by Stephen Vagg
Everyone who works in the entertainment industry must deal with rejection. A lot of it. But if you are tenacious, good things can happen, even if it takes a while.
Such was the case for Gregory Marton, author of Silo 15. He was a Hungarian migrant who moved to Australia in 1949 and eventually settled in Mosman, Sydney. Marton’s day job was at the Lotteries Office, but he liked to write in his spare time – his book The Boy and His Friend Blizzard was published in 1962 and sold well overseas, if not in Australia. Marton decided to have a crack at writing a television play and came up with Silo 15, the story of two military officers in charge of a silo containing nuclear missiles at an unspecified location. The two men banter and bludge and are basically having a cruisy day when they hear a tremendous explosion; they’re cut off from the outside world, presumably under attack and the senior officer wants to launch a missile – but the junior doesn’t.
As you can tell from the synopsis, Silo 15 fits neatly into the deservedly-paranoid-about-nuclear-war-because-this-was-the-time-of-Curtis-LeMay genre that included Fail Safe, Dr Strangelove, The War Game, The Bedford Incident and On the Beach. The central premise is very strong and ideal for television; basically, a two-hander in the one set.
In 1965, Marton sent off his script to Ken Hannam, then a director working at the ABC, who ghosted him. He asked for a copy of the script back, several times, and kept being ghosted. These things happen [trust me], so Marton wrote a letter of query to the ABC Chairman. Hannam got a rap over the knuckles for being rude, but the ABC still didn’t offer to buy it or anything.
To his credit, Marton didn’t give up. He submitted his script to a New York agent who sold Silo 15 to a West German company who filmed it in 1967. The German Silo 15 screened throughout Europe on German-language channels.
Marton also entered the script into the first Australian Writers’ Guild Awards, where in March 1968 it picked up a Merit Award. This was reported in the Sydney Sun Herald, prompting the interest of commercials director John Alaimo, who tracked down a copy of the script. Alaimo decided to film Silo 15 in Australia using private funding (Grahame Jennings produced), and the budget was big enough for it all to be done on film, in colour, which Alaimo knew would help with overseas sales. The two leads were played by Owen Weingott (a highly experienced actor) and none other than Jack Thompson, just at the beginning of his career (post-Motel, pre-Wake in Fright). The editor was Brian Kavanagh, who later directed several feature films such as A City’s Child (1971).
The Australian Silo 15 was also popular internationally, selling to television networks in the US (National Educational Television), Canada (CBC) and the UK (BBC), among others… and it still hadn’t been seen in Australia! (The distributor was Seven Keys, a company run by Andrew “Return of Captain Invincible” Gaty, another Hungarian migrant) Eventually, Silo had a brief run at a cinema in Sydney in August 1969 as a supporting feature, before finally selling to ATN-7 who broadcast it in January 1972 and repeated it a few times afterwards.
I’ve seen a copy of the Australian Silo 15 via the National Film and Sound Archive (you can see it at one of their access centres). It’s a very good television play, with two strong actors, and a compelling story; it sags a little in places, but the ending doesn’t sell out. There’s a clip here:
On one hand, it’s remarkable that it took so long for (a) such a good script to be filmed, and (b) for such a strong realisation of that script to be screened in Australia. But on the other hand, it’s unfortunately not surprising – when it comes to genre, especially, overseas countries tend to like Australian stuff more than Australian gatekeepers.
I don’t know what happened to Marton’s career after this – I do know that John Alaimo and Graeme Jennings made another film called Odyssey: A Journey, and Alaimo eventually moved to Pennsylvania. But at least Silo 15 is relatively easy to access via the NFSA. It would make a terrific extra on a DVD by the way, hint, hint.
The author would like to thank James Dyer at the National Film and Sound Archive for his assistance with his article. All opinions are my own.
