Pubdate: Wed, 05 Feb 2014
Source: Sydney Morning Herald (Australia)
Copyright: 2014 The Sydney Morning Herald
Contact:  http://www.smh.com.au/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/441
Author: Steve Dow, Arts writer

SCHAPELLE CORBY DRAMA WILL SPARK CONTROVERSY AGAIN

Nine's telemovie on drug smuggler Schapelle Corby has angered her supporters.

A father with white scraggly whiskers lightly nicotine-stained by the 
make-up artist and glued to his chin looks up at his daughter, a 
one-time beauty school student in a green dress seated before him in 
a prison garden.

Her eyebrows are shaved down each day rather than plucked, so the 
actor playing Australia's most famous contemporary female prisoner, 
who was sentenced to 20 years in jail in 2005 after being convicted 
for smuggling marijuana into Bali in a surf body board bag, can 
easily regrow her brows once filming finishes.

Twenty-seven extras - women in batik dresses and cut-off jean shorts, 
walking or sitting in pairs; men in brown prison-guard uniforms - 
complete a faux Kerobokan prison courtyard at Nerang on the Gold Coast.
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It's scene 165, the denouement of the telemovie, and actor Krew 
Boylan, in character as Schapelle Corby, tells Colin Friels, who is 
playing Corby's late father Mick, that a visitor, a former prisoner, 
has advised her to plead guilty to gain release from the jail.

"What did you say?" says Friels as Mick.

Her response - and most importantly, the way she says it - is a 
chilling end to what has been a tense shoot and will surely spark 
controversy again in this TV production of Corby's story, written by 
Katherine Thomson.

FremantleMedia optioned Fairfax journalist Eamonn Duff's account of 
the Corby story, Sins of the Father. "The book and Eamonn himself 
were really important elements to developing the screenplay, but then 
I did loads of my own research," says Thomson.

Modelled on video footage and Instagram photos of the real thing, the 
set, in its sixth and final day before being torn down, includes the 
recreated prison cell that Corby shares with five other women, with 
aqua-painted window frames, pastel and salmon walls, mattresses lined 
up in a row and a grotty squat toilet.

The buildings are hollow plywood and plaster. In the nearby fake 
holding cell, water and shellac were applied to replicate years of 
bodies rubbing against the walls.

Friels tells the director of his understanding of Mick: "I think he 
wants her to say that she should plead guilty." Earlier, Friels had 
reassured Boylan her performance as Schapelle "sounded truthful". 
Boylan admits quietly to him she feels pressured.

Later, sitting with her feet up on a bench, she says that as an 
actor, judging Corby's guilt or innocence "doesn't serve the story". 
She didn't pause to consider potential sensationalism "until I got 
some aggressive tweets".

Her Twitter account is now protected. "It's part of the job," she 
says of the reaction, "Hopefully, I'm dealing with it with some grace."

An army of Corby supporters has mounted a social media campaign 
against the show, assuming it portrays Corby as guilty.

Thomson admits the legalities of writing are tricky given that most 
of the players, bar Mick, who died of bowel cancer in 2008, are still alive.

"I feel very much for Schapelle," says Thomson. "I feel sorry that 
her parole has been seemingly in some state of suspension. I carry 
that compassion before being worried about legal things."

Thomson admits she doesn't have a clear idea about what happened: 
"I've probably got a few scenarios in my mind. I don't know that 
anyone will ever know."

But she sees parallels between how the media treated Schapelle Corby 
and how it handled the story of Lindy Chamberlain and the 
disappearance of her daughter Azaria at Uluru in 1980.

Make-up and hair designer Louise Coulston says she's aiming to get 
"essence of Mick" in Friels, given the actor doesn't much resemble 
him, while Boylan's hair has been darkened and extensions clipped in, 
along with "very groomed" eyebrows. Contact lenses give Boylan's blue 
eyes more of a turquoise tinge.

Jacinta Stapleton, who plays Schapelle's sister, Mercedes, was given 
prosthetic teeth fitted with an overbite and gummy smile.

Friels says the story leaves guilt or innocence "up for conjecture 
.. I'm sure everyone has got theories about Schapelle; people say, 
'She's guilty, slam her up', [or] 'Oh no, she didn't do it' ... but 
this script doesn't attempt to do that."

But, he says, "to lock someone up for 20 years for marijuana, just to 
me is too severe". 
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MAP posted-by: Jo-D