Team
Michael Brindley
Michael has worked extensively as a script consultant and reader for all Australian government film funding bodies and for the New Zealand Film Commission. When he ran the Australian Film Commission Script Office in 1987-8, he was responsible for the entire script development budget.
In 1993 he consulted to the West Australia Film Council (now Screen West) on script assessment and script editing and wrote guidelines for reader reports, which are still used, in adapted form, by a number of other film funding bodies.
A screenwriter since 1978, when he graduated from the AFTRS, his credits include Prisoner, Punishment, Taurus Rising, Bellamy, Blue Heelers and Police Rescue. He was a staff script editor on the top-rating A Country Practice and went on to become Story Producer on this show.
Michael Brindley co-wrote the award winning feature film, Shame, (New York Times Review extract) which was invited to many festivals, beginning with the New York Museum of Modern Art ‘New Directors, New Films’. It went on to worldwide theatrical distribution and was remade as a telemovie for US Lifetime cable. He wrote the ABC mini-series Half A World Away and, with Karin Altmann, the top-rating telemovie One Way Ticket.
On the AFI award-winning Series I & II of Geoffrey Atherden’s Grass Roots Michael was a writer and the series script and story editor. He was the ABC network executive supervising MDA-Medical Defence Australia Series I & II, which won three AFI awards, including Best Television Drama.
Michael has lectured at RMIT University (where he was a founding teacher in the Advanced Diploma In Professional Screenwriting), La Trobe University, VCA Film School and AFTRS. He devised and taught courses in Adaptation, Script Analysis and Feature Film Writing. He has also lectured in New Zealand for the NZ Film Commission New Writers Scheme. He was a script advisor to the AFC SP*RK program in 2004 and 05 and a participant in 2008.
Michael wrote the guide on Synopses and Treatments for Screen Australia, What Is A One-page synopsis? and The Screen Hub Guide to Script Format.
In 1996 Michael received the AWG Hector Crawford Award for Script Editing
New York Times Review
Michael Brindley
A Macho Australian Arrives on Her Cycle Shame (1987)
New York Times March 19, 1988
by Caryn James.
“SHAME takes the B Level action genre seriously enough to turn it on its head and eventually shatter its limits. ….. ”
“It is easy to find soft-headed movies that pretend to be about women’s roles in society, and much harder to come across a film as good as Shame, a tough-minded Australian action story with a smart, sensitive, unsettling macho heroine….”