The bitter dispute that threatens to derail one of the year's best films

The Age

3 days ago

In a stunning decision, a Federal Court judge has ruled that Never Get Busted, a documentary screening this weekend at the Melbourne International Film Festival, must have its directorial credits changed or be prevented from screening at all.
Justice Yaseen Shariff handed down his decision on Wednesday afternoon, just days after an interlocutory hearing in Sydney on Monday in which lawyers for Stephen McCallum and David Ngo (pronounced Go) each claimed their client was the rightful director of the film.
Shariff had been urged by McCallum's team to order that the film be screened with him credited as principal director, or alternatively with no director attributed at all but only a note indicating 'the directing credits are the subject of court proceedings'.
Ngo's team had insisted that to flag the legal proceedings would amount to commercial death for the film, as the screenings at MIFF represented its best chance of being sold.
The gavel came down squarely in McCallum's favour.
Shariff ruled that the documentary about American drug cop-turned-drug activist Barry Cooper could not 'be seen and heard in public or communicated to the public unless [it] both contains the credit 'Directed by Stephen McCallum' and does not contain the credit 'Directed by' [David Ngo].'
His orders also prevent Ngo or anyone else associated with the feature from promoting it unless it is credited principally to McCallum and not to Ngo.
Although Ngo can still be listed as a director of the film, and as its writer and one of its producers, the result is a devastating blow for him and his colleagues at Adelaide-based Projector Films.
It also poses an almighty headache for MIFF, where the film is slated to screen on Friday night and Sunday, where Ngo had been scheduled to introduce the movie and appear in post-screening Q&A sessions. McCallum is not slated to appear at all.
'I am very pleased with the decision of the Federal Court today about the credits for the film,' McCallum said. 'The orders require that I get the 'Directed by' credit on the film and all promotions, and David Ngo should not. Those were the orders I asked for. But I acknowledge that the final hearing as to who is the principal director of the film will not be heard until mid-September.'
Who is Barry Cooper?
The battle over who made Never Get Busted began in December, ramped up at the Sundance Film Festival in January, and reached its zenith in the Federal Court in Sydney this week. It has been ugly, expensive and, to outsiders, arcane. But none of that should detract from the movie itself, which is utterly fascinating.
It tells the story of one-time Texas policeman Barry Cooper, who discovered in the early 1990s that he had a flair for busting people for narcotics possession, marijuana in particular. He trained his own dog, became an absolute gun, and went on to join the state drug enforcement agency.
But by the end of the decade, something had switched for Cooper. He realised he wasn't making society safer – he was an agent of terror, whose arrests often broke up families over small, recreational amounts of dope. He realised the police with whom he worked were frequently corrupt. He didn't spare himself from that judgment either.
He quit the force, became a pastor in an 'X-rated church' that preached sex and free love, and met and fell in love with a stripper called Candi, whose appetite for marijuana was prodigious.
And that was when Cooper had a full-scale Damascene conversion. He grew his hair, got a bunch of tattoos, took to the reefer … and in 2007 released a mail-order DVD, Never Get Busted Again, in which he shared his insider knowledge to help people evade arrest, and if arrested, escape conviction.
It's a rollicking ride, and one that's already resonating with audiences; Never Get Busted won the grand jury prize for documentary feature at the Dances With Films festival in Los Angeles last month, where it had its world premiere ahead of its hometown debut this weekend.
Credit where credit's due … or not
It's obvious that something strange is afoot with this movie from the moment the opening credits start to roll.
On the version I saw in late July, it begins with a title card saying 'director Stephen McCallum', followed by another that says 'written and directed by David Anthony Ngo'. A third credit describes it as 'a documentary by David Anthony Ngo & Erin Williams-Weir'.
This is a highly unusual way of denoting authorship. To the outside world, it is merely confusing. But to those in the industry it suggests a hierarchy, at the apex of which sits David Ngo.
And that, says Stephen McCallum, is fundamentally wrong.
In a statement of claim lodged in the Federal Court last December, McCallum alleged that he had been denied his moral right to be credited as sole director of Never Get Busted, for which he had been hired in January 2020 by producers David Ngo and Daniel Joyce, of Adelaide-based Projector Films.
McCallum claims he was effectively locked out of the editing process in late 2023, which is roughly when he became aware that the credits listed on imdb.com had been changed from 'directed by Stephen McCallum' to 'directed by Stephen McCallum and David Ngo'. About that time, he also noticed that a sizzle reel on Vimeo had changed from 'directed by Stephen McCallum' to 'directed by David Ngo and Stephen McCallum'.
Invited to Sundance, the 'rarest of air'
McCallum was prompted to act in late 2024 when a version of Never Get Busted, which had originally been conceived as a four-part series, was invited to screen in the TV strand at Sundance in January 2025.
Advance material listed the director as David Ngo. The show's landing page on the festival website listed no director at all among the credits, instead identifying Ngo and Williams-Weir as 'showrunners'. But body copy under the heading 'meet the artist' referred to the work as 'the directorial debut' of David Anthony Ngo.
Nowhere did Stephen McCallum's name appear.
For a rising Australian filmmaker, appearing at Sundance is the kind of leg-up that can launch a career from Struggletown to the big leagues.
'Sundance is the rarest air that there is in some ways for a filmmaker,' Ngo told me this week. 'It was certainly something I've dreamt about since I was a kid, watching Tarantino and Soderbergh and Robert Rodriguez and those sorts of films get launched there.'
McCallum – who made his feature debut in 2017 with the bikie movie Outlaws (aka 1%) – no doubt dreamt about it too. And he wasn't prepared to let the opportunity of being there slip through his fingers. So when he realised he was being cut – or at the very least demoted – from the Never Get Busted story, he wrote to Sundance to object. He didn't get much joy, with the festival saying it didn't get involved in credit disputes, so he flew to Utah, bought himself a ticket to the screening and Q&A session, and stood in line in the snow with a friend waiting to get into the theatre.
And that, the Federal Court heard on Monday, was when insult was added to injury.
'Security was called when he sought entry into Sundance Film Festival,' Justice Shariff noted in an 18th-floor courtroom in Sydney. 'He tried to resolve this, and when he sought entry into Sundance, he was told by the organisers, 'we're calling security, you have no right of entry'.'
What does a doc director do anyway?
Speaking to this masthead, Ngo conceded that McCallum had helmed some important elements of the film.
'Stephen was involved with the interview part of the process,' he said, referring to the five days in March 2020 when Cooper – who fled the US in fear for his life 13 years ago and now lives in the Philippines – sat down for a series of filmed sessions in St Kilda, just as Victoria went into lockdown. 'Stephen was there conducting all of the interviews with Barry.'
Barry Cooper, though, has a slightly different take.
'I'll tell you what I know,' he told me over Zoom. 'David and Erin made that film. David directed it, produced it, wrote it, and Erin right there by his side, doing the research. They did the film. I don't see how anybody else could take credit, unless it's just for holding a camera.'
McCallum, who is now directing a TV series, was unavailable to speak for this story.
To the lay observer, this might appear to be a ridiculously petty squabble. But to the parties involved, it's both a matter of principle and of vital career importance. Both sides claim there is a risk of reputational damage in not being credited properly.
For McCallum, the perception that he was hired to do a job but then deemed unworthy of a credit is enormously harmful. Ngo's side, meanwhile, claims that selling the film is now at risk (though the court was told on Monday that the film has not yet been sold anywhere, Pinnacle Films has already acquired the distribution rights in Australia).
'People have put in an enormous amount of money and support along the way to make this film come to fruition, and for someone to now be trying to rip that down for their own personal reasons, I think it's disgraceful,' Ngo said.
The battle isn't yet over
The list of documents produced in this case is incredibly long, on both sides. So long that Shariff was moved to comment upon it on Monday.
'It seems there's no love lost between the parties given the wealth of material that's been filed,' he said.
Shariff urged both sides to consider a second stab at mediation (the first failed) rather than proceed to trial in September, where it is set down for three days (the judge was dubious it could actually be finished within that time frame).
'I shudder to think of the costs that have been incurred,' he noted. 'What did it [the movie] cost to finance, $950,000 or something?'
Shariff indicated in his ruling on Wednesday that he was 'satisfied that Mr McCallum has established that there is a serious question to be tried as to whether he has an entitlement to relief, which I do not regard as weak but equally I cannot presently assess it to be strong'.
If the case does go to trial next month, what will be at stake is not just who made the film, but the question of what directing a documentary actually entails.
Is it writing and asking the questions of a subject while filming them, as even Ngo concedes McCallum did? Is it developing the idea, writing the treatment and script, lining up interviews and overseeing the edit, as Ngo insists he did? Or is the person who turns hundreds of hours of archival and interview material into a coherent narrative the one who deserves greatest credit – and if so, is that an editor (in this case Julian Hart, who also assembled The Tinder Swindler) or executive producers John Battsek (an Oscar winner for Searching For Sugarman) and Chris Smith (Tiger King), who gave extensive notes and fundamentally helped shape the final story?
'I personally believe that the fundamental role of a director is to be the lead storyteller,' Ngo said. 'That comes down to overseeing, particularly in documentary, the research, the writing, the creative decisions of who to interview, how to interview, gaining trust, access.
'I wrote every outline,' he continues. 'I wrote every paper card. I spent two years-plus working with the editors back and forth on calls … Stephen did zero of that.'
There's a lot more at stake than just this film, too. The four-part series that was originally envisaged also exists, with a wealth of material and stories beyond what's in the feature. And Ngo and Williams-Weir have the rights to tell Cooper's story in a narrative feature form too, which is what they originally had in mind.