Small Time Gangster: Aiming high
Boilermaker’s new series for Movie Extra Small Time Gangster tries to find a new spin on crime dramedies, for a fraction of the cost of its US counterparts.
Boilermaker co-founders and producers Andrew McInally and Gareth Calverley know that Small Time Gangster – their first ever full-length television series – will inevitably be compared to other projects about the criminal underworld.
“As a TV writer, you’re always going to be compared to other shows that are out there in the market place. I would absolutely not compare us to The Sopranos; we’re 70 percent drama, 30 percent black comedy, so if I had to compare it to something it would be Breaking Bad… One of the problems is that it takes two years to get a show from the drawing board to the audience and there’s not much we can do about it with comparisons,” said Calverley.
Small Time Gangster was born when Calverley, a former head of development for Jonathan M. Shiff Productions, met New Zealand writer Joss King. In their conversations, Calverley brought up an idea inspired by Jules Dassin and Samuel Fuller’s films about small-time criminals and realised there was an opportunity to make a show that, unlike Underbelly, would not focus on “the main guys”, but on the blue collar, working class everyday family guy (Tony Piccolo, played by Steve Le Marquand) that has two lives and a secret he wants to keep: he is an underworld enforcer. Suffering a middle-life crisis, he wants out, but it’s not going
to be that easy.
At the end of 2008, Boilermaker received a business loan from Film Victoria, so they decided to spend part of that money on developing the show. They also approached Ewan Burnett – an old acquaintance of Calverley’s, with whom he’d worked on 1996’s TV series The Wayne Manifesto in Brisbane – to join them as executive producer on a number of projects and together, they pitched Movie Network a show about the film industry. The pay TV network had just done The Jesters, so they didn’t want to go down that road. It was then that they pitched Small Time Gangster.
“Ewan is a very important part of the show. As a newish company, it’s very hard to get your first series into development and production, so Ewan was certainly a familiar face for the network’s CEO Tony Forrester and other executives. He provided a feeling of security, having a very experienced producer like him standing behind us and guiding us,” said McInally. As Boilermaker-Burberry Entertainment, the team created Small Time Gangster, and as a joint venture, they still have at least one more series on their shared slate.
Once Calverley and King finalised the script for the pilot episode and the show’s bible (defining their target audience as males 18-55), Movie Network got involved and provided funds to further develop and produce the series without any Government support.
“They said to us, ‘We’re not trying to make a show that’s going to drag millions of viewers over to Movie Extra to watch it; that’s a long process of building the brand and making projects that are different from the FTA networks. Just make the coolest show, write it smart, make it smart’. That’s s a great thing to hear in a meeting,” said McInally.
FINDING THE COMEDY
The eight-episode series was shot on 32 locations around Melbourne over seven weeks. It has a heavy action focus, and each episode features a set piece – the biggest one of them involving a $400,000 Ferrari dangling from a construction crane on the road to Dandenong.
“There are explosions and shoot outs, hanging Ferraris, full gangster nightclub casino scenes… that’s a lot of fun but it is also nerve-wracking because there are a lot of resources for those shooting days and any hiccups could cost a lot of money. I don’t think the set pieces should overtake the fact that it is a character based show; they merely contribute to the fact that it is an entertaining show,” said McInally. “As new producers, we try to be ambitious and do something that is not quite the same as what you’ve seen before. It’s the kind of TV we like to watch.” Director Jeffrey Walker was Calverley’s first option from the very beginning. The director – whose television career has recently took off, with work on Rake, Dance Academy and Angry Boys – was attracted to the project because it’s “a very dark comedy in the vein of the Coen brothers”: “Calverley’s approach was also quite cinematic in terms of how he wanted it to be covered and captured, and it would have a certain irreverence that came through from the characters and the violence. It’s an interesting take on the gangster genre.
“This is the first show where I have been the only director, and it’s my most personal. The producers wanted me to be involved in every aspect of it, from scripting and production design and the setting up of every part of it and I’m an associate producer as well. They’ve trusted me to make some of the decisions that you don’t usually get to make in television shows.”
The show was shot by DOP Craig Barden on the Red camera, which Walker praised for its shallow depth of field and richness of images. They also used the tiny GoPro camera for movement tracking shots on vehicles, and the Canon 5D for car interiors
“We’ve gone for a cinematic widescreen look, letting things happen within the frame, holding on to shots, and using beautiful tracking shots. It’s on Movie Extra, sitting alongside some of the best series made in the world, so we really wanted to make something that looked really special. We aimed really high,” said Walker.
Small Time Gangster starts April 26 on Movie Extra.
To bad none of this actually paid off.
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