It’s fair to say I wouldn’t ever have had a career in film and TV if it wasn’t for Craig Elliot Tonkin, who among other things was the multi-talented bloke who shot, directed, assembled, edited and did all the cool visual shit for our doco The PhanDom Menace.
And now the prick has gone and died on us all, aged just 51. So I guess I should give him a decent send-off / send-up / pisstake. It’s what he would’ve wanted, given that he’s not here to do it himself.
Craig landed at Glen Iris Primary School in Grade 2 and became firm friends with my younger brother Marty. They bonded over Warner Brothers cartoons and Masters of the Universe action figures, foreshadowing an obsession, nay, an addiction, that loomed large over Craig’s whole life.
Marty and Craig also started to play around with primitive film-making. He-Man, Skeletor and their vast toy armies battled over Castle Grayskull. Claymation figures smooshed themselves into surreal shapes. And occasionally we’d even film ourselves making sketches.
I went off to one high school, Marty and Craig to another, but our mutual love of the surreal anarchy of comedy such as The Young Ones kept us connected. For Craig, life was there to be mocked, only sci-fi – in particular Star Wars – was to be taken seriously.
As he later wrote about himself in his PhanDom bio, “Star Wars, or in a more roundabout way, making films that could not compare to Star Wars, would be his calling.”
Yes, while I was merely dabbling in creative pursuits on the side while partaking in the very serious tertiary study of Mathematics, Craig had oddly enough decided that the path to being a filmmaker involved enrolling in filmmaking at RMIT. I think Bummer Daze was his audition film, and starred Marty as a hapless put-upon loser, which I want to assure you is not a commentary on the regard in which he held the Holts.
Around 1993, Craig made a short about a superhero, played by his good self, called Repman, whose only superpower was that of his reputation. I had a minor role as a stocking-masked bank robber who handed himself in at the mere sight of Repman in the opening scene.
I have a much vaguer memory of his follow-up, Arthouse Crap, in which Craig played a wanky artist, and I played a wanky TV host paying tribute to him. (A bit like this blog entry, really.) All I remember is Craig encouraging me to be very silly with my performance, shooting linking material while interacting with the studio set in all sorts of off-the-wall, or even behind-the-wall, ways. I suspect it wound up pretty wacky, and indeed wanky.
Somewhere around then would’ve been when we shot the first sketches for Laugh You Bastards, moving from community radio to community TV. And Craig was co-opted as our Director through our early shoots. He also appeared in front of the camera on a few occasions, including as deceased species enthusiast Bart Bathroom-Plaque in the Victims of Evolution sketches.
Craig had grander plans in mind, moving on to his final year film – a sci-fi short called Pariah, where he played a tortured captain of an abandoned spacecraft, as well as designing and constructing a pretty awesome Star Trek-esque set, designing costumes and doing digital effects. I had a very minor role as a crew member, testing the limits of my dramatic acting – I remember having to do quite a few retakes of walking on to the bridge and saying “What…?” because I just wasn’t believable. By the end I was surely inhabiting my character’s state of bewildered incomprehension.
Yes, Craig was a perfectionist, and it paid off – he received 5 High Distinctions for Pariah, and set him up for moving into the edit suite straight out of film school. In 1999, as an actual filmmaking professional, he was my first and only choice of collaborator when I was trying to salvage something from my very average footage of a trip to Juste Pour Rire, the Montreal Comedy Festival. As a favour, after hours at his workplace, we pieced together a half-hour doco called Just For Laughs? It screened on Channel 31. And hey, suddenly we were doco makers.
It was while editing that doco that Craig, sad comic book nerd that he was, excitedly approached me with a copy of Vanity Fair, featuring the first photos from the set of Star Wars Episode 1. I was having a serious case of the “what nexts”, and it dawned on me that not only was that a great idea for a movie (not Star Wars itself, but the imminent explosion of enthusiasm from Star Wars geeks like Craig), but an undeniably easy way to keep scumbagging free cameras and studio time out of Craig’s work. (Thanks Keith and Image Control!)
So The PhanDom Menace was born. We started filming on the street, very briefly interviewing random people outside sci-fi and fantasy bookstores. On the first day of shooting, we made the canny decision to step back from being on-camera interviewers. But importantly we found a flyer that led us to the Aussie Star Wars fan club, Sky Walking Inc., and from there, our cast led us.
With no budget per se, the two of us did almost everything between us. Craig carried the heaviest load: he shot most of the film, and did all the editing and graphics. I did the bulk of the interviewing and a lot of the music, assembling the rest of the soundtrack from musical friends, and sat in the edit suite pontificating.
We played to our strengths and our different takes on the subject. As a Star Wars fiend, Craig was always after showing off the cool stuff that the fans were doing and wanted to shoot sexy shots of their toy collections. Whereas, as someone who’d enjoyed the films as a kid but didn’t really even know who Boba Fett was, I was an outsider getting an education.
As a result, I like to think The PhanDom Menace was a doco that spoke to fans and non-fans alike. Indeed it was quite telling that when screened publicly, the laughs weren’t always in the same places, depending on who was in the crowd.
It was a key turning point for me. After years of very ropey radio and TV, I’d finally made something that looked and sounded pro. We screened it in actual cinemas! It was picked up by distributors both local and global for release on DVD. We recorded a Directors’ Commentary (not to mention a Cast Commentary). It was the point that I saw that a creative career was a possibility.
But oddly enough, from that point on, Craig and my lives diverged, and post-PhanDom we only worked briefly together again. I started writing jokes about the news for a living and screenplays on the side. Craig continued to have a highly successful career as an editor and motion graphics artist under the Primordial Productions banner. We had families and we didn’t get together often enough, despite the best of intentions.
He was funny, passionate, loyal, a man deeply in touch with his inner child, but also happy to take the piss out of himself. And now, out of nowhere, unknown natural causes have taken him from us. He leaves behind his wonderful wife Natasha (who he happened to meet during the same period we were cutting PhanDom, in what was clearly a more romantic edit suite) and two young sons. My heart is broken, he is a shocking loss to them and the world.
Craig, I’m sure you’re as pissed off as I am. But if you are out there somewhere, I hope you are now at one with the universe, lost in the stars.
