We have three more screenings!
MELBOURNE
Saturday 26 Oct 2024 4:00pm, Palace Balwyn Cinema, Tickets
Sunday 27 Oct 2024 6:00pm, Palace Cinema Como, Tickets
SYDNEY
Sunday 03 Nov 2024 4:00pm, Palace Norton Street, Tickets
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Cam Fink and I both worked on ‘Santo Sam & Ed’s Cup Fever’ at the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa, and on Sunday, Santo Cilauro was good enough to host the Q&A at our premiere. He told the thousand strong crowd straight off the top that each Sunday, he sends a text to old friend Ange Postecoglou with some chat about that weekend’s Tottenham match. Santo was already confident of a happy exchange. The Posteccoglou coached Spurs had won 4-1 against West Ham on Saturday night, and ended the match as the equal highest ‘goals for’ team in the Premier League. Then Santo MC’d our film premiere, ‘Ange & The Boss’, which is frankly more about the Boss than it is about Ange. But he is a star interviewee, and he loved Puskas enough to turn up to our interview seven years ago, just two days after he resigned from the Socceroos job. He must have been hurting that day as he came to the terms with the idea that he wouldn’t be going to the 2018 World Cup with a team that he’d qualified. It’s amazing Ange kept that appointment with us. If he hadn’t, it’s almost impossible we’d have finished this film.
What can I say? It’s been one of the happiest weeks of my life. I’ve been producing books and articles and TV bits and radio segments and podcasts and speeches for over twenty years now, and you get a sense when people really love something, and when they’re saying, something more like — ‘yeah, great, okay, thanks, good on you for finishing something, nice!’.
With this one, the responses have been so excited and genuine that I feel like Aloisi himself, seeing the ball smash into the top corner of the net and wheeling away to wait for the wall of sound. (he really did have to wait for the noise! He told me)
The South Melbourne fans have been coming up to me and Cam with wide arms and tears in their eyes. The Hungarians have this beautiful tribute to their most famous countryman, that shows his humility, his humanity and his humour. Football fans have a document to the 90s, to show to everyone under 30 that the game attracted crowds and big signings and played large in small stadiums. Australian football (soccer) was not born when Aloisi hit that penalty.
A true star of the before times was our travelling Q & A buddy, Paul Trimboli, who took to the stage in Sydney and Melbourne. Trimmers played 430 games for Hellas, won two Johnny Warren Medals, delivered the assist to level the 1991 grand final and win the 1998 one, and is the most perfect film interviewee you could possibly imagine. No ums and ahs. Funny. Animated. He even delivered unprompted this perfect bridge we needed, between the colossal deeds of Puskas the European star, and the smaller pond of Middle Park in the late 80s. This was spun gold to us.
I remember him [Puskas] telling us that he played in the World Cup final for Hungary, and they were rated the world's greatest team. And they'd actually, they were going to play Germany, who they'd played in the group stage. And in the group stage... albeit he said, I think, Germany rested some players, they beat them 8-3. This was in an era when goals were flying in. But they'd won 8-2 in the group stage, so they're going into the final thinking, we have a pretty good chance.Puskás scores in the first five minutes, I think. And by the eighth or ninth minute, they're two-nil up, and they lose 3-2. [horrified giggle] And so, we're here whinging about some round 17 game in Sydney that we lost two one after leading one nil, and he's telling us, "Boys, things like this happen in football."And his example to us is the World Cup final! And I just think, this is unbelievable. He's saying it so calmly and coolly. And it was incredible. That's the world he lived in, that's the level he operated in.
Trimmers nailed the Q & A, guided by Simon Hill in Sydney and Santo in Melbourne. In some ways the Sydney screening helped allay my fears for Melbourne. They laughed and cried in equal measure, and they were mostly Sydney Olympic fans, rivals of their Hellas brothers in Melbourne. As we flew home the next morning, I thought, ‘if the Sydney Greeks can be that enthusiastic, and the general football fans, and the children of other ethnic migrant groups, we have something’. I ended up getting this text from my podcast friend Nigel Marsh, who hosts the show ‘The Five of My Life’
That was Sydney. I’d like to write a longer piece about these few days, but I’m running out of time before Polly’s graduation, and I’d like to post this so people know about the new screening dates.
Maybe I’ll finish this post with the flat tyre conclusion to Sydney, that ended in a tow and which bothered me not at all because I was so happy about the screening! I’ll also post a piece that I wrote for general media, that isn’t really ‘Good one Wilson’ style (not enough shambolic diversions) but does give a sense of things.
Come along this weekend!
Articles about the film and the Melbourne premiere
Greek Herald: ‘Ange & The Boss Enjoys Sold Out Screenings at Greek Film Festival’
Neos Kosmos: ‘Ange & The Boss’ Puskas documentary Thrills Audiences in Sydney and Melbourne
Here is my personal piece that I sent to new agencies to accompany our press release:
For a week we’ve felt like honorary Greeks.
Despite having the surnames of Wilson and Fink, we’ve been embraced by the Hellenic community as our film premiered at the Greek Film Festival.
‘Ange and the Boss – Puskas in Australia’ is our feature documentary about the great Hungarian striker, Ferenc Puskas. He was a titan of football in the 1950s and 60s, an Olympic gold medalist, a goalscorer in a World Cup Final, the shining star in the Magnificent Magyars. There are still murals of Puskas on the streets of Budapest and the national stadium is named after him. The FIFA Award for the best goal in the world each year is the Puskas Award. Our film starts with a sentence from Ange Postecoglou, ‘if you’re having a poll of 100 journalists … 90% of them are having him in the top ten players of the last century’.
‘Ange & The Boss’ celebrates the oddity that this great player, the great Puskas, lived and coached in Melbourne. He and his wife Elizabeth settled in a modest house at the back of a garden supply in Ashwood, and because he didn’t drive, Ange Postecoglou drove him to and from training in his Datsun 200B. Maybe the biggest laugh we had from our premiere audiences this weekend is Ange’s story of changing a tyre in the rain on the Tullamarine freeway, and the portly Puskas choosing not to get out of the car.
Cam Fink, Rob Heath and I have worked on this project for seven years. To hear the laughter, to share the miracle of Puskas’s time here, and to sense that full houses in Sydney and Melbourne were moved by the courage of those in the migrant generation — it’s been a euphoric week for us. The sporting story of this film is important, but the stuff around community is the beating heart of ‘Ange & The Boss’. As Santo Cilauro said, ‘Genuinely astonishing, beautifully nostalgic and bloody funny’.
Santo hosted our Q & A at the end of the event in Melbourne. He was at his wonderful personable best, and he opened proceedings with a full theatre ‘Hi Ange’ selfie that he sent to Australia’s most famous coaching export that evening. There was Postecoglou family in attendance, and Ange has been a long distance supporter of ours. To give a sense of how long we’ve been making the film, we interviewed Ange two days after he exited the Socceroos job in 2017. The fact that he kept his appointment with us, at such an emotional time, says everything about him. No wonder he keeps winning.
On this day, Cam Fink and I were winners too. Astor management told us that this was the first time their 1000-seater had sold out in four years. When Socceroos and South Melbourne greats Paul Trimboli and Miki Petersen joined us for Q & A, almost the entire sold out audience remained in its seats. This was a football film event, and now it had its footballers.
‘Magical’ is the word Petersen used for the Puskas era in the film, and Trimboli repeated it on stage. They were funny and deferential and gave more examples of Puskas’s relaxed easy manner. ‘Don’t make it any nervous’ Trimboli remembered was regular Puskas pre game instruction. ‘Don’t need it!’
At the end of proceedings, all the Puskas era South players in the theatre descended on the stage – Peter Tsolakis, Kimon Taliadoris, Michael Michalopoulos. We also saluted Val Kopasz, who with her husband Arpi owned the garden supply and looked after the man they called ‘Öcsi. [Little Brother’]. There are many fraught moments finishing a film, we still have some fundraising to do if ‘Ange & The Boss’ is to have a wider release beyond film festivals, but this week, the seven year journey felt worthwhile. As Cam said to me as we walked onto Chapel Street, ‘we’ve made a film!’’
We have indeed. And I couldn’t feel prouder.
News of screenings and other bits about the film
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