Justin Monjo, the screenwriter for INXS: Never Tear Us Apart, is 'puzzled' by a member of Michael's family being upset about the way in which he and his mother were portrayed?
With writing there comes integrity and I think by the mere fact that Mr Monjo and his writing partner limited their interviews to the 5 remaining members of the band and a manager who had not been with them in the last three years of Michael's life, he missed an opportunity to flush out the real story. I read somewhere that this series came across at an 'unauthorized Michael Hutchence expose' and I have to agree to a point.
Where were the interviews with Michael's friends? You wouldn't believe how many of them, angered, have approached me since this docu-fiction made its way to the little screen. By the way, if you are going to include a libelous scene about our mother, it would probably be smart to at least speak to one person who was in the household at the time.I don't care if the scene lasted three minutes or three seconds - it pictured our mother as an adulteress. Michael's father came off as the concerned, supportive dad. Jill Farriss came off as the loving, supportive mother that she was. There is no accident in this - her sons are alive and got to speak to the writer. Michael is no longer with us and neither is our mother. See where I am going with this?
Mr Monjo says that he was trying to depict that our mother had multiple marriages. Trust me, you missed your goal. Judging by the emails and support I have had on my Facebook and website, there is no way anyone thought that scene did anything else but paint our mother as the mother from hell. Multiple marriages? Our mother was married for the first time at age 18 and a year later she gave birth to me. She was much too young and had ambitions of making something of herself. She was divorced by the time she was 21 when she became a sought-after model.
She married Kell Hutchence at age 30 when she was a successful makeup artist. Michael was born a year later, Rhett two years after that. They divorced after 17 years. Some time after that she remarried and it lasted only 2 years.
At age 62 she finally married the love of her life, the wonderful, much decorated retired Group Captain, Ross Glassop, and it lasted until his death 19 years later. One year later our mother passed. I applaud and rejoice those people who found their soulmate at an early age. That didn't happen for our mother. Our mother worked 10 and 12 hour days on soap operas and motion pictures - that left little time for affairs. How could the band allow such a scene to be included and what did it have to do with the story of INXS?
Did you know that it was our mother who encouraged Michael to go join the band in Perth? Kell thought it a bad idea, thought Michael should have been working at a bank. He told Michael he should get these silly ideas of music out of his head and get a real job. How do I know? Because Michael joked about this. Now there's a story.
No wonder we didn't get a true representation of anything. How one sided can you get. Where were the inner conflicts of the band, the jealousies? Believe me, there was plenty of politicking and jealousies. But that would be according to friends, and girlfriends and family - Michael's. Because the band would not want people to know that they were jealous of his popularity and it is ludicrous to believe there were none.
What bothers me is that Mr Monjo dismisses this as an insignificant thing and that we just didn't get it. Well, actually we did get it, along with my mother's grandchildren. Rhett's children, my children and yes - Michael's child. Tigerlily? The teenager who INXS now want to get to know? She will now have a picture of her grandmother as an adulteress.
Tina Hutchence
24th February 2014
California, USA. |
