movie magazine, Cinema Papers, I went to lots of previews of Australian films. But this one was different: there was a huge buzz about it and we had already put its star, Paul Hogan, on the cover of our next issue. A couple of weeks later, we would be promoting the issue in Cannes, so I needed to know what the film was about. The film was, of course, ‘Crocodile’ Dundee.

Right from that very first aerial shot of a helicopter swooping over the Northern Territory accompanied by Peter Best’s pounding score, I was hooked. I knew, of course, that the film had been carefully market-researched. Hoges’ ‘Put another shrimp on the barbie’ campaign promoting Aussie tourism on US television was specifically designed to make him familiar to US audiences before the movie was released. But this was more than just clever marketing. This seemed to be a take on Oz that was romantic enough to appeal to foreigners, but also sufficiently tongue-in-cheek to cut it with a local audience. At the end, the response was rapturous.

“That film,” I said to my deputy editor on the way out, “is going to make shit-loads of money.” She disagreed: like a lot of right-thinking Australian women, she tended to be dismissive of the Hogan sense of humour. The first-ever review of the film, which appeared in the movie trade paper, Variety, wasn’t so great, either. For Variety’s reviewer, the Australian bureau chief Don Groves, this was just another example of parochial Aussie humour that had zero chance of appealing to overseas audience.

By the time I read Grove’s review, however, I had already written the letter that would go out with the Cannes copies. It began: “On the cover is Paul Hogan, whose new film, ‘Crocodile’ Dundee, has just opened to record business downunder…” It wasn’t until weeks later I realised I had written and signed off on that statement a full week before ‘Crocodile’ Dundee’s actual Australian public premiere. That’s not the sort of gamble I would recommend to other editors, least of all in the movie business.

But I needn’t have worried: Hoges’ film did indeed break box-office records downunder. It also went on to take a staggering $360 million worldwide, ending up the No 1 film of 1987 in most countries (the film didn’t open in the US until the northern-hemisphere autumn of 1986, and not until the spring of 1987 around the world).