Bogan Bay

Some snaps from sunnier days in Byron Bay, the northern town that has become so popular with the ex-Hollywood set like Chris Hemsworth and Elsa Pataky, Matt Damon, Zac Efron and assorted characters. Whispers has been visiting Byron Bay and nearby Mullumbimby for nearly 40 years. Ever since our pal the late British printing press heir Nicholas Shand re-located from Shropshire and puchased a few hundred acres in "Mullum". Shand set up the local newspaper, the Byron Echo which has since become the established newspaper for the area. Shand sadly passed away in a car accident and there is statue of him outside the local council chambers.

But there are rumblings of discontent about the "newcomers" and the glitzy Hemsworth set and assorted hanger-ons who number in the dozens, from the oldtimers who first moved to Byron Bay over the previous decades. And the addition of anti-vaxxer chef Pete Evans has really got blood vessels pumping. We can't name the locals but it seems most cannot abide the new crowd and the attention it has brought to Byron. Among the complaints are the rapidly rising house prices and the flocks of visitors who pour into the town on weekends.

One local described it as similar to the beautiful California enclave Sausalito which in the 60s & 70s was a playground for those wishing to escape the city ratrace but went along similar lines as Byron with property prices outstripping the ability of the sort of "arty" crowd that made it popular in the first place.

Byron Bay locals are now calling it Bogan Bay and say an event a few weeks ago sums up the new mob. A marquee and tables were set up in a park at the beach claiming Covid was a hoax and wearing masks stupid calling them "face nappies" as an insult. It was the sheer numbers who headed for these tables to lend support that upset the locals. Many early Byron locals were "alternatives" in the 60s thru 80s when they moved there but are not like the QAnon nutters who have been boring the world to death lately.

The original movie super-star to spot Byron's potential was Paul Hogan who snapped up acres in the hinterland and built a magnificent mansion and redeveloped the pub in the main street. Hoges packed up nearly 20 years ago selling up for $Millions and moved to LA. Now Byron, or Bogon is flooded from the recent torrential rains and the beach was recently washed away in another storm which caused terrible damage. One prominent local likened it to God's wrath.

Matt Damon & the premiere of Elysium.

Matt Damon was in Sydney last night for the Australian premiere of his new film Elysium.He gave an interview about his life to local TV:

ABC.net.au

The Gatsby Effect

It's not just the fabulous era of flappers that is cleaning up at the box office with The Great Gatsby. Now comes what looks to be an amazing film about the life of Liberace and the excesses of the 70s & 80s. Featuring Michael Douglas as Liberace and Matt Damon as his lover Scott Thorsen  (on whose autobiography the film is based) Behind The Candelabra opens in June. Here is  a taster:

Camerman Displays Perfect Tabloid Mentality

The Shuttle interviewed him once in Sydney on his many visits to promote his movies. Matt Damon is an intelligent and polite actor (not star truck, just impressed).

In this answer to a cameraman as Matt explains to an interviewer why he supports US teachers (one success of the Tea Party in the USA has been it's ability to convince the country the worker is now the Enemy Of The State) he illustrates the state of today's media.

The public may say they "don't believe everything they read in newspapers" but still buy them in large numbers. The demise of the News of The World has seen a surge in the circulation of other Sunday tabloids in the UK.

With some in the media business now mounting a campaign to convince the public that freedom of the press is about to be trashed by politicians (Brendan O'Neill on Monday's Q&A) and that the attacks upon News International are some sort of Commie plot, despite one newspaper, The Guardian having uncovered one of the greatest scandals in decades in British public life by legal means, it's scary how many media workers today are possibly more gullible than the public.

Gone are the grizzled old cynical hacks of yesteryear who pounded away on typewriters and created a network of contacts, trudging their beats and uncovering all manner of underhand political machinations, fraudsters and so on, replaced by a new breed who believe everything they write is gospel, re-produce press releases or simply don't give a damn and even worse, believe what their rivals publish.

Was Nikita Krushev channeling the future when he reputedly asked JFK in the 1960s how the West got journalists to write their lies when he had to threaten Pravda scribes to do likewise ?
..and here is the 14 year old lad who won Australia's Got Talent last night (plus $250,000) who Kyle Sandilands says has "a black woman inside him and looks like Ellen DeGeneres" : Jack Vidgen.

Hopefully in 3D-Murdoch The Movie

A film script on the life of Rupert Murdoch is being hawked around Hollywood.

This news comes courtesy of Franklin Leonard's annual Black List. Leonard is regarded as 'Hollywood's most important soothsayer" according to the LA Times with his list each year of unmade film projects. 

He compiles the list by talking to LA's most influential agents and studio bosses and any script that gets 5 mentions is included  with the added bonus it generates so much industry chat that the inclusion is regarded as a lifeline for ailing screenplays.

'Murdoch' was commissioned by the UK's Channel 4 and written by respected TV script writer Jesse Armstrong but 4 decided against making it. It's now being handled by a top agency Creative Artist's Agency who are looking for a producer and backer.

The script blurb reads : "As his family gathers for his birthday party, Rupert Murdoch tries to convince his elder children to alter the family trust so that his two youngest children by his newest wife will have voting rights in the company."

Ouch ! A little close to home. 

When Rupert divorced his second wife Anna Murdoch Mann , the mother of children Lachlan, James and Elisabeth, Anna went in tough with heavy New York lawyers and  secured a very profitable trust which she controls that holds huge swathes of News Corp shares in her children's names although  she was forced off the News board in the process. 

And she had rather unkind words to say about Rupert in a 2001 interview where she described him as "hard, ruthless and determined".

No-one quite knows what size of inheritance Wendi Murdoch's 2 daughters Chloe and Grace may be in for. With  News Corp  headquartered in Delaware with it's secretive corporate laws, the outside world doesn't really know quite what the media empire or Murdoch is worth although it will be in the billions of dollars.

 Long before Wendi appeared on the scene Murdoch also made a famous faux pas in 1997 when he referred to "my 3 children " while talking about succession in a press conference that drew the ire of his daughter Prudence Murdoch MacLeod, his first child from marriage to Patricia Booker. Never shy, Prudence got a public apology out of her father.

So it's all there-plenty of meat for Murdoch the film !

Rupert ?

Who would play the roles in this gripping drama where the clan get-together to discuss high finance?.

As the media baron Rupert Murdoch  step forward Barry Humphries who played Rupert in the 1983 film Selling Hitler: The Story of the Hitler Diaries. Humphries has aged nicely with the same crumpled look as Rupert.

Matt Damon is a cinch for the role of the American accented Lachlan Murdoch and surely  Sarah Murdoch with thespian ambitions could play herself. New actor Leighton Meester could do a good Elisabeth Murdoch. Hayden Christensen with specs could play James Murdoch.

That leaves roles for the two who are bound to play  a leading part in the carve-up of Murdoch's billions-Wendi Murdoch and Mathew Freud. Answers on a postcard please.

# you can download Leonard's Black List here and see other scripts 'Murdoch' is competing with. The Shuttle's favourite : Abraham Lincoln : Vampire Hunter. The future president's mother is killed by a vampire and Abe spends the rest of his life hunting down the killers !

this is becoming just too easy...

The Sunday Telegraph today brings us an interview with charming actor Matt Damon. As journalist Jane Cornwell reports in her piece titled: Matt Damon opens up about love, kids and saving the world

In Australia for the 2007 premiere of The Bourne Ultimatum, he did so much promotion that the Matt Damon sightings continued after he left.

Last December, he allegedly hopped off an ocean liner at Bateman’s Bay, NSW, where he allegedly bought prawns and signed a petition to support, um, vodka dipping sauce.

He sighs good-naturedly.

“That was somebody pretending to be me,” he says of this Tom Ripley-style identity theft.

“It happens. My wife used to work in a bar and the bartender called us once, saying, ‘There’s a guy in here who looks like you and says he is you.’ There was some guy sitting in the VIP section getting free champagne.”

And what was the august publication that Ms Cornwell neglected to inform her readers that reported the "Tom Ripley-style identity theft " ? (as fact without the crucial word "allegedly"..which the Social Shuttle shot down in flames within hours of the report.)

Step forward the Daily Telegraph-sister and week-day publication of the Sunday Telegraph.

the things people say...

    A political moment overcomes tSS as we read today that the Sydney Morning Herald reports: Iraqi rage at Blackwater decision in US court by their Baghdad correspondent Michael Hastings.

A speech by former PM John Howard to Parliament in 2004:

 " I again take the opportunity of reaffirming the correctness of the government’s assessment in predeploying our forces, and I record the bitter opposition of the  Australian Labor Party when that decision was taken. Not only was the military operation completed quickly and successfully but it is also worth recording that all of the doomsday predictions, particularly the many that came from those who sit opposite, were not realised.

     The oilwells were not set on fire; there were not millions of refugees; the dams on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers were not breached to bring on catastrophic flooding; and there was no long, drawn out, bloody, Stalingrad style street-to-street fighting in Baghdad. For all of this we must be immensely grateful, but it is a reminder of the hysteria and the doomsday predictions that often accompany operations of this kind. And, just as many of the predictions about a Western Front style holocaust that were made in 1991 when the land war commenced were proved wrong, so the predictions on this occasion have been proved wrong.

       The decisive  victory of the American led coalition reflects enormous credit on the strength and the determination of the leadership of President Bush.

      Again I remind the House of the way in which his role was vilified and traduced by many of those who sit opposite and of the way in which speaker after speaker from the Australian Labor Party impugned his integrity, assaulted his judgment and called into question his ability to lead the United States in this very difficult conflict. History has proved them wrong.

The performance of the President has illustrated how infantile their protests were, and the leadership that he has given on this occasion, I believe, will bring about a permanent change in attitudes in the Middle East."

Yeh, sure.

update ## my favourite green-grocer in Kings Cross was very excited after the fall of Saddam and made a trip back to Iraq in 2005 where he was born. He returned within a week and said he had secured a job in a government ministry and was off again within the month. His family in Australia..or relatives in Iraq have never heard from him again.

If you think the noughties were fun...wait until we bring news of what is in store for us all according to Nostradamus !

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Apologies accepted !!

  And it was nice to see the same newspaper yesterday finally picked up our tale of Nicole Kidman attending the Carols by Candlelight delivered by us on 22nd December after she had previously claimed life in Sydney was a living hell because of the media (we politely left her alone on the night) and demolished the utter nonsense printed in an unnamed newspaper ( the Daily Telegraph ) that actor Matt Damon and his family were cutting a swathe throughout small holiday townships on the south coast of NSW during their non-existent cruise aboard the giant liner The World. He was skiing in the US.

                          Check out The World's website-there are still plenty of apartments for sale including the 6 bedroom penthouse where for a lazy few million dollars you can sit and watch the sea for hours on end. What fun

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reality check

      OK it's the silly season but that's no reason to go totally troppo. A tabloid we won't name (Daily Telegraph) is reporting that Hollywood actor Matt Damon is currently holidaying in Huskisson on the NSW South coast having moved on from Bateman's Bay where it's reported he "signed autographs".

     Damon, one of Hollywood's Mr Nice Guys is supposedly on The World, a vast cruise liner that is heading for Sydney and is like a 15 storey apartment block laid upon it's side. tSS  inspected The World the last time it visited Sydney and, well frankly they may be very nice apartments but the whole floating shebang is ghastly.

      It's like being trapped at sea in an apartment block full of neighbours you never wanted to know and are usually types like a Texan husband and wife who own a thousand bowling alleys and are worth a mint but would bore for The World.

 If Matt's aboard that boat I'll eat Madame Arcarti's hat. These shipboard apartments are mostly owned by people who occasionally rent them out-well just like a real apartment block but why would you want to spend weeks at sea when someone like Damon can hire his own Lear Jet if he wants to holiday in Oz with the kids-particularly as there would be very few other children aboard.

     There are some pleasant owners of these floating flats like Bill and Imelda Roche who sold the Nutrimetics empire for a squillion but they have even started spending less and less time aboard. The highly successful astrologer Athena Starwoman also purchased one when she found instant success in the USA but succumbed to cancer before she could even cross the threshold of her sea bound home.

    Frankly I'd prefer a trip on the Poseidon as at least you would get to go down with Shelley Winters.

And besides, tSS's World spy disguised as the PR agent says there is no-one named 'Damon ' listed onboard.

       This tale reeks for all The World like the story that engulfed the same newspaper when it discovered Sex in The City star Sarah Jessica Parker sipping a beer at the Rushcutter's Bay yachting club a few years ago and ran the pic for 3 days swearing blind it was her despite tSS saying 'you've got it all wrong folks". On the 4th day they admitted their mistake  (no apology of course) but the British lass who had a passing resemblence to Parker lapped up every moment of her new found fame.

     Of  course tSS may be completely wrong about this one but when have we ever been before  ?

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    The same tabloid has run a list of parties for New Year's Eve where one might spot Sydney's "A-List". That would be some feat finding this mysterious crowd who have been missing in action for decades and I doubt even David Attenborough could discover this rare and relatively unknown species.

   Still, they reckon there is an "exclusive" private party at the Top of the Town's $8.25 million penthouse "It's super private, ultra-glam and the guest list includes Charlotte Dawson and John Ibrahim." . Whatever.