Film director.
Born in England to an Australian father serving in the RAF, Brian Trenchard-Smith attended Wellington College in Berkshire before migrating to Australia in 1965.
In Australia, Trenchard-Smith worked for both the Nine Network and Network Ten in various roles, including editor, as well as returning to the UK for a brief period. According to Richard Brennan in Cinema Papers (Dec. 1979 - Jan. 1980), Trenchard-Smith was a significant maker of film trailers in both Australia and England during this period. Among the Australian films for which he made or edited trailers were Picnic at Hanging Rock, Mad Dog Morgan, My Brilliant Career, and Stone.
In around 1973, he started his own production company, for which he produced this one-hour television special The Stuntmen. The film won the documentary section of the Fourth Benson and Hedges Australian Film Awards, although the Canberra Times reviewer dismissed it as 'competently made and interesting enough but left no lasting impression' ('Finalists Not Pleasers'). In 1974, he followed this with 'Kung Fu Killer' for the Nine Network, a documentary consciously designed as an 'East-meets-West' dialogue, in which Australian stuntman Grant Page used 'Western' fighting techniques against the 'Eastern' fighting technique of kung fu practitioner Carter Wong and martial artist / actor Angela Mao.
From this point, Trenchard-Smith went on to become a major figure in Australian genre film-making in the 1970s and 1980s, specialising in action (including kung-fu films) and horror. Unlike his later Los Angeles films (most of which were released direct-to-video), many of Trenchard-Smith's Australian films enjoyed theatrical release and, later, a high degree of cult popularity.
Trenchard-Smith's first Australian film was The Man from Hong Kong in 1975: an Australian-Hong Kong co-production, it starred Taiwanese actor Jimmy Wang (Wang Zhengquan) as the hero, Inspector Fang Sing Leng, and George Lazenby as the antagonist, Sydney gangster Jack Wilton. The film was made at the height of the kung-fu film craze and, as Stephen Teo points out in 'Australia's Role in the Global Kung Fu Trend', managed to injure both of its lead actors. The cinematographer, Russell Boyd, became known for such significant films as Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Last Wave, and Gallipoli, and would later win an Oscar for Master and Commander : The Far Side of the World.
The following year, Trenchard-Smith made Deathcheaters, which he directed to a Michael Cove script. The film, ostensibly an action-adventure piece, was a thinly veiled excuse for maximum stunts: two ex-commandos, now working as television stuntmen, use both sets of skills to break into an island stronghold. As with The Man from Hong Kong, the ultimate stunt involved a hang-glider. According to Richard Brennan, it was intended as a television pilot, but was first released theatrically, where it performed poorly.
In 1977, Trenchard-Smith was one of the founding members of the Australian Feature Film Producers' Association (A.F.F.P.A.): chaired by Phillip Adams, the group's members included James McElroy, Hal McElroy, Pat Lovell, Joan Long, Philippe Mora, Fred Schepisi, Anthony Buckley, Terry Bourke, and Sandy Harbutt ('A.F.F.P.A. Formed'). He also continued to make documentaries and instructional films: his 1977 fire-safety film for hospitals, 'Hospitals Don't Burn Down', had a cast of 77 (headed by Jeanie Drynan), allegedly cost $90,000, and won a major award at the 1978 US Industrial Film Festival ('Safety Film').
Deathcheaters was followed by perhaps his best-known film, the dystopian Ozploitation title, Turkey Shoot. Written by American script-writers Jon George and Neill D. Hicks, Turkey Shoot is set in a future Australia, but only because the tax-based financing (the 10BA tax exemption scheme) required it to be set in Australia: the original script, according to Trenchard-Smith, 'was set in the depression era Deep South [of the US]. We had tax based financing in place on condition that it was supposed to be set in Australia. So I suggested we set it in the future, and make it more universal' ('Interview with Brian Trenchard-Smith'). Set in a prison camp called 'The Establishment', the film touches on all the usual components of exploitation films, including a high degree of (both physical and sexual) violence. The film was re-made, also as Turkey Shoot, in 2014.
Turkey Shoot was followed by the children's adventure film BMX Bandits (1983, directed to a script by Russell Hagg and Patrick Edgeworth and best known today as an early film for Nicole Kidman. But in 1986, Trechard-Smith made another film that has subsequently become a cult classic: Dead-end Drive-In. Scripted by Peter Smalley from the short story 'Crabs' by Peter Carey, the film is set in a post-apocalyptic Australia in which undesirable and unemployed youth are incarcerated in drive-in cinemas. The film was compared to Mad Max 2 : The Road Warrior (1981), but, as Rebecca Johinke argues, in 'Not Quite Mad Max', also 'offers a valuable contribution to discussions about Australian masculinity, car culture, phobic narratives and the White Australia Policy'.
Just as Dead-end Drive-in was being released in the United States (August 1986), Frog Dreaming, directed by Trenchard-Smith to a script by American ex-pat Everett de Roche, was being released in Australia (21 August 1986). Centred on an adolescent American orphan (Henry Thomas, of ET) being raised in a small Australian town, the film presents a problematic employment of Aboriginal Australian culture, not in least the conflation of the 'frog dreaming' of the title with an aquatic monster that the film persistently refers to as 'Aboriginal legend'. Furthermore, as Alan McKee points out in ''Superboong!...' : The Ambivalence of Comedy and Differing Histories of Race', the film is one of a succession of mid-1980s Australian films in which 'Aboriginal people are profoundly and meaningfully silent', thereby promulgating the 'figure of Aboriginality only allowed to be powerful so long as it remained outside of discourse, could not communicate' (pp.55-56). The film was released as The Quest in the United States, where the film poster showed hero Cody staring impassively out at the viewer while holding a shotgun.
In 1988, Trenchard-Smith directed Out of the Body: written by Kenneth Ross, better known for Breaker Morant, the film pitted an astral traveller, played by Mark Hembrow, against a demonic force killing the women of Sydney and removing their eyes. The film was not a critical success, and has not become the cult favourite that Turkey Shoot and Dead-end Drive-in have become.
Among the last films that Trenchard-Smith made in Australia were the martial-arts action duo Day of the Panther and Strike of the Panther, filmed simultaneously and released consecutively. The films were made in Perth, originally under the direction of Peter West, one of Australia's most experienced stunt co-ordinators, who is also credited as script-writer. The star, Edward John ('Ed') Stazak, who plays hero Jason Blade, was an Australian martial artist. Trenchard-Smith was brought in to provide directorial experience early in the shoot, but noted in an interview with Jim Schembri for Cinema Papers that 'It was the toughest rescue job I've ever done' ('The Panther Takes the Plunge'): the result, he said in the same interview, was a 'martial arts adolescent macho adventure, with as much credibly linked non-stop action as possible'.
In the late 1980s, Trenchard-Smith moved to Los Angeles, from which base he has largely worked since. His American films (see Notes below for details) include military action-adventures (The Siege of Firebase Gloria [1989] and In Her Line of Fire [2006], more mainstream action-adventures (Absolute Deception [2013] and Drive Hard [2014]), disaster films (Arctic Blast [2010]), science-fiction adventure (Megiddo: The Omega Code 2 [2001]), and instalments of horror franchises (Night of the Demons 2 [1994], Leprechaun 3 [1995], and Leprechaun 4: In Space [1997]). Many of these films, especially the later franchise instalments, were direct-to-video releases.
In 2016, Trenchard-Smith published his first novel, The Headsman's Daughter, intended as the first in a series.
Sources:
'A.F.F.P.A. Formed', Filmnews, 1 May 1977, p.3.
'Finalists Not Pleasers', Canberra Times, 6 June 1973, p.10.
'Interview with Brian Trenchard-Smith', Arrow in the Head [horror-film fansite], 5 August 2011.
'Safety Film Set the Festival on Fire', Australian Women's Weekly, 21 June 1978, p.55.
Schembri, Jim. 'The Panther Takes the Plunge', Cinema Papers, July 1987, pp.66-67.
