Filmmaking
View allAll Photos Tagged filmmaking
The flying machine from Czech filmmaker Karel Zeman’s 1958 film, Invention of Destruction. At the Karel Zeman Museum, Prague.
Our group got combined with a film crew from Western Michigan. Here, guide Ricky Hayes explains how this petroglyph showed solstices and equinoxes.
Though I've done a fair amount of similar filming, this team had a lot more experience than mine. It was interesting to watch and learn.
There used to be a big film presence around Kings Cross, with many businesses including Kennedy-Miller in the area. In 1997, Iona was leased by film-making duo Baz Luhrmann and Catherine Martin, already filmmaking royalty after the success of Strictly Ballroom and Romeo + Juliet. Iona became their private apartment and filmmaking studio. Stars like Leo DiCaprio stayed here. The Luhrmanns rented Iona for nine years before purchasing it in 2006 for $10 million from pharmaceutical entrepreneur Ian Gowrie-Smith.
When the Luhrmanns moved to New York, where they made The Great Gatsby and Elvis, they sold the 1888 Victorian Italianate house to its present owners, Sydney-based Kiwi couple Tim Eustace and Salvador Panui for $16 million in 2016.
It’s situated just off Victoria Street where the ‘Tropicana’ film festival took place in the 1990’s, and at more than 2700 square metres it’s Darlinghurst’s largest private landholding. Very close to the city, it retains original features including stained-glass windows and a Welsh slate roof. Inside, its 30 rooms include seven bedrooms, a billiard room and cellar, and there’s a large garden backed by an imported wrought iron gate.
It was built for Edward Chisholm, a pastoralist and later director of the Bank of NSW and the Perpetual Trustee Company, among others. He was the son of James Chisholm who was a member of the first NSW Legislative Council from 1851 to 1856 (and later in 1865-68).
The property survived the usual tale of disrepair, subdivision and destruction as it was a private hospital from 1912 to 1977, although had a close call when permission was granted to subdivide it into 13 strata units. The National Trust intervened and a heritage order preserved it.
Renaming the house Iona in 1979 returned the earliest known name of a property on the site (Iona Cottage, first occupied by Elisabeth Grose in the mid-1800’s) and when a proposal to convert it into a boutique hotel fell over it remained in private ownership. It’s back on the market again, and likely to set another Darlinghurst record…