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Street of Dreams
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| Year: |
1988
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Director: |
Martin Sharp
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| Stars: |
Tiny Tim, Tilly Khaury, Jenny Godson, Adrian Rawlings, Jeannie Lewis, Marvin Lewis, Miss Natasha, Lenore Zaan, Philippe Petit, Ted Hopkins, Sue Smithers, Don Lane, Nell Campbell
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| Genre: |
Documentary, Weirdo, Music |
| Rating: |
  7 (from 1 vote) |
| Review: |
Ladies and gentlemen, direct from New York, Tiny Tim! He's here in Sydney to make an attempt on the world record for continuous singing, and plans to run through his repertoire for over two hours. This is in 1979, some time after the height of Tim's fame in the late sixties, the pinnacle of which would be getting married to Miss Vicki on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show with over twenty million people tuning in, and now, with the marriage broken up and behind him, he clings to celebrity with stunts such as the record-breaking try. However, around the same time, the amusement park where he planned his show was under jeopardy.
That would be Luna Park, subject of a terrible tragedy in 1979 where the ghost train caught fire and seven people perished; the blaze was contained, but the park was tainted with the notion that it wasn't safe. For filmmaker Martin Sharp, this was an injustice which consumed him, and he spent practically all his money on making Street of Dreams, combining his twin obsessions in life, that entertainment facility and the work of ukelele strumming, vibrato voiced Tiny Tim. Sharp made his own name not as a filmmaker or even a musician, but as an artist, often in an underground capacity during the period Tim was at his most popular.
Sharp's most famous work was arguably the cover of Cream's Disraeli Gears, but he kept busy with various projects since then, with this one taking up around ten years of his life, and even then barely seeing a release. As an experience, it was a collage of footage he had assembled down the years, either by actually taking a camera crew out to collect documentary clips, by assembling bits and pieces from Australian television, or even apparently by pointing his camera at the TV and recording what he wanted to capture. The results were haphazard, scattershot for that matter, and edited in a fashion that suggested Sharpe had a short attention span, yet this mosaic style was quite compelling.
You might find your attention wandering but not for long, for just as you thought you might well have seen - or heard - enough, there would be something else, an arresting image or concept, to draw you back in. It was obviously a very personal project for its director, and in that way bringing together the two tales of a notorious eccentric and an awful loss of life doubtless spoke very much to its creator, leaving the rest of us somewhat bemused at the gear shifts between the pair. Tiny Tim, shown here after putting on a few pounds but with the same flamboyance as before (his Mickey Mouse impression uniquely disturbing), is offered the chance to speak his mind on a variety of topics, which do little to dispel the image of him as a benevolent weirdo.
And you had the impression that suited him just fine as we watch him on chat shows and answering questions candidly about how he believes S-E-X (he never says the word without spelling it out) should be used solely for the glory of God, and for him that meant two seconds of passion with Miss Vicki, leading her to report this left her understandably unsatisfied in the tabloids (the interviewer asks impertinently if the two seconds included the foreplay!). In fact, Tim comes across as a devoutly religious man, a committed Christian from his father's side but proud of his mother's Judaism too, and his mother, Mrs Kaury, appears in the film to proffer many photos of her boy, evidently pleased as punch with his achievements. Unfortunately this religion doesn't seem to have helped with his drinking, as we see in one scene where he spends time rather sozzled with a half-naked woman, prompting Sharp to enquire why Tim asked to be filmed in this state. The Luna Park reportage is no less committed, suggesting a conspiracy theory of arson for the '79 fire. Very strange, then, but intriguing.
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| Reviewer: |
Graeme Clark
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