What is PUB: The Movie?

“You haven’t made it in the Melbourne music industry unless you’ve appeared in Fred’s Pub strip”

-Rowland S. Howard

Imagine underground comic artist Robert Crumb singing in a punk version of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band? Filmed over six years, Queensland-based cult movie historian and gonzo filmmaker Andrew Leavold brings the same obsessive eye for madness and humanity in The Search For Weng Weng (2013) to his bizarre new documentary.

Meet Fred Negro (real name): Melbourne musician, artist, satirist, ratbag troublemaker and cultural provocateur, diarist, barfly, family man, and unofficial Mayor of St Kilda, who for more than thirty years meticulously rendered in cartoon form his life as well as the mutating band scene and pop culture in general in his weekly Pub comic strip in Melbourne’s Inpress magazine.

PUB: The Movie is precisely that, Fred’s life in comic form brought to the screen, and what a wild ride it is! From his working-class childhood in Richmond to Prahran Art College and the Roaring Eighties of St Kilda, the Crystal Ballroom as a Babylon-by-the-Beach and Fred’s near-mythic roast chicken fucking antics in The Gong Show, to Dadaist musical experiments I Spit On Your Gravy, The Brady Bunch Lawnmower Massacre and the delightfully-named The Fuck Fucks, and to the dark side of excess: alcoholism, drug addiction, broken relationships, and a long line of fallen comrades.

Equal parts exhilarating, scandalous and heartbreaking, Pub: The Movie is a bizarre punk-rock collage of Fred’s art, music, flyers, rare photos and video footage, and commentary by friends, family, band members, fellow rock fraternity members Tim Rogers, Paul Stewart (Painters & Dockers) and Cosmic Psychos’ Ross Knight, and of course Fred himself, proving the line between art and real life is so blurred as to be rendered utterly meaningless.

CAST & CREW

INTERVIEWEES

Fred Negro

and

Bec Anthony (Kooky Karaoke compere, The Eggs, Little Freddie And The Pops)
Lush Aston (The Twits, cartoonist)
Joey Bedlam (DollSquad)
Mark Carson (I Spit On Your Gravy)
Sam Crassweller (I Spit On Your Gravy)
John Durr (The Editions)
Paul Elliott (Gong Show, Gravies manager)
Paul Fraser (artist, PUB collaborator)
Vivienne Gay (The Hanks)
Graham Hood (The Johnnys)
Kaos (The Fuck Fucks)
Ross Knight (Cosmic Psychos)
Fiona Leonard (Gong Show)
Steve Lucas (X)
Fiona Lee Maynard (Delicados, St Kilda Walking Tour)
Greg McAinsh (Skyhooks)
Phil “Pog” Miles (I Spit On Your Gravy, Gravybilllys, The Band Who Shot Liberty Valance)
Dave Moll (Shonkytonk, The Fuck Fucks, Black Molls)
Dez Negro (Fred’s brother)
Millie Negro (Fred’s daughter)
Ross Negro (Fred’s brother)
Elizabeth Reale (The Peptides, Piranhas In Love co-author)
Tim Rogers (You Am I, Twits’ manager)
Matt Ryan (editor of The Munster Times, The Fierce Urgency Of Now)
Paul Stewart (Painters And Dockers)
Sindy Virtue Van Eede (I Spit On Your Gravy, ex-partner)
Melynda Von Wayward (curator, punk historian)
Clinton Walker (rock journalist and historian)

FILM CREW

ANDREW LEAVOLD
Director, Writer, Co-Producer
Film-maker and film historian Andrew Leavold owned and managed Trash Video, the largest cult
video rental store in Australia, from 1995 to 2010. He is also a published author, researcher, TV
presenter, film festival curator, musician, and above all, unrepentant and voracious fan of the
pulpier aspects of genre cinema. His writing has been published globally in mainstream magazines,
academic journals and underground cinema fanzines, since the mid-Nineties. Leavold and Trash
Video were the subjects of an award-winning documentary for SBS, Escape From The Planet Of The
Tapes (2003).

Leavold toured the world with his feature length documentary The Search For Weng Weng (2013),
and his 2017 book version, on the tragic life story of the two-foot-nine James Bond of the
Philippines. His ten years of research on genre filmmaking in the Philippines formed the basis of
Mark Hartley’s documentary Machete Maidens Unleashed! (released internationally in 2010), on
which Leavold is also Associate Producer, and he has since been recognized both in the Philippines
and abroad as the foremost authority in his area of expertise, teaching Philippine film history at
university level in Australia, the United States, and throughout the Philippines. Leavold teamed up
with Daniel Palisa to co-direct The Last Pinoy Action King (2015), both a feature-length documentary
on the late Filipino action idol Rudy Fernandez, and a dissection of film royalty, politics, privilege,
idolatry, and the Philippines’ pyramid of power.

Leavold’s future projects include Film Safari, a six-part series to be filmed around the world on global
cinema’s wildest untold stories; a guerrilla action-comedy-mockumentary Da Taller Dey Come to be
filmed in Ghana in 2023; and the feature-length documentary The Most Beautiful Creatures On The
Skin Of The Earth, the third in his Filipino trilogy, about the politics of erotic cinema under the
Marcos regime.

JONATHAN SEQUEIRA
Co-Producer, Co-Director of Photography, Supervising Editor
Jonathan Sequeira is a film producer and director with over fifteen years in the film and TV industry
as an editor, producer, director and director of photography. He directed and produced the
acclaimed documentary, Descent into the Maelstrom – the Radio Birdman Story, (New York Times,
The Age, Guardian, Australian, Mojo magazine) called ‘the best rock documentary ever made’.
Jonathan wrote and edited and co-produced the award winning documentary Waiting – the Van
Duren Story (Best Film – Indie Memphis Film Festival, 4 Stars – The Age). Jonathan’s TV editing
credits include 4 Corners, Triple J TV, Message Stick, Catalyst, That Pacific Sports Show, and 7.30
Report. He has been Director of Photography and camera operator on over 50 music videos, and

theatrical feature documentaries including Descent and Waiting and the upcoming music
documentary Hard-Ons: the Most Australian Band Ever!

JARRET GAHAN
Co-Director of Photography
Jarret Gahan is a film historian, critic, journalist, commentator, programmer and documentarian
from Melbourne, Australia. He’s the editor-in-chief on the Monster Fest site, a podcast
correspondent at Good Movie Monday and a filmmaker for the past two decades. His award-winning
documentary feature GONE LESBO GONE: THE UNTOLD TALE OF AN UNSEEN FILM has played
festivals the world over and focuses on Andrew Leavold’s cult film LESBO-A-GO-GO, the film on
which he also served as cinematographer. Aside from features, Jarret has worked in various
capacities from producer to director to cinematographer to editor to commentator on numerous
promotional and supplemental featurettes for such labels as Monster Pictures, Umbrella
Entertainment, Madman Entertainment, Lionsgate, Kino Lorber, Severin Films, Vinegar Syndrome,
Second Sight Films, Bounty Films, Wild Eye Releasing and 88 Films.

MATTHEW VICTOR PASTOR
Co-Director of Photography
Matthew Victor Pastor is a Filipino-Australian filmmaker. An alumnus of the prestigious Victorian
College of the Arts, his feature and short films have been selected at over 70 international film
festivals. In October 2020 the first in his 2020 trilogy of pandemic themed feature films The Neon
Across the Ocean (91 mins) made its world premiere at the 44th São Paulo International Film
Festival. The second instalment A Pencil to the Jugular (121 mins) world premiered at the FIAPF
accredited A-class Moscow International Film Festival (43rd Edition, April 2021).

BENJI STEANE
Editor
Benji Steane is a documentary editor based in Perth, WA. From humble beginnings in the Top End of
Australia, he realized what his calling was later than most when he found himself sucked into the
vortex of counterculture documentary films. With formal training in Screen and Digital Media at
Flinders University in SA, Benji cut his teeth editing biographical documentaries for production
company Living Stories, as well as corporates and TVCs with Frankie Films, before making the leap to
features, where he has since worked as a Second Assistant Editor on Dev Patel’s upcoming
directorial debut Monkey Man (Netflix) (TBC). PUB: THE MOVIE is Benji’s debut as solo editor on a
documentary feature and the first of many collaborations with director Andrew Leavold. Stay tuned!

BRETT GARTEN
Executive Producer
Garten is an industry veteran, with an eclectic forty-year career on the fringes of the cinema, media
and entertainment industries. He’s more widely known among the hardcore film buff community as
Australia’s biggest online retailer of rare and collectable movie stuff, Maximumdaddy-o. While still in
high school, Garten joined the influential film zine Crimson Celluloid, which led to work in the media,
cinema and film industry, producing the early films of Abe Forsythe. The 2000s saw Brett working for
Hoyts, Palace, and the Valhalla and Chauvel Cinemas. Brett revived the Cinematheque, curating the
long running Chauvel Cinematheque, producing over three hundred shows that leaned on his
extensive knowledge and collection of rare and archival film. Art critic Amelia Groom called Brett
“one of the top five artistic movers and shakers in Sydney.” Brett returned to producing with 2017s
RED CHRISTMAS. Brett’s innovative new finance venture, LIFEBOAT CAPITAL supports grass-roots
projects in the local indie film community and industry.

Director
Andrew Leavold

Writers
Andrew Leavold, Benji Steane

Producers
Andrew Leavold, Jonathan Sequeira

Executive Producer
Brett Garten

Directors of Photography
Jarret Gahan, Matthew Victor Pastor, Jonathan Sequeira

Editor
Benji Steane

Music
The Screaming Meanies

Sound Mixer
Stephen Hope at New Hope Media

Audio Conversion
Shaun Cooper at Audioviz

Animation
Lluis Fuzzhound

Trash Video Archives

Living Eyes Films