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wrote it all.
    KATE : You think you’re using him, but he’s using you.
    COLIN : [ irritated ] I can look after myself.
    KATE exits. COLIN sits in an armchair and thinks. MIKE enters and sits poised at the typewriter. Suddenly COLIN bounds up out of his chair and starts pacing around waving a clenched fist as if he is threatening the gods of creativity with physical violence if they don’t start the ideas flowing.
    The trouble with this scene is that there’s nothing at stake . Unless something’s at stake you have no emotional undercurrent and all you’re left with is two people chatting. What’s at stake?
    MIKE : [ dutifully repeating the magic litany ] What’s at stake?
    COLIN : Hold it a minute while I think this one through.
    COLIN returns to his armchair and to deep thought. MIKE looks to the heavens as if to say, ‘How much more of this do I have to put up with?’
    MIKE : [ to the audience ] I began to think I wasn’t going to last the distance. My stomach was giving me hell. Every morning it’d flicker from yesterday’s embers and by the end of the day I’d have your full fireball. I was taking three times as many tablets a day as I should’ve been but it had as much effect as pissing on a bushfire. [ To COLIN ] Just make a quick call.
    He picks up the phone and dials.
    [ Into the phone ] Bob? How about a drink? Six-thirty at the Admiral’s Cup bar. Heard about Terry’s film? Disaster . Absolute disaster. Only took three thousand over the long weekend. [ He nods .] Disaster. See you at six-thirty.
    COLIN : Terry’s film not doing well?
    MIKE : Disaster.
    COLIN : Do you know what really amazes me about this industry, Mike? I’ve got the best track record on script in the country and that phone never rings. Terry could’ve asked me to write that script and I could’ve made it work. But he didn’t. They never do.
    MIKE : [ to the audience ] If I’d’ve heard him whinge once more about why producers weren’t lining up to plead for his services, I’d’ve perforated. The thing that amazed me about him was that he knew nothing about how the real world operated. The reason producers weren’t flocking to him was that they had egos almost as big as his, and who would enjoy crawling on their bellies like I had to do? [ To COLIN ] I’ll get some coffee.
    MIKE leaves.
    COLIN : [ to the audience ] I watched Mike with the fascination of a zoologist who’s found a new species. Port Jackson huckster. He kept ringing around an endless list of contacts, all male, and arranged meetings. The currency being exchanged at the meetings was failure. Other people’s. It seemed crucial to Mike that everything failed. If there was a film due for release that seemed in any danger of being declared a success, Mike and his drinking mates would expend enormous amounts of mental energy cracking its pretentions like a walnut. I had an image of Mike as a kind of filmic gridiron player, waiting with the ball until all of his opponents were lying bloody and prostrate so that he could wend his way through them to the touchline. I found this behaviour amusing and reassuring. Other people’s failures are always reassuring, but the frantic energy and effort he put into his networking of failure was worrying.
    KATE comes home looking upset.
    [ To KATE ] What’s wrong?
    KATE : I’m so angry I can’t even talk about it. The children are all screaming for food, I suppose?
    COLIN : Don’t worry about that. We’ll phone up for some pizzas. He’s not going to publish?
    KATE : I just wanted to grab that hollow little man by his collar and hurl him down into that sparkling blue harbour he’s paid seventy thousand dollars a year to gaze at. I know you can’t understand my passion about that book—
    COLIN : [ interrupting ] I can. I’m not totally insensitive.
    KATE : I was nearly in tears today. I’m