Dead and Company set for trio of concerts at San Francisco's iconic Golden Gate Park in August
Although the rock band - which is a continuation of the Grateful Dead with original members Bob Weir and Mickey Hart joined by John Mayer, Oteil Burbridge, Jeff Chimenti, and Jay Lane - haven't officially announced the trio of gigs, the city's mayor, Daniel Lurie, confirmed the dates of August 1, 2 and 3.
In an X video, he said: 'We have some really big news.
'Dead and Co., three shows, August 1, 2 and 3, right here in the city that is the home of the Grateful Dead. What better way to celebrate. We'll see you out here in August.'
The clip is captioned: "San Francisco is planning to welcome @deadandcompany to Golden Gate Park for three days in August, to mark the 60th anniversary of the Grateful Dead. Stay tuned for more details from the band coming soon!"
Dead and Company will wrap their 10th anniversary 'Dead Forever' residency at The Sphere in Las Vegas this weekend (May 15 to 17).
Meanwhile, Bob recently suggested it's possible for the Grateful Dead to reunite as a trio following the passing of bass player Phil Lesh.
The musician died in October, at the age of 84, and before his passing, Weir, and bandmates Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart were planning a 60th anniversary reunion tour with Lesh.
Should they get back together, Weir admits he couldn't replace his beloved bandmate.
In an interview with Rolling Stone, he said: 'I think when Phil checked out, so did that notion, because we don't have a bass player who's been playing with us for 60 years now. And that was the intriguing prospect.… I think you need somebody holding down the bottom. Phil had all kinds of ideas that were pretty much unique to him. I grew up with Phil holding down the bottom in his unique way.'
Asked about reuniting as a three-piece, he added: 'I suppose I could go back out. I wouldn't put anybody in his place, so it would be a trio at this point. It'd be me and two drummers. I'd have to think about that. I haven't thought about it — it's just now occurring to me that it's a possibility that we could do that, since you asked.… I guess we'll just see what the three of us can pull together.'
Weir also admitted he and Lesh had their "differences".
Recounting their last conversation, he shared: 'We did have our differences. But the last phone call I had from him was when the news came out that we were being honoured at the Kennedy Center. He called me just simply to congratulate me and us, and that was his entire reason for calling. And when we were done talking about that, I was spun out, he was spun out. We tried to make sense of it for a little bit. And then said, 'Well, OK, see you there,' basically. I guess that wasn't to be.'
The trio turned up with Lesh's son, Grahame, to be honoured by then-President Joe Biden at the Kennedy Center Honors in December.
In 2015, Weir, Lesh, Kreutzmann, and Hart reunited for the 'Fare Thee Well: Celebrating 50 Years of the Grateful Dead' concerts.
They were joined by Trey Anastasio of Phish on guitar, Jeff Chimenti on keyboards, and Bruce Hornsby on piano.
The 'Touch of Grey' hitmakers claimed the five shows would be the last to feature the trio.
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The Aussie film that's baffled viewers for 50 years
It was written in a frenzy - a two-week fever-dream in which writer Joan Lindsay, then 71 years old, tried to get a series of images out of her head and onto the page. She had dreamed of schoolgirls in white lace, climbing across the surface of the dark monolith of Hanging Rock. They didn't belong there, on an ancient monolith, and the rock eventually let them know. Published in 1967, Picnic at Hanging Rock sounds like science fiction, and it was - a gothic horror that sent shards of nightmarish scenes through your brain long after reading. Film director Peter Weir, then young and relatively unknown, couldn't let the images escape either. Less than a decade later, in 1975, he wrangled these images into a film that, like the images, the mystery and the ancient monolith itself, has stood the test of time for 50 years. It shone a new light on the Australian film industry, launched Weir's career and opened the door for generations of filmmakers and artists to work overseas. Picnic at Hanging Rock has a plot as simple and easy to recite as, say, Jaws or The Exorcist, but the synopsis doesn't quite convey the layers of meaning. Nor does it quite sum up the atmosphere, or warn you of the chills that come on the second you recall those languid girls in ethereal white dresses, lounging in the yellowed grass at the height of an Australian summer. It's Valentine's Day, the teachers have silly parasols, the girls, in black stockings and sturdy boots, are permitted to go gloveless. Why, then, is there a pervading sense of dread in every scene? The film endures mainly because of its atmosphere and imagery. Edwardian lace and large hats and a big country mansion. Valentine's Day swooning and later, an urgent clamouring for answers and reassurance. And then that face, of missing girl Miranda, played by Anne-Louise Lambert, is the Botticelli-like symbol - of lost innocence, of ethereal beauty vanished into the forces of nature (her iconic dress, along with other film memorabilia, is now on display at the National Film and Sound Archives). But so too is the large and looming rock - the kind of natural feature Australians have long learned to revere and respect. It's a story that makes implicit reference to an image created much earlier by the painter Frederick McCubbin. The 1886 painting Lost depicts a young girl in the Australian bush. We only know she's lost because of the painting's title, although the way her dress and hat stand out from the all-encompassing landscape already give you that haunting sense of dread. Weir's film, like the book, is constructed like an Impressionist painting. The girls are young and beautiful and white, in both senses; the rock is also beautiful, yet dark and ancient and forbidding. Why do Miranda, Marion, Irma and Edith rouse themselves from their summer torpor and decide to climb through its gaps and crevices? They fall asleep in a trance, and then wake up, and three of them continue climbing. The fourth, Edith, screams in terror as they drift off. Three of the girls and one of the teachers are missing, one returns with no memory of what has happened and, infected by the ever-cinematic virus of fear, panic and dread, the school steadily implodes from within. The film, like the book, has no answers; readers and viewers have been trying to work it out for almost 60 years. When it came out in 1975, Picnic was an instant success, both here and overseas. It shone a completely new light on the Australian narrative and the country's sense of itself, and could be absorbed by people of all ages, on varying levels. It was erotic without being explicit, scary without any gore (unlike, incidentally, the book) and suspenseful, with a masterful lack of answers. ACM film critic Cris Kennedy says while the film was part of a "new wave" of Australian cinema in the late 1970s - think My Brilliant Career, Mad Max and Sunday Too Far Away - it has remained at the pinnacle, referenced again and again in the years since. "I think David Lynch owes a lot to Picnic at Hanging Rock," he says. "Almost like the characters in Twin Peaks, it looks like one thing but it's something else. There are so many layers to what appears to be a lovely, idyllic country pastoral, and yet there's darkness in the class structure." Fifty years at the pinnacle of Australian film history is no small feat, and deserves a treat beyond a simple re-watch. The National Film and Sound Archive has now released a series of deleted scenes. Weir's vision was whittled down to just 115 minutes, and these small scenes, including an alternative ending sequence, were consigned to the cutting-room floor. A later version of the film, released in 1988, was even shorter, in line with his original vision that was vetoed by the film's investors. "The changes were important in retaining the overall tension of the film," Weir told the NFSA. "The deleted scenes, when viewed in isolation, may have charm, but they contributed to a languor that was harmful to the mood I was carefully building." Luckily for us, 50 years on, some of the 35mm film was rescued by Weir's artistic collaborator, the artist Martin Sharp, who saw the deleted scenes as the same kinds of shards and fragments of impressions and dreams that make up the finished product. Watching them now - significantly, the scenes are silent - is like coming across a pile of old, disordered photographs. The scenes are outtakes that focus mainly on the four schoolgirls climbing up the rock, as well as symbolic imagery like waving grass, wildflowers and a white swan. The girls play and dance and, thanks to the lack of sound, seem filled with portent. Miranda, at one stage, stands in a kind of shadowy glen, looking over her shoulder. We know already, from her cryptic words early in the film, that she knows more than us; here, she seems to have one foot in another realm already. There's also an entire end sequence that never made it to either version; the school's fearsome headmistress heads to the rock dressed in her heavy funereal blacks, and seems to be pulled in by forces similar to the girls. She sheds some garments as she heads to the top, where Sara, the girl she has tormented throughout the film to the point of suicide, is waiting in white. It's like a glimpse into an alternate universe - the cutting room floor where visions are pared back. Not many works - of film or literature - benefit from having edited pieces reinstated, and Picnic stands alone without the extended ending. But seeing this extra vision and imagining the conversations that came before and after is tantalising. In her biography of Lindsay released this year, Brenda Niall writes that Lindsay herself wasn't entirely sure what she had written when she finally dropped her pen. "A novel without an ending? A mystery with no solution? An attack on an education system that stifled young women? A story of a place in which the human figures were ultimately insignificant in an ancient land that rejected European intrusion?" she writes. As more and more people found themselves gripped by the narrative, the quest on the part of readers - and later viewers - as to the ending of the story, its origins and meaning bordered on obsessive. But Lindsay was happy to leave it to the reader. "It encapsulated her ideas about time being all around us, not linear, leaving open the possibility that Miranda, Marion and Miss McCraw exist in a parallel time," Niall writes. "They might even return, as if nothing had happened." Significantly, though, Anne-Louise Lambert later recounted meeting Lindsay on the Picnic set. The older woman gripped the young actress, hugged her and said, "Miranda, it's been so long", with tears in her eyes. It made the young actress wonder whether Miranda was indeed based on a real person. Niall posits that the book was Lindsay's attempt to reconcile the secrets and hurts of her own life - her treatment at school, her lack of children, her relationship with the landscape. But 50 years is a long time to go without any real answers - perhaps that's the key to the film's enduring appeal. It's a perfectly executed interpretation of a finely turned novel, one that needs no tweaking whatsoever. Let audiences make of the deleted scenes - and of Lindsay's biography - what they will. As for Weir, his career went on an upward trajectory that had little to do with Picnic, at least aesthetically. Gallipoli, Dead Poets Society, Green Card, The Truman Show, Master and Commander - there's no clear through-line in this partial list. Kennedy says this is as it should be for a jobbing film director. "I think the link is mainly that for the first time, Australian directors are invited to Hollywood and given the opportunity to make money," he says. "If you're an author, you get to have recurrent motifs and themes and things. If you're a screenplay writer, or a stage play writer, or a film director and you actually want to work and pay your mortgage and feed your kids, well, I think themes are things that film students find in your work afterwards." For his part, in a recent interview with the National Film and Sound Archive, Weir said looking back was as mysterious and hard to pin down as his first experience of reading the book. "In my memory, Picnic is like a foreign country, one I journeyed to as a young man," he said. "A very foreign country - strange, beautiful and haunting - and only possible to visit once. The memories of that visit remain vivid and undimmed by time." Who wouldn't want to revisit that foreign country, though? It's worth noting that there was an inevitable remake in the form of a prestige series on Netflix in 2018. The verdict? "That was perfectly lovely, but I just don't think you can get lightning to strike twice," Kennedy says. It was written in a frenzy - a two-week fever-dream in which writer Joan Lindsay, then 71 years old, tried to get a series of images out of her head and onto the page. She had dreamed of schoolgirls in white lace, climbing across the surface of the dark monolith of Hanging Rock. They didn't belong there, on an ancient monolith, and the rock eventually let them know. Published in 1967, Picnic at Hanging Rock sounds like science fiction, and it was - a gothic horror that sent shards of nightmarish scenes through your brain long after reading. Film director Peter Weir, then young and relatively unknown, couldn't let the images escape either. Less than a decade later, in 1975, he wrangled these images into a film that, like the images, the mystery and the ancient monolith itself, has stood the test of time for 50 years. It shone a new light on the Australian film industry, launched Weir's career and opened the door for generations of filmmakers and artists to work overseas. Picnic at Hanging Rock has a plot as simple and easy to recite as, say, Jaws or The Exorcist, but the synopsis doesn't quite convey the layers of meaning. Nor does it quite sum up the atmosphere, or warn you of the chills that come on the second you recall those languid girls in ethereal white dresses, lounging in the yellowed grass at the height of an Australian summer. It's Valentine's Day, the teachers have silly parasols, the girls, in black stockings and sturdy boots, are permitted to go gloveless. Why, then, is there a pervading sense of dread in every scene? The film endures mainly because of its atmosphere and imagery. Edwardian lace and large hats and a big country mansion. Valentine's Day swooning and later, an urgent clamouring for answers and reassurance. And then that face, of missing girl Miranda, played by Anne-Louise Lambert, is the Botticelli-like symbol - of lost innocence, of ethereal beauty vanished into the forces of nature (her iconic dress, along with other film memorabilia, is now on display at the National Film and Sound Archives). But so too is the large and looming rock - the kind of natural feature Australians have long learned to revere and respect. It's a story that makes implicit reference to an image created much earlier by the painter Frederick McCubbin. The 1886 painting Lost depicts a young girl in the Australian bush. We only know she's lost because of the painting's title, although the way her dress and hat stand out from the all-encompassing landscape already give you that haunting sense of dread. Weir's film, like the book, is constructed like an Impressionist painting. The girls are young and beautiful and white, in both senses; the rock is also beautiful, yet dark and ancient and forbidding. Why do Miranda, Marion, Irma and Edith rouse themselves from their summer torpor and decide to climb through its gaps and crevices? They fall asleep in a trance, and then wake up, and three of them continue climbing. The fourth, Edith, screams in terror as they drift off. Three of the girls and one of the teachers are missing, one returns with no memory of what has happened and, infected by the ever-cinematic virus of fear, panic and dread, the school steadily implodes from within. The film, like the book, has no answers; readers and viewers have been trying to work it out for almost 60 years. When it came out in 1975, Picnic was an instant success, both here and overseas. It shone a completely new light on the Australian narrative and the country's sense of itself, and could be absorbed by people of all ages, on varying levels. It was erotic without being explicit, scary without any gore (unlike, incidentally, the book) and suspenseful, with a masterful lack of answers. ACM film critic Cris Kennedy says while the film was part of a "new wave" of Australian cinema in the late 1970s - think My Brilliant Career, Mad Max and Sunday Too Far Away - it has remained at the pinnacle, referenced again and again in the years since. "I think David Lynch owes a lot to Picnic at Hanging Rock," he says. "Almost like the characters in Twin Peaks, it looks like one thing but it's something else. There are so many layers to what appears to be a lovely, idyllic country pastoral, and yet there's darkness in the class structure." Fifty years at the pinnacle of Australian film history is no small feat, and deserves a treat beyond a simple re-watch. The National Film and Sound Archive has now released a series of deleted scenes. Weir's vision was whittled down to just 115 minutes, and these small scenes, including an alternative ending sequence, were consigned to the cutting-room floor. A later version of the film, released in 1988, was even shorter, in line with his original vision that was vetoed by the film's investors. "The changes were important in retaining the overall tension of the film," Weir told the NFSA. "The deleted scenes, when viewed in isolation, may have charm, but they contributed to a languor that was harmful to the mood I was carefully building." Luckily for us, 50 years on, some of the 35mm film was rescued by Weir's artistic collaborator, the artist Martin Sharp, who saw the deleted scenes as the same kinds of shards and fragments of impressions and dreams that make up the finished product. Watching them now - significantly, the scenes are silent - is like coming across a pile of old, disordered photographs. The scenes are outtakes that focus mainly on the four schoolgirls climbing up the rock, as well as symbolic imagery like waving grass, wildflowers and a white swan. The girls play and dance and, thanks to the lack of sound, seem filled with portent. Miranda, at one stage, stands in a kind of shadowy glen, looking over her shoulder. We know already, from her cryptic words early in the film, that she knows more than us; here, she seems to have one foot in another realm already. There's also an entire end sequence that never made it to either version; the school's fearsome headmistress heads to the rock dressed in her heavy funereal blacks, and seems to be pulled in by forces similar to the girls. She sheds some garments as she heads to the top, where Sara, the girl she has tormented throughout the film to the point of suicide, is waiting in white. It's like a glimpse into an alternate universe - the cutting room floor where visions are pared back. Not many works - of film or literature - benefit from having edited pieces reinstated, and Picnic stands alone without the extended ending. But seeing this extra vision and imagining the conversations that came before and after is tantalising. In her biography of Lindsay released this year, Brenda Niall writes that Lindsay herself wasn't entirely sure what she had written when she finally dropped her pen. "A novel without an ending? A mystery with no solution? An attack on an education system that stifled young women? A story of a place in which the human figures were ultimately insignificant in an ancient land that rejected European intrusion?" she writes. As more and more people found themselves gripped by the narrative, the quest on the part of readers - and later viewers - as to the ending of the story, its origins and meaning bordered on obsessive. But Lindsay was happy to leave it to the reader. "It encapsulated her ideas about time being all around us, not linear, leaving open the possibility that Miranda, Marion and Miss McCraw exist in a parallel time," Niall writes. "They might even return, as if nothing had happened." Significantly, though, Anne-Louise Lambert later recounted meeting Lindsay on the Picnic set. The older woman gripped the young actress, hugged her and said, "Miranda, it's been so long", with tears in her eyes. It made the young actress wonder whether Miranda was indeed based on a real person. Niall posits that the book was Lindsay's attempt to reconcile the secrets and hurts of her own life - her treatment at school, her lack of children, her relationship with the landscape. But 50 years is a long time to go without any real answers - perhaps that's the key to the film's enduring appeal. It's a perfectly executed interpretation of a finely turned novel, one that needs no tweaking whatsoever. Let audiences make of the deleted scenes - and of Lindsay's biography - what they will. As for Weir, his career went on an upward trajectory that had little to do with Picnic, at least aesthetically. Gallipoli, Dead Poets Society, Green Card, The Truman Show, Master and Commander - there's no clear through-line in this partial list. Kennedy says this is as it should be for a jobbing film director. "I think the link is mainly that for the first time, Australian directors are invited to Hollywood and given the opportunity to make money," he says. "If you're an author, you get to have recurrent motifs and themes and things. If you're a screenplay writer, or a stage play writer, or a film director and you actually want to work and pay your mortgage and feed your kids, well, I think themes are things that film students find in your work afterwards." For his part, in a recent interview with the National Film and Sound Archive, Weir said looking back was as mysterious and hard to pin down as his first experience of reading the book. "In my memory, Picnic is like a foreign country, one I journeyed to as a young man," he said. "A very foreign country - strange, beautiful and haunting - and only possible to visit once. The memories of that visit remain vivid and undimmed by time." Who wouldn't want to revisit that foreign country, though? It's worth noting that there was an inevitable remake in the form of a prestige series on Netflix in 2018. The verdict? "That was perfectly lovely, but I just don't think you can get lightning to strike twice," Kennedy says. It was written in a frenzy - a two-week fever-dream in which writer Joan Lindsay, then 71 years old, tried to get a series of images out of her head and onto the page. She had dreamed of schoolgirls in white lace, climbing across the surface of the dark monolith of Hanging Rock. They didn't belong there, on an ancient monolith, and the rock eventually let them know. Published in 1967, Picnic at Hanging Rock sounds like science fiction, and it was - a gothic horror that sent shards of nightmarish scenes through your brain long after reading. Film director Peter Weir, then young and relatively unknown, couldn't let the images escape either. Less than a decade later, in 1975, he wrangled these images into a film that, like the images, the mystery and the ancient monolith itself, has stood the test of time for 50 years. It shone a new light on the Australian film industry, launched Weir's career and opened the door for generations of filmmakers and artists to work overseas. Picnic at Hanging Rock has a plot as simple and easy to recite as, say, Jaws or The Exorcist, but the synopsis doesn't quite convey the layers of meaning. Nor does it quite sum up the atmosphere, or warn you of the chills that come on the second you recall those languid girls in ethereal white dresses, lounging in the yellowed grass at the height of an Australian summer. It's Valentine's Day, the teachers have silly parasols, the girls, in black stockings and sturdy boots, are permitted to go gloveless. Why, then, is there a pervading sense of dread in every scene? The film endures mainly because of its atmosphere and imagery. Edwardian lace and large hats and a big country mansion. Valentine's Day swooning and later, an urgent clamouring for answers and reassurance. And then that face, of missing girl Miranda, played by Anne-Louise Lambert, is the Botticelli-like symbol - of lost innocence, of ethereal beauty vanished into the forces of nature (her iconic dress, along with other film memorabilia, is now on display at the National Film and Sound Archives). But so too is the large and looming rock - the kind of natural feature Australians have long learned to revere and respect. It's a story that makes implicit reference to an image created much earlier by the painter Frederick McCubbin. The 1886 painting Lost depicts a young girl in the Australian bush. We only know she's lost because of the painting's title, although the way her dress and hat stand out from the all-encompassing landscape already give you that haunting sense of dread. Weir's film, like the book, is constructed like an Impressionist painting. The girls are young and beautiful and white, in both senses; the rock is also beautiful, yet dark and ancient and forbidding. Why do Miranda, Marion, Irma and Edith rouse themselves from their summer torpor and decide to climb through its gaps and crevices? They fall asleep in a trance, and then wake up, and three of them continue climbing. The fourth, Edith, screams in terror as they drift off. Three of the girls and one of the teachers are missing, one returns with no memory of what has happened and, infected by the ever-cinematic virus of fear, panic and dread, the school steadily implodes from within. The film, like the book, has no answers; readers and viewers have been trying to work it out for almost 60 years. When it came out in 1975, Picnic was an instant success, both here and overseas. It shone a completely new light on the Australian narrative and the country's sense of itself, and could be absorbed by people of all ages, on varying levels. It was erotic without being explicit, scary without any gore (unlike, incidentally, the book) and suspenseful, with a masterful lack of answers. ACM film critic Cris Kennedy says while the film was part of a "new wave" of Australian cinema in the late 1970s - think My Brilliant Career, Mad Max and Sunday Too Far Away - it has remained at the pinnacle, referenced again and again in the years since. "I think David Lynch owes a lot to Picnic at Hanging Rock," he says. "Almost like the characters in Twin Peaks, it looks like one thing but it's something else. There are so many layers to what appears to be a lovely, idyllic country pastoral, and yet there's darkness in the class structure." Fifty years at the pinnacle of Australian film history is no small feat, and deserves a treat beyond a simple re-watch. The National Film and Sound Archive has now released a series of deleted scenes. Weir's vision was whittled down to just 115 minutes, and these small scenes, including an alternative ending sequence, were consigned to the cutting-room floor. A later version of the film, released in 1988, was even shorter, in line with his original vision that was vetoed by the film's investors. "The changes were important in retaining the overall tension of the film," Weir told the NFSA. "The deleted scenes, when viewed in isolation, may have charm, but they contributed to a languor that was harmful to the mood I was carefully building." Luckily for us, 50 years on, some of the 35mm film was rescued by Weir's artistic collaborator, the artist Martin Sharp, who saw the deleted scenes as the same kinds of shards and fragments of impressions and dreams that make up the finished product. Watching them now - significantly, the scenes are silent - is like coming across a pile of old, disordered photographs. The scenes are outtakes that focus mainly on the four schoolgirls climbing up the rock, as well as symbolic imagery like waving grass, wildflowers and a white swan. The girls play and dance and, thanks to the lack of sound, seem filled with portent. Miranda, at one stage, stands in a kind of shadowy glen, looking over her shoulder. We know already, from her cryptic words early in the film, that she knows more than us; here, she seems to have one foot in another realm already. There's also an entire end sequence that never made it to either version; the school's fearsome headmistress heads to the rock dressed in her heavy funereal blacks, and seems to be pulled in by forces similar to the girls. She sheds some garments as she heads to the top, where Sara, the girl she has tormented throughout the film to the point of suicide, is waiting in white. It's like a glimpse into an alternate universe - the cutting room floor where visions are pared back. Not many works - of film or literature - benefit from having edited pieces reinstated, and Picnic stands alone without the extended ending. But seeing this extra vision and imagining the conversations that came before and after is tantalising. In her biography of Lindsay released this year, Brenda Niall writes that Lindsay herself wasn't entirely sure what she had written when she finally dropped her pen. "A novel without an ending? A mystery with no solution? An attack on an education system that stifled young women? A story of a place in which the human figures were ultimately insignificant in an ancient land that rejected European intrusion?" she writes. As more and more people found themselves gripped by the narrative, the quest on the part of readers - and later viewers - as to the ending of the story, its origins and meaning bordered on obsessive. But Lindsay was happy to leave it to the reader. "It encapsulated her ideas about time being all around us, not linear, leaving open the possibility that Miranda, Marion and Miss McCraw exist in a parallel time," Niall writes. "They might even return, as if nothing had happened." Significantly, though, Anne-Louise Lambert later recounted meeting Lindsay on the Picnic set. The older woman gripped the young actress, hugged her and said, "Miranda, it's been so long", with tears in her eyes. It made the young actress wonder whether Miranda was indeed based on a real person. Niall posits that the book was Lindsay's attempt to reconcile the secrets and hurts of her own life - her treatment at school, her lack of children, her relationship with the landscape. But 50 years is a long time to go without any real answers - perhaps that's the key to the film's enduring appeal. It's a perfectly executed interpretation of a finely turned novel, one that needs no tweaking whatsoever. Let audiences make of the deleted scenes - and of Lindsay's biography - what they will. As for Weir, his career went on an upward trajectory that had little to do with Picnic, at least aesthetically. Gallipoli, Dead Poets Society, Green Card, The Truman Show, Master and Commander - there's no clear through-line in this partial list. Kennedy says this is as it should be for a jobbing film director. "I think the link is mainly that for the first time, Australian directors are invited to Hollywood and given the opportunity to make money," he says. "If you're an author, you get to have recurrent motifs and themes and things. If you're a screenplay writer, or a stage play writer, or a film director and you actually want to work and pay your mortgage and feed your kids, well, I think themes are things that film students find in your work afterwards." For his part, in a recent interview with the National Film and Sound Archive, Weir said looking back was as mysterious and hard to pin down as his first experience of reading the book. "In my memory, Picnic is like a foreign country, one I journeyed to as a young man," he said. "A very foreign country - strange, beautiful and haunting - and only possible to visit once. The memories of that visit remain vivid and undimmed by time." Who wouldn't want to revisit that foreign country, though? It's worth noting that there was an inevitable remake in the form of a prestige series on Netflix in 2018. The verdict? "That was perfectly lovely, but I just don't think you can get lightning to strike twice," Kennedy says. It was written in a frenzy - a two-week fever-dream in which writer Joan Lindsay, then 71 years old, tried to get a series of images out of her head and onto the page. She had dreamed of schoolgirls in white lace, climbing across the surface of the dark monolith of Hanging Rock. They didn't belong there, on an ancient monolith, and the rock eventually let them know. Published in 1967, Picnic at Hanging Rock sounds like science fiction, and it was - a gothic horror that sent shards of nightmarish scenes through your brain long after reading. Film director Peter Weir, then young and relatively unknown, couldn't let the images escape either. Less than a decade later, in 1975, he wrangled these images into a film that, like the images, the mystery and the ancient monolith itself, has stood the test of time for 50 years. It shone a new light on the Australian film industry, launched Weir's career and opened the door for generations of filmmakers and artists to work overseas. Picnic at Hanging Rock has a plot as simple and easy to recite as, say, Jaws or The Exorcist, but the synopsis doesn't quite convey the layers of meaning. Nor does it quite sum up the atmosphere, or warn you of the chills that come on the second you recall those languid girls in ethereal white dresses, lounging in the yellowed grass at the height of an Australian summer. It's Valentine's Day, the teachers have silly parasols, the girls, in black stockings and sturdy boots, are permitted to go gloveless. Why, then, is there a pervading sense of dread in every scene? The film endures mainly because of its atmosphere and imagery. Edwardian lace and large hats and a big country mansion. Valentine's Day swooning and later, an urgent clamouring for answers and reassurance. And then that face, of missing girl Miranda, played by Anne-Louise Lambert, is the Botticelli-like symbol - of lost innocence, of ethereal beauty vanished into the forces of nature (her iconic dress, along with other film memorabilia, is now on display at the National Film and Sound Archives). But so too is the large and looming rock - the kind of natural feature Australians have long learned to revere and respect. It's a story that makes implicit reference to an image created much earlier by the painter Frederick McCubbin. The 1886 painting Lost depicts a young girl in the Australian bush. We only know she's lost because of the painting's title, although the way her dress and hat stand out from the all-encompassing landscape already give you that haunting sense of dread. Weir's film, like the book, is constructed like an Impressionist painting. The girls are young and beautiful and white, in both senses; the rock is also beautiful, yet dark and ancient and forbidding. Why do Miranda, Marion, Irma and Edith rouse themselves from their summer torpor and decide to climb through its gaps and crevices? They fall asleep in a trance, and then wake up, and three of them continue climbing. The fourth, Edith, screams in terror as they drift off. Three of the girls and one of the teachers are missing, one returns with no memory of what has happened and, infected by the ever-cinematic virus of fear, panic and dread, the school steadily implodes from within. The film, like the book, has no answers; readers and viewers have been trying to work it out for almost 60 years. When it came out in 1975, Picnic was an instant success, both here and overseas. It shone a completely new light on the Australian narrative and the country's sense of itself, and could be absorbed by people of all ages, on varying levels. It was erotic without being explicit, scary without any gore (unlike, incidentally, the book) and suspenseful, with a masterful lack of answers. ACM film critic Cris Kennedy says while the film was part of a "new wave" of Australian cinema in the late 1970s - think My Brilliant Career, Mad Max and Sunday Too Far Away - it has remained at the pinnacle, referenced again and again in the years since. "I think David Lynch owes a lot to Picnic at Hanging Rock," he says. "Almost like the characters in Twin Peaks, it looks like one thing but it's something else. There are so many layers to what appears to be a lovely, idyllic country pastoral, and yet there's darkness in the class structure." Fifty years at the pinnacle of Australian film history is no small feat, and deserves a treat beyond a simple re-watch. The National Film and Sound Archive has now released a series of deleted scenes. Weir's vision was whittled down to just 115 minutes, and these small scenes, including an alternative ending sequence, were consigned to the cutting-room floor. A later version of the film, released in 1988, was even shorter, in line with his original vision that was vetoed by the film's investors. "The changes were important in retaining the overall tension of the film," Weir told the NFSA. "The deleted scenes, when viewed in isolation, may have charm, but they contributed to a languor that was harmful to the mood I was carefully building." Luckily for us, 50 years on, some of the 35mm film was rescued by Weir's artistic collaborator, the artist Martin Sharp, who saw the deleted scenes as the same kinds of shards and fragments of impressions and dreams that make up the finished product. Watching them now - significantly, the scenes are silent - is like coming across a pile of old, disordered photographs. The scenes are outtakes that focus mainly on the four schoolgirls climbing up the rock, as well as symbolic imagery like waving grass, wildflowers and a white swan. The girls play and dance and, thanks to the lack of sound, seem filled with portent. Miranda, at one stage, stands in a kind of shadowy glen, looking over her shoulder. We know already, from her cryptic words early in the film, that she knows more than us; here, she seems to have one foot in another realm already. There's also an entire end sequence that never made it to either version; the school's fearsome headmistress heads to the rock dressed in her heavy funereal blacks, and seems to be pulled in by forces similar to the girls. She sheds some garments as she heads to the top, where Sara, the girl she has tormented throughout the film to the point of suicide, is waiting in white. It's like a glimpse into an alternate universe - the cutting room floor where visions are pared back. Not many works - of film or literature - benefit from having edited pieces reinstated, and Picnic stands alone without the extended ending. But seeing this extra vision and imagining the conversations that came before and after is tantalising. In her biography of Lindsay released this year, Brenda Niall writes that Lindsay herself wasn't entirely sure what she had written when she finally dropped her pen. "A novel without an ending? A mystery with no solution? An attack on an education system that stifled young women? A story of a place in which the human figures were ultimately insignificant in an ancient land that rejected European intrusion?" she writes. As more and more people found themselves gripped by the narrative, the quest on the part of readers - and later viewers - as to the ending of the story, its origins and meaning bordered on obsessive. But Lindsay was happy to leave it to the reader. "It encapsulated her ideas about time being all around us, not linear, leaving open the possibility that Miranda, Marion and Miss McCraw exist in a parallel time," Niall writes. "They might even return, as if nothing had happened." Significantly, though, Anne-Louise Lambert later recounted meeting Lindsay on the Picnic set. The older woman gripped the young actress, hugged her and said, "Miranda, it's been so long", with tears in her eyes. It made the young actress wonder whether Miranda was indeed based on a real person. Niall posits that the book was Lindsay's attempt to reconcile the secrets and hurts of her own life - her treatment at school, her lack of children, her relationship with the landscape. But 50 years is a long time to go without any real answers - perhaps that's the key to the film's enduring appeal. It's a perfectly executed interpretation of a finely turned novel, one that needs no tweaking whatsoever. Let audiences make of the deleted scenes - and of Lindsay's biography - what they will. As for Weir, his career went on an upward trajectory that had little to do with Picnic, at least aesthetically. Gallipoli, Dead Poets Society, Green Card, The Truman Show, Master and Commander - there's no clear through-line in this partial list. Kennedy says this is as it should be for a jobbing film director. "I think the link is mainly that for the first time, Australian directors are invited to Hollywood and given the opportunity to make money," he says. "If you're an author, you get to have recurrent motifs and themes and things. If you're a screenplay writer, or a stage play writer, or a film director and you actually want to work and pay your mortgage and feed your kids, well, I think themes are things that film students find in your work afterwards." For his part, in a recent interview with the National Film and Sound Archive, Weir said looking back was as mysterious and hard to pin down as his first experience of reading the book. "In my memory, Picnic is like a foreign country, one I journeyed to as a young man," he said. "A very foreign country - strange, beautiful and haunting - and only possible to visit once. The memories of that visit remain vivid and undimmed by time." Who wouldn't want to revisit that foreign country, though? It's worth noting that there was an inevitable remake in the form of a prestige series on Netflix in 2018. The verdict? "That was perfectly lovely, but I just don't think you can get lightning to strike twice," Kennedy says.
Perth Now
7 days ago
- Perth Now
John Mayer hails Dead and Company shows 'the honour of his life'
John Mayer has hailed playing with Dead and Company the "honour of [his] life". The 47-year-old guitarist has been performing with the Greatful Dead's founding members Bob Weir, Bill Kreutzmann - who retired from touring in 2023 - and Micky Hart since 2015 and in honour of the legendary rock band's 60th anniversary, he has paid tribute to the group and their spin-off band, which also includes Oteil Burbridge, keyboardist Jeff Chimenti and drummer Jay Lane. From 1-3 August, Dead and Company marked six decades of the Grateful Dead with a series of concerts in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park and John will "never forget" the shows. He wrote on Instagram on Tuesday (05.08.25): 'Night 3 in Golden Gate Park celebrating 60 years of @gratefuldead will be a one we'll never forget." Sunday's (02.08.25) second gig saw Phish guitarist Trey Anastasio take to the stage with Dead and Company for renditions of Scarlet Begonias and Fire on the Mountain, while the band were joined for the whole weekend by Graheme Lesh, the son of Grateful Dead's late bassist Phil Lesh. John wrote: "I finally had the chance to play with @treyanastasio, and beyond the full-circle moment of it all, the lock we had going was instant. Trey's ear-to-fretboard data transfer time is unparalleled. I'm still blown away. 'Extra special thanks to @grahamelesh for joining us all three nights. 'No matter how many shows we play as a band, I will always be a guest in this musical world, and I'll never lose sight of what is the great honor of my life. Happy 60th, Grateful Dead, and long may you run, @bobweir, @mickeyhart, and @billkreutzmann.' The Gravity hitmaker concluded his message with a tribute to the late Jerry Garcia. He wrote: 'It must be said… I'll never come close to playing like @jerrygarcia. 'But if I can somehow get you closer to him – and to the spirit he created 60 years ago – then I suppose I've done my job. "Thank you for accepting me. [heart emoji].' In December 2024, the Grateful Dead were among those chosen by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts for the Kennedy Center honour, being recognised for being a "social and cultural phenomenon since 1965". The organisation added: "Grateful Dead's music has never stopped being a true American original, while inspiring a fan culture like no other.' And the surviving members of the group admitted the accolade was "beyond humbling". They said in a statement when the news was announced in July 2024: 'To be recognised alongside the artists who have in the past received this honour is beyond humbling. 'We've always felt that the music we make embodies and imparts something beyond the notes and phrases being played — and that is something we are privileged to share with all who are drawn to what we do — so it also must be said that our music belongs as much to our fans, the Dead Heads, as it does to us. This honour, then, is as much theirs as ours."
Sydney Morning Herald
31-07-2025
- Sydney Morning Herald
The haunting Australian mystery that still captivates 50 years on
August marks the 50th anniversary of one of the most famous Australian films of all time – an atmospheric mystery about three schoolgirls and a teacher from an elite women's college who go missing on a day trip to Victoria's Hanging Rock on Valentine's Day, 1900. Picnic at Hanging Rock, based on a 1967 novel by Joan Lindsay, launched the international career of the great director Peter Weir and remains a landmark for many of the cast and crew. And the restored version, released in Europe, the US and Australia this year, proves the film has lost none of its haunting power. The questions continue to linger long after the lights come up. Where did the missing girls and their teacher go? Why did the ethereal Miranda, played by Anne Lambert, know she would not be around for long? Did it really happen? Weir, now 80, went on to direct masterful films including Gallipoli, Witness, Dead Poets Society and The Truman Show. To celebrate the anniversary, he and some of his collaborators reflect on making the film and its significance. They reveal why the restored version is 12 minutes shorter than when Picnic became an international hit in 1975, how it went from filming in February to being released in August the same year – unimaginable now – and a new plan for a stage musical. The genesis In 1973, Gough Whitlam was prime minister, the Sydney Opera House was opened and there was what Weir calls 'furious excitement in the air' as the emerging Australian film industry came alive. He was working on the screenplay of his first feature film, The Cars that Ate Paris, when TV presenter turned film producer Pat Lovell visited. She handed him a book and said she wanted to film it. 'I glanced down at the title, Picnic at Hanging Rock,' Weir says. 'I read it in one long night and knew I had to do it.' Lovell, who died in 2013, once said she thought Weir was the perfect director because his 1971 short feature Homesdale showed 'he had a capacity for seeing the unusual and the sinister beneath typical, everyday events'. 'I read it in one long night and knew I had to do it.' In the year before shooting Cars, Weir supervised work on the Picnic script. David Williamson was down to write it until a scheduling clash; Cliff Green took over. Weir thought the challenge with Picnic was to create a similar feeling to the novel. 'It's not literally taking the words to the screen,' he says. 'As the director, it's rather like putting music to a libretto for an opera. So I had to compose with images – the kind of music that I'll make – that becomes the film.' The other issue was the unresolved mystery about the disappearance. 'This was at the same time its great originality and its greatest danger,' Weir says. 'The audience expected a solution. How to divert interest away from that expectation? Fortunately, I had two years to think about it.' The day after Lovell and Weir optioned the film rights, they visited Hanging Rock, about 80 kilometres north-west of Melbourne. Weir says he felt 'a power in that pile of stone', adding 'one of my first impressions was what looked like faces carved into the living rock, like those monoliths on Easter Island – a trick of the light I thought I could use. Revisiting years later, a ranger told me tourists often take home bits of rock as a souvenir. Curiously many later mailed them back, saying they got 'a bad feeling' from their chunk of Hanging Rock.' Casting the film With Cars producers Hal and Jim McElroy on board, Weir auditioned teenage girls, but found it was trickier than expected. 'In Sydney and Melbourne, they seemed too sophisticated, except for Anne Lambert,' he says. He says he found girls who seemed more suited to the 19th century in Adelaide. 'They seemed to be from another era – a simpler time,' Weir says. '[So] that's where most of the cast came from.' 'What's extraordinary is that it still has such a life force – how it still speaks to people.' Lambert, who was 19, was working on TV series The Class of '74 at the time. 'I was probably one of the oldest,' she says. 'Karen Robson [who played Irma] was 17.' The look Weir worked closely with cinematographer Russell Boyd, who was inspired by Australian painters of the 19th century including Tom Roberts, to capture the particular Australian light that makes the film so distinctive. Another inspiration for Weir was early colour photography by France's Jacques Henri Lartigue. 'Russ went off and had to work out ways he would produce this kind of special atmosphere,' he says. 'It ended up with Russ in the wedding department of David Jones, buying bits of veil to try to find different ways of netting the camera'. Diffusing the light created the atmospheric look they wanted. The shoot Lambert thought at the time that they were making something special because the film 'was so different to not only what I'd done but what was around generally at the time'. Her many fond memories of the shoot included meeting Lindsay, then 78, after a scene on the rock that left her doubting her performance. It was an odd meeting. 'She just threw her arms around me and held me, spoke into my ear and said 'oh Miranda, it's been so long',' Lambert says. 'She was obviously very moved. 'When we came apart, I could see she had tears in her eyes. I wasn't quite sure what was happening but I somehow found it incredibly validating. Any doubt about myself felt like it was just washed away.' Camera operator John Seale, who went on to join Boyd as an Australian cinematography great, remembers Hanging Rock as an eerie place to shoot. 'The wind works its way through those rocks, which Peter put into sound and the music was hinting at … as though the rocks were talking to you,' he says. 'That's what he got magically into the film: that the girls were carried away into a different sphere.' Seale loved seeing Weir and Boyd work together. 'Watching them put the visuals together for the film was a real privilege,' he says. 'I remember thinking, 'Oh gee, I'm working with some of the greats'.' Mind you, Seale adds that he joked with Weir recently that they didn't really know what they were doing in those early years of the Australian film renaissance. 'Peter laughed and said, 'We didn't. We just made them',' he says. Jacki Weaver, who played school staff member Minnie, describes shooting the film as a 'magical time'. She realised Weir was a visionary director. 'Look at his catalogue of films – they're amazing and all so different from each other, as well as from most films,' she says. Despite her doubts, Weir appreciated Lambert's performance as he edited Picnic. 'She disappears with the other girls quite early in the story and I found on a first cut I missed her and decided to 'bring her back', at least in a dreamy way, to keep her presence deeper into the film,' he says. The screening So how did it get to cinemas so fast? 'The two years before I began the film proved invaluable – a lot of time to think the thing through, a lot of problems worked out,' Weir says. 'That preparation showed in the first cut of the picture – it was there. That was why we could keep to a tight delivery schedule.' Weir remembers that it was exciting but tense showing Picnic to an audience for the first time and wondering whether it was working. Positive reviews and strong box office in Australia – joining Alvin Purple as the country's biggest hits – and later Europe indicated it was. But it was four years before it was released in the US. 'They seemed unsure how to market it,' Weir says. Enduring success In her enigmatic way, Lindsay was the first person close to the film who thought it would have a special life. 'She said 'this film is going to be highly significant for some of you',' Weir says. As beautifully as the film is made and as compelling the story is, Lambert says its success owed something to the times. 'There was something about the way Picnic was received that was a celebration of us finding out cultural identity, finding our voice, being able to tell our own stories,' she says. 'What's extraordinary is that it still has such a life force – how it still speaks to people.' Watching the restored version before a Q&A with a German audience, she found herself transported. 'That indefinable thing it has – that atmosphere – is extraordinary,' Lambert says. 'You see different things every time you see it. This time it was all about Sara [played by Margaret Nelson]. I was really so moved by that storyline and her performance.' After the film inspired a TV series (starring Natalie Dormer, Lily Sullivan and Samara Weaving) and this year a Sydney Theatre Company play, Weaver says there are now plans for a musical. 'I got an email asking if I'd talk about the experience of making it,' she says. A true story? One enduring myth about the film is that it's based on a true story. Lindsay was ambiguous in her introduction to the novel, writing that since 'all the characters who appear in this book are long since dead, it hardly seems important' whether it is fact or fiction. Loading Weir thinks it was 'either a metaphor or something personal' for Lindsay. 'What's true for me is the disappearance,' he says. 'For a person to disappear, it's the most terrible thing because for those left behind they're neither dead nor alive. There's no closure.' The distributors played off the ambiguity. Weaver says that doing publicity 'we were discouraged from saying that it was a piece of fiction'. But there is no doubt it's an invented story. When Lindsay submitted the novel for publication, then-junior editor Sandra Forbes suggested it would have more impact by deleting a final chapter that suggested the disappearance involved a type of time warp. Lindsay agreed, which left the ending a mystery until the final chapter was published after her death in 1984. The director's cut While many director's cuts are longer, Weir made Picnic shorter when, sitting with an audience, he realised the middle needed tightening because the tension was dissipating. He went to Lovell and the financiers and said he wanted to cut 12 minutes before the European release. Loading 'They thought I was making a joke – 'You want to cut a hit film?' they said. I said, 'Yes, it will only be better'. They didn't agree.' It was not until Picnic was released on video in the 1990s that Weir cut the 12 minutes. As well as trimming scenes that were too long by 10 or 15 seconds, he lost two whole scenes after the disappearance. 'They were quite nice scenes but, for me, it was losing the eeriness, where you dipped into the wrong kind of slowness,' he says. So why was Australian film so vibrant that Picnic was shut out at the 1976 AFI Awards by The Devil's Playground and Caddie? 'We worked in complete freedom in the 1970s and were stimulated by the great films being made around the world and shown at our festivals,' Weir says. 'That was our film school.'
