Independent Australia
By Cherie Moselen
December 12, 2020
The Australian film and television industry has lost one of its greatest talents, Picnic at Hanging Rock screenwriter Cliff Green (6 December 1934 — 4 December 2020). Newspaperman and mentor to Independent Australia's Cherie Moselen and Michelle Pini, he will be sadly missed.
It wasn't surprising, that looking for photos of acclaimed screenwriter Cliff Green yielded few results — the modest frontman was happiest behind the scenes.
Green originally trained as a compositor in the printing industry, then worked as a primary teacher before pursuing his love of writing.
In the late 1960s, he was hired as a staff writer at Crawford Productions and began contributing episodes to police dramas Homicide and Matlock Police.
Green described his three years with Hector Crawford as “the best way to learn the trade” and respectfully referred to the influential radio and TV producer as the “father of Australian television drama”.
During this time, he founded award-winning Melbourne community newspaper Warrandyte Diary, which celebrated its 50th anniversary this year.
Politically minded, Green managed the paper alongside his
scriptwriting work. After going freelance at the end of 1971, he wrote for such
distinguished TV series as Rush, Power Withour Glory and I Can Jump Puddles.
In 1975, he agreed to help out overcommitted playwright David Williamson who had been signed to write the screenplay of Picnic at Hanging Rock. Green's haunting adaptation of Joan Lindsay's novel went on to make cinematic history, anchoring the drama in the harbour of popularity as one of Australia’s most loved movies of all time.
The landmark Australian film earned Green an Australian Writer's Guild Award for Best Screenplay and a Best Writer nomination, U.S. Science Fiction Film Awards, bringing him international recognition.
In the film and television world where only one in ten projects ever get made, Green’s screenwriting star blazed. His credits also include TV drama series Against the Wind, A Country Practive, The Flying Doctors, and Blue Heelers among others.
The prolific writer also created two well-known TV
mini-series: Marion and The Petroy Affair.
And adapted for television the work of Australian authors such as Henry Lawson, Alan Marshall, Frank Hardy and Norman Lindsay.
Later work included the original screenplay for the prize-winning children’s TV film More Winners: Boy Soldiers and award-winning episodes of the highly successful ABC-TV series Phoenix and Janus. In 1995, Green created the critically acclaimed series Mercury.
Other works include stage play Cop Out!, three children’s books in his Riverboat Bill series, a novel Break Of Day and a collection of short stories.
Green won a total of 17 industry awards including eight Australian Writers Guild AWGIE awards.
More Winners: Boy
Soldiers won the Liv Ullman Peace Prize at the 1990 Chicago
International Festival of Children’s Films and was a finalist in the
International Emmy Awards in 1991 (the first Australian drama to receive an
Emmy nomination).
Green's Janus episode ‘Fit
To Plead’ won a 1995 Australian Human Rights Award. Other credits
include a "Best Writer" nomination at the 1978 Hollywood Science
Fiction Film Awards and two AFI nominations.
All the while, at Warrandyte Diary, Green nurtured journalists and writers including clinton Grybas, Sam Davies, Michelle Pini and this writer, among others.
Green accepted an OAM in 2009 for 'service to the Australian film and television industry as a screenwriter and educator'.
A gifted storyteller, Cliff Green taught this writer – and others – the economy of "not using seven words when three will do".
Vale Cliff Green.
GREEN, Cliff (Clifford James Green)
Born: 12/6/1934, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Died: 12/4/2020, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Cliff Green’s western – writer:
Rush - 1974
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