Open Letter From Dick Done Broke's Director Shaun Charles

Here I am, a couple of weeks out from opening the Australian premiere of DJ Mendel’s Dick Done Broke at the Brisbane Powerhouse, and I have an opportunity to reflect about how I got here. This project, in one way, has been relatively quick. I think I made the decision to produce the play somewhere in the middle of last year. But from another angle this project kind of started a long, long time ago in the early 90’s. But first, so you know what I’ll be raving about, our trailer.

So, if you’re not afraid of declaring your age then you’ll fondly remember the 90’s as a time of Pearl Jam, Nirvana, early Tarantino and Cameron Crowe’s Singles. There was a ton of cool stuff happening but for me the coolest, by a long mile, were the independent films by American filmmaker Hal Hartley. Getting into Hartley’s films was like joining a club. Hartley regularly used the same actors from film to film – Martin Donovan, Robert Burke, Bill Sage and the exquisite Adrienne Shelley (stupidly murdered in 2006 - what a goddamn loss to the world). Here Hartley channels Jean Luc Godard with the famous dance sequence from Simple Men.

These films were widely popular at the time (in an independent sense), but as the 90’s faded so too, it seemed, did Hartley. But this is far from the case. Hartley, rather than drift into the mainstream and direct an episode of the X-Men franchise, remained ever the experimentalist. He has worked in opera and theatre and continued to make films. In 2014 he released the Kickstarter funded Ned Rifle, the final installment in a trilogy that began in 1997 with Henry Fool and 2006’s Fay Grimm. But it was his 60 minute feature, Meanwhile, starring Dick Done Broke’s playwright DJ Mendel (another Hartley regular), that grabbed my attention last year.

I don’t know how it happened. I was drinking red wine, it was late and after watching the film I googled Hartley’s film company – Possible Films – and emailed them directly telling them I thought it was really, really, really great. I didn’t hear back. I also googled DJ Mendel, discovered he was a theatre actor and playwright, and, fuelled with more red wine, I perused DJ’s website, discovered he’d written a bunch of plays, and then I was emailing him asking how I could get a hold of them. DJ, unlike Hartley’s staff, got back to me pretty quickly. He asked a few pointed questions just to make sure I wasn’t a total loon, and then we were off. If you’re curious here’s DJ’s website.




'Dick Done Broke' performs Brisbane Powerhouse 28 June-2 July.