| Billy's Holiday | |
| Director: | Richard Wherrett |
| Producer: | Tristram Miall |
| Starring: | Max Cullen |
| Studio: | Beyond Films |
| Distributor: | Anchor Bay Entertainment, Miramax |
| Runtime: | 92 minutes |
| Country: | Australia |
| Language: | English |
| Budget: | A$4 million[1] |
| Gross: | A$68,472 (Australia)[2] |
Billy's Holiday is a 1995 Australian musical film, directed by Richard Wherrett and starring Max Cullen. Based on Cullen's real-life ability to vocally impersonate Billie Holiday, the film revolves around a man named Billy Apples, played by Cullen, whose life and music career are stagnating until he is visited by Holiday's spirit and finds himself gifted with her voice. Despite finding a receptive audience at the Cannes Film Festival and some success with international distributors, the film was negatively received in Australia and was a box office bomb.
As the film begins, bus driver Sid (Drew Forsythe) is stuck in traffic on King Street, Newtown, Sydney, making light of the situation by playing "I Can't Get Started" on trumpet to his passengers.
We then meet Billy Appleby, known professionally as Billy Apples (Max Cullen) - a divorced, middle-aged man who owns a hardware store in Newtown. In his spare time, he plays trombone and sings lead vocals in The Billy Apples Band. He is dating a woman named Kate (Kris McQuade), but is going through a period of indecision and inertia in life as he recovers from his divorce from Louise (Tina Bursill), who has lately been studying Ancient Egyptian afterlife beliefs and the possibility of "soul reincarnation".
One night, after Billy sings "After You've Gone" in a gruff voice at a local bar, Louise leads a séance at a yum cha restaurant which hypnotises those around the table. While staring at a salt shaker, Billy is visited by the spirit of Billie Holiday. Later that night, Billy arrives home to find he has locked himself out. His daughter Casey (Rachael Coopes) is embarrassed to find him sitting on the roof, watching shooting stars. In the morning, she overhears him singing "After You've Gone" while showering in a voice uncannily resembling Holiday's.
At his next gig, he sings "Am I Blue?" in his newfound Holiday voice to a transfixed audience. Later that night he tells Kate, "I felt different. Released. New." His daughter Casey is again embarrassed in front of her friends as they witness Billy recreate Gene Kelly's "Singin' in the Rain" dance on their street, but this moment leads to a discussion between them about his newly-awakened emotional state. Riding Sid's late-night bus to the end of the line in Blackwattle Bay, Billy sings "Why Was I Born?" in the Holiday voice to the Anzac Bridge and Sid joins him on trumpet.
When Billy sings "What a Night, What a Moon, What a Boy", it leads both Louise and Sarah to call his sexuality and gender identity into question. Sarah confronts him about this, saying to him, "It's as if she's inside you." Record company executives also begin to express interest in Billy, considering him marketable as a "gender bender". Billy seems to resent the projection of others onto his performance as Holiday, but never comments on this directly. At one stage, he hallucinates a vision of himself in the mirror wearing a fruit hat à la Carmen Miranda and remarks, "Strange... fruit". Billy rejects the offer of a recording contract at first, but is later peer pressured into signing by his bandmates and family members.
In the studio, he records "I Want the Whole Fairytale" in the Holiday voice. though the record company soon force him to drop the band and record as a solo artist. Kate tells him that he has "locked up his heart", but he insists on pursuing this career opportunity. Walking through an empty train station, he sings "I Had Too Much to Love Last Time" in a more refined version of his original voice. Later, he records "Mr. Exhilaration" in the Holiday voice. This becomes the title track of his new album, which tops the charts in Australia upon release. The band continue on with Rob (Richard Roxburgh) on lead vocals, who runs through "Ragtime Romeo Ball" at band practice.
Before a show at Sydney's State Theatre, Billy runs through "Is You Is Or Is You Ain't My Baby." Meanwhile, Billy's family and friends, including Louise, find an old record in which Billy sang a duet in a more refined voice with Louise. This convinces them to force him to use this voice again, believing that he is "not lost, just dozing".
That night, Billy opens the set with "It Must Have Been Easy for You", finding to his surprise that Louise - who has centred herself in this plan, to the surprise of Billy's other friends and family - is on stage with him and has turned it into a duet. He then attempts to sing "I Can't Get Started" in the Holiday voice, but finds it will not come out. His family urge him to sing from the heart, and he begins to apply his more refined and personal voice to the delight of the audience. Louise is spun off stage, thwarting her attempt to hijack the show and leaving Billy to complete the show in a new voice that belongs to him alone. He receives a standing ovation as the spirit of Holiday watches on approvingly from the back of the audience, blowing a kiss and then walking away.
That night, Billy and Casey sit on their house roof and she reflects that she is glad to have taken after him. Billy then visits Kate at her hairdressing job the next day, offering her a rose and singing "I'll Do Beautiful Things to Your Heart".
In the 1980s, Denis Whitburn wrote the play The Siege of Frank Sinatra, based on the infamous 1974 incident in which Sinatra was held hostage by Australian trade unions after calling a local journalist a "two-dollar whore". Max Cullen met Whitburn and producer Tristam Miall while starring in the original stage production. One night, Cullen surprised an audience in a crowded bar by singing "Am I Blue?" in his Billie Holiday voice.[3] In the early 1990s, Whitburn decided this could be the basis of a film and wrote the screenplay for Billy's Holiday in three weeks.[1]
Director Richard Wherrett had never made a feature film before, though he had enjoyed a long and esteemed career in the theatre and had occasionally worked on short films and televised plays. He was drawn to the screenplay's premise of "a middle-aged man getting a second chance at life and love", and came out publicly as HIV positive around the same time as the film's release.[4] Wherrett never made another film, but directed several more stage productions and the opening ceremony of the Sydney 2000 Olympics before his death in 2001.
The opening scene has James Morrison playing "I Can't Get Started" à la Bunny Berigan. The musical score was written by the late Larry Muhoberac, who won an AFI award that year for Best Musical Score. It was produced in Sydney, Australia, with co-production, instrumental performances and engineering by Parrish Muhoberac. The soundtrack was released on CD by Mercury Records.
A novelisation was written by Whitburn and published by Pan Macmillan in 1995.[5] Amongst other things, the novelisation much more directly explores the transgender and queer implications of the story, and makes clear that the voice Billy develops by the end of the film is meant to sound like a third, more refined voice, not a return to the voice he had in the first place.
Billy's Holiday was negatively received in Australia. "The problem", wrote Barbara Creed in The Age, "is that Billy is neither black nor female". While feeling that the "glossy, dramatic musical numbers" were the film's strength and recalled the films of Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, she called the film "hackneyed (and) terminally slow... The characters are one-dimensional and the dialogue is appalling."[6] Paul Byrnes called the film "a folly of substantial proportions (that) dies a thousand deaths before it's over", but spoke highly of the "heartfelt and true" scene in which Billy Apples sings "Am I Blue?".[7] "It's unclear exactly what we're meant to make of the changes that result from Billy's discovery", wrote Tom Ryan, "for Wherrett seems more interested in the opportunities they provide for production numbers... Perhaps (Billy's) acceptance of the gift nature has bestowed upon him is supposed to represent his first step towards self discovery... But what is one then to make of the eventual restoration of the old Billy?"[8]
Cullen himself was also critical of the film, telling an interviewer that he thought "the gimmick went too far".[9]
However, the film was a critical success when it debuted at the Cannes Film Festival, leading to its sale to Miramax and several other distributors for international territories.[10] Cullen recalled several Cannes attendees telling him the film had genuinely moved them and made them cry.[11]